Month: May 2022

“As leaders, we need to get more comfortable with conflict and make space for disagreements. Messy is a valuable part of the process. Struggles, disagreement, and conflict in the mix creates authentic unity over time. Great work involves struggle.” – Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown

 

I often work with leadership teams on problems that don’t have a fixed answer. Like heroes on a quest, we might know the direction of travel and have a sense of where we’re going, but we don’t know exactly how things will end up or what we will find along the way. Sometimes the destination is clear, but the route to get there is up for debate. Different team members see the value of one plan or the potential pitfalls in another, but no one can be certain that they know the best course of action.

 

One of the most valuable things leaders can do is hold space for ambiguity and disagreement. A leader’s job isn’t to come up with all the ideas on their own, it’s to create the conditions for ideas to flourish. Let people argue it out! Just make sure you focus the disagreement on the task and not on the personalities involved in the dispute.

 

Bring together a diverse group that doesn’t give ideas the benefit of the doubt. Diverse groups are better at questioning what they don’t understand.

 

As leaders, we’re rewarded for impatience and certainty. That can make holding space for disagreement, which is messy and time-consuming, challenging. But complex problems are characterized by ambiguity and disagreement. In fact, struggle is an indicator that you’re moving in the right direction. After all, if the problem were easy, it would already be solved.

 

To effectively hold space for disagreement, you need to manage your own uncertainty and anxieties. Anxiety can flare up as a problem gets messier. If you aren’t calm and open to the possibilities, your team won’t be either. People need to feel safe to put forward their ideas. And you, as their leader, need to trust that you and your team will eventually converge on the right path.

 

I support leaders as they co-create solutions to their most challenging problems. I coach people to lead transformational change. If you’re feeling daunted by a complex problem, send me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn.

 

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Some organizations I work with feel like perpetual startups.

 

They’re constantly moving in new directions, adding new technologies, and inventing new ways of working (I’ll admit that I feel like I’m like this sometimes, too).

 

It’s not that inventing things or exploring new ideas is bad. Of course not! Imagine a company that could never try or do something new. Over time, those companies go stale and, eventually, they all get a familiar label: bankrupt. However, companies that continually change their processes face the same threat. It’s easy to work really hard on the wrong things.

 

A software company I worked with became trapped in a cycle of reinvention, constantly changing its product and its offerings while ignoring issues that impacted functionality and utility. Leadership lacked an understanding of the product and its customers, handing down objectives that weren’t proven out in hopes that the company would be perceived as a cutting-edge industry disruptor. This caused a great deal of frustration, waste, and expensive employee and customer overturn.

 

You cannot be a startup forever. At some point, your company must stabilize, settle into itself, commit, and deliver. That isn’t to say you can’t or shouldn’t continue to innovate, but you should stop chasing every single shiny thing flashing in your periphery. If you can only ever originate new ideas and ways of working, you enter a separate area of challenge. Your leaders will be overtaxed, your teams will be pulled in a million different directions at once, and your people will suffer burnout.

 

If you are constantly switching up practices that work, you’re wasting a lot of energy.

 

A day of real-world trial-and-error teaches us more than we could learn with a month of theorizing. Buckle down and make something real, something with predictably favorable results. As you get confident that a new way of working is valuable, or a new approach to launching a product is successful, create a process that solidifies that practice and teaches others (including your future self!) how to duplicate it consistently.

 

Toyota is famous for doing this well. If a worker at a Toyota factory has an idea for a new tool that they think could make their job faster or easier, the company engineers work with the inventor and a small team to create and test a prototype. Based on the workers’ feedback, the engineers refine the tool and slowly distribute updated models, first within the factory where the tool was invented, and then to a widening group of workers who perform the same task at other Toyota factories.

 

This process of building a foundation from successful experiments is fundamental to shifting from growth to scale.

 

Growth is about adding things—people, practices, products. Scale is about consolidating—stopping what doesn’t work and improving what does. It’s about creating systems that help you leverage your talent base so people aren’t reinventing the wheel every time they come up against the same problem.

 

What are some ways you navigate between growth and scale? Email me at [email protected] and let me know.

 

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