This is a continuation post from last week where we covered the first six leadership principles from the perspective of a technology leader. In this post we’ll cover the remaining five principles.

7) Keep your soldiers informed – In the military the headquarter staff makes an overall plan for a mission, presents the plan to subordinate units, and lets them plan the details of how to execute. This planning hierarch can occur across many levels such as starting from the Division HQ, then to the Brigade HQ, then to the Battalion HQ, then to the Company, the Platoon, and finally to the Squad. All this planning takes time but each subordinate plan requires information from the higher plan. You can imagine that with all this planning you could quickly run out of time to actually perform the mission, assuming it is time sensitive, which most things in life and business are. The rule of thumb that we used as a staff in the military was to take 1/3 of the remaining time to put your plan together and leave 2/3 for your subordinates. If we the Division staff had 1 week prior to the mission they would take 2.3 days to develop their plan, leaving 4.7 days remaining. The Brigade would use 1.5 days, leaving 3.2 days. The Battalion would use 1 day, leaving 3.1. The Company would use 0.7 days, leaving 2.1, the Platoon 0.5 day, leaving 1.4, the Squad 0.3 day, leaving 0.9. This same concept should apply to your teams. Don’t sit on ideas, contracts, or problems for 3/4 of the time before it is due and make your team scramble. Give your teams the majority of the time to plan and execute. Reiterating from principle #3, make sound and timely decisions. Taking up all the time so that you get 95% of the information before you make a decision is being a whimp. Gather the most pertinent data, make the best decision and make sure your team gets as much time to react as possible.

8) Develop a sense of responsibility in your subordinates – This principle is a combination of #2 “Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions” and #4 “Set the Example”. If you seek responsibility for your actions and set the example for your team, they will follow and behave the same way. For a technology leader, this might manifest itself in a situation where you expect your subordinates to admit when they changed the production environment without approval resulting in an incident. You should expect and demand this behavior from your team but you first must ensure that you are’re taking responsibility for your own actions. Instill in your team a sense of ownership over the site. In order to do so you need to set the example of owning the business. Blaming the business leaders for poor decisions and expecting your team to take responsibility for the technology will never work. Create a culture where people want to own their areas and do so by owning yours.

9) Ensure that the task is understood, supervised and accomplished – There is a big difference between micromanaging and providing adequate guidance on a project. Per principle #2 “Seek responsibility and take responsibility for your actions”, you can’t delegate your responsibility only your authority. Miscommunication is probably the single biggest cause of rework. Clear, concise, articulate criteria are the way to ensure tasks are started properly and accomplished. If you assign an unclear task without a deadline and without guidance on resources you can expect it to come in over budget, after the deadline, and not accurately completed. Communication of the task is your responsibility. In military aircraft we used a three-way positive transfer of control. This meant that if I were flying and I wanted by co-pilot to fly I would say “you have the controls”, they would respond with “I have the controls”, and I would reiterate “you have the controls.” This way there was very little chance of no one actually flying the aircraft…which in tandem seat aircraft you’d be surprised how easy that can occur.

10) Build the team – As a leader you must be constantly building the team. This doesn’t always mean hiring more engineers. Building the team can take the shape of improving their skill sets or replacing underperforming individuals. We’ve written before about seed-feed-weed-succeed. This simple garden analogy means that you need to hire (seed) the team with great players, grow (feed) them through challenging projects, greater responsibility, and training, get rid of (weed) underperformers once they’ve had a chance to improve, and by doing these three things well you and your teams will succeed.

11) Employ your unit in accordance with its capabilities – This last principle requires that you first follow principle #5 “know your soldiers and look out for their welfare.” In order to deploy or ask your team to take on certain projects, you need to first know what their capabilities are as a team and as individuals. If your team is newly formed, you probably don’t want to take on critical projects for major customers. If you don’t have anyone who knows databases you don’t want to architect a DB heavy application. Setting your team up for failure is not what leaders do but you won’t know if you’re doing that unless you know your team and the team members.

I recently had the honor to speak with the CS and IT majors of the USMA (West Point) Class of 2010.  Recognizing that these young men carry an incredible burden for all of us,  I struggled for what I could tell them.  These young men and women, after all, are going to be the tools of our international efforts against terrorism for quite some time to come and in 5 years will likely see 2 combat deployments.  The price they pay for their “free” education is much higher than the one my partner and I paid and larger still than the 99.9+% of the rest of their generation (those that never serve their nation in uniform).

I settled on trying to pass along four things that I wish I had learned in school – before the Army and before becoming a civilian.  These aren’t four things that I wasn’t taught mind you.  I may have been taught some of them, and at any rate the burden for learning should really be placed upon the student – especially in college.  These are four things that I wish I had recognized, retained or learned on my own; four things that would have made my Army and civilian life much easier.  Here they are as I discussed them with elements of the USMA Class of 2010:

1)      Moral and Ethical Challenges Occur Frequently – More So Than You Might Think

It doesn’t matter if you are in the Army and parts for your dead-lined vehicle magically appear overnight or you are reviewing the use of company assets and find that people are using company assets for personal use – potentially in violation of company policy.  Sometimes even people who are on balance “good” make ethical mistakes.  And make no mistake, there are morally bankrupt people committing unethical acts at an incredibly high rate all around us.

Most of us, quite honestly, are ill prepared to address ethical issues upon graduation.  Many schools barely touch the subject.  Even the service academies, with their strict honor code, too often paint topics as black and white rather than the spectrum of blacks, whites and grays that occur in the real world.  As we’ve written in the past, the journey to moral bankruptcy isn’t one giant leap, but a series of small steps.  Draw lines in the sand early in your career so that you know you are heading in the wrong direction as you progress.  Build a support group of people who will tell you the truth and help guide you should you start to go astray.

2)      Smart People and Terrible Teamwork Equals Crap Technology

Intelligence is only one of many independent variables (inputs) resulting in the dependent variable (output) of overall team performance.  Behaviors of individuals within the team are another equally important independent variable.  Leadership and culture are important moderators of this equation.  It is possible to have brilliant jerks, incapable of getting along with anyone, who completely destroy the output of the team.

We should reward people on their accomplishments and their ability to work as a team.  Intelligence is great, but we simply don’t pay people for being smart.  Who cares if you are smart if you can’t either get something done or alternatively destroy team morale and throughput?  Consider using this 2×2 matrix presented within The Art of Scalability to evaluate the individuals in your team for both behaviors and accomplishments.

3)      Leadership is about EQ – Not IQ

Our frequent readers will also remember this from our postings abroad.  As Malcolm Gladwell has indicated within his book Outliers, all of the evidence points to the notion that the most successful leaders have some minimum IQ.  But IQ alone is not sufficient to be a successful leader.  The greatest leaders have high emotional quotients, often considered a combination of social intelligence and emotional intelligence.

Two of the world’s foremost experts on the topic of leadership and social and emotional intelligence, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee have written two wonderful books on this topic:  Primal Leadership and Resonant Leadership.  In keeping with our theme of 2×2 matrices, here is Richard and Annie’s representation of commitment and emotional quotient.  The Y axis indicates how mindful the leader is of himself/herself (emotional intelligence) and how mindful they are of others (social intelligence).  The X axis indicates their overall emotional tone towards others.  Successful (aka Resonant) leaders have on balance a positive emotional tone and are in touch with themselves and their teams.

4)      It’s All About Performance

See my brief discussion of the model for success.  Superior performance, I argue, is measured as improving long term stakeholder wealth.  This might be emotional wealth in the case of some non-profits or financial wealth in the for profit world.  This means getting things done on time, on budget, in an ethically appropriate manner, with the right quality and meeting the expectations of stakeholders.  Time and experience are just moderators to this equation; they only help performance.  Independent variables are intelligence, drive, commitment, behaviors, etc.  Look to build the right teams with the right behavior at the right time.  Don’t get tied up in how much “experience” people have.  I’d rather have a dedicated person with 5 years of experience than a lazy person with 20.