Alicia McKay's Blog, page 25

Real Leaders Let Go

The number one complaint I hear from senior public leaders is about time – or a lack thereof. Which isn’t really about time, of course, but space. No time to work ‘on the business’ because BAU gobbles it all up.

The answer to this is surprisingly simple – get out of the weeds, operate at your paygrade and delegate the ‘doing’ to your capable, hamstrung managers.

Trust me when I tell you this: they are crying out for the permission to get on with it. They’re not afraid of the change you want to roll out. They’re frustrated by a lack of certainty and direction.

I regularly see senior leaders signing off low-level decisions, attending meetings and making project calls that should be handled by managers two tiers down. Ironically, these are often the same leaders who are frustrated that their team won’t prioritise or take ownership.

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Dan Pink outlines three key elements to human motivation:

1) Autonomy – The desire to have control of our lives
2) Mastery – The urge to improve
3) Purpose – The desire to be in service of something greater.

What does all this mean, put together? That direction is critical – but it’s not synonymous with prescription.

At General Motors, the dress code is only two words: ‘Dress appropriately.”

When asked about the policy, GM’s Chief Executive, Mary Barra said: “You really need to make sure your managers are empowered – because if they cannot handle ‘dress appropriately’, what other decisions can they handle? And I realised that often, if you have a lot of overly prescriptive policies and procedures, people will live down to them.”

When things are complicated, it makes sense that we cling to control. You might avoid a few mistakes this way, but the price is high. When we hold on too tight, we stifle innovation, culture and growth in the process. Motivation drops off, and our customers and community are the ones that feel it.

Like parenting, relationships and pretty much all things involving people, trust goes both ways… and someone has to go first.

Real leaders trust first. Let some things go.

Til next week,
- A

Real leaders let go.

The number one complaint I hear from senior public leaders is about time – or a lack thereof. Which isn’t really about time, of course, but space. No time to work ‘on the business’ because BAU gobbles it all up.

The answer to this is surprisingly simple – get out of the weeds, operate at your paygrade and delegate the ‘doing’ to your capable, hamstrung managers.

Trust me when I tell you this: they are crying out for the permission to get on with it. They’re not afraid of the change you want to roll out. They’re frustrated by a lack of certainty and direction.

I regularly see senior leaders signing off low-level decisions, attending meetings and making project calls that should be handled by managers two tiers down. Ironically, these are often the same leaders who are frustrated that their team won’t prioritise or take ownership.

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Dan Pink outlines three key elements to human motivation:

1) Autonomy – The desire to have control of our lives
2) Mastery – The urge to improve
3) Purpose – The desire to be in service of something greater.

What does all this mean, put together? That direction is critical – but it’s not synonymous with prescription.

At General Motors, the dress code is only two words: ‘Dress appropriately.”

When asked about the policy, GM’s Chief Executive, Mary Barra said: “You really need to make sure your managers are empowered – because if they cannot handle ‘dress appropriately’, what other decisions can they handle? And I realised that often, if you have a lot of overly prescriptive policies and procedures, people will live down to them.”

When things are complicated, it makes sense that we cling to control. You might avoid a few mistakes this way, but the price is high. When we hold on too tight, we stifle innovation, culture and growth in the process. Motivation drops off, and our customers and community are the ones that feel it.

Like parenting, relationships and pretty much all things involving people, trust goes both ways… and someone has to go first.

Real leaders trust first. Let some things go.

Fighting Fires? How To Push Back On Other's Priorities

Marie Kondo, in The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, talks about getting rid of everything in our lives that doesn’t ‘spark joy’. Clearing clutter helps us to focus on the things that matter most – it’s like turning down the volume on your car radio to see the letterbox numbers better.

Helping people get clear on their most important priorities is my favourite thing to do. It’s my most popular programme. Getting down to a short list of top priorities is hard - but even harder is sticking to them, particularly when others need something from us.

“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
- Seneca, 60AD

I ran a great session with Auckland Council early this year, where we ‘Marie Kondo’ed a huge pile of strategic plans - dumping them all in the middle of the table and then working through them systematically, discarding everything that didn’t fit with our future direction. This was tough work, which involved a lot of ‘no’.

Saying yes to something new is great. But everything we say yes to comes with an opportunity cost. This cost might be our resources. It might be our time and attention. Ultimately, it might be our health, values or potential for impact.

Saying no is tough enough when it’s our own stuff – it’s even tougher when we need to try it with others.

When people we respect or report to confront you with a new request or direction, we face a choice: the discomfort of pushing back, or to compromise real progress.

Respectful, consistent priority conversations ask questions and give options around relative priority, time, quality and purpose:

Is this more or less of a priority than x?

Would you like me to push out the timeline on project x, or reduce the quality on project y?

What are you trying to achieve? Have you considered..

These questions change the agency dynamic, even when the decision isn’t ours, politely requesting a deeper consideration of the big picture from the asker.

Pushing back politely isn’t just possible, it’s necessary. Saying yes to the wrong things robs us of our potential, and makes it impossible for others to reach theirs.

What do you need to push back on for real progress?

Until next week,
-A

Fighting fires? How to push back on other's priorities

Marie Kondo, in The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, talks about getting rid of everything in our lives that doesn’t ‘spark joy’. Clearing clutter helps us to focus on the things that matter most – it’s like turning down the volume on your car radio to see the letterbox numbers better.

Helping people get clear on their most important priorities is my favourite thing to do. It’s my most popular programme. Getting down to a short list of top priorities is hard - but even harder is sticking to them, particularly when others need something from us.

“If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.”
- Seneca, 60AD

I ran a great session with Auckland Council early this year, where we ‘Marie Kondo’ed a huge pile of strategic plans - dumping them all in the middle of the table and then working through them systematically, discarding everything that didn’t fit with our future direction. This was tough work, which involved a lot of ‘no’.

Saying yes to something new is great. But everything we say yes to comes with an opportunity cost. This cost might be our resources. It might be our time and attention. Ultimately, it might be our health, values or potential for impact.

Saying no is tough enough when it’s our own stuff – it’s even tougher when we need to try it with others.

When people we respect or report to confront you with a new request or direction, we face a choice: the discomfort of pushing back, or to compromise real progress.

Respectful, consistent priority conversations ask questions and give options around relative priority, time, quality and purpose:

Is this more or less of a priority than x?

Would you like me to push out the timeline on project x, or reduce the quality on project y?

What are you trying to achieve? Have you considered..

These questions change the agency dynamic, even when the decision isn’t ours, politely requesting a deeper consideration of the big picture from the asker.

Pushing back politely isn’t just possible, it’s necessary. Saying yes to the wrong things robs us of our potential, and makes it impossible for others to reach theirs.

What do you need to push back on for real progress?

Until next week,
-A

The Turtle Only Makes Progress When It's Neck Is Stuck Out

Most turtles live almost half of their lives inside their shell. Every time they sense an enemy, or the weather’s no good, they retreat and wait.

I don’t know about you, but this feels extremely sad to me.

Imagine hiding every time something felt mildly risky?

Sometimes I work with teams like this. They're so caught up in the things that might go wrong that they self-censor their ideas. They fear public or political retribution, resist innovation and point fingers in every outward direction to prove all the reasons why change is too risky to try.

“Behold the turtle. He only makes progress when he sticks his neck out.”
– James Bryant Conant

What this approach fails to account for, of course, is the cost of inaction. Those of us in the public service have a duty of stewardship that should never be conflated with conservatism. The community pays us to do our jobs, and in doing so, trusts that we are going to make good decisions and deliver good stuff that improves their lives.

What this doesn’t mean is that we should be too afraid to take risks, spend money or try new things. The one branch of society that has nothing but public good at heart should be showing leadership and pushing the envelope on what’s possible.

We’re weird about risk. We downplay the risk of the status quo, and overestimate the risk of change. We assume that risk is negative. We forget that risk is simply the yin to our reward yang!

The turtle’s not all bad, of course. When he sticks out his neck, he gets somewhere – and he teaches us that while you don’t need to be fast to make progress, you do need to be brave.

Is your team hiding in a shellst? What are the costs of inaction for your community?

Til next week

- A

The Grey Area

I talk a lot about the importance of brave public service – community-focused, impact-led policy and strategy decisions that change our world.

This pure approach to public service fits the textbook neatly, but for many of us it can feel unattainable. What about those of us who have a more complicated job? Who are expected to deliver on commercial or financial targets at the same time?

There’s a cliché about working parents: that we’re expected to turn up to work as though we don’t have children, and parent as though we don’t have a job. That tension and dual-identity is the source of grief for working parents everywhere – how do we balance competing priorities to give the best results to everyone?

Welcome to the grey area. That muddly, murky place where those of us chasing both revenue and impact live. Those of us who are juggling the quantitative and qualitative, the outcomes and the outputs, the aspirational and the operational, walking a tightrope between starry-eyed and pragmatic.

I never thought I’d be quoting Justin Timberlake in a Wednesday Wisdom, but I couldn’t resist this one (even with the American spelling of grey…):

“The gray area, the place between black and white – that’s the place where life happens.”
– Justin Timberlake.

The truth is that it’s all a grey area, whether we like it or not. Whether we’re juggling competing stakeholder interests, trying to meet revenue targets, or trying to be a present parent, there is no straight line between our goals and our actions.

My take: our drivers are generally less conflicting than we think. The beauty comes from harnessing them to create new opportunities. In fact, research tells us that operating within constraints is often the breeding ground for innovation.

For the working parent, this might mean taking stock of all the ways that our work life adds value to the way we parent and our children’s wellbeing, while channelling our learnings at home into the workplace. For the conflicted public manager, this might mean thinking about how to create new commercial and community partnerships, or distil our value proposition to create a more meaningful impact.

I worked with a team last year who faced the seemingly intractable challenge of increasing non-rates revenue from commercial facilities, while also delivering better services to under-served communities. Once we moved past the frustration, the way ahead became clear: tailoring services locally, and achieving more value from facilities with innovative local partnerships. You can read more about this here.

Are you in the grey area?

How can you flip the narrative, and harness your constraints to be more creative?

Til next week
- A

Thinking In Newspaper Headlines

“When I grow up, I want to answer emails.” (…said no-one ever.)

“Here lies Alicia. She completed 455 tasks.” (…is a terrible gravestone inscription.)

“Woman consistently achieved PDP targets” (… doesn’t make the newspapers.)

The lens of a childhood dream, obituary or a newspaper headline gives us the opportunity to question the meaning of things. What meaning do we create from our lives? What about our life’s work?

The public service is a special place to be. It’s an incredible opportunity to participate in meaningful work that positively impacts the life of others. We know this, but it’s an easy one to forget this when we get wrapped up in the daily minutiae.

I love the concept of the 50 year newspaper, which I read about In Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker. Essentially, the idea is that if you looked at the last 50 or 100 years as a series of headlines, you’d be quite impressed with how much progress the world has made.

I read this little anecdote by Donald Miller a few years ago, and it’s always stayed with me:

“If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn't remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.

But we spend years actually living those stories, and expect our lives to be meaningful. The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won't make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either”

― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

Our work life is full of high-pressure goals that are the equivalent of that Volvo. If we let the pressure of our work environment numb us to our potential for impact and public change, statis sets in.

We feel disengaged, we don’t innovate and we don’t bother trying to push for change. But our public deserves more – and so do we.

Are you wasting precious time on Volvo goals?
What would your 50 year newspaper headline look like?
How can you level up the impact of your public service?

Til next week
- A

Fear Breeds Complexity

The Global Simplicity Index tells us that, in the private sector, simplicity pays. The majority of consumers will spend more, for an easy customer experience and clear value offering.

Aldi has topped the index for the last four years. Compared to other supermarkets, Aldi carry fewer options per product category. They have a more consistent store layout across locations and a crystal-clear customer promise that is consistently delivered on – affordable, quality products. Simple brands, like Aldi, Google, Netflix and Ikea understand that making an experience easy is one of the most powerful ways to make customers like me happy.

You may be unsurprised to learn that government is not so simple. The average government agency is 30% more complex than some of the world’s largest companies. Externally, this means that service can be needlessly complicated. Internally, this means that policies, processes, strategy, organisational design act as handbrakes to progress.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”
― Leonardo da Vinci

We add complexity and bureaucracy out of fear. Simplicity would require bravery, clarity, risk and trade-offs. Ironically, this complexity erodes the very trust we are trying to protect.

A desire to be accountable, transparent and frugal underpins a heavy layer of bureaucracy that is totally off-putting to stakeholders and community. The bigger we get, the worse we seem to be, creating a tyranny of scale that amplifies complexity with duplication, overlap and inefficiency.

Our customers aren’t the only ones getting frustrated by this – staff suffer too. Engagement and productivity are the obvious victims, but the more insidious stifling effect of needless complexity is risk aversion. When people stop sticking their necks out because it doesn’t feel worth trying to change anything, the quality of policy and public service suffers too.

Our problems are complex, but our organisations shouldn’t be.

Til next week
- A

Practice Makes Autopilot

For three days every three months, I invest in my own professional development and head off to business school in Australia. Those three days are always the most tiring days of my quarter, even compared to the weeks where I do back to back full day workshops!

Anyone who’s been on training or to a conference lately will know what I mean – taking on new information and getting our head around new skills is exhausting. We have to switch off the autopilot and keep all systems firing.

Anything worth learning has a steep effort curve at the beginning. Whether it’s driving, playing an instrument, or taking on new practices at work, the initial steps are hard and there’s no autopilot to be found. For leaders who need to think differently about new problems and be more focused and strategic in their work, it often feels like a daily battle to show up at work differently.

The good news is, it’s often not a linear curve. In Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the lag effect of small changes that create big transformation. By taking the right steps and consistently focusing on specific behaviours, big change becomes possible. This is true of our personal habits, and also of rolling out organisational change.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle

Common mistakes that we make, in pushing forward with new change are:

Relying on willpower (instead of creating systems that support our success)

Putting off change for when things ‘settle down’

Giving up too early

According to Clear, we often give up just before we reach the tipping point – where those incremental, consistent changes tip into the zone where everything becomes easier. Once these new habits are embedded, like driving or playing an instrument, we get to shift into the autopilot zone and focus on something else.

Nothing worth having is easy. If we want something new and better, we need to learn how to be new and better. Practice is the key – practice, practice practice. It might not make perfect, but it can make autopilot. And that’s enough for me.

Til next week
- A

Out Of The Weeds You Love

Get Out of the Weeds You Love

The paradox of leadership, according to Greg McKeown, is that as we advance in seniority, we can become so overwhelmed with new tasks and responsibilities we actually get further away from how we contribute and add value.

I see this a lot, with reluctant managers – often those who have progressed through their careers as technical experts – who don’t want to extract themselves from the ins and outs. They are brimming with expertise, and they can’t help but provide project input, even once they’re in a senior leadership position.

It’s great to care about the details – particularly about the accuracy and quality of the work produced by our teams, and the logistical implications of our strategies.

“What’s most likely to distract us on any given day are the things we have a good reason for doing but not a great reason for doing.” – James Clear

The potential problems with being too focused on details, and not conscious enough of the bigger picture, are that:

We work more hours but feel like we achieve less

Teams don’t have the opportunity to learn and grow

People become frustrated and disengaged by our meddling

We don’t see big shifts coming until it’s too late

We close our minds off to out-of-the-box solutions too early.

As Marshall Goldsmith writes in What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, our success can be more in spite of our behaviour than because of it. Keeping a close eye on the details is one of those behaviours – we get an immediate payoff, but long-term, we find it harder to connect to context.

When you get out of the details, you empower others to be good at their jobs and help to keep your teams and organisations responsive, creative and future-focused. Some of my most rewarding work is coaching executive teams to strike the right balance, maintaining useful oversight, adding value and empowering their people to get on and be awesome.

Stay out of the weeds! Even when you love them and you know a lot about them. They’re not your weeds anymore.

Til next week
- A