Zooming In and Out in Leadership
Sometimes my newsletter articles are prompted by a topic I've been wrestling with and thinking a lot about lately. Other times it's something I feel like I've "figured out" and can bring some value by writing about it. This is 100% the former. As a leader there's a constant tension between diving deep into your business and keeping some distance so you can focus on the big picture. In my experience the best leaders can do both, and regularly toggle between zooming in and zooming out.
I've been chewing on this a lot lately because we just closed on our first acquisition, and I've been diving deep. I've been in the office every day, attending all their meetings, learning their software and systems, shadowing folks to see what they do day-to-day, getting to know the team personally, and trying to find some areas I can chip in and get some quick wins. However, our 2nd acquisition closes this coming week, and possibly a 3rd in early June. I see the writing on the wall that I'm going to quickly have to zoom out in order to effectively lead multiple, very different businesses.
After pondering this for a quite a bit, I think your default setting as a leader, especially as a senior leader or "manager of managers" as I put it, has to be zoomed out. If you aren't setting the vision and strategy, or focusing on how the various departments work together, or taking steps to build the right culture, or making decisions around critical investments in people or resources...then nobody is. You must accomplish most of this through interactions with your direct reports where you provide them direction and help to remove obstacles so they can effectively lead their teams and drive the business forward. If you're constantly diving into the weeds, there won't be enough hours in the week to tend to your other responsibilities and something will be neglected with significant negative implications.
That said, I think there are some critical times where it makes sense to zoom in and go deep, and I'm going to attempt to outline several of those. These can be more or less frequent depending on the situation, but remember the default setting of leading at the appropriate level in the organization to be most effective in your role. Here are some reasons to zoom in:
Build Relationships and Credibility
This is especially important with a new team or business. The more people you know by name, have some knowledge of their personal situation, and understand their work tendencies...the better. This is easier to do with a team size of 20, difficult at 100, and near impossible at 1,500. Doing so at whatever level you can helps to humanize you though.
I genuinely enjoy this aspect of leadership. A big part of my personal purpose is to create a fulfilling work environment for my employees. I've spent much of the last week and a half focusing on this with our first acquisition. Our announcement BBQ, lunch with comfort specialists, a site visit with a field supervisor, going to a rarely visited satellite office where the CSRs and administrative staff work, recognizing a technician for his birthday, and thanking the mothers going into Mother's Day Weekend.
Learn the Business
Another reason to zoom in is to learn the business. In Lean they call it "going to the Gemba" which means going to where the work happens. There's no better to way to understand the processes, the flow of information, and all the nuances than to see them with your own eyes. Needless to say I've been doing a lot of this too in the last week and a half and it has my head spinning. Partially because I haven't worked in a residential home services business before, but also because very little if anything is structured or documented yet. As a senior leader though, the goal generally isn't to directly fix problems at a ground level. It's to extract themes and learnings to make better informed and higher impact decisions for the company overall.
Inspect What You Expect
Sometimes zooming in is about inspecting what you expect. As a leader you often have to make decisions based on key performance indicators (KPIs), what your team is telling you, and limited touch points. This is simply because as a business scales and/or your role grows, you can't be everywhere all the time. You run the risk of having the wool pulled over your eyes. I use periodic targeted skip-level interactions to dive deep and see reality. This allows me to spend time with people 2 or more levels below me in the org chart and observe, ask questions, and see if things are operating the way I'm being told they are.
Management Turnover
Turnover is never easy. In fact it can really suck, especially if it's a strong manager on your team. That said, it creates a great opportunity to zoom in and get a better understanding of that particular team or function in a way that you can't really do when there's a buffer in between. During this time you might identify a high potential employee you weren't aware of, an issue you thought was solved that isn't, or even something that causes you to reconsider the scope of or ideal candidate for the role being backfilled. Don't miss the opportunity to dive deep when there's turnover.
Address a High Priority Problem
Let's face it, sometimes as a leader you just have to rollup your sleeves and zoom in to solve a high priority problem. These instances should be few and far between, or you have to question the folks you have on your team that should be managing the business day-to-day. That said you have a unique set of skills and experiences and sometimes you're simply the person best equipped to do something, even if it could be looked at as "beneath you".
I'm sure there are others, but those are five reasons I could think of to zoom in as a leader. These overlap with each other as well. You could have a key manager quit, then use that opportunity to build credibility and rapport with their team, all the while learning an area of the business you weren't that familiar with yet.
In closing I'd just give you the same advice I'm giving myself. Make sure you're zooming in for a specific purpose. Does it fall under one of those five buckets, or perhaps another good reason you've identified? Too often I've found myself doing it out of comfort and familiarity, while in turn not spending that time on something higher leverage and bigger impact, and in the process undermining the managers on my team. It's a constant balancing act but the important thing is to be mindful and zoom in and out with intention.
Here are a few of the favorite things I've watched and read the last 2 weeks:
· Article - Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid by Jonathan Haidt – The comparison to the Tower of Babel and the insights around the impact of social media were sobering to read. That said, I think this article does a good job of explaining some of the things happening in America today. The Atlantic might force a subscription to view the article so a summary can be viewed in Section B of this newsletter - Link
· Movie - King Richard – It’s unfortunate that when many people recall this movie, they are likely to think of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock. But this movie is excellent. Great acting and fascinating origin story for the Williams sisters and their dad Richard
· Article - Why Thinking About Inflation Leads to More Inflation by Mark Dent and Zachary Crockett – You can hardly watch or read anything these days without the topic of inflation coming up. I thought this article was particularly interesting from a psychological standpoint and looking at how inflation can be a self-fulfilling prophecy
· Article - How to Succeed by Josh Brown – If you regularly look at my newsletter article recommendations, you know I love Nick Maggiulli’s blog “Of Dollars and Data”. This is a cool quick story of his journey which recently culminated in publishing his first book
· Quote #1 – I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. Rabindranath Tagore
· Quote #2 – Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement… get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed. Rabbi Heschel