Why Most Leadership Training Is Not Effective for Product Companies – Sequel
Cliff Berg
Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Agile 2 Academy; Executive level Agile and DevOps advisor and consultant; Lead author of Agile 2: The Next Iteration of Agile
I previously wrote about why most leadership training programs are not effective for product companies, especially high tech ones. Basically, most such programs focus on the far soft end of the “soft skills”. Soft skills are important – including those on the far end – but they are not sufficient; and the evidence is that they actually don’t matter that much when it comes to effectiveness.
What tend to matter more are judgment, decisiveness, listening, and courage, among other things. The very soft skills can even be a disadvantage sometimes. For example, Elon Musk claims that a lack of empathy is his “super power” because it enables him to make painful decisions.
I personally don’t want to lack empathy. And just because some leaders seem uncaring in some ways does not mean that I want to emulate that. But leaders are case studies who we can learn from: what behaviors made or make them so effective?
In the previous article about this I listed several behaviors that we found to be consistent across many highly successful tech companies. I won’t repeat those here. Instead, I want to share what a widely acclaimed leadership program at a major university focuses on. Its focus consists of:
Again, these are good things. But they won’t get things done.
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We have conducted surveys with many of our clients about what problems concern them. The top five concerns across most of them are these:
These issues blend between the strategic and the operational. They are strategic because they impact how effective people are and how fast the company can move and adjust strategies. They are operational because they are about the day-to-day realities of how well the organization works. They are therefore critically important for moving fast and making good decisions while staying flexible.
But these things are not taught in most leadership curricula.
They are in ours.
Chief Technologist
9moI think as a leader we have to demand and model (demand in effective ways which is a topic on its own around leading, vision, influence) * Bias for Action * Decisiveness * Proactively seeking alignment * Using others ideas and decisions (most of the time) then coaching them on how to improve in that area. (best through questions, did you think of?) That last really drives a driving out ego. Funny how from a distance those all kind of feel the same. What if in a meeting we presented the problem, then ask two questions Is this the root of the problem? How would you solve it? Each person gets a timeboxed opportunity to provide input. Pick an option and take a steps in that direction. Constantly evaluate outcomes.
International Speaker | Coach | Driving Agile Transformation with outcome driven behaviors
9moNice piece. I couldn’t help noticing that four of the five items on that bullet list have to do with dependencies and it just boggles my mind how little focus teams, management, leadership has on inter and intra team dependencies from identification to resolution standpoint. It’s like one needs to have a training workshop on “if there’s a dependency or problem, raise the flag instead of continue twiddling your thumbs”. Leadership in part can be taught but only to those who have the inherent drive to get things done, exhibit the signs to accomplish this and are equipped with the soft skills to put a bow on this. Just one man’s experience !!
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9moI think financial acumen could be added to the list. Jim