Success fills available space

This might not be the right title. Break this up into smaller bits and just post smaller things.

There are some separate themes here:

• Don’t manage the “how,” manage the “why.” Very Simon Sinek, very Art of Action. As a leader, especially a senior leader several levels removed from the people doing the “real work,” you serve the organization best by focusing on the intent, the desired outcome.

• Focusing on “why” and “intent” are tactical implementations for the goal of providing space and trust to teams. Fire people when they’re not understanding the outcome, when they’re defying the desired outcome. Don’t expect them to do exactly what you would do.

“If you could imagine it, you wouldn’t need a team to do it.”

Teams build things you couldn’t build on your own. By definition, a team builds something they invented. It serves a purpose that you’ve defined, but if you could imagine all the details of what it needed to be, why did you hire a team?

I can already think of some leaders saying “I know how it should be, I just can’t do it fast enough by myself.” Maybe that’s a bad reason to be in leadership? If you just need speed, or parallelism, bring in contractors.

But what’s the thesis?

• Leadership is about being a conduit for customer and business need

• Team needs are secondary to customer needs, but still more important than your personal needs

• Of course this is contrary to all of our evolutionary instincts and our sense of ego (?)

• The limits of success for your team, beyond obvious skill and resources constraints, are at the edges of your own ego

• If you want your team to succeed, you need to get out of their way

• Chasing promotions, profits, etc., is the opposite of truly chasing success. Success is a lagging proxy metric so it’s hard to pin down (?)

What could we learn from the failures of the Boeing 737 MAX and the Sears retail chain? What leadership mistakes were made?

Success expands to fill the available space. One way to be certain your team will have little to no success is by filling all the available space with your ego.

What does the defunct retail chain Sears, Roebuck and Company have in common with the Boeing 737 MAX? Both catastrophically failed because leaders let their egos suffocate their teams.

Sometimes the key to success—or to avoiding failure—is to do the thing that many leaders are afraid to: let go.

TODO maybe something here from Art of Action about the propensity of leadership to implement more measures and controls. I can quote the book.

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