David Piccione.com

I read a pretty good article the other day over on Steven Downes’ site. Although it was posted almost a year ago, I only came across it recently. In it, he posits the things he believes every person should take the time to learn.

One of his points - how to value yourself - got me to thinking about how value is related throughout a professional organization, and why it’s important for you as a leader to know your value, and understand where you are and where you want to be.

Value is in the Eyes of the Beholder

Our “value” to an organization can be defined in many ways. Usually though, we’re really talking about the factors that you as an individual bring to the table that benefit the organization as a whole.

Often, if we don’t consciously explore our own view of what we think our value is to the organization is, we fail to fully understand it. Being confident in what we know we can both deliver and achieve within the structure enables us to act more effectively as a leader.

The problem is, we are often over confident in our value when we relate it to tasks, but overly critical of it when we relate ourselves to others.

What’s Your Value?

This is a fully participative blog post. I want you to take out a piece of paper and write down every person in your company. If that’s too daunting a task, write down everyone you can remember off hand, but be sure to include both superiors and juniors.

Now, put that list in order from most to least valuable as far as their worth to the organization. This is completely your opinion, but be honest, and make sure no two people share a spot. Of course, make sure you include yourself!

So where did you end up? I’d imagine, somewhere near the middle, depending on your experience and the organization.

Measuring Yourself Against Your Peers

It’s time now to evaluate how your personal performance compares with how you see yourself, value wise. Take a look at the names you feel are persons that are less valuable than you to the company. What is it that you bring that makes you more important than them? Do their teams do work that the company could afford to lose before yours? What you will find by doing this are the specific strengths and key qualities that you bring to the organization. Do you embody and perform to those strengths on a daily basis?

Now take a look at the names you designated has having more value than you to the company. Why is this so? Are they more experienced? Do they process skills you do not? Are they in a better position to make decisions than you are? Looking at these names, you should find the focus you need to build yourself to the next level.

So, What’s the Point?

Most of this will give you a common sense overview of what you (should) already know. The point is that until you actually take stock of where you stand, it’s difficult to make sure that you properly value yourself within the organization. Finding ways to increase your value enables you to continue to grow.

As a leader though, knowing your value will help you allow others to discover theirs. Being able to lead a team that knows exactly where they stand and what they can do to increase their worth to you and the organization gives them clear goals and direction.

At the end of the day, we’re all rated on a scale that equates our value to the organization. The better you understand this, and how it directly impacts you, the better you will be - both on your own and as a leader.

If you want to become the worst leader in history, don’t ever make any decisions. As a leader, this is basically your bread and butter. Making the call (and taking the fall) is what you get paid for.

Making decisions is hard work though. Everyone wants to make the right call at the right time, and nobody wants to be the goat, especially if it means that your team will suffer for it. Many, many people have developed countless techniques and methods to help you make the right call. Most of them do little to help with the actual decision at hand.

What they do in spades however is make you feel better about the choices you make. I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether or not that’s a good thing. Feeling good about your decision is one thing, and I’d suggest doing whatever it is you like best. The more important issue though is making the right call. The only way you’ll do that is with a combination of experience, instinct and process.

Personally, when I find myself in a position where I need to make a decision, I tend to use the following process. I’d recommend it to anyone if you haven’t already found one of your own that works consistently.

Scope the Decision

The first thing you should do is properly scope your decision. In a single phrase, what’s the decision you have to make? What are the outcomes you are choosing between? Is this the right decision to be making, or is it only a symptom of a larger call that you - or somebody else - is putting off? Make sure you’re making the right call on the right thing.

Along with this, you should take a few minutes to evaluate your authority to make the decision. Are you the right person to make this call? If not, who should? Be careful though not to use your perceived lack of authority to avoid the problem altogether. Unless you know that your superiors will get thoroughly upset that you didn’t consult with them prior to making the decision, buck up and take action.

Gather Information

Once you’ve assumed authority and defined the decision to be made, start to gather as much information about the problem your decision is expected to resolve. The amount of information to be gathered directly corresponds to the immediacy and importance of the decision being made. On one hand, strategic and large impact decisions can benefit from using a SWOT analysis or similar tool, while immediate and tactical decisions will use less formal techniques, such as a brainstorming session.

The important thing here is to limit your information gathering to the scope of the problem. If you are doing a SWOT analysis to decide what outfit to wear to a meeting, you’re gathering too much information. You’ll never have all the information, learn to act without it.

Forecast Expected Outcomes

Once you’ve learned as much as you can - given constraints - about an issue, it’s time to forecast the expected outcomes of your options. For a great many people, this involves a simple pro/con list. It gets a little ridiculous when you start adding numbers and looking for some mathematical formula for the “best” decision. To each their own though.

Myself, I paint three scenarios: best case, worst case, and mean/average outcome. I’ve outlined a simple version of this below for the trivial problem of whether or not to wear a suit to a client meeting:

For most decisions that you make, either the best or worst case will be something you will want to avoid completely. In the case above, it looks like if I needed to make a mistake, I’d be better off overdressed. (FYI: You almost always are!)

There are two other components to the process here that are often key to arriving at the correct course of action, as well as often overlooked in the classic mathematical methods. Instinct and experience are valuable allies when making a decision and should never be overlooked. Often, a gut feel is the only distinguishing factor between two choices of equal merit. Gained experience will enhance your instincts and give you a better feel for a situation based on similar occurrences in the past. Both are instrumental in the process and should never be overlooked.

Sleep on It

In my former life as a soldier, I could only dream of having the luxury of this much time in making a decision. Making major decisions with life or death consequences is par for the course in that environment, and the stress is almost unbearable. Working in a business environment, it’s truly rare when you can’t say, “Let me get back to you tomorrow.” Nothing is so earth shatteringly urgent that it can’t bare some sober second thought.

While sleeping on it is great taken literally, what you’re really trying to accomplish here is the act of stepping away from the problem after thinking it through initially, then resuming the process. With my example above, for instance, it may seem on first glance that wearing a suit is the best option. Perhaps though you are a designer, and your brand is hip and edgy. After sleeping on it, you return to the process with the thinking that wearing a suit takes away from your brand, and thus the image you want to portray.

In the least, sleeping on an issue gives you extra confidence in your first instinct, and is a great way to allow yourself the freedom to make a gut call.

Act!

Finally, all of the above is for naught if you don’t actually carry through with your thinking and act. This is by far the hardest of the steps, and also the most important. Often, we know exactly what needs to be done, having analyzed it over and over in our heads, but by never acting, we never make the decision.

Once you have chosen, it’s important to always look forward. Pause for analysis of past turning points only as a means of self improvement, and never as a part of future decision processes. In other words, don’t get into the trap of the Sunk cost fallacy with your decision making.

I’ve used this technique to make some very major choices in my personal and professional life. Although I’ve sometimes made the “wrong” decision, I’ve always been comfortable in acting on future choices because of the strength of this solid thought process.

As leaders, we spend a good deal of time building teams. Putting together the right group of people, giving them a good and meaningful task and allowing them to excel is the pinnacle of what it means to lead.

The problem is that we work so hard at creating the team of our dreams that sometimes we end up with more than we bargain for. Although we figure that our high performing team should make all of our problems go away, it’s often the case that our elite cadre simply creates new issues for us to handle.

There are two main areas that a leader of a great team will come under attack from and will need to learn how to manage effectively. Primarily, the dynamics within the team will be fluid and ever changing; requiring constant tweaking and adjustment. To a lessor extent, yet no less important (especially to new leaders charged with a team within a larger organization) will be the intricacies of how the team interacts with other teams and individuals.

Internal Dynamics

Elite teams are but a single part of a cycle of team building. As such, they are a temporary state and will only last as long as their members are personally fulfilled in their roles. Strong teams are made up of strong people, and these people will be unsatisfied if they are unable to pursue the growth and challenges they need to perform to their best.

As a leader, it’s your job not to fight this simple reality, but to embrace it and use it to your advantage. Work within the natural cycle to allow the veterans to mentor, the stars to have the opportunity to shine, the role players to feel secure and needed, and the rookies to learn. Allow those who are outgrowing their roles to move to the next level, even if it means temporarily weakening your team in the process. Be sure to promote from within whenever possible to give others the chance to fail. Failure is how we learn.

Additionally, you’ll need to manage the relationships and interactions between your team members as they change positions and roles. Try to avoid situations where you have too many people of the same type. Too many rookies will lead to undisciplined mistakes. Too many veterans, a lack of innovative thought; role players, a lack of dedication to the task.

Like a professional sports team, there are always going to be times within the cycle that you’ll need to rebuild, times when you are perfecting the team’s performance and times when you are at the top of your game. Your job is to roll with the situation, and tweak the team when needed to perform over expectations. The team life cycle is something I’m planning on covering in depth in a future post. For now, know that if you choose to fight it, you’ll lose.

Inter-Team Interaction

How your team interacts with other teams will become more of a concern as it approaches true “elite” status. You’ll be completing projects and tasks with higher outcomes than you imagined, your team will be thinking and acting as one, and then your manager or HR will come to talk to you about how your team isn’t playing nice with others. Perhaps someone has complained that they are arrogant. Maybe they feel that they can’t measure up to your team’s expectations of them. It might be said that your team is inclusive and “elitist”. Although as a leader you’ll need to address these concerns, it should make you smile a little bit inside. You have created a team that is truly exemplary.

Complaints of this nature come from jealousy and envy. Your team is better than their team, they know it and it bothers them. With high performance comes a level of pride, and once that pride is picked up by others, it doesn’t translate well. For the most part, you should be flattered that such a compliment has made itself your way and resist any attempt at corrective action. If your team is performing this well, a straight comparison to the bottom line usually works to end the controversy. Your bosses didn’t get to their positions by being stupid, after all.

I should point out though, that I did say that you’ll need to consider the concerns of others. There’s a fine line between pride and arrogance, and this is a great way to evaluate whether your team has reached the peak of the cycle. Perhaps there is an element of complacency that could be adjusted by making a change.

Respect the Cycle

High performing teams come with their own unique challenges for the leader. It is important to ensure for our own team’s success that we pay specific attention to the internal composition and inter-team dynamics at play during times of high quality output.

If we assume that we can rest once our team is performing above expectation, we’ll find ourselves surrounded by destruction caused by our own success. As leaders, we need to work to use elite teams to our advantage.