The Most Difficult Leadership Skill
Or, there are peacetime leaders, then there are wartime leaders
Happy Sunday!
If things are looking a bit bleak for you by any chance, here’s something uplifting from me.
I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. It’s a long read, but totally worth the time. So much of knowledge has been compressed into this book that it’s almost unbelievable.
It’s a good refresher on the progress of science and Bryson covers nearly everything — space, physics, chemistry, geology, particle physics, genetics, biology, fossils, microorganisms, and more. He takes us with him on the ultimate eye-opening journey, and reveals the world in a way most of us have never seen it before. This is how science should be taught. If you haven’t read it yet, you just dunno what you are missing out.
Now it’s the time for your weekly dose of multidisciplinary reading. Each week I tackle fundamental questions about decision-making and clear thinking that may help you live a better life. If you are here for the first time, please consider subscribing.
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Q: What is the most underrated leadership skill?
With the rampant layoffs, forced acquisitions and death of several businesses, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what it takes to be a leader in these tough times.
I believe organisational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing are all relatively straightforward skills to master. There’s not much ambiguity. But as a leader the toughest skill you have to master is to manage your own mindset.
There are peacetime leaders and there are wartime leaders. Both have very distinct traits.
Peacetime is when things are overall looking good, a organisation has a large advantage over the competition, and its market is growing. Things are sunny in peacetime, and all you have to do is make the best of the situation. Innovation, expansion, and hyper growth usually happen in peacetime.
In wartime, an organisation is fending off an imminent existential threat. Such a threat can come from a wide range of sources including competition, dramatic macro economic change, market change, and so forth.
You don’t necessarily have to be the founder or the CEO of a company to be a wartime leader. Departments within a large organisation, sports teams, research groups, NGOs, and several institutions go through wartime situations. If you have a side hustle with your friends, it applies to you. If you are the head of your family, it applies to you as well. In fact, if you are leading a team of individuals in any form, you are a leader, and it applies to you.
Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements.
— Ben Horowitz. The Hard Thing About Hard Things
A wartime organisation is a completely different ballgame. It all comes down to survival. A leader will have to make a lot of tough choices in these turbulent times to keep the organisation afloat. Managing your own mindset is the most difficult skill to master in these times.
Organisational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing are usually straightforward skills to master compared to keeping your mind in check. If you aren’t thinking straight, it would be very difficult to make the right calls. During wartime, a single wrong call might be the difference between one more day of survival and going belly-up. If you start getting in your own way, it’s not a very good sign. This is the most personal and important battle that a leader faces, and what makes it worse is that very few people talk, read, or research about it.
A leader naturally has a sense of purpose and deeply cares about the work they do, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing what they are doing. And, nobody sets out to be a bad leader, yet every leader has to face great challenges in some form that’ll define them. You have to understand that things will go wrong along the way in some way or the other—it’s a hard truth that you’ll have to swallow.
The best business problems are those that you can avoid. But sometimes, things totally out of your control can creep up and create unnecessary difficulties for you. It’s not your fault that things went bad, but it’s you who will have to fix them. It’s always the leader’s responsibility. You got nobody to blame. You got nobody to take care of things for you.
This presents certain problems. For starters, there’s no place where you can learn about managing your mindset as a leader without yourself becoming one. On top of that, nothing in this world can prepare you to become a wartime leader. This means that you will face a broad set of challenges that you don’t know how to solve, that require skills that you don’t have, and have no idea how to acquire. Nevertheless, everybody will expect you to know what to do when.
But, even if you make all the right calls, there’s no guarantee that things won’t go wrong. If you are running a big team, your executives might be making bad decisions that are affecting others. There might be nasty favouritism that you aren’t aware of. Or worse, female employees might be mistreated in your organisation without your knowledge. At the end, it’s all on you. As long as it’s your team, your people, your organisation, your teammates, your students, your subordinates, your family members, it’s all on you.
A leader doesn’t have the luxury to let somebody else solve their problems. You’ll have to take full responsibility of whatever wrong happens on your watch. If someone gets promoted for all the wrong reasons, it’s your fault. If the team missed the release date, it’s your fault. If the team didn’t play well, it’s on you. If a good student didn’t perform well, that is on you. If a member makes unreasonable demands, it’s on you. If the product has too many bugs, it’s your fault. To be honest, it kind of sucks to be the leader, and given the stress, you either take things too personally, or don’t take them personally enough. Both are wrong.
Taking things too personally might push you to terrorise your team to the point where nobody wants to work with you. (Just look at your team motivation or attrition rate to get a fair idea.) Or, you would indulge in self-pity making yourself overloaded and sick from all these constant problems (that you are responsible for) that keep on creeping up everyday, thus rendering you ineffective.
On the other hand, if you take a completely nonchalant attitude towards the organisational problems, thereby giving them no importance so that they needn’t be dealt with urgently, it might help you feel better about yourself. But making yourself feel better isn’t your only goal. A leader’s job is to get obstacles out of the team’s way. If you keep on ignoring problems, or start hiding them under the bed, people are eventually gonna get frustrated working with you. On top of that, small problems would pile up into huge mountains, and it would be too late to start fixing things.
Ideally, you should be urgent yet not insane. You’ll have to be aggressive and decisive without getting too emotional. You’ll have to separate the importance of a problem from how you feel about them. You’ll have to think straight and stop terrorising your colleagues and yourself.
It’s a lonely job indeed. No matter how many books you read, and how many people you talk to, your problems will be unique to yours, and no matter how much advice you take, at the end it’s you who’ll have to take all the hard calls. Sometimes the hard calls would be imposing salary cuts, or letting go of good people, or give timeout. These are very strenuous choices, and they are likely to take a toll on you, therefore managing your mindset is very important.
Living in uncertain times, your mind has a habit of automatically building certain narratives. Some of them might be positive: “we’ll get out of it unscathed.” Others might be negative: “this is going to be the end of us.” It’s natural to have them, but when you are judging ideas and outcomes the key to getting to the right outcome is to keep yourself from getting married to either the positive or the dark narrative. To be honest it’s not easy.
Think of it this way: your narratives make you either a naive optimist or a depressive pessimist, when what you really need is to be a realist. A realist knows the limits of their own knowledge, judges the situation objectively, and makes the best of it without getting too anxious about the future.
Any advice on managing your mindset is ought to hit a wall because everybody is a bit different. But here are a couple of techniques you might find helpful.
Share your problems with others: Speaking to others is therapy. We all need counselling sessions once in a while. Talking to a friend, or a loved one about your problems, opening up about the roadblocks and the obstacles your are facing, and how you are feeling about the whole thing holistically—your fears and your anxieties—would really help.
Write things down: Writing down clears out a lot of things, and gives you perspective. It also helps you fill in the gaps in your thinking and fix the loopholes in your plans. You can write about your plan of action, or your feelings. Both are bound to help you see things clearly.
Focus on solutions: It’s very easy to get bogged down by the never-ending problems when you hit a wall. The trick is to divert your attention from the problems and find a way out. Fear and anxiety have their roots in thinking too much about the problems and ignoring the solutions. Having a solution is always better than having no solution at all.
Every business has problems. Every organisation is unique. There’s no smooth sailing in turbulent times. As a leader, you would often feel like quitting, but quitting makes no great leaders. A leader has to learn to live with uncertainty, make hard calls, and convince themselves that there’s no perfect solution to a lot of hard problems—only practical solutions. You gotta make the best out of your situation. And the first rule of getting out of a tough situation is to make sure you have the right mindset to think clearly and act decisively.
An Idea For You
Say what you will about tradition but unless you have a reasonable alternative you’d best not mess with it. Traditions have survived generations. They have stood the test of time.
Anything that has remained in practice for a long time is very likely to remain in practice for a long time. Traditions are Lindy proof.
I Enjoyed Reading
The Devastating Decline of a Brilliant Young Coder — “In Cloudflare’s early years, Lee Holloway had been the resident genius, the guy who could focus for hours, code pouring from his fingertips while death metal blasted in his headphones. But some years before the IPO, his behaviour began to change. He lost interest in his projects and coworkers. He stopped paying attention in meetings. His colleagues noticed he was growing increasingly rigid and belligerent, resisting others’ ideas, and ignoring their feedback.”
What Would Aristotle Do in a Pandemic? — “Consider the rule that we should take whatever action is necessary to save the most lives, which seems like a no-brainer. But now suppose a healthy young man comes to the hospital for a routine test. As it happens, the hospital is treating six mortally ill patients, each in need of a different vital organ. So the doctors decide that they should euthanise the young man and use his organs to pull six patients from the jaws of death.”
When The Dust Settles — “Your neighbour’s children play their sports but only after digital temperature measurement each time that they leave the field. You hug your neighbor but you do so with an eye for what onlookers may think about you. Dining out is reserved for the most exclusive restaurants, the type that can enforce minimums that begin to address a lacking volume. Functioning movie theatres are rare.”
What Makes a Business Durable? — “Buffett’s approach is to figure out why a company has had a high return on capital in the past, has a high return in the present, and is likely to have a high return in the future. Once he knows the reason for the high return—the company’s “moat”—he can judge how durable that moat is.”
Why Western Philosophy Can Only Teach Us So Much — “To travel around the world’s philosophies is an opportunity to challenge the beliefs and ways of thinking we take for granted. By gaining greater knowledge of how others think, we can become less certain of the knowledge we think we have, which is always the first step to greater understanding.”
The list of all the articles I’ve written can be found here. And the past three editions of Sunday Wisdom are here: 33, 32, and 31.
I Enjoyed Watching
Parasite — The Power of Symbols — “In this video, we examine the way Parasite cleverly utilises symbols and motifs to express its theme.”
The Nightmare Artist — “The horrifying paintings of Polish artist Zdislaw Beksinski, whose work combined Freudian nightmares with fragments of World War 2 and Holocaust imagery, also serving as a key inspiration for the modern heavy metal aesthetic.”
How Walter Murch Worldized Film Sound — “How do you capture the acoustic spirit of a place without the software to simulate it? In the early 70s legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch invented a technique called Wordizing that solved the problem of realistic reverb.”
Contagion – Anatomy of a Global Pandemic — “A video essay about Contagion and the anatomy of a global pandemic.”
How A. R. Rahman Scored Bombay — “This video breaks down A. R. Rahman’s use of music and the (possible) thoughts behind composing the music for Mani Ratnam’s 1995 film on the fateful Mumbai riots, BOMBAY.”
Worth Thinking About
A good decision cannot guarantee a good outcome. All real decisions are made under uncertainty. A decision is therefore a bet, and evaluating it as good or not must depend on the stake and the odds, not on the outcome
— Ward Edwards
Complement this with Thinking in Bets.
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Best,
Abhishek