Reconnect
Lessons
Information is filtered through each layer it travels, so being out of touch with the trench’s is debilitating
Go spelunking - find fun and innovative ways to connect with the individual contributor levels of your org
Connecting cross-level is a powerful cultural force that creates strong social ties to your organization
As a leader it is very easy to get out of touch with what is actually going on at the ground level. It might be easy enough to stay in the loop when your just one tier off the individual contributor level, simply because of proximity, but as soon as you get two, three, or more tiers up it becomes nearly impossible to keep up with the minutia. This is to be expected, and is actually effective. The higher your position, the broader your view of the organization. The issue arises when you either A) Continue to grasp for control and involvement in every detail, or B) Completely lose touch with what’s going on. In this article we will focus on (B).
The minutia that you can easily lose sight of not only includes how your people are executing on your vision, but also the culture, the inefficiencies, and the individuality of the organization and its people. But how do you keep your finger on the organizations pulse without becoming that overbearing manager we’ve all hated to work for?
Organizational Spelunking
A tactic I’ve used in the past is to randomly and regularly sit with someone at the individual contributor level, someone down in the trenches, who understands the dirty details of the organization’s day to day, at their desk and have them explain a specific piece of technology or a specific initiative they’re working on. I try to get as down in the weeds as possible with them. Usually this conversation ends up expanding beyond just the technology, and into other areas like inefficiencies they’re suffering from, problems with the tools the company is using, etc. This is information that is too easy filtered through layers of management and never makes it to the people who make organization wide decisions (effectiveness of this decision making structure to be discussed in another article).
Kim Scott discusses this strategy in her book Radical Candor (which by the way, I highly recommend), where she calls it “‘spelunking’ in your organization”. She gives the example how engineers at Apple would regularly come back from a break to find Steve Jobs at their desk, eager to discuss the nitty-gritty of their work.
I attended the 2018 Women in Tech Conference in Seattle, Washington where I listened to Manuel Medina, CEO of Outreach, a sales engagement platform, talk about how he doesn’t actually have a desk, he just has a laptop and a chair that he rolls to random areas of the office. On any given day he could be hanging out with Sales, while the next day he’s sitting with Engineering or Support. This is an innovative form of organizational spelunking.
There are a ton of examples out there of specific strategies you can use from eating lunch in the cafeteria (and not at your desk) to not even having a desk but just rolling a chair around the office, but the point remains that it is incredibly important to stay in touch with the people in the trenches of your organization, because that’s where the most unfiltered important information resides. We put all sorts of corporate processes and policies in place to make sure information can move up and down the organization, but like the game of telephone, the closer you can get to the source of the information, the more accurate it is going to be.
Recognition
The side effect of going spelunking is that you’re going to be giving people recognition for their hard work. Every time I’ve done this exercise I always notice a sense of pride well up in the person as they talk about their work and walk you through how they solved a complex problem. This kind of recognition and approved bragging is a very powerful cultural force. When people are able to show off to their leaders and they get recognition for their sweat equity, it creates much stronger cultural bonds between them, the organization, and you. What’s better is that the higher up your position and the bigger the company, the more powerful it is. It is easy to get lost in the fold and be just a number in an organization of thousands, or sometimes even hundreds. Being able to stand out in these environments is not only powerful, but it’s vital. When we feel like a number, it is literally dehumanizing.
Break down that wall, connect with your people, and strengthen your culture.
There is a very fine line between staying in touch with your organizations minutia, and being so involved in it that you spend most of your time grasping for control and pissing your people off. The latter we will discuss soon.