Leaders Eat Last – Simon Sinek

I just finished reading Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek, an interesting book that examines what it means to be a leader. The main focus of the book revolved around the concept that the best leaders put the members of their group ahead of themselves.

Sinek gives a number of examples of great business leaders over the last 50 years and explained that companies where the leaders put their staff first and treat them well tend to have more success in the long term. The examples given include James Sinegal of Costco, the US military and 3M. He argues that a lot of the boom and bust of the last 40 years is down to the pressure that shareholders put on top company executives to make short term choices over long term stability.

He makes the point that the best modern companies provide a ‘circle of safety’ for their staff members. When all the members of a team feel safe there is less stress, politics,  hiding of mistakes and more sharing, collaboration and a better atmosphere. He quotes a number of studies that show that stress appears in employees when they have a lack of control in their job. His belief is that this largely comes about due to weak leadership who are unwilling to give up even a modicum of control to the individuals who are executing the actual task and doing the actual work.

Some of these concepts dovetail nicely with the concept of a Servant Leader. The term Servant Leader has appeared in the world of software development over the last ten to fifteen years, largely driven by the agile concept of a scrum master. The prototypical servant leader has an altruistic style of leadership that focuses on a high degree of member participation, shared decision making and high levels of team ownership.

My belief is that a really great scrum master or team leader must foster a strong circle of safety as described by Sinek. Without it you are fighting an uphill battle to elevate team engagement and employee ownership. Unfortunately it is very easy for leaders to fall into the trap of using their title; or worse manipulation to orchestrate their teams. This will negatively affect team trust.

Trust is the foundation of a solid team as described in the brilliant book the 5 dysfunctions of a team (click link for summary):

Sinek explains that two of the most important elements of being a good leader are integrity and the ‘management’ of control. A leader has to have a strong sense of integrity and the trust of the groups individuals, without this the members of the group will not be willing to commit fully, reducing the overall performance of the team.

Secondly a strong leader has to have the strength to share control. To engage the members of the group and share the decision making process, to delegate clearly and effectively and not micro manage staff members as they work on the assigned task.

Sinek also delves into the biology that drives strong teams forward, and shows how the advent of technology and reduced social interaction may be having a negative effect on the ability for geographically distant individuals to work as an effective team.

He examines the balance between the various different hormones that humans are exposed to in various circumstances. Endorphins and Dopamine, which are released into the blood stream to mask physical pain and to reward positive survival behaviour such as hunting and killing game.  Or in a more modern setting they are released when you win a game of hearthstone or complete a 52 book challenge 🙂.  There hormones can be highly addictive and have a tendency to promote self centered behaviour.

Serotonin and Oxytocin on the other hand provide a feeling of significance, pride and status. It drives us to make connections with people, seek the recognition of others and to be part of a team and achieve as a group. These hormones are only expressed in an environment where the circle of safety is maintained. Our physiology has been hardwired over thousand of years to operate best in this sort of environment.

So in summary this book touches on a number of really interesting areas with regards to leadership. If you are in a position of leadership such as a manager, team leader or scrum master you should definitely give it a go.

If you have recently read Leaders Eat Last and want to explore the concept further I would recommend the 5 dysfunctions of a team. It touches on a lot of the same areas and does so in a well written narrative driven manner.

Review: “The Goal” – Eliyahu Goldratt

I first heard of “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt when reading The Phoenix Project (TPP) during my 2016 52 book challenge.

TPP follows an IT manager as he attempted to turn around a failing IT department. His boss has just been fired and he has been given the impossible task of saving the department and the company. The approach that the IT manager used in The Phoenix Project originated from “the goal”, this prompted me to read “The Goal”.

The core concept explained in the book is the Theory of Constraints. The rationale behind the theory is that in any system designed to produce an output, the limiting factor in productivity is the systems most prevalent constraint. Any improvement made in the system anywhere but at the constraint only gives the illusion of an improvement.

The book starts off by making the point that before you can identify constraints you must understand what the ultimate goal of your system is. In the vast majority of cases (be it software development or manufacturing) the goal is to make money. It is quite surprising how easily this fact gets lost in software development, when you have hundreds of bugs and features all vying for a limited resource pool. In the vast majority of cases it comes down to someones subjective view of ‘what is urgent’.

The important distinction identified in the book is that the theory of constraints is not about trying to ‘improve efficiency’ or ‘get better metrics’. It is focused on better achieving the goal. In a contained system, whether it is a software development department or a manufacturing plant you get closer to achieving the goal by identifying and if possible removing the constraint.

Goldratt outlined 5 focusing steps that help you to identify and then eliminate constraints:

image by leanproduction.com

The first step involves identifying the constraint in the system. In The Goal (and the manufacturing plant that it focuses on) the constraint turned out to be an industrial heat treatment oven. In TPP (and the IT department) it was an individual called Brent. I’ll focus on the story of Brent as that has the most parallels with my own work experience.

Quite often in an IT work environment there are a few individuals who end up becoming a major bottleneck due to their ‘usefulness’. The management team in TPP identified Brent as the bottleneck by going through all the work in progress in the system, then identifying the key resources required to complete the relevant task. It turned out that Brent was fully booked for multiple years into the future and was on the critical path for many of their most important projects that needed to be delivered ASAP !

Having someone who can jump into any situation and solve whatever task is encountered is extremely useful, but unfortunately those individuals often become crutches, single point of failures or knowledge vaults.

They can develop into crutches as whenever shit hits the proverbial fan it takes a very brave manager to resist going straight to their very own Brent. The decision to utilize Brent is often made even if there are many individuals in the team with the required task relevant maturity for the job, quite often the path of least resistance is still chosen. This sort of behavior subtly erodes the strength of the team as a unit. This sort of reaction also robs the management team of a chance to test someone else out to see if they have what it takes to be the next Brent in the making. Which is an important aspect of delegation.

Single points of failures are also unhealthy in a team due to the damage they can cause to knowledge retention and skill development. Department structures that try to support these fundamental building blocks must promote the concepts of succession planning. Everyone in the team should be training their successor. Not only does this drive growth and development for the individuals below but it gives the people above the opportunity to move on to bigger and better things.

Preventing knowledge vaults is important, both for the company and the individual. If you believe the modern maxim that knowledge is power then it is easy to understand why people might have a tendency to horde knowledge for themselves. The reality is that although this might give you some short term gains (the ability to hold your employer to ransom for a big pay rise) it will inevitably prevent you from progressing out of that role as no one else can do it. Additionally it deprives you of the chance to teach, as Seneca said:

So once you have identified your constraint, the next step is to do everything you can to attempt to relieve the constraint of work. in TPP this involved managing the work load to Brent. Identifying tasks that were lined up for Brent that don’t specifically need him, then making sure he is only working on urgent and important tasks. The management team also assigned a number of other capable individuals to work through Brent’s backlog, whilst he worked on the most important task. If they didn’t know how to complete a task they would discuss it with Brent and then document the exact steps required so that they would never need to go back to him again.

With the constraint identified and steps taken to manage it the department were better able to achieve ‘the goal’. My short review stands no chance of doing the two books justice (TPP, The Goal), I would recommend picking them up if you found this blog vaguely interesting.

If you want to learn more about the Theory of Constraints then there are a few great videos by BigVisible Solutions that can be found on Vimeo here:

Identifying the Constraint

Exploiting the Constraint

Subordinate to the Constraint

Elevate the Constraint

Micro Review: “The Coaching Habit” – Michael Bungay Stanier

The coaching habit is a useful book to go through if you are a reasonably experienced coach and want to give your coaching method a bit of a kick start.

It summarises some of the pitfalls that you can fall into and gives good advice on simple techniques that can make you a more effective coach. This includes:

The kick starter question – A simple question that can kick start a coaching conversation into a productive discussion rather than a general chit-chat that drags on and on… The main example was the question “What’s on your mind?”.

The AWE Question – “And What Else?”. This focuses on getting as many options on the table as possible. More options gives the coachee more ways forward. The book highlights statistical studies that show when more options are considered people generally come to better choices. There is a limit though, at a certain point the number of choices/options become paralyzing. The Author suggests the book “The Paradox of Choice” makes this point succinctly, I’ve added it to my reading list.

The Focus question – This attempts to focus on the real issue at hand by redirecting back towards how problems are affecting the individual and what they can do to move forward.  An example is.. “What is the real problem here for you?”

The Lazy Question – This involves simply asking how the coach can help the coachee. Sometimes its as simple as asking and finding out.

The Strategic Question – The revolves around the strategic decision on what requests to say yes to, and what responses to say no to.

I’ve found the book very useful and am attempting to weave some of these questions into my coaching sessions.

Review: “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie

How to win friends and influence people is a brilliant book that outlines the simple things you should do (and avoid doing) to maintain good relationships at work, home or play. The book was written by Dale Carnegie. In his time he was famous for being a great public speaker and developing self-improvement courses that changed millions of lives.

The book is very well laid out, in each chapter there is a main principle that all the examples and stories relate to. These were draw out of Dale’s personal experiences as well as historical examples. There are a number of stories about the American civil war that show the principles in action.

The summary below which was taken from this Hubspot post provides an excellent reference for people who have read the book or want a brief summary of its contents:

Review: “Blink” by Malcolm Gladwell

I decided to read “Blink” after reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman on the subject of logical thinking. In that book Daniel Kahneman looks at  how the human brain works and the flaws in how we sometimes perceive the world and come to incorrect conclusions.

In summary “Thinking, fast and slow” comes at the analysis of the two natural systems of the mind from a very different perspective than Blink. It describes the unconscious ‘associative’ mind (System 1) as something that we cannot trust as it is prone to a number of logic errors that the conscious (slow) mind (or System 2 as Daniel describes it) is not.

In Blink Malcolm looks at the unconscious mind in a much more positive light. He eloquently describes many situations where people have used their experience and associative minds to achieve a better result than when others we’re given lots of time to ponder and deliberate.

He believes that expert knowledge and appropriate ‘thin slices’ of knowledge can give a better answer than in-depth analysis and the weighing of numerous individual variables. Gladwell managed to tie the concepts that he is trying explain in his books around interesting and insightful stories which helps turn a conceptually tricky subject into an engaging read.

From my perspective the summary of this book is that we should not fear using our unconscious/associative mind to make decisions, but we should be more aware of what answers this part of our brain is best suited to solving.

For problems where there are a myriad of different variables, where you are an knowledgeable in the given field, it is best to go with your judgement or ‘gut’. For problems with less variables and less inherent knowledge of the subject engaging ‘system 2’ (as Daniel Kahneman would put it) is a wiser choice.

The book also talks about ‘white space’. In effect putting some distance between yourself and a situation in order to make a the best decision. Some of the worst decisions are made in the heat of the moment, when people only have time to react in a situation that  they do not have prior experience in. He gives examples of the shooting of a number of black individuals by rookie police officers in america. The story describes how inexperience, dangerous assumptions and snap decisions by the police officers in the heat of the moment conspired to produce tragic results. Such as the pointless murder of innocent victims such as in the shooting of Amadou Diallo.

Review: “Thinking, fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman

This book gives a deep insight into how we as human beings think. It talks about the two systems that have developed, what kind of problems they solve and how errors in judgement occur.

System 1 is the quick reactive, associative system in the brain. It is quick to try and solve a problem, even if it has to tamper with the question before it attempts to answer it. For example if you were asked:

“How much money would you be willing to give to protect wildlife?”

That question is extremely broad, system 1 will try and break this question down or associate it to another question and answer that. If for example you care about foxes or dolphins your brain might translate the question to:

“How much money would you be willing to give to protect dolphins?”

The two answers may have very different monetary amounts. System 1 is extremely quick at making associations, receiving a hard question to answer and transforming it into a simpler one. It is also possible to ‘prime’ system 1 to influence responses, by activating pleasant or unpleasant thoughts you can impact the results of a question. This makes system 1 quite unreliable. Another example where System 1 is engaged is the question “What does 2+2 equal?”, your brain knows this knowledge. It instantly retrieves the answer that is associated with the maths problem.

System 2 is reserved for harder problems. It is inherently lazy and is quite often happy to just “go with” system 1’s associative answer. System 2 is engaged when deep thought is required, for example the question “What is the result of 24 x 17?. you can tell someone has engaged system 2 because their eyes dilate and they generally stop all other activity whilst processing the answer.

Interestingly glucose levels in the blood stream  affect the performance of system 2. This shows that operating system 2 has an inherent cost which may explain why it is lazy by default. System 2 can also suffer from ego depletion when it is over worked. It basically gets to the point where system 2 gives up handling complicated problems and hands the reigns over to system 1.

The book has helped me gain a deeper understanding of how the human mind works. It will hopefully allow me to recognize when I am not engaging system 2 for a problem that I really should !

Review: “Work Rules!” by Lazlo Bock

If you are interested in google or managing (and getting the best out of people) then this book is a must read.

It is a detailed account of how google formed a performance management system that hooked into data driven philosophy to quantify the performance of their staff, this data driven philosophy comes right from the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and underpins every endeavour the company undertaken to date. It promotes the sanctity of data and the importance of using quantitative as well as qualitative data in performance management of staff.

As we all know, over the past 15 years google have been the poster boy for rapidly expanding businesses.

They promote the habit of putting your best staff under a microsope. By doing this you can build a picture of the important traits and attributes of people in a particular role. You can then use this to seed the recruitment and performance management process to keep the quality of hired staff members high and to promote growth in current staff members.

After you have identified the best individuals in certain areas you have the option for them to train the rest ! For example if you have a manager who is amazingly organised, very rarely misses meetings or deadlines. Talking to him and figuring out his process, and then empowering him to teach others is good for the employee (they feel important) and the other staff members (they can strengthen a weakness).

They also promoted regular coaching of individuals. This would involve regular catchups and setting SMART goals for the individuals. This would support the setting of internally visible OKR‘s (objectives and key results) that employees would work towards. An example of an OKR might be the launch a new product, increase ad venue in a quarter or optimise the efficiency of a search algorithm.  OKR’s were introduced to google by John Doerr who is a famous venture capitalist at Kliener Perkins who was an early investor in companies including Google and Amazon.com. He brought the concept over from IBM, they became a bit hit at google and are still used at the company to this day.

John Doerr has also backed BetterWorks. A startup that is attempting to build a set of tools to assist the setting of company wide OKR’s. My understanding is that they have struggled to define their product and its price range and the uptake was low. The company has pivoted in an attempt to reverse their fortunes. Time will tell if they can cash in on the concepts that have helped build companies such as IBM and google.

A few other interesting concepts include:

• The use of checklists as part of processes to reduce cogitative load, for repetitive but complicated tasks.
• Using experiential rewards to award publicly and financial rewards privately
• De-emphasize job titles. The weakest form of staff member is one that is reliant on a job title to lead (see 5 levels of leadership by John C Maxwell)
• Pay unfairly – Pay people what they are worth, not what a job title dictates because an employee’s worth to a company follows a power law distribution not a normal distribution.
• Building a culture/community is in the best interest of a company. It increases motivation, employee happiness, retention and therefore profits
• Mistake proofing – Build systems that are designed to reduce mistakes using the japanese Poka-yoke concept.

If you have read the book feel free to add a comment about what you found most useful.