4 Things Leaders Need To Know To Succeed.

Knowing What To Do Next.

 

Leaders have a serious problem: there is always more to be done than time available to do it.

This isn’t new, I think it’s always been this way. The main reason is a leader doesn’t have a clearly defined role at the task level. They are there to lead, to “influence others towards the goal” as I like to say. Sometimes they accomplish that through individual efforts, sometimes their whole job involves talking and listening and seeking to understand.

The problem: many leaders go into this without a strong foundation. Maybe they’ve never really thought about leadership and are just trying to emulate the leaders they like from their past. Maybe they think leadership is about expertise or knowing what to do in all situations, or maybe they do view it as a clear set of tasks to repeat like sending reports, scheduling meetings, and having “hard conversations” when the time comes.

One piece of advice I gave when new producers would start at Riot Games: know where you’re going. Have a goal in mind. Leading isn’t about solving the calendar tetris game and figuring out the rote things you do every day so you can put yourself on autopilot. 

A leader on autopilot is a failing leader.  

I’ve expanded this advice since, so I’m going to share with you two things - really two pairs of things - that you need to know to truly succeed.

 

What Would “The Best Team” Look Like?

Leaders lead others, or they aren’t leading. They are often in charge of teams or organizations, or at least one other person. Their job, whether they know it or not, is to improve the effectiveness of that person or group of people. 

How you do that will change over time, and if you ever join any new group of people, there will be no shortage of opportunities to make them better. Teams are insanely multi-faceted and complex. You can make them more efficient across a ton of different measurements. You can make them happier. You can make them more collaborative. You can help them focus, or improve their resilience, or broaden their capability. You can make them more self-sufficient, or increase their trust in each other or increase the organization’s trust in them.

There are so many things you can do to improve a team, one of the first problems a leader runs into is: what should I focus my time on? Because not only can you improve your team in limitless ways, but often any particular axis could continue to be invested in for months or years or even longer without capping out what is possible for that team.

There’s an infinite amount of work to create the perfect team (it’s actually impossible because the goalposts will endlessly move on you), and you don’t have infinite time.

The inexperienced leader starts playing whack-a-mole. They see a problem or opportunity for the team, they try to solve it. They keep doing this, either sequentially or all at once, and sometimes this helps out. A little bit. To me, this is the mark of an inexperienced leader. Busy, frazzled, chasing whatever latest shiny improvement they read about in a book, and with no real end state in mind other than, “make things better.”

My advice to you: start by understanding what you think “the best” or “the ideal” team would look like based on your current context. If your team was maximally effective, what would that look like? 

You won’t get this right. That’s ok. Simply knowing a directionally accurate goal state will get you moving, and once you are moving you can iterate and pivot as needed.
 

The next thing you need to do is understand where the team is at today. So, you know what you think the ideal is, now let’s look at reality. The team you're on is not that ideal. That’s ok too! It never will be. Ideals are aspirational, not attainable. You just need the direction.

If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress.
 - Barack Obama 

Once you know what the ideal is, and where the team currently stands, you know the delta. This enables you to see where the biggest gaps are, and to prioritize what you might improve about the team. Maybe your initial instinct was to improve how well the team focused, but upon reflecting on the gap between current and ideal, you realize that the team really needs to solve their internal trust issues. This is good to know, because right away you have given yourself a framework to make progress.
 

By the way, as you’re going about thinking through all this, I recommend talking with others. Whether they are fellow leads, individuals in the team or org, stakeholders, etc. they will provide you insight into where the real problems and opportunities exist. They will give you more perspectives to learn from.
 

Last thing to note about this: make sure your ideal team isn’t just, “my current team with a bunch of new tools/hires/etc.” By default, I encourage you to assume that you are stuck with your current team members. Otherwise, it’s easy to think the ideal team is a bigger team, and that’s true far less often than we’d like.
 

OK, so that’s the first pair of things: know what the ideal team looks like and where the team is today. Once you do, you can stop chasing fairly meaningless improvements and start focusing your own time on what actually moves the needle.

 

Who Is “The Best” You?

 
The second thing to figure out is you, and it follows the same pattern.

Who do you want to be? What’s the best version of yourself that you can imagine?
 

How is that different from who you are today?
 

I know some people take the stance that who I am today is perfect, and everyone else needs to accept my strengths and weaknesses and I shouldn’t have to change, and I’m “enough” and whatnot.
 

I disagree.
 

Other people take the stance that I’m worthless, an imposter, someone who can’t figure it out, hopelessly lost and insufficient in a complex and terrible world. I just need to grind away trying to be better knowing I’ll always fail.

I disagree again.
 

Most of us, given a little thought, can recognize we aren’t perfect. Simultaneously, most of us, given a little thought, can probably see the unique value we bring to those we work with. Like the team, the product, the company, and most things, we could be better, and we also already are capable.
 

The fascinating thing about asking yourself the question, “What’s the best version of you?” is how multi-dimensional the question is. It forces you to ask a series of questions: 

• What are things I want to be good at? What are the things I should be good at to succeed as a professional?

• What does success mean for me?

• What’s the impact I want to have on the product? What’s the impact I’m having?

• What’s the impact I want to have on the people I lead?

• How do I want to balance all the various roles I may have, both in and outside of work?

• What are the tradeoffs that I accept to be the best version of myself?

• What does it mean to operate ethically in the world?

• What do I value?

• What’s a simple thing I need to stop doing to be closer to the best version of me?

If you do nothing else from this newsletter but run through those questions, I believe what I’m writing is valuable.

Too many leaders never think about who the “best” version of themselves is. They accept everyone else’s worldview of what it means to be the “best.” Depending on culture, that may relate to wealth, status, honor, skills, character, relationships, security, influence, and who knows what else. But the “best” version of you is something that you need to figure out.
 

And just like with a team, you won’t get it right the first time. But it will give you a direction.
 

Once you know what a better version of you is, you can look at yourself today. Like the team, you aren’t the best version of you today. That’s ok. You are hopefully better than you were 10 years ago, and in another 10 years ago hopefully you’ll be 10 years better.
 

But you have to understand what “better” is. You have to understand what success looks like. Otherwise, you’ll meander around learning random things, having various experiences, and frankly missing the opportunity to have the impact you want to have.

Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.
 - Arthur Ashe

 

Wrapping Up
 

I wish I’d been more explicit with myself and with my teams at understanding what “better” meant over the course of my life. I often operated as a leader without a real ability to work on myself or meaningfully help the team. I was just changing stuff, moving around, going through the motions, and treading water.
 

I also understand why. When you take the time to understand who you could be, and who your team could be, it can be disheartening to realize you aren’t there, or how far from that ideal you are today.
 

Don’t get caught there. The point isn’t to beat up on yourself or your team. It’s to recognize the path to making things better.
 

This also means you don’t need to become an obsessive self-improvement junkie with every waking moment spent trying to better yourself. Maybe for some of you that’s what success looks like. That’s fine, please remember to keep an eye on if that goal becomes a tyrant over time.
 

For many of us, the best version of ourselves is someone who isn’t obsessed with any one thing. We find meaning and pursue it, but that meaning comes from many places. Part comes from work and the relationships there, some from family and friends. We enjoy hobbies. We take on causes and teach ourselves random things that most people don’t care about. The idea of knowing the best version of yourself and understanding what “success” looks like isn’t about overwork and addiction to better. It’s about taking the holistic lens and then moving at an appropriate pace towards that “better.”
 

This applies to the team you lead as well. Don’t obsess over every little problem or failure and drive everyone crazy trying to rush to perfection. It will take time. Many of the most important things you will change on teams are cultural, and they take time. You can’t just implement a new “trust” meeting and expect everyone to completely trust each other right away.
 

Go on the journey, both for yourself and for the team, and remember the goal. It will keep you from wandering aimlessly.
 

So, to recap, two pairs of things you need to know as a leader:
 

1. What the ideal version of your team looks like, and where it is today

2. What the best version of you looks like, and where you are today
    

Once you know these things, the journey can begin. 

You never reach the ideal, but do this well and you will have a lot of success (for you and your team) moving towards it.

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