It’s a fair bet that the people closest to the action have a better and more nuanced understanding of what’s going on than you do. Sure, you might have a clearer oversight and you might even have a better insight, but if it’s a question of facts then they are in a better position than you.

So what?

With all those facts and all that understanding, they’re probably better decision makers than you about the things in their world.

Even if they’re not, you’ll benefit from including them in the process, hearing their positions and opinions, mining them for details and correlations and dependencies, and only then coming to a conclusion.

Better yet, especially if they’ll be the ones most impacted by a decision, help them come to the conclusion themselves.

Why?

Better decisions and buy-in built in.

Skippy strategy: Involve the people in the middle of the decision.

As the team becomes larger, it’s likely that you’ll spend less time doing the technical thing that you built your position on and more time on things to do with people and things to do with their problems.

The people things are about who and how they are. Their fit for the team, their skill set, their availability or otherwise, how they can contribute, their values. It’s about bringing people in and moving them on. It’s about the individuals who make up the team.

The problems things are about finding ways for those people to work better together as a team. It’s about breaking down barriers, making connections, encouraging the everyman who asks the questions no one else will, it’s about smoothing things over and digging into cracks. It’s about bringing the talents to the table and getting them to focus on the objective.

Skippy strategy: People and people problems.

There are always numbers we care about.

The financial ones.

The human ones.

The key performance ones.

The ones going the right way and the ones going the wrong way.

The first job most people do is to set up monitoring systems to track them. The second job, seemingly less common, is to actually monitor them and notice when things move away from expectations. The third job, even less standard MO than noticing changes, is doing something when the variations drift too far from whack.

Either way, when things go from ten to zero, we notice and react pretty quick.

It’s the slow burns that foxes us.

Ten, to 9.8, to 9.5 then left alone some more. Creeping. No change remarkable comparing week-to-week, nothing striking, until … What! When did that happen?

Skippy strategy: Set up your numbers, keep an eye on them, act before streams become waterfalls.

There are many things you’re asked to deliver but there’s one thing that underpins them all. 

Without it, the good work gets lost and the reputation you spent so much anguish and effort to build, suffers.

Your brand is diminished.

People stop trusting.

They stop asking you for important things and eventually stop asking you for anything they care about.

When someone doesn’t offer that underpinning-something to you, or worse, when they promise it and fail to deliver, you turn aside.

You hire people because you believe they can bring it.

You fire them when you stop believing they can.

And everyone, you and your customers, hunt for new suppliers as soon as the door shuts behind expecting it.

Whatever you do, if you want to do more of it, the one thing you have to deliver: reliability.

Skippy strategy: Reputations are built on reliability (or its lack).

There’s the plan and then there’s what really happens.

The plan is the chosen method to achieve the agreed goal. We will do this and this and this, and if we do well we expect the results to be that and that and that.

What really happens is (hopefully) everything on the plan, and then all the other things (guaranteed) that we do as we react to the reactions and deal with the signal and noise that come across our desk and impacts on our day to day.

The key word in all of that: hopefully.

Don’t leave it to hope.

If the plan was worth anything, even if it was just the thoughts and discipline involved in the act of planning, hope shouldn’t come into it. 

On or off? Make active choices.

Skippy strategy: If you take something off the plan, do it intentionally and with your eyes wide open.

There’s all the factual knowledge.

There’s all the tacit, skills and relationships knowledge.

There’s all the different kinds of knowledge that make the world, your world – your particular and peculiar world – go around.

Knowledge that’s necessary. Knowledge that makes a difference. Knowledge that makes things easy.

Where is it?

More than likely, people in your team already know things you’re trying to work out. Inside people – your people – who know the how, the who, the where and the when of the things that you need.

Maybe that’s ok.

Maybe you can work it all out in due course. Sure you can. That’s the way it’s always been. You’ve always coped in the past. And you will now. No worries. 

But for the sake of asking some questions and writing down the answers, why not take the short cut?

Skippy strategy: Knowledge is waiting to be shared.

There are always issues.

A long list of things you’d like to change, improvements you’d like to make, systems you’d like to implement, hires you’d like to find, features you’d like to add, responsibilities you’d like to enhance, promotions you’d like to push through, a heap of other stuff you’d like to make happen.

Plenty.

Some are easy to do, have an immediate impact and make no waves. Win win win. No hesitation.

With everything else there’s a downside in the middle of the upside. The distraction, the loss of performance before the gain comes through, the vested interests, the angst, the confusion, the endless ways change can be hard and the infinite strategies you can try to ease the way.

That’s not an argument to hesitate.

It’s an argument to choose, to start, to follow through and make the next choice.

Skippy strategy: Choose where to start. Keep going.

It’s your world.

You’ve built the team and the process, you shaped the product, the positioning and the perspective, you’re behind the values and the ethos, the work ethic and the culture.

All set.

Except, those things about the place you don’t like.

Those thing.

The details that bug you, the graffiti in the car park, the player that doesn’t fit their role, the pace of change, the lights shining into the void, the direction of travel and the leaps in development.

Those things.

You know you don’t like them. You know, and everyone else knows, that they’re not up to the job.

What about those things?

Like ‘em or change ‘em.

If it isn’t good enough, if it sucks energy, if it’s not fit for purpose, if they’ve stopped playing its part?

Stop staring at it (and moaning about it) and change it.

Skippy strategy: Like it or change it.

There’s nothing wrong with being busy and filling your day with all that busyness. Things will get done, meetings will be had, orders will be fulfilled, email will be answered, customers will be happy, suppliers will be contracted and paid, staff will he hired and fired, the clock will continue to tick, the earth will carry on its way around the sun and, all things being as they should be, the salary will land in the bank some time towards the end of the month.

Nothing wrong with being busy. At all.

There’s more though.

There’s having a goal. There’s the new products you’ll build, the markets you’ll move into, there’s building the organisation you need to make it all happen.

Stepping away from the day-to-day, the busyness, to create the future … is a choice, and it needs a different way.

Skippy strategy: Leadership takes more than being busy.

When do you do what you know you need to do?

Option one is to do it straight away, or in a relaxed time of your choosing, then iterate until the deadline comes. The upside, plenty of time to think things through and add the polish you know you’ll need. The flip-side, no sense of urgency to motivate and no adrenaline to get the creative juices flowing.

The other way it to wait until the deadline looms and then throw everything at it in a mad/creative/dopamine rush, gathering all the pieces and squishing them together in a dash. The upside, you’ve had all that time for your subconscious to do its thing, and the thrill of the chase might just bring it all out. The flip-side, you wasted so much time and quality is inevitably squeezed.

Two schools for thought.

Skippy strategy: Whatever way it works for you.