Leadership in a Time of Continuous Technological Change Align, Strengthen, and Mobilize Your Team ― Bar Schwartz LEADERSHIP IN A TIME OF CONTINUOUS TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE ALIGN, STRENGTHEN, AND MOBILIZE YOUR TEAM Bar Schwartz Leadership in a Time of Continuous Technological Change Bar Schwartz Berlin, Germany ISBN-13 (pbk): 978-1-4842-6299-3 ISBN-13 (electronic): 978-1-4842-6300-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6300-6 Copyright © 2020 by Bar Schwartz This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Trademarked names, logos, and images may appear in this book. 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Printed on acid-free paper Contents About the Author� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �v Acknowledgments � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �vii Introduction � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � ix Chapter 1: The ACE Model                                          1 Chapter 2: Identity                                                17 Chapter 3: Emancipation                                           35 Chapter 4: Capability                                              55 Chapter 5: A utonomy                                              75 Chapter 6: Leading with Clarity                                    97 Chapter 7: Leader’s Question Guide                               109 I ndex � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 113 About the Author Bar Schwartz is an Organizational Excellence and Agile Leadership consul- tant and coach. Currently, she heads the technology department at medneo, where she supports the leadership in simplifying ways of working, building digital product development capabilities, and enabling further company growth. Furthermore, she works together with AgileLAB to deliver profes- sional, hands-on Agile trainings. Bar started her career as a software engineer and has over the years worked in leadership roles where she led tech, product, people, and transformations in diverse organizational structures, such as startups, corporations, and consultancies. With her work, she aims to enable people to create successful change in their work and organizations so that together they can create more meaning, more value, and a better future. Her focus is agile- and technology-dominant envi- ronments as they evolve faster than we humans can often adapt to. Acknowledgments Foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Dave Stachowiak and my Coaching for Leaders Academy cohorts for their continuous encour- agement and support, which inspired me to write this book. Thank you for teaching me that every book starts by writing one line. I would like to thank all the great leaders I met along the way, from whom I learned so much. They inspired the case studies in this book. Thank you for allowing me to support your journey. My sincere thanks also go to Minna Paananen, Vera Hillmann, Karo-Lyne David, Iris Henne, Boris Schulz, Anita Ripke, Vanessa Englert, Filip Moriau, Philipp Zupke, and so many other great friends and colleagues for supporting my journey. Thank you for every thought-provoking conversation and feedback. Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my mother, Dorly Schwartz, and my father, Pini Amar, for raising me to be the person I am today. Introduction To become a leader in an organization, it takes a lot of ambition, competence, and discipline. Leaders set the pace and drive results. As such, they need to be the best in what they do and set the standards, lead by example, focus on impact, and get things done. If they do so, people will be motivated, empow- ered, and engaged. This will drive better economic success, which will lead the organization to realize its vision. They will win the game! Wait, what game? My name is Bar Schwartz and I used to believe that I needed to be all those things to be a leader. I needed to be an expert, the best in what I did. I needed to have the answers to all questions. I needed to overcome myself and my emotions so I could be resilient and disciplined. I thought that it was all about me becoming the best version of myself because only then I could lead. I believed that no one wants to follow people who are not good enough, so I better be. To be precise, I used to believe all of that, and then I realized it didn’t matter. How does becoming an expert in my field help the people I lead? It doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying having expertise is not important. I am also not saying that leaders should give up their learning and development journey. I am a true believer that we ever evolve and grow. What I am saying is that you being an expert is not going to help other people to develop their expertise. Yes. Even when in my head, I wanted to help, be resourceful and needed. In reality, I covered my inner insecurity by telling myself that I am ambitious. I covered my perfectionism by telling myself that I am building my competence so I can help more people with my wisdom. If I have all the answers, people will want my help. If I work hard enough, if I am disciplined enough, my work will speak for me so I don’t have to speak for myself. I am an expert. Experts are resourceful. People follow experts. Don’t they? For years, I evaluated myself by my achievements. I needed to be the best. When my work was celebrated, I was celebrated. When my work was criti- cized, I was criticized. I cared very much about my competence. It was not good enough to be good enough. However, how can you be the best without everyone else being worse? How can you allow people to explore, evolve, learn from their mistakes if they learn from you that nothing is good enough? I set my bar so high that even I couldn’t reach it. By doing that, I made sure everyone around me felt that they were also not good enough. One can’t hold themselves to different standards than they hold others to. x Introduction I didn’t come up with this belief on my own. I am the type of person who listens to others more than they listen to themselves. Hence, I learned it from the role models I had. People like my mother, teachers, and most of the man- gers I had since I started my career back in 2009. They validated me for being smart and competent. It was the most important thing about me. Maybe it is how my brain is wired or maybe it is the trap many of us fall into when we care about what people think. I don’t know. What I do know is that it was not only my belief that if I am the best at what I do, and people know that I am the best at what I do, I will be rewarded for my expertise and people would want to be led by me. So, I was the best and I was promoted. I had no trouble finding new jobs, bet- ter roles, and generally selling my expertise to different employers. I became a team lead in 2014 because of my ambition and expertise. It was less than five years into my career and only one year after I officially graduated with my bachelor’s degree in software engineering. I was so proud to be acknowledged for my hard work. So imagine my surprise when I discovered four months into the job that I was not naturally a great team lead, that I couldn’t handle peo- ple. No matter how great I was as an engineer, being “the expert” didn’t make me a great leader. Every new leader wants to demonstrate that they can bring so much more to the table. My ambition led me to attempt to do the same. From the first day of taking over the leadership role, I started changing things to fit my ideas and style, “hoping” that the others would follow suit. I did it because I thought I knew the work best. After all, I was hired for my expertise. All those changes, I thought, I did for them. I cared; I wanted to help. Also, when I obsessively identified everything that was done wrong, many things improved in a rela- tively short time, which made me feel great about myself. I was sure people were happier. However, how did my team feel? In short, they felt abandoned. As inspiring as this idea of strong leadership and devoted followers is, it is a flawed system that has led to long-term setbacks with initiated projects, including losing the people the leader led on the way. After all, why would people follow you if it is all about you and nothing about them? Even if things improve, what makes you believe that things improved for them? Thinking about people as followers is not just flawed, it is dangerous. Why? Because it works. You got your leadership role because you are smart. You are competent. You get things done. You can create short-term results. However, in the long-term, this mindset slows you down, disconnects you from the people you lead, and limits your scalability and adaptability capacity. Why? Because it assumes that everyone else on your team will do as you tell them to. It assumes people are motivated in the same way as you. It assumes people think, feel, and understand the world in the same way you do. It assumes that if you set ambitious goals and control the process, people will follow it willingly, no questions asked. After all, you are the expert and they all want to learn from you, right? Introduction xi Let’s take a step back and talk about leadership. What is leadership? It is the ability of an individual or an organization to guide a group of people towards achieving a certain outcome. In the business world, we often confuse leader- ship and management, the process of dealing or controlling people and things to achieve a certain outcome. We even tend to call managers, leaders. For example, my first team manager title was Quality Assurance Lead. I had man- agement responsibilities because people reported to me. Nevertheless, lead- ership and management do not have to go together. One can lead without having management authority, and one can manage without leading by merely demanding. However, they both aim for an outcome. We, you and me, are experts in those outcomes. This is why we got the job. When we speak about outcomes, most organizations speak about business results. This is often measured by the profit the business makes because if your business is not a non-profit organization, you have to show that your revenue is higher than your operational costs to remain in business. Therefore, regardless of whether your organization is serving a cause, selling a product, or providing a service, the underline trends every organization aspires to are to increase revenue, reduce operational cost, and mitigate risks that could disrupt these goals. As a manager in an organization, you are given the author- ity to achieve these goals by ensuring that your people contribute their part. As a leader, you are the custodian of the vision and your responsibility is to enable people to realize it—not for you, for themselves. Leaders lead people, and people create results. Leaders mobilize and inspire team members to channel their energies towards the actualization of a vision or a goal, but people are different. Everyone you work with has a different personality, feelings, thoughts, skillset, and more importantly, they come from a different work culture, even if they worked in the same country, city, or company. They see the world through their unique lens. They move to action differently, get inspired differently, and manage their energy differently, mean- ing that what works for you might not work for them. You are an expert in how you get the best results, not how everyone else can. If you dismissed the previous paragraph by thinking something along the line of “my organization is mostly homogeneous, so I do not have to worry about that,” well, maybe. But maybe not. Will it always be like that? I am not sure. As location boundaries disappear, globalization brings a whole new challenge. These days, people can relocate easily or work remotely with an international team. It means that organizations can hire the best talents regardless of where they are located! It means that diversity is the reality of many organizations, not an ideal or a desire. Thinking globally and appreciating and seeking diver- sity of background, thoughts, and expertise are going to become the new normal. Like it or not, if you want to lead, you will have to lead people who are different than you. xii Introduction So is this whole book about telling you to not be an expert? Or is it about how to get results when you lead people who are different than you? Maybe it is about how to stop thinking that you know best and let people come up with their unique way to solve problems. Not exactly. There are so many books about that. Yes, this book is going to help you with that in a very practical way. However, this book is also about you becoming a different type of leader. It is going to challenge you to let go of the strong expert that you became because being a great leader isn’t just about achieving a set of goals. It is also not about being the smartest person who knows how to get things done. While these traits are important to you, being a leader is more than that. Being a leader is about bringing your people along on the same path and enabling them to grow to deliver these goals, even if you are not there anymore. You are not a great leader if the organization is successful while you are there; you are a great leader if it remains successful even when you are not there. If you are like me, your first thought might be that your results will speak for themselves. Your results will last and represent your mark on the organiza- tion. Maybe. I am not sure if anyone remembers the results I created in each organization where I worked. Moreover, I am confident some of my work had to get redone because things changed. For example, I worked as a Product Manager at an organization called HERE Maps. When I started working there, they were owned by Nokia. Less than a year after I joined, my whole team was transformed because Nokia sold all of their Windows Phone devices to Microsoft. Then, less than two years later, they sold the whole company to a consortium of German automotive companies. At some point, I stopped counting the number of organizational changes we had. Nevertheless, each of those changes transformed everything, including organizational structure, processes, roles, strategic focus, and culture. What remained was not the work I did, it was the people. Continuous change and uncertainty are now the reality of many other orga- nizations. It doesn’t have to be as extreme as HERE Maps. It can also be a result of normal technology evolvement or changes in the market. It is a com- mon belief that only technology companies have to adapt quickly, that only software teams desire to become more agile and accelerate their product or service delivery to remain relevant in today’s fast-moving world. Other sec- tors deal with the same challenges. This can be due to digital automation of roles and processes that used to be manual, or an unexpected circumstance such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted the way people live their lives. Business models are reinvented every day, technology solutions become commodities as technology evolves, and so many large corporates are slowly going out of business due to creative companies, mostly startups, that disrupt the status quo in ways larger corporates are often too slow to adopt. You might hear about “Agile” or “Lean.” Most organizations realize that having an organizational transformation is the new status quo. In such a reality, results are important, but they don’t last. People do.