Recently I find myself in a tough position to execute through my managers/team leads. I wish to get the best outcome from your team, but I find myself shuck between executing on the task personally and delegating the task to my team. Delegation seems to create a much lower quality than done personally. Now, as I read the book, I caught myself in a fallacy - I will always deliver the best quality work in my team. It could be true when the team is small, but it may no longer be true if you have moved away from individual contributor’s work for at least 6months.

Let us explore further on 2 specific topics:

1. What are the characteristics of multipliers

2. My thoughts on the book’s assessment as an accidental diminisher - as a 2nd time reader

Characteristics of an Technical Multipliers

1. Attract and optimising talents
   You need to be known for your management style; a style that enables the team to be fully utilised and developed to be ready for their next challenge.

With reference to Who: the A method of hiring by Geoff Smart, A players are excited about difficult problems. You want to have a healthy stream of problems to feed these problem-starving engineers. These engineers have gotten beyond the technical complexities to actual business complexities - competing business requirements - that could complicate what may in fact be a straightforward solution.

2. Create intensity that requires best thinking

You create environment for people to think and the space for them to do their best work.

You find yourself in the best state when youre calm and collected. First organise yourself, before you organise your team for the task at hand. This way, you find yourself creating a intense environment that requires concentration, diligence and energy instead of a tense environment which its stress-filled.

Your role as a leader is best suited to present the goal and the problem at hand, then allow the team the space for discovery and exploration on the possible solution to address. If it is a big problem and necessary to break down the tasks to smaller components, perhaps you may wish to allow the team to do that. This process has valuable nuggets of wisdom that are best appreciated when self discovered.

3. Extending challenges

Your role is to set directions. Ensure that the direction is set, and find out what assumptions that supports the direction are required to be valid - allowing the team to operate in these premise.

You define the desired goal, where they are and what they know, and define what they don’t know that they don’t know and the gaps towards the goal; you define the undefined.

You want to avoid charting the plans from start to finish for the team. set the goal, ask them what it takes to get there. This question will require them to find out what they don’t know. But that said it would be essential for you as the leader to facilitate by having an idea of what direction the answers should bring them to. You may not know the details but you know if they are heading towards the goal or not.

Instead of asking open ended questions to create that vacuum, you could create a more directed question that includes what specific framework from this set of mental models could be relevant for this discussion?

You wouldn’t want to find yourself in a situation which a blind is leading the blind.

you get people to identify a need to be filled, then you ask them how that need could be filled. You have just created your own goals for the team to focus on

“Good leaders don’t just give people more work, they give them harder work—a bigger challenge that prompts deep learning and growth.”

A leader’s goal is not to moderate the workload. You present the need, envision a goal and direction for the team and facilitate the team towards your desired outcome. You want to push people to their 100% capacity and find out just what more they need/have to do to get to their desired outcome.

If you get the team’s buy in and conviction of the need to be met, you find yourself a team invested into the same game as you.

4. Debating decisions
   You create safe space for debates for the best plan to raise from the team.

Framing the right problem statement is 50% problem solved. Finding the right resolution to your problem could potentially be delegated to the discussion among your team. You got to do your homework. If you want a productive discussion, it would be wise for you to understand best practices for a specific type of problem you have at hand - you don’t want another scenario of blind-leading-blind if you yourself have no idea what are the market’s option or experiences in this situation.

It was once shared with me, in a discussion, you can use an analogy of a jig saw puzzle and everyone has a piece of the puzzle to contribute to the big picture. What you need to do as a facilitator isnt just to draw everyone out to put their own puzzle piece onto the table, rather you want to make everyone single one feel that they have the most important piece of the puzzle.

How do you do this? There is the concept of Radical Candor: Care Deeply, Challenge Directly. You need to build your circle of safety for conversations to flow; for ideas to bounce of one another; and most importantly for people to bare out the limitations of their knowledges, pouring all that they know into the discussion. Could a leader/facilitator test the limits of the group’s knowledge without first understanding the boundaries of the topic?

Lastly when you debate a decision, you got to conclude with a decision. The team needs to know that their heart-bared efforts to brainstorm/problem solve a problem bears fruits. It has a purpose, and its meaningful - not only to me but to the entire team. Decide with clarity. You have gotten the team’s investment into the puzzle, you owe it to the team to explain the decision process and its considerations.

I wish to think if done wrongly, you could lose the team for your future discussions & debates. A company built for perpetual will have perpetual problems to debate over. Don’t lose your team sprinting and losing the marathon.

5. Instilling ownership and accountability
   Give people the objective and the plan, find out how they should achieve this goal and hold them accountable

Ownership to the end goal. Define your leader to take ownership of the end goal. Set the goal as you would if you are the leader - stretch the leader role as needed.

Invest into your leader; coach her and provide her the backup required to get the work done. Set in your margin of safety without falling back to her manager.

Hold people accountable for the whole solution to the problem. You may advise but you got to ‘give the pen back’ to the leader to drive the conversation forward. Your role as leader now position yourself as an advisor to the leader. You provide guidance to troubleshoot but never to drive the idea forward. Keeping people account not only to the process but also the natural consequence. If your child decides to climb that tree you have forbid him to climb and fell, let that pain remind him never to do that again. Exercise some discretion, i’m sure you will not let your child climb near an edge, but a short playground tower is fine.

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Accidental Diminisher

You do not want to find yourself here. Firstly, you need to check if you are one. You can take the free online test here.

When I took this test, i was given the test without the reasoning behind. Even more so, the context of the questions were not taken into context either. On retrospect, I suspect the goal was rather to shock you as a leader to dig deeper into the concept and understand your blindspots.

1. Idea Guy

Always tossing ideas around. People tries to make progress with yesterday’s idea only to meet with a new idea today.
There seems to be a lack of team commitment for a common goal. The description seems to be a chase for shiny objects. What makes sense to me is the context in which this is done.

If it’s a time of brainstorming, this person is tasks to come up with ideas, he is doing exactly as requested. But if it’s mashed up with the need for execution, then perhaps that is a missed objective.

If the team is stale with no fresh ideas, this person could be a fresh blood to bring some creativity back into the team. Although the unintended outcome seems possible: If people don’t have idea, they will just wait for the fountain (you) to spew again.

How then can we avoid this?

Give ideas with its reasons for their current situation at hand. Avoid giving ideas without any context, in which your team cannot follow the reasoning. What you want to achieve is to align the reasoning and thinking process, not the idea - which could be a solution to an existing problem.
What would be useful is to do the following:

1. Establish the context & struggling circumstance
2. Establish the need
3. Establish the existing attempt, if any.
4. Establish your attempt & thought process
5. Establish the idea for feasibility
6. Gather feedback on your own idea

That said: frequency matters, you cannot be doing this on a daily basis, that would be a disaster for everyone. And this could be the context in which the Idea Guy tendency is a diminishing habit.

2. Always on

The issue is ‘always’. There are interactions which you take the backseat and allow the team to navigate the details. Assuming the role of a leader, your primary responsibility is to point the team in a specific direction. Inspire them with a purpose and reason to move in that direction. Motivate them with the intensity needed to engage in that journey. Stop here. Are we done yet? No, there is 1 final step, is to open the room for the conversation to flow. What should we do to get there?

Here’s the tricky part: If the team lacks experience, their task relevancy maturity will be low.
What you need to provide is not ambiguity. The Complexity, Uncertainty and Ambiguity (CUA) would paralysed them too.
Discern if this task is a new task for them, and provide a specific approach & thinking process to engage such a call.

If you want to lead a stand up as a product manager, how would you approach this productively?

1. You start with an objective, what do you want the team to work towards collectively?

• Have you encapsulated what you need to deliver to your external stakeholders?

2. Break down your objectives to its required deliverables

• What do you need to deliver by which deadline?
• What are your complexity you need help from your engineers?

3. Find out your dependencies, what needs to be accomplished first before your engineer can execute on the task?

• Setup your dependency graph to ensure your tasks has their pre-requisites completed

4. How do you execute the standup productively?

• Clear & concise communication
• Hold the team accountable
• Address their blockers
• Motivate with successes

Here’s an example which you may consider imparting your knowledge for work that has industry best practices. You do not want your team to reinvent the wheel.

As your team members level up and the CUA increases with every task, now you can allow them to navigate the complexity on their own while you provide the guidance required.

In short: you should be ‘on’ when you execute your directions. You should be ‘On’ when you’re providing clear detailed instructions for team members with low TRM. You need not be ‘on’ once you have established those 2.

3. Rescuer

“When a manager helps too soon and too often, people around him become dependent and helpless.”

An abstract from the book, this is true as it is. No premise or context required. While you are focused on getting the required outcome, you may lose sight of the lessons from the process.

The fundamental lesson: There are natural consequences to your actions; if you act poorly, you will get poor results. If you act poorly, competent boss decides to step in, you got great results. I’ve got great results because of my ‘great’, but in fact poor, actions.

This is parallel to the ‘teach the person how to fish & not give the person the fish’ parable.

If you wish to let the team drive the initiatives, learn how to hand off the execution steps to them. As a manager, hands off does not mean no monitoring. You monitor actively, and you provide feedback actively.

Now, what happens if your team said the wrong thing infront of clients? This falls back on the training process. What is your training process to ensure accurate & clear quality communication between client and your team? Do we have a set of SOPs to equip the team and boost their confidence? As you have delegated your team to facilitate a client conversation, and you wish to achieve a specific outcome or objective in your client meeting, set that objective clear in your internal meeting. A lack of this internal alignment falls on the manager, not the individual. Objective setting is your job as a manager, execution on the plan is the team’s job.

In short: Plan your objectives proactively, and let the team take the driver seat. Allow them to face the consequence of their actions. Give them the rightful credit for a good smooth drive as well. Dont lose sight of the lessons in the journey while getting to the destination.

4. Pace setter

The book talks about an achievement-oriented leader who leads by example. The premise is an assumption that the team is observing the leader: If the leader is moving so quickly, I should do just the same.

What is the point here? Should we leaders not lead by examples? Should leaders allow the team to run their own pace?

I find the indicated writing flaw and skewed - once again bias to prove general beliefs wrong without caveating the premise of these actions.

What then should be the lesson learnt here to avoid being an accidental diminisher?

A) You do not set your expectations implicitly.

If you have an expected pace you wish the team to move, then state it clearly. In the world of engineering, your sprint has expected deliverables. You got to deliver on your commitment regardless the pace that is collectively set by the team. You set the required pace so you can deliver on your commitment to your sales team. You set those expectations clearly. You set your working standards explicitly. Then you lead by example.

B) Don’t assume people get inspired by watching you - debrief your team on what is expected from the every individual from the team.

You move fast because the business team demands that from you. You move fast before you committed to the timeline. You move fast to get work done - not to inspire. Set that tone clear for your team and demand that from them. Get their commitment from the onset, set the required training and support system in place to sustain the team in the ‘marathon’. On retrospect you are setting the ‘why’ we are moving at the required pace. People do not lose faith in the work, often times, they lose faith in their boss, the leader’s purpose and reason.

In short: cast your vision - where do you want the team to be by X time? If you are picking up existing team, ensure you have the right people ‘in your bus’ (an idea from Beyond Entrepreneurship). Communicate that purpose and ask for a hard commitment. That purpose will become the team’s reason to move; and this pace is often faster than what the team is comfortable with.

TLDR

This will summarise my initial thoughts on the book as i read it for the 2nd time in my time as an entrepreneur.

While I find strong disconnect between the assessment and management best practices, putting time into understanding the concept of multiplier actually further reveals your blindspots as a leader. Further thoughts are required to sieve out these biases and ensure you are not swinging to extremes; in short, put in time for your homework.

As an engineer, there could come a time you will have a team under your care, you got to ‘unlock’ those talents under your care - it requires skilful hands, a good heart to do good is not sufficient.

What are your thoughts on this topic? I love to engage and make sense of this as well - there are much to unpack in these topics.

Reference

Multipler book by Liz Wiseman