Rocketeer Leadership Behavior 7 - Deliberate & Decisive

Sink or Swim. Analysis Paralysis. 💩 or get off the 🚽.... being Deliberate & Decisive provides clarity for your team. And that makes things most FAAAST!!

Knowing when to put aside your fear of being wrong is key for this Leadership Behavior. Our seventh Leadership Behavior centers around making it happen: being Deliberate & Decisive. And if I had to pick my favorite Leadership Behavior, this is the one. I will explain more below. Here’s the slide from our internal deck:

A lot of this leadership behavior is really about learning how to synthesize lots of information quickly, trusting your gut and realizing that the most important resource you have is time.

The Deliberate & Decisive Rocketeer Leadership Behavior has the following sub-points:

• Directly addresses issues that get in the way of team performance

• Is efficient at decision making

• Able to focus on What’s Important Now (Asks “W.I.N.?”)

• Makes tough decisions when required with respect

• Effectively uses a backlog and discovery to avoid wasting time

• Calls out ineffective meetings

In a previous post, I shared detail about KOLBE and how to understand your team and their default behaviors. Take a quick look at that post.

In our company, like most technology companies, folks have a high tendency for being Fact Finders. They love to gather information, and more information, and more information so that they can be sure, that they are right and not being blindsided. That makes sense right?

It does, but when this takes you so long that you miss the wave, then you’re actually going backwards. And a great leader knows when to make a decision, provide clarity and move forward. Knowing that they can course correct if more information comes in as they go.

The Surfer 🏄‍♂️ and the Perfect Wave 🌊

I love to share this analogy with my team to explain this behavior. I love the ocean, and swim a lot of open water. I have tried surfing a few times and loved it, but I am terrible at it. There was some key lessons

The unprepared surfer goes to the beach at a random time and doesn’t check the weather, tides or forecast. That’s not always fun because if there’s no waves then there’s no surfing.

The best surfers have a sense of the tides and conditions, check with their peers and get out there. Once they are surfing, they have to quickly pick which waves to surf.

The surfer DOES NOT sit there from 9am to 5pm and analyze every wave and then at the end of the day, say “OK, the wave at 2:15pm was the one to catch”.

In our lives, as leaders we have to make the best decisions possible, based on what we know right now. And be prepared to pivot.

Use the GPS model to quickly have your key data available. Make decisions and know you can course correct.

And importantly, put your fear of being wrong aside.

Anti-Behavior: Finds Excuses / Over Analyzes

The Anti-Behavior for this Leadership Behavior is: Finds Excuses/Over Analyzes

Look out for phrases that deflect accountability, or that add confision. Such as “but what about?” The more questions that are thrown into the mix here cause delay, confusion and ultimately frustration for your team.

Our Inspiration

We leveraged the core of this Leadership Behavior from Scaling Leadership by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams along with it’s anti-behavior. And then we adapted it for our culture and The series of books and research by these authors and the underlying Leadership Circle framework is used heavily at our company and linking these together made so much sense. In that body of work it distinguishes between leaders being in the state of high creativity or high reactivity. The anti-behavior logically has a canceling effect on the creative side.

The sub-points were inspired by our Rocketeer managers along with the Leadership Circle. I’ll write more in a future post how we use this leadership framework in our company across the globe in a scalable way.

Some great resources for this Leadership Behavior include*:

• Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor Frankl

• Mastering Leadership - Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams

• Scaling Leadership - Robert J. Anderson, William A. Adams

• Principles - Ray Dalio

Why do we have Leadership Behaviors? Isn’t this what Core Values are supposed to do? See my previous post below on ‘When are Core Values not enough?”, but in short Leadership Behaviors give you explicit coachable items to work with your team to help them get better. Telling someone they have fallen on a behavior is much easier to correct and improve, whereas telling someone that they have failed against values is akin to telling them that they’ve been banished from the tribe.

In my opinion, companies need to define these behaviors if they are truly invested in growing their employees to reach their potential. We outline this in our Rocketeer Promise.

When are Core Values not enough?

ROB CASTANEDA

·

FEB 9

At some stage around 2007 we got to a stage where we needed Core Values. I remember this moment clearly, Philip, a fellow member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization took my call where I started expressing issues I was having with our business. We were ~60 people at that stage and alignment was a challenge.

Read full story

*I have some amazon affiliate codes on book links, I may make billions from these and quit my job.

**Over time these posts will be updated with more links, tweaks and changes as we learn more. Nothing is ever final at ServiceRocket, and we don’t like “unveiling” things.