Rocketeer Leadership Behavior 8 - Smartly Anticipates
Seeing the forest through the trees and understanding the ecosystem that you're just a small part of.
Our eigth Leadership Behavior is Smartly Anticipates. As you gain experience in anything that you do, you’re able to see the patterns emerge, enough to anticipate what’s coming ahead. Like mapping out which stones to step to cross the river, or which wave to catch. Get this one right and you and your team will be operating in flow. Here’s the slide from our internal deck:
This leadership behavior balances data, pattern matching and your ability to bring it all together. It’s a nice one that when you get right can have you receiving a lot of high 5’s 👋 and fist bumps 👊.
The Smartly Anticipates Rocketeer Leadership Behavior has the following sub-points:
Curious, investigates the deeper reality that lies behind events
Has a firm grasp of the market and marketplace dynamics
Anticipates future consequences of current actions
See’s how the parts of the system are interconnected
Stays abreast of external environment
Integrates multiple streams of information into a coherent strategy
Doesn’t wait to be told
Rocketeers that blitz at this behavior are curious by nature, they understand things at first principles and their own biases. They read and consume information from many sources and map it all together to logical conclusion and they are also really good at determining what is a fact and what is an assumption. At ServiceRocket, we also invest heavily in the Black Belt in Thinking methodology and training for our team, to help have a common vocabulary across our organization to help overcome cultural friction and calibrate our team.
The training you do, the articles you read, the prototypes you build, the curiosity you have for your customer challenges and the work your team mates, industry and competitors do all feed into your pot of knowledge that you use this behavior to apply. It’s game time!
Anti-Behavior: Unaware and constantly blindsided
The Anti-Behavior for this Leadership Behavior is: Unware and constantly blindsided.
Some common phrases you might hear that could indicate the anti-behavior. “Nobody told me.”, “I didn't know.”, “Was this meeting recorded?” (and the recording never gets watched or read the notes).
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
Black Belt in Thinking - Viago
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?
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*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.