The Big Ideas of Leadership

Foreword

I'm NOT a corporate manager. However, I've been actively involved with student leadership for 7 years now. Yes, it's common for someone to simply hold student leadership titles, but for me, I went beyond the titles: I avidly thought hard about the fundamental conceptual beneath leadership and management. I digested books, blogs, and talks, observed how others lead, applied what I saw to my leadership endeavors, reflected on what I did right and wrong, and corrected myself from the iterations.

This blog captures my understanding on what managing an organization really boils down to. It's not an exhausting listing, just the big ideas. Everything here is backed by my student but not corporate leadership experience, but I think the big ideas do carry over.

The goal

The goal of a leader is, within an organization:

1. Given a set of resources: human, money, authority, etc.
2. Given a hierarchy of missions
3. Do whatever it takes to use the above set of resources to fulfill the missions

The bootstrapping phase

For a new organization, the leader(s) must bootstrap the organization by:

1. Bootstrap the set of resources
   • Recruit the team
   • Secure funding
   • Secure
2. Define its hierarchy of missions
   • Why does this organization exist? To create value in some area.
   • What kinds of value? Money, convenience, happiness, anything that is good
   • To whom? For corporation, it's the shareholders. For government, it's the citizens. For school clubs, it's the club members.
   • The top level mission can be recursively broken down into sub-missions, thus it's a hierarchy of missions.
3. Go from the organization's set of resources to fulfilling its hierarchy of missions. This boils down to, one leading to another:
   • Designing the products and services to achieve the organization's missions
   • Designing the processes and workflows to facilitate the life cycle of various products and services
   • Designing the people structure to run the processes and workflows
   • Designing the incentives, rules, and culture to power the people structure

The growing phase

Once the initial set of resources, missions, and implementations had been bootstrapped, growing an organization means adding, subtracting, and optimizing for:

1. Resources
2. Hierarchy of missions
3. The products and services, processes and workflows, people structure, and incentives, rules, and culture.
   • This part is driven by changing resources and hierarchy of missions
   • And or, driven by the need to be more efficient

This is the most exciting phase.

The maintenance phase

Once the organization has matured sufficiently, purely maintaining the organization requires a magnitude less effort than having to bootstrap or grow the organization.

Given that the organization is already running and matured, the most important thing the leader must do, is to not fuck up the system. The leader shouldn't have to be very hands-on, because existing workflows and organizational chart should already adequately power the organization's missions, otherwise this organization is incomplete and is considered still in the growing phase.

The leadership role here is to:

1. Ensure the culture remains effective
2. Resolve unexpected conflicts that cannot be delegated away or absorbed by existing system, such as important people conflicts, organization-wide emergencies, etc.
3. Serve as the figurehead of the organization, as its top diplomat, external negotiator, top media voice
4. Stay in touch with what's happening within the organization internally and externally with the big environment

Point 4 on "stay in touch" is an absolute routine. Nothing stays the same but change. Thus the leader must be ready to exit the pure maintenance mode to grow or adjust the organization in partial or in full, in reaction to or in foresight of changes.

Without point 4, the leader for a maintenance mode organization would be just purely a figurehead and emergency resolver. Point 4 gives the leader something to do and can mean life and death for the organization's longevity.

The transition or shutdown phase

As a student, I haven't experienced any shutdown of the clubs, endeavors, or organizations I've been involved in; corporate organizations definitely do experience death, since I don't have experience with death, I will refrain from commenting on it here.

But, here's my big ideas on leadership transition. Whenever the leader needs to leave, commonly for these reasons:

1. Term finished
2. Got promoted or put to somewhere else
3. Too tired to lead
4. Fired

Then the leadership transition means:

1. Scout potential replacements
2. Identify and settle on the best replacement
3. Empower the new leader to establish their own top leadership team
4. Empower the new leader to adjust the organization's missions, resources, implementations, etc. as needed
5. Meanwhile, ensure the system is still stable in light of changes
6. Step back to have the new leader play the proactive execution role and take on a reactive advisory role
7. Fully exit

A few final points

1. People is everything. Competent and passionate teammates make leadership 10x easier and output 10x more
2. Leadership can not be effective if it's only supported by title and rules. It must be bolstered by trust, respect, and competency.
3. Leadership is hard. The big ideas make up less than 10%, the other 90% are intuition, judgement, and playbook from one's experience and thinking
4. Effort is non-linear. Sometimes the leader has nothing to do, other times the leader has every battle in the world to fight.
5. Nothing stays the same but change