A colleague has been reading and commenting about Leadership Is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say--and What You Don't by L. David Marquet, and it seemed like a good pick to read and discuss.
The essential idea is right there in the subtitle - what you say matters. The book fleshes out that idea with some nice anecdotes and elements of the thinking behind the concepts. There are some good concepts in here for regular interactions with other people - whether you are a formal “leader” or otherwise working with people to get things done. (In other words, almost everyone.) That said, I am not totally convinced in some of the way Marquet brings the various elements together.
One of the underlying concepts in the book is that there is “execution” work and “thinking” work.* Traditionally, these types of work were separated in the workplace - managers did the thinking and front line workers did the execution. But in modern work - modern life - these are no longer separate. People who do the work can have excellent ideas for doing that work better or even what work should be done. And people who plan the work are often just as involved as executing those plans. The underlying challenge described in the book is that the way we speak can reinforce this division between thinkers and doers, or it can bring out the best in those same people.
The other organizing principle is that there are times in the cycle of work when thinking is more prevalent and other times when doing is more prevalent. And the language we use with each other needs to reflect where we are and what we expect of one another. We naturally move from thinking to doing to thinking to doing - and one of the challenges Marquet describes is being stuck in one mode when the other mode is in play. Marquet breaks this into a sequence or cycle of “plays” - he specifically doesn’t want to call it a “continuous improvement cycle,” but I had a strong resonance with the idea. One of the principles he suggests, and which comes up with continuous improvement, is that cycling from thinking to doing should be relatively short: the idea of planning for months to execute without change for months or years no longer works. (It may not have worked to begin with.)
In many of these plays he describes them as the old way compared to the new way. An with all of them he provides examples of language used by leaders to drive the old way or new way of operating. The plays are Control the clock, Collaborate, Commit (to act), Complete, Improve, and Connect.
Control the clock, rather than Obey the clock. The example here is the “andon” cord which calls an audible pause on a manufacturing line when people notice defects or errors. It is a clear signal to shift from doing to thinking - in this case, discovering why the problem is happening and what can be done to resolve it. In the larger discussion about this idea it is shifting people’s mindset from “get it (all) done” to “get to the next pause.” The language has to shift away from pausing being a waste to it being a useful aspect of making the system work as smoothly as possible. This might even mean changing how people are measured and rewarded (efficiency pushes people into obey-the-clock performance, where effectiveness will encourage improvement).
“collaboration is based on the belief that others have something to offer”
Collaborate instead of Coerce. I was excited to read a chapter on collaboration, but what Marquet described surprised me - collaboration can often be coercion in disguise. When a leader is trying to convince everyone or have them “get on board”, she is coercing them regardless of the words she uses. When she actively seeks ideas and input without imposing their own viewpoint, then it starts to look more like collaboration.
The specifics of the collaboration discussion was around decision making - clearly a thinking activity. One of the things that was surprising to me was describing decision making as a dichotomy: either the leader makes the decision or the team makes the decision. There is no middle ground. Of course there is a range of models which are appropriate depending on the scenario.
Once a decision has been reached - the team must move forward. One of the big challenges is getting stuck in analysis or gather just a bit more information or checking with another person. Stop! Commit to the decision. And to do that successfully, the plays of Control the Clock, Commit and Complete all come into the frame. Decide, commit to the next steps, pause to check and celebrate, and possibly redirect before starting again.
“Individuals make commitments. Groups do not. Commitment is persona; it comes from within.”
Commitment over Compliance. This play is about not only coming to a conclusion of a Collaboration phase, but agreeing together on the next steps - that we will make a good faith effort to move forward with the work until the next stopping point. I thought an important aspect of this - a way to help people commit - is to pick short horizons on the next stopping point. And not only is it committing to a specific set of actions, but also a commitment to learning - to finding out if our assumptions were correct. The shorter the cycle on this learning the better. Agile teams, for example, check in every day AND at the end of a sprint for a retrospective.
Complete over Continue. Decide when to stop - or have agreed-upon stopping criteria. Change the “sunk cost” mindset of thinking just another month. This feels similar to the Control the clock play above, but it is about coming to specific stopping points (again, the Agile teams example is relevant with regular sprints). Marquet talks about making those stopping points significant with celebrations of the behaviors that got us to this point. I read in a lot of the Manager Tools feedback model here - when you do X it creates Y (can you do more / less of that?).
Improve over Prove. This one feels like a big mindset shift. Rather than thinking about proving how good I am or proving that I am not at fault if things didn’t go as we expected, this is the mindset of thinking “that’s interesting I wonder what I missed?” The Improve play is when we take the time to think about how to make discontinuous improvements in the results. In here there is a great conversation about the dual needs of people to “Be Good” and “Get Better.” When people are hammered on reliability and "who’s fault” then they have a hard time thinking about “Get Better” - getting better almost requires that we learn from mistakes. And we can’t make mistakes if our Be Good need isn’t being met.
Connect over Conform. Marquet describes this play as a supporting behavior - when people feel pressure to conform to roles, it is difficult for them operate in these new modes. The Connect play is about reducing the impact of hierarchies (they can’t be removed entirely), so that people can make better connections to each other. A simple example of the difference here is to trust first, rather than require that trust be “earned” - it helps to get people away from the “prove” mindset.
To me, all the conversation here apply much more broadly than thinking vs doing. Just like there are layers of strategy and tactics (tactics at one layer may be strategies for another layer), there are layers of “thinking” and “doing.” These concepts apply up and down that scale as well.
The overall concepts of choosing your words to create the environment you want, which then creates the results you want are right on. This is an interesting read for the anecdotes and the plentiful examples of the kinds of things we say to each other, particularly as leaders, that can help or hinder the cause.
* Note: Marquet has decided to call execution work “redwork” and thinking work “bluework”, which confused me every time it came up with the text without the reminder of which is which. (Maybe I have a red / blue mental blindness, because I still struggle to remember which political party these colors are supposed to be attached to in the United States.)