💎 The Corner Office #6 - Be a Long Term Leader

Read time: 6 minutes

Happy New Year y’all,

Leadership is a full time job. Often, the way that time is divided is what makes the cream rise to the top. In hindsight, many of the challenging times I have experienced have been because of misspent time. This has, in my career, taken two forms. The first is shiny object syndrome. The other is spending too much time in an area that is outside my zone of genius.

I took a truck full of insights away from Matt Mochary in this conversation. Specifically, I was intrigued by several of the principles he talked about and their application to leadership in the longterm.

This week’s Corner Office Insights come from Matt Mochary’s (Author of The Great CEO Within) appearance on The Logan Bartlett Show.

 Insight of the Week  

The amygdala has a central role in the storage of fear memories and your fight or flight response. Knowing when it is activated or not is tricky. A successful senior manager is often judged on a handful of decisions every year. To improve the quality of my decisions, I started to focus on how I make them and what is influencing me. Understanding the different types of fear and how to identify them in real time has been a major challenge.

So I started a decision journal. Documenting major decisions, my states of mind, my reasoning, and later down the line, the outcomes. I have built a bank of decision inputs and quality that enable me to identify patterns in real-time and make better decisions. If you’d like my decision tracker template, hit me back in the replies.

Focus on Fundamentals

Chasing new ideas can be exhilarating. It feeds our dopamine habit. It can give us a sense of motion. However, it can also lead us off course from our long-term goals.

Shiny object syndrome is where people focus on whatever is new and trendy. Dropping it as soon as the next trend comes along. The remedy? Basic blocking and tackling. Sticking to the basics consistently and at a high level seems obvious. But from my own experience, it is deceptively hard.

One of the concepts I have embraced over the past couple of years is motion versus velocity. Whereas motion is a change in position regardless of direction, velocity takes both speed and direction into account. A leader’s job is to get their team from their current state to their desired state. So direction matters. Many managers get busy applying the latest trendy tool or framework to how they work with their team. They spend more time on the tool than on achieving the objectives. They achieve motion, but not velocity.

Contrary to popular belief, effective management doesn’t have to be complex. It’s about doing to basics and following through. Matt offers a simple solution:

Matt highlights the obvious questions a manager should ask, as well as the obvious outcome to the average one-on-one meeting between a manager and team member. But just how obvious is it? I think if you were to spend time shadowing 10 developing managers for a month, you wouldn’t hear these questions. And if you did, they wouldn’t be asked so directly. The simplicity of management is often lost in the fog of ego. The great fear of managers is to be exposed as value-less or that their job is so simple that anyone on the team could do it. Perhaps one difference between great leaders and bad managers is their perception of leadership complexity.

Truly great leaders not only seek feedback, they act on it. Surprisingly, most people don’t do what they say. This is true at all ranks and in all businesses. Specifically, with feedback, whether it’s unwillingness to accept feedback, or an unwillingness to change, the result is the same: hardly anyone listens and actually adjusts to the feedback they receive. Don’t just hear the feedback, listen to it. Apply it. This practice builds trust, shows that you value your team’s input, and most of all, gets the best out of them.

Stay in your Zone of Genius

Don’t get me wrong, strive to be a multi-disciplinary leader. But that doesn’t mean you should do everything. The greatest leaders have a wide variety of knowledge, but know where they excel and they focus there. They know, and stay within, their zone of genius. Spending too much time outside of your zone of genius can lead to burnout and apathy.

Watch out for the zone of excellence. That’s what’ll grind you down slowly. Easily misinterpreted as your zone of genius, you may not feel its destructive impact until far into the future. Discovering your zone of genius is easier said than done. It can take years.

Here’s one question to help you on your way: “What do I do that adds unique value and that I seem to be loving?”

Working in a gaming company has led me to better understand the dynamics of gamification. We most often experience it being applied to us. Understanding how to apply it to myself was a major unlock. A frame shift that turns the mostly mundane into more enjoyable, and more productive, experiences.

Finding your zone of genius and operating within it exclusively is what Matt suggests. Great idea. Not always possible (right now). Aim to delegate all work outside of your zone of genius. For those things you can’t delegate, make them into a game. Have a meeting you can’t get rid of? Make it fun. Have a quarterly report you can’t delegate? Make it fun.

Tiny thought

Trust isn’t just a feeling; it has economics and velocity. In a team where trust is high, things move faster and cost less. Trust is a multiplier. On the flip side, when there is low trust, it’s like incurring a tax at every step. Trust can be quantified. It is not just social, it is financial.

Kicking off 2024, look at your relationships. Where is your balance of trust lacking?

Keep your stick on the ice,

Jess

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