To a Hammer, It's all a Nail
Leadership is taking a stance, making a decision and owning the full consequences. Leaders however don’t always have every detail but should be able to see the bigger picture. I hate using the 30,000 foot view analogy but a strong leader should be able to see the 30,000 feet but be able to jump to the ground level to solve problems and empathize / sympathize with everyone involved when required. When you ask opinions of others though, you have to remember that they are a dataset of ‘1’ and ‘1’s experiences’ and you have to collate the responses to craft your own world view. Therefore if you ask a specialist how to solve a problem, they’ll give you a very specific answer.
If you go to an orthopedic surgeon, you’ll walk out with a plan for a titanium knee. If you go to a dermatologist, you’ll have a dozen spots on your body that will need annual monitoring. When you go to a customer success manager, they’ll tell you that sales people need to do a better job handing off post-sale. When you go to a sales person, they’ll tell you that operations needs to be more attuned to their needs and a sense of urgency to win the business. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The reason I’m writing about this today is because I’ve been thinking a lot about business conundrums and forks in the road that businesses have to take. We’ve found ourselves at many of these forks in the past and will continue to in the future at Xeal.
Key business problems are often complex and have a variety of factors or symptoms as the root cause. Could you trace problems back to the company culture? Sure. Could you draw problems back to individuals? Ok. Could you blame problems on process? Of course. Could you attribute the issues to external factors like the ‘big bad market?’ 100%. The reality is that every business has problems. Find me one that doesn’t and I’ll show you the Lochness monster that lives in my pool. The best businesses identify problems, make the calls to solve them and hope they are right more than they are wrong. You’re never 100% correct and some actions are one way and others are reversible.
The question that I find interesting for most leaders is '“how do you solve problems that remove the biases of everyone’s ‘powertool’ stance.”
Let my break that down:
Sales Leader - Hammer - Growth - ‘Just help me sell more’
Marketing Leader - Paint Brush - Brand Awareness - ‘We have to be consistent with our messaging’
Customer Success - Measuring Tape - Customer Satisfaction - ‘We have to ensure everyone loves our product’
Operations Leader - Screwdriver - Process Efficiency - ‘We have to do more with less’
Finance Leader - Sander - Capital Efficiency - ‘What’s the quantifiable ROI of doing it?’
Technical Leader - Wrench - Roadmap Accuracy - ‘Are we building the right thing at the right time’
Ask all the tools in the tool belt what they need and you will get very different opinions on how to build a house. If you listen to one tool over the other or let one completely drive the decision making you could be ignoring the needs of the others and send those tools into obsolescence and you can’t give them all what they need. You can’t build a house without all of these tools and thus a leader needs to know how to tweak and pull on any of them at the right times. Now let’s go build a house.