I’m not sure how many of you are checking out LinkedIn Learning videos, but if you sort through them, you’ll find some pearls that are worth sharing. I especially like that I can click around to view only the short segments I’m interested in, and then fast forward until I get to the meat of the message. Hey even when we’re learning something new it makes sense to be efficient!
Last week I came across a course by Bob McGannon called Leading With Intelligent Disobedience. It turns out that Bob and I have similar backgrounds. We both spent over 30 years working with Fortune 500 companies, improving processes enabled by technology, leading large teams, and helping companies to outsource various services. His career went more in the Project Management Office direction and mine in marketing and company culture, but we both worked closely with technology companies and I absolutely get where he’s coming from. He managed to complete his book and mine is still in my computer so I definitely give him kudos for that. On the flip side, I’m happy to say that only one of us has white hair!
Anyway, as soon as I heard the term “intelligent disobedience” I connected with the concept. To me, it means rising above the rules and fighting the status quo if it doesn’t make sense. Honestly, that pretty much describes my entire corporate career. At one point I took over a large team where the client was threatening to fire us and take legal action and I ran it like I would my own company. When one of the members of my team was clearly making a mess of our client relationship, I fired him. I couldn’t actually fire him from the company since he had another manager and had just been placed on this particular project, but I fired him from my team. I made a few people in the corporate hierarchy unhappy that day but keeping him on the job just wasn’t the right thing to do. And when everyone else felt that they had to run their message by 3 layers of management, when I had an urgent situation with an executive from my client that required our company to act swiftly in ways that meant doing things differently, I called our CEO. Now I don’t recommend this action when you’re in a really junior position in a company, but I had been brought in to fix things, so I was damn well going to fix them! And it seems our CEO didn’t mind at all and later that year invited me to present to the Board of Directors, so it all turned out ok. Looking back now, they seriously could have fired me but at least now I have a good story to tell!
I’m sure Bob and I could share other good stories if we ever got together, but I enjoyed listening to his recommendations. Clearly some are more targeted at people working for large companies, but I did find 3 key lessons that we can apply as entrepreneurs.
Lesson #1: The 30-3-30 Model
Here’s something that as a leader you may relate to. Yesterday I checked my inbox and I had received 120 emails between the hours of 7:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. I also had calls during the day that involved 14 other people. That’s not even a full day, but according to Bob, that represented 134 opportunities to show my leadership. For each interaction, I had the opportunity to ask myself, “do I act on this, delegate it, file it or delete it?”
Bob proposes something he calls the 30-3-30 model. The first 30 seconds is about how long it takes for you to read the first line of an email. That’s when you make the “keep” or “delegate” decision. If you decide to keep the problem, then 3 minutes is about how long you should ideally take to solve the problem if you’re working on your own, or perhaps the time you should take to explain the delegation. If someone calls you or steps into your office, then 30 seconds is the statement they make to introduce the problem they need help with. Again, 3 minutes is about the time to spend making a decision on how to get the problem resolved, but if that doesn’t work, you’ll quickly get pulled into a 30+ minute vortex of trying to fully understand the problem so you can delegate the solution, or else just diving in to solve it yourself. The trouble is that as a leader, you don’t have many of those 30 minute time slots available during your day without cutting into work you need to do to grow the company. You want to help your team, but if you spend 30 minutes on each problem the company faces, you won’t have a company.
Bob’s advice, which I think is sound, is to coach your team to use the first line of an email or their opening line of a conversation with you to either share with you the opportunity they’re presenting, or the pain relief they have either found or need. Either way, if they think about what they’re going to say and give you their opportunity or pain relief in a way that is digestible and quick, then you’ll both be more effective.
This same advice applies when you’re getting ready to email or speak to a client. What 30 second message can you give them that will identify the opportunity you’re presenting or the pain relief you can offer?
Lesson #2: You are a CEO–A Chief Environment Officer
I particularly love this lesson as it’s a leadership style I try to live by. Bob’s point is that the way you as a leader celebrate victories, deal with defeats and work through coaching moments creates the tone that will carry over to how your employees treat one another and your clients. If you’re a hardass with your team, then they may take it out on your clients. If you lack structure as a company, then your employees will appear disorganized when speaking with clients. If you are generally a glass half full kind of leader, then your employees are more likely to display a positive attitude at work.
Personally, this is an area where I don’t believe the “fake it til you make it” philosophy works, despite what others may tell you. People see through that a mile away. Bring the real you to work. The real you may sometimes feel frustrated, but if your frustrations revolve around constructive things your company could do better, then displaying your humanity, as long as you aren’t publicly taking it out on people, isn’t a bad thing. But do try to get enough sleep and coffee to genuinely feel positive and excited when you start your day. The old saying that enthusiasm is contagious is really true. Find a pearl in every oyster and your team will naturally want to do the same.
Lesson #3: Process Is Not Your Staff’s Job
I have a kind of love-hate relationship with process. I thought I hated it as I was exiting Corporate America. I was so tired of fighting through layers of approval required to do the right thing for clients, and especially of working with people who had just resigned themselves to processes and refused to think for themselves.
It’s funny, when I was working in London I had a German woman on my team. Now no one does process better than a German and if you have ever traveled in Germany you know that you can set your watch by a German train. This is the culture of precision that created the brilliant engineering of BMW, Mercedes and Audi. Their culinary expertise crafts what is arguably the finest chocolate in the world. And you may not know that their precision extends to healthcare and that they are the top exporter of pharmaceuticals in the world, although the Bayer and Merck brands may be somewhat familiar. In any case, I called my London team in for a brainstorming session on a particular client strategy, and my German team member was uncharacteristically quiet. “We haven’t heard from you yet” I asked her, being as upbeat as possible, hoping she would offer some ideas. But she looked back at me completely confused. “This brainstorming”, she said “what are the rules?”. Ah the beauty of working with different cultures. The concept of brainstorming, which by definition is throwing out ideas without any rules, was a completely foreign concept to her.
When I started my company, I felt that I really needed to leave all of those stuffy rules behind. The manuals, the training that reinforced the manuals, the internal contact packed websites that reinforced the training that reinforce the manuals…I was done with all of it. But over the years, I learned something really interesting about human behavior. Process creates comfort. Process builds the rituals that allow for predictability in someone’s day. Process provides repeatability that supports quality. So I broke down and yes, now we have processes for just about everything.
But there are limits. Because remember, I spent 30 years living through processes taken too far. One thing I used to hear from corporate leaders back then is “my people just don’t think”. But you know what? That’s on us as leaders. When do you give your team an opportunity to think, and they vary from their process, how do you react?
Bob’s point here is that we need to encourage our team to speak up and break the rules if it is in the best interest of our clients and our company. Managers make the mistake of thinking that following processes is someone’s job. That’s one of the reasons why during the PPP lending cycle of the pandemic, many small business owners decided to shift their accounts to community banks. It was the big corporate banks who got stuck in their rules and couldn’t react to the needs of even some of their best small business clients. The community banks were nimble enough to adjust their processes. And now, hopefully, they will reap the long term rewards of a larger, more loyal customer base. Like Bob says, “generating outcomes is someone’s job–following process is a tool to get them there.”
I’d like to leave you with a quote from one of the most famous executives to build a company around the concept of intelligent disobedience, Zappos CEO Tony Hseih (shay).
“I think the main thing is just trust [the customer service reps] and let them make their own decisions. Most call centers are set up by policies and so the actual person that’s answering the phone doesn’t really have the ability to do anything. If you…call most customer service places, if you ask for anything that’s not normal they have to talk to a supervisor or just say ‘oh our policy doesn’t allow that’ and whatever. So we generally try to stay away from policies, we just ask our reps to do whatever they feel is the right thing to do for the customer and the company. And that’s actually really uncomfortable for a lot of reps that come from other call centers. We kind of have to untrain their bad habits.”
Last year, Zappos celebrated their 20th anniversary with $400 million in revenue. I’d say that’s a pretty good return on intelligent disobedience.