7 Practical Insights for Overcoming Today's Leadership Challenges

To celebrate our 10th edition, I'd like to see how many questions I can answer from our 7653 readers while keeping it under the 5-minute read time promise.

Read time: 4 minutes 53 seconds

Riffing on RIFs

"What’s the right way to evaluate and rank technical teams, so a RIF isn’t random?" Max via Twitter.

There are two common forms a Reduction in Force can take:

• The model is wrong so you're exiting specific areas or initiatives

• The model is right but demand has dropped so you need to scale back

I'd start here because the ranking isn't particularly important when you're exiting. And most companies should be making the call this way. It's the harder but cleaner choice - one decision to eliminate a thousand more. AirBNB did this to survive the pandemic.

In the scale-back model, there's no single right way. But a clarifying model could be borrowed from the world of sports: Wins Above Replacement (WAR). You're benchmarking each team member's contribution above freely available talent in the marketplace.

The hard part is defining what factors lead your team to "winning," but considerations for a technical team might include:

• Points delivered per sprint

• Defects per point

• Percent of code base impacted

• Mentorship hours

• Contract-weighted customer calls

And one last piece of advice: It is better to cut deeper once than undershoot and need to cut a second time.

Most employees know how hard it is to navigate a business in times of change and will forgive the first one. But with a second one, they'll question your leadership and judgment. A misstep here will make it much harder to refocus them to do better with fewer.

Raise the Standard

"I am managing multiple locations with multiple subordinates. I know the details but don’t feel like I have time to focus on them and have to look at things in broad strokes. The company needs the details buttoned up but it’s hard to focus on everything.

How do I help raise the standard and attention to detail of location managers?" Stephen via MGMT Playbook.

Expectations - Align on the What (their goals) and the How (your shared standards). I wrote a full playbook on setting expectations.

Measurement - Pick the most critical standard and measure it. Use measures that prevent it from being gamed, or you'll end up with cobras everywhere.

Improvement - Tight feedback loops are necessary to reset a standard. Start by asking them:

• Was it to their expectations? It's good to doublecheck you share the expectation.

• What changes will they make to improve? Keep ownership with them.

Peer Pressure - Since you can't be everywhere, how can you create mutual accountability? Consider ways to gamify or incentivize the change you're trying to make.

Integral Integrity

"What's your trick to figuring out integrity during hiring? Currently, I have them dive into a recent mistake and talk about a difficult team member. It's helped build a good team, but I feel like I can do better there." Kevin via Twitter

I like where you started. A few more interview questions you could consider:

• What's the biggest sacrifice you've made to stay true to your values? What was the biggest compromise you made and regretted?

• What lessons did you learn from your worst boss? Did you provide that feedback? And if no, why not?

More than fixating on one specific answer, I'm looking for consistency across them. Anyone can have a single, polished story. Those who live the value will have many.

Other tactics you might want to consider: