Bias Toward Developmental Action
Never just do the work. Always use the work as an opportunity to develop your team. This accelerates your transformation.
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Business leaders often advocate for a “bias toward action.” Quit talking, and do stuff. Fail fast.
There is definitely some important truth at play here. Action is usually preferable to inaction, and thinking teams sometimes need to break free from the paralysis of analysis. Likewise, poorly executed meetings can end with a lot of discussion about the problem but without any clear action steps or directly responsible individuals.
However, as a company grows, action isn’t enough. Every action should also contribute to improving the future execution of the team. We call this a bias toward developmental action. (Interestingly, Jay Hawthorne of Pressure Connections Corp, calls this a bias toward exponential action because your results increase exponentially when you develop people who develop people.)
Coaching for Development
The essence of a bias toward developmental action is viewing every task or problem as an opportunity to develop the competency, character, and culture of your team. Stuff still needs to get done, and the essential tasks of your business must move forward. However, as your team grows, your leadership team will function less and less as players and more and more as a coaching staff. This is an advanced form of leadership because everything you are doing is two or three levels removed from the output. [See also: “Beyond the Three Musketeers.”]
When a new task or problem arises, triage and delegation must be paired with coaching and development. Always consider how you can use the issue at hand to improve your people and your systems.
In solving a problem, you ask higher-order questions. What is the upstream cause of this problem? How does our team need to grow or change to better handle this whole class of problems? Do we need to change any processes or systems to be more prepared to identify and manage issues like this in the future? Who would benefit from owning our work on this?
In delegating a task, you ask developmental questions. What are the learning opportunities involved here? Who is ready for a stretch assignment? If it’s too high profile to entrust to someone without experience, who can we partner with a more experienced team member so they can take the lead next time?
Make all your work do double duty, and your team’s productivity will accelerate exponentially. You aren’t just trying to solve the problem or get the task done. You are leveraging this particular issue as a developmental opportunity for your people and your systems.
This approach requires both a long-term perspective and empathy. It’s long-term because coaching is often slower and more painful than the founders rolling up their sleeves and doing the work. This approach is also empathetic because it requires you to put yourself in your people’s shoes, to understand what they really need to grow. Sometimes, you will even put them into your shoes, into your roles. You step out of the limelight and support them.
A bias toward developmental action still gets the work done. Better yet, it both increases the number of people who can do high-quality work and improves the way our team works together.
Cultivate your Bias Toward Developmental Action
Today’s work is always an opportunity to develop for tomorrow. Your default mode will regularly (and frustratingly) slip back to doing the work yourself. It takes time and intentional effort to reset your mental habits on this.
This is critical and long-term work, but here are a few starting points. See the supporting articles to dig deeper into each practice.
Foster psychological safety. Building a team culture rich in psychological safety is an evidence-backed path to boosting learning, innovation, and overall performance.
After-Action Reviews. Make open, candid, and encouraging reviews of important meetings, events, or projects standard operating procedure for your business.
Shorten review cycles. If you only set performance goals once a year, you’re pretty much wasting everyone’s time. Merge your goal-setting, performance reviews, and mutual feedback with formal quarterly reviews and frequent informal check-ins.
Combine invitation and challenge. The most effective coaching involves bringing genuine challenge within a committed relationship. If you want your people to really accept your challenges, you’ve got to invite them into deeper relationships.
To accelerate your company’s transformation, you and your leadership team need to develop a culture that always presses for development. Make space to ask each other how you are developing your people for the tasks at hand. Ask yourselves over and over again how you can focus more on people rather than tasks. As you grow in this practice, your people will be able to do more and more meaningful work, and you will increasingly be able to spend more time on the work only you can do. And this is the main point of developmental action.
Check back next week about how to avoid common pitfalls in developing your people.