The lasting harm of leadership bullshit

Or, lessons from taking the spotlight at the company All Hands and advice to current and future leaders

Midjourney “imagine a snake presenting at a company all hands”

One of the more stressful parts of leadership is that you need to make yourself available for people to throw rocks at you. Hopefully this is metaphorically and not literally. What I’m talking about is the requirement to go in front of your team, organisation or company and make yourself available for questions or announce unpopular decisions. The way you go about it lays down a marker for the culture you’re a part of and how people behave within it. I am, of course, referring to the company or team all hands. Google used to do this incredibly and one of my signs for when it was time to leave was when Larry and Sergey stopped showing up every week to take questions.

I will admit to being slightly odd here. I actually enjoy standing up at an all hands and inviting people to ask questions. I see it as both an opportunity to be held accountable and a chance to role model the behaviours I want to see from the people around me. It’s a chance to build trust and credibility. To get feedback and to open dialogue. It can be a deeply uncomfortable experience because you are never going to have all the answers, you are going to make mistakes and the better job you do the more people are going to feel able to challenge you directly. Thus making all future instances less comfortable. The better you do the harder it becomes.

Which, by the way is a good thing. If we’re talking about building an effective culture then promoting one where people speak truth to leadership and are comfortable challenging things which don’t make sense is how you avert disaster. If speaking truth results in defensive, evasive and bland responses people are going to stop speaking truth to you (and each other). You’re also normalising how people go about receiving feedback.

I should also apologise to anyone who has ever put me on stage at this point because having me speak in front of a large group of people has historically has been something of a white knuckle ride. So, sorry. Sort of. Hopefully this post explains where I was coming from.

One of the single biggest levers you’ve got is to stand up and take those rocks. Leadership isn’t meant to be comfortable. You are responsible for people…