Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The Toughest Place to Lead

The toughest place to be a leader is in the church. Well, any non-profit, mostly volunteer organization. Why, you may ask.

Because, in a church, community group, or any other non-profit organization that depends on volunteers to do most of the work the leader has very little leverage over the followers. In a paid employment organization, the leader/manager has various incentive and consequence tools he can use to influence his subordinates. In most volunteer organizations on the other hand there are very few incentives or consequences a leader can use to influence those he leads. Thus, the toughest place to lead is in a church.

Most pastors I know do not receive nearly the recognition they deserve for being successful leaders. Our society rewards leaders who build giant companies, lead Superbowl or World Series winning teams, or attain the highest political offices in the land. While these are all noteworthy accomplishments--and some of my favorite leaders come from the arena of business, sports, and politics--they are possibly easier to attain than to lead a church. For the reason mentioned previously, but also because essentially a pastor leads his parishioners to do things that are antithetical to their own self-interest. Pastors regularly ask congregants to give up time on a weekend to serve others--such as teaching, driving people to church, assisting the elderly, providing childcare during services, preparing food, and a myriad of other duties. Then, not only does the pastor ask people to give up their free-time, he has the audacity to ask people to give up some of their income to help feed homeless people, send Bibles to far away countries, pay for poor children to attend summer camps, and to keep the electric and the heat on in the church facility.

I say again, pastors are far underrated as leaders. They typically work for far less pay than their peers or even those with less education, they are expected to "be there" whenever a crisis occurs and they do not have regular working hours.

If you want to find a successful leadership role model, this coming weekend attend a church service. While not all pastors are good leaders, many, many are better than most of us think.

If you are leader in business, sports or politics, try leading in an all volunteer organization and see how well you do. If you succeed, then maybe you are as good or better than you thought. If you fail, take it as a lesson learned in leadership.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Learning the hard way . . . from your mistakes.

John Maxwell authored a book a few years ago entitled "Failing Forward". The basic premise of the book was that we often learn and grow more from our mistakes than our successes. If that is the case, then I hope I grow alot from my most recent mistake (see previous blog post "Breakin' the Law . . . of Influence".

Here's the background of the previous blog post.

The whole project in which I am currently engaged is rife with corporate political intrigue. One and a half to two years ago the department I work for--one of the information technology departments--proposed a new WAN system to connect all our various sites' financial, procurement, requisition, and inventory systems via an intranet and the internet. The system would have been very costly to design and implement and equally as costly to maintain. The senior executive of my department pushed this idea whole-heartedly, but fortunately the CEO did not go for the idea. However, as a result the senior executive of my department fell out of favor with the CEO and other senior executives. In the vacuum that ensued (previously my senior executive was held in very high regard) the senior executive of the third department discussed in the previous post stepped in with a "less expensive solution"--a custom-built system his department had developed under the radar. He told the CEO with a few "tweaks" his system could do everything the one my department was proposing but in half the time, at half the cost, and with no additional staff! In July 2007 he said he could deliver the system by December 2008--eighteen months!

Unfortunately, the senior executive of the third department had no idea what he was talking about. His department's business needs (his department basically acts as a procurement arm for our biggest customer) are vastly different than mine or the second department (we are basically research and development organizations) and his department's custom-built solution is not scalable to an enterprise wide system.

Long story short, in December 2007 my team was added (five people) as well as five people from the second department as the project leadership from the third department began to realize the enormity of the task. So, now there are 15 developers on a project was only supposed to need 5. And, not a single line of code has been written yet. We are still trying to figure out how to merge all the requirements of the three departments together when their business needs are very different.

The project is now going way over budget and time and will ultimately deliver a system that is not nearly as robust as the current system. The users are looking at losing current functionality so that the system can be completed in a relatively shorter period of time. Many core functionalities are being pushed off to "phase 2"--whenever that will happen.

Thus the reason for my trying to influence the development teams to consider the needs of the users.

I know, another long post, but I hope it helps to give some background. I do not justify my actions--I was wrong because I violated the laws of leadership; it will now take me a long time to restore the influence I did have and I may never be able to build a good working relationship with the project leadership. Lesson learned for me.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Breakin' the Law...of Influence

My favorite leadership guru, author, and speaker John Maxwell states leadership very simply. He says, "leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less." This principle forms the foundation of his second law of leadership: the Law of Influence. Last week I came hard up against this law when I tried to lead a mini-revolt against the "positional" leadership of the project in which I am currently engaged.

I, and many others, believe the leadership of this project is more interested in their own agenda than trying to produce the best product possible--a new enterprise-level financial/procurement/requisition/inventory software system. I firmly believe that those who will be using the system should be involved early and often in the design of the system. The "positional" leaders do not. They believe the more you involve the users the longer the system will take to develop. Actually, I agree...in part. Yes, involving the users in the design will take more time up-front, but will pay big dividends in the long-run. First, the users, having been involved, will be getting a system they want and agreed to; second, we developers will spend less time on the back-end re-working a system the users do not want and does not meet their business needs.

So, I tried to "influence" others on the development team to push the leadership into accepting more input from the users. On this project there are three departments: the one I work for, a second department that does very similar work to my department but is located in in another state, and a third department that does not work anything like mine and which is located in the same state as the second department. I was very successful with the members of my sub-team and I was mildly successful with members of the sub-team in the second department. I was not at all successful with the sub-team that works in the third department. Furthermore, all the members of the third sub-team work for managers in the third department who are also the project leaders.

When I pushed the issue of involving more user input, my sub-team worked with me. The second sub-team said they were with us, but in a teleconference they remained silent. The third sub-team and the project leadership were adamantly against me and my sub-team. Additionally, all the users who agreed with me and appreciated what my team was doing did not back us up! As a result, my team came out looking like fomenters of rebellion and our senior level departmental manager was dragged into the fray. In the end my team was taken to the "woodshed" and told to "cease and desist" all activities related to the issue of user input.

At first I was angry and frustrated with my management, the project leadership, and the users and other sub-teams that did not back us up. My sub-team and I commiserated for a while. But then I realized, I had broken the Law of Influence. I tried to get people with whom I have little or no influence to back me up; I thought they would because it was the right thing to do. However, as Maxwell says, people do not buy into the leader's vision until they buy into the leader. Even though it was the right thing, nobody but those who know me best would follow me.

I still think I am right, and all project management books and seminars back me up; but that means nothing to the Law of Influence. I should never have attempted to get the rest of the project team to push the project leadership into seeing my point of view--at least not until I had significant influence with the team members.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

"You Can't Make This Stuff Up!" is the title of the first chapter of the book I am writing about my current software development project experience. I am sure thousands of others have been involved in completely screwy projects--software or otherwise; however, this is by far the screwiest project with which I have ever been involved. I will be posting many sometimes humorous, most of the time frustrating, and almost always illogical decisions made on this project. Some of the information will be intentionally changed--such as the name of the company for which I work and the names of some of participants to protect their identities. Otherwise all events are true--yes, true. You won't believe some of this, but I say again, all of the events are true; as I stated in the title of this post, "You can't make this stuff up!"