Successful managers and leaders don't ignore details.
When I envisioned starting a blog, I often thought about my first post – one that would be celebratory – maybe even auspicious in tone. Having been a faculty member for over 20 years, September has become synonymous with ‘new beginnings’. Students are back from the summer. Faculty return from conferences and retreats where they have endeavoured to bring new life to their research and teaching. On campus, there is an excitement in the air! So, what better time to launch my blog with something positive and celebratory!
However, my life for the last two years has not been a celebration. In 2018, I lost my father. The last two years have been the hardest ones of my life. My Dad was in the hospital for 9 months and I went to spend time with him every day as I watched him fight for his life. While my dad was struggling, my mom had a stroke – she had a brain bleed. I have spent hours, days, weeks, and months in the hospital, watching doctors, nurses and other health care professionals take turns at leading my parents’ care. I would leave the hospital after 10:30pm. I would go home, eat and get my daily fix of Donald Trump. I would lament how the President is changing the US, a country I really liked living in – a bit blasphemous for a die-hard Canadian to admit! The Leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world – whether dealing with job growth, health care, infrastructure, tax reductions, growth of domestic terrorism, or impending war – seems to be unconcerned with the details – he claims leadership while others take care of details.
When I see how the Canadian Health Care system led my father’s care – I saw, first-hand, their obsession with details. Without access to details, without team meetings to discuss those details, without a constant monitoring and reflection process over details – my father and mother would not have survived even in the short term. But this obsession with details is something some leaders feel are beneath them.
If you don’t understand the details of the industry in which you operate, if you don’t understand the details of what is driving competition, if you don’t know the strengths and weaknesses of the various systems inside your organization that allow you to add value to your products and services – you can’t lead.
You can be called the leader of the free world – you can be called the CEO – but you can’t lead. Leadership is not about knowing all the details. It is, however, about knowing a little more than you think you need to know so you can appropriately focus the attention of those who follow you to realize your vision – a vision that creates value. Leadership grounded in the details is powerful. Leadership grounded in anything else is lazy, cowardly, and selfish. So, what does this mean for a successful leader?
Confirm your gut feelings with a healthy dose of data and well thought out reports created by thoughtful individuals
Understand the specific nature of your dependencies inside and outside your organization
Know the process by which new ideas come to fruition inside your organization
Interact with those you lead in a way that is more than simply sharing niceties in passing. Have meaningful interactions with highflyers at every level in your organization and understand their specific contributions
Inspire your employees, but don’t smother them with rhetoric. Inspiration needs to be specific. When inspiration lacks details, inspiration is limited to only making those who listen to you feel good and passionate for a fleeting moment. When inspiration comes from ‘understanding the details’, it provides your people with a sustained source of direction and can credibly incite value creating behaviours.
My mom came home from the hospital. When she had her stroke, she fell and broke her ankle in three places. She was exhausted, and for a year we waited for the blood in her brain to reabsorb so she could regain the specificity she had lost in her movements. A week before her stroke, she took her women’s group, the Jambo Club, on a cruise. She has led this group for years. What she would given after coming home from the hospital to regain the detail in her motion and thinking. Details matter – they are a matter of life and death. Leaders who ignore them are not leaders. Leaders who work hard to achieve a detailed understanding of their organizations are true leaders. As I write this blog post, you may be happy to know that my 72 year old mother and I went on a 1-hour walk this morning and while we made dinner together, she commented, “you don’t pay enough attention to the details when folding Samosas – they are tricky – you need to focus”.
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