The Hagakure #84: Are You Successful?

Photo by Anna Samoylova on Unsplash

It's a long story but I recently started a CTO role and it made me reflect again on what is success for me in a role like this.

Sitting on a plane a few thousand feet above the ground it occurred to me that success in an executive role is largely a compound of 3 things:

1. Results.

2. How those results are achieved.

3. How you make people feel.

What's interesting to me is that, as far as I'm concerned, while the outside world will generally care mostly about the results, the best way to achieve them in a way that endures is by focusing on the list above in reverse:

• If people feel good (about being in the team, about working with you and others, about their learning)...

• They'll excel at doing their part in implementing systems that deliver results...

• And results will be (sustainably) achieved.

I fear that the majority of tech leaders—especially those early in their careers—only think about results. Many will inevitably carry the burden and try to control things, becoming micromanagers who can't tell the forest for the trees. They experience the pressure from their boss, from their people, from their inner critic, and act in ways that often lead to short term results but that sooner or later fall apart (both the results and themselves.)

Some understand that success comes from implementing systems and processes that make producing great results more likely, especially with larger teams. But they still go about it in a prescriptive way, often implementing processes and tools that worked for them before but lacking a compelling rationale in their current environment. They soldier on even despite the lack of buy-in from those in their charge.

And then there's the few that learned that...

• A company is just a group of people trying to achieve a common goal.

• In a complex system it is the interactions between the parts (i.e. the relationships between the people) that yield the biggest impact on results.

• If people are not intrinsically motivated, and aligned with who they are and what they value, nothing else will (really) work.

To be clear, this is not about catering to entitlement, to an employee's every whim or making people happy. Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin put it best in their book, From Impossible to Inevitable: How SaaS and Other Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue:

"A company is responsible to employees, not for employees. It can create the conditions for your fulfillment: a safe work environment, no assholes, fair pay, career opportunities, and an honest culture. But it can't be responsible for making you happy—just as it can't be responsible for keeping you entertained or interested."

I am reminded here also of a book I read called Obliquity about how the most effective path to achieving complex goals is almost never a direct one. Creating great business results is certainly a complex goal. But it cannot be aimed at directly. Rather, it's like tending the soil of a garden where Nature can then, without hindrance, do its miraculous work of growth through both rain and sunshine.

Photo by Gabriel Jimenez on Unsplash

In the workplace, the act of gardening is striving every day to create the conditions for people to feel like this is the place to be. Somewhere they can grow in, where they can expect both respect and challenge, and where the work is an opportunity to do something worth doing for someone worth doing it for.

As Maya Angelou once said, "I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Help them feel like a million bucks, and the odds are they will help you create many multiples of that in real value.