Common mistakes of unofficial leaders

We’re all the unofficial leader, unless of course you are a manager or executive. Have you ever found yourself the figurehead of an initiative and you’re not sure why? Do you ever feel like you’re the project manager, strategist, and analyst all in one? Have you ever wondered how to describe your role without using the word “lead”? You “drive” projects, you “facilitate” them, you “coordinate” them, you “head them up”?

Without the named authority to compel people to do things (which, even when you have it, is not as effective as you’d like it to be), often we’re left figuring out how to bring a team of people together around a shared objective and delegate a sequence of tasks to others. It can be uncomfortable. I’ve made a lot of mistakes, usually out of excessive excitement and enthusiasm (I am who I am). Here’s a few:

You think the sheer brilliance of your idea is enough to rally the troops to act.

It happens like this: it’s 11 PM. I’m wide awake in bed, the gears are whirring in my brain, smoke is seeping onto the pillow. I have *the best* idea, it’s so obvious! It’s been staring us right in the face forever, and if we just look at the problem from a different angle it all makes sense. 

I share it with a roughly assembled team of people required to make it a reality, and everyone oo’s and aah’s, and maybe there’s even a semi-lively discussion. But nothing happens afterwards. It’s just another great idea that is going to whiz by gold flakes in a muddy mountain spring. 

Jocko Willink, executive leadership consultant and former Navy SEAL, talks about this a lot: an imperfect plan developed by many people is better than a perfect plan developed by one person. When many people are part of the idea itself, they feel the kind of ownership and investment that inspires them to act. Further to that, when things go wrong down the line, their investment means that they’ll work harder to resolve problems rather than back down. 

When trying to make changes or improvements to the way we do work, I’ve learned the hard way that my ideas are effectively worthless when I think of them as mine. The art here is in inspiring those around you to join you in the adventure of finding a solution, not in compelling them to carry out someone else’s idea. 

You over-manage the project as a result. 

My idea meets enthusiasm, but no action. I respond by crafting a clear project plan with tasks, deadlines, and a meeting schedule. I form a core group and an extended team. We have recurring meetings. 

This isn’t just micromanaging, it’s squeezing the joy out of trying something new and it leaves no room for spontaneity. You close off your view of the periphery, and your project will lose steam at the smallest roadblock. When surprises come up, they can be either good or bad. A good surprise is when you hear an executive champion your project to other parts of the organization and all of sudden more people want to be involved. They bring new ideas, new perspectives that you haven’t accommodated for in your plan. It can be frustrating to change an elaborate plan.

A bad surprise is when you realize a platform or system you were relying on doesn’t have the feature you need and it will take several months to implement it. You have to go back to the drawing board completely rather than smoothly navigate this new rock in the river.

And worst of all, you’ve turned your inspired, transformational project into a series of tasks for everyone involved. They try to check them off their list instead of engaging with them and elevating them. 

You start at step 20, not step 1. 

It’s Saturday. I think to myself, I’m going to make holiday cookies and take them to my husband’s fire station. I get out the flour, sprinkles, confectioner’s sugar. Shit, I don’t have any butter. Maybe shortening will work. Hmmm, there’s not enough left. Suddenly, I’m stalled and I’m wondering if it’s worth it. 

Let’s back up. Step one wasn’t getting the ingredients out. Step one was browsing holiday cookie recipes online. Step two was deciding which type of cookies I wanted to make and finding a recipe, perhaps one that I had all the ingredients for. 

Time and time again, I develop a beautiful, gorgeous program, campaign, or initiative that, once I go to execute, clearly step 20, not step one. I know this because I meet many obstacles in trying to implement it. I discover there are too many variables in the plan to ever be able to effectively evaluate whether it was successful and why it was successful (or not). I realize I don’t have the tools to implement it in its current form. 

In design thinking terms, this is why we start with empathy, not the prototype, to learn about the environment they’re working in and better understand the problem they want to solve. In startup terms, this is why entrepreneurs start with the minimum viable prototype to validate ideas before building elaborate products. In Sound of Music terms, “Let’s start at the very beginning.” 

You back down when you encounter resistance. 

When introducing a new way of doing something to a team or organization, I get excited about all the benefits we’ll experience like better quality plans, fewer headaches down the road, more clarity in measuring impact, and so on. 

Recently, my immediate team members and I decided to try a new way to do our quarterly marketing planning and budgeting with our extended team. The benefits were obvious, and this was something the extended team had been asking for for several quarters. 

We did a lot of things right: we didn’t try to have the entire planning process outlined to the last detail, we left room to adapt to new information, feedback, and other changes occurring in a rapidly evolving organization. We did our best to bring the team along in the adventure with us, using language and an approach that asked questions, demonstrated clear openness to feedback, and framed the process as a chance to learn. 

It went well, until it didn’t. The team enthusiastically participated in the early phases - the brainstorming, the discussing of their budget requirements, the discovery of common needs across the team - these were all reasons we needed a better quarterly planning process to begin with. 

But at some point we had to introduce structure and we had to take ideas and write them down into cohesive, actionable plans. These plans needed a layer of project management, people to execute them. We tried to make it as easy as possible and consistent across projects with templates for plans, assigned working groups, and some tight deadlines (driven by finance deadlines for budget). All of a sudden, we were in trouble. 

We started hearing anxious questions about how responsible everyone would actually be for these plans, who specifically would be executing, concerns about how this work was aligning with the broader marketing strategy for the company. 

It was hard to feel the pushback and resistance after we’d seen such enthusiasm and support. We heard the questions and they felt like criticism; they felt like people were losing faith in trying something new. In reality, there were likely several dynamics at play. As the masterminds of the plan, we had worries about how it would all be received: would people feel like we were trying to boss them around without actually being their bosses? Would they think it was too much work and not worth it? 

When we started hearing some of the questions, it immediately felt as though our worries were becoming a reality. I always forget (in my excitement for my own ideas) that introducing change is ultimately a very vulnerable place to be. We were tempted to scrap the whole thing. 

To get past this phase of resistance and pushback from our extended team, we had to recognize that they were coming from a place of vulnerability too. Our organization is transforming and we had undergone a lot of change in a short amount of time; there were very few things that weren’t changing and we were all trying to perform in the midst of pervasive ambiguity. They wanted the help and support of a more coordinated and strategic marketing plan in our area, and we were worried that we might try, fail, and it would set us back and make things harder, not easier. 

Once we acknowledged our shared vulnerability and fears as normal, we knew the first step was to de-escalate the tension in our conversations. We were all reacting from a place of fear on some level, and once we could diffuse some of the pressure to get things exactly right or perfect, we could systematically address the real concerns of the team and work through the process together. 

You let perfection be the enemy of good. 

In the scenario described above, it was extremely uncomfortable to not have the perfect, complete answer for our extended team on how we were going to work together to develop a better quarterly marketing plan. We would have felt more comfortable over-managing and over-prescribing the process with clear expectations, deadlines, coordination with everyone’s manager about what everyone’s role would be. 

We didn’t have the luxury of doing that and, as mentioned previously, that can be suffocating in its own way. The greater marketing organization was in the midst of bigger change itself; our campaigns were changing, we were investing in different technologies, we were changing our KPIs. We could have said, “Well, there’s so much change happening, it’s not worth trying to come up with a plan if it’s just going to have to change anyway.” Yes, there is absolutely truth and wisdom in that. 

However, we’d been saying that for years. The change never stopped long enough for us to get organized and come up with a perfect plan for our area. On top of that, we’re a sales-facing organization and just because marketing changes their strategy, doesn’t mean our sales reps or customers’ needs change. We still had to support sales in hitting their numbers regardless of what our corporate marketing campaigns were going to be. No one was going to hold us accountable to this, but we had the opportunity - a suspended moment in time when no one else in marketing had plans we needed to coordinate with - where we could try something new. 

Developing a perfect process for coordinating quarterly marketing planning would have taken too much time, and with the changes in the broader marketing organization, we simply didn’t have answers to a lot of questions. We had to be comfortable with discomfort, okay with the vulnerability of not having answers, and we had to figure out how to bring our teams along with us. 

It’s still a work in progress, it may fail yet.