Survival skills in the wilderness include starting a fire (and maintaining it), building shelters, finding water and purifying it, treating injuries, signaling, navigating, avoiding poisonous plants and animals, finding and preparing food. 

You can train on these independently.  That kind of focus is necessary to master the basics.  In the real situation, you have the added challenge of putting them together.  A fire without a shelter will be of limited value in a cold rainy night. Spending hours on making the shelter ‘just right’ limits how much energy and daylight left find water. Treating injuries is usually first. Water is more critical than food, for at least the first two weeks.  But which is more important next – fire or shelter?  The answer varies depending on your specific situation.

You can think about leadership skills – analyzing, deciding, communicating, developing relationships – in much the same way.  They are all part of the package, but it takes experience and wisdom to know what to do first, and then next. 

There are two more parallels.  First, preparedness matters.  Information, equipment, training, and prior experience matter.  In tense situations we rise to the level of our training, not the level of our knowledge.

Second, the moment you realize you’re lost, or facing an unknown situation, you should sit down and think before wandering further.  How did you get here?  What’s the most critical thing to do next.  Breathe deeply and let any panic evaporate.  Make a plan – the simpler the better.

You have a clear vision for the future.  You have the big idea that will revolutionize the market.  You can see how a transformed process approach would work far better than the current successful model.

Wise leaders don’t get too far ahead of their organization.  Product developers can’t get too far head of customers. 

We read the stories of Henry Ford transforming the car industry, of multifunction smartphones destroying Nokia’s mobile phone dominance, or of Abraham Lincoln’s vision for winning the war and then reconstructing a unified country.  After the fact they look like amazing and fast leaps. They were incremental steps along a vision.

If you go racing along as a leader and people can’t keep up, you’re in front of the line but you’re no longer leading.  People will naturally find someone leading at a slower pace.

Yes, it’s frustrating.  Yes, this requires patience.  Celebrate the wins along the way without becoming satisfied with the destination. 

You might have a few opportunities in your career to rapidly expand your team through a hiring surge.  It’s a welcome change from downsizing and cost cutting, but you do face different problems.  Here are hard-won lessons so you can avoid some of the mistakes I and others have made when given this opportunity. 

• Develop a clear mission statement for adding positions.  Something like “We’re adding 6 positions with _____ skills to deliver __________ which helps the organization [this way].”  Repeatedly communicate the focus area and expectations.

• Think team hires vs. individual hires.  Interview candidates for several positions.  Use broad-strokes job postings which can encompass several positions.  Work closely with HR to ensure they understand what you want to accomplish. Accept their help for keeping you out of trouble with hiring protocols.

• Continue to be selective in hiring to get the best people for the roles (and anticipated work to come).  Treat hiring as a disqualification process to sort through candidates.  Having six open positions is not a reason to substitute quantity for appropriate quality.

• Onboarding is crucial, and a considerable energy investment.  (See The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding New Knowledge Workers for strategy and tactics.)   A helpful approach when you have multiple people coming on quickly is to assign portions of the onboarding to existing employees.  “Jill, I’d like you to handle onboarding for all the safety protocols and give them tours of the facility.  Mike, I’m giving you the responsibility to review the division structure, and introduce them to our contacts in HR and Production.  I’ll give them the overview of how our current projects fit into the business goals.”  Two-fold benefit:  The workload is distributed and more consistent; the new employees quickly get into discussions with others in your team. 

The Ultimate Guide to Onboarding New Knowledge Workers

• Demonstrate fast value capture from new hires.  Look for opportunities to demonstrate early progress.  Permission for hiring surges always comes with high expectations. 

• Don’t slack off on performance management for your weaker performers.  It’s tempting because poor performers can ‘hide’ more readily in a larger team.  It’s a mistake because senior leaders expect a higher level of contribution from the whole team.

• Decide if and where you can take more risks with projects. There are likely projects where the risk of delegating leadership to someone more junior is manageable.  Take advantage of development opportunities for people who demonstrated trustworthiness. 

• Be wary about giving all the cool, sexy projects to the new hires, leaving loyal long-timers with the routine.  Don’t unintentionally create space for resentment to fester.

• Talk with your direct reports about how to preserve and amplify the best of your culture as the organization gets bigger.  Get their input and cooperation.

• A hiring surge often requires re-structuring of reporting relationships.  There is no ideal org chart; consider all the tradeoffs. Consider which of your existing people managers can take on more direct reports.  You might have opportunities for a first-time manager.  Keep in mind that they’ll need extra help and feedback for a season.  Be realistic about your own capacity to add direct reports; keep margin in your own role to be able to address issues and lead a larger group.

• Plan to give your boss a periodic update on personnel and project expansion.  They’re putting trust in you.  Demonstrate you’re validating that trust.  Put meetings on the calendar at 3 months and 6 months to review current state and get their feedback.

Hiring surges are an exciting opportunity and a chance for you to shine as you create more value for your organization.  The tips above can help you! 

We need contrasts to help us clarify and unify.  Every hero needs an enemy.  Every organization needs to strive against the status quo (or at least what threatens their status quo).  Parents worry about children who don’t follow the rules, and/or that a child is too much of a rule-follower. 

Part of how we define what we are for is to define what are you opposed to. My working list:

A purely mechanistic view of the universe and everything in it.  A worldview which says everything and everyone is just particles and information will consistently fail to explain our collective human experiences.  Life has agency. Life is an anti-entropy entity that defies thermodynamics.  Our breakthrough understanding of quantum mechanics means there is an unsettling weirdness underlying the predictable attributes of bodies at rest and in motion.  For those who insist there is nothing divine or spiritual, only mechanisms we don’t yet understand, I ask for the historical examples of a thriving and peaceful civilization that denied the divine.  We observe that a religious majority can readily accommodate a minority viewpoint, whereas historical examples of state-sponsored atheism cannot tolerate religious views.  (Note:  See the link for Stuart Kauffman’s new paper below)

“Everything is relative, and there is no absolute truth, only your truth and my truth.”  We’re deeply flawed and inadequate to understand the full picture.  We twist ourselves into odd knots when “your truth” and “my truth” are incompatible. There are foundation truths which support our ability to thrive together.  The follow-through of ‘everything is relative’ has always led to far more problems than it “solved,” and only provided short-term convenient benefits at a terrible price. 

Emphasizing “the state collective” over the individual.  There’s a spectrum here.  The phrase “one another” occurs 138 times in the New Testament.  We are meant to be in healthy communities that love, serve, protect, and encourage one another.  I’m opposed to a collectivist view of a political state because every historical example becomes willing to murder people for “the greater good.”  Most people find it easier to fear all-out nuclear war than all-out state control. I prefer the challenges that come in the tension between individual rights and body politic. The flip side of the coin is being opposed to “every individual must always get their way,” because that’s also a path to destroy families and communities. 

Censorship of competing ideas rather than engaging in uncomfortable dialogue.   Fears drive censorship; we should not be afraid to work through competing ideas.  Nor should we allow people who prefer monologues over potential learning to control the agenda.

A fixed-term education mindset.  Far too many people think of education as something that finishes at X point (e.g., High School, College) and then… you get on with life.  The processes of learning and maturing are life long and joyous.  Every day presents learning opportunities.

Indoctrination.  The test to differentiate indoctrination and education is whether the student is permitted to go beyond the teacher after a reaching a basic level of mastery.  Indoctrination cannot tolerate this; education expects it.  We all need to be instructed to develop functional competence as a foundation for creatively expanding.  We all need feedback and reinforcement, but even this can be accomplished without indoctrination.  Some fields (e.g., math) have correct and wrong answers. 

Social environments where forgiveness and redemption aren’t possible.  Soul-crushing intolerance of an ‘error’ does not allow people to learn and mature.  Dinged relationships cannot be restored and strengthened.  Fear becomes the primary driver.

Making Science an idol.  (I write this as a trained Ph.D. scientist, folks.)  The scientific method is an powerful approach to discovery in domains where you can make measurements and control some variables.  You make a hypothesis, design experiments which could disprove your hypothesis, and interpret the data you can collect.  There are major portions of things we care about where the scientific method cannot, by definition, give us answers.  There is no such thing as “The Science™” because current understanding is always subject to new information and new technical capabilities.  DaVinci, Galileo, Newton, Jenner, Franklin, Pasteur, Curie, Maxwell, Einstein, and McClintock all updated “The Science” of their time.  Scientists, even the best, can incorrectly interpret data and draw wrong conclusions.  Respect scientific views but never worship them.  Be particularly wary of mixing market forces with science.

I’m likewise opposed to turning away from science.  Science and technology have been, and will be, the keys to growth and modernity.  We must be wise in the ways we use them as tools.

Unequal application of the law and its consequences.  Or, not enforcing the consequences of the rule of law because someone thinks it shouldn’t apply. Justice operates from constraints and consistency.  “Rules for thee but not for me” has led to some of the worst of the history of our species. 

Tolerating lies.  Lies are the foundation of evil, and the path of least resistance to broken relationships, eroded trust, and wholesome justice.  We casually say, “Of course politicians lie, it’s practically their job description” – and we shouldn’t.  Reminder to self:  You get what you consistently tolerate, not what you expect. 

Prayerlessness. I advocate almost daily for more self-leadership and personal responsibility.  Yet this must be in the humility and recognition that we all kneel before God and are desperate for His sustaining love and guidance.  We weren’t designed to do this on our own. 

What’s on your list?  Anything you’d add or disagree with? 

Something endemic to organizations:  Certain corporate decisions and business landscape realities and the consequences of decisions made years ago create headwinds that make a manager’s job more difficult.  The military describes this as ‘friction’ in the battlefield. 

The fundamental step is to recognize that you will always have some level of headwind working against you.  It’s not personal.  It’s not exceptional.  It’s not unique to your situation.  Some headwinds are temporary; others are more persistent.  Some of our own making!

So how do you handle headwinds?

Sailboats can go into the wind by tacking.  They zig-zag a bit, using the power of a headwind to drive the boat forward.  Managers are wise to think about tacking.

When you get into moments of despair about the headwinds, to the point of wondering if perhaps you should leave for another role/organization, consider two points.  First, are you ready to trade one set of headwinds for another in the new environment?  Second, are you still in a position for contribution and learning despite these headwinds?  These are part of your stay vs. leave equation.

Embrace the opportunity to learn to navigate and endure headwinds.  The more senior your role, the larger your responsibilities, the more headwinds you’ll encounter.  Experience and endurance matter.  A spirit of “this too shall pass” can take you a long way.

Niccolò Machiavelli wrote this in The Prince, published in 1532:

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things; because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

You’ll encounter the Machiavelli Effect many times in your career.  It’s always going to be present when power accrues to one group over another.  Sometimes you’ll be the innovator.  Sometimes you’ll realize you’re on the side of the resistance, or the “lukewarm defender” role. 

You’ll be able to spot it frequently once you understand the pattern.  Then you can decide what you need to do:  persist, support, or resist. 

For years now I have told people “It’s never problem vs. no-problem.  It’s about which problems you prefer to have.”

Going forward I will end it better by saying, “which problems you prefer to have, and when.”

The “and when” was always implied but specifying it brings out clarity in discussions.  Usually it’s about short-term vs. longer-term problems.  I find in conversations that the time element forces one to think about the costs of procrastination, or the power of patience. 

My criteria for great non-fiction books:

• “2×4 whack to the forehead” insights multiple times
• Challenges my assumptions and points out inconvenient or uncomfortable truth that I must wrestle with, not instantly resolve
• Presents a coherent framework which is usable to assess new situations
• Is well-written, quotable, shareable
• Is unlikely to be outdated in only 3 years
• Is documented, or at least presents follow-up trails to investigate

Three contemporary books I read in 2022 which fit these are Strange New World, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, and Failure of Nerve.  

Proven truth:

• Your performance is built on your strengths.
• Mastery of a strength area is a life-long journey.  We are always working on our craft.
• No one is perfectly well-rounded.
• Both strengths and weaknesses can become derailers in a role, and therefore both must be managed.

It’s a mistake to be overly-dependent on your strengths.  Your weaknesses are a roadmap to interacting better with others.  

I recommend you spend 80% of your effort improving your particular strengths. We effectively manage our weaknesses with 20% of our energy in several ways:

Adopt a mature mindset. Don’t beat yourself up over your weak areas, but don’t wallow in status quo either.  Pick one weakness area and work on it for a quarter, then switch to another one. 

Intentionally draw complementary strength people around you to offset your weaknesses.  This is the power of effective teamwork.  Keep in mind, this is not only about an org chart, but who is in your network.   

Learn enough to appreciate and work better with the strengths of others.  Example: I frequently work alongside biostatistics experts.  Although stats is not a strength area for me, I can read a few articles to better understand how Bayesian models work and cooperate with their expertise.