For several years I managed the global DuPont IT infrastructure team – data centers, servers, networks, security, phone systems, databases, PCs, printers, help desks.  As you can imagine, every day was a firefighting day.  Somewhere, some system or some process wasn’t working correctly, for someone, for at least some time. We had a great team. We did a good job dealing with many issues and struggled badly with others. 

Our performance rating system required a fixed distribution of “Exceeds Expectations,” “Meets Expectations,” and “Does Not Meet Expectations” ratings.  No more than 2 of my 17 direct reports could receive an Exceeds rating, and at least 1 had to receive a Does Not Meet rating.    

One of my steady-eddy managers approached me shortly after he told me he was planning to retire in a year.  In the course of a very open conversation he mentioned this observation:  

“You have a tendency to reward heroics to fix what’s broken over the well-planned, well-designed system work that doesn’t require heroics.” 

There will be crises and emergencies and unplanned work when you’re leading an organization, or managing a working team.  People who step up and go the extra mile to help should be recognized and appropriately rewarded.  [Be sure to arrange for a review of what happened and what’s needed to ensure that won’t happen again, or at least reduce the consequences if it does occur.] 

Good leadership means looking deeply at the quiet, steady work which prevents problems, including good design.  Find ways to celebrate proactive work which prevents emergencies.  Give it equal weight as firefighting when it is time to recognize people.  Build a culture which honors risk assessment and appropriate mitigation.   

Related tip: It’s easy to brag to your management about the firefighting event and recognize the people who took care of the problem.  Be the kind of manager who highlights the preventative work to your management.   

Remember, you will always get more of what you reward.  

Anger has been a lifelong companion, and constantly seeks to rule me. This is a prayer I have used in recent years:

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Precious God, thank you for making me in Your image — slow to anger, seeking justice, and full of self-control.

I trust You because You have sovereign power over all the universe.

Thanks for giving me the emotion of anger so that I can be alert to what is not right, and respond rightly.

Thanks for saving me from slavery to anger, which always seeks to rule me. You and you alone are my ruler.

I rejoice that You have already brought me far and kept me safe. I’m not yet what I will be by Your grace and power, so please continue to shape me into Christ-likeness. Thanks for keeping Your promise to complete the work You began in me.

Thanks for the opportunities You give me today to practice discernment and self-control.  Help me to see the gaps between what is and what should be the way that YOU see them.

Thanks for giving me a spirit of self-control and freedom from sin, so that my responses will be pleasing to You. Help me to repent quickly when I fail. I remain confident in Your sustaining power working in me and through me.

May I be a large, clean conduit of Your love and grace today to a world that struggles with anger.

In the beautiful name of Jesus, who was angry but did not sin,

Amen.

I wrote this six years ago, and it’s still true.

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Frustrated?  Angry?  Read this.

Not long ago I left the office, fuming with frustration, and headed home.   I could feel the blood pounding in my ears.  I got a glass of ice water and sat down with my journal, took a deep breath, took another one, and then wrote this out.  I’m sharing because I hope this helps some others, too.

I want to acknowledge how ungrateful I am. I leave my office most days tired, frustrated, unsatisfied. I selfishly want so much more, most of the time, that I fail to remember how good I have it.

I am extraordinarily blessed with wife, children, and extended family. I have handfuls of deep friendships.

Spiritually I am filthy rich in Christ Jesus, a citizen of heaven by grace, and able to rely upon the strength of the gospel day by day. I have nothing to fear because “the God of angel armies is by my side.”

 I live a comfortable, affluent life. Kings of old could not imagine the conveniences we take for granted. I use more technology daily than sci-fi writers in 1950 wrote about. I’m in a generation that is living longer and healthier at older ages than any previous generation. I live in one of the freest safest countries on earth.

Our travel options are so grand I could get to almost anywhere on the planet within 3 days of starting out. People the world over speak (or want to speak) my native language.

Intellectually I get to live in an idea-rich world, practically unlimited access to data, and I’ve benefited from 21 years of formal schooling and post-doctoral studies. I have the tools to capture and share my writing with others.  I have meaningful work with smart, savvy, hard-working colleagues. We’re contributing to our company’s efforts to tackle a handful of the most important problems in the world, including feeding a growing world population.  

I have abundant opportunities to serve others.

I have no reasons for complaints, none. I should have only room and energy for gratitude. Perhaps the most significant battle I get to fight (not need to, but get to) is the fight for joy and gratitude.

Many conversations these days are loaded with concerns about the future and the state of societies. How we view the future strongly affects our ability to perform well today. Believing “the view out the windshield is bigger than the rear-view mirror” is right and proper.  

Make this your mental model:

• I’m going to live a long time, therefore I care for my body, and discipline it to be effective.
• Every day is precious for contribution, celebration, relationships, recovery, and worship.
• It is right to fear God, and needless to fear men.
• I must use my agency and gifts well.
• I can trust that God will put what and whom I need within reach.

Avoid mindset traps like these:

• I will die soon.
• My best days are behind me.
• I deserve to coast or quit.
• There is nothing more for me to do.
• I can do this alone.

It’s true that we could die today. In the sovereignty of God, you’re effectively immortal until He calls you home. (Sidebar: You should still wear your seatbelt and avoid stupid decisions!) Our ignorance of the details of our future is a great gift to us because we could not handle the knowledge and live well.

Many intrapreneurial projects — the little initiatives started by someone and carefully cultivated through a first test and promising success — get crushed by the “immune response” of a big organization.   Relatively few big organizations do more than tolerate innovation arising outside of the groups that are “supposed” to do innovation.  

Today I want to clarify another way that intrapreneurial projects fail.  Well-intentioned leaders get excited about an early success and think that the best way to help is to load them up with steering teams, elaborate project management, dedicated KPI tracking, frequent project reviews, and so on.  These sincere attempts to help can instead smother a project and keep it from being successful.  It takes some wisdom to know how best to help, and when. 

An analogy:  When you’re starting a fire in damp conditions and have the first flames going with the smallest and driest tinder, don’t heap on a large pile of damp wood right away.  You’ll only smother the initial flame.  Instead, gradually feed a small fire with a few other pieces of wood until you have a strong flame and the first few coals.  Then you can heap on damp wood with less risk of smothering the fire.

Each choice has a consequence, so make choices that lead to good consequences.

Tips on making a good choice:

• Act in congruence with your highest, best identity
• Which choice has the highest expected value (EV) over the long term?
• If you’re hesitant about a decision, choose the harder path.  If the right thing were easier you wouldn’t hesitate.
• Remember that cause and effect are rarely close in time or space.
• Even small deviations from the proper course take you to the wrong place.
• Momentum matters, for good and for evil.
• There is nothing anonymous in this universe.

We’re desperate for leadership.

All leadership begins with self-leadership.

Self-leadership is a function of self-discipline. 

We need self-discipline about our eating, sleep, exercise, and nourishing our minds and hearts.  You already know what is best.  Do that.

Today, at least in the US, we face a combination of trends which will require a new level of discipline:

• Infatuation with style over substance.  Style matters, but increasingly passes as a substitute for substance. 
• Ascending post-modern worldviews are dominant in education, corporate leadership, governments.  Fewer people accept the idea of absolute truth.  Dialog about truth is swiftly converted into arguments about power.  Opinion is frequently honored above truth.
• Diminished context.  Social media largely operates outside complex context.  Subject lines, headlines, text messages, and soundbites are sufficient to reinforce mindsets.
• Declining trust in most institutions.  This is understandable — many institutions are recognizably corrupt.
• Large percentage of the population spends hours every day immersed in information streams, weirdly compelled to “keep up.”
• We swim in abundance of stuff, food, sanitized environments, and information.  Many of us are not handling abundance well. This is proving to be unhealthy.
• Far more remote work, less time at the work-site.  Distractions abound, peer pressure is physically absent, the benefits of face-to-face social interaction are missed.  

T.S. Eliot captured it well in his “Four Quartets” poems:

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper whirled by the cold wind

You might be saying, “But not me, Glenn, no, I’m different!”  Are you sure?  Let’s test it out:

• How do you feel if you sit perfectly still, no sound, no flickering images, for 5 minutes?
• If you searched and couldn’t find your smartphone for 15 minutes, what’s your panic level?
• When was the last time you turned off your phone for any length of time while you were awake?
• If I demanded that you read nothing but books more than 400 years old for a week – no news, no social media, no podcasts – what’s your first reaction?

Full candor: I fail these tests, too.  

I’m not trying to make a political commentary – these are the trends in our cultural environment, which is where we must exercise our leadership work.

We’re deeply in this reality.  Yet we have agency.  We can make choices.

I challenge you to be an intentional leader rather than passively absorbing every aspect of cultural trends.  I challenge you to be a free man or a free woman, rather than a slave to circumstances and circumstantial evidence.  We desperately need leaders who think for themselves, who speak outside echo chambers, who call out bullshit, who love fiercely, who rally people without manipulating them, who command respect from others even as they wrestle with constructive disagreements.

This level of leadership comes at a price, beginning with your self-discipline.  Practice stepping up and out of the swirls of information and emotion which captivate most people.  Recognize that the statement “Your truth” is actually “truth and your opinion.”  Fast from incessant mindless activity and task completion.  Do something which makes you physically uncomfortable every day – a cold shower, fasting from a meal, sitting in a hard chair, exercising in a new way, studying a difficult subject, talking with people who hold a completely different worldview. Select for quality and depth of information and insights. Invest time in measured reflection and meditation on events; Experience is not the best teacher – evaluated experience is.  Demand context and alternative perspectives.  Demand evidence of truth statements.  Live more generously with people than they might deserve.  Don’t fall in love with the idea of “the people” and then fail to interact with actual flesh-and-blood messy people.

98% of the people around you may be slaves to their inbox, smart phone, and information as someone-with-an-agenda presents it to them, but purpose to be in the 2% who strive for freedom.  It’s a both-and situation – understand the reality of where the 98% are living, and live differently.

Pursue this self-discipline and you’ll become the leader that the people in your sphere of influence actually need. Model this self-discipline, and your sphere of influence will increase.

Provocation for leaders thinking about strategies to improve the culture of their congregation, community, nation, and business: What if our strategy is to focus on the fruit of the Spirit? (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control – see Galatians 5:22-23)

Years of studying systems has demonstrated that you get what you optimize for, so choose your optimization angle wisely. Businesses which are optimized exclusively for near-term profit will always struggle with human issues and long-term sustainability. An organization optimized to increase size (or budget) will inevitably become an ineffective bureaucracy. An organism hyper-optimized for a specific ecological niche is likely to go extinct when the world changes. A man or woman who optimizes for sensual pleasures will end in a sorry state of regret.

Select what you optimize for carefully, for the long game.

People are looking to you for clues and signals, not just facts.  The human species is highly evolved to pick up on subtleties and implicit information as we communicate  Therefore, how you relay information can dwarf the message you intend to deliver. 

When the good folks at Manager Tools say “Communication is what the listener does” they mean that the bulk of the information received is on the listener – their mental frameworks, worldviews, attention/distraction ratio, and specific effort to comprehend.  You can’t control all this but should be mindful of the reality.  

Focus on what you can control.  

Leaders need to strive for consistency as they communicate.  Pair up frank statements about uncertainty and change with confident statements that are true for you and your team.  Clearly distinguish hypothesis and speculation from facts, and hard trends which aren’t going to change from soft trends which could be adjusted.  State “I’m thinking out loud here” to make sure people know your position might change with additional information.   

Inconsistent signaling is quickly interpreted as waffling and weakness.  It’s difficult to recover from that situation.  Therefore stay out of that ditch rather than drift into it.  

You’re probably aware of the failed Antarctic expedition, led by Ernest Shackleton, told in detail in the fantastic book “Endurance.” Shackleton’s leadership saved all 28 men under incredibly inhuman weather conditions.  

This supposed advertisement is apocryphal: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”

But Shackleton did pick these 28 men from over 5,000 applicants – and this is a key reason why any of them returned home at all. A randomly selected group of men would simply not have survived. Every expedition member knew the risks and challenges, had deep skills, and was well-prepared for suffering necessary for success.

Lesson here: Be selective about who is on your team if you have a difficult objective.