Fearless Leaders
My last post was about the rewarder, which removes (and optimizes) one of the main historical jobs of ‘Management’: evaluating people. So if these managers aren’t spending time evaluating people’s performance, what should they do instead? Do the companies of the future need no leaders? No! On the contrary, the companies of the future need Fearless Leaders:
Once a quarter, as CEO of Linden Lab, I would send an anonymous email survey to the entire company (I used SurveyMonkey) which you could complete in about 1 minute. The anonymous survey asked 3 simple questions:
#1: Would you rather keep me as CEO, or get a new one? (Keep/New)
#2: Regardless of your answer to #1, do you think I am doing better at my job, or worse? (Better/Worse)
#3: Why? (text box)
Each quarter, I shared the results of #1 and #2 with the whole company as soon as they were all in (as you can imagine the participation rate was pretty high!). The answers to #3 I took home and read privately, generally with a glass of something strong in my hand (In Vinum Veritas). I generally scored high on these questions, but in sharing the data I used to remind everyone that what mattered most was the trendline. Someday, one way or another, it would come my time to leave, and the trendline on that answer was how the whole company would know it was time for me to go. Being fearless enough to take a survey like this isn’t just for you (the aspirational fearless leader), it’s for the whole company. Think what it feels like to work at a place where you get a survey like that in your email.
A version of this survey is one of the things we are planning to build at LoveMachine, and try and get other companies to use. If it takes only a minute to ask everyone in your company this question, why wouldn’t you? Yet there are no more than a handful of companies doing anything similar to what we did at Linden. Why not? Can it really be that such a frank evaluation of executive performance isn’t worth the one minute it will take to get? Why isn’t your company doing this? Give me a single answer that makes sense. I dare you.
Technology, transparency, and communication can remove the need for much of what we have conventionally referred to as management. If you are willing to be honest about your own contributions, and willing to help evaluate everyone else, systems like the LoveMachine and Rewarder can replace the part of management that makes sure you are at work for 10 hours a day or measures how well you do what you are told to do. But technology and community certainly can’t replace leadership! The measure of true leadership in a company should be whether people will follow you and work for you, even if they aren’t required to. Your job as a leader should be to convince people to follow you – to commit to your specific projects, to get behind your strategy, or to agree with your mission.
Moreover – and this is captured in many of the LoveMachine tools – true leaders should be measured on how well they do this. Don’t tell people what to do. Instead, let them choose, and measure yourself on to what degree they follow you. For a senior exec, probably the best way is with surveys like this, because execs should author and evangelize great high-level strategy, as well as do a fantastic job mentoring others. This is fairly easy and fast to measure with surveys. For project leaders that are committed to specific deliverables – what we most typically call ‘middle management’, the simple way to measure their success is to create an internal marketplace in which they present their ideas to an audience of individual contributors who can make their own decisions which projects and leaders to follow. If as a project leader, noone is willing to work on your project, what should that tell you? At LoveMachine, if noone wants to work with you, they don’t have to.
It seems likely that companies willing to measure their leaders in this way will take over, in much the same way that countries ruled by Kings and Queens were competed out of existence by the more efficient democracies in which leaders were measured in this same way.
Nota bene for future users of such surveys: despite the frequency with which these were sent at Linden, they ALWAYS caused a flurry of worry amongst some — why is Philip sending this!? Did something happen at the board meeting? Is there a palace coup afoot?
Then again, those were probably the same people that freaked out anytime they spotted men in suits heading into conference rooms…
Similar ideas are embedded into the “360 evaluation” though, as always Philip, you distilled it to a “no overhead” pure chemical compound
Excellent!
One little gripe: the very American confusion between “Democracies” and “Republics”. Most democracies in Europe are *not* republics (UK comes to mind but also Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, etc…). Quite a few “republics” around are hardly democratic (China comes to mind…).
Some years ago, that confusion led a Bush administration official to thank the “Republic of Spain” one day, provoking outrage and furors over there (quite understandably when one remembers the bloody Spanish civil war of 1936 that republicans lost…). Spain is today a parliamentary democracy with a King (Juan Carlos I).
Politically, Kings and Queens have hardly been “competed out of existence”.
Cheers,
It is interesting when people choose to follow, especially when most corporate structures attempt to impose management as leadership. Once someone becomes a leader via actionnot appointment there is quite a culture clash:)
Daniel, has “men in suits heading into conference rooms” ever been a good sign of anything? Bad enough it’s all men, but in *suits*?
In SF?
On Battery Street?
Shoot, *I’d* worry. And look where things are there today…
Phillip I don’t know how Linden lab would vote right now about their leadership.
I do have a good guess as to how anyone over two years in-world would vote about the current executive handling of Linden lab today.
I don’t imagine we {your former residents} will ever know the entire story.
I do know that if survey monkey were to ask if you personally should return…you would be gratified.
I always wondered; who kicked you out of SL?
Kapor?
Remember Steve and Amelio et All?
Now is the time to revenge yourself of the humiliation and SAVE SL; otherwise they will kill your dream!
Go spread love over there!
Cheers
hey maybe you could post one of these out for M linden….. hes no good at the new ceo and now theres 30% less staff at LL and all the ones people like… none of the big suits he hired that probably make more then 5 lindens together
well,
Honestly you need to change the actual manager of Linden lab, cause the leadership is compromised , i think the new objectif of this networ is to do more money and charge for any new product launched, after this 30% of layoff i have lost some friend at Linden lab, and im not very happy of that .. Blue, Periapse, Teagan, Rodney and too many other linden is gone tdue to this stupid décision. The customer service is very poor since a long time.
What you do with your first compagny? After this famous CT project party, i observ some negativ change week after week ..
well.. i hope you can drive the first virtual world correctly and i hope its not a big machine to do more cache without respect of the old resident ..
cinserly
Eddi
I taught it could be nice if residents of Second Life participated in such evaluation in regards to the new CEO at Linden Lab. I made this survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9FQCJ5Y
lets see…
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