Leadership Moment: Know Your Environment
I recently attended a leadership breakfast with a few notable New England Patriots personalities, and a few comments really stuck out, emphasizing the difference that environments have. Head coach Jerod Mayo noted a difference between the business world, where there might be a wall of text highlighting a companies “core values,” using vague-but-inspirational words like “Integrity,” and the football world, where printed on the walls of Gillette Stadium is the clear message: Do Your Job. The specificity of the latter makes for a clear litmus test: if you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, then why are you trying to do something else? He also noted that in a business, you might not know how you’re doing until a Quarterly Business Review (if then), while on the football field, an error would be met with someone hitting you in the head—literally.
Steve Burton was moderating the panel, and when a discussion of the transition at quarterback from Jacoby Brissett to Drake Maye came up—and how gracefully Brissett handled it—Steve Burton noted that “Winners don’t mind other people winning.”
It’s a fascinating comment, because from the outside, the NFL is a cutthroat place: there are only 53 positions on each NFL team, only 22 of which are starters, and a position like starting quarterback is coveted. Getting that job means taking that job, usually from someone else, and defending that position every single day. Yet, as defensive captain (and Walter Payton Man of the Year nominee) Dietrich Wise Jr noted, it’s the difference between the scarcity and abundance mindsets.
Which baffled my brain for a while. Should corporate America, where jobs are generally more stable than in the NFL, have more of an abundance mentality than the NFL, with its fixed number of jobs? How do they have it inverted? Perhaps it’s that in the NFL, losing your job seems less capricious, because the person who takes it is likely to provide better value at lower cost, while in corporate America, people lose their jobs without ever realizing they weren’t performing up to expectations.
Perhaps corporate America doesn’t understand its environment. Tim Dellinger’s article on the distribution of employee performance is a must-read: If HR teams and managers believe that their employees are a normal/Gaussian distribution (which, on cursory inspection, is obviously wrong, unless you were staffed by a lottery), it’s no wonder that employee mindsets generally operate from a scarcity mindset: their job is always at risk, and they never know why.
Appearances
Recent
Nov 19: CISO Series Podcast, Once You Show Me Your Diploma, I’ll Explain Why We Don’t Gatekeep
Nov 19: Ben Rothke (cameo), How to get on a board
Dec 5: Crunchbase, How CISOs Are Spending Their New Budgets
Upcoming
Dec 11: CyberMarketingCon CEO Summit, Navigating the Investment Landscape for Cybersecurity Companies
One Minute Pro Tip: Share Stupid Bad Ideas
Volunteering ideas to someone else always feels a bit dangerous. They might look down at us for our reckless ideas, or they might expect us to do more validation on an idle fancy. Maybe we think they’ve heard it a dozen times already, and they’ll be annoyed at us for making them repeat their deflection. So any number of great ideas get buried in the imagination that hatched them, never seeing the light of day.
“I have a stupid idea…” is a great way to start. It tells the person that you know this idea is likely not one they’re going to do anything with. Making fun of the idea is acceptable, since you’re already mocking it yourself. It invites them to tell you why it might be stupid, and maybe tell you the story of how they tried something similar and it went really badly. And, just maybe, they’re a kernel of a good idea inside your bad idea that they can use.