Here’s a simple exercise you can run. It is a helpful exercise that most leaders should run periodically. After a while, it may become a sort of “second-nature” skill. It is the trend test.
Leadership is… trendy
Leadership is often about trends.
Your job is to look at the horizon and identify how things are going to trend:
- What things are getting better over time?
- What is getting worse over time?
- How can you make sure that your organization is getting better in every dimension? Producing better outcomes, better for its people, producing the best possible value in the world?
Entropy is a very real force in organizations. And growing organizations face complexity explosions. Both of these are like gravity, pulling things towards ruin.
This leadership test is trending
Here is a simple exercise you can do. With it, you can survey your organization, and determine where the upcoming problems will be.
Look at each of these categories. Circle or mark whether you think things will be better, worse, the same, or not sure for that category. In a one year time horizon.
For example, for speed of delivery, do you have evidence and believe that things will be better, worse, or the same in a year? Or are you not sure. Do that for each of these categories.
| Category | Rating: Better, Worse, Same, Not sure |
| Speed of delivery | |
| Speed of feedback loops | |
| Product success (in the market, vs competition) | |
| Quality | |
| Ease of use | |
| Reliability | |
| Innovation | |
| Clarity of mission | |
| Employee retention and satisfaction | |
| Ability to hire | |
| Risk management | |
| Coordination with the rest of the company | |
| Hot spots in the organization |
If you aren’t sure, dig in and figure it out.
Some nuance
Now obviously there is some nuance to this.
- If things are terrible in a category, they need attention, even if they’re not getting worse over time.
- Some things need to get better faster than just “compared to today”. For example, you might be in a competitive situation where your competitors are moving faster than you. Your benchmark can’t be what you’re doing today, it has to be relative to what is needed.
But even if you run this is a totally naive fashion, it’s a useful exercise.
Okay, what do I do with this?
By doing this exercise, you’ve identified some important leadership work to do. After that, you have to dig in and determine how important each of the “worse” categories is, and what you need to do to address it.
I wrote a piece about that, in: how to develop a sense for the long-term. But this is probably more familiar leadership work. Figure out what needs to be done, make a plan, prioritize, execute on it.
Thank you
Image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay