At some point in your career, you’ve been given bad advice. It’s usually well meaning. But maybe it is dated or exposes a problematic world view in the advice-giver that you’d be better off not emulating. Even bad advice can be a good teacher, though.
Teradyne CIO Shannon Gath told CIO in a Leadership Live interview that she learned an important lesson from a piece of bad advice she received early in her career. She was told she should, “Act like a man” — once common advice given to women. The idea was that you should compartmentalize your personal life, hide photos of your kids, and show no emotion — the way men do.
This turns out to be bad advice, even for men. Gath thought about it and decided to focus instead on authenticity.
“Say what you mean. Do what you say you’re going to do,” she says. “There’s a level of credibility that comes with that. There’s a level of trust you build with people, if that’s how you operate.”
Taking bad advice and learning from it is a great way to make lemonade from lemons.
I asked leaders to share the worst advice they got on their way to their current role and what lessons they ultimately took from it.
Do everything yourself
Early in his career, a mentor told Paul DeMott, CTO of Helium SEO, that if he wanted something done right, he would have to do it himself. He took this to heart, but it turned out to be bad advice.
“It places an unsustainable burden on the leader,” he says. “It also stifles the growth and development of the team.”
It is, unfortunately, common advice — and leads to burnout, while creating a bottleneck around work and decisions. It demonstrates you have no faith in your team. And it shows you won’t let people learn from their own decisions, mistakes, and successes.
“Absolutely terrible,” agrees Ruslan Halilov, co-founder and CMO at BluedotHQ, who received the same advice, early on. “You’re not a good leader unless you know how to delegate. You need to be able to trust your team and treat them as responsible, grown-up professionals.”
Many people try to follow this advice, though.
“It took me some time to realize that effective leadership is about empowering others, not micromanaging every detail,” says DeMott. Even believing that something cannot be done well unless you do it shows disrespect to your team. It will also likely throttle innovation and growth at your company.
“You need to be flexible and innovative to stay afloat,” says Halilov. “Innovation can only come from collaboration and hours of collective brainstorming.”
Pretend you’re always working
“I got a piece of advice that set me on a tangent that I have had to work to course correct throughout my career,” says Justin Abrams, co-founder and CEO at Cause of a Kind. “It was, ‘Control the optics of the leadership team. Never let a customer know that a leader is not at their desk at all times.’”
This advice is misguided in the same way that Gath’s bad counsel — “Act like a man!” — is bad. It requires you to tell, and live, a lie.
“That advice set me up for such a dichotomy,” says Abrams. “Do I lie?” Because you are obviously not at your desk all the time. And it’s easy for a team, or customer, to see through this lie. No one works 24 hours a day, every day of the year. People have families, extracurricular activities, take vacations, and get sick. Attempting to create this illusion will quickly illustrate that you can’t be trusted.
“If I told my partner, my spouse, that I’m always home, but I’m really not, that would break our long-term trust,” says Abrams.
Being authentic, as Gath also decided, is always a better path.
“It is better to be as transparent as possible,” says Abrams. “That will create a sense of meaningful engagement and trust.”
Set fake deadlines
Egbert Teeselink, founder and CTO of TalkJS, got some leadership advice that quickly backfired on him: “Set tight deadlines so developers ship faster,” he says. “This is not the way to build quality products.” It also creates a frenetic energy among your team and sucks the fun and creativity out of work.
“Deadlines are a great tool to get a team to ship something before a given date,” he says. “But they’re a terrible tool for shipping something good. The moment I set a tight deadline for a deliverable, work that does not belong to it gets postponed. People become less helpful. When noticing something wrong with a product, developers bounce it to a product manager or ignore it because they don’t feel they have the space to fix it. Having deadlines all day every day takes all the joy and creativity out of building software.”
If the deadline is important, the product is slipping dangerously, or there is some other reason to get the work done at all costs, tight deadlines are an unfortunate necessity. But creating false tight deadlines to create a sense of urgency won’t lead to higher productivity. It leads to poor products and a stressed team.
A better strategy, says Teeselink, is to break the work into small chunks so nothing slips too far behind. Then let the team work without time pressure but with encouragement to do their best work.
Focus on the technology
Elvis Sun, founder of PressPulse, got a piece of advice that seemed, at the time, sound. “I was told, ‘Focus on technical excellence,’” he says. “This was misleading. It ignored the human element of leadership. It is important to develop emotional intelligence, empathy, and the ability to inspire and motivate others.”
Because of this advice, though, he spent all his time focused on technical solutions. As his team grew, he began to see the folly of this advice.
“I quickly learned that this level of care wasn’t enough on its own,” he says. “I realized that my focus on the technical side of the business was making me miss the needs and goals of my workers.”
This is a common learning path for technical people moving into leadership roles.
“Learning how to listen better, understand my team’s problems, and talk to them in a way that made sense helped me make the workplace a place where people felt valued and motivated to do their best work,” says Sun. “I didn’t give orders or point out technical problems; instead, I tried to understand each person’s strengths, goals, and way of working. This helped me customize how I lead my team and get the best out of them.”
Be a perfectionist
“During the initial stages of my career,” says Roy Benesh CTO and co-founder at eSIMple, “senior colleagues told me that to become an effective leader, everything must be flawless.”
This dangerous advice included such details as, “There should never be mistakes in coding, projects, or even in meetings.”
“I tried to adhere to this advice,” he says. The results, though, were not good: “Stress, bottlenecked projects, and a reluctance to innovate or take risks within the team,” he says.
Striving for perfection while accepting that you — and your team — will make mistakes that you can learn from is a healthy, attainable goal. Insisting that no one ever make any mistakes is maladaptive perfectionism.
“It is an impediment to action,” says Benesh. “An overemphasized attention to detail is bound to kill imagination.”
This level of perfectionism leads to procrastination because the goal is unattainable. It thwarts the many iterations that will lead, eventually, to an exceptional product.
“Effective leadership is about encouraging and being flexible rather than pursuing perfection,” says Benesh. “It creates a space where failure is acceptable, and development occurs through failure. Focusing on advancement and mastery makes it easier for the team to learn and create new things. A good approach is the adoption of the MVP — minimum viable product model. This method encourages teams to get a working product out in the first stage and improve it. Allow for experimentation, motivate your team to go forward despite failures and use those experiences to develop a better and more effective organization.”
Pick between hands-on or strategic leadership
“There’s this piece of advice I’ve often received,” says Ravi Pratap, CTO and co-founder at Uniqode. “You are either a hands-on tech leader or a strategic one. You have to develop your strategic side and be less hands-on as you go higher in an organization.”
As he grew into leadership, though, he discovered that, however common it is, this is still bad advice. There is no need to dismantle the part of you that wants to be hands-on. The trick is to know what each situation requires of you.
“You have to learn how to do both,” he says. “Then decide which side to lean more on, depending on the situation and priorities.”
Leadership, he says, is like a dance. Sometimes you join the dancers, out on the floor. You learn the steps, enjoy the company, and get things done. And sometimes, you watch from the balcony.
“You can’t only be doing one or the other,” says Pratap. “You have to figure out how to float between the two.”
In a down economy, stick with a large company
“When I was thinking of leaving my job to start the company I now own,” says Andrew Nieman, co-founder and managing principal at Arro Labs, “my then boss told me that, in a down economy — and we were very admittedly, at the time, in a down economy — the smart move is to stick with a big company.”
This is a commonly held belief. People typically assume there is job security in a big company and that large firms are better able to weather economic ups and downs.
“You generally think of them as having less inherent risk, and it’s a safer career move to stay there,” says Nieman.
With the benefit of hindsight, though, he sees that this assumption is false and that the advice, if he had listened to it, would not have served him well.
“Big companies are forced to make harsh, often shortsighted decisions,” he says. “Whether it’s to move the stock price or satisfy executive KPIs you didn’t even know existed. That means you might be swept up in a layoff round of 2,000 people without explanation.”
Eliminating staff — especially key decision-makers — is brutal at a small company. They think hard before cutting loose key roles. Those people are core to the operation of the organization.
“You’re safer at a small company when times are tough,” says Nieman. “You likely have a closer relationship with the final decision-makers, your impact on the company is more apparent to everyone there, and it’s easier for management to envision the harsh reality of life without you. A company will feel the impact of pulling one person out of a 20-, 50-, or 100-person organization more than from a 25,000-person organization.”
Always have the final word
“Early in my career I was counseled to ‘always have the final word’ in any decision,” says Raviraj Hegde, SVP of growth at Donorbox. “The idea was to establish authority by having my voice be the loudest and, ultimately, unquestioned.”
This advice might stem from a belief that leaders should always appear decisive and confident, he says. But it didn’t go well for him. With this advice in mind, he found himself inadvertently shutting off input from team members and losing valuable, diverse perspectives, ideas, and solutions. None of this served his goals or those of the company.
“It finally dawned on me that great leadership isn’t about having the last word,” he says. “It’s about facilitating a team culture where everybody is comfortable contributing. As I turned my attention to open communications and team-member empowerment, our outcomes started to improve — as did our team dynamics.”
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Source: News