The Herding Tigers Podcast is brought to you by the Herding Tigers Workshop, a live event for you and leaders just like you. Check it out at herdingtigersworkshop.com. Big Tigers Podcast, my name is Todd Green. I am the author of the brand new book Herding Tigers Beat a Leader that Creative People Need to Be Able Now.
Where ever books are sold. And here on the show we talk about some of the unique dynamics that accompany leading creative work. And most of us who lead teams of creative people, we started our careers as tacticians, as practitioners, as designers, as writers, as people who are doing the tactical work necessary to deliver great results to our client or to our organization. And then we were so good at doing that that at some point somebody tapped us on the shoulder and said, Hey, you know what?
You're really good at doing that work. You should lead other people who are doing that work. Hooray, right? Now you were no longer doing the thing that you were great at doing.
You're trying to lead other people. The problem is your entire career to that point has been a giant setup because to that point everything has been about control, controlling the work, getting the work right, making sure the work is exactly what it needs to be in order to please the stakeholders that are involved. But once you assume a leadership role is no longer about control, it's about influence, about creating an environment in which other people can thrive and which people that your tasks with leading can do their best work. And that's what we have to do is we have to unleash the best work of the people on our team.
If we're not doing that, then we're leaving work on the table and we're not fulfilling our role. So the first key transition mindset transition we have to make is from Maker to Manager. And I ended up cutting this story out of the book, but one of my favorite mini-series pieces of film work over the last couple of decades is the series Band of Brothers, which aired on HBO. And it's about the American or the Allied invasion of Europe and sort of the drumming back of the Germans who had invaded France and in Belgium and obviously other countries.
And there's a scene where the Americans are poised on the hill and they're about to take the town of Foy back from the Germans. And they plan the attack and they're about to go in for the attack. And Captain Winters has been leading the men all along, but he's been promoted now to a role of Captain. So he's sort of a bit removed from the attack.
He's leading the attack, but he's not on the ground sort of going in and actually leading the charge. And the person who was leading the charge, Norman Dyke made a couple of really bad decisions, sort of froze up in the pressure. And the men were just getting pummeled, just getting destroyed by the Germans. They were sitting ducks basically.
And so Captain Winters starts to grab his gun and run into the battle. And his commander, Colonel Sing, says, Captain Winters, you'll get back here. It starts chewing him out. And he says, no, I know you're attached to the troops, but you cannot go.
So Captain Winters grabs Lieutenant Spears and sends him in to lead the battle, the attack is successful. Everything works out in the end for the Americans in the invasion of the town of Foy. But what was interesting to me in that situation is that many of us as leaders, when we see our team struggling or when we see our team going into uncomfortable territory, our first instinct is to want to grab the proverbial gun and run straight to the front lines and start doing the work of our team for them. The problem is that when that's our instinct, when that's what we do as a leader, when we come in and we control, when we see them struggling, we're not teaching them to be able to do the work for themselves.
We're not teaching them to be able to think strategically. We're not teaching them how to be able to solve similar, the different problems in other contexts. We're training them instead to wait for us to come and fix the problem for them. So yes, there are times to step in.
When things get urgent, when things are, you know, if it's a client pitch that you're doing tomorrow, or if there's a lot of money on the line, if something goes wrong, yes, there are times to step in and to do the work to the extent that it needs to get done. But in the midst of that, are you teaching your team what you're doing, why you're doing it, how you're thinking about it, and why your approach is the right approach. Or are you just stepping in and controlling the work and taking over and doing it for your team. Okay, so we have to resist that urge to grab the gun and run the battle every time.
We have to instead lead by principle. We have to teach our team to think strategically. The problem is we face a handful of pressures as managers. And I illustrate these in a chapter in Herding Tigers called Stop Doing the Work.
There are a handful of pressures that we face as managers. So I want to see if any of these are familiar to you. I want to talk about them and then offer a few ways that we need to think about these pressures. Because as leaders, we're not on top.
As leaders, we're in the middle, right? We tend to think of leadership as being on top, command and control. But that's not really the way it is. The reality is that you're facing pressure down from your boss, your boss, your clients, from all the people who want something from you.
And you're also facing pressure up from your team. So I want to talk about what some of those pressures are in the middle. So one of the pressures we transition from maker to manager is make it good enough now versus make it great later. Good enough now is the maker mindset.
Great later is the manager mindset. So what does that look like? Well, good enough now means, listen, I'm going to step in and I'm going to make it whatever it needs to be right now in order to please the clients, stakeholders, my boss, whoever it is. I'm going to step in and make it good enough now.
Now it's not going to be great because I'm stepping in and having to do the work for the team. But I'm stepping in to make sure it is what it needs to be. The problem is that when we do this, we're compromising later effectiveness. So good enough now means that we're compromising having great work later because we're allowing our team to try it.
And to fail and to risk and to think and to try to figure out how to do the work on their own. We're not teaching them how to think about the work. We're teaching them what to do. We're showing them tactics, not strategy.
This is a huge differentiating factor for teams that eventually become self-sustaining and great and brilliant and highly productive and are able to be highly productive over the long term. It's because the people on the team have learned how to think about the work and they've learned the why behind the what. They've learned the strategy behind the tactics. And when leaders step in and do the work for their team, they're only teaching them tactics.
And tactics are often situational. They're contextual. But your team isn't learning how to think about the work. So this is a pressure that we face.
And the maker mindset is I just need to step in and do the work right now and make it what it needs to be. When you do that, you're compromising your team's ability to do great work later. So where are you tempted to step in and make it good now at the expense of it potentially being great later? And this is a difficult challenge, right?
Because again, you're facing a lot of pressure from your own manager. And this is the second pressure that we face or the second tension that we experience as leaders pressure down, which is the maker pressure versus pressure up, which is the manager pressure, right? When we're responsible for doing the work, when we're a tactician, we get a lot of pressure down from our manager, from our client, whoever it is to make it great, right? And the pressure really only comes one way.
It's coming down at us and we feel that pressure to make it what it needs to be. But when you're a manager, you also have to balance pressure up. When is it going to be my turn? When am I going to get the next promotion?
When am I going to go with my idea? When do I get to work on that prestigious project? So we're managing pressure down from the stakeholders and the clients, you're from our manager, from our boss or bosses, boss from the organization, resource constraints, all of those things. We're facing those pressures, but we're also facing pressure up from our team.
When am I going to get to shine? When do I get your role? When do I get promoted into your role? So we're facing all of these kinds of pressures.
Or frankly, the pressure up is why can't we go with something more interesting or creative or risky? Why do we always have to go with the safe route? Well, you might be juggling all kinds of pressures from the client that your team doesn't understand or doesn't see. There are all kinds of dynamics happening in the organization that you have to wrestle with that your team doesn't see.
So you're caught squarely in the middle. Pressure down and pressure up. That's what it's like to be a manager. And so what we have to do is balance the practical need of saying, okay, it's good enough for now for what it needs to be with the pressure to your team wants to do something new and risky and make it great.
So this is sort of the counter argument to the other pressure that we talked about where you step in and do the work for them, and it's good enough now versus great later. Well, sometimes you face pressure from your client or your manager to just make it good enough for now because it's all they want to do, where your team is pressuring you to stretch and to try new things. So you have to manage that pressure, right? You have to manage that pressure as a leader, and you have to be able to stand in the gap and to fight for your client as well as for your team.
So I encourage you to step back this week and consider, where am I falling prey to the pressure from above at the expense of my team? Or where am I falling prey to the pressure from my team at the expense of my client or my organization? Is there any place where you need to better deal with that tension so that you can be the leader that creative people need? And the third tension that we experience, and again, I call this out in the chapter called Stop Doing the Work and Hurting Tigers, but the third tension that we experience is career management, which is a maker centric pressure versus team aspirations, which is a manager centric pressure.
When you are a maker, you're only concerned with your career. So how will this work affect my career progress? What kind of reputation will this earn me? You become known for a thing, and that thing is the work that you do.
And so you become identified as a person who does a certain thing, and this is what makes me great, and this is my identity, and all you're the person that did that project. Oh, that's great. That's how we become known, and our identity becomes very wrapped up in the thing that we do. But once we become responsible for leading other people, we can no longer associate our identity with a thing that we do, because often we're not doing the work.
So how do we identify ourselves? If I've been a designer my entire life, and that's what I'm known for, or I've been a writer, or I've been whatever, a salesperson, and now I'm managing other salespeople, and I've always been known for being the person who can close the sale, and I've closed a couple of key sales, and that's really what I'm known for, but now I'm managing other people who are doing that work. Well, how do I identify myself? Who am I in the midst of that?
You see, once you transition from being a maker to a manager, you're transitioning from identifying your value and your worth in your role with a finished product, you're transitioning from that to identifying as someone who unleashes the work of other people, and you're no longer focused solely on your career aspirations or career management, but instead you're focused on team aspirations. What are we trying to do? How can I help other people accomplish their goals? And listen, this is why a lot of people are not, frankly, they're not wired to be a manager, to be a leader, because they really don't care about other people, and if you don't care about other people, if you only care about the work, then you're going to be a miserable manager.
So I think a lot of people need to ask the question, do I really want this? Is this really something I want to do? But if you've chosen to be a manager, if this is something that you have embraced, then you need to forfeit your personal career management and making your mark, and instead you need to shift your mindset to how can I unleash the brilliance of the people in my team? How can I position them to do their best work?
How can I open up possibility for them and help them navigate their career and the work that they're doing, help them develop a reputation for what they're doing? As you do that, as you unleash your team, your own reputation will grow within the organization and with your clients, but it's not because you're great at controlling the work or claiming credit for things, it's because you're creating an environment in which other people can thrive, and that is the role of a leader. Your greatest impact will not be the project you just completed, it won't be the work that you do, or some specific execution that you facilitate. Your greatest impact is going to be in the lives of the people you lead as your influence grows over time, and it multiplies as they take on more responsibility, making the lead other people.
You want to be a leader who makes echoes. In order to do that, you have to transition from this mindset of maker to the mindset of manager, which means instead of owning just your work, you own all of the work, and not just the work, you also own the culture and the talent, and we'll talk about that on episodes to come. But these are the three big pressures that we have to face as we make that transition from maker to manager. I encourage you to consider this week those three questions that I posed to you.
I may not have asked last one yet, but the first question is, is there any place where I am tempted to just make it good now by stepping in and controlling the work instead of creating an environment which my team can problem solve and learn not just what works, but why it works, because again, tactics are contextual. If you just teach tactics or your team just sees you solving problems, they won't be able to solve a problem in the context of changes. So you have to give them an environment which they can take risks and think and strategize and come to you with problems, and yes, there will be a time when you have to step in and make it right when things get urgent, no questions about it, but that can't be all the time. And then the second question I encourage you to ask is, is there any place where I'm allowing pressure down from my manager, from my client, from someone above me, organizationally in the hierarchy, allowing that pressure to affect how I lead my team or affect how I'm allowing my team to do its best work?
Okay, so where am I compromising my team's effectiveness because I am too concerned about the pressure coming down and do you need to advocate more for your team or do you need to advocate more for the organization? You're allowing your team to call too many shots, you need to advocate more for the organization and its initiatives. And then finally, is there any place where you are more concerned about your career, your progress, your reputation than you are about unleashing the people on your team because your job as a manager is creating an environment which the people on your team can thrive? So how is that happening?
And in herding tigers, I offer a prescription for this, I encourage you to check it out, it's something that you are interested in diving into more and obviously there are many rituals and conversations and questions you can ask as well to help you along this journey. But the main thing is you have to embrace the transition from maker to manager if you want to be successful and you want to unleash the best work of your team. Alright, I would love to hear your thoughts, your feedback, your comments about this, interact at accidentalcreative.com, so if you have any other questions you can meet me there or at accidentalcreative.com. Until next time, be a leader, we'll see you then.