Leadership observability means observing yourself as you lead. Alex Schladebeck shared at OOP conference how narrating thoughts, using mind maps, asking questions, and identifying patterns helped her as a leader to explain decisions, check bias, support others, and understand her actions and challenges.
Employees and other leaders around you want to understand what leads to your decisions, Schladebeck said. Leadership observability is treating oneself as the system that is under observation, she explained:
It’s being able to ask questions and get meaningful answers because “my brain” is capable of telling me why I acted / reacted / communicated / decided the way I did.
Heuristics give us our “gut feeling”. And that’s useful, but it’s better if we’re able to take a step back and get explicit about how we got to that gut feeling, Schladebeck mentioned. If we categorise and label things and explain what experiences lead us to our gut feeling, then we have the option of checking our bias and assumptions, and can help others to develop the thinking structures to make their own decisions, she explained:
I had a colleague who had to decide which of their team to put forward for a customer project. I was able to share my context of assessing the person on their technical skills and their ability to represent the company.
Schladebeck recommends that leaders narrate their thoughts to reflect on, and describe their own work to the ones they are leading. They can do this by asking themselves questions like, “Why do I think that?”, “What assumptions am I basing this on?”, “What context factors am I taking into account?” Look for patterns, categories, and specific activities, she advised, and then you can try to explain these things to others around you.
To visualize her thinking as a leader, Schladebeck uses mind maps. She groups things and experiences together, and makes different branches for different topics:
I categorise the mindmap branches with categories of what I’m doing, such as “making decisions”, “dealing with conflict”, “managing time and tasks&rquot;. Then I collect activities within them like “collecting options”, “pros and cons”, “personal preference”. And then I add examples as they happen.
Schladebeck also describes general continuums of thought, such as “planning versus exploring” and “directing versus letting others lead”. Using these things, she tries to make her inner workings clearer for others.
Observing her self-confidence as a leader, Schladebeck found out how she increases it:
I try to remind myself that I’ve managed all my hard days and tasks so far. I call my coach or my friends if I need extra support. And a look at the world stage reminds me that there are people in much higher jobs with much lower qualifications than me!
She also observed how she deals with conflicts, which is something that she is still working on to further improve it:
At the moment my focus is to listen carefully and ask for the facts / concrete examples on both sides. Based on those, we can start conversations.
Schladebeck mentioned that by observing how she leads, she has learned which activities are hard for her (like “keeping quiet and letting others decide!” and “interacting to understand when I disagree”) – and, more importantly, why they are hard. Once she can identify why she doesn’t manage a specific thing very well, she can choose to work specifically on those aspects. It helps her to be aware of “what I’m doing” on a daily basis:
Being able to link your current activity back to a higher goal is very important in leadership work!
InfoQ interviewed Alex Schladebeck about what she learned from observing how she leads.
InfoQ: How do you balance making decisions versus having other people decide?
Alex Schladebeck: I’m still working on this! I’m currently trying to leave a gap, some seconds, before I jump into the conversation with my input. This leaves room for others, and for my brain to catch up to the situation and think about whether my input is needed right now.
InfoQ: What if a decision may disappoint people, how would you handle it?
Schladebeck: It’s not often that absolutely no one is disappointed! This is why being clear and explicit about how and why you make decisions is important. What is the context? What are the risks or opportunities?
And – of course we’re going to disappoint people, and it’s ok that they are disappointed. I don’t try to convince them otherwise. Accepting the feeling doesn’t mean that you’ll change the decision. It does mean you understand the human who is affected.
InfoQ: Has there been an observation that surprised you?
Schladebeck: When my then-boss would cancel a meeting at short notice, I would wonder why he did that. It didn’t feel respectful. And then I was the proud owner of the manager-level calendar when my role changed… I realised that short-term management of your calendar is necessary. Sometimes you have three meetings planned in parallel! And only really on the day do you find out which ones are really happening.
On the other hand, if you try to clear your calendar weeks in advance to make sure you only have one meeting at a time, the effort is often wasted. By the time the week in question rolls around you have three again!
I’ve also become a short-term calendar manager. What I try to do though is be very clear about how and why that happens. And if I have people who really don’t like it, then I make sure their meetings don’t get moved at short notice. That, however, does mean that they might get moved more.
