I don't claim to be a fantastic chess player, though at one point I was fascinated by the endgame. There was some site or game or something that would give you an in-progress chess game and tell you how many moves it should take to reach checkmate, so it basically focused just on the endgame.
The thing about it is, at some point checkmate becomes inevitable. When the king is in check the only move available is to get the king out of check, so your choices become constrained. If there is only one way to move the king out of danger, your opponent can predict your move and act on it... generally by placing your king in check yet again.
If you want to win (or at least avoid losing) it does no good to go back a turn, because your choices are still constrained and there's only one move available. You would have to go back four or five (or however many moves - I hear chess grandmasters may be able to see 15-20 moves ahead) and do something different there.
While there are problems with drawing too many parallels between a game (no matter how complex) and the real world, I think this is a reasonable one - sometimes your options narrow, and you get too focused on taking the immediate logical action, and really you should think over how you got there and go back four or five steps to make a change there. Obviously you can't turn back time, but life isn't a turn-by-turn game, and you probably have a similar situation in the present. Choose differently.
This all would make more sense if I gave an example, so here goes.
Leading people is tough. When your only responsible for yourself and the boss gives you an assignment, you know what to do. Do the work, make the boss happy, look good. You put in the work, you decide if it's acceptable, and if you procrastinate or do a poor job that's on you.
When you're a leader, and the boss gives you an assignment, your reputation and job depend on other people doing theirs.
And you'll very quickly learn that you can't just give someone an assignment and leave it at that. They forget, or your tasking gets buried under 20 e-mails as they deal with their most recent request, or they get sick, or their kids get sick, or their car breaks down, or they've fallen behind and don't want the boss (aka you) to know and are desperately trying to fix it before you find out.
Really, when you have an employee who reliably gets stuff done they are gold, they make your job So. Much. Easier. (And then you tend to go to them for all your critical tasks, and they get overworked and burnt out while they're colleagues collect the same paycheck for doing hardly anything, and ultimately you lose.)
Inexperienced people managers are a bit like a checked king. Only one or two (or, if I include the scenario with the 'go-to' employee, three) moves seem obvious, and they're next logical step, but each move ultimately leads to checkmate.
The first move is to just do it all yourself. You know you can get the job done, and get it done right, and you can't trust your people to do the same. So you just stay a little later to work on it, or come in earlier. Devote your morning to it, or lunch.
There's all sorts of problems with this, though. If you're doing you're employee's job, you're probably not doing yours. There's only so much one person can do, and there's a reason you were given a team to lead... trying to do the work of a team all by yourself is a recipe for failure. (If you can't grow as a leader to the point where you're not doing this, you shouldn't be in a leadership position.) Not only that, but it tends to be demotivating to your employees, who aren't given the chance to grow and excel. They'll underperform, and kick even more work your way, and they won't be happy.
The second move is to micromanage. If you can't rely on your people to get it done without supervision, you supervise... and then some. Now, to be fair, some people may need a hefty degree of supervision. Part of your job is assessing where your people are and giving them that appropriate level. Maybe you've got a new hire who needs a lot of oversight, maybe you've got a twenty-year veteran who already knows what to do. You've got to figure out where they're at and what level of support they need, because if you supervise that veteran like a new hire they'll get upset that you won't just let them do their job... and if you neglect to provide the supervision that new hire needs, you're setting them up to fail.
Not only that, but again - if you're doing this you're not doing the job you were really hired to do, and one person can not do the work of five. Or, in this case, one person will run themselves ragged trying to micromanage a group of people. Maybe you spend one hour watching over one person's work, and the next hour watching over someone else's... and the moment you're no longer peering over the shoulder of the first person, maybe they'll switch to watching youtube videos or something.
What you need to do is go four or five moves back, before you feel compelled to either do it yourself or micromanage your subordinates, and put in the work to build your team.
This is not a quick or easy solution, and it requires a lot of work. In my most recent job, for example, we had a clear policy on how to deal with a new hire. They were assigned a more experienced employee to train them on the specific steps (how to log in to your voice headset, how to find locations in the warehouse, best practices for ensuring you counted the correct number of parts, etc.) That's time my trainer, generally a good employee or they wouldn't have been picked to train, isn't actually producing. And our company had forms to use for a 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day meeting where we'd give the new hire feedback on how they were doing. You had to be clear on what your expectations were, what the standards were, and how well they were doing at meeting those standards. Maybe you'd have to give them a bit more time with the trainer, or maybe they picked it up quickly and easily. That's all person-specific.
You do something similar for all your employees, though they may not need quite as much attention as a new hire. Unless they're underperforming, and then it's (again) giving them time with a trainer, and providing feedback, and documenting it... you want to give them the tools to succeed, everything they need in order to do so... and if they still can't do it, then maybe this isn't the right position for them.
This example was for a warehouse environment where there is pretty clear standards on what's expected. It's a little trickier if you're a person managing other people managers, or managing something less clear cut. I think one of our instructors at the Captain's Career Course had a great analogy for that:
Imagine you're a Captain in your office, sitting at your desk, and your young Lieutenant comes in carrying a huge, slimy, smelly fish that s/he promptly dumps on your desk. Now, you may be tempted to yell at the LT to take the fish out of there (as one of my classmates suggested when the instructor asked what you'd do... though that wasn't the answer he was looking for), and you may be tempted to just do whatever it takes to get the smelly thing out of there... but, as a people leader, what you really should do is talk the LT through how to handle the big ol' smelly thing, and then get him/her to dispose of the fish as you'd discussed.
You're teaching that subordinate how to handle difficult problems. What sorts of things to consider, where to go, etc. Then the next time s/he gets a smelly fish, they'll know exactly what to do.
Do that often enough, and your team will know what's expected of them, how to handle any problems, and can pretty much run itself. (A half-truth. There's always turnover, always new hires and under-performers, and drama between people who just can't get along... it's just that you'll have that regardless of whether you've done what I've suggested or not, and it really is easier if you don't have to worry about everyone.)
This gives you more time to sit in your office playing solitaire. J/k. It means you'll have the time you need to, you know, plan ahead. Coordinate for the ammo and other supplies for weapons qualification next month, or figure out how to procure an extra computer and printer, or order the batteries needed for the picking headsets, or decide when you'll pull everyone out for annual training, or coming up with that lean six sigma project to improve the business, or working on some special project to please your boss, or whatever. Point is, you don't have to spend all your time doing the work your team should be doing (or standing over their shoulder in order to make it happen) and can devote yourself to other things.
You may have to put in a lot of effort up front, and at least a little effort in maintaining it, but this is how you build a team that can make yourself irrelevant (a good thing, really. Like that book about being a "One-Minute Manager" our ROTC instructor talked up back in the day. I've heard it said that the best leaders are smart and lazy, so they make their team do all the work, and it makes sense to me.)
To bring this back to my starting point - when a leader is doing all the work on their own, or micromanaging their employees, or assigning everything to their 'go-to' employee, it's a bit like when a king is in check during a chess endgame. Each move appears to be the next logical one given the situation, each step makes sense... and ultimately you're going to lose.
You need to go back four or five moves, and start doing something different there. Set your expectations, provide clear and consistent feedback, develop your people. Teach them how to handle problems on their own (and what criteria to look for when deciding to kick the issue up to you.) Get them to the point where they're confident and capable of handling it themselves. And maybe they'll come to you if they're trying to work with another department and that dept is being uncooperative, because you can reach out to your colleague there and sort things out (or kick it up to your boss, whatever.) You do the things that need done for your level, and make sure you have the resources on hand to set your people up for success.
To give another less business-related example (because I feel like it)...
When I first got paired with my Little through Big Brothers Big Sisters, her mom was always working and her grandma didn't want her in the kitchen because she didn't want to deal with cleaning up the mess. So one of the first things we did as a match was cook - I can't recall if it was cookies, or brownies, or a meal. Over the years we've cooked all of the above.
Anyways. Initially I had to go through everything in-depth. You know, 'this is how you read a recipe. That 'c' stands for cup. This is a one-cup measuring tool. That t or tsp stands for teaspoon. Here's a teaspoon, here's where you look to see whether it's 1 tsp or 1/2 tsp or 1/4 tsp. That T or Tbsp is a tablespoon. Here's a tablespoon. When you measure the flour, make sure you level it off so that the cup is full but not over full. And here, the recipe doesn't call for it but I always add almond extract to the cookie dough, and cut the sugar in half. Or if you're making chili or something similar, just sniff your various spices and decide what smells like a good fit. Add it, taste it, see if you want add a little bit more.'
As she gained experience and grew confident, she started being able to do more and more of it herself. This, btw, is something most kids love. They'll excitedly demand that they get to crack the eggs this time, or measure out the flour. My Little would sometimes save recipes she saw online, and ask if we could make them. Or we'll be planning dinner and she'll look for recipes online.
You may have to peer over their shoulder the first few times, remind them that 'that's a small 't', not a bit 'T', so you've got to use the teaspoon not tablespoon', but they'll get better. Soon enough they'll be able to do it all by themselves (though generally it's a social activity, so it's not like I just leave her to it.)
As a Big in the program, I love teaching kids these sorts of things. First, cooking is a useful life-skill. It gives you options, and means you don't necessarily feel compelled to eat out all the time. Second, it's the sort of thing that gives children a sense of mastery. Let's them feel like they're capable of something, at least. People, especially children, need that. Need to feel like they're have things they can succeed at.
I've been matched with my Little for six or seven years now, and even though I'm not the only one who taught her how to cook (once she started doing it with me, she sometimes did it at home), I get a warm feeling when I see her use those skills, and use it well. I can't even describe how proud I was when she said she'd fixed dinner for her mother and grandmother all by herself.
That's the other thing, btw. Doing all that stuff? Setting people up for success, teaching, developing? It's rewarding as hell. Sure, giving feedback and documenting things can be a pain, but seeing someone succeed? Seeing them grow, and excel?
So. Rewarding.
The thing about it is, at some point checkmate becomes inevitable. When the king is in check the only move available is to get the king out of check, so your choices become constrained. If there is only one way to move the king out of danger, your opponent can predict your move and act on it... generally by placing your king in check yet again.
If you want to win (or at least avoid losing) it does no good to go back a turn, because your choices are still constrained and there's only one move available. You would have to go back four or five (or however many moves - I hear chess grandmasters may be able to see 15-20 moves ahead) and do something different there.
While there are problems with drawing too many parallels between a game (no matter how complex) and the real world, I think this is a reasonable one - sometimes your options narrow, and you get too focused on taking the immediate logical action, and really you should think over how you got there and go back four or five steps to make a change there. Obviously you can't turn back time, but life isn't a turn-by-turn game, and you probably have a similar situation in the present. Choose differently.
This all would make more sense if I gave an example, so here goes.
Leading people is tough. When your only responsible for yourself and the boss gives you an assignment, you know what to do. Do the work, make the boss happy, look good. You put in the work, you decide if it's acceptable, and if you procrastinate or do a poor job that's on you.
When you're a leader, and the boss gives you an assignment, your reputation and job depend on other people doing theirs.
And you'll very quickly learn that you can't just give someone an assignment and leave it at that. They forget, or your tasking gets buried under 20 e-mails as they deal with their most recent request, or they get sick, or their kids get sick, or their car breaks down, or they've fallen behind and don't want the boss (aka you) to know and are desperately trying to fix it before you find out.
Really, when you have an employee who reliably gets stuff done they are gold, they make your job So. Much. Easier. (And then you tend to go to them for all your critical tasks, and they get overworked and burnt out while they're colleagues collect the same paycheck for doing hardly anything, and ultimately you lose.)
Inexperienced people managers are a bit like a checked king. Only one or two (or, if I include the scenario with the 'go-to' employee, three) moves seem obvious, and they're next logical step, but each move ultimately leads to checkmate.
The first move is to just do it all yourself. You know you can get the job done, and get it done right, and you can't trust your people to do the same. So you just stay a little later to work on it, or come in earlier. Devote your morning to it, or lunch.
There's all sorts of problems with this, though. If you're doing you're employee's job, you're probably not doing yours. There's only so much one person can do, and there's a reason you were given a team to lead... trying to do the work of a team all by yourself is a recipe for failure. (If you can't grow as a leader to the point where you're not doing this, you shouldn't be in a leadership position.) Not only that, but it tends to be demotivating to your employees, who aren't given the chance to grow and excel. They'll underperform, and kick even more work your way, and they won't be happy.
The second move is to micromanage. If you can't rely on your people to get it done without supervision, you supervise... and then some. Now, to be fair, some people may need a hefty degree of supervision. Part of your job is assessing where your people are and giving them that appropriate level. Maybe you've got a new hire who needs a lot of oversight, maybe you've got a twenty-year veteran who already knows what to do. You've got to figure out where they're at and what level of support they need, because if you supervise that veteran like a new hire they'll get upset that you won't just let them do their job... and if you neglect to provide the supervision that new hire needs, you're setting them up to fail.
Not only that, but again - if you're doing this you're not doing the job you were really hired to do, and one person can not do the work of five. Or, in this case, one person will run themselves ragged trying to micromanage a group of people. Maybe you spend one hour watching over one person's work, and the next hour watching over someone else's... and the moment you're no longer peering over the shoulder of the first person, maybe they'll switch to watching youtube videos or something.
What you need to do is go four or five moves back, before you feel compelled to either do it yourself or micromanage your subordinates, and put in the work to build your team.
This is not a quick or easy solution, and it requires a lot of work. In my most recent job, for example, we had a clear policy on how to deal with a new hire. They were assigned a more experienced employee to train them on the specific steps (how to log in to your voice headset, how to find locations in the warehouse, best practices for ensuring you counted the correct number of parts, etc.) That's time my trainer, generally a good employee or they wouldn't have been picked to train, isn't actually producing. And our company had forms to use for a 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day meeting where we'd give the new hire feedback on how they were doing. You had to be clear on what your expectations were, what the standards were, and how well they were doing at meeting those standards. Maybe you'd have to give them a bit more time with the trainer, or maybe they picked it up quickly and easily. That's all person-specific.
You do something similar for all your employees, though they may not need quite as much attention as a new hire. Unless they're underperforming, and then it's (again) giving them time with a trainer, and providing feedback, and documenting it... you want to give them the tools to succeed, everything they need in order to do so... and if they still can't do it, then maybe this isn't the right position for them.
This example was for a warehouse environment where there is pretty clear standards on what's expected. It's a little trickier if you're a person managing other people managers, or managing something less clear cut. I think one of our instructors at the Captain's Career Course had a great analogy for that:
Imagine you're a Captain in your office, sitting at your desk, and your young Lieutenant comes in carrying a huge, slimy, smelly fish that s/he promptly dumps on your desk. Now, you may be tempted to yell at the LT to take the fish out of there (as one of my classmates suggested when the instructor asked what you'd do... though that wasn't the answer he was looking for), and you may be tempted to just do whatever it takes to get the smelly thing out of there... but, as a people leader, what you really should do is talk the LT through how to handle the big ol' smelly thing, and then get him/her to dispose of the fish as you'd discussed.
You're teaching that subordinate how to handle difficult problems. What sorts of things to consider, where to go, etc. Then the next time s/he gets a smelly fish, they'll know exactly what to do.
Do that often enough, and your team will know what's expected of them, how to handle any problems, and can pretty much run itself. (A half-truth. There's always turnover, always new hires and under-performers, and drama between people who just can't get along... it's just that you'll have that regardless of whether you've done what I've suggested or not, and it really is easier if you don't have to worry about everyone.)
This gives you more time to sit in your office playing solitaire. J/k. It means you'll have the time you need to, you know, plan ahead. Coordinate for the ammo and other supplies for weapons qualification next month, or figure out how to procure an extra computer and printer, or order the batteries needed for the picking headsets, or decide when you'll pull everyone out for annual training, or coming up with that lean six sigma project to improve the business, or working on some special project to please your boss, or whatever. Point is, you don't have to spend all your time doing the work your team should be doing (or standing over their shoulder in order to make it happen) and can devote yourself to other things.
You may have to put in a lot of effort up front, and at least a little effort in maintaining it, but this is how you build a team that can make yourself irrelevant (a good thing, really. Like that book about being a "One-Minute Manager" our ROTC instructor talked up back in the day. I've heard it said that the best leaders are smart and lazy, so they make their team do all the work, and it makes sense to me.)
To bring this back to my starting point - when a leader is doing all the work on their own, or micromanaging their employees, or assigning everything to their 'go-to' employee, it's a bit like when a king is in check during a chess endgame. Each move appears to be the next logical one given the situation, each step makes sense... and ultimately you're going to lose.
You need to go back four or five moves, and start doing something different there. Set your expectations, provide clear and consistent feedback, develop your people. Teach them how to handle problems on their own (and what criteria to look for when deciding to kick the issue up to you.) Get them to the point where they're confident and capable of handling it themselves. And maybe they'll come to you if they're trying to work with another department and that dept is being uncooperative, because you can reach out to your colleague there and sort things out (or kick it up to your boss, whatever.) You do the things that need done for your level, and make sure you have the resources on hand to set your people up for success.
To give another less business-related example (because I feel like it)...
When I first got paired with my Little through Big Brothers Big Sisters, her mom was always working and her grandma didn't want her in the kitchen because she didn't want to deal with cleaning up the mess. So one of the first things we did as a match was cook - I can't recall if it was cookies, or brownies, or a meal. Over the years we've cooked all of the above.
Anyways. Initially I had to go through everything in-depth. You know, 'this is how you read a recipe. That 'c' stands for cup. This is a one-cup measuring tool. That t or tsp stands for teaspoon. Here's a teaspoon, here's where you look to see whether it's 1 tsp or 1/2 tsp or 1/4 tsp. That T or Tbsp is a tablespoon. Here's a tablespoon. When you measure the flour, make sure you level it off so that the cup is full but not over full. And here, the recipe doesn't call for it but I always add almond extract to the cookie dough, and cut the sugar in half. Or if you're making chili or something similar, just sniff your various spices and decide what smells like a good fit. Add it, taste it, see if you want add a little bit more.'
As she gained experience and grew confident, she started being able to do more and more of it herself. This, btw, is something most kids love. They'll excitedly demand that they get to crack the eggs this time, or measure out the flour. My Little would sometimes save recipes she saw online, and ask if we could make them. Or we'll be planning dinner and she'll look for recipes online.
You may have to peer over their shoulder the first few times, remind them that 'that's a small 't', not a bit 'T', so you've got to use the teaspoon not tablespoon', but they'll get better. Soon enough they'll be able to do it all by themselves (though generally it's a social activity, so it's not like I just leave her to it.)
As a Big in the program, I love teaching kids these sorts of things. First, cooking is a useful life-skill. It gives you options, and means you don't necessarily feel compelled to eat out all the time. Second, it's the sort of thing that gives children a sense of mastery. Let's them feel like they're capable of something, at least. People, especially children, need that. Need to feel like they're have things they can succeed at.
I've been matched with my Little for six or seven years now, and even though I'm not the only one who taught her how to cook (once she started doing it with me, she sometimes did it at home), I get a warm feeling when I see her use those skills, and use it well. I can't even describe how proud I was when she said she'd fixed dinner for her mother and grandmother all by herself.
That's the other thing, btw. Doing all that stuff? Setting people up for success, teaching, developing? It's rewarding as hell. Sure, giving feedback and documenting things can be a pain, but seeing someone succeed? Seeing them grow, and excel?
So. Rewarding.
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