Newsletter #106 : The Art of Delegation and How To Let It Go

Time To Let It Go…

I was a control freak. Here’s how I let it all go and became a better leader…Tzury Bar Yochay, founder of Reblaze explains that one morning, he sat down in his company conference room for what was to be an hour-long meeting with several of his colleagues to discuss a product-related matter. Since he had strong feelings and also had overheard a few corridors talks about the issue, he was sure he had the right solution. So he didn’t intend to stay long.

“Listen, everyone,”  He said. “This meeting shouldn’t be any longer than five minutes. Here’s what we need to do.”

Spoiler alert: The meeting didn’t end happily. As the co-founder and chief technology officer of his cybersecurity company, Tzury figured he had all the answers, and so he thought he was being helpful by cutting to the chase and saving them all time. But did he seem open to other ideas? Did those in the room feel empowered to express them? Did they leave the meeting feeling motivated?

Of course not. As he now knows, he was suffering from a syndrome common to company founders (especially first-time ones like himself) and that he had a particularly acute case of a tendency toward controlling behavior. Though many loath to admit it.

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API Security By Design…Stephen Withers states achieving API security starts with the design and architecture, so jumping in and writing code immediately is a mistake. Unfortunately, starting with a completely blank slate is unusual, and some code will likely already exist. In that case, it is especially important that the design makes provisions for possible weaknesses. If you want secure APIs, then ensure that everyone working on the project – architects, developers, testers and so on – are “very security savvy,” said Matias Madou, Co-founder of Secure Code Warrior.

The need to improve skills is often triggered when the company or one of its competitors experiences a problem. So teams should work to identify any existing problems, realize they need to proactively avoid the underlying issues, and undergo appropriate training, he says. The trouble is, “security and developers are not often the best of friends,” Madou said. So, developers tend to think that security is the responsibility of their security colleagues. But there should be a common goal: making reliable and secure software.

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If You Want to Improve Employee Satisfaction, Try This Controversial Practice… Nigel Green suggests career dissatisfaction is something that we all struggle with from time to time. We’ve all had situations where we thought our lives would improve if we only had that one thing that was missing.

If you lead a team, there’s a high chance that you’ve encountered difficult situations where an employee wasn’t satisfied with how much they earned, their title, or with an organizational change. When employees are discontent, their focus shifts from doing their job to worrying about themselves — and the quality of their work could suffer. How you address these scenarios will define you as a leader. Sometimes the discontentment is easily resolved with a raise or a promotion. Other times giving in to an employee’s feelings of dissatisfaction is a trap. Either way: The faster the situation is resolved, the better for you, the employee and the business.

Consider the practice of an annual interview with another company. Encourage each of your employees to interview with another company every single year. It may seem scary or unfamiliar, but the pros far outweigh the cons. Here are just three of the many ways this practice will amplify your leadership.
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Here are 5 ways that leaders can learn to embrace new ideas…When Wharton management professor Adam Grant sat down to write his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, he wanted to make the case for why executives should reconsider their approaches to how to manage people in a modern workplace and embrace new ideas, based on systematic evidence.

Grant is an internationally recognized thought leader in the management and workplace dynamics, best-selling author, and co-director of Wharton People Analytics. In an Ivy Exec webinar called “Inside the Mind of Professor Adam Grant” sponsored by the Wharton MBA for Executives Program, Grant sat down with Wharton Dean Erika James, an organizational psychologist herself. The two discussed the importance of questioning your assumptions regarding how to engage and communicate in the workplace, in order to become a more evolved leader.