I am conscious that I have a lot to learn as a leader. I have mulled leadership for a long time now. In an environment where there is no leadership there is a vacuum that quality cannot exist in. It may exist in small little bites like the Tardigrades but it is out of sheer will not based on the system.
Leadership is the stewardship of people, processes, systems, budgets, values through establishing an organization and environment that positively balances all of those things while taking in variables, noise, situations, and fluctuations in surrounding and impacting all of those things.
As a tree hugging hippie, I will die on the hill of empathy. Leadership, practiced to it as an art, is the purest expression of empathy. If you cannot have empathy, you should not want to be in the seat. Otherwise the contortions and the outright circumstances you will be put in in the execution of your duties and objectives makes the seat exhausting. It hurts, taxes your emotional and physical state. It makes you question who you are and twists the best humans. Being empathetic is not a weakness. Practicing empathy is a demonstration of strength against all of those requirements if, and only if, you do not compromise principles or move the goal posts.
Being asked to be a leader, much lest actually living up to those expectations is hard. Or at least it should be. If you find it easy, check your privilege, check your narcissism and if you still think it is easy I question your values and most importantly your empathy.
Here are a few things that I have learned in sitting in that seat:
- check on your people first; if they don't come first you are doing it wrong
- say you are sorry often, but actually be sorry
- know when you are wrong, admit it to yourself, say you were wrong
- fix what you can
- keep a horizon and base it off your values
- you are the first one in and the last one out (within reason because be empathetic and realistic to who you are)
- when there is a problem that keeps your people late, you do not leave.
- be a working leader, set an example
- you are a buffer for management; you are on a leadership team and there are complications with that, but you must deal with the noise and stupidity of the deliberations of the team
- tell the truth about the decisions you made, even when it sucks
- stand behind the decisions your people make, even with the imperfect information they may have had given the situations they were in. Counsel them afterwards.
- remove people that should not be there as soon as you can (I know there are processes)
- understand there is history before you got there. People can be hurt by promises before hand.
- know when you can't do the job anymore (this one hurts a lot)
Of course there is a lot more, but at least I wanted to set a level of where I come from.
Fear is a fact of life. The laws in the US are based on the 'right to work'. Anything is grounds for termination. One of the best grounds for not being terminated is to ruthlessly and ethically do your job. Document everything, communicate to all stakeholders and preserve the record to ensure all context is provided.
Everything is changing and it is absolutely scary. Your duty is to stay and fight unless there is clear violation of law that it is your duty not to take part in. Or if you can't do the job (if you can't do the job you have to pull yourself off the field). Otherwise if you can't it is going to suck for a while wondering if they are going to get rid of you, what is their narrative, etc.
In short you must have resolve in your decision to be a leader as a quality professional.
I have this thing that I stated a long time ago and it has had to flex from time to time; I work for who I want to work for. Sometimes I have worked for people what have not been good people. Sometimes I have worked for people that have given me an opportunity to do something fantastic but they were known quantity of being problematic.
Sometimes I worked for people who were fantastic who had horrible bosses.
My self esteem about my leadership is up and down. Sometimes I am overly aware. Then there is the grind where I am in the middle of it and my leadership suffers. I have to own that and I have to be accountable to my people. Introspection is key. But you have to be honest with yourself.
We are unfortunately living in the worst time in demonstration of leadership. Most don't even know what good leadership looks like to where the horrific demonstration of bad leadership does not register. Here is objective evidence of poor leadership:
- Making changes without understanding the impacts (no organizational change management)
- Not admitting they have made mistakes (loss of credibility)
- Not apologizing for their mistakes when they do (lack of integrity and quality culture)
- gaslighting / semantics lose credibility from people (lack of integrity and quality culture)
- Taking action as wins, rather than actual results in the service of people (short measuring objectives)
- Making up data to spin the narrative without fully verifiable objective evidence (cooking metrics)
- Hypocrisy in the face of data and the same values they decry (inconsistent quality system)
- Only measuring results in dollars, not people (full root cause not determined)
- The plans that are communicated are slogans without details, without plans and without impact
- Not taking accountability; blaming everyone else
- Only serving their specific constituency and not the entire people (promoting placeism)
Again this is not about politics, this is about leadership.
So what do you do.
If you re angered by this I wish you enough time on this earth to realize that this is not about viewpoint but it is about values and integrity. If you are here for quality, please tell me about how any of the tings that I have chided here can exist in a system that promotes a quality culture, especially in the pharmaceutical industry.
Here are some leadership check ins:
- Do you make time for your people even when you do not have time?
- Do you yell? Do you lead through intimidation rather than argument?
- Do you talk about firing people?
- Does your frustration isolate you?
- Do you have to make excuses for your inaction?
- Do you over delegate?
- Do you under delegate?
- Are you paralyzed from creating deliverables on your own?
- Are you often blindsided in meetings?
- Are you often swayed in your opinion from people that 'do you favors'?
- Do you know what to do 95% of the time? On the other 5% do you defer to research or have the people that will know and advise?
- Do you use people as a pejorative as to why you are ineffective or cannot get results?
- Do you stop saying the things you need to say because you have been told no, even though it is the right thing to do?
I have messed up in all of these. I have taken time to try to reset. Even the people who had the agenda did not deserve me at my worst. To them I apologize.
But in being better, in aspiring to be better, you have to stand strong even when it sucks. I am thinking of one person in particular who was a straight challenge for various reasons, some to do with me. But I feel for that person, but they were never going to be a leader unless they could stop being a bully. I hope you are doing well, wherever you are.