Big Sticks

Organizational leaders often carry a “big stick” that sometimes puts excess weight behind any minor questions or requests they might make. This dynamic can waste a lot of organizational resources, so it is essential to be mindful when you find you have a “big stick.”

Months after graduating from college, I started my first professional job, working on the personal staff of an Executive Vice President (EVP) of the nation’s tenth-largest bank. The EVP was brilliant and accomplished, with three degrees from Harvard and a varied career that ultimately encompassed executive leadership stints in strategy consulting, banking, utilities, and airlines. I learned a lot working for him.

As an impressionable new college grad just beginning my MBA at night, my job was to “assist.”  That could mean many things, but often it meant following up on any number of initiatives across the bank as an extra pair of hands for the EVP and his business manager. With multiple divisions and layers upon layers of executives, managers, and staff reporting to him, I quickly discovered that my 22-year-old self carried a “big stick” when I showed up asking questions in the EVP’s name.

For example, early on, I went to talk to the credit card division executive about a hypothesis that had come up that morning. It was one of those “is it possible that x, y, z is going on?” thoughts. I shared the question and was asked to stop back later in the week. No problem, I thought. Everyone is busy. They will think about it when they get a chance. Three days later, I did as asked and stopped back by. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity as three analysts showed up with binders of information on the hypothesis. I was stunned to realize that a passing question had been converted into an “emergency project” that had consumed many person-days of time and had produced about a ream of paper’s worth of “results.”  The EVP wanted a sentence based on an educated sense of what was likely. Now I had a binder full of details and no summary statement. And I realized that I had undoubtedly contributed by not being very clear and explicit about the depth of response desired.

As time passed, this scenario played out again and again. Just the fact that the EVP, a person so high up in the hierarchy, asked a question tended to cause massive waves in the organizational units below. Everyone wanted to do a perfect and thorough job answering the question. And that would lead to boiling the ocean to generate an exact answer when often the question was more of the “what is the general trend or sense of a thing?”

Over time, I got better. I quickly discovered things about the power dynamics that have been career-shaping for me. I learned to be watchful for how sometimes innocent and minor questions could trigger sometimes priority and resource-stupid decisions in reaction to hearing the EVP’s name. Over the years, I have become much more sensitive to how some people react to “titles” instead of asking what level of response is desired or thinking through what is valuable to the business and investing time and resources proportionately.

When I started leading companies as a CEO, I discovered that sometimes I had people on my team that would overreact in that same way. Sometimes they would be working on something important, yet they would not mention that if I asked a quick question. Instead, the important thing would get dropped while they took off chasing the quick question. As I began to recognize that potential, I started prefacing my casual questions with, what are you working on right now? Would you mind spending no more than five minutes on this question? Or simply deciding never mind, I do not need to ask the question because the answer to my question is not as important as what they are already focused on. As a startup leader with an “important” title, one must be conscious of possible unintended consequences of what we ask or direct.

Now I try to be very clear when something needs to get the highest-priority treatment and trump other things versus when the question one that a minimal effort answer will suffice. We also need to cultivate a culture where team members feel comfortable asking, “Is this new thing you want more important than this other thing you already have me working on?” In the end, we want to determine the highest best use for every team member and ensure there is enough fohttps://startupceoreflections.com/focus-means-saying-no/cus to allow rapid forward progress. Pay attention when you carry a “big stick.”