Leadership is as much about learning as it is about teaching

Of all the systems we have at Menlo, the one that has the greatest impact both on developing teachers and leaders is our paired work model.  

Almost everyone at Menlo works in pairs now. When we started the company, only our programmers paired. A couple of years later, we added pairing to our high-tech anthropology practice, as we learned its power and effectiveness from our programmers. Then QA started pairing. We now also loosely pair our project managers, and our front- and back-office staff. We pair when we teach, we often pair when we are in sales conversations, and we pair when we develop class materials.  

Our life experience with teaching and learning was strongly modeled for at least thirteen years in the classroom and then some if you went to college. The teacher is in the front, and the students are in the seats. The teacher teaches, the students study. The teacher tests the students and determines how well they learned. A state board of education adds a layer of hierarchy on top of this model with standardized tests, which further demonstrates that the teacher needs a boss too. It is little wonder we build our business organizations the way we do. What alternative models do we have? What if the students were also the teachers? I imagine this is what one-room schoolhouses were like. The fifth graders sat alongside the first graders and helped teach. They likely enjoyed quickly employing their newfound knowledge. Of course, the younger students ask annoying questions that cause the teachers to scratch their head and learn even more. And every once in a while, a precocious youngster would offer up a kernel of unexpected wisdom that caused new learning by the older students. This is exactly what we have in Menlo’s one-room schoolhouse for innovation. Each week, we pair our team members, one with another. The teaching and learning is going in both directions all day long.

And in our big open room, with nearly everyone paired and in constant conversation all day long, you hear the sounds of teaching, and you can sense the development of budding leaders as they solve problems together. In this problem-solving mode, if one pair partner has an idea, they must lead the other person to their idea, explaining, thinking out loud, answering questions, and leaving themselves open to the idea that their idea is incorrect, incomplete, or needs improvement. You can imagine the cascade of leadership development that occurs when you get to practice teaching and are being taught almost every minute of every day. Further, the pairs switch often, at least once a week. The approach for leading one person may differ from another, so you will learn in our environment how to teach, learn, and lead with different styles.

There are many opportunities as well to learn and teach in a larger group setting. Because we work shoulder to shoulder with no walls, and the project teams have all their tables pushed together, there is always the serendipity of hearing the ideas of another pair and chiming in on the discussion that is occurring just a few feet away. This might lead to a quick jump up to a whiteboard and an impromptu brainstorming session to solve a problem that requires six heads rather than just two.

Our weekly kickoffs for each project team are another chance to practice teaching and leading others. In these sessions, the entire project team is gathered together, away from their computers, walking through the team plan for the entire week. In this way, each pair gets to hear what all the other pairs are working on in their group and reflects on the best strategies for the overall work, not just their own pieces. Many lively discussions ensue during these sessions.

Our weekly Show and Tells bring us together with our customers. We must teach and be taught by someone who is paying us for our work. The style of our customers varies wildly from company to company. Our methods and approaches may not match theirs (it typically does not), so we must learn to lead in different ways with various methods of influence within the course of projects that can last months or years.

Lisa joined us in 2007 right after she graduated from the University of Illinois. During her laborious job search after college, a friend suggested to her that she look at the list of “Best and Brightest” companies to work for in the Midwest, and she stumbled upon Menlo. She did some research and felt this could be the place. She traveled to Ann Arbor and went through our Interview. She made it through the interview process and joined the team as a Project Manager.

Shortly into her tenure, she took over the PM role for the Accuri project, our biggest and most complex project to date. Fortunately, in our world, the PMs aren’t left to fend for themselves, as they are surrounded and supported by their peers on the projects.

One of our customary practices is to ship to our client an installable CD/DVD every week with the software we’ve completed to date, so they can play with the software on their own while we continue working. Lisa made sure we did this every week for our customer.

One week the “completed software” didn’t work. Rare for us, but not that unusual for a project as complex as this. This version wouldn’t be shipping to Accuri customers, so it wasn’t that big of a setback or problem, as the problems would be corrected in the next cycle. However, Lisa decided we would still go through the motions of our standard process and build and ship the DVD to Accuri even though the software wouldn’t run. It was our standard process, after all, and a practice our customer had come to expect. Lisa included a note with the DVD indicating that while the software didn’t work, we still wanted to follow our process and send along an installable but broken piece of software.

Our customer was not happy. It wasn’t the broken software that upset them. It was the fact that our team seemed to be blindly following a process that provided zero value to the customer and cost project dollars that could have been better spent either fixing the problem or adding another feature.

Lisa didn’t get the angry email from our client, but my cofounder James did. His next move was key to growing a future leader. James calmly went over to Lisa and walked through the lesson of making sure we are always thinking about client value when applying our standard process. He further explained it is OK to make on- the-fly decisions and deviate if the situation warrants it. She should always be comfortable saying, “I’m not sure what to do” in any given circumstance and ask for guidance. In this way, she can develop a stronger internal compass for decision making.

James’s lesson was delivered over eight years ago. Lisa is one of our senior leaders now and still tells the story like it was yesterday. She became a better project manager that day, and she found that through encouragement confidence builds and personal growth can happen. This lesson gave her important insights on what it means to patiently develop leaders.

Lisa saw a similar scenario play out for another team member. She was able to recall this old leadership lesson and remind us of its importance. In this way, the student became the teacher. As it turned out, her student was me. I was away on a European speaking trip and I saw, via email, a mistake being made (in my opinion) by another team member. With only the benefit of email, I intervened—not as a teacher but as boss. So rather than use the mistake as an opportunity to teach, I just made sure the team member knew I didn’t like what was happening and, of course, expected it to be fixed. (Not much joyful leadership here, eh?) I returned to the office a few days later and Lisa was upset and let me know. We talked about it and got a chance to air both sides in person. A few days later, she pulled me aside and had crafted a thoughtful mind map to show me what our strongest values were and what I could have done differently in that situation. She even used some stories from our history (including the one I wrote above about her and James) to draw lessons and describe the hope she had for the future. Fortunately, I grew a lot that day with Lisa as my teacher.  

If you want to create great leaders, you must keep those leaders in learning mode. They must stay curious and hungry students. Then they must learn to pass those lessons along to others on the team.

Excerpted from Chief Joy Officer: How Great Leaders Elevate Human Energy and Eliminate Fear by Richard Sheridan; Foreword by Tom Peters, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright ? Richard Sheridan, 2018.