Leading By Editing, Isn’t (and Why)
Frequently, we find the role of managing described as “editing” or leading as “editor in chief”. This can seem like a good idea until you dive into it. So let’s.
By edit I mean more than just to shorten or fit, but also the whole process of altering, adapting, rearranging to meet a specific need. In writing and film, editing meets the need of a completed work. In product development and broadly business, there is rarely a single completed work and most efforts are part of a continuum. This is especially true when you consider the relationship between product, marketing, sales, and customers and partners. There are many, often related, “works” over many periods of time.
It is common to view a product or company through the lens of the narrative. It is true in that case that there is a story to tell and this story should be the work of great editing — it should be clear, concise, and well-articulated.
Such editing is crucial, and often the role of the CEO, but it is the process of crafting a story from the choices already made, which is different than the choices the team makes along the way.
Resource allocation is the process of deciding rough priorities — it is akin to the budget of a film or form of writing. In product development these are leadership choices that can be made quickly or often already exist.
It is the challenge of applying the idea of “editing” to the ongoing and uncertain, work of the team that can prove to be problematic or even damaging to the long term strength of the company. That is what is worth exploring.
Management by Editing
As a manager of any level from first line through CEO (or leader such as in product management where you are accountable but not necessarily the manager), you routinely face situations where you don’t know what to do about a problem or don’t know all the details about a solution under development.
A typical reaction is to ask teammates to look into possible solutions or to ask for more details — and then to report back. Reporting back usually creates another round of feedback. Repeat. The positive way to think about this is that the team is working towards a solution in an area of ambiguity. The less positive way to think about this is as management by editing.
It is all too easy for a manager to feel good about managing by editing. In particular, the feeling of imparting wisdom and experience, through the application of judgement or instinct, on someone trying to solve a problem can be rather alluring. The challenge is that this starts from the assumption that as a manager there is more knowledge of a situation, better understanding of constraints, or clearer view of what needs to happen next than there is among the people feeling their way to a solution. This assumption leads to a potentially self-fulfilling prophecy.
The first time I faced this situation, early in my career, wasn’t as the manager but as someone trying to get an assignment done. I would come up with an approach, talk to my manager, then start over again or revisit the solution with yet another constraint I didn’t previously know about.
Every edit or iteration created more frustration, not more insight. Each interaction followed one of what would become familiar patterns:
- Create new options — Asked to come up with two options, the feedback was always a combination of the two presented. Usually this followed the pattern of “Option A is fast but fragile, Option B is slow and robust” and the feedback was “get to Option C, the fast and robust one”. Duh.
- X would work better — Showing a proposed solution, the feedback was that another approach would just be better. I would leave thinking, then why didn’t I get asked to just do X?
- Think about Y — While the initial problem statement had a set of constraints such as time, tools to use, code to rely on, and APIs to work with, each iteration introduced a new constraint or a revised constraint based on the progress I was making or not. It always seemed to me that I was playing whack-a-mole with new parameters.
- Reprioritize — I entered the meeting having consider the order of execution, only to leave the meeting with a different prioritization. The problem was we had gone through the prioritization and the discussion was not as much about how we arrived at that but that a different outcome would be better.
- Let’s go with Z .— At some point in the discussion a seemingly small detail became the topic of much conversation and debate. We left the meeting having focused on one detail and made a pretty ‘random’ change to our work.
- We define ourselves by what we don’t do. The most common refrain is that there is always too much we were trying to do and the most important choices are to not pursue something, so that is what leadership needs to do. That’s always been a false choice because my list of things we are not doing is infinite. All that matters is what we are doing!
There are many more examples as you can imagine. The pattern is simple in that there’s a view that management should be deciding things and that the purpose of the meeting was to find things to decide. The worst interpretation of this dynamic is that there is an implicit assumption that the purpose of these iterations was to inform management so that decisions could be made. The best is just that management didn’t know what to do and everyone else is there to create a rough draft of the work to be edited based on playing back the potential choices.
Fast forward a couple of years and I had probably gotten a bit better at this ‘process’ and learned to prepare for these various patterns. I even became pretty good at predicting potential alter paths through these review or decision meetings. Then I got thrown for a loop by one of the greatest managers I have had the opportunity to work with, Mike Maples Sr (yes, father of Floodgate’s Mike Maples and also one of the earliest great leaders at Microsoft).
We were considering a pretty big set of decisions around the evolution of Office (actually you can read about it here$ though the specifics hardly matter). The strategic choice was a big one but one also made up of many smaller, dependent choices, and a lot of details (inputs and outputs) easily debated.
We had come up with two big options and a lot of discussion of all those details — attempting to pre-empt a lot of potential discussion. My instinct said that we would leave the meeting with a new option to consider, but instead after most of the meeting was spent with us going through our hundred slides and Mike listening to our conclusion we got to the punchline “What do you think we should do?”
Mike, in his classic Oklahoma manner said “I just have one question” and he continued “how long have you-all been working on this?”
We thought that a really odd question because, well frankly, we had been doing nothing but this day and night for weeks, so we just said “a couple of weeks”. Mike just looked at us and said, “Well, I have worked on a lot of projects and managed a lot of stuff but I’ve only been working on this problem for about 50 minutes and so clearly you know way more about this than I ever will so it seems like you know exactly what to do”. That was it. We left the meeting and just kept moving forward.
What an incredible rush. Not only did we just feel like we “survived” what for sure was going to be a contentious meeting but we left feeling empowered, on the right track, and a sense of owning our destiny. While the truth is that Mike could have used the opportunity to tweak what we were doing, find areas to improve, and so on, what he knew (and I now know) is that even with all of his knowledge and experience, the hard choices and important details were all ahead of the team and the best thing to do would be to keep things moving forward rather than use the opportunity to edit.
Allure of Editor In Chief
Management, and thus leadership, is difficult and uncertain. You are accountable for a lot (or everything) but for most things don’t do the work yourself. Even on the smallest teams, if you are a manager you still cannot do the work of the whole team. The biggest challenge in scaling is that the great work you did to get you to a place where you lead others is not really what you need to do as a manager.
Mike once explained this reality to me this way. He said, that even if you are smarter and harder working than the 3 people you manage and can do everything they do, you still can’t do the work of 4 or 5 or more. More importantly, as a leader you aspire to have a team doing even better work than you would do. The only way to do that is to let people do what they believe is best, even making preventable mistakes along the way, rather than being a leader that is spends time correcting or editing the work of others.
I purposely choose the word edit, rather than other terms like micro-manager or random, because there are both positive and negative connotations. That’s the essence of business as a social science. In fact, when things are going super well for the team editing doesn’t seem so bad or even seems like the exact right thing to be doing (because when things are going well everything you’re doing causes success). Conversely when things aren’t going well, even the best attempts at imparting knowledge or experience can look like randomizations.
Still, the idea of being an editor, especially editor-in-chief, is pretty alluring. The term editing could easily see as mentoring, for example, or helping to arrive at a new option or choice might be viewed as coaching or sharing experience. Tweaking a seemingly small detail might be viewed by some as preventing a bigger problem down the road.
Additionally, the idea of editing fits well with the view that managers have a unique perspective that isn’t shared by the team doing the work. A manager once told me, “I’m the only one qualified to make a decision like this”. I remember thinking that I wasn’t really asking for help, and critically I wasn’t actually deciding but relaying the work of the team that knew all the details that I did not.
For better or worse, sitting at the head of the table weighing options, seeking alternatives, and providing course corrections is all to often a view of management or leadership.
What Can Go Wrong?
Of course if you have been on the other side of the table and experienced being edited you know what I’m talking about. Years ago, someone explained the idea of editing to me as an old “go get me a rock” leadership:
Leader: We need a rock. Go get one.Me: (runs to riverbed to get a rock, picks out a nice one). Here is a rock.Leader: No not that rock. Try a bigger one.Me: (runs again). Here's a bigger one.Leader: Yeah, but that isn’t smooth enough.
Well, you get the point. The real challenge is not even in the leader’s ability to define what sort of rock to get or my ability to think that maybe I should have brought back two rocks at once, but in the whole dynamic. This basically never works.
The real downside of viewing leadership as a process of editing is how it systematically erodes the quality of a team. The most scarce resource on a team is the ability to effectively execute and everyone knows that. In fact, teams are really smart about wanting to conserve execution resources and so they work hard at avoiding false starts or changes in direction if that can be helped. When faced with repeated “edits” teams will naturally decay in order to avoid rework and false starts.
There are quite a few ways that editing can lead to a negative team spiral:
- Rough drafts get rougher. Once the team knows that work will be edited, the desire to present a complete and bullet-proof plan is greatly reduced. I mean why bother to come up with a great plan if you know things are going to change? Those resulting rougher rough drafts offer more opportunity (or need) for editing and quickly there’s a reduced quality of work for the whole organization.
- Accountability is lost. The most immediate and obvious result of editing is that accountability for the work is transferred from the team to the manager. This is especially the case if the editing is particularly counter to what was planed or questions the fundamental data upon which the plan is based. Once accountability shifts, there is almost always a precipitous decline in work quality or output.
- Options are created that don’t exist. One of the most common editorial decisions is to take the most positive attributes of any two or more options and combine them into an impossible to construct and new alternative. This is very common when it comes to laws of physics like architectural choices, manufacturing costs, and more. In other words, the more impossible it is to combine options the more likely it is that such combinations will be constructed. Over time the team learns to construct alternatives in such a way that they can’t be combined or you’d have to be an idiot to pick something different. Unfortunately that only makes the process worse and drives even more editing.
- Edits take place in public. More often than not, editing takes place in meetings where everyone can see. As a result, something that could be 1:1 coaching or mentoring turns into a fairly public criticism. Few people like to be trained and coached in front of other people, so while it might be timely or efficient to edit at the very end of the process in the meeting it is also the least effective time when it comes to the team. Nearly every leader I know says they lead an open and honest team that appreciates candid feedback. Nearly every person I know has real limits to how much and how often their work can be subject to broad public “editing”. People are…human. Once teams realize that members will be edited in a group setting, there’s almost always a conservatism or that settles in and a desire to avoid anything too “radical” that might result in singling out people or ideas. Over time, aggressive or public feedback almost always leads to a passive-aggressive team culture.
- Details are lost. It should be obvious but very rarely are members of a team able to compress their days or weeks of information gathering, ideation, and solution ideas into a short form. Whether a dreaded slide deck or a long email, nuance and details are lost in the presentation of plans but the discussion takes place around the data not presented. As a result, editing takes place on top of a shaky or abstract foundation. As teams learn that no detail is too small to discuss, the preparation takes up more and more time. Pretty soon there’s not enough time to wade through the details and more time is spent up front. Soon, preparing to discuss something takes longer than the work being discussed (because if you have to deeply describe multiple alternatives…)
- Decisions are sought out. Ultimately the biggest downside of viewing leadership as editing is that editing can happen all the time — work itself is in a continuous process of editing but if the leader’s role is to edit then all work can be subject to this process. As a result, there’s almost a constant search for decision points or places where input can be provided, options created, or approaches considered. Again this has the positive of looking to speed up work and unblock things, but seeking out decisions has the unintended side effect of actually causing the team to generate more decisions to be made.
What Can Leaders Do?
If leading by editing, with all the allure it might have, risks having such downsides what is it that leaders should be doing? As a reminder, business is a social science and so there are no absolutes over what works and doesn’t work and certainly circumstances matter.
In times of crisis, it might be that all that is needed is an editor in chief. In good times, no one argues with empowering the team because the risk is low. In reality, most every team and organization is operating in a crisis mode, self-imposed or not, so we need something more practical.
My view has always been that the high-order bit is leading the team for the long term and a strong belief that people know more about the work they are doing than I do. Turning the tables, the times I was least excited to do a good job were when I felt I was being edited the most. As a manager, I always felt I was editing the least when I felt my role was the following:
- Choose people. The first order effort of building a team is to choose people for the team or figure out who is doing what. My first manager explained to me that all you really do as a manager is pick the team and after that your job is to stay out of their way. I suspect the best reality is pretty close to that.
- Define success. The primary role of leadership is to define success. This is almost always the most critical step. It is a cliché, but talented people love to know they are solving the right problem, but hate to told how to solve it. While there is a whole other process to arrive, as a team, at the definition of success, having that clarity is key. Along with this comes a process by which success can be redefined as everyone learns. Implicit in success is that everything else is “out of scope” until success is achieved.
- Identify progress measures. Measuring progress is really what comes between picking people and celebrating completion. Leadership, again through a process of collaboration and enrollment, defines how progress can be measured. More often than not, this is where experience and knowledge can come into play because as the saying goes, “you are what you measure” and so understanding how teams respond to measurement is a key leadership skill.
- Use tools of management. Along the way there are plenty of tools of management to put into play that replace editing with the positives of coaching, mentoring, sharing. How as a manager you employ 1:1’s, skip level meetings, casual interactions, sharing your own learnings are all things that work well. A great example of this is to ask yourself as a leader what you do to share the unique perspectives and knowledge you gain from your role that others might not see. If you lead engineering but spend a lot of time with customers, how are you transferring that knowledge (rather than using it to justify editing), for example.
As a leader or manager, finding a balance between working closely with the team while not viewing your role as editor is quite challenging. For many it is the first real challenge of scaling up in the role.
In practice, thinking of yourself as an editor can give you a false sense of leading while at the same time have some negative and counter-intuitive effects on the team.
Perhaps the most important thing to consider is if the tables were turned, how would you react to being edited?
— Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi)
Thanks to Li Jin for feedback!