I’m going to share the single best tip that I can come up with organically. No one told me this. I sincerely hope I’m not the first to share it with you. But if I am, please accept that this is one of my game-changer techniques. It’s completely up-ended how I approach managment:

Share your first draft immediately.

WIP is good!

I’m going to go ahead and share a bit of myself. I never wanted anyone to read any of my prose that I hadn’t edited and re-edited. Any awkward phrases, all mispellings, every grammatical issues caused me grief.

I wanted every document to be pristine. No errors and no omissions. Every document had to impress. And it had to impress everyone.

And that was not only a fool’s errand, it was holding me back from effective communication!

I like to think that I have a healthy ego. I try to share and create teams of trust and growth. I like to say that “we make errors today in order to make better errors tomorrow!” and exemplify what I’m learning as we go.

But there are a lot of parts where I don’t want to show how little I actually know. There’s a part of leadership in which a strong vision is important. I have a strong sense that my team doesn’t need to know how often I’m searching for an answer. There’s just a trust that I will find one if I don’t have it already.

There are a lot of organizational things that require a cross-team buy-in. I no longer get to just say “do” and it gets done, there’s a whole political part where I need to align business needs, allocate staffing and other resources, and make sure that my team can meet the immediate needs.

To that extent, I never wanted to reveal anything other than absolute exceptional artifacts. My documents would be proof-read and accurate. They would be unimpeachable!

Over time and with experience, I realized how misguided that was.

The first draft is the most important

I realized that my carefully polished drafts required a lot of additional explanation over time. There were various considerations and explanations that needed to be fulfilled after publication. But I don’t need to publish to everyone at once.

That realization really opened up how fully and effectively I communicated with my team.

I can write a document that I share with a small subset of my staff. These are individuals that are looking for leadership opportunities. I get to charge them with specific needs. I then get the cultivate their thoughts and additions so that my final document speaks to my team fully.

Invite your team; grow your leaders

I have a few people on my team that are concrete and literal thinkers. They kill me. I can publish a document and they parse every last phrase and idiom. I hate it. But they make me a better writer. They make me consider what I’m saying more thoroughly. They tear up my prose and parse every bit of poetic expression. I can’t hand-wave anything because they’ll catch it and flag it.

I also have a few people that want to know intention far more than implementation. They don’t invest any thought into the act of what I’m proposing so much as the result. They need to know what the team should be doing and how they can organize that effort.

Finally, I have some staffing that’s caught up entirely in the holistic experience of software development. They need a goal and the enthusiasm to accomplish it. The specifics and the actions don’t matter. They just need to be bought in to that growth.

Sometimes, one individual is in each of these three camps. Frequently, no staffer on my team identifies with one for any given initiative. Unfortunately for me, I fail to speak to all three groups simultantously in my written documentation.

You editors are your supporters

I have, in my leadership group, individuals that are very concrete and literal thinkers. I have people that are very abstract and “squishy” in their needs. I have some people who need to have a strong purpose and reason to do a thing as well as people who just need to know what needs to be done. This leadership group represents my first draft editors.

When I want to make an idea manifest; when I want to have the entire team focus on something, I write an awful first draft. I grant you, my first thoughts are not good thoughts. They are just trying to put down some ideas that can be refined.

I then invite my first draft leadership team to rip up that document. It makes all the difference in the world.

There are two primary things that happen. First, my team reads my words and starts parsing them out. There is a certain frustration to watching someone mis-read your words in real time. I didn’t mean that! How could you come to that conclusion!

Then you have to deal with it; re-shaping your prose and finding more specific words. There’s a whole part of finding how to communicate effectively in which sharing a draft short-circuits. If something is unclear to my leadership team, then it’ll be unclear to my staff. If what I write works for my leaders, then it’s likely to work for my staff. If it works for me, there’s a 30% change (optimistically) that everyone my team will understand what I just wrote. Maybe 9%.

Second, my staff buys in by editing what I’ve written. There’s a whole thing here around generating support that I can’t explain enough. If my ideas don’t get support, then we either drop it or revisit the drawing board until we come to a concensus. This isn’t some kind of magic bean where support will grow from infertile fields. But if you have a good idea or plan and want to share, getting it in front of your leaders early will only prove beneficial.

I think there’s a lot here. There’s a bit around personal investment from your leads. There’s a lot more around you, as a leader, being willing to invest in hearing your team’s feedback. I’m not going too deep here at this junction except to say that your leadership team will be buying in to your vision. If it’s a bad vision, then yeah, no buy-in. But if there’s merit, inviting them to be a part of it will only drive deeper investment.

If your leadership is bought-in, then your teams are more likely to be bought in. This isn’t deterministic, but there are two items at play. If you’ve considered and reconsidered your message until your leads are bought in, it’s likely to be shaped well enough that your individual contributes will also accept your plan. Secondly, if your leads are invested, they’ll invest themselves and their political capital as well.

Kill the ego; win the day

I’m speaking very abstractly around this, but I think there’s a very specific thing that can be done immediately.

Go to your shared document service, Google Docs or a similar service. Create a new document and put the goal of your new initiative at the top. What is is? Fully automated CI/CD? More fully implemented unit testing? A greenfield product built on an older technology base that your company uses? Rewriting your mobile apps in Flutter?

Take that document and share it with the technology and product stakeholders that will be the immediate people tasked with implementing or owning that initiative. Lean all the way into your naivete. This isn’t an immediate thing. This is a potential next thing. What do they think? What remarks or notes do they have?

You will have invited those people to equip you with everything that you need to known or understand to make your vision manifest. That may not be an immediate thing, but it’s a thing that you can work towards.

If you’re already a product owner or technical stakeowner, realize that this is the gift of your future. Other people will invest their good will, hopes, and aspirations into your product.

You just have to be humble enough to listen and accept. You also have to be magnanimous enough to promote and boost the voices that have helped you.