Leadership Is What Happens When the Leader Is Not in the Room

You’ve been in this meeting. Six people around a table, or six squares on a screen, and one person is missing. The whole thing stalls. Nobody wants to make the call because the person who normally makes the call isn’t there. So everyone agrees to pick it up next week, and the work slides.

Then there’s the other version of that meeting. Same person missing, and somebody says, look, we know what we’re here to do. Let’s get it moving. And they do.

That second version tells you more about the absent leader than anything on their resume.

In Biotech IT, a Team Runs Without Its Leader Less Than Half the Time

I got asked recently how often that second version actually happens. How often a team keeps moving because they already know the direction, with nobody there to hand it to them.

If I had to guess, it doesn’t happen half the time. I’d say a little less than half.

I’m not being cynical about the people in these seats. Most of them are good at their jobs. But a team that can operate without you is a specific thing that somebody built on purpose, usually over a couple of years, and most leaders never get around to building it. They’re too busy being the person in the room.

Big Biotech Teaches You To Wait for the Strategy, Small Biotech Makes You Write It

Part of this is where somebody came up.

The bigger the company, the more the strategy gets handed to you. And the more that happens, the more you get used to having the leader in the room to do that part for you. That’s the habit. It gets built into how a team operates, and nobody notices until the leader is out for two weeks and everything stops.

I had a conversation a while back with somebody at a smaller biotech about a candidate they were interviewing. They told me, we really like this guy. He grew up in big companies, but then he went into small companies, and he figured out that in a small company nobody hands you the strategy. In a small company, you are the strategy.

That’s the whole thing, right there. You have to figure that out and then you have to actually do it.

And it doesn’t come naturally. It’s something you work on. But a lot of folks are willing to work on it, and after enough reps it becomes natural to them. It’s like riding a bike. Or golf, maybe, where you get better the more you do it. Skydiving I’ll never figure out, but I have no interest in that one.

Perpetual Curiosity Builds Biotech IT Leaders, and Coaching Keeps Them Sharp

People ask me the nature versus nurture question a lot…

Is a great leader born that way, or do they get built? Nobody comes back from a two-day seminar, “a different person”, so where does it come from?

Honestly, I don’t know how you identify it on paper. But you can see it.

What I keep landing on is perpetual curiosity. When somebody is curious about a whole bunch of different things that feed into leadership, they’re working on those things. They’re thinking about them. They’re talking to other people about them. That stuff is rattling around in the back of their head whether they’re at their desk or not.

Compare that to somebody who wants to come in and punch the clock. That person has no interest in being a leader, and that’s fine, but let’s call it what it is. They’re not setting strategy. They’re not taking the work to the next level, and they’re not taking themselves there either. They’re doing what it takes to get to five o’clock.

Both of those people can hold the same title. Only one of them has a team that knows what to do on a Tuesday when they’re out.

So there is some nature in it. You need DRIVE! And in my opinion you need a high level of self-worth, meaning you believe you can take yourself, your team, and the situation in front of you to the next level. That part is hard to teach.

But the nurture side is where most of the actual work happens. Even if I’m Derek Jeter, I still have to take batting lessons. I’m not perfect. Nobody is. Everybody needs hitting lessons, everybody needs coaching, everybody needs mentoring, and everybody needs somebody who can not only sharpen their skills but make them think about things a different way.

This goes all the way to the top. Some of the biggest names in technology have executive coaches, which people forget when they assume the person in the corner office has it all figured out.

The line that stuck with me, from reading about one of those coaches, was to remain paranoid. Don’t get complacent. Don’t ever decide you’ve arrived.

That’s what happens to companies that get comfortable. They hit a number and decide they made it, and then they spend a decade slowly turning into whatever the cautionary tale of their industry is. Understand that every dollar you make is one you earned. You went three for three in that game because you took batting practice all week. Don’t skip next week and expect to go three for three again.

Stay on your game. Be paranoid.

The Litmus Test for a Biotech IT Leader Is Who Comes Asking for Your Opinion

Almost everybody in a leadership position thinks they’re a leader. That’s why they’re in the chair. The harder question is whether people would follow you without the title.

So if you’re in IT and you want to know whether you’re actually a leader or just somebody who holds a leadership job, ask yourself a few things.

Do you get invited to the strategy meetings? Not the IT meetings. The strategy meetings.

Do people ask your opinion on things outside your lane? Does your boss come to you? Does your boss’s boss come to you? Do you have a rapport with those people at the company gatherings, the kind where they ask what you think about something that has nothing to do with your systems?

Notice that every one of those questions is about them coming to you.

That distinction is the whole test, because giving advice nobody asked for is a different thing entirely, and it doesn’t count. You don’t want to cram your opinion down anybody’s throat. Back to baseball: you don’t tell the coach when to pull somebody out of the game. He should know what he’s doing. But if he asks, absolutely have an opinion ready.

What you don’t do is walk over and tell him to get rid of the third baseman because the guy stinks.

If you’re a leader, people come to you with different angles on different things. Strategy. Logistics. Day to day operations. Whatever it is. And they’re truly asking, not being polite.

The Biotech IT Leaders Who Get Replaced Are Solving for the System, Not the Business Problem

I get called in on quiet replacements, where a company needs to move somebody out of a leadership seat without the whole organization finding out. When it happens because a person can’t lead, the symptom is almost always the same. They’re not hitting the metrics of the business.

I had one recently where the leader wasn’t hitting the mark, and when you looked at what they were actually spending their time on, it was the projects the IT folks were running. Not the strategy and direction between IT and the business. The projects.

So the business says it needs X, Y and Z. And this leader’s instinct is, great, let’s implement X, Y and Z.

What’s missing is the drilling down. What does X, Y and Z actually do? What business problem is it supposed to solve? Do we already own something that solves it? Could we solve it another way entirely, by changing a business process or a workflow instead of buying a system?

That’s the difference. A leader thinks about everything holistically. The business, IT, the business processes, the workflows, how it all fits together. Somebody who isn’t leading looks at one metric, or one project, or one system that’s supposed to take care of it.

The person who thinks holistically doesn’t need to be in the room, because their team has heard them ask “what problem are we solving” enough times that they start asking it themselves.

That’s the whole game. If your team can’t run a meeting without you, that isn’t a scheduling problem. That’s the direction you never quite gave them.

About The Author:

Steven Swan is the Principal of Swan Group, where he places technology leaders in biotech, from small and medium companies where one leader sets the entire technology direction to billion-dollar organizations with IT seats on the executive leadership team. Much of his work comes down to the question this article raises: which candidates have built teams that keep moving when they step away, and which ones have made themselves the bottleneck. He also writes The Biotech Brief, a newsletter for the CIOs, VPs of IT, and heads of infrastructure running technology inside the industry.

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