Jon Gribble’s Post

If you’re the most senior person at a meeting, you probably shouldn’t be the one presenting. If we’re talking about strategy or vision, that’s the exception. But in a typical, everyday meeting, the leader needs to put their other professionals in front of everyone else as a presenter — and as a way to train them as a leader. Being able to communicate with others through public speaking is a fundamental leadership skill. It’s more involved than just having a conversation with another person. It’s also a skill you need to practice and receive feedback on. A lot of groups struggle with this: Are we keeping the meeting crisp? Is each topic relevant? Are we discussing critical information? Or are we just rehashing information that could have been an informal, outside discussion instead? Could this have been an email? One thing to consider is that when we put others in a position to present, it doesn’t mean they have to present the entire meeting. Maybe it’s just one topic. There’s a dual benefit in doing that, too, as having different presenters adds interest to the meeting. It changes things up. Recall my earlier post about most baseball managers are former catchers. By not presenting in your own meeting, you shift into the catcher role. You can ask questions, observe others engagement and shift the conversation when needed. As you’re striving to build a high performing team, this is a key trick I have picked up as the rest of the team begins to drive meetings in the same way when you’re no longer in the room. Crisp and highly efficient!

Everyone should have their own personal board of directors. Not your organization’s board, or the board for an association you belong to. I’m talking about a collection of confidantes you’ve carefully curated for when you need guidance. These are very close co-workers, friends, and family members who will give you advice no matter what — people who value you as an individual, and with whom you’d trust sharing your own confidential information. They’re who you ask: Should I take this promotion? Should I switch jobs? Should I enroll in this class? Along with helping you self-govern and make decisions; they serve another important function — professional development. Seeking out coaching and advice from trusted mentors and others on your personal board of directors is a pathway toward stretching the way you think. They’re a resource for recommending books, podcasts, classes, seminars, or even just their own wisdom to help you grow — as a manager, as a professional, as a person. Make it known to them that you read and listen to podcasts and share with them your interests and your struggles. Keep them up to date on you, because in some moment of crisis you will need their opinion and hopefully you’ve kept them up on you, your aspirations and all things that offer context to you. It’s in these moments where an informed board can help steer your career in the best way for you. Who’s on your board of directors?

Golden. Working. Broken. Stop. Of these four descriptors, which one would you describe your team’s processes? Recently, our team held one of our twice-annual business development summits. And at that summit, I conducted a multi-hour brainstorming session to highlight, evaluate, and improve our processes, one by one. Everyone had big markers and Post-It notes, and for the first 10 minutes they were asked to write down which processes they consider to be “Golden.” What’s working so well that you wouldn’t touch it? They could identify a process, but they could also jot down a person or group, a behavior — anything. Then they took turns reading the note out loud and sticking their notes on a board at the front of the room. They came back with a lot of great things. Next, we asked everyone to do the same thing for the practices they would file under “Stop” — things that just weren’t working and were beyond repair. A lot of these were just obvious and made sense to everybody, and so it helped. The exercise was intended to exhaust everyone of things that we either needed to just leave alone or get rid of altogether, because what I really wanted the group to focus on was the next two categories: the things that are “working” but need improvement, and the things that are “broken” and need fixing. In other words, these are the things we should still do, but need to lean into to make them better. After they got through that exercise and it was just about time for everyone to go to lunch, I gave each person five stickers before they left. The instructions were to take those stickers and use them to vote on the top five “working” or “broken” items that would benefit the most from improvement and provide the most impact to the group. When everyone got back, it was pretty clear which items received the most votes and thus where we should focus our limited resources for the biggest impact. And so the final task was to break everyone up into smaller teams, and assign one item per team. Each team was responsible for coming up with the first three steps towards a solution to their problem. Once time expired on that task, each group took a turn to report out and the whole group leaned into their solution steps. The exercise proved to be rich with feedback, and it was encouraging to hear that several people were struggling with the same things — and that we were all working on solutions. The real takeaway here is that a problem well defined is a problem half solved. When people started putting all these things in writing, and then voted on their top issues, it became clear what the key problems were, and what the best solutions should be. And it brings all of our processes that much closer to Golden.

Watching my Royals this summer, I’ve been thinking about how baseball applies to leadership. Something that caught my attention when I was watching a game recently where the announcer was explaining that many managers have been catchers at some point in their history. I thought that was an interesting perspective, and it got me thinking about how to coach leaders. As a catcher, you’ve got the full view of the field, you’ve got the batter right in front of you, and you can see pretty much everything that’s going on in the game. The pitcher, on the other hand, has a much more limited view. He can only see what’s in front of him, and so he must lean heavily on his teammates — and especially on the player behind home plate. So, it’s incumbent on the catcher to be a leader on the field. The catcher tends to be the quieter player, too. To the casual observer, the catcher is simply catching the ball and throwing it back. But in the context of communication, the catcher is the one relaying the signals to the pitcher. As managers, we want to give our rising leaders a shot at the pitcher’s mound. That could be in the form of presenting at a meeting or taking the lead on a project. It’s our job to be there as the catcher, where we have a full view of the field and signal the next big play.

On the topic of establishing systems… Already-established systems and best practices within your organization can be a useful blueprint for building your own systems. Not only are they familiar to everyone already, but leaders can pick and choose the best pieces to create processes that fit your team’s needs. Then, what’s empowering is that the processes you establish get used by others and become part of the team’s lexicon. When new team members come along, these systems provide them with a roadmap for how to do their jobs. You don’t want to be so rigid about your systems that you’re unwilling to adapt, though. Along with putting systems in place, leaders also need to reflect periodically on how to recalibrate those systems to sync with the team’s current needs. If the consensus is that the team needs to stop doing things a certain way to pivot to market conditions, then the processes need to change to reflect that. How often do you revisit your business processes and systems? Never or not often enough?... better revisit that.

Mid-career, I took a Harvard executive business class on executive finance for non-financial executives. It was maybe one of the most insightful professional development opportunities I’ve had. On the very first day of class, the professor walks into the room of about 50 people, pounds his fist on the desk, and says, “LIARS, LIARS, LIARS!” And he says, “Ladies and gentlemen, the purpose of this class is to tell you that all accountants are liars. And it’s your job as executives to figure out when they are lying and why.” After a few minutes, he settled down a bit and explained what he meant — that accountants have rules to follow, and they don’t like changing those rules. And so, they come off sounding very confident. He said, “You as the business manager need to understand the intricacies of how your business operates, and what accounting needs to do to properly manage and elevate the business. Because accounting doesn’t run the business. You run the business.” That really stretched my thinking. I bring this up since I’ve been posting here lately about how great leaders prioritize professional development. And I really believe that those kinds of outside classes are what challenge us and elevate us as individuals. Now that I’m further along in my career, I’ve come to recognize the importance of providing these kinds of opportunities for others — either through our internal Kiewit University classes, or by finding outside training and education for my team. Or even something just as small as recommending an insightful book or podcast to my team so we can use that language as a shorthand in our different processes. Maybe it doesn’t have to be a professor pounding on a desk. But just the act of tapping into development opportunities can go a long way toward effective leadership.

The question of whether or not a utility’s water samples exceed federal PFAS limits could come down to whether the lab technician had McDonald’s for lunch. When the EPA set enforceable standards in April to limit PFAS chemicals in drinking water, they set the maximum contaminant levels for PFAS at 4.0 parts per trillion — that’s right at the lowest level you can actually detect through a lab test. And so, a test isn’t going to detect 3.0 parts per trillion; it can only detect 4.0 PPT. It’s such a tiny difference that if a lab technician were to touch a fast-food wrapper — which we all know contain PFAS — before handling the sample, it could completely throw off the test results. Keep in mind that it takes six to eight weeks from the time the sample is collected until the lab delivers the results, and think about the chain of custody of all the people handling that sample. That’s a lot of opportunity for cross contamination. And it only takes one cheeseburger. The results of that test will dictate a water utility’s decision as to whether to invest millions of dollars in equipment so they can comply with the new PFAS limits. This is why you need to rely on strong partners. The only possible way to avoid that kind of scenario is to work with a partner that has a thorough understanding of these kinds of processes because they’re immersed in the industry, on the forefront of innovation, and they’ve been doing all this for over a century. Because when a multimillion-dollar decision comes down to a highly sensitive lab test, you want to make sure the team handling the testing knows exactly what they’re doing — right down to a detail as minute as whether someone had drive-thru on their lunch break.

On the topic of meetings and establishing systems… I had an insightful conversation about meetings recently with a colleague who works in another business segment here. Connecting with my division is useful to him because we're essentially an internal source of clients for his team. He isn’t obligated to attend my team’s meetings, but he’s sat in on a few of them. And he reached out to me recently to thank me for letting him join the meetings — one, because they provide him with a tremendous number of internal connections, and two, because the meetings are a rich source of information about business opportunities that he would never be able to get on his own in such rich detail. And that provided me with a great deal of insight. You may have read one of my previous posts about why I think it’s important for leaders who plan meetings to regularly pare down the invite list so people don’t get stuck on a meeting chain they have no interest in, but don’t know how to get out of. But as I’ve also mentioned, I feel it’s equally important to avoid blocking these individuals from attending meetings if they still want to. And so, this particular colleague reinforced my reasoning for why I don’t force people off meetings, other than the ritual of cleaning out the list. His explanation afforded me a conscious understanding of why he sits in on these calls, and how he finds the meetings useful. He also explained that the crispness of these meetings — the fact that they get right to the point and don’t eat up half the workday — is of particular value to him. For one hour, he gets all sorts of rich detail in rapid fashion that he can use to be a force multiplier in his role. And so, going back to my conversations about leadership and establishing systems, which include meetings, I think that leaders really need to think about the content, format and attendance of their meetings. They need to ask themselves: Do I have the right meetings? And if they were the right meetings the last time I checked, is that still the case? Or is it time to rethink them? Has the market, the work force, or the maturity of people in my organization evolved to where I need to revisit how I structure these meetings? And who are these meetings serving? The people who attend your meetings usually have the answers to these questions. And when they offer feedback, we should listen.

Any leader who’s ever had to schedule recurring meetings has probably encountered their share of “meeting clingers.” This is when someone gets attached to an invite for one of the meetings, but then ends up being forever attached to the series of meetings. That creates a lot of confusion for everybody. If you’re the individual receiving the invites, you don’t know if the meeting leaders have come to expect that you’re going to attend every meeting. Meanwhile, the other meeting attendees could be thinking: “This person isn’t really contributing. Why are they here?” This goes back to some of the conversations I’ve been having here lately about how great leaders establish systems. Effective meetings are a piece of the systems we’re charged with establishing as leaders. And to keep those meetings crisp, we need to periodically take the time to go through our invite list and clear the deck. By the same token, you shouldn’t block that person from returning if they want. If the individual finds the meetings informative and helpful and wants to keep coming, let them in! My thinking is to go ahead and tidy up the list from time to time to eliminate some of that confusion. Then if an individual still wants to come to those meetings, we’ll have a discussion, and they can argue their way back in. But clinging doesn’t do anyone any good.

What makes a great leader? 5. Take time to strategize. I purposefully block off chunks of time when I have nothing else scheduled. This is my time to strategize and think. I think about how I can practice those other four things. • What conversations should I have in my one-on-ones? • What do I need to delegate, and how can I communicate those tasks clearly? • What are some things I can read or listen to so I can better develop myself? • What systems do I need to put in place? And can I delegate some of those tasks as a stretch exercise to provide personal development opportunities for and build relationships with my team? I’ve learned that to be an effective leader, it’s important to make time for yourself to think through all those intricacies, and to do that in a thoughtful, purposeful way. Sometimes, you get to take the time. But often, you have to make the time. That’s not always easy, but it is necessary. Otherwise, you get so busy and caught up in other things that you let it slide off your plate. And then you’re forced to make off-the-cuff decisions. Of course, that’s going to happen from time to time. But my best decisions are the ones I make when I’ve taken the time to process things. All it takes is a little bit of time. The key word is take not given. You must plan for it and take the time.