R&D Leaders: This rare skill will help you build a stronger team – but it needs your protection.
I was early in my career and knew something didn’t feel quite right – but I was too fresh to know exactly what it was.
It happened during my first posting with a global product group, where I was hired as a design engineer. Our full team was more than a hundred people, all striving to release what would become one of the bigger projects in the firm’s history.
There was one teammate, let’s call him Dan (not his real name), who consistently asked the hard questions and made it uncomfortable for management to take the path of least resistance. In meetings, you could always depend on Dan to have a completely fresh take, and in many cases, initiate open discussions that needed to happen. However, they were not always the most pleasant or complimentary of the group’s management team.
You can guess the outcome. Dan was removed from the team during a down economic cycle. The result was that it led to a genuine decrease in the quantity and quality of the team’s work.
This event left a mark on my thinking and how I look at the robustness of a design team. This one element shows up over and over again. The most adaptive teams have room for dissenters to express themselves – and then have a beer at the pub.
What I Know Now
I use the term Architect in the Complete Growth Leader system (see links here and here) for those teammates like Dan who are the strategic, visionary thinkers on a typical development team. These are the visual thinkers who are able to communicate very well using sketches and word pictures. They bring new thinking to the team, either by contributing fresh viewpoints or borrowing from their extensive background of experiences and insights that has been built by their insatiable curiosity. They are concentration challenged, preferring to swoop from meeting to meeting where they can add value before quickly moving on. They have very high expectations for progress and become very irritable if things are not moving quickly.
These leaders are rare – typically less than 10 percent in the normal population. Yet, due to the nature of technology firms, they can become highly concentrated there.
Two Kinds of Architects
On a team, the Architect plays a specific role, and depending on how strongly they identify with the style, they are either adaptive or disruptive:
- Adaptive Architects are those team members who can see the entire value stream all the way from customer need through distribution, production, and design. They are masters at helping the firm adapt new ideas and concepts to the firm in a way that is most efficient. Since they are experts at helping others see their role in new approaches to delivering to new clients and markets, they are perceived as easier to work with. When they do run into issues, they are experts at the “three-way deal” which allows two players to shift a bit in the value chain so that everyone can “share the pain.”
- Disruptive Architects are those leaders who see the need for a radical departure from the status quo and are tireless advocates within the system for the change that they can see so clearly. This person is the pioneer who installs the breakthrough processes even though all the old equipment is not yet depreciated. They take the time to speak the truth to power, and many times develop a negative label that can lead to their ouster when the inevitable belt-tightening occurs. They have radar for those issues in the value chain that will simply not work and they don’t cut corners. It’s not that they have a chip on their shoulder, it’s just that they want the most direct path to success.
While these disruptive architects may have a reputation as being more difficult to work with, there are hidden positives to this approach. When time is of the essence, it’s best to put together a solution that has the highest probability of success and let the consequences come out quickly. This pioneering work can frequently set the stage for work by adaptive architects to quickly work out a win/win.
How to Support your Disruptive Architect
The adaptive Architects can do a great deal to ensure a healthy future for their disruptive colleagues. The three practices that help the most are:
- Buffer: One technique I have seen work very well is for one of the adaptive architects to take on the role of interviewing the disruptor and carrying the highest value input into the meeting themselves. In this way, the disruptor doesn’t have to sit in the meeting (which they loathe anyway) and the key information gets packaged in a way that leads to a higher level of adoption. Think of this as the equivalent of an air gap in plumbing.
- Harmonize: Another close cousin is to work 1:1 with the disruptive voice to identify all the points of friction with them before the disruptor springs them on the world. Many times the disruptive architect is so into their single path idea that they don’t take time to think through all the friction points. Don’t mistake this for a lack of empathy. It is more of a full vetting of all the potential friction and the ability to speak to everyone’s concerns.
- Interpret: This is a key skill to be used once you are in the meeting. When friction arises, there is a need for a statesmanlike role to pause the meeting and reinterpret the point in plain English so everyone can take a deep breath and see both sides. By simply restating the point in the more visual and integrative language, you can help the disruptor help the team.
This work is important, not simply for the disruptive leader, but also for the longer-term health of the group. Let me give you a couple of examples. In the first, I worked with a team that had developed a product with an outsourced agent. The lead was being very adaptive and accommodating, and the program misfired – badly. The second was the installation of a major chemical machining process, (which was a massive step forward from existing technology) where the architect was extremely directive. The new system set the group up for decades of success.
If you are the leader of an R&D team that needs to run at a very high level of output, I have a number of individual and team programs that can accelerate your progress and assure you have the right project, the right team, and the right plan. If you’d like to talk, please reach out to me at 847-651-1014, or put an appointment on my calendar with this link.
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