Leadership
- Michael Cannon (Unlicensed)
Axelerant leaders strive to ensure success and safety for everyone. We promote leaders from within of people who improve themselves, share freely and encourage others likewise, actively demonstrate Axelerant values, and are admired by peers.
This guide provides a standard mindset structure beyond Being Axelerant for how leaders consider their group’s purpose or other desired outcomes. Our leadership stance is a mixture of Amazon’s Day 1 and Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game.
Prepare Yourself
Becoming a great leader takes more effort than you might ever expect, much less figuring out the kind of leader you want to be. The materials below will help introduce high-level concepts to improve your chance for successful leadership in planning your first 90 days.
And don’t forget that your manager and others are there to help. Be sure to get with them at least monthly or bi-weekly for a 1-1 towards becoming your best leading self.
The following demonstrated concepts, explained below, are those expected of Axelerant’s leaders.
Adaptable
Just
Earning Trust
Promoting Customer Success
Courageous
Adaptable - Prepare for Existential Flexibility
Existential flexibility, or embracing trends, is an infinite-minded leader’s capacity to create an extreme disruption in strategy or product to advance the Just Cause, Being Axelerant | Our Purpose. This happens when the company is already successful.
Great leaders continuously scan the horizon for opportunities and ideas to promote the Just Cause better. While a finite-minded leader thinks the risk is not worth it, an infinite-minded leader sees that staying on the existing path is a more significant risk.
Don’t settle for what works now; continue monitoring outcomes and adjust how things get done for the desired positive result. Challenge the status quo and express disagreement with ideas. You are choosing to make Axelerant better by sharing your differences more freely.
E.g., Performance management aligns with desired outcomes; People know how they contribute and just enough process for desired results.
When we ignore trends, especially those being asked, talked about, and written about, we choose to become irrelevant. By challenging the status quo, we’re embracing the future.
E.g., Build awareness of now and potential, Identify critical trends to focus on, Define experimentation structures, and Elicit feedback from teams.
Being Just - Further, a Just Cause
A leader must have a clear vision of a more significant future state than the organization that inspires people to work to lead in an infinite game, Being Axelerant | Our Mission. This Cause, Being Axelerant | Our Purpose, provides sustained motivation beyond immediate rewards and encourages us to keep playing the infinite game.
Earn Trust - Build Trusting Teams
Trust is at the heart of the organizational performance. When there is a lack of confidence, employees feel forced to lie, hide information, and avoid asking for help when needed. This prevents real problems from surfacing.
A safe space is an environment where people feel vulnerable, admit mistakes, and ask for help with the confidence that the team will support them. Leaders must continuously and actively cultivate Axelerant as a Safe Space for its people.
Customer Success - True Customer Obsession
Customers are always dissatisfied because they know more is possible, despite saying they’re happy and business is excellent. Staying in Day 1 requires us to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant and protect ideas, and double down when we see excited customers. A customer-obsessed culture best creates conditions where all of these aspects happen.
E.g., Define our understanding and fit for what we’ll say yes to do; Create a framework to evaluate opportunities to help us say no; Be customer-obsessed through clarity on why, what, and how we do it.
Courageous - Find the Courage to Lead
The Courage to Lead is a willingness to take risks for the good of an unknown future. It takes Courage to Lead to operate at a higher standard than the law and casual ethics where Continuous Improvement and Accountable Transparency go beyond others.
Courage to Lead is not just about our actions; it all concerns our perception of how the world works, rejecting shareholder supremacy, and having an infinite mindset.
As many decisions are reversible, we use a lightweight Being Axelerant | Decision Making to make feedback-driven, good-enough decisions. And, instead of a majority consensus, we’ll disagree yet commit towards keeping us moving forward and course-correct quickly when wrong.
E.g., Create a generalized, organization-wide decision-making framework; Define impact-based decision timeframes for localized or organizational-wide reversible decisions; Define default allowable decisions.
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