In the context of the concern from my boss and an ensuing directive that came to take our celebrate success mobile down for the upper leadership visit, I stopped to think about how I was leading my team. I've felt very positive about this team and how things are going. There's a good atmosphere here and I love some of the quirkiness of it. With the help of a few similarly minded people, I've created an environment that I would like to work in. So when others came along to question it, it was really tempting to take it personally. But I listened and thought about their feedback. I also asked around the team and found out some on the team really didn't care about some of the things I was doing. Additionally, I realized that I was doing some things not because it was the right thing to do, but because I thought it would be cool to do it.
As I realized these errors and weighed that against the magnitude of my responsibility to lead these 39 people, I became very embarrassed that I had lead them in the wrong direction. After a few more days of reflection, I sent out a survey to the team to see what tactics/systems/meetings we have as a team that are helpful to them in working better and producing more inspired products. 90% of the team responded and the response data is very helpful. Some of it supports things that I enjoy, some of it does not.
The lesson I've learned here is that it's easy for a leader to plug along thinking that everything is one way. But it takes listening and a good measure of putting your own agenda aside to be able to lead in the right way. I'm sure there's more to learn here but this was a good starter.
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