New Book: Performance Leadership
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As I mentioned here, I suddenly started writing a new book last quarter.
Well, it’s done now!
This Was Wild
A few weeks ago the main contributors to the book and I had a “wrap party,” which was a Zoom call where we virtually toasted to the completion of the book (we’re in 6 different locations). We thanked each other for making it all happen but there was one theme that stood out:
None of us had done anything like this before
From my own perspective, I shared how I’d co-authored other books before, but this was the first time an entire TEAM was listed as co-author. This was also the first time I have written a book based on someone else’s idea (other coaches in our team came up with the original framework, but I flushed it out into a whole book). It felt like developing a novel based on a screenplay.
It was also the most accelerated timeline I’ve ever been a part of for a writing project. I want to share some of my learnings about the collaboration and timing as well as my biggest takeaway from the whole process because I think there are probably some broader applications to other areas of life and work.
Although the final case study in the book gives details about how we applied our same Performance Leadership framework to ourselves to write the book, this article is like “behind the behind the scenes” from the primary author (me).
Collaboration
It was very important for this project to get way more input at all stages than I’m used to. The key to doing this was to identify very quickly (we’ll get to timing later) what adaptive challenges would stop me from doing this. It was basically these:
Fear of people not replying (hating the feeling of chasing people)
Fear of people not liking what I’d written (“wasted” words on the page)
Fear of slowing down the process (we had an ambitious timeline)
These 3 fears really slowed me down until I designed experiments and tested how true they really were. They turned out to be somewhat true! But not as true as I thought.
The bedrock of adaptive challenges is often times connected to fears and identity. For these, I realized I see myself as the kind of person who:
Collaborates well with others
Writes good… stuff… (you know what I mean)
Gets stuff done
These adaptive challenges threatened the way I saw myself. If people don’t reply, and I have to chase them, I feel like I’m maybe NOT a good collaborator. Maybe I’m not a good writer. Maybe I can’t actually get stuff done. Ah! These challenges are chipping away at the core of who I think I am!
The solution?
Again, I had to test the limits of how true the specific assumptions were and see how much impact that really had on my identity.
One quick example: there was a great case study I wanted to include in the book, but the business leader needed to reply to tell me it was ok to use. I was getting nervous that I never heard back. My experiment was to see if this person would reply to someone else we both knew. If so, the problem is me and I’m a terrible collaborator! But if not, maybe it’s not just me.
In the end, neither of us got a reply so I felt much better. The case study didn’t go in (sad), but the experiment was a success (happy). I basically never ask someone to ask someone else something for me. Even that sentence just then feels overly complicated and not what I’m used to. “I’m the kind of person who communicates directly!” But for this project, I had to push my limits on what collaboration means to me.
One of the core concepts in adaptive leadership is:
What worked before, won’t work this time.
Timing
In the end, I used 25 days to write the whole book (35,000 words). That is still crazy for me to comprehend. How could I do that?
For me, that fear of not being productive enough was a great motivator, but also my worst enemy. There were days when I needed to do things besides write (such as research, or even MY OTHER JOBS) and I felt anxious taking a break from the writing.
I’d written many other things before but not on a timeline this tight. So remembering the mantra:
What worked before, won’t work this time.
helped me focus on my actual anxiety: “If I take time off writing, the book will fall behind schedule.”
The test for this was a new one for me: a writing dashboard that tracked words written against projected words needed (we were aiming for 30,000). Since I knew the deadline, I was able to see if I was “on pace” like a marathon runner checking his clock every mile.
It would be ridiculous for a marathon runner to think: “I can’t stop to tie my shoe because then I’ll fall behind!” Obviously, the pros find ways to minimize all unnecessary stops. But the real key is knowing whether you’re on pace all the time.
I had never designed anything like this for myself for a writing project before and it was a huge help (I actually finished the writing a few days before the deadline).
Lessons Learned
I had to stretch my personal productivity to the max to get this book done and it was only possible because of:
Constant checking for assumptions (best phrased as “If… then…”)
Systematically checking how true those were (“Am I REALLY falling behind pace? Wait a second, what even IS my pace?”)
Chanting (mentally) “What worked before, won’t work this time.”
Now, that last one isn’t 100% true. The fact that I’d learned how to do a bunch of cool stuff in MS Word really did help me this time (for example, I can’t recommend the Reference Manager enough, flawed as it is).
But I’ve found those past wins that really do help are not worth thinking too much about. When a past win is helping, you can see it’s making the result better. For example, I could see that my familiarity with MS Word was helping me make progress faster.
The biggest danger I was paranoid about was “What old ways of writing a book am I subconsciously relying on that are hindering my progress?”
That one sentence seemed to be the biggest help and continues to guide my work in other areas (including marketing the book, and doing all the other stuff I’m doing).
For example
Normally I wouldn’t put two links to the same book in an article, but I’m going to try that now.
Here’s the book if you want to read it and get more behind the scenes about how we were able to produce it so quickly:
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