Our Philosophy

If your technical organization looks like your competitors’ and acts like your competitors’, why would you expect them to perform differently than your competitors’?

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In order to peform different, you need to lead differently. And to lead differently, you need to think differently. Unfortunately, most leaders were never taught to think about leadership principles, only to perform leadership actions.

Principles Inform Actions

From the most junior levels of leadership to the most senior, leaders are simply taught to “do”. “Have weekly 1:1s with your directs.” “Divide up your organization into two-pizza sized teams.” “Create a yearly hiring plan by rolling up the number of resources needed for your top stack-ranked projects.” When was the last time you thought about the “whys” of your leadership actions, and more importantly, considered whether you could stop doing these actions in favor of more impactful alternatives?

Critical Understanding

Crucially, however, your universe of alternatives are often no better than what you are doing currently, and sometimes even worse. Because the impact of leadership actions are both difficult to measure quantatatively and take a long time (in software terms) to see results, they are instead taught and passed down via cargo-culting (“Google does it and they are a successful company, so it must be good”) and small sample sizes (“this famous leader who founded two world-changing companies attributes this practice to their success, so it must be good”).

Substance Based in Research

Do a LinkedIn or an internet search for “how to build culture”, “how to build trust”, “creating a learning organization”, “enabling effective collaboration”. Many of the results rely on personal anecdotes, abstract generalities, and quoting from other well-known leaders and personalities? Do any of them actually offer substance with their advice?

Technical organizations are made up of people and people are complicated. Growing effective people and teams requires understanding the science behind the mechanisms that make them tick. Science also has the benefit of being repeatable and when something is well-studied enough to overcome small sample sizes, we get what we at Leadership Raft call “substance”.

Grounded in Experience

Of course, the “substance” we speak of is not a magical answer. Social science has its own challenges, especially around study methods. Again, humans are complicated and studying them is complicated. Just taking what was seen in a controlled environment and calling it fact is just as suspect as the cargo-cult-ed, small sample-sized leadership actions. It needs to be taken into the broader world, subjected to different and challenging situations, and vetted with real experience to ground it into an actionable practice.

The Goodness

That’s what we do at Leadership Raft. We read the papers and follow the research. But we have also been in the trenches for over twenty years at some of the most complex, profitable, global, and specialized companies in the industry. So when we apply the research, we do so with a discerning and skeptical eye, using our combined experience as a filter and foil. The result of the blend and distillation of research and experience is the most validated and actionable tactics for building impactful and differentiated technical organizations and leaders.