Leadership in the Skytap Field Team
Hiring great people is hard, maintaining high standards is harder.
Our team regularly takes lessons from Jocko Willink and Leif Babin and their book Extreme Ownership, and we’ve also taken similar lessons from Amazon’s Leadership Principles. We use these principles in our hiring decisions and in how we operate as a team. We’re globally decentralised with people in the UK, USA, and Canada; and without this kind of North Star we could never function as a team.
Skytap Cloud Solutions Architecture Principles
DEFAULT: AGGRESSIVE
Taking action to solve a problem the instant it occurs. You have to make things happen, they won’t happen on their own. Leaders must attack a problem before it gets worse and demonstrate to their team that an aggressive approach to identifying and solving a problem is the default.
Extreme Ownership (E.O.)
A true leader takes 100% ownership of everything in his domain, including the outcome and everything that affects it. This is the most fundamental building block of leadership that cuts across all other principles. It applies to leadership at any level, in any organization.
Cover And Move (Teamwork)
Cover and Move is a common military tactic, where one team covers while another moves, so they can jointly gain ground. This is all about having different teams working together and supporting one another.
No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders
Leaders fundamentally decide their teams’ level of performance. Under the right leadership, any team can thrive.
Keep Things Simple
Keep your plans simple, so they can be easily communicated, understood, and adjusted in response to real-time changes.
Clarity And Belief
As a leader, you must fully understand and believe in a mission, before you can convince others to embrace it and lead them to do what’s needed to succeed.
Prioritise And Execute
It can be overwhelming to be faced with many time-sensitive, high-stake problems, all of which may snowball into bigger issues. In such situations, good leaders stay calm, take stock to identify the top priorities, then tackle them one at a time.
Manage Your Ego
Great leaders prioritize the wider mission over their personal ego. They’re willing to learn, accept good ideas from others, and own up to their mistakes. They also manage their team members’ egos to keep everyone focused on the team mission.
Decentralised Command
Break down your teams into groups of 4–5, with a clearly assigned leader for each group. Ensure that leaders at all levels understand the overall mission and immediate goals, including what the team must do and why.
Sound Planning
Great leaders ensure there’s a sound planning process that includes mission clarity, evaluation of options and risks, engagement of all levels, post-action debrief, and systematization of the planning process.
Lead Up And Down The Line
Great leaders concurrently lead upward (by offering information and updates to help their leaders understand their work and support them) and lead downward (to help junior leaders and frontline staff to see the bigger picture).
Be Decisive Amidst Uncertainty
As a leader, you must be prepared to make the best possible decisions based on available information.
Discipline Brings Freedom
Discipline doesn’t mean rigidity and is, in fact, essential for freedom and results.
Over the next few months our team will be writing up examples of where we’ve been able to use these with real customers to solve real problems.
