In 2013, I was offered a leadership role in the organization's innovation Lab. I liked the people I worked with, so I accepted the offer. I didn't know it then, but I had just received the most significant challenge of my career yet.

After I started, I began to feel the shift from an individual contributor to a management role. People asked me the same questions, and they had different expectations. When they asked me about a technical topic, they expected me to know experts to add to their projects. They expected me to connect with the rest of the organization and a business audience. Increasingly, my manager expected me to provide leverage, not become leverage.

My first challenge was communication. I would stare for thirty minutes at a 3-line email response and try to see all the futures with undesirable outcomes. I would be secretly frustrated at being unable to solve divergent problems with other leaders. My ethics would not allow me to blame the other leaders, but at the same time, they were the closest to me, so by the "law of blame," in despair, the blame went to the leader I was working with closely.

I turned to study leadership as a discipline. The application of those studies has shaped my direction and taught me a few lessons.

Value Relationships over Processes

How do you walk uncharted territory together with someone else? What helps to resolve differences? I am part of the delivery center leadership team with leaders from different functions such as IT, Finance, Recruitment, HR, and Engineering. We have an excellent working relationship. We don't need to be best friends, though we have developed friendships after solving many challenges together. Regardless, we value the complementary contributions of each other.

When I find myself blocked or going around in circles, I take a step back to evaluate my relationship with other leaders. I try to understand if we share the same desired outcomes and the same perception of the facts on the ground. Next, we assess the obstacles. We may need to be vulnerable about the broken things in our backyard. If we can stay the course, these conversations lead to vulnerability-based trust that is foundational for great partnerships.

Establish Direct Communication

I cringe a little every time someone refers to a person as a 'resource.' A book is a resource, a piece of equipment is a resource, furniture is a resource, but people are not resources. This is an example of abstracting away humans, which may seem harmless till you look a little deeper. The Milgram Experiment presents a chilling finding that when humans are abstracted away, other humans will ignore their morals and inflict pain, even death on the abstracted human. The experiment was an attempt to understand how ordinary people could enable the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.

Those experiments and their connection with the crimes on humanity have left a deep impression on me. Fortunately, my world is far less dramatic. When rolling out a new process, I prefer direct communication with the team members. Getting to know their initial reaction and feedback firsthand is never the same as the second-hand information. I catch myself from generalizing or stereotyping team members because I don't want to abstract away the human. Even as I take data-driven commitments, I make sure to know some of the humans (the "data points"). The further away the human is from the organization's leadership, the more I seek to amplify them.

Take Extreme Ownership

The underlying principle is to take ownership of the good and bad aspects of everything you are responsible for. Instead of finding someone or something to blame when things go wrong, a leader must take the blame on themselves.

This was the most challenging thing I have had to do in leadership. It is one thing to own up to the mistakes you've made and quite another when someone in your department has made a mistake. The toughest ones to own up to are the systemic problems because those are what you inherit. Irrespective of the source of the issues, taking responsibility is the first step of the solution. I have found that people are generous and graceful when I raise my hand to take responsibility. Almost immediately, they are willing to help.