Grace Hopper was the first female Navy admiral, leading teams that were on the forefront of computer technology. She is so revered by her colleagues that a college at Yale is named after her.

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Having read a great deal about her success, I can say with a bit of confidence that

Hopper was a good computer programmer, but not a genius.

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What she was great at was putting together teams of notoriously difficult programmers that accomplished great things and exceeded everyone's expectations.

 

She was able to get competing egos to share ideas, to get grudges put aside, to force teams to self-correct, all in the name of beating a deadline or the enemy.

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The biggest example of this was when she personally assembled and led the team that invented the COBOL computer programming language. Her "secret" began with recognizing the difference between tasks and the people who perform them.

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Admiral Hopper saw her job as leader to be perfecting these three core skills: 

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• Motivating employees to identify and overcome barriers to performance

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• Building Trusting relationships grounded in appropriate feedback, resulting in decisions that are driven by data and informed by emotions.

 

• Patterning success so that everyone understands what success looks like for the company, the team and the employee.

 

Admiral Hopper talked about the inherent conflict involved in managing smart people:

“When we are too focused on tasks, we tend to ignore the people, whose motives impact the quality of how those tasks are executed.

 

“But, if we focus too much on the individual, we can put their satisfaction above the quality of execution.”

 

Every team, she said, has a balance point between the first two skill sets, necessary for "Leading People"; and the third skill set, which she labeled necessary for "Managing Work.” It is the team leader's responsibility to find that point.

 

Because you are dealing with humans, Leading People requires the manager to be brain-savvy. What is brain-savvy? An understanding of the biology behind how people make decisions. It is the basis of behavioral economics and cognitive neuroscience. As long as we rely on humans to get things done, Hopper reasoned, we should at least have a basic understanding of how they work.

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Managing Work is about constantly looking to improve systems; it requires a hyper-curious mind willing to test the status quo. It requires an understanding of what tasks are essential to produce the outputs that lead to the desired outcomes. In essence, you must be willing to test your methods against the reality of your business metrics.

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Hopper posited that great managers become great leaders when they find a company’s needed balance of brain-savvy and business-tested. The nature of our jobs is changing daily, weekly, monthly. So, setting up to produce the same output is kind of useless.

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If we use Hopper’s skill sets as our foundation, we see that our job isn’t the output of writing the actual code, but to make sure our people have the safety and respect, and to know how a successful outcome – the code – behaves and what it accomplishes.