Swoop & Poop

Leadership is not about dramatic entrance or positional authority — it is about cultivating trust, shared context, and steady value creation. When leaders disrupt without dialogue, performance suffers. When they call, connect, and collaborate, teams thrive.

In a call with a VP, he lamented about an exec who came out of nowhere and changed everything in motion without any consideration of the team or context or priority.  Asserted authority, pulled rank, do this and that, nothing else matters.

The Swoop and Poop

A fan favorite for low EQ and/or low trust leaders.  And sometimes the go-to tactic for those that love chaos and despise planning, or the relationships they have with peers and subordinates.

The "Swoop and Poop" Approach to Leadership Causes Disruption

I’m sure it goes without saying, but this leadership approach has major flaws:

• The urgency and demands derail work in progress and disrupts workflow.

• The low or no collaboration approach forces tradeoffs and poor decision making with little regard to downstream impacts which could include missed deadlines, employees working massive hours to try to do previously planned work plus the swoop and poop work.

• Long term goals suffer and if this occurs frequently, the team can shift from missionaries to mercenaries with heavy emphasis on “just doing my job” and “I’m just doing what you told me to do” instead of a more considerate professional view of owning the overall intent of work and why it matters.

• Employees feel frustrated and unable to do their best work due to the disruption and priority conflicts.

• People leave or begin the quiet quitting we hear about, just phoning it in.

At a glance, the “swoop and poop” might look like decisive leadership or expert execution—but it’s not The Path of a Leader.

However, this is not The Path of a Leader.

Here’s a couple examples of what this looks like in the wild:

• Kay and Victor were handling a new website launch for the company. A big project and a lot of expectations from marketing and being ready for an upcoming sales event. The team had been planning the project for months - doing research, creating prototypes, and preparing the content. The launch date was two weeks away when suddenly the CEO barged in and demanded they ditch everything to create a last-minute mobile app instead, citing a conference he had just returned from where he learned about the mobile-first strategy and stats on mobile users.

• Mike’s team had been steadily working on a key product upgrade that was important for long-term success with automating some critical workflows that reduced human error and increased speed to value for key customers. Out of nowhere, the VP showed up demanding total focus and team resources because she just sold a service offering that depended on a new analytics dashboard that she thinks the customer team expects to use. So now they had to scramble to deliver that in the next 3 weeks.

• Kendall had carefully planned her marketing campaign calendar and budget for the rest of the year. But one day the CMO popped in and insisted she needed to do a huge event in 2 months focused on their new branding. This meant throwing out her plans and creating something from scratch on a rushed timeline that was below standard and turned a career elevating project and strategy to subpar tactical work that she and the team were embarrassed to take ownership of.

• The engineering team was heads-down delivering a critical system upgrade on time. But the day before their big release, leadership found out a competitor launched a new feature. Instead of a strategic view, they decided on a hack approach that could be cobbled together over the weekend to appear just as good as the competitor.  This forced the team to deliver a quick and fragile solution that introduced significant technical debt.

Lets shift this.

The Call and Saw

Favoring people, relationships, transparency and trust, a leader on the Path empowers individuals and teams to do great work

In this regard, The Path of a Leader is about being called to act based on communication, collaboration, shared context and a sense of individual and group ownership. 

This means the work can get done with minimal disruption.  It’s the work of sawing the log – or others may call it “making the sausage”.

The Call and Saw has several benefits:

• Leaders call and connect with team members, keeping an open dialogue about priorities and goals.

• Leaders keep the connection to assist with blockers, challenges, and confusion so they can act swiftly to unblock the work being done.

• Leaders are listening to the team and individuals, seeking to understand, and showing their ideas and expertise matter.

• The team is a critical partner in deciding the right work to focus on.

• Leaders value the work in progress and recognize that when work is well planned, that all WIP is value creation, and the goal is to see that value get created and shipped.  This means leaders and employees are diligent about work in progress becoming incremental value.  To much WIP is too much incomplete value and it hurts the business and the teams and certainly doesn’t help the customer or the growth flywheel.

• Innovation and problem solving are dramatically increased due to high trust and open collaboration around value creation and doing great work.

• Trust, connection, communication, and collaboration create an environment for teams to thrive.

To illustrate this, let’s revisit the swoop and poop examples above.

What would be different?

• Kay and Victor listen to the CEO, add their feedback on mobile-first, and offer some easy-to-implement enhancements for mobile-friendly experience to address the mobile experience.  The CEO learns that mobile-first was discussed and deprioritized due to budget constraints and speed to launch and gets involved in securing budget and a phase two initiative for their team to apply additional mobile-first capabilities.

• Mikes project is completed as expected. They discuss and agree to workshop the dashboard needs and expectations as a collaboration with the customer to ensure it is well understood and meets the customer’s intended purposes.  This enables more time and improves the customer experience without disrupting the critical project or losing the sell.

You get the point.

A true leader on the path seeks to understand, fosters shared context and shared knowledge so the teams can thrive without demoralizing and disrupting everyone.

"Call and saw" leaders make growing team members a priority:

• They mentor and share their knowledge to help develop skills of the individual.

• They emphasize clarity and teamwork recognizing that all of us are better than one of us, so the team can work together to accomplish more together.

• People are personally known including their skills, capabilities, and career goals with an interest in helping with opportunities that advance their goals and enhance their skills and capabilities.

• Because people are valued and being heard we see loyalty and ownership increase.

Organizationally we see the flywheel of growth getting more consistent and frequent pushes based on accelerating the work in progress by better planned work and limited disruptions. 

To make this more tangible, you should read the 4 cornerstones to a GSD Guide.

This is The Path of a Leader.

#ThePathOfALeader
#GSD

Appreciate you,

Justin