In my last post about "snacking", I promised to cover one more leadership anti-pattern (also mentioned by Will Larson in "Staff Engineer") - this one is called "preening".

What is "preening"?

Preening means doing low impact + high visibility work to get wider recognition (and sometimes also because of other selfish reasons, like boosting your ego or fixing your insecurities).

As high visibility is usually connected to all kinds of status games, preening is widely seen among all kinds of leaders - those with and without authority.

How does preening look alike?

I bet that you've seen (or at least can imagine) preening in the wild, but for the sake of completeness, here are some examples of preening:

• Gaming the metrics/KPIs to maximize your personal benefits (where metrics poorly represent the true priorities), ignoring the intentions behind the metrics
• Promotion-driven development - putting what could promote you above what would truly benefit the organization/users/customers (if the organization lets these diverge too far - which is more frequent than many assume)
• Prioritizing projects/favors for chosen stakeholders because of selfish reasons (reciprocity expectations, internal politics/coteries)
• Personal insecurity has put you in a mode where you feel you have to continuously convince everyone around that you contribute as much as everyone else and do not stand out negatively

The impact of preening isn't hard to guess, even if we put aside the most obvious implications (missed opportunity, lost focus, suboptimal effectiveness). People see a leader's self-orientation and start to copy this (selfish) behavior. It's "every man for himself" from now on, as there's no space for trust & teamwork anymore. Not even to mention that sometimes the (most) valuable work has minimal visibility (e.g., so-called glue work). What happens if it's not being done or recognized?

Preening is not evenly distributed

Fortunately, it's not that preening is omnipresent, as it needs particular conditions to flourish, for instance:

• The low-impact organization with the low-impact culture - either the individual's work doesn't matter (poorly defined role/position or simply a "bullshit job"), or the link between one's work and value streams is unclear/too stretched
• The organization has issues with assessing the performance (and impact) of people - it's either not done at all or done in the wrong way (artificially made up, not representative, impractical)
• A weak leadership team that doesn't react to the behavior of people with strong personalities amplified by a "self-selling" attitude
• Toxic competition has actually become part of the organization's culture; it artificially created a zero-sum game that only benefits folks who are most extravert/noisy (& hence get the most recognition)

How to battle preening?

First, while snacking is typically unconscious and instinctive (w/o bad intentions), preening is, in many cases, purely intentional. That expands our focus from just self-awareness to a critical assessment of the whole work environment around us.

The most essential tools in this battle are (w/o any doubt) - goals and priorities. The ones that are not only clear, specific & measurable but also well-aligned (e.g., organizational ones vs. individual ones) and shared among people (on a team, org. unit-level). Such goals make objective measures that you can not only assess (if they've been met and to what degree), but also compare (with the other results). Bad goals - e.g., dead (defunct) ones that exist only "on paper" - create a "grey zone" for status games and anti-patterns like preening.

(Good) goals will only work if a culture of critical feedback accompanies them. Praise (consistently) the behaviors you want to promote in the organization, always dive deep in search for added value (and effective leverage), don't be hesitant to call it out when the value is missing (radical candor FTW!), and (last but not least) continuously preach self-awareness so folks know how to tell high-impact work by themselves.