- chatGPT and Chomsky,
- identifying core principles,
- defining success,
- growing as a manager,
- managers doing culture,
- jerks winning and losing, and
- responsibility and delegation.
We are a few days into the invasion of a sovereign country by another sovereign country… and the senseless deaths that ensue. I’m not one for pronouncements but if we can learn anything from history it is this: if we don’t discuss our differences, if we don’t talk, then the only alternative is violence. This is as true internationally as it is domestically. Technology has only exacerbated this fundamental human tendency. The only way to prevent violence is to learn to express one’s differences and learn to hear and understand the differences of others.
“Communication” is not about how eloquent or smart or well-spoken one is. It’s not about the clever tricks of rhetoric or the slick slide deck. My work as a consultant and a coach is to invite people (I work mostly with managers) to approach communication as
a process by which all parties make themselves co-responsible for the creation of a shared understanding.
I am responsible not only to express my ideas clearly (which requires that they be clear ideas to start with). I am also responsible to ensure that the other party has understood what I was trying to say. Conversely, it is also my responsibility to ensure that I have understood what the other party is trying to say.
This is impossible without dialogue: not only my telling you something and you telling me something, but also my asking you if I got you right and your asking me if you got me right… with the purpose of creating a shared understanding. The outcome is that we have both understood the meaning that each other is trying to convey.
People or parties talking without the express work of creating a shared understanding are at best engaging in turn-taking monologues. They are talking at each other. They are not necessarily talking to each other. There is no dialogue.
And while listening is important and one can learn to do that better, nothing replaces the premise of effective listening: a genuine interest in what the other person has to say.
If you know it all, if you’re the most experienced person in the room, if you’re the most senior person in the room, the smartest person in the room, if you think you have forgotten more about this topic than the other person will ever know then you might be far removed from having a genuine interest in what the other person has to say.
photo by Tina Hartung on Unsplash
Building a successful organization is a mix of doing new/novel things, old things, and very old things. I think we usually spend too much time talking about the new and novel as if it’s a silver bullet. Doing the old and very old things consistently and well is overlooked.
I would add an additional distinction: there’s the new/novel and there’s the timeless. There is also the timely: doing things at the right time.
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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter.
From the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual, here is an 8-point plan for disrupting meetings and conferences. You will probably recognize some of these from your own circumstances:
(1) Insist on doing everything through ‘channels’. Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make ‘speeches’. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration’. Attempt to make committees as large as possible—never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate ‘caution’. Be ‘reasonable’ and urge your fellow-conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
“(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision. . . . It might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.”
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Highlighting content from my September 2021 newsletter
Important, yet often forgotten:
So much startup advice comes down to one common element: Hiring the best people. Whether it’s Twitter threads about how the first 50 hires set the cultural tone, or blog posts recommending that a founder interview the first 100 employees, most pointers are about keeping an unwavering focus on the people who power startups.
“While I definitely agree that people are your most important asset, I’ve noticed that most content doesn’t talk as much about the systems. What I don’t come across as often is a read about how the systems that those first hires build are the manifestation of the culture,” says Fishner.
In his view, it’s not an either or — it’s both. “While early employees are of course a driving factor for the company culture, they’re only half the equation. The other half is the foundational systems,” he says. “The comparison I like to draw is the nature versus nurture debate. Both your genes and your memes are highly influential on your outcomes. Likewise, both your people and your systems are highly influential on your company’s outcomes — but the system side doesn’t get as much attention as it should.”
Fishner expands on why he thinks systems deserve equal footing. “While early employees help set implicit norms, building systems early in a company’s lifecycle sets explicit norms. How do decisions get made? How are meetings structured? How are goals set? These systems are much easier to build when the company is small, and very challenging to put into place as the company grows,” he says.
(…)Fishner’s conviction here surprisingly comes from his college days. “I studied philosophy. My thesis was on the impacts of subconscious advertising techniques. Theories of economics are built on the foundational belief that individuals are rational, well-informed and autonomous. But in practice, none of those things are true. For example, we’re far from autonomous — each person influences other people,” he says.
“In my reading and research for the thesis, I came to more of a determinist worldview that free will is overrated and our willpower is overstated. We’re actually much more influenced by the environments that we’re put in.
Having watched technology go from a curio to curiosity to a daily necessity, I can safely say that we in tech don’t understand the emotional aspect of our work, just as we don’t understand the moral imperative of what we do. It is not that all players are bad; it is just not part of the thinking process the way, say, “minimum viable product” or “growth hacking” are.
But it is time to add an emotional and moral dimension to products. Companies need to combine data with emotion and empathy or find themselves in conflict with those they deem to serve.
This comes up quite often in my coaching conversations. For now, I’ll say this: the choice to ignore the emotional and moral dimensions of one’s work, services, or products is itself an emotional and moral stance.
Both Malik and Sacasas’ newsletters/blogs are well worth following.
1.
I have lived and worked in many countries and in some of these countries I have lived and worked in many cities. I travel for work, domestically and internationally, and I often rent cars to get to my destination. In other words, I have driven thousands of miles, in hundreds of cities, in tens of countries, and here’s a universal fact: everyone rates themselves as great drivers. It’s not a normal (bell curve) distribution around the “good” mean. Most people think they’re great drivers.
And here’s what I suspect is another universal fact: upon reading the above statistic you thought “well, some people are just not realistic about their driving abilities. I wish they acknowledged it. The roads would be safer”.
It turns out that several surveys report that 70% of managers rate themselves as “inspiring and motivating”¹. Seventy percent – that is not a normal distribution either. And I know what you’re thinking: “well, some people are just not realistic about their management abilities. I wish they acknowledged that. The workplace would be better.”
And while you ponder on how you fare with respect to other managers, here’s the reality: 65% of employees would forego a pay raise if it they could fire their managers² and 82% find their managers to be uninspiring.
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2.
There are 120,000 excess deaths per year attributed to ten workplace conditions³ and they cause approximately $190 billion in incremental health care costs. That makes the workplace the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. — higher than Alzheimer’s, higher than kidney disease.⁴
I’m going to list them here. As you read through the list, please identify the ones that are directly within a manager’s purview:
In my leadership programs as well as in my coaching conversations with managers we often go over these items, identify the ones that are directly under one’s control as a manager and distinguish them from those that are more broadly defined by the organization’s policies and cultural norms.
There are two that most often stand out:
6. Facing family-to-work and work-to-family spillover or conflict.
7. Having relatively low control over one’s job e.g., workload.
#7 speaks to intrinsic motivation. As per data from McKinsey & Company, when employees are intrinsically motivated, they are 32% more committed and 46% more satisfied with their job and perform 16% better.
This makes sense: it is easier to derive satisfaction from the work itself⁵, to feel good or fulfilled about a job well done, when we have autonomy over the work we do. In other words, it’s hard to experience the work as “my” work when there is little to none of “me” in it.
This begs the question: Am I the type of manager who tells people what to do (and how to do it) or am I the type of manager who provides clarity on the expected outcome and allow for people to attain that outcome on the manner they see fit. And just as in the case of the quality of one’s driving, we should focus not on what we think but on what our direct reports experience.
We come to #6: Facing family-to-work and work-to-family spillover or conflict. For now, I want to focus on the latter. The short version is this: the way you treat your direct reports has an impact not only on them but on their families and the communities to which they belong. A person frustrated at work necessarily carries that frustration with them in their communities – it spills over. The longer version of this point is that what is even more detrimental than the frustration we experience at work is the effort we put in trying to “compartmentalize” and not have it spill over. Unfortunately, it always does. If not to others around you, at the very least to your own health.
Managers have the ability to impact the lives of their direct reports in significant far-reaching ways. The way they treat people day-to-day over a period of time has an impact on their psyche, on their body, on their families, and on their communities.
In other words: your manager is more important to your health than your primary care doctor.
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3.
When we look back at our experiences at work we can all acknowledge that our managers have played a significant role in making our lives somewhere on a continuum:
miserable – tolerable – acceptable – enjoyable – inspirational
And once we acknowledge this for ourselves as someone’s direct report then we as managers can at least be deliberate about what we want our direct reports to experience. And I’m not suggesting that “inspirational” is what all managers should be aiming for, if only for the simple fact that not all direct reports want to be inspired. A lot of folks are fine with “acceptable” and “enjoyable” (“tolerable” entails some form of discomfort and I’m assuming that no one wants to be “miserable”). And if you’re deliberate about what you want your direct reports to experience you can then identify
I acknowledge, as I did earlier, that the workplace experience is affected by company policies and culture. It is also nonetheless affected by how managers treat their direct reports.
I’m not talking about the one-time, the extraordinary, the heroic, the bandied-about in the company’s newsletter.⁷ I’m talking about the every day, the day in and day out, over the course of weeks, months and years. It’s not what you think you’re doing or the impact you think you’re having, it’s about what your direct reports experience.
In this regard I believe that people have a misguided sense of legacy when they think it’s about the accomplishments that people are going to remember about them. In reality, what we carry with us after a manager leaves, what stays with us after they are gone, is how they treated us, and how they made us feel.⁸
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4.
So, how’s your driving?
These are thoughts on the book I am writing. They were first delivered to readers of my free, monthly newsletter. It’s easy to subscribe… and unsubscribe.
By far the most substantial piece of content I read recently is from Jay Rosen. He is a press critic who writes about the media and politics. He is a professor at the School of Journalism at New York University.
Here is how it starts:
"When in doubt, draw a distinction."
Not sure where he got it, but in grad school one of my teachers told me that. Some of the best advice I ever received.
This THREAD is about some of the key distinctions I draw on to do my work. If you're into that kind of thing.😎
Ready? 1/
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) February 22, 2021
And here are some of the distinctions he draws in this Twitter thread:
He says that
For distinctions to work, the terms have to be sufficiently close that prying them apart clears space for thought. If I write, “bending is not the same as breaking,” well, who said it was? That one is going nowhere. But “naked is not the same as nude” is an idea with legs.
It’s not just semantics. Well, it is, but it’s more than that. It’s a show of clarity of ideas in your field of endeavor. In his case, it’s media and politics.
And it occurs in all fields.
Just last week, I bumped into a few more instances:
When we fail at forming new patterns of behavior, we often blame ourselves, rather than the bad advice we read from someone who doesn’t really understand what can and cannot be a habit.
A habit is a behavior done with little or no thought, while a routine involves a series of behaviors frequently —and intentionally— repeated. A behavior has to be a regularly performed routine before it can become a habit at all.
The problem is that many of us try to skip the “routine” phase.
There are other distinctions that Rosen does not discuss in his thread, including
Anyone who took part in one of my leadership development programs will have heard me discuss exit, voice, “loyalty”/conformity, and sabotage as a way to distinguish how different people react differently to finding themselves in conflict situations.
The take-aways from this piece?
And since a lot of readers of this newsletter are managers then it begs the question: are your distinctions mostly about the domain of expertise that preceded your becoming a manager or are they about management itself?
The content of this post is an edited version of an entry in my free, monthly newsletter in which I share my own writing as well as links to articles and research on management, leadership, and strategy. It’s easy to subscribe… and unsubscribe.
I’m a jazz fan, always have been. And I’m a Monk fan.
Monk created this list when a musician joined his band for a multiple-week gig.
I encourage the managers I work with to have a readme document for themselves and to have a structured, personal way of welcoming new members to their team. It also goes a long way for that welcoming to include peers.
In any case, here’s Monk’s list. What does yours look like?
Source: Open culture
Managing is getting something done, stabilizing existing processes, controlling and correcting deviations to ensure quality and reliability.
Leadership is about doing something new or better, whether a simple process improvement or a transformation. It is more about reframing for improvement. It likely calls upon people to learn new skills and shift beliefs.
Our tendency to ascribe leadership to individuals that hold a formal entitlement as head of a team, group, or function is unhelpful when distinguishing management from leadership as activities with different purposes.
Leadership is not the property of a formal position, but rather an activity that occurs anywhere in the company. A person responsible for such a change is therefore in a leadership role irrespective of title.
source: “Culture shift with Ed and Peter Schein” in Dialogue. Also a Twitter thread.