Jason Yip:

Good relationships facilitate future support and creates advocates. Being able to get something done is not just about your individual capability but also about your influence with the stakeholders and teams that you depend on.

The art of naming what’s happening in the room to get things back on track.

Tara Seshan:

For years, communicating tradeoffs to senior leaders was one of my biggest challenges. While presenting the pros and cons between two priorities, I’d somehow always end up committing to doing both, and in less time than I had planned. As you’d expect, this usually went … badly. I’d burn myself out or, worse, burn out my team.

But when I started managing, I finally understood why I had been so ineffective at it. Sitting on the other side of the table, I watched others make the same mistakes I had. I realized I hadn’t been framing tradeoffs correctly.

Charity Majors:

Success in business is what earns you the right to devote more time, attention, and resources to cultural issues, and to experiment with things that matter to you.

One of the most common ways that leaders fail is that they get so bogged down in the daily chaos of running the company, managing a team, raising money, responding to crises and scoring OKRs is that they struggle to keep the focus zeroed in on the most important thing: succeeding at your mission.

Phil Le-Brun:

Rather than pretending you can craft the perfect organisation chart and operating model, I advocate starting with principles and tenets to guide your organisation. The former method is an overly logical and static approach to human issues, as I described in my first post on untangling your organisational hairball. Principles have (I hope) shifted from outdated concepts, such as spans of control, in search of elusive efficiencies to those better suited for an era where complexity, speed, and innovation define organisations. Previous blog posts give in-depth examples of principles and decision-making tenets. But remember, the most beautifully crafted principles in the world mean nothing unless a comprehensive understanding of them cascades throughout the organisation.

A big part of leading teams is identifying issues to address and opportunities to exploit. The bigger the team, the harder it is to sense trends that need attention. Your job is to help ferret out the signal from the noise—like a human high-pass filter¹.

It’s tempting to jump in at the first sign of difficulty—this can send you around the bend as you chase an increasing number of tails. It can also lead to intervention bias.

The trick, instead, is to slow down and “debounce the signal”. Wait for input around a topic to collect, then take stock of your response.

Having a broad purview and taking the time to think means you can internalise things that others haven’t yet. Typically, the challenge isn’t whether something needs resolving but which of the many opportunities you should direct your constrained capacity towards.

Letting some time pass and banking a couple of nights of sleep can soften your view and reduce the effect of tilt. Working with trusted advisors in your team can also help establish perspective and modulate your response.

What happens when you slow down?

Sometimes, things resolve themselves. The team steps up and sorts things². Internal or external factors change and obviate the issue.

Sometimes, new information comes to light that contradicts what you’ve previously heard. Follow-up conflicting information is particularly prevalent with interpersonal issues within teams. Welcome to the Rashomon Effect. Regardless, you need more information to establish what is happening.

Sometimes, you don’t hear anything more on a topic. Given a large enough team, this scenario is pretty standard. The risk here, of course, is that low-frequency issues can still have a high impact.

Sometimes, things are chronic and severe enough that they need more attention. It becomes evident that you need to do something.

Finally, some issues or opportunities are significant enough that you need to act immediately.

The art is in knowing when to act and when to wait.

Luca Dellanna:

Leaders who think organizational culture is a set of concepts attempt to change it using words and concepts – and inevitably fail, because organizational culture is not a set of concepts.

It’s a track record.

In particular, it’s the track record of which behaviors are a waste of time and which lead to good personal outcomes.

Walk the talk, people.

Simon Harris:

Participatory leadership is knowing when to lead, when to be led, and when to get out of the way. It’s connecting people, creating and holding the space for them, helping with jobs to be done, and allowing things to play out. It’s fostering a sense of ownership and accountability by actively involving and guiding others in problem-solving and decision-making. It’s recognising that no individual possesses all the necessary information or expertise, and that we don’t need to have all the knowledge and all the answers. It’s being comfortable being uncomfortable.

Farnam Street:

The key lesson here is that if we are to intervene, we need a solid idea of not only the benefits of our interventions but also the harm we may cause—the second and subsequent order consequences. Otherwise, how will we know when, despite our best intentions, we cause more harm than we do good?

Farnam Street:

Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.

Christoffer Stjernlöf:

The perspectives needed for good engineering (And good management, for that matter):

1. Trust the people doing the work.
2. See the problem for yourself and accept reality.
3. Attend to the big picture.
4. (Work with interactions and trade-offs.)

Simon Harris:

Most people want to improve, know that improvement requires change, and want to take an active part in it. Engage with them early and often, be explicit about what is known, and what is still to be worked through, and help them understand for themselves how to use their own skills to drive the change you want to see.

Simon digs into building the currency you need to spend when rolling out change—trust and understanding.

Kristi Hedges:

Inspired people make inspired workers make inspired companies. Encourage workers to define passion in any way they want, and align your workplace to support a wide variety of situations.

This means stretching your own ideas of what ambition looks like. Is it better to have a productive worker who leaves early to train for a marathon or a burned-out worker who’s strapped to their desk? How do you judge the person who declines a promotion because they love their job exactly as it is?

Let’s not punish people who have an updated model of success that works for them.

It’s often necessary to roll out organisational changes in a business, e.g. new reporting structures, goal setting frameworks, or planning processes. Each change introduced requires time for people to adapt and normalise.

When businesses introduce a series of changes in quick succession, people deal with them like a swimmer facing a tight set of waves. As they adjust to the wake of one change, they are immediately destabilised by the onset of another.

This situation can make it difficult for people to build their capability and improve performance. Leaders spend most of their coaching effort on dealing with the impact of the changes rather than improving an individual’s performance.

If you find managers in your team are spending the majority of their time coaching people through change it’s likely a sign that you are trading off rolling out change over coaching performance.

Sean Byrnes:

In fact, as a leader, there are often only a handful of key decisions that make the difference between success and failure. The challenge is not whether you can be at your best all the time, the challenge is whether you are at your best when you make those key decisions. Since we never know when those decisions will happen, we have to find a way to be ready for them at all times.

…

I rebuilt my schedule with some new rules:

• Exercise is part of my job
• Sleep is part of my job
• Spending time with my family is part of my job

Product development is a team sport mostly carried out through meetings and conversations.

Two practical things you can try to help create clarity and reduce chaos in particularly complex conversations:

1. Consolidate progress with a series of summaries.
2. Crystallise outcomes in writing.

These might seem obvious, but they don’t happen as often as I’d hoped.

Consolidate progress with a series of summaries

Do you find yourself in meetings with multiple people discussing complex topics?

Does a series of tangents and related issues emerge as the conversation progresses?

In the end, are you unsure of where things are at?

Are you confident that you understand the situation but are uncertain if it’s the same for others?

Taking complex, meandering conversations and providing clear, structured summaries throughout is incredibly valuable ¹.

I think of each summary as incrementally locking in consensus or taking a collective step up the ladder of inference, as described in Crucial Conversations.

Sometimes the state of play seems obvious, and therefore it feels unnecessary to summarise. I suggest pushing through this feeling and doing it anyway to ensure alignment and avoid pluralistic ignorance.

Crystallise outcomes in writing

As soon as you leave the conversation, you are immediately misaligned again ².

You can reduce this misalignment by sharing a written conversation summary including decisions and actions.

Given the volume of conversations leaders tend to be in, capturing the outcomes becomes essential for rebooting context later or remembering which decisions were made and why.

Roger Martin:

The entire white-collar workforce of the modern company works in decision factories where they pump out decisions such as what and how much to produce, how to market and sell what is produced, what new things to consider producing and selling, where to sell what it produces, how to protect the IP behind what it produces, and so on.

If you had that as your conceptualization, you would naturally do things such as organize around decisions; measure output in terms of decisions; measure and work on enhancing the productivity of producing decisions; and so on. But companies don’t do any of the above because their conceptualization is of a coordination and control structure, not a decision factory.

Luis Velasquez and Kristin Gleitsman:

Leaders who model optimism set a positive tone in the workplace, empowering team members to recover from setbacks. If you want your team to navigate challenges independently, the worst thing you can do in the face of a setback is look for who to blame. Developing the organizational muscle to pull together to overcome setbacks is crucial. And while blame is not helpful, team retrospectives can help the team collectively get better at anticipating and avoiding similar setbacks in the future, creating a sense of shared accountability.

Rands:

Leaders sound like they know what they’re talking about because they’ve taken the time to understand the situation entirely. They read the room; they communicate clearly and consistently to their audience. Their context has been carefully constructed by asking penetrating questions from the humans who most understand the situation.

This entire post is on the money.

Zero Defects means the goal would be considered ‘failed’ if there were even a single defect, so even if the intention behind the goal was good, it puts great pressure on people to find other ways to achieve this impossible objective.

Farnam Street:

Sometimes doing nothing at all or removing inputs is the better approach.

Dina Denham Smith and Alicia A. Grandey:

Leaders are expected to attend to employees’ mental and physical health and burnout (while also addressing their own), demonstrate bottomless sensitivity and compassion, and provide opportunities for flexibility and remote work — all while managing the bottom line, doing more with less, and overcoming challenges with hiring and retaining talent. They should appear authentic, but if they get too honest about their distress, others may lose confidence in their leadership, known as the “authenticity paradox.”

This whole article resonates with my experience.

A post that looks at various aspects of being a senior leader.

I personally have a fondness for framing the role as building the machine that builds the machine and all that entails.

Sam McAfee:

Many organizations still focus the majority of their decision making on one person or one small group of people at the top. This concentration of decision making isn’t just inefficient, it’s degenerative. No organization that maintains such centralized control over decisions will be able to adapt at the speed required by today’s markets.

…

The other key to promoting autonomy is to ensure individuals and teams have the skills they need to act on the clarity that comes from strategic thinking. Skills are honed through delegation. Managers must practice delegation to successfully develop new skills in their direct reports. And yet, good delegation skill is more rare than it should be.

…

Teams can then take the clarity they capture from long-term strategic thinking, the capabilities they’ve built by having decisions delegated to them, and combine them into action that is fast, flexible, and responsive.

Dave Bailey provides a manager’s guide to holding their teams accountable.

Dave Kellog:

In the end, there are two types of things that CEOs can potentially stress about:

• Things they can control. They shouldn’t stress over these because they should do something about them, instead.
• Things they can’t control. They shouldn’t stress over these because doing so will not change the outcome. Worse yet, it may well change the outcome — for the worse — over the things they can control.

Ergo, CEOs should never stress about things. QED.

Jean-Michel Lemieux:

“I thought that was my job — to take away all this crap from you and let you do your CEO thing. I thought you wanted me to be autonomous. I need autonomy.”

He said sure, but you should cheat “and use my brain to help you”.

Johanna Rothman:

When managers collaborate, they can collaborate on the entire management job. That job is to create an environment where everyone can do succeed, in service of a greater goal.

Instead of changing the management structure, the organization can change the management collaboration.

Instead of separating leadership from serving people, integrate leadership and serving at all levels.

Kent Beck:

“Holding accountable” is code for blame, the attempt to avoid or deflect consequences. Blame is a weak premise from which to work. Blame requires that you spend time and energy protecting yourself. In an environment of blame it is not safe to say what you do and don’t know. Blame leaves everyone worried about who is out to get them. All the energy they spend hiding could be spent interacting and adding value to the project. Work gets done much less efficiently.

Accountability is a powerful premise from which to work. Working well and visibly builds strong relationships. Accepting responsibility sets the stage for satisfaction in a job well done. It’s a pity that the word “accountability” is misused, because the misuse obscures a useful concept.

Accountability can be offered, asked, even demanded, but it cannot be forced. “I hold you accountable,” doesn’t make sense. “I blame you,” or, “I hope you will accept the consequences,” are at least honest, even if they are a toxic basis for a working relationship. Managers can request or demand accountability. For example, a manager could ask that the software be ready to deploy at the end of every week so that the team’s progress is visible. From the other side, accountability can be offered even if it isn’t requested. “I can show you a log of how I spent my time last week,” is an offer of accountability.

Practical experience of using Ray Dalio’s believability metric.

Bill Parcells:

The only way to change people is to tell them in the clearest possible terms what they’re doing wrong. And if they don’t want to listen, they don’t belong on the team.

Those turnarounds taught me a fundamental lesson about leadership: You have to be honest with people—brutally honest. You have to tell them the truth about their performance, you have to tell it to them face-to-face, and you have to tell it to them over and over again. Sometimes the truth will be painful, and sometimes saying it will lead to an uncomfortable confrontation. So be it. The only way to change people is to tell them in the clearest possible terms what they’re doing wrong. And if they don’t want to listen, they don’t belong on the team.

When you’re shaping an org in practice, the work you’re doing usually decomposes to manipulating three levers: structure, incentives, and culture (or, as Andy Grove puts it ‘contractual obligations, economic incentives, and culture’). A good org designer knows that they must pay attention to the interplay between all three elements.

…

I bring up the interplay between structure, incentives and culture because I think highlighting this interplay serves one other purpose: it enlarges the discourse around org design. If you focus on org structure alone, every solution to an org design problem is necessarily a restructuring. This is unrealistic. And, from experience, there are whole classes of problems that may be patched by a change to an incentive system or via a tweak to org culture instead.

Lara Hogan:

So, when a fraught issue arises, how can we help our organization move forward in a way that actually builds rather than breaks trust? Over time, and after many communication mistakes, I honed a four-part template, covering the following

Bungay Stanier explains how advice-giving goes bad; the three personas of your Advice Monster; and the powerful act of staying curious a little longer.

Timothy R. Clark:

Low-velocity decision making. In a nice culture, there’s pressure to go along to get along. A low tolerance for candor makes the necessary discussion and analysis for decision making shallow and slow. You either get an echo chamber in which the homogenization of thought gives you a flawed decision, or you conduct what seem to be endless rounds of discussion in pursuit of consensus. Eventually, this can lead to chronic indecisiveness.

Denise Yu:

In every conversation you’re part of, create clarity and reduce chaos.

With more advice on how to do that in the linked thread.

Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can step forward and create the new replacement theory. If you believe too much you’ll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won’t get started.

Pat Kua:

Makers receive constant praise for solving problems, and take pleasure in being the expert. Leaders in Maker mode go out of their way to show they have the right answer. They need to have the first and last say. They over invest in their own solutions and don’t create space for others to contribute.

…

Multipliers amplify or multiply the intelligence of the people around them. They lead organisations or teams that are able to understand and solve hard problems rapidly, achieve their goals, and adapt and increase their capacity over time.

Will Larson:

Stories focus on the why, sharing the experience and context around the decision and results.

Stories also eliminate most of the least productive follow-up conversations after giving advice, where the advice-requester then argues against the advice. Stories relieve the advice-giver from the obligation to defend their advice. There’s nothing to agree or disagree with, just a recounting of past events.

Devon Price:

It’s really helpful to respond to a person’s ineffective behavior with curiosity rather than judgement.

…

If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context.

Claire Lew:

A leader doesn’t shape people – a leader shapes an environment.

Dan Slimmon:

Ideas are funny things. It can take hours or days or months of noodling on a concept before you’re even able to start putting your thoughts into a shape that others will understand. And by then, you’ve explored the contours of the problem space enough that the end result of your noodling doesn’t seem interesting anymore: it seems obvious.

…

But as you get into more senior-type engineering roles, your most valuable contributions start to take the form not of concrete labor, but of conceptual labor. You’re able to draw on a rich mental library of abstractions, synthesizing and analyzing concepts in a way that only someone with your experience can do.

Camille Fournier:

So what are the management skills that are needed to achieve [Engineering productivity]? At the first level of management, they look like:

1. Breaking down the scope of projects to help your team ship frequently. An eye for the MVP, for sequencing work and for predicting likely risks and bottlenecks for project completion are the skills here. This is why I think project management is such an important part of engineering leadership development, and why I hate to hand it off to professional project managers for work that doesn’t cross teams or organizations.

Bingo.

An explicit approach to delegation.

Camille Fournier:

So the next time you find yourself tempted to volunteer to take over responsibility for something from someone who reports to you, pause. Instead of taking it over, ask them what they think the next steps should be. Give your feedback, and let them bring the follow-ups to you in the next appropriate touch base. You owe it to them to stop taking over their work in the name of helpfulness.

Tips to visualise and limit context switching.

Camille Fournier:

If you are (or were) a highly opinionated engineer, practicing making space for information rather than quickly jumping in and sharing your conclusions is a must for leadership growth.

Management and leadership lessons.

Dan North:

Over the last year or two I have been exploring OKRs—Objectives and Key Results—with several organisations, from a few hundred people in size to a couple of thousand. Some are well over a year in, some are just starting out. There doesn’t seem to be much out there in terms of experience reports or hands-on advice so I have tried to capture the advice I wish I’d had when I started out.

An extensive look at what it takes to be a senior engineer.