Cory – Leadershipness

Take your Seat at the Great Renegotiation

The IT industry has undergone huge advancements in the last 20 years since I joined it. I would say, conservatively, that a programmer today, with all of the modern tools and frameworks available to them, is probably 5x times as productive as they were in 2020. I also know that these tools and platforms aren’t specific to the IT industry, that sales, marketing, HR, finance, etc. have all undergone similar productivity revolutions.

Imagine that in 2020 we all spent 40 hours a week producing 40 units of value for our employers. Here we are 20 years later, and that same 40 hours now produces 200 units of value. Where has all of this additional value gone? We’re all making mostly the same salaries as we did 20 years ago adjusted for inflation, and free lunches don’t cost that much.

The answer is that companies have captured almost all of this additional value at no additional cost.

Taking a Step Back

I’ve read economists who believe that the pandemic caused people to reflect on their lives without the commute or the requirement to be in a desk for 40 hours a week between the hours of 9am and 5pm, and we’ve realized that, from a work perspective at least, things are so much better now and we don’t want them to go back to the way they were.

We’ve realized that being in the office wasn’t about productivity but about control, not about culture but about a lack of trust, not about doing what’s best for employees but what’s easiest for employers. Let’s face it, organizing a functional remote workplace is challenging. The last year has shown us that maintaining the culture, organizing geographically dispersed teams, and remotely delivering a high-quality product are all possible, they just take a lot of thought and effort. Effort that companies were unwilling to put in before, because they didn’t have to and the outcome was uncertain.

Now we know that it can be done, and that knowledge changes everything.

The Great Renegotiation

One of the reasons that companies didn’t provide the kind of flexibility that we’ve enjoyed during the pandemic is because they were in a stronger negotiating position. An individual negotiating with a company has very little leverage, and the result has been a race to the bottom of wages, benefits, and flexibility. Even the companies famed for their worker-friendly culture: providing massages, free meals, entertainment, and a gym in exchange for your presence in the office for a specific 40 hours a week, doesn’t sound like a bargain to me anymore. And those are the best in the industry!

What we’ve realized in the last 2 years is that the things that really matter to us, the things that bring more meaning and enjoyment to our lives: more time with our families, more time for ourselves, less pressure to respond in the evening and on weekends, and less time commuting, are all very reasonable demands. They are things that would cost our employers so little, but benefit us so much. Companies didn’t create the tools that have made us all so much more productive in the last 20 years on their own. We all did it together, employees and employers, and we should all benefit from these advancements in a way that has the most meaning to us.

Companies are slowly, so slowly, starting to respond not because it’s the right thing to do, but because our global society, in the face of the pandemic, has started to spontaneously behave like a union in a collective bargaining negotiation. We’ve all realized that the old deal was a bad one, negotiated in a different time in a different context that no longer applies, and collectively decided that this deal needs to be remade taking into account the world in which we now live. I think of this not as The Great Resignation, but as The Great Renegotiation.

A New Bargain

In this new world, we are willing to accept:

our current, market-based salaries
our current benefits packages
being available during some core hours for necessary, synchronous work
that companies can keep the extra 160 units of value that we’ve been producing each week since the start of the millennium thanks to automation and productivity improvements
our current 40 hour work week (you should know that this is the next thing we’re coming for #fourdayworkweek)

… in return for:

no more sitting in traffic for 2 hours a day (does anything seem more stupid and infuriating than this senseless loss of hours of our lives?!)
no more sitting at a desk just so you can feel good that we’re working
no more attending meetings that only exist because some people don’t seem to know how to communicate in any other way
the flexibility to do asynchronous work whenever and wherever we choose
the right to sit on the couch and rest when we’re actually sick
the right to attend important family events without the worry that we’ll be seen as uncommitted and receive negative reviews

Companies that are unwilling to accept these terms should be prepared for employees to take their 200 units of value per week to an employer who will, and then be wiling to take their chances in the job market finding someone who is willing to accept turn-of-the-millennium working conditions. People are saying that there’s a labor shortage, but what this really is is the inability of companies to find people willing to accept their old deal.

I’m experiencing this first-hand as I left my job in June, and have been looking for a new one for a couple of months now. I will not even entertain a position at a company that doesn’t meet the above criteria, no matter what other benefits or salary they’re offering. I’ve realized what’s important to me, and will not consider anything that does not provide it. The good news is that while most companies are still catching up to this new reality, there are a lot more opportunities out there than I had hoped. I’m currently talking to a few companies who really get it, and sound like they’d be great partners in my pursuit of a meaningful job that benefits me professionally and personally.

We’re currently living through a very exciting time that I’m sure will be talked about in history books in the decades to come as the time when workers forced a permanent change in their relationship with work. I’m happy to be playing a small part in it, and am very energized by the future that we’re making together. Welcome to your seat at the Great Renegotiation.

How to know when your life goals are right

When I was in my second year at Georgia Tech, my girlfriend at the time asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I had just spent a few weeks that summer at the World Cup in France with my sister. We travelled across the country, ate amazing food, met interesting people, visited fascinating cities, and joined the world in a mutual celebration of soccer. It was a life altering experience. So without thinking too hard about it, I responded that I’d like to live all over the world, learning new languages, exploring different cultures, and meeting different people.

This was not the right answer, or at least not the one she was looking for. She wanted stability for a family, a big house, a yard, security, and all of the other signs of success that young Americans dream of achieving. I remember feeling a little silly and irresponsible, thinking that backpacking across Europe was a something you did after high school or college, and not a life ambition. I was going to have to grow up, and so were my dreams.

Twenty years later I was married to an entirely different woman with a family, a big house, a yard, and security. We were very stable. We had achieved our dream, the dream, at a reasonably young age, but there had, of course, been compromises. I had commuted huge hours for years to get to work, my wife had been working in a job that she had become increasingly disillusioned with over the years, and our savings weren’t what they should been considering how hard we worked. The stress caused both of us to be short-tempered, and we occasionally fought over things neither of us really cared that much about. We needed a vacation.

Getting away

My wife is Polish, and every other year we’d make a summer trip to Poland to visit her family and visit another destination while we were already in Europe. My wife noticed that Wrocław, Poland had just been declared Europe’s best destination in 2018, so we decided that it would be a perfect place to spend a week.

We got an AirBnB right on the old square. It was summer, people were everywhere, the food was amazing, and we fell in love with the place. Spending a week in this beautiful foreign place reminded me of my youthful dream of living, working, and exploring places like it for my entire life. A dream that I thought I had outgrown.

For the first time in decades, I stopped to look at my life, what I had and what I truly wanted. I had a big, beautiful house in a very desirable location, but I felt more alive in a tiny apartment that was a two minute walk from 50+ restaurants and bars. I had a convertible sports car in my garage, but I didn’t even want to own a car at all. I just needed one to get to work. We’d lived in the same city for 20 years (stability!!), and we had stopped exploring it long ago.

I was outwardly successful, but unfulfilled. I had spent the previous two decades perfectly executing a carefully planned strategy to achieve someone else’s dream. I didn’t really need any of the things that I had, and in order to get them we had sacrificed the things that were truly important: family time, international travel, language classes, etc.

Iterative planning

It is often said that “execution trumps strategy”, and this is true. A great strategy counts for nothing if you can’t realize it. What is also true is that executing the wrong strategy, no matter how perfectly, is equally useless. Building the perfect product that no one wants is an excellent way to make a large investment disappear. Often business leaders miss a giant opportunity as it zooms by them while they are focused on executing their current strategy, not realizing that what they are trying to achieve no longer matters.

Markets and technology change fast, and focusing on what you think you’re supposed to do, or what the rest of the industry is doing, can blind you to what you really should be doing. There are a few really effective techniques for cutting through the clutter of information and assumptions and getting at the true core of the problem. I have personally used both First Principles and 5 Whys to help me understand a problem, decide on a goal, and formulate a strategy. But that’s just the first step.

Once you’ve done all of the hard work to determine your ultimate goal, and plot a path to get there, you have to periodically and objectively re-apply these frameworks during your journey to evaluate your progress, your approach, and whether the destination still makes sense. During this evaluation it’s critical to avoid the Sunk Cost Fallacy and Confirmation Bias (First Principles thinking can be especially helpful here) to ensure that all of your efforts are the best investment the company can be making at that time. If you decide that it’s not, then it’s important to have the courage to learn, adjust, and move on. This unemotional detachment from a goal and a plan is often what spells the difference between a successful project or startup and failure.

Life pivot

After returning from our trip and having taken this long, hard look in the mirror, I found a remote-only job 3 months before the first Coronavirus case was announced in the US. We sold our big, beautiful house, and moved to Wrocław in the middle of a pandemic. My life is now so much smaller and quieter, but it’s filled with the things that I care about. The clutter has been removed and everything is simplified.

My Polish is coming along nicely, but I only have another 16 months to master it because we plan on moving again next summer after 2 years in Poland, and then again, and again… It turns out my plan to be a digital nomad was just ahead of its time, and not a childish dream after all. My teenage self didn’t get a lot of things right, but it did seem to know itself. Without all of the clutter of other people’s dreams and expectations, just knowing what made me happy and inspired me, I was able to come up with a goal that was truly aligned with who I was and what I wanted. A great example of First Principles thinking.

How to Avoid the Race to the Bottom

Recently my wife and I were struggling with the kids, which I hear is a common sentiment a year into the pandemic. Trying to teach and maintain healthy habits, we limit their screen time to an hour a day and 2.5 hours a day on the weekend, ask them to do chores around the apartment, and we try to limit their sugar intake. This has been, to put it mildly, a challenge.

They don’t want to do any of it, and will bend, break, or skirt the rules whenever they think they can get away with it. We’re trying to team them habits that are good for them now, and will be valuable skills later, but with the stress of eternal social distancing and a soft-lockdown, they’re waging a constant, low-grade rebellion… and winning. My daughter’s room is a hazardous waste site, our son needs constant supervision to turn in any school assignments on-time, and neither of them want to have anything to do with doing the dishes or taking out the trash.

This has led to a destructive cycle where we take away more and more screen time and privileges for misbehavior, and they then have fewer and fewer things that we can threaten them with, giving them little incentive to behave. This has led to a household where the kids are miserable and bored, the parents feel taken advantage of and frustrated, and the chores are still not getting done! We had reached the bottom.

It’s not a good system when literally no one is winning, so the other day I sat down to think about what we were doing wrong and I was reminded about another broken system that I inherited in the first few days of my current job.

Cherry-picking

Taking over the SaaS Support organization a year ago, one of my teams offered L1 support. It was a small team, that executed simple requests made by coworkers through a Service Desk portal. Ideally, the work was supposed to be frictionless, with requests getting done in under a day, no required clarification or follow-up from the requestor, and a first time delivery with quality.

It wasn’t working. The queue constantly had tickets in it that had failed SLA (our 24-hour delivery commitment), languishing for most of a week, and tickets were being rejected by the requestors at an unacceptable rate. Not much was working.

After talking to the members of the team individually they seemed intelligent, motivated, and competent. Mistakes were being made due to carelessness, not inability, and the tickets that were failing SLA were long-running tasks that took a lot longer than other tasks to execute. The problem didn’t appear to lie with the people, so the manager and I took a look at the system. Why wasn’t it working?

The team was graded by how many tickets they delivered within the 24-hour SLA that were accepted the first time. Sounds like a good definition of success, right? This is what we wanted, however it wasn’t achieving our goals. Digging deeper into the numbers we found a few causes of the problem:

the team was rushing through execution, and not taking care to validate the result before delivering it to the customer in a quest for numbers.
no one wanted to pick up the long-running tasks, because they could do fewer of them, and if they failed SLA they wouldn’t get any credit anyway.

The behaviors we were encouraging with our grading system was not aligned with the outcome we wanted. Aligning goals and incentives is easy to say, but very difficult to do. It has been poorly done by business and governments, large and small, everywhere, throughout all of time, and classically illustrated by the cobra effect.

Tasty Carrots and Sharp Sticks

First, we decided that allowing a team who is supposed to get tickets out as quickly as possible shouldn’t be spending time deciding what ticket they wanted to work on. It creates an incentive to cheat, one of the classic causes of goal misalignment. We created restrictions on the queue, where the tickets were prioritized by age, and an agent completing a task automatically had the next ticket in the queue assigned. No one could cheat, and no one had to worry that their co-workers were taking advantage of the system.

Secondly, we decided that prioritizing quality and productivity was incompatible. We changed the grading so the agents got credit for tickets that went past the SLA (only fair since they could no longer choose their tickets), in the hope that a focus on quality would lead to an increase in overall system productivity as Lean Six Sigma predicts.

It worked! Within two weeks, the team that consistently failed SLA on ~20% of requests, and had rejections on another 10%, got the backlog of tickets to under 10 during the working day and kept it there. Rejections also fell to less than 1% of requests. This was all done with no additional resources or automations. It has been over a year, and tickets that fail SLA are now very rare despite this no longer being a grading criteria.

Treating My Kids Like Employees

Now, how could I apply this approach to my kids? First, we had to decide what my wife and I wanted, keeping it simple and focused:

good effort at school (grades are like SLA, not the measure we want to track)
household chores done

What did the kids want?

time on electronics
desserts

With these goals and incentives in mind, we came up with a system that awarded them points for positive reports from school, and completion of chores that we thought the kids could handle on their own. Points could be lost for poor reports from school. These points could be converted to 30 minutes of electronics (up to the 1 hour per weekday and 2.5 hours per weekend day previously established), or five points for a dessert.

The next morning my daughter unloaded the dishwasher and my son made his bed, both without being asked, for the first time ever. A screaming success. It turns out that our arbitrary rewarding and punishing behaviors was demotivating to the kids. They were reluctant to perform a chore with an uncertain payout, and were less hesitant to do something wrong when the punishment was unknown. Now that they knew the score (literally!) they enthusiastically looked for ways to get more points, and now that my son knows that not doing an assignment could cost him his full hour of Fortnite that evening he is far more likely to get it done.

We’re all self-interested, and even the most disciplined of us is going to spend more time on things with a greater payoff and avoid things with a higher downside. One of the magical aspects of leadership is truly understanding your employees and the system in which they operate. Without that knowledge and empathy, you have no hope of designing a system so that it encourages the behaviors that provide the greatest payoff to the organization. But if you can do so, you can create an environment where employees love to come to work, and you never have to beg or threaten to get the results that you want.

Soft Power

I actually had multiple people respond to my previous post and comment that their favorite part was the point I made about informal authority. Informal authority is such a cornerstone of my leadership philosophy that I was sure that I had written a full-length post dedicated to it, but after reviewing my archives it turns out I haven’t! It definitely deserves a post of its own, so here it is:

Formal authority is vested in you by the company and your title. It is given to you when others are placed under your leadership; it is an awesome power and a powerful tool, and is best left completely unused.

Informal authority is earned through your actions and your reputation, and cannot be given or faked. It is the true currency of leadership, and the invisible steering wheel with which real leaders guide their organizations. In a healthy organization with a positive culture, informal authority is all that is necessary to keep a team aligned and productive.

Formal Authority Apocalypse

As I’ve mentioned in this blog before, most of my ideas about proper leadership come from experiencing the opposite for so long from so many different sources. I have seen what bad leadership looks like so clearly and so pervasively, that it crystallized in me a determination to never subject anyone else to the kind of “leadership” I had suffered. Formal authority is the tool of those leaders that I have spoken of.

You can recognize a weak leader by their consistent use of imperatives and self-reference: “do this…”, “I need this…”, “this is what you will do and how you will do it…” They dictate a vision to their subjects, whose sole purpose is to execute on their master’s plan. Any attempt to question, deviate, or even propose an alternative results in the wielding of their formal authority; a constant reminder that things will be done their way, because they’re in charge.

If you ever find yourself in a situation like the above, leave. Not because it’s a miserable work environment, even though it is. Not because it will stunt your career growth and professional development, even though it will. Not because of any high-minded, moral objection to this behavior, but because it is a failing strategy. A weak leader who dictates from on high creates an organization where ideas are only generated from a single mind, where discussion is silenced, independence crushed, and initiative discouraged.

A workplace like this will be out-competed quickly by organizations where ideas win the argument no matter their source, where disagreement is encouraged, and initiative rewarded. The command and control model of corporate authority is obsolete, and working at an organization where leaders have to lean on their formal authority is a dead end. People in these organizations are promoted based on relationships and their ability to follow orders, not to think or creatively problem solve. If you are good at what you do, you should avoid this situation at all costs.

Punctuation Matters

How do you avoid using your formal authority, but still manage an organization effectively? How do you drive the agenda, execute on a plan, but avoid all of the pitfalls described above? It can be as simple as the usage of punctuation.

I mentioned above that weak leaders lean on their formal authority by issuing commands and using terse imperative statements which leave very little room for discussion or disagreement. If you instead turn these statements into questions, you invite discussion and disagreement. An employee is far more likely to voice an opinion after “would you do this?” than after “you will do this.”

A team of smart motivated individuals doesn’t need to be told what to do and how to do it. They merely need to know what the priorities are, and they can take the rest from there. Denying creative, intelligent people a forum for discourse or disagreement will result in their departure from the organization, leaving only mindless sheep in their place. Always leave the door open for disagreement from your team, and when someone walks through that door welcome them.

After asking one of my team members if they would do something, they often point out other priorities that they believe are important. What ensues then is a collaborative discussion about what is most critical and why. Some of the things they bring to my attention I had either forgotten or did know about at all. How could I have made the best, most informed decision about priorities without that discussion?

Informally Persistent

Informal authority builds credibility in the eyes of your team. They see you as someone who values them and their opinion and is secure enough in your position to accept disagreement. People are much more likely and willing to put in the extra effort for a manager that they believe truly hears them and plans that they feel some ownership over.

Like in all things in life, it is necessary to observe and recognize your own behavior. Try to be attuned to your tone and how you delegate work. Be aware if you are encouraging discussion and welcoming differing ideas, or if you are often commanding and dismissive of alternative views. It may not even something that you are aware of until you look for it.

If you ever find yourself trying to use informal authority, but having to fall back on formal authority to achieve your aims, take a step back and review the situation. At some point, I believe that all reliance on formal authority is an indication of an underlying systemic issue: Are you trying to achieve the wrong thing and your team is trying to tell you? Do you have team members that take your attempts at collaboration for weakness and become obstructive? Are you too focused on your goals instead of those of the team and its members?

All of those are situations that can be dealt with and resolved, but only if they are recognized for what they are. Don’t mistake a systemic or cultural issue for a failure of informal authority. Informal authority won’t necessarily be effective if there are other issues present, but that’s not a reason to abandon it; it’s a reason to fix the problem that’s causing it to fail in the first place. If you start with the view that all appeals to formal authority are a failure in leadership and should be addressed as such, then you’re on the road to creating a healthy productive team.

Drawing the Line

If you’ve read any of my blog entries, you know that one of my core tenants of leadership is that a leader has no greater goal or responsibility than helping the members of their team achieve their goals. This obviously requires getting to know each team member well in order to understand what their goals are. It’s natural to build empathy and become close to your team members as you get to know them, as you make their dreams and desires the purpose of your day, as you enable them to grow beyond their current role and abilities, but how close is too close.

I will say that that empathy is absolutely necessary to be an effective leader. It will motivate you and help you push through the hard times, but it can be a double-edged sword if you lose perspective and a professional distance. Employees who feel that you are more buddy than boss may be tempted to push the boundaries trusting that their friend wouldn’t punish them, that their special relationship means the rules don’t apply to them.

This attitude can be as destructive to the morale of a team as almost any other team dysfunction. If any team members are perceived to be receiving special treatment and avoiding punishment for bad behavior, then team members who are doing everything right won’t be motivated to follow the rules either. The choice then becomes to allow discipline to slip across the entire team, or to punish your friend and risk losing a good employee. The only good way out of this situation is to never allow it to arise in the first place.

This can be harder than it sounds. Building a positive relationship with your team members, establishing trust, participating in team building exercises are all valuable activities, and are designed to bring the team closer. How does a leader who has organized and participated in team lunches, after work socials, and holiday parties with their team keep a professional distance? For people like myself, who are naturally social and build relationships easily, this is a real danger.

Maintaining Authority

I believe that, like all leadership activities, one should start with one’s goals in mind. What are you looking to achieve and what are you trying to avoid through these social activities? You want your team to see you as a person, to trust you, to believe that you have their best interests at heart. At the same time, it is critical that you maintain their respect, be someone for them to emulate, model behaviors you would like to see in your team, and above all maintain authority.

I’m not talking about the authority given you by your position at the company: formal authority. I see formal authority as a tool of last resort when all other avenues have failed. Using formal authority is an admission of failure, and should be avoided whenever possible. Leadership, when done properly, makes formal authority unnecessary in almost all situations.

The authority that I mean is informal. It’s the authority granted to you by your team in the way they listen to you not because you’re the boss, but because they respect your opinion. Informal authority gives a leader’s voice weight in a way that formal authority never can. Informal authority is what allows you to correct your employee’s behavior through a simple side conversation instead of an HR-approved Performance Improvement Plan. It’s this authority that must be guarded at all costs.

Create Space

One way to maintain professional distance is to decline invitations to lunch. Lunch is when people vent their frustrations, complain about their work, and, sometimes, their boss. This venting can be healthy and necessary for an employee, and they can’t do it if you’re always there. Give them space to talk to each other about what’s bothering them, and if you’re running a strong, healthy team, then the other team members will talk the employee through the problem for you.

It’s good to not have to solve everyone’s problems, and if anything really important is said, you’ll probably hear about it anyway. Eating lunch with the boss might be fun and not overly stressful sometimes, but it’s definitely a different experience than a lunch that’s just with peers. It’s still a team building exercise, just one you don’t have to always participate in. This will set the expectation that you will join sometimes, but not always, thus leaving room for different conversations to occur at different times.

Always at Work

When you do choose to join your team for a social event, it’s critical that you be cognizant of your behavior. I tend to be very informal with my team both in the office and out, but I would never allow myself to get drunk, tell inappropriate jokes, or display any behavior that would undermine my authority. The easiest way to ensure this is to think that if you are with anyone from you company, anywhere, ever, then you are at work. If you can’t say it or do it at work, then you can’t say it or do it if you are with someone from work.

For me, this is a rule that leaves no room for compromise. It can be difficult sometimes to remember to behave differently in some social situations than others depending on who you’re with, but as I wrote earlier, the consequences of a misstep that could compromise your informal authority could be disastrous. If you feel that treating all social situations with coworkers as a work event is excessive or not something that you can trust yourself to do, then I would strongly advise you to avoid these situations altogether. It is far better to remain a distant leader than one who is too close to the team.

You know you’re striking the right balance when your team comes to you with problems, and actively polices each other without your intervention. That speaks to a healthy team dynamic that needs to be carefully nurtured. The leader sets the example, models the company’s culture, and is responsible for cultivating a healthy team dynamic. Leadership takes discipline, empathy, and moderation, and a strategic leader would never put their team or their position at risk for a night of socializing.

Busy Is Dumb

Anyone in IT can tell you, and Americans are notorious for this, that a completely full calendar is a badge of honor. Ideally not only should you have every minute of every day committed, but you should have overlapping meetings, preferably three deep. The thinking, as best I can figure it goes, “if you’re important, then everyone wants you to be in their meeting.” If you’re not as busy as you can possibly be, then you’re not contributing to your full ability.

The Busyness Fallacy

I have fallen into this trap, as has almost everyone I’ve ever worked with. No one has ever explicitly explained this to me, it’s cultural, implied. You notice that the people you report to have more full calendars than you do, and that the people they report to even more so. Expectations are set, and everyone very quickly comes to the same understanding: busy is good. Busy = advancement.

The longer I’ve been in the workforce, the more I’ve realized that conventional wisdom isn’t always right, however. I’ve found that some of my most profound insights have come from questioning what everyone just knew to be true, and almost nothing is held to be more true than the above. It’s for this reason that I was shocked when I read that Warren Buffet, the very symbol of American success, sustained over decades, had, at most, a single item in his daily planner that he’d kept his entire career. He would often have no scheduled appointments on a given day.

How? Why? Was Warren Buffet’s time not important? Was he not needed in meetings? By clients? How could he get away without committing every second of every day to someone or something, and why would he want to? It got me thinking.

Question the Fundamental Assumption

What is the effect of being busy all the time? Sure, attending a ton of meetings meant that you were in the loop, your voice was heard, your input recorded, but was that really the best use of one’s time? Of course, there are important meetings, but not every meeting is critical. While you’re busy, what is happening outside of the meeting room, and what signal does it send to your people that you’re always in one?

It occurred to me that adding a meeting to your calendar, in effect, took some of the slack out of your day. Slack that could be used to have a conversation with someone, handle an unexpected issue, or just sit and think for a moment. Schedule enough meetings, and there ends up being no slack in your day for these ostensibly less important things, but really, what could possibly be more important in a leader’s day than being available for his people?

The message that continuously being in meetings sends to your team is that you’re off doing important leader-y things, and that they should just learn to handle their unimportant issues by themselves. It removes availability, and creates an artificial separation between you and your team. This is exactly why I strongly advise against anyone in leadership ever wearing headphones at work. It sends the signal that your time is too important for your team, and that you should not be bothered.

Time to Breathe

After this realization, I’ve taken to actively leave as much time as I can open on my schedule. I attend meetings that I think are worth it, but don’t attend everything that I possibly can. I leave huge gaps in my schedule, and spend that time either at my desk available to my team, or walking around actively engaging them to see if they need anything from me.

It’s a sign about how ingrained the philosophy of busyness is in our culture that despite this, when people come to my desk to ask me a question, they often preface it with an apology or an acknowledgement that they know how busy I am, but if they could just get a moment of my time they’d really appreciate it. I consistently respond that nothing I could be doing would be more important than helping them with their problem, but the apologies persist. If they’re reluctant to bring their issues to me when I’m sitting quietly at my desk, do you think I’d ever hear about it if I spent all day, every day in a meeting? I’d never have any idea what my team was doing, if they were struggling, and I’d never be available to help them with their problems.

Serving Your Team

This approach has an additional benefit that reinforces another priciple of mine: creating opportunity for others. Some meetings are important, but not critical. They need leadership in attendance, but does it have to be me? I’ve started asking members of my team that have shown an interest in leadership or management to attend these meetings in my place, and to let me know if anything comes out of it that needs my attention. This has the duel effect of keeping my schedule free, and giving members of my team exposure and experience leading meetings.

Inevitably things go wrong where something important gets missed, or a detail gets miscommunicated. Afterall, these people are learning how to lead. Imagine, however, how much worse these misses would be if I were constantly in meetings and less aware of the issues the team was dealing with. By keeping my time free, I notice much faster and am much more available to deal with things that unexpectedly come up.

I know that this entire post could be construed as a defense of laziness, of having others do your work for you, but the truth is I’m just as busy all day as I ever was before. The difference is that I spend all of my time handling things that only I can do. Things come up unexpectedly all day, things that I would be otherwise unaware of if I kept myself fully scheduled, and I have the flexibility to handle them. I spend all day addressing my number one priority, helping my team.

In the end, it’s not about doing less work, it’s about priorities. By leaving your day open, you are prioritizing your team over the appearance of importance, prioritizing flexibility over your own visibility, and prioritizing your teams goals over your own, and nothing is more important than that.

One-on-Won

My company is performing quarterly performance reviews this month, which means that members of my team are to submit a series responses to self-evaluation type questions, one of which is to describe their role and duties. One of the members of my team responded to that question with a copied and pasted version of their job description from our company’s website.

At first I was a little surprised and frustrated that they would put so little thought and effort into their responses. How could they expect to get anything of value out of our performance review meeting without putting any effort or thought into their behaviors over the last three months. Without that pre-work and serious introspection, our performance review meeting was going to be a waste of time.

Performance Reviews Suck

Then it occurred to me that that was exactly the point. These meetings had been a waste of time everywhere I had ever worked. Human Resources dictates that you must do performance reviews, because that’s what serious companies do. A manager takes hours of their busy week to remind their reports to fill out the company mandated paperwork, and then has to read the responses and schedule a meeting to talk about it. Notes are taken at the meeting, submitted to HR, and then never spoken of again.

I’ve never had the results of a quarterly or yearly review impact my job or career in any way, and I it was very rare that a manager put more than a nominal effort into caring about this process or my career. I would bet that the person who submitted their job description as their thoughts on their role at the company had had similar experiences. Why put in the effort if it won’t have any impact? Why put any thought into a document that is intended to check a box and will go into a filing cabinet to never see the light of day again?

The real question wasn’t why hadn’t they put any thought or effort into the responses, but why would anyone. As leaders, it’s our job to communicate to the team that any effort they put into their career will be supported and reciprocated by us. If they’re willing to put in the time to seriously self-examine your behaviors and determine which of those behaviors support your goals and which undermine then, then so will I. If they want to take a training class to expand your skillset, then I’ll help them manage their tasks and schedule to make sure they can do it.

In the end, once the direct report believes that they are not the only person who cares about their career, then they’ll start to open up to you about their goals, and they’ll be more receptive of criticism because they’ll trust that it’s constructive and coming from a desire to help. This same criticism, given before that trust has been built will not be so quickly or gladly received. In other words, if it’s important to you, then it’s important to me.

Better One-on-Ones

My quarterly performance reviews this month went very well, in part because no one was surprised. Their goals were things that we had discussed at their weekly one-on-ones. Any behaviors that I had noticed that I thought were counterproductive had been mentioned, and a plan for remediating those behaviors had been put in place. Progress towards goals was tracked at every meeting. The performance review had just become a formalized extension of a meeting that we had had weekly for months.

These meetings, like quarterly reviews, had always been painful for me everywhere else I had ever been. They were cancelled more often then not, because my manager had a conflict. This told me exactly where in the list of my manager’s obligations I stood. When we did have them, they were always updates from me to my manager about what I had been working on and when I thought I would be done. In other words, my one-on-one was intended to serve my manager’s need for an update and were always about my job and never about my career.

I believe that one-on-one’s, like a leader’s entire job, is to serve the direct report. My one-on-ones are focused entirely on the needs, concerns, and goals of those I’m meeting with. I only reschedule the meeting in the most urgent of circumstances, and almost never cancel it. Managing my team and their concerns is the most important part of my job, and this meeting is an opportunity to express that.

These meetings don’t have to be dire wastes of time. They can provide real value to the company, to the manager, and to the direct reports. At the end of every meeting I always ask if there is anything I can do to help, anything I can do to support them better, and every week someone says something that they hadn’t volunteered earlier. These comments, which would have otherwise gone unsaid, have led directly to the improvement of organizational processes. These improvements won’t happen if you focus on your needs instead of those of your direct reports.

Here is a summation of advice on how to win at one-on-ones:

Don’t reschedule. These meetings are important, and should be treated that way. Exceptions to this rule should be very rare.
Take notes throughout the week about things to mention at the meeting. These can be compliments for good work, concerns about behaviors, or organizational updates to share with them. If you don’t note it, you won’t remember to bring it up.
ALWAYS focus on your direct report. If you take care of your team’s goals, your goals will take care of themselves. Use this time to find out what they need from you to better succeed.
ALWAYS follow-up. If you commit to doing something in this meeting, do it and then provide an update at the next meeting. Nothing will lose you credibility faster than offering to help, but then not doing anything.

With a little effort and the right mindset, you can make one-on-ones and their awkward cousin, the performance review, fun, and informative. There’s so much value in these meetings that goes uncaught, because everyone has learned to expect so little from them. I wish you the best of luck changing that perception where you work.

To Rent or Own Your Career

I spent the first half of my career making a big, and I would expect, very common mistake. I believed that if I worked hard, developed my skills in my spare time, and became good at my job, that my career would progress.

This idea made so much sense at the time that I never really questioned the logic of it. It wasn’t until years later, after I had become good at my job but my career still hadn’t progressed to where I expected that I started to question the wisdom of my plan.

It turns out it wasn’t a plan at all. As I like to say, hope is not a strategy, and that’s exactly what I had been counting on to deliver me the career of my dreams: hope. A plan has a goal, milestones that can be used to measure progress towards that goal, and actionable steps to achieve them. I had none of that. I just thought that if I worked hard, I would get what I wanted, even if I couldn’t articulate exactly what that was.

Finally, after realizing that career advancement isn’t just a thing that happens to those who work hard, I started to put together a plan.

Goal

My plan started with analyzing my strengths and weaknesses. I wanted to aim for something that would accentuate the former while minimizing the latter. This required some soul-searching, and a good, hard look in the mirror to come up with some harsh truths about what I was good at and what I wasn’t.

I had known for some time that I was a good programmer, but that there were those who were much better than I would ever be. Software development just made sense to these people as naturally as breathing, and they were not people I wanted to compete with.

At the same time I realized that what these savants usually lacked was the ability to communicate their complex technical ideas/problems/solutions in a way that non-technical people could understand. I recognized more and more that a brilliant idea, improperly communicated to decision makers, was likely to get ignored, and was therefore useless.

This was an area I excelled in. I could be the conduit between the genius software engineers and the business savvy leadership, translating each group’s needs into ideas the other group could understand and act upon. My goal became to join IT management.

Milestones

How to make this happen? I had been a software engineer for quite some time, and I was successful enough at it that my managers wanted me to keep doing it. How to make the leap to management when all everyone wants you to do is individual contribution?

I decided that my first milestone would be to get an MBA. The decision to get a business degree was as much about signalling the seriousness of my intentions as much as it was about anything I’d learn in the program. Business school was an extreme challenge, but given how hard it had been for me to take the next step in my career I thought that a grand gesture was necessary.

After graduating from business school a few years later, my next milestone would be to find a job where my primary role was not to write code. This would allow me the time and freedom to leverage my new business degree and demonstrate the strengths that I identified during my earlier soul-searching session.

My last milestone would be to finally move into a position where no coding was expected at all. This move would signify the achievement of my years long goal, and allow me to be leverage my strengths to their best advantage.

Own Your Career

I’m happy to say that this move happened almost a year ago, and I’m very happily in a role where I believe I bring far more value than I ever did as a developer. And now that I’ve achieved this goal that I set for myself almost a decade ago, I’ve had a moment to reflect on how it didn’t just happen to me. It was the result of deliberate planning, hard work, and honest conversations with myself.

If you’re waiting for someone else to advocate for your career, if you expect to achieve your goals without having really articulated them, if you are not taking deliberate, concrete actions to get what you want, then you’re renting your career instead of owning it.

Renting your career means ceding control to others who certainly don’t have the same intentions for your career that you do. Renting your career means working hard, but not seeing the desired results because all of your effort isn’t part of a coherent plan.

Renting your career is hope as a strategy, and unless you make the decision to own your career, you’ll always be used by others to accomplish their goals instead of yours. It isn’t quick or easy, but if you pick your nose up from the grindstone for long enough to figure out what you really want and how to get it, it can be done. Best of luck!

The Danger of Certainty

When I was younger, I would stand in awe of people who knew with absolute certainty what they were talking about. I wanted to be a person who could look someone in the eyes and tell them exactly the way things were and why. I wanted to understand a topic so well that I could confidently educate others on the nuances of a complex issue and correct their misconceptions.

As a kid I believed that I just hadn’t had enough experience yet, and that all the doubts that I had about my beliefs just meant that I needed to learn more, dig into a topic, and really understand it a deeper level. Once I had enough schooling and enough experience I believed, my doubts would go away and I’d be left with the certainty that what I knew was right and have the confidence to stand up for my beliefs in the face of those who disagreed.

I’m considerably older now, have a graduate degree, almost two decades of work experience, a family with two kids, and that day has still never come. When someone questions something I say, my first instinct is one of self-doubt. I wonder if this person knows something that I don’t, if what I think I know is wrong, if I’ve been looking at the whole thing the wrong way the entire time. I have abandoned the hope of ever gaining enough knowledge, of ever truly understanding anything, of attaining certainty, and I am so much better for it.

Instead of a complete mastery of any realm of knowledge, what I’ve gained over the years is an understanding that certainty is not a goal to strive for, but a trap to be avoided. I’ve met many, many certain people in my life, as you probably have as well, and I’ve found that they generally fall into a couple of categories.

Ignorant

Ironically, the people who understand a topic the least seem to be the ones who have a sense that they understand it the best. There’s definitely some Dunning-Kruger effect going on here, but when you really think about it, it makes sense. How often do you learn something only to have several other questions occur to you, and answering any one of them only leads to more questions?

This is the experience of the truly knowledgeable: every question answered only reveals how much more there is to know, and how small your knowledge is. The person who never answered that first question, never saw how many others there were. To them, the world is small and simple, and unworthy of investigation. To know anything is to acknowledge that you know nothing.

Incurious

It is so comforting to learn a truth that is exactly what you hoped it would be. So much so that we humans have a tendency to add extra validity to arguments that we agree with, and ignore or dismiss those that we don’t. It is such a well understood, but treacherous human tendency that it has a name: confirmation bias. Any scientist I have ever spoken to on the topic has told me that confirmation bias is one of the greatest fears of the scientific community, and huge efforts go into avoiding it when conducting research and formulating results.

That’s why scientists, trained and aware of the pernicious effect of confirmation bias, react to arguments that they are personally attracted to with suspicion. This is not how the average person behaves. People will naturally seek out information that reinforces their opinion, and once they have found it they not only stop actively seeking more information, they ignore any other information presented to them. This gives them the comforting belief that they agree with all valid information that they’ve found on the topic, when the reality is that it wasn’t the information that shaped their opinion, but the other way around.

These people have no problem being certain, because everything they’ve allowed themselves to learn on the topic reinforces their point of view. Anyone questioning their position is questioning reality, and should be dismissed or corrected.

The Beauty of Uncertainty

I have come to embrace my uncertainty as a strength instead of a weakness. Being uncertain means that I know enough to know that there’s so much on any topic that I don’t understand. It means that I am open to learning more; to being right instead of just feeling right. Certainty ends the conversation, it ends learning, it ends growth. Certainty is the opposite of everything I actually wanted to achieve when I was a kid.

My uncertainty has been a huge asset in my career and my life. As a software engineer, it allowed me to learn from others who did things differently than I did. As a husband, it allowed me to value and learn from my wife’s experience which is so different from mine. As a father, it allowed me to acknowledge that children have a wisdom of their own, and that we can can learn a lot from them. And now that I’m further along in my career, it has allowed me to surround myself with people smarter than I, who disagree with me, and to get their input before making decisions for the team.

Being a leader isn’t always having the answer or being right. I think that one of the most powerful things a leader can do is acknowledge when they don’t understand, when they don’t know, and to draw on the wisdom of their team to make the best decision. The next time you start to question yourself or a decision you’ve made, don’t feel bad about it. Allow it to happen. It’s probably one of the best practices you can have to get the most out of yourself and your team.

Giving Criticism

A conversation I often have with my son is about taking responsibility for bad behaviors or mistakes. Like all of us, he doesn’t like to be told he’s done something wrong. It doesn’t feel good, and he resists by making excuses or blaming something or someone else. Really anything but raising his hand and taking responsibility.

This behavior is understandable, expected really, in eleven-year-olds. It starts to become really problematic when this behavior is displayed by adult co-workers, however. Working in a place where no one takes responsibility can become toxic, because the inevitable outcome is a blaming, which leads to resentment, which creates a very poor culture indeed.

Telling my son to take responsibility over and over didn’t seem to have much of an impact. I guess he didn’t really see what was in it for him. It made his parents feel better, but why would HE want to do it when it felt so much better to make excuses? I started looking for an argument that a child could understand; something that could help motivate him to take ownership and strive to do better in the future.

Now, before giving him criticism I’ve started asking him, “do you want to feel better, or do you want to BE better?” This makes him stop and think. Even at his age he knows that being good is the goal, so he has started accepting my feedback more easily, as long as it’s given in a constructive and non-judgmental way. Slowly, he’s starting to see feedback the way I do: compliments are candy and criticisms are veggies.

Candy and Vegetables

Compliments feel good in the moment, but they don’t do a thing for you. What’s the value? What’s the takeaway? When you’ve been told that you’ve done a good job, there’s nothing that you can do better next time. Just like candy, you get no benefit from being told what a good job you did other than a happy feeling.

Criticism, on the other hand, doesn’t feel good. We naturally resist it, try to find some way to deflect, nullify, or ignore it all together. But the truth is criticism is the way that we can get better, either through self-criticism or criticism from those who’ve observed our behavior. Learning from our mistakes is only possible if we’re aware and honest with ourselves that a mistake was made. Criticism makes us better, stronger, and wiser.

Just like learning to eat your veggies, one can become better at accepting criticism and we can help others become better at accepting it as well. To paraphrase Gordon Gecko, “Criticism is good,” and it needs to be seen in this light. Here are a few of the things that I’ve noticed make criticism easier for myself to accept, and have seemed to work for others:

Be Positive

Just because something went wrong, doesn’t mean that the tone of the feedback needs to be negative. In the end, we can focus on punishing a mistake or we can focus on the better, more glorious future in which this mistake is no longer made. Tone makes a world of difference when delivering criticism.

Focus on the Behavior

One of the biggest problems with giving criticism is all of the unnecessary, unhelpful things that get thrown in along with it. The most helpful feedback in the world isn’t going to get through if the point is lost amid personal attacks, and hindsight. The only thing that truly matters is that the cause of the mistake is understood and it can be avoided in the future. That’s it!! Everything else is besides the point, and clouds the issue.

Model Responsibility

Nothing else matters, if you as the leader don’t show the team how it should work. If you find yourself in a culture of blame-shifting, be the change. Actively seek out opportunities to own mistakes, loudly and publicly take responsibility, and let everyone know what went wrong and how things will be different going forward. For team members to see that owning a mistake doesn’t entail being blamed, that, in the case of a genuine mistake, there are no real consequences, and that this is how leaders behave, it can make a world of difference.

A Better Way

A team where there’s no responsibility is a dangerous place. Mistakes may be hidden for fear of the associated blame, investigation into root causes might be poorly done for fear of what might be found, and there can be no trust because you know your teammate will pin the blame on you if anything goes wrong. In this situation mistakes are still going to happen, there’s just very little chance that anyone will learn from them.

Creating a culture where there is no fear of blame doesn’t mean a culture where mistakes are OK. No one wants to make mistakes, and if you make it easy and safe to learn from them, then they’ll become less frequent not more. Your people will feel more secure without the threat of blame hanging over their every action, the team will grow as they learn from their experience instead of hiding it, and genuine trust will form as criticism can then be seen as a beneficial action by a helpful colleague instead of an attempt to tear you down.

Learning to give and receive constructive criticism is one of the most beneficial, and least observed, leadership skills that I know. If done properly, it can mean the difference between leading through respect, and leading through fear.