Box Kite Machine

❖ The neglected skip 1:1

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 14:23:04 -0500

“How on earth could he say those things so confidently when he doesn’t have a clue about what’s happening down here? It’s kind of like the American politicians who used to visit Vietnam, look around a bit, talk to the top brass in the military command, review some statistics, and then proclaim that the war was being won and they could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Right!

…

Being present allows you, as a leader, to connect personally with your people, and personal connections help you build your intuitive feel for the business as well as for the people running the business. They also help to personalize the mission you’re asking people to perform.

—Ram Charan and Larry Bossidy: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

One crucial but often neglected meeting in an organizational leader’s meeting toolkit is the skip 1:1—a one-on-one meeting between a manager and her directs’ directs. In other words, it skips a level in the organization.

Frankly, I haven’t been consistent in my career in conducting them. It’s easy not to do them. They are the kind of meeting that you can get away without holding for quite a while without visible negative consequences. Each individual skip 1:1 may provide a bit of value, but they are an incredibly high-leverage activity in the aggregate. Occasionally, you can uncover a severe and otherwise invisible issue that makes all of your skip 1:1s worth it.

Like 1:1s with directs, they are a purposeful business meeting, not just a chance to chat. The purpose is (1) relationship building, (2) information gathering, and (3) a chance to provide affirmation and praise. More specifically, skip-level 1:1s:

Create rapport between you and everyone in your organization. As your team grows, you will have less and less contact with any one individual. Later, as your organization grows, this may be the most substantial conversation you have with an individual that year. Skip 1:1s allow you to build personal connections that can pay dividends later.
Give team members time to ask questions or raise concerns. To a first approximation, zero people in your organization will contact you to ask questions or raise concerns. These meetings are the most successful when you give prompts for potential topics and remind the person that the meeting is mainly for their benefit.
Give you a finger on the pulse of alignment and communication between you and your managers and how that alignment and communication flow down to ICs. Do people understand what your organization is doing? What is the company doing? Do they understand how their work fits in?
Give you a reality check from people on the ground. They can illuminate areas of your organization that you need to pay attention to and lingering issues you may have missed and give you a deeper understanding of the day-to-day work getting done in your organization.
Can uncover places where you are being “managed up” to the detriment of those reporting to that manager. In general, you will hear the perspective of the managers reporting to you more frequently and before the perspective of the people reporting to those managers. This is an opportunity for individuals to give feedback about their manager.

Frequency

How frequently you hold these meetings depends on the size of your organization. Two guidelines: I do not recommend holding more than one skip 1:1 per week (your time is too valuable) or meeting with the same individual more than bi-annually (their time is too valuable). The idea is to get insight into your organization, not to build strong individual relationships with every individual throughout your team. As in all things, use your judgment.

Things to watch out for

You don’t want to create a situation where you cut your line managers out of communication loops, send mixed messages about your confidence in them, or issue “accidental orders.”

These are real risks, and you should watch out for them. Skip 1:1s are a great tool, but the primary communication channel should always be IC <-> Manager <-> You. That’s what the organization is for. That’s what gives line managers the autonomy they need to do their jobs and helps push decision-making down to the lowest possible level. Issuing instructions undermines your managers.

In fact, Manager Tools recommends against holding skip-level 1:1s because it can undermine your direct managers. (They have a entire podcast about it!]). They recommend a combination of group skip-level meetings, having your directs conduct 1:1s with their directs, and maintaining an open-door policy. All of these are great! That said, I have found skip 1:1s too valuable of a tool to ignore, even with these risks.

So, when you are conducting a skip 1:1, and someone runs an idea by you, asks for your permission to do something, etc., or even, in some circumstances, complains about something, a key thing to ask is, “Have you talked to your manager about this?” You can recommend this as a first step and ask the individual to follow up with you later. For a truly serious situation, you should, of course, act as you see fit.

Sample meeting invitation template

Here’s an example of a meeting invitation:

A chance for us to meet and chat about what’s working and what’s not on our team.

The goal is to help us all work better together and ensure you’re happy and successful working here.

This is meant to be a conversation. I’ll bring a few questions for you, and if there’s anything you’d like to discuss, we’ll start with that. Ideas for improving your team, observations you think I should know about, and feedback on your manager are all good topics. I’m also happy to answer any questions you have for me.

If this time is not convenient, please don’t hesitate to suggest another.

I look forward to talking with you!

Questions for skip 1:1s

The following are some ideas for questions to ask in skip 1:1s:

Organizational Strategy and Processes:

What should the organization start doing?
What should the organization stop doing?
What should the organization continue doing?
Are there any process improvements we should consider?
Are there any opportunities we might be missing?
Are there any areas of the business strategy you don’t understand?
What should I know about?

Team Dynamics and Collaboration:

How do you feel about the communication in your team and the broader organization?
Is this team working poorly with any other team?
What do you need from your peers?
Who on your team has been doing well recently?

Individual Performance and Satisfaction:

Do you feel you get appropriate recognition when you do a great job?
Do you have the training & resources to improve?
What are the biggest time wasters for you each week?
What’s keeping you from doing your best work right now? Are there resources or tools you need that you’re currently not getting?
How happy (or not) are you working at the company?
Do you see yourself working at our company in three years?
What do you like best/worst about the project you are working on?

Managerial Relationship and Feedback:

If you were the team leader, what would you focus on (or do more of) and why?
Do you have any feedback about your manager—what’s going well and what isn’t?
Is your manager giving you enough feedback?
How often does your manager cancel 1:1s?

Open-Ended Questions:

What’s on your mind? What questions haven’t I asked that you wish I would?

References

The neglected skip 1:1 was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

❖ Overcoming management myths: Common excuses for avoiding tough feedback

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 06:14:08 -0500

Giving feedback is a core responsibility of any leader. But it can be surprisingly easy to convince yourself not to do it—especially if you are empathetic and caring. (Both great qualities!) Every leader has shied away from saying the necessary thing at times. It can be incredibly uncomfortable!

Genuinely caring about your people and their success, and using that care to build a relationship on a foundation of mutual trust, is the hallmark of a great manager. Giving difficult feedback is not only 100% compatible with achieving that—it’s required.

Here’s what we tell ourselves to let ourselves off the hook:

1. Feedback is a confrontation

Feedback that works is anchored in humility and a desire to help. Effective leaders rely on feedback to help team members better understand their strengths and areas for improvement—approach feedback with the mindset that you offer a valuable perspective to aid your colleague’s growth. Great feedback opens up discussion rather than closing it down.

On the other hand, if you are angry, don’t give feedback. Then it will be a confrontation. And it won’t work.

2. Feedback is criticism or blame

Great feedback doesn’t litigate the past—it creates a better future. It builds conditions for improved performance by encouraging effective behavior. When you withhold difficult feedback, you deny your team member an opportunity to learn.

3. Feedback is uncaring

Managers often equate negative feedback with not caring, but giving negative feedback demonstrates that you care enough about your people to help them improve. When you give feedback, show that you genuinely care about the person as an individual while challenging them to improve. Be direct yet compassionate. Feedback is an essential tool to help your people grow, achieve their potential, and advance professionally in their careers. Withholding it is apathy.

4. Feedback makes the other person feel bad

It might, in the short run! But ultimately, helpful feedback is kindness. Feedback delivered with genuine good intent helps your team members understand how they can do better—which can positively impact their career.

Be willing to put your team members into mild, temporary discomfort to extend their reach beyond their grasp. There is supposed to be some stress associated with urgency and working to achieve difficult things. Your job is to challenge your people and lead them through discomfort into deep, long-lasting pride of accomplishment.

Put another way: Your job is not to make your people happy. It’s not possible. You can create an environment of kindness, respect, psychological safety, and achievement. But happiness is ultimately up to them.

5. Feedback creates resentment

Real resentment comes from not receiving helpful feedback that could have helped the individual improve and succeed. But by providing constructive feedback, you can prevent future issues and frustrations—and open up new opportunities.

6. Feedback damages your relationships

Managers often worry that giving difficult feedback will damage their relationships. But if you’ve invested the time in building solid relationships and genuinely care, the opposite is true. Honest feedback builds trust. People appreciate and respect leaders who are transparent about areas for improvement. Not giving clear and direct feedback can lead to misunderstandings that turn minor issues into larger ones.

7. Feedback demotivates

It’s true that poorly delivered feedback can demotivate. But for your best people, well-structured and thoughtfully conveyed feedback is a positive challenge to improvement.

8. I might be wrong

No leader has all the answers, and no one expects you to. Giving feedback isn’t about being infallible but sharing your perspective based on observations and experiences. Speak with humility but be confident in your convictions. Your company has entrusted you to lead people for a reason.

Overcoming management myths: Common excuses for avoiding tough feedback was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

Every day matters

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 19:39:04 -0500

We had an internal culture of counting the passage of time from Day 0, the day (in California) we started working on the project. We made the first calls and published our first vaccine availability on Day 1. I instituted this little meme mostly to keep up the perception of urgency among everyone.

We repeated a mantra: Every day matters. Every dose matters.

Where other orgs would say, ‘Yeah I think we can have a meeting about that this coming Monday,’ I would say, ‘It is Day 4. On what day do you expect this to ship?’ and if told you would have your first meeting on Day 8, would ask, ‘Is there a reason that meeting could not be on Day 4 so that this could ship no later than Day 5?’

I started every meeting and status report to the team by reminding them what Day it was. Our internal stats dashboard had a counter of what Day it was. I had a whiteboard in my apartment showing what Day it was. I wrote that every morning as soon as I woke up, and updated the other two numbers right before I went to sleep. Those were: the number of locations we had published to Californians where they could currently get the vaccine, and the number we knew about elsewhere across the United States with the vaccine.

The latter was zero at this point, of course. I brushed my teeth, wrote my emails, ate my meals, did media interviews, called my family, negotiated with funders, and said my prayers with the zero where I could see it.

From The story of VaccinateCA.

Every day matters was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

There are a lot of tech companies whose CEOs do not think this way

Tue, 03 May 2022 12:58:55 -0500

A lot of people think of Twitter as a public utility, a public trust, “the town square,” a company with an important social mission that many of its users and employees and Elon Musk care about deeply. And its CEO and board of directors essentially can’t bring themselves to talk about it. When employees asked him about what was best for the company, Agrawal could talk only about the shareholders. Elon Musk is not at all embarrassed to say that Twitter has an important public mission, which is why he’s buying it. But its current management can’t say that, which is why they’re selling it.

I want to be clear here that I am not saying that it was a bad decision, for Twitter’s product or users, to sell to Elon Musk. I have no idea; that’s not the point. The point is that the board seems to have put almost no weight on these questions. … I have written this before, but the basic problem with Twitter’s management and board of directors seems to be that they do not care about Twitter, as a company or as a product, so they are left to care about shareholders. This seems bad for everyone, including shareholders.

There are a lot of tech companies whose CEOs do not think this way. They are not all companies with “other legal mechanics,” as Agrawal said: Tesla Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. do not have dual-class stocks, and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have exactly the same duties to their shareholders as Agrawal has to his. But what Tesla and Amazon have are executives and boards who believe in what they are doing, and shareholders who trust them to pursue a long-term vision. If you ask Elon Musk about his decision-making, he would never say “Tesla is a public company owned by shareholders and I just try to maximize their profits.” He would talk about his master plan to decarbonize the world, he would talk about self-driving cars and rockets and tunnels. He cares about the product, not the shareholders. That’s why Musk’s shareholders are rich, and why Bezos’s are, and why Twitter’s are selling at $54.20.

From Matt Levine, Twitter’s Board Gave Up.

There are a lot of tech companies whose CEOs do not think this way was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

Moving fast doesn’t mean working harder

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 12:57:58 -0500

As an engineering leader, it’s important to remind your team that moving fast doesn’t mean working harder, or longer, or on the weekends. And it definitely doesn’t mean releasing a perfect product from day one. It requires cutting scope, iterating over time, and being more at ease with putting out a feature that’s not fully baked in order to learn what customers want.

You’re not going to get everything right from the outset, and that’s okay. The goal is to learn as you go: formulate a hypothesis, establish metrics, derisk, gather feedback, iterate, rinse, and repeat. Once you embrace the uncertainty, working on finding product-market fit isn’t just a challenge, but a thrill.

From Planning in the Dark: Planning for Product-Market Fit - Increment.

Moving fast doesn’t mean working harder was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

The Wright brothers building bicycles, 1897

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 07:56:40 -0500

The Wright brothers building bicycles, 1897 was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

Art involves a kind of conjuring trick

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 08:08:31 -0500

The already classic scene in which Paul wrenches the chorus to Get Back out of himself shows us, not just a moment of inspiration, but how the group pick up on what is not an obviously promising fragment and begin the process of turning it into a song. In the days to follow, they keep going at it, day after day, run-through after run-through, chipping away, laboriously sculpting the song into something that seems, in its final form, perfectly effortless. As viewers, we get bored of seeing them rehearse it and we see only some of it: on January 23rd alone they ran it through 43 times. The Beatles don’t know, during this long process, what we know - that they’re creating a song that millions of people will sing and move to for decades to come. For all they know, it might be Shit Takes all the way down. But they keep going, changing the lyrics, making small decision after small decision - when the chorus comes in, where to put the guitar solos, when to syncopate the beat, how to play the intro - in the blind faith that somewhere, hundreds of decisions down the line, a Beatles song worthy of the name will emerge.

A good song or album - or novel or painting - seems authoritative and inevitable, as if it just had to be that way, but it rarely feels like that to the people making it. Art involves a kind of conjuring trick in which the artist conceals her false starts, her procrastination, her self-doubts, her confusion, behind the finished article. The Beatles did so well at effacing their efforts that we are suspicious they actually had to make any, which is why the words “magic” and “genius” get used so much around them. A work of genius inspires awe in a lesser artist, but it’s not necessarily inspiring. In Get Back, we are allowed into The Beatles’ process. We see the mess; we live the boredom. We watch them struggle, and somehow it doesn’t diminish the magic at all.

From The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back.

Art involves a kind of conjuring trick was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

❖ Consistent weekly comms

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 06:41:23 -0500

A recurring bug in many leaders’ operating systems—including mine—is overlooking just how much useful context a leader can have than folks on their team.

A regular practice I’ve adopted is sending a brief, five-minute weekly video communication to my team. The weekly comms, in fact, has been a long tradition in my org predating me that I have continued. Having been on both the receiving and sending end of the regular weekly comms, I’ve come to believe that this is a critical leadership activity on a growing team.

Information dissemination is a core responsibility of a leader. Leaders have access to a huge amount of information that most individuals on the team do not. Why is Sales hiring so much? Why did we decide to work on X instead of Y? What exactly is Marketing working on? By communicating habitually with my entire team, I can tell them what is going on, why it is going on, and critically, reinforce core cultural values.

The format

My weekly comms consist of an informal 5-8 minute video and transcript, published internally and announced on our internal all-company listserv. I record a video for a few reasons:

There are people willing to watch a video but not read an email.
It feels more personal and creates a bit of face-to-face connection on a distributed team.
It is easier.

The last bit is surprising. It surprised me, at first, and would not have been true a year ago. But now I am practiced at talking to a camera and have a good video setup that I use every day. Another factor is some excellent software called Descript that makes it simple to edit video and create transcripts. It feels like a magical advance in video editing.

I’m someone who obsesses over word choice, so I’ve found it easier to bang out a video script because I don’t worry as much about polishing it to the same extent as a stand-alone document. In the past, I tried to write a weekly email in the same format, but I was never consistent. It always felt like too much work. Recording a video is more sustainable.

I record in one take.

In practice, about one-third of the team watches the video, and one-third read the transcript, for about 2/3 total penetration.

What I talk about

Welcoming new team members.
Acknowledging major, company-impacting accomplishments.
Acknowledging significant accomplishments that can fly under the radar of the business. Things like open source contributions, technical debt paid off, continuing iterative improvements after a big-bang launch.
Announcing new policies.
Connecting revenue numbers with project initiatives, site traffic, major closed deals, etc.
Project team spin ups and spin downs.

A regular weekly comms is a great way to get a consistent message out to the entire team at once.

The habit

The key to making this work is forming a habit. If I wait until Friday morning to sit down in front of an empty text editor, I create lots of head-scratching and not much writing.

So on Monday, I create an empty document for the week that will serve as a script and transcript of the recording. I leave it open all week. On the side, I keep a running document of possible, non-time-sensitive topics to cover or topics that didn’t make it into the previous week.

Throughout the week, as I learn things from leaders on the team or hear of any information that needs to be flowed down, I capture that in the script as a quick bullet point.

On Friday morning, I write a quick draft and often send it to a few people for a quick review. Their feedback is critical—it’s a quick check to make sure I’m communicating what I mean. It is especially important to ensure I acknowledge the right people for accomplishments and don’t leave anyone out.

Then I record, almost always in one take. My assistant edits the video, exports, and then I Slack and email it to the team.

I dedicate 1.5 hours to my weekly video. Is this a lot of work? Yes. Is it worth it? Also yes. It is a chance to acknowledge efforts that could go unnoticed. It is a direct conduit to people on my team. It also makes me a better listener. Consistently creating a weekly comms puts me in a mindset of asking questions like “Is this important?” “Is it important for the team to know?” And critically, “what culture values can I communicate and reinforce?” It gets me out of my own head. It makes me a better, more informed leader.

What you talk about is what gets thought about

The weekly comms is a nudge. Done well, it can consistently and subtly shift the conversation in a positive direction. The weekly comms is an opportunity to create a story around the team and give it purpose.

References and further reading

Consistent weekly comms was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

A simple technique such as a daily standup

Mon, 16 Aug 2021 08:08:06 -0500

Groups of technically oriented people often want to optimize the work process to those activities needed for the technically oriented output, and overlook those that are focused on the needs of humans and groups of humans working together. Yes, you can have a standup and not get any value from it. You can also not have a standup and avoid providing a convenient mechanism for taking advantage of the differences in observation, interpretation, and significance made by the entire team.

If you’ve got a really good team facilitator, they’ll likely notice this and help bring it out. If they’re really excellent, they’ll convince the team to work in a fashion where it can more easily come out without them acting as a middleman to make it happen. They might use a simple technique such as a daily standup to create such an opportunity.

From George Dinwiddie’s blog » Daily Stand-Up Meetings. Reflects my background suspicion of the efficacy of Slack “standups.”

A simple technique such as a daily standup was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

70% of what you wish you had

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 07:19:56 -0500

… most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

Yes, I’m quoting Jeff Bezos’ 2016 Letter to Amazon Shareholders again. This quote is referenced in Working Backwards, which I’ve added to my recommended reading for engineering managers.

Pair with Making the decision right.

70% of what you wish you had was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

What I’ve been reading

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 16:21:54 -0500

Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma. I resisted reading this for a long time because it’s so much a part of the fabric of working in tech. I’m glad I did. Cost structures matter. Recommended.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me. I listened to this as an audiobook, read by Coates himself. Short but powerful.
Eric Berger, Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX. If you want to know why SpaceX can do so much in so little time, this is where to start. Great story.
John le Carré, The Night Manager. A lot of people love le Carré; I am not one of them.
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon. You can find a lot online about “how Amazon works.” This is the clearest distillation I’ve found.
Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Broad, not deep. That said, I’m looking forward to the next installment. A summary.
Arkady Martine, A Desolation Called Peace. Solid sequel to A Memory Called Empire.
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. I hadn’t realized just how chaotic the late 60s early 70s were. This book filled in many gaps for me on where many of the political divides leading up to the Trump era originated. The book is overlong, and the author maintains an ironic detachment that grows tiring.
Kim MacQuarrie, The Last Days of the Incas. Recommended. In the end it reads likes a morality tale as the original conquistadors of the Incas, almost to a man, fall to violence and betrayal.
Ted Widmer, Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington. A strange little history book that makes a lot of connections.
Erik Larson, The Splendid and the Vile. Engaging, but ultimately not for me.
Barack Obama, A Promised Land. What you think this book is exactly what it is.
David McCullough, The Wright Brothers. Really enjoyed this. I would have appreciated more about the business and patent fights of later days. You can see the Wrights slipping behind in the industry but, this is scarecely commented on.

What I’ve been reading was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

The process is not the thing

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 08:13:57 -0500

As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.

Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers – something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products. “Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. That is up from 47% in the first survey.” That’s hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead.

Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.

I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.

From Jeff Bezos’ 2016 Letter to Amazon Shareholders. The whole letter is clear, precise, and worth reading.

The process is not the thing was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

What I’ve been reading

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 07:23:40 -0500

Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. I really enjoyed this one. It draws a straight line of innovation in math and astronomy through the middle ages into the Renaissance. People in the past are always smarter than you think they were. If you ever wondered how people actually did arithmatic with Roman numerals, this is the book for you.
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake. This book has not aged well, despite and especially because of the pandemic.
Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III. One of my favorite books of 2020. Either the story of a man whose relentless operational excellence and hard work ran the nation or the story of a man with no credentials whose country club tennis partner happened to be George Bush that ran the nation. Or both.
William N. Thorndike, The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success. Necessarily surface level, but an excellent narrative introduction to the concepts of capital allocation and the value of looking at cash flow versus reported earnings.
Mark Robinchaux, Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business. Very inside baseball and uncritical of its subject, but I enjoyed it. Again on the theme of capital allocation and cash flow versus reported earnings.
Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom. An engaging polemic and history of how technological innovation happens in the real world.
Michael Kulikowski, The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy. A bit inside baseball, even for me.
Stuart Ritchie, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. Incentives rule everything.
Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. Liu is Ted Chiang’s English translator. Beautifully written and creative.

What I’ve been reading was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

❖ First-team mindset

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 13:22:21 -0500

Things were simpler as an individual contributor. You understood what your teammates were up to, you chatted every day, and you knew they had your back—and you had theirs. Now you’re a people manager. On bad days, it feels like you’re stuck on an island, squinting across the water at your peers busily doing … something on their own little islands.

Sooner or later, most people managers suffer a painful day that ends with self-searching questions like:

“Why can’t I get my team what they need?”
“How did I not see that coming? I feel out of the loop.”
“Why is everything so political?”

The good news is that you can take concrete actions to build the strong teammate-quality relationships you need with your peers to succeed.

Your peers are your first team

People management means playing on two teams, not one. One team consists of the people who report to you. The other team consists of your peers. This group includes people reporting the same boss as you, and more broadly, peers across the entire organization. Getting the support you need to succeed as a leader requires treating your peers as your team and not just an assortment of faces who happen to show up at staff meetings. The more senior a role you take on, the more important this becomes.

The priorities of these two teams will often, but not always, align. It’s inevitable that at some point, the demands of these dual roles will conflict. On the one hand, you now serve those who report to you—coaching, creating opportunities, sticking up for them against unreasonable demands, and shielding them from noise elsewhere in the organization. On the other hand, you now serve the entire organization you’re a part of, your peers, and the whole company. And ultimately, you are paid to deliver for the latter.

One antipattern newly promoted managers can fall into is prioritizing the interests of their direct reports over working with their new peers. The temptation is especially strong when managing people who used to be peers.

A useful way I’ve found to navigate this tension—and feel like you’re on a team again—is through what’s called a first-team mindset.

First-team mindset is treating your peers as your first team. Optimize first for your peers’ success, and second for supporting your direct reports. And yes, by treating your peers as your first team, you are treating your direct reports are your second team.

Thinking this way can feel overly hierarchical and wrong—so much of what we talk about when talking about the practice of management is serving your direct reports. However, in my experience, treating my peers as my first team is the most healthy way to operate because it motivates me to broaden my focus outward instead of narrowly focusing inward solely on my team’s immediate needs. In fact, adopting a first-team mindset enables you to serve your direct reports more effectively over the long haul.

I’ll discuss two ways to think about why a first-team mindset matters—suboptimization and relationships—and then I’ll explain six concrete actions for putting it into practice.

Suboptimization

Sometimes you will have to disappoint or cause hardship for the people you manage in order to help your peers or the company achieve big-picture objectives.

Simple but common examples of this are enforcing organization-wide standards such as supported languages and libraries, issue-tracking systems, or code review standards. While allowing an individual development team to choose whatever language they want might make it more efficient in the short term, if every team did the same, the efficiency of the entire organization would suffer as people struggled to make their code interoperate and every team had to write their own tooling. A better solution, optimized for the entire organization’s success, would be to task a platform team with writing a standard set of tooling, once, even though the standards it produces may be suboptimal for any individual front-line team it supports—including yours.

This is known as the rule of suboptimization. Making changes to improve one subsystem’s performance while ignoring the effects on the other subsystems will not lead to optimum performance of the whole. Maximizing the performance of the entire system means sub-optimizing the performance of individual parts.

Other examples include canceling a project your team is invested in or asking your team to temporarily take on an “unfair” customer support burden to support a critical customer.

This is simple enough in the abstract, but it takes courage to support and implement decisions that impose tangible negative impacts on individuals on your team.

Relationships, i.e. “politics”

Real life is messy.

Servant leadership is a wonderful mindset to adopt. But it cannot be the whole story, or at least the naive version of it can’t. Sometimes you will need to execute a decision that does not directly serve those who report to you but instead helps solve a problem for your peer’s team or helps you maintain a productive relationship with that peer.

The last one, in particular, feels a lot like the skin-crawling “politics” that everyone hates. But in the end, your team’s relationships with your peers’ teams are inseparable from your personal relationship with those peers.

Work, especially at leadership levels, is done through relationships. From the outside, this can look like politics. Many people don’t like doing it. But the alternative is not building productive give-and-take relationships with your peers. This will severely limit your ability to get things done when it’s your turn to ask your peer for help on your initiative or help take some load off your overloaded team. And you’ll always be watching your back.

Give and take is part of how humans build and maintain relationships. As an IC, you would do things personally for others on your team—take over their on-call shift so they could go to their kid’s school play, act as a sounding board for ideas, and more. You didn’t do that with a cynical view towards reciprocity, but because that’s what humans who care about and support each other do. This still applies now that you manage people. And one of the primary mechanisms of support you have available is the output of your team.

If you don’t take building relationships with your peers seriously enough to put your team’s skin in the game, then you are severely handicapping your team from getting the support they need to deliver.

Practices towards a first-team mindset

Here are some ways to put a first-team mindset into practice:

1. Know your peer’s work.

At a minimum, actively learn what your peers are working on and what they are trying to get done. Understand their incentives, their accountabilities, and their challenges. You can’t support someone if you don’t know what they need. This is also an opportunity to learn from people who may approach their work differently than you do. You can start small by dropping into your peer’s daily stand-ups, but doing this right takes work.

2. Hold regular 1:1s with your peers.

1:1s are a foundational practice for building and maintaining relationships with your direct reports. Making those appointments sacred and not to be missed ensures that you communicate regularly and sends the metacommunication that the relationship is important to you.

You can use a similar practice, the peer 1:1, to maintain your most crucial peer relationships. Here’s how:

Identify your most important relationships. You don’t need to meet with everyone who reports to your boss, and your most important peers may report elsewhere. Focus on the peers that you work with the most or have the weakest relationship with. Start small, but aim for no more than 3-4 recurring peer 1:1s.
Ask your peer if they would like to hold a recurring 1:1 meeting. Propose whatever cadence makes sense, but every other week or monthly are good places to start. If they are reluctant, propose a single one-off meeting to try it out.
Tell your peer what they need to know. Make the meeting useful for them. Provide a quick, 10-minute update to them about initiatives on your team. Be open to questions.
Build a relationship with your peer. Make a point to understand your peers as three-dimensional human beings and not just as job titles.

All of this applies doubly to people you don’t personally like. You don’t have the luxury of choosing your peers. You don’t have to be buddies to have a productive relationship.

Manager Tools has an excellent podcast on the topic.

3. Give (and graciously receive) peer feedback. Don’t “drop a dime.”

A benefit of building trusting, respectful relationships with your peers is that you can talk directly to them about real things that matter—especially when those conversations are challenging.

Ask for feedback from your peers. Graciously thank them and act on it when appropriate. This builds trust that you can take it as well as dish it out. If you’re working on a big initiative, get their input, and ask them to tell you the flaws. Not only will this result in a better product, but it will also likely result in an ally when the time comes to get others on board.

Give constructive feedback directly to your peers. It’s kinder and more respectful to talk to a peer directly instead of complaining to your boss. It’s also more effective because you can share specific details and context. No one likes being complained about behind their back, and doing so breeds distrust. Better yet, giving good-faith feedback helps drive your peer’s success, and done well, can build an even stronger relationship.

Don’t surprise your peer in public if you can avoid it. If your peer’s team is blocking your team, tell her directly and give her a chance to act on that information before calling out her team as a blocker in a staff meeting. No one likes someone dropping a dime on them. Speaking directly is both more respectful and efficient.

A metric of success is that you are talking with a peer 10x more than you are talking to your boss about that peer.

4. Trust your peers.

Respect each other’s turf. Let your peer team leads own their areas. This isn’t about staying in your lane or not engaging in productive debate, but it is about showing mutual respect. Ultimately, you don’t want them second-guessing decisions you or your team make in your area or expertise, so don’t do the same to them. Trust that they know their stuff. Let minor disagreements be.

5. Support your peer’s initiatives. Practice first follower.

Part of working together on a team of peer leaders is cooperating to drive big-picture initiatives. Sometimes cooperation means getting out of the way:

Give your support quickly to other leaders who are working to make improvements. Even if you disagree with their initial approach, someone trustworthy leading a project will almost always get to a good outcome.

The second point is vital—knowing when to exercise humility and trust when someone else’s intelligence, knowledge, experience, and drive will likely lead to good results. Commit to supporting them, even if you disagree about some of the particulars. Support drives results further than criticism.

6. Disagree and commit.

A huge advantage of working with a true team of peers is that you debate and argue about real issues, driving better, more informed decisions. But once the debate is over and a decision is made, you must support it—even if you disagree, even if it is to your team’s immediate disadvantage. Airing your disagreements with your peers serves no one, especially not your team. It only sows confusion and destroys relationships. This, admittedly, can be difficult.

If you find yourself in a situation where you find it truly ethically objectionable to support a decision, you should resign. But short of that, find a way to sincerely speak to the merits of the path forward, and lead the way.

Level up

Leading a team is not just about the people who report to you; it is about working collaboratively with your peers to accomplish initiatives that are larger than the parochial interests of your team. It’s natural to see the world through your team’s lens—after all, you spend most of your time and attention there—but your success will be limited if you cannot look beyond that. Embracing the perspective of your peers is not only how to get the support you need to succeed; it is an effective way to learn and practice thinking at the next level in your career journey. The first step is looking beyond your own island to treat your peers as your first team.

References and further reading

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, p. 135-138
The Manager’s Path, “Senior Peers in Other Functions,” p. 178
Make your peers your first team
Building a First Team Mindset

First-team mindset was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

Elsewhere on the web

Fri, 13 Nov 2020 07:00:00 -0500

— The Metronome. “Two minutes early to a meeting. As much as possible. The last act of my morning opening productivity ramp. What lessons do I demonstrate to the meeting attendees by being there two minutes early? A couple: beginning on time is respectful to attendees, and meetings are expensive affairs, so let’s invest our time wisely. There’s a more fundamental lesson I am teaching: Leaders are capable of showing up to meetings on time.”

— Receive Better Feedback by Asking and Listen, Lead, and Grow. A great two-parter about how to ask for and recieve feedback from others.

— Speak in Stories. “Too often we present our work as a series of facts. The sad truth is that most humans are bad at remembering facts. When our audience is in a related conversation days later the data we shared isn’t likely to be top of mind anymore. Our impact remains localized.”

— Does Palantir See Too Much?

Elsewhere on the web was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

What I’ve been reading

Wed, 11 Nov 2020 07:51:39 -0500

Ted Chiang, Exhalation. A collection of short stories from my favorite living fiction writer. The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate and the title story, Exhalation, are my favorites in this collection.
Gene Wolfe, Epiphany of the Long Sun. I enjoyed books 1 and 2 of the series, but I put this one down. I read for pages at a stretch with no idea what was physically happening in the story.
Rebecca Sykes, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art. Neanderthals are much more interesting than you think.
David Carpenter, Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule, 1207-1258. The second book this month I put down. Well written, but I couldn’t get into it. That said, it’s interesting to read a biography of what sounds like an ineffective leader.
Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story. A few technical howlers, but an engaging telling of the founding and growth of Facebook. I would have liked more detail on either the technology or the management practices.

What I’ve been reading was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

Steve Jobs always gets it right

Tue, 10 Nov 2020 08:26:57 -0500

Fucking Steve always gets it right. … Steve really always gets it right. I mean it, precisely, like an engineer. I am not joking, and I am not exaggerating. … I didn’t say Steve is always right. I said he always gets it right. Like anyone, he is wrong sometimes, but he insists, and not gently either, that people tell him when he’s wrong, so he always gets it right in the end.

Andy Grove, as quoted in Radical Candor, by Kim Scott.

This is an interesting distinction. Steve Jobs is sometimes hagiographized as the always-right visionary genius, but the truth is more interesting. One story comes to mind: Apple’s decision in 2003 to bring iTunes to Windows.

Jobs was adamantly opposed, at one point shouting that letting iTunes and the iPod run on Windows would only happen “Over my dead body! Never! We need to sell Macs! This is going to be why people buy Macs!”

His team had to battle him loudly, many times to convince him. It wasn’t pretty. Jobs deflected responsibility for the decision. But he finally was convinced that the upside of increasing iPod sales would outweigh the downside of potentially fewer Mac purchases in the short term. So in the end Apple got it right, setting the stage for Apple’s resurgence, the iPhone, and everything that followed. This was the result of the Apple leadership team doing its job and telling Steve Jobs that he was wrong.

If even the most celebrated visionary can be wrong, you can be too, and so can your boss. Have the courage and humility to seek the truth, and the conviction to act.

Steve Jobs always gets it right was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

❖ Definite vs. indefinite thinking: Notes from Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 07:37:16 -0500

Peter Thiel is a controversial figure for a good reason. But he’s also brilliant, accomplished, and takes (for better and worse) unpopular public stances. His track record of success makes him worth listening to.

Zero To One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future is a collection of his thoughts about Silicon Valley startups. It is very much attuned to that particular environment, but I recommend it if you work in software anywhere. It’s easily digestible even as an audiobook.

Thiel covers a fair amount of ground, but I’m going ignore most of it in favor of discussing the one idea that’s stuck with me: his framing of definite thinking versus indefinite thinking.

He argues that you can choose to think of the future in either definite or indefinite terms, and that choice has a real effect on how you approach and live your life:

You can expect the future to take a definite form or you can treat it as hazily uncertain. If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it. … Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. … A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions.

Indefinite attitudes, he argues, explain much of what’s dysfunctional in today’s world. It’s a hyperbolic statement but worth thinking about. I certainly have a lot of (well-founded?) cynicism about our society’s ability to define, plan, and take on big challenges, which has only increased with COVID-19. This is most obvious at the federal level—it is tragic how little of federal stimulus money this year went to projects that actively and concretely tried to combat the actual threat that we faced. (Project Warp Speed, despite the controversy surrounding it, is a fortunate counterexample, along with the incredible acceleration of scientific research across the world.)

Thiel defines four quadrants combining the two axes of definite/indefinite thinking and optimism/pessimism:

Let’s cover these in turn:

Indefinite Pessimism. “An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it.”
Definite Pessimism. “A definite pessimist believes the future can be known, but since it will be bleak, he must prepare for it.”
Indefinite Optimism. “To an indefinite optimist, the future will be better, but he doesn’t know how exactly, so he won’t make any specific plans. He expects to profit from the future but sees no reason to design it concretely.”
Definite Optimism. The future will be better than the present if you make plans and work to make it better. “From the 17th century through the 1950s and ’60s, definite optimists led the Western world. Scientists, engineers, doctors, and businessmen made the world richer, healthier, and more long-lived than previously imaginable.” Thiel gives some of the expected examples of the Golden Gate Bridge (1933-1937), The Manhattan Project (1941-1945), and the Interstate Highway System (1956-1965).

Thiel contends that the U.S. since 1982 (Reagan) has been defined by indefinite optimism, exemplified by the rise of finance as a driver of the economy. We believe in progress; we just don’t believe in planning for it:

Instead of working for years to build a new product, indefinite optimists rearrange already-invented ones. Bankers make money by rearranging the capital structures of already existing companies. Lawyers resolve disputes over old things or help other people structure their affairs. And private equity investors and management consultants don’t start new businesses; they squeeze extra efficiency from old ones with incessant procedural optimizations.

Definite vs. indefinite thinking is about agency. If you see the future only indefinitely, there is no reason to plan. It’s something that happens to you, not something you can create. Therefore, embracing definite optimism is the way to create a better future.

The other three views of the future can work. Definite optimism works when you build the future you envision. Definite pessimism works by building what can be copied without expecting anything new. Indefinite pessimism works because it’s self-fulfilling: if you’re a slacker with low expectations, they’ll probably be met. But indefinite optimism seems inherently unsustainable: how can the future get better if no one plans for it?

This brings to mind the famous Steve Jobs quote, “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?” John Siracusa, in his remembrance of Steve Jobs, said this:

I was 9 years old at the time. … My grandfather also had a subscription to Macworld magazine, including multiple copies of issue #1, two of which I took home with me. I cut the Macintosh team picture out of one and left the other intact. (I still have both.)

I pored over that magazine for years, long after the technical and product information it contained was useless. It was the Macintosh team that fascinated me. That’s why I’d chosen to cut out this particular picture, not a photo of the hardware or software. After seeing the Macintosh and then reading this issue of Macworld, I had an important realization in my young life: people made this.

The Macintosh was the first thing in my life that I recognized as being wholly new. Everything I’d seen thus far in my nine years had seemed like it already existed prior to my birth—perhaps like it had always existed. But here was something different, something amazing, and this magazine explained how it had been created by this small group of people.

The implications bloomed in my mind. We aren’t stuck with the things we have now. We can make new things, better things. And it doesn’t take many people to do it. The team that had created this mind-bending new machine were all up on my wall, their individual faces clearly recognizable.

That is: those with a definite vision for the future are the ones who can actually build the future. Thiel argues that in contrast, the common belief in modern software practice in incrementalism—that the best way forward is small, iterative, adjacent steps—diminishes potential:

Even in engineering-driven Silicon Valley, the buzzwords of the moment call for building a “lean startup” that can “adapt” and “evolve” to an ever-changing environment. Would-be entrepreneurs are told that nothing can be known in advance: we’re supposed to listen to what customers say they want, make nothing more than a “minimum viable product,” and iterate our way to success.

But leanness is a methodology, not a goal. Making small changes to things that already exist might lead you to a local maximum, but it won’t help you find the global maximum. You could build the best version of an app that lets people order toilet paper from their iPhone. But iteration without a bold plan won’t take you from 0 to 1. A company is the strangest place of all for an indefinite optimist: why should you expect your own business to succeed without a plan to make it happen?

In other words, for a company to be great, it needs to create for itself a concrete vision for the future that is different and better in some fundamental way from the present. This sounds grandiose, but it is an excellent way to encapsulate the goal of building and delivering a unique and superior product to your customers. It is creating a future that other people have not yet imagined.

Thiel’s discussion made me realize that I can tend toward indefinite thinking. By nature, I am suspicious of the Big Plan and gravitate towards refining already existing processes and products. This, perhaps uncoincidentally, is the same trap that I see many Agile practitioners fall into. Sprints lead people towards a two-week planning horizon. Which is a feature! But I have found that if I’m not careful, this approach’s clear tactical advantages and comfort can lead to myopia and discourage me from committing to a concrete and big-picture strategy. Long-term planning is not just for waterfall development.

It’s easy for cynicism about the world and our ability to change it to prevent us from making big concrete plans for the future, or worse, from imagining a future that is better in some big, tangible way from the present. It can cause us to turn our focus inward toward relative status games or internal company politics instead of outwards toward the wider world and what we’re trying to build. It’s this diminishment of the imagination that I think is a real tragedy and something I am now trying to guard against in my own thinking.

Thiel issues the challenge to think bigger, be a definite optimist, and be determined to shape the future to your vision, even if in a small way, make a plan, and do the work. Even if the universe is too big for most of us to make a dent in it, this approach has to be better than capitulating to indefinite cynicism about the future.

Definite vs. indefinite thinking: Notes from Zero to One by Peter Thiel was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

What I’ve been reading

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 08:56:36 -0500

I’ve never been into audiobooks, but I’ve taken up listening to them while exercising. I like it and feel better about it than listening to yet another podcast about Apple products.

Michael Lewis, The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds. An accessible narrative introduction to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work around heuristics and decision-making. And they led fascinating lives! Their representativeness heuristic is another way of looking at why narrative stories are so powerful, for better and worse. I hope to follow up with Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.
David Wolpe, David: The Divided Heart. Not a story I knew much about.
Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero To One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. A lot to think about in this one, particularly around definite vs. indefinite thinking.
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Moon. No, it’s not related to the Red Mars series. Vintange Robinson. He published this in 2018, so it was sad how its depiction of Hong Kong in 2047 is already out of date, and not a good way.
Ibram X. Kendi, How To be an Antiracist. An important book with an important message, but for me, could have been more powerful if it focused more on making its central arguments and less on defining new terms.
Kevin Davies, Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing. Once I got past the throat-clearing, this is an interesting story about how science actually works.

What I’ve been reading was originally published in Box Kite Machine.

❖ Acceptance is not agreement

Fri, 16 Oct 2020 07:19:30 -0500

“It’ll be a disaster,” Marie says. Her eyes narrow, and she raps the table. “We don’t have the people and we’ve never used that stack in production.”

Devon, who’s been silent for the entire team meeting, nods, just barely.

Angela’s heart rate spikes. Yesterday the company’s biggest customer asked—demanded really—a new feature nowhere on the roadmap with hairy technical implications. Angela, the team’s tech lead, immediately sprung into action, whiteboarded with other tech leads and senior engineers on her team and across the company, and even endured an interminable one-hour phone call with that one sales guy she can’t stand. Nobody likes the situation, but Angela is proud of the plan she worked hard to put together. It’s a good plan.

And now this.

The hairs on the back of Angela’s neck prick up. Marie’s only been on the team for what, a month? She takes a breath.

“You’re wrong.”

Disagreement is inevitable on any team: whenever two or more humans come together, they bring differing knowledge, context, and motivations. This is healthy, but that doesn’t prevent the words “you’re wrong” from physically wrenching you into fight-or-flight.

Reacting to that feeling, digging in, and aggressively arguing your case is almost always counterproductive. Instead, disagreement is an opportunity to learn something, and maybe counterintuitively, build a stronger relationship by grappling honestly with another person’s perspective. All of this starts with being willing to recreate and acknowledge the other person and accept what they are saying without resistance, even if—especially if—you just know they are wrong.

Acceptance is not agreement: You can fully accept what someone is saying and still wholly disagree with it. You can acknowledge that understanding without looking weak, giving in, or committing to any action you don’t want to. Showing acceptance in the face of disagreement is an act of kindness, it builds knowledge, and it increases your influence and ability to drive agreement.

If you’re doing your job as an engineering leader, you should face disagreement all the time. You should encourage it! Being able to listen and explain your position without disempowering is a critical behavior of a leader.

Acceptance is a kindness

“It all starts with the universally applicable premise that people want to be understood and accepted. Listening is the cheapest, yet most effective concession we can make to get there.” - Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference

Actively listening to someone and accepting what they are saying is kind. Just think of how agonizing it can feel to be misunderstood, alone, or that no one listens when you talk. Lifting this burden from someone is a gift.

The key is to truly listen, don’t just hear. Don’t just shut up long enough to let the other person talk, nodding along until you get your turn. Don’t just murmur empty sounds of sympathy. That doesn’t accomplish anything. You should tune into and try to grasp their underlying ideas, feelings, and motivations. If done well, you can start to see what’s underneath the surface-level facts.

You may have to ask direct clarifying questions. That can feel uncomfortable and weird:

“It sounds like you are angry about this.”
“It sounds like you think I didn’t consider the team’s thoughts about this.”
“What I’m hearing is that you’re fine about this decision, but from your body language, it looks like you have doubts.”

This is hard work! And it can feel downright impossible if your adrenaline is pumping because you disagree about something that matters. In Crucial Conversations, the authors refer to this as “exploring others’ paths.” They recommend focusing intently on your sense of curiosity about the mystery of the other person:

To keep ourselves from feeling nervous while exploring others’ paths—no matter how different or wrong they seem—remember we’re trying to understand their point of view, not necessarily agree with it or support it. Understanding doesn’t equate with agreement. Sensitivity does equate to acquiescence. … There will be plenty of time later for us to share our path as well. For now, we’re merely trying to get at what others think in order to understand why they’re feeling the way they’re feeling and doing what they’re doing.

Once you think you understand what a person is saying, summarize it back to them in your own words to confirm. If you find this a struggle, have a go-to phrase you can use. For example: “Let me see if I follow what you’re saying. What this looks like from your point of view is…”

Repeat until you get it right. And thank them.

Note that nothing here involves apologizing, agreeing with them, or saying that you are wrong.

Acceptance can build knowledge

Beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded. - Philip Tetlock

If you succeed at grappling with someone’s perspective, a magical thing may happen: you may learn where you are mistaken.

It may be flaws in your reasoning. Or facts that were hidden from you. Or maybe that you’re just plain wrong. If you can manage to listen in this way, you’ll invariably learn something. People bring different facts to the table because they know different things, have talked to different people, and spend their time thinking about things that you don’t. It’s foolish to ignore that! It’s not your job to have all the answers.

Acceptance can build consensus

One of the best ways to persuade others is with your ears—by listening to them. - Dean Rusk

The quickest way to ensure someone never changes their mind is to try to ram something down their throat. Just think about how you would feel! However, by showing that you are genuinely open to what they are saying, you signal that you yourself are open to change, and therefore, make the other person feel a little bit safer about being open to change themselves. People will not listen unless they feel listened to. Consensus is not achieved by steamrolling or by downplaying someone else’s opinions.

From Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In:

Unless you acknowledge what they are saying and demonstrate that you understand them, they may believe you have not heard them. When you then try to explain a different point of view, they will suppose that you still have not grasped what they mean. They will say to themselves, “I told him my view, but now he’s saying something different, so he must not have understood it.” Then instead of listening to your point, they will be considering how to make their argument in a new way so that this time maybe you will fathom it.

Reaching consensus is not about rationally weighing objective facts. It is a narrative. Each person needs to be able to tell themselves a story in which they are the protagonist who is respected, heard, and acts with autonomy. When someone makes an argument, they are (1) presenting their facts for judgment, but more importantly, they are (2) putting up their story, and themselves, for validation. Acceptance—even without agreement—is the first step towards consensus.

As a leader and a human, be committed to getting to the right outcome, but not invested in personally being right. You don’t look like less of a leader by listening intently and being open to change. People respect the ability to accept criticism with grace more than you might think. It’s hard! People get that.

Don’t let your fear of giving in dissuade you from engaging with and understanding someone else’s perspective. You’ll usually learn something. You can’t make everyone happy all of the time, but if you work at it, you can make everyone feel respected and heard.

Listen

Angela listens. She asks questions. She repeats and summarizes. She bites her lip.

“I just don’t like being jerked around,” Marie says. She looks straight at Angela, then exhales. “I think if we get some support from an SRE up front, this can work.”

Angela nods. “I like that. I’ll see what we can do.”

Acceptance is not agreement was originally published in Box Kite Machine.