Good Managers Produce Exceptional Teams

The difference between a good manager and a bad one can be huge.

Good managers make careers while others break them. Good managers bring new innovations to customers while others quit. Good managers find a way to make a profit without polluting, exploiting, or cheating while others cut corners. Good managers find ways to adapt their organizations while others in the industry go extinct.

But it’s almost impossible to be good at something without defining what success looks like. As the saying goes, “begin with the end in mind.”

This is one model for the results a good manager takes responsibility to produce.

What would you add, subtract, or revise? My hope is that by sharing, all of us that are committed to being good managers get better faster.

Objective: Be a Good Manager

Key Results:

• Talent of each team member is fully utilized

• Develop team members enough to be promoted

• Team has and utilizes diverse perspectives

• Team delivers measurable results on an important business objective

• Team is trusted by internal and external customers

• Team and all stakeholders are clear on on the why, what, how, when, and intended result of our work

• Whole team feels supported and respected

• Team stewards resources (time, money, etc.) effectively

To build a great team, get specific

Building a team is hard, but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

What I’ve learned when trying to build teams (whether serving on hiring committees, recruiting fraternity pledges, or volunteer board members) is that most of the time we’re not specific enough.

To build a great team, we can’t just fill the role with a body. We can’t count on the perfect candidate either - there are no unicorns. Instead, we should be clear about the role, and the attributes that we can and cannot compromise on.

Here’s a video with a tool / mental model on how to actually do that.

Learning to Win Ugly

What it takes to “win” is different than what it takes to “win ugly.” In sports what it means to win ugly can be something like:

• Winning a close, physical game

• Winning in bad weather or difficult conditions

• Winning without superstars

• Winning after overcoming a deficit or when your team is particularly outmatched

• Winning by just doing what needs to be done, even if it’s not fancy or flashy

But winning ugly is also a useful metaphor outside sports:

• In a marriage: keeping a relationship alive during adversity (e.g., during a global pandemic) or after a major loss

• In parenting: staying patient during bedtime when a child is overtired and throwing a tantrum

• In public service: improving across-the-board quality of life for citizens after the city government, which has been under-invested in for decades, goes through bankruptcy (I’m biased because I worked in it, but the Duggan Administration Detroit is my thinly veiled example here)

• At work: finding a way to reinvent an old-school company that’s not large, prestigious, or cash-infused enough to simply buy “elite” talent

The point of all these examples is to suggest that it’s easier to succeed when circumstances are good, such as when: there’s no adversity, the problem and solution are well understood, you’re on a team of superstars, or you’re flush with cash. It’s something quite different to succeed when the terrain is treacherous.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of winning ugly lately because as a parent, the fee wins we’ve had lately have been ugly ones.

Generally speaking, I’ve come to believe that winning ugly is important because it seems like when the stakes are highest and failure is not an option - like during a global pandemic, or when a city has unprecedented levels of violent crime, or when the economy is in free fall, or a family is on the verge of collapse after a tragedy - there’s usually no way to win except winning ugly.

I’d even say winning ugly is essential - because every team, family, company, and community falls upon hard times. In the medium to long run, it’s guaranteed. But honestly, I don’t think most people look at this capability when assessing talent for someone they’re interviewing for a job, or even when filling out their NCAA bracket. 

Moreover, as I’ve reflected on it, I’ve realized that my whole life, I’ve been coached, actively, to avoid ugly situations. I was sent to lots of enrichment classes where I had a lot of teachers and extra help to learn things (not ugly). I had easy access to great facilities, like tennis courts, classrooms, computer labs, and weight rooms (not ugly). I was encouraged to take prep classes for standardized tests (not ugly). I was raised to think that the way to achieve dreams was to attend an Ivy League school (not ugly).

If I did all these things I could get a job at a prestigious firm that was established, and make a lot of money, and live a successful life.

What I’ve realized, is that this suburban middle class dream depends on putting yourself in ideal situations. The whole strategy hinges on positioning - you work hard and invest a lot so you can position yourself for the next opportunity. If you’re in a good position, you’re more likely to succeed, and therefore set yourself up for the next thing, and so on.

If you don’t think winning ugly matters, this is no problem. But if you do believe it’s important to know how to pull through when it’s tough, the problem is that the way you learn to win ugly is to put yourself into tough situations, not easy ones. The problem with how I (and many of us) were raised is that we didn’t have a lot of chances to learn to win ugly.

I, for example, learned to win ugly in city government, at the Detroit Police Department…in my late twenties and thirties.

There, we caught no breaks. Every single improvement in crime levels we had to scrap for. Every success seemed to come with at least 2 or 3 obstacles to overcome. We didn’t have slush fund of cash for new projects. We didn’t have a ton of staff - even my commanding officers had to get in the weeds on reviewing press briefings, grant applications, or showing up to crime scenes. Just about any improvement I was part of was winning ugly. 

By my observation here’s what people who know how to win ugly do different:

No work is beneath anyone: if you’re winning ugly, even the highest ranking person does the unglamourous work sometimes. You can’t win ugly unless every single person on the team is willing to roll up their sleeves and do the quintessential acts of diving for loose balls, grabbing the coffee, sweeping the floor, or fixing the copy machine. 

Unleashing superpowers: If you are trying to win ugly, that means you have to squeeze every last bit of talent and effort out of your team. That requires knowing your team and finding ways to match the mission with the hidden skills that they aren’t using that can bring disproportionate results. People who win ugly doesn’t just look for hidden talents, they look for superpowers and bend over backwards to unleash them.

Discomfort with ambiguity: A lot of MBA-types talk about how it’s important to be “comfortable with ambiguity”. That’s okay when you have a lot of resources and time. But that doesn’t work if you’re trying to win ugly. Rather, you move to create clarity as quickly as possible so that the team doesn’t waste the limited time or resources you have.

Pivot hard while staying the course: When you’re winning ugly, you can’t stick with bad plans for very long. People who have won ugly know that you don’t throw good money after bad, and you change course - hard if you need to - once you have a strong inclination that the mission will fail. At the same time, winning ugly means sticking with the game plan that you know will work and driving people to execute it relentlessly. Winning ugly requires navigating this paradox of extreme adjustment and extreme persistence.

Tap into deep purpose: Winning ugly is not fun. In fact, it sucks. It’s really hard and it’s really uncomfortable. Only people who love punishment would opt to win ugly, 99% of the time you win ugly because there’s no other way. Because of this reality, to win ugly you have to have access an unshakeable, core-to-the-soul, type or purpose. You have to have deep convictions for the mission and make them tremendously explicit to everyone on the team. That’s the only way to keep the team focused and motivated to persist through the absolute garbage you have to sometimes walk through to win ugly. Teams don’t push to win when it’s ugly if their motivation is fickle.

Doing the unorthodox: People who can win pretty have the luxury of doing what’s already been done. People who win ugly don’t just embrace doing unconventional things, they know they have no other choice.

Be Unflappable: I’ve listed this list because it’s fairly obvious. When it’s a chaotic environment, people who know how to win ugly stay calm even when they move with tremendous velocity. This doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t get angry. In my experience, winning ugly often involves a lot of cursing and heated discussions. But not excuses.

Sure, I think it’s possible to use this mental model when forming a team or even when interviewing to fill a job: someone may have a lot of success, but can they win ugly?

But more than that, I am my own audience when writing this piece. I don’t want to be the sort of husband, father, citizen, or professional that only succeeds because of positioning. At the end of my life, I don’t want to think of myself as someone who only succeeded because I avoided important problems that were hard.

And, I don’t want to teach our sons to win by positioning. I want them to succeed and reach their dreams, yes, but I don’t want to take away their opportunity to build inner-strength, either. This is perhaps the most difficult paradox of parenting (and coaching at work) that I’ve experienced: wanting our kids (or the people we coach) to have success and have upward mobility, but also letting them struggle and fail so they can learn from it, and win ugly the next time.

Bad Managers May Finally Get Exposed

If I were running an enterprise right now, I’d be doubling down HARD on improving management systems and the capabilities of my organization’s leaders. Why?

Because bad management is about to get exposed. 

This is merely a prediction, but even with all the buzz about the “Great Resignation” I actually think most organizations - even ones that are actively investing in “talent” - are underrating the impact of workforce trends that have started during the pandemic. The first order effect of these trends manifests in the Great Resignation (attrition, remote work, work-life balance) but I think the second-order effects will reverberate much more strongly in the long-run.

Here’s my case for why.

A fundamental assumption a company could make about most workers, prior to the pandemic, was that they were mostly locked in to living and working in the same metro or region as their office location. Now, hybrid and fully remote work is catching on, and this fundamental assumption of living and working in the same region is less true than it was three years ago.

This shift accelerates feedback loops around managers in two ways. One, it lowers the switching costs and broadens the job market for the most talented workers. Two, it opens up the labor pool for the most talented managers - who can run distributed teams and have the reputation to attract good people.

I think this creates a double flywheel, which creates second order effects on the quality of management. If this model holds true in real life, good managers will thrive and create spillover effects which raise the quality of management and performance in other parts of their firms. Bad managers, on the contrary, will fall into a doom loop and go the way of the dinosaur. Taken together, I hope this would raise the overall quality of managers across all firms.

Here’s a simple model of the idea:

Of course, these flywheels most directly affect the highest performing workers in fields which are easily digitized. But these shifts could also affect workers across the entire economy. For example, imagine a worker in rural America or a lesser known country, whose earnings are far below their actual capability. Let’s say that person is thoughtful and hard working, but is bounded by the constraints of their local labor market.

Unlike before, where they would have to move or get into a well known college for upward mobility - which are both risky and expensive - they can now more easily get some sort of technical certification online and then find a remote job anywhere in the world. That was always the case before, but the difference now is that their pool of available opportunities is expanded because more firms are hiring workers into remote roles - there’s a pull that didn’t exist before.

Here’s what I think this all means. If this prediction holds true, I think these folks would be the “winners”:

• High-talent workers (obviously): because they can seek higher wages and greater opportunities with less friction.

• High-talent managers: because they are better positioned to build and grow a team; high-talent workers will stick with good managers and avoid bad ones.

• Nimble, well-run, companies: companies that are agile, flexible, dynamic, flat, (insert any related buzzword here) will be able to shape teams and roles to the personnel they have rather than suffocating potential by forcing talented people into pre-defined roles that don’t really fit them. A company that can adjust to fully utilize exceptional hires will beat out their competitors

• Large, global, companies: because they have networks in more places, and are perhaps more able to find / attract workers in disparate places.

• Talent identification and development platforms: if they’re really good platforms, they can become huge assets for companies who can’t filter the bad managers and workers from the good. Examples could be really good headhunters or programs like Akimbo and OnDeck.

• All workers: if there are fewer bad managers, fewer of us have to deal with them!

And these are the folks I would expect to be the “losers”:

• Bad managers: because they’re not only losing the best workers, they’re now subject to the competitive pressure of better managers who will steal their promotions.

• Companies with expensive campuses: because they’re less able to woo workers based on facilities and are saddled with a sunk cost. Companies feeling like they have to justify past spend will adjust more slowly - ego gets in the way of good decisions, after all.

• Most traditional business schools: because teaching people to manage teams in real life will actually matter, and most business schools don’t actually teach students to manage teams in real life. The blueboods will be able to resist transformational change for longer because their brands and alumni connections will help them attract students for awhile. But brands don’t protect lazy incumbents forever.

This shift feels like what Amazon did to retailers, except in the labor market. When switching costs became lower and shelf space became unlimited, retailers couldn’t get by just because they owned distribution channels and supply chains. Those retailers resting on their laurels got exposed, because consumers - especially those who had access to the internet and smartphones - gained more power.

And two things happened when consumers gained more power: some retailers (even large ones) vanished or became much weaker, and, the ones that survived developed even better customer experiences that every consumer could benefit from. It’s not a perfect analogy because the retail market is not exactly the same as the labor market, but switch “consumers” out with “high-talent workers” and the metaphor is illustrative.

Of course, a lot of things must also be true for this prediction to hold, such as:

• We don’t enter an extended recession, which effectively ends this red hot labor market

• Some sort of regulation doesn’t add friction to remote workers

• Companies and workers are actually able to identify and promote good managers

• Enough companies are actually able to figure how to manage a distributed workforce, and don’t put a wholesale stop to remote work

I definitely acknowledge this is a prediction that’s far from a lock. But I honestly see some of these dynamics already starting. For example…

The people that I see switching jobs and getting promoted are by and large the more talented people I know. And, I’m seeing more and more job postings explicitly say the roles can be remote. And, I see more and more people repping their friends’ job postings, which is an emerging signal for manager quality; I certainly take it seriously when someone I know vouches for the quality of someone else’s team.

So, I don’t know about y’all, but I’m taking my development as a manager and my reputation as a manager more seriously than I ever have. If you see me ask for you to write a review about me on LinkedIn or see me write a review about you, you’ll know why! I definitely don’t want to be on the wrong side of this trend, should it happen - you probably don’t.

Bad managers, beware.

Conflict resolution can be baked into the design of our teams, families

In our family, there are no small lies.

So when our older son (Bo) lied about knowing where our younger son’s (Myles) favorite-toy-of-the-week was, we didn’t take it lightly. He went to “the step” where I directed him to stay for 10 minutes. 

“Think about the reason why you lied. I want to know why. We’re going to talk about it over lunch.”

“But papa…”

“You’re a good kid. But lying is unacceptable in this family. We’re going to talk about it over lunch.”

It turns out, Myles did not treat Bo well the previous night. The two of them recently started sharing a room (which they love and they get along great), and Myles was talking loudly and preventing his big brother from sleeping.

Bo, now four, was not happy about this. And even though Bo loves his little brother dearly - they’re best buds, thank goodness - his frustration manifested by taunting Myles about the toy keys, and lying about knowing where they were.

As we talked over lunch, the real problem became clear, lying was merely a symptom. Bo was angry about being mistreated by his little brother. What our lunch became was not an interrogation about why Bo lied, but a expression of feelings and reconciliation between brothers. Our scene was roughly like this:

“Bo, I think I understand why you lied about the toy keys. When someone does something we don’t like, we have to talk to them about it. I know it’s hard. Let me help you work this out with Myles. Could you tell Myles how you felt?”

“Sad.”

“Why?”

“Because you were talking loud and I couldn’t sleep.”

“What would you like him to do to make it right with you?”

“Don’t bother me when I’m trying to sleep, Myles.”

“Can you both live with this and say sorry?”

“Okaaayy…”

Which got me to thinking - this happens in organizational life all the time.

Intentionally or not, we get into conflicts with others. More often than not, the conflict brews until it spills out into an act of aggression. Rarely, in our organizational worlds, is conflict handled openly or proactively.

It’s understandable why it plays out this way Conflict is hard. Admittedly, my default - like that of most humans - is to avoid dealing with all but the most egregious of conflicts and letting things resolve on their own. Stopping everything to say, “hey, I’ve got a problem” is incredibly uncomfortable and difficult. Basically nobody likes being that guy.

It’s MUCH easier to pretend everything is fine, even though it’s usually a bad choice over the long-run. This tendency is unsurprising; it’s well understood that humans prefer to avoid short term pain, even if it means missing out on long-term gain.

But, we can design our organization’s practices to manage this cognitive bias. We can build pressure release valves into our routine, where it’s expected that we talk about conflict because we acknowledge up front that conflict is going to occur.

In our family, we’re experimenting with our dinner routine, for example. We shared with our kids that we’ll take a few minutes at the beginning of our meal to talk about what we appreciated about other members of the family, and share any issues that we’re having. 

We had a moment like this with our kids:

“We all make mistakes, boys, because we’re all human. It’s expected. We’re going to talk about what’s bothering us before we get really sad and angry with each other.”

In hindsight, approaching organizational life - whether it’s in our family, marriage, our work, or our community groups - with the expectation that we’ll have conflict is so obviously a good idea. Conflict doesn’t have to be a bug, it can be a feature, so to speak. If we’re intentional, we can design conflict resolution into our routines and make our relationships and teams stronger because of it.

I didn’t realize it, but this design principle has been part of my organizational life already. The temperature check my wife and I do every Sunday is centered around it.

Even my college fraternity’s chapter meetings tapped into this idea of designing for peace. The last agenda item before adjournment was “Remarks and Criticism”, where everyone in the entire room, even if a hundred brother were present, had the chance to air a grievance or was required to verbally confirm they had nothing further to discuss.

The best part is, this “design” is free and really not that complicated. It could easily be applied in many ways to our existing routines:

• Might we start every monthly program update by asking everyone, including the executives, to share their shoutouts and their biggest frustration?

• Might every 1-1 with our direct reports have a standing item of “time reserved to squash beefs”?

• Might part of our mid-year performance review script be a structured conversation using the template, I felt _______, when _________, and I’d like to make it right by _______?

• Might the closing item of every congressional session be a open forum to apologize for conduct during the previous period and reconcile?

It might be hard to actually start behaving in this way (again, we’re human), but designing for peace is not complicated.

If you have a team or organizational practice that “designs” for peace and conflict resolution, please do share it in the comments. If you prefer to be anonymous, send me a direct message and I’ll post it on your behalf. 

Sharing different practices that have worked will make organizational life better for all of us.

Diversity: An Innovation and Leadership Imperative

The US workforce is more diverse and educated than previous decades. And it’s getting more diverse and educated. This is a fact.

This transformation toward diversity is a big challenge. Because as any parent knows, a diversity of opinions leads to deliberation and friction. Managing diverse organizations is really, really hard - whether it’s a family, a volunteer organization, or a team within a large enterprise.

I’ve seen leaders respond to diversity in one of four ways:

Tyranny is fairly common. If you don’t want to deal with diversity, a leader can just suppress it - either by making their teams more homogenous or shutting down divergent ideas. The problem here is that coercive teams can rarely sustain high performance for extended periods of time, especially when the operating environment changes. Tyrannical leaders exterminate novel ideas, so when creative ideas are needed to solve a previously unseen problem, they struggle. Tyranny is also terrible.

Conflict avoidance is also fairly common. These are the teams that have diversity but don’t utilize it. On these sorts of teams, nobody communicates with candor and so diverse perspectives are never shared and mediated - they’re ignored. As a result, decisions are made slowly or never at all because real issues are never discussed. By avoiding the friction that comes with diverse perspectives, gridlock occurs.

Another response is polarization. Environments of polarization are unmediated, just like instances of conflict avoidance. But instead of being passive situations, they are street fights. In polarized environments, everyone is a ideologue fighting for the supremacy of their perspective, and nobody is there to meditate the friction and make it productive. Similar to conflict avoidance, polarization also leads to gridlock. I don’t often see this response to diversity in companies. But it seems a common phenomenon, at present, in America’s political institutions.

What I wish was more common was productive mediation of diversity. Something magical happens when a diverse-thinking group of people gets together, focuses on a novel problem, candidly shares their perspectives, and then tries to solve it. Novel insights emerge. Divergent ideas are born. New problems are solved. A more common word for this phenomenon is “innovation”.

It seems to me a central question in leadership of organizations today, maybe THE central question of leadership today is “how to do you respond to diversity?” Because, as I mentioned and linked to above - the workforce has become more diverse and more educated. Which means the pump is primed for lots of new, weird ideas and lots of conflict within enterprises.

Leaders have to respond to this newfound diversity. And whether they respond with tyranny, conflict avoidance, polarization, or productive mediation matters a great deal.

I wanted to share this thought because I think this link is often missed. Leadership is rarely cast as a diversity and innovation-management challenge, and diversity is usually cast as an inclusion and equity issue rather than as an innovation and leadership imperative.

The types of questions asked an interviews are a good bellwether for whether enterprises have understood the nuance here:

A traditional way to assess leadership: “Tell me about a time you set a goal and led a team to accomplish it.”

A diversity and innovation-focused way to assess leadership: “Tell me about a time you brought a team with diverse perspectives together and attempted to achieve a breakthrough result.”

The person who has a good answer to question one is not necessarily someone who has a good answer to question two, or vice versa. The difference matters.

High Standards Matter

I’ve been part of many types of organizations in my life and I’ve seen a common thread throughout: high standards matter. 

Organizations of people, - whether we’re talking about  families, companies, police departments, churches, cities, fraternities, neighborhoods, or sports teams - devolve into chaos or irrelevance when they don’t hold themselves to a high standard of conduct. This is true in every organization I’ve ever seen. 

If an organization’s equilibrium state is one of high standards (both in terms of the integrity of how people act and achieving measurable results that matter to customers) it grows and thrives. If its equilibrium is low standards (or no standards) it fails.

If you had to estimate, what percent of people hold themselves to a high standard of integrity and results? Absent any empirical data, I’ll guess less than 25%. Assuming my estimate is roughly accurate, this is why leaders matter in organizations. If individuals don’t hold themselves to high standards, someone else has to - or as I said before, the organization fails.

Standard setting happens on three levels: self, team, and community.

The first level is holding myself to a high standard. This is basically a pre-requisite to anything else because if I don’t hold myself to a high standard, I have no credibility to hold others to a high standard.

The second level is holding my team to a high standard. Team could mean my team at work, my family, my fraternity brothers, my company, my friends, etc. The key is, they’re people I have strong, direct ties to and we have an affiliation that is recognized by others.

To be sure, level one and level two are both incredibly difficult. Holding myself to any standard, let alone a high standard, takes a lot of intention, hard work, and humility. And then, assuming I’ve done that, holding others to a high standard is even more difficult because it’s really uncomfortable. Other people might push back on me. They might call me names. And, it’s a ton of work to motivate and convince people to operate at a high standard of integrity and results, if they aren’t already motivated to do so. Again, this is why (good) leadership matters.

The third level, holding the broader community to a high standard, is even harder. Because now, I have to push even further and hold people that I may not have any right to make demands of to a high standard. (And yes, MBA-type people who are reading this, when I say hold “the broader community” to a high standard, it could just as easily mean hold our customers to a high standard.)

It takes so much courage, trust, effort, and skill to convince an entire community, in all it’s diversity and complexity, to hold a high standard. It’s tremendously difficult to operate at this level because you have to influence lots of people who don’t already agree with you, and might even loathe you, to make sacrifices.

And I’d guess that an unbelievably small percentage of people can even attempt level three. Because you have to have a tremendous amount of credibility to even try holding a community to a high standard, even if the community you’re operating in is relatively small. Like, even trying to get everyone on my block to rake their leaves in the fall or not leave their trash bins out all week would be hard. Can you imagine trying to influence a community that’s even moderately larger?

But operating at level three is so important. Because this is the leadership that moves our society and culture forward. This is the type of leadership that brings the franchise to women and racial minorities. This is the type of leadership that ends genocide. This is the type of leadership that turns violent neighborhoods into thriving, peaceful places to live. This is the type of leadership that ends carbon emissions. This is the type of leadership, broadly speaking, that changes people’s lives in fundamental ways.

I share this mental model of standards-based leadership because there are lots of domains in America where we need to get to level three and hold our broader community to a high standard. I alluded to decarbonization above, but it’s so much more than that. We need to hold our broader community to a high standards in issue areas like: political polarization, homelessness, government spending and taxation, gun violence, health and fitness, and diversity/inclusion just to name a few.

And that means we have to dig deep. And before I say “we”, let me own what I need to do first before applying it more broadly. I have to hold myself to a high standard of integrity and results. And then when I do that, I have to hold my team, whatever that “team” is, to a high standard of integrity and results. And then, maybe just maybe, if the world needs me to step up and hold a community to a high standard of integrity and results, I’ll even have the credibility to try.

High standards matter. And we need as many people as possible to hold themselves and then others to a high standard, so that when the situation demands there are enough people with the credibility to even try moving our culture forward. And that starts with holding ourselves, myself included, to a high standard of integrity and results. Only then can we influence others.

Who is low-potential, exactly?

There are lots of organizations that have programs for “high-potentials”, cohorts of “emerging leaders”, or who’s who lists for “rising stars”.

But lately, I’ve wondered: if we have programs for “high-potential” talent, who is “low-potential”, exactly? It’s audacious to me that we consider anyone low-potential. 

With the right role, coach, opportunities, and expectations, my experience suggests that just about anyone can grow and thrive and make a tremendous contribution to whatever organization they are part of. Moreover, in my experience the most important ingredient needed for someone to be “high-potential” is that they want and are motivated to grow and be better.

It seems to me that a better approach than creating high-potential programs or leadership development cohorts that are exclusive is to design them in such a way that anyone who wants to opt-in and put in the work can participate.

And wouldn’t that be better anyway? Aren’t our customers, colleagues, shareholders, and culture all better off if everyone who wanted to had a structure where they could grow to their fullest potential? Even if not everyone ends up being a positional leader, don’t we want every single person in our companies to be better at the behavior of leading?

I don’t buy the excuse that it would take too many resources to design structures for developing potential that’s inclusive rather than exclusive. Software makes interaction much cheaper and scalable. People are really good at developing themselves and learning from their peers, given the right environment. And, in my experience most people are willing to coach and mentor someone coming up if that person is eager to learn and grow.

I definitely would want to be persuaded in a different direction,.however. Because to me, employing the best ways to prevent human talent from being wasted is worth doing, even if it’s not my idea that wins.

But again, if someone is truly motivated to grow and make a greater contribution, who of those folks are low-potential, exactly?

Status fights and wasted talent

Companies, and really any organization, can function like a fight for status. This “fight” plays out in organizations the same way whether it’s a corporation, a community group, or a typical school cafeteria.

There’s a limited number of spots at the top of the pecking order, and the people up there are trying to stay there, and those that aren’t are either trying to claw to the top or survive by disengaging and staying out of the fray.

If you’re engaged in a fight for status there are two ways to win, as far as I can tell: knocking other people down or promoting yourself up.

Knocking other people down is what bullies do. They call you names in public, they flex their strength, they form cartels for protection, and they basically do anything to show their dominance. They become stronger when they make others weaker.

This is, of course, easy to relate to if you’ve ever been to middle school or have seen movies like Mean Girls or The Breakfast Club. However, the same sort of dominating behavior that lowers others’ status occurs in work environments.

“Bullies” in the work environment do things like interrupt you in a meeting, talk louder or longer than you, take credit for your work, exclude you from impactful projects, tell stories about your work (inaccurately) when you’re not there, pump up the reputation of people in their clique, or impose low-status “grunt work” on others. All these things are behaviors which lower the status of others. In the work environment, bullies get stronger by making others weaker.

The other way to win a status fight is to promote yourself up and manage your perception in the organization. In the work environment, tactics to promote yourself up include things like: advertising your professional or educational credentials, talking about your accomplishments (over and over), flashing your title, hopping around to seek promotions and avoid messy projects, or name dropping to affiliate yourself with someone who has high status.

Let’s put aside the fact that status fights are crummy to engage in, cause harm, and probably encourage ethically questionable behavior. What really offends me about organizations that function as a status fight is that they waste talent.

In a status-fight organizations people with lower status are treated poorly. And when that happens they don’t contribute their best work - either because they disengage to avoid conflict or because their efforts are actively discouraged or blocked. 

Think of any organization you’ve ever been part of that functions like a status fight. Imagine if everyone in that organization of “lower status” was able to contribute 5% or 10% more to the customer, the community, or the broader culture. That 5 to 10% bump is not unreasonable, I think - it’s easy to contribute more when you’re not suffocating. What a waste, right?

Of course, not all organizations function like a status fight and I’ve been lucky to have been part of a few in my lifetime. I think of those organizations as participating in a “status quest” rather than a “status fight”. In a status-questing organization, status actually creates a virtuous cycle rather than a pernicious one.

A status quest, in the way that I mean it, is an organization that’s in pursuit of a difficult, important, noble purpose. Something that’s aspirational and generous, but also exceptionally difficult. 

In these status-questing organizations the standard for performance (what you accomplish) and conduct (how you act) is set extremely high, because everyone knows it’s impossible to accomplish the important, noble, quest unless everyone is bringing their best work everyday and doing it virtuously. 

And when the bar is set that high, everyone feels the tension of needing to hit the standard, because it’s hard. Whether it’s to achieve the quest or be seen by their peers as making a generous contribution to the organization’s efforts, everyone wants to do their part and needs the help of others. 

And as a result, the opposite dynamic of a status fight occurs. Instead of knocking other people down, people in a status-questing organization have no choice but to coach others up, which ultimately raises everyone’s status. 

If you’re on a noble quest, there’s plenty of “status” to go around and the organization can’t afford to waste the contribution of anybody in the building - whether it’s the person answering the phone or a senior executive. In a status-questing organization, the rational decision is to raise the bar and coach instead of throw other people under the bus.

And what’s nice, is that in an organization with that raise-the-bar-and-coach-others-up dynamic is that the bullies don’t succeed, because their inability to raise and coach is made visible. And then they leave. And so the virtuous cycle intensifies.

So if you’re in an organization that feels more like a high-school cafeteria than an expeditionary force of a noble, virtuous quest, my advice to you is this: raise the bar of performance and conduct for the part of the organization you’re responsible for - even if it’s just yourself. And once you raise the bar, coach yourself and others up to it. 

And when you do that, you’ll start to notice (and attract) the other people in the organization who are also interested in being on a noble quest, rather than a status fight. Find ways to team up with those people, and then keep raising the bar and coaching up to it. Raise and coach, raise and coach, over and over until the entire organization is on a status quest and any “bullies” that remain choose to leave.

Of course, this is one person’s advice. Looking back on it, it’s how I’ve operated (but I honestly didn’t realize this is how I rolled until writing this piece) and it’s served me well. Sure, I haven’t had a fast-track career with a string of promotions every two years or anything, but I have done work that I’m proud of, I’ve conducted myself in a way that I’m proud of, and I have a clear conscience, which has been a worthwhile trade-off for me.

—

Note: this perspective on equality / the immorality of wasted talent is well-trodden ground, philosophically speaking. John Stuart Mill (and presumably his contemporaries) wrote about it. Here’s an explainer on Mill’s The Subjection of Women from Farnam Street that I just saw today. It’s a nice foray into Mill’s work on this topic.

Clear, shared, expectations: in projects and parenting

My wife made a brilliant parenting move this week.

Our older son is 3, and we’re trying to work on table manners with him. At least 5 days a week we have been getting into some sort of tussle with him over playing with his food, chewing with his mouth open, or deliberately making a mess. Mealtime has been the most common trigger of friction between us all.

And the other day I asked Robyn what she wanted to do, and she calmly replied, “I have a plan.”

What she did was simple and immediately effective. When we were serving the next meal, she set expectations for our son as she was putting down his plate. “The expectation is that we eat Cheerios with a spoon, blueberries you can eat with your hands.” And on she went about sitting down properly and what can be dipped and what cannot.

Her plan of setting clear expectations, in advance, worked immediately. It was a master stroke.

—

My work colleagues and I have been experimenting with approaches to clarify expectations, too. Instead of doing a weekly check-in with a traditional project board, we made a “why-what-how” board.

Here’s a representation of what our board (which is just a slide in PowerPoint) looks like:

What we do each week is re-score and re-plot our projects on this chart together. The goal of this exercise is to ensure the project is in the sweet spot of clear, shared, expectations.

The x-axis is the what. We make sure we understand what the intended outcome of the project is. Do we understand the deliverables? Do we understand what success looks like and what result we are trying to create? If the value is left of the origin it means the what isn’t clear enough. If the value is to the right of the origin, it means we are over analyzing the intended outcome and/or talking about it more than we need to.

The y-axis is the how. We make sure we understand the steps we need to take to achieve the intended outcome of the project. Do we understand the major milestones and next steps? Do we have a plan for how we’ll actually get the deliverables and analyses done? Do we understand the roadblocks ahead? If the value is below the origin, it means the how isn’t clear enough. If the value is above the origin, it means we’re micromanaging the project or getting too prescriptive about how it should be done.

We ask ourselves each week, usually during our Monday morning check-in, where are we at for each project. If we’re outside of the sweet spot, we spend some time clarifying the what, the how, or both. 

Each quadrant, conveniently, has a nicely fitting heuristic which gives us a nudge on how to get back to the sweet spot:

• High how, high what: we are talking too much. Let’s just take action.

• Low how, high what: we understand what we’re trying to accomplish, but need to talk about how we get there. Let’s spitball and figure it out.

• Low how, low what: we’re totally lost. We need to take a pause, reset and understand everything clearly where we are. This is the quadrant where the project is at risk and we have to dig out immediately.

• High how, low what: this is the we might be wasting our time quadrant. If we don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish, even if we nail the project tactically, are we even solving the correct problem? We need to clarify the what (usually by escalating to the sponsor) or end the project.

What’s not plotted on the graph, but in the data table that powers the graph, are a few other elements: the why and who and the immediate next step.

The why and who has been a recent addition to our board, that we added a few weeks after trying this out for the first time. This value is the motivation for the project. Why does it matter, who is it for, what positive impact is this project in service of, why should anyone care about it? We think about our who as one of four general parties, that are applicable, honestly, to any organization. Any project has to ultimately impact at least one of these stakeholders in a big way to have a compelling why:

• Our customer

• Our owners or shareholders

• Our colleagues

• Our society or the communities in which we operate

If we can’t think of a compelling reason why what we’re doing matters to at least one of these four stakeholders, why are we even working on this project? We push ourselves to understand why, for our own motivation and to ensure we’re not doing something that doesn’t actually matter.

We also ensure everyone knows what the immediate next step is. If that’s not clear we establish it right there so there’s no reason we can’t take action right after our meeting.

Our team only started experimenting with this since the beginning of the year, but I’ve been finding it to be much more helpful than a traditional project board where the conversation revolves around the ambiguous concept of “status” and “accountability”.

Instead of checking our “status” non-specifically, and being reactive to a project that is “off-track”, we ensure that everyone on the team has clear, shared, expectations on each project, and we chip away at getting into the sweet spot of clarity on a weekly basis. By using this approach, we end up teasing out problems before they become large. Because after all, how often do projects get off-track if the why, what, and how of the project are clear to everyone, all the time? Rarely.

This approach is also much less autocratic than a traditional project board. Instead of the “manager” being dictatorial and projecting authority, this process feels much more democratic and equal, relatively at least. We all are working through the why, what, and the how together and even though one of us on the team is the titular “manager”, it feels more like we’re all on equal footing. 

This is a good thing because everyone is more able to speak up, ask questions freely, and bring their talents forward to benefit the team and the people we’re serving. It’s less of an exercise where everyone is afraid of not having hit their milestones and therefore trying to tap dance around the status of the project.

There is of course a time and place for “status” and “accountability”. Of course, deadlines and results matter and we have to hit those. But what I’ve found so far is that by having clear, shared, expectations we are in a perpetual state of forward motion. We hit our deadlines as a natural consequence of having clarity. As is often said, but no less true, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

As is usually the case, what my wife and I are learning as parents is incredibly relevant to what we are learning about management and leadership. In this case the lesson is simple: clear, shared, expectations lead to better results (and less strife).

The Weekly Coaching Conversation

Coaching others is definitely the most important and rewarding part of my job. When I took on this responsibility, I worried: would I waste my colleagues’ talent? How do I help them grow consistently and quickly?

Here’s a summary of what I‘ve been experimenting with.

Experiment 1: Dedicate 30 minutes to coaching every week

I raided my father-in-law’s collection of old business books and grabbed one called The Weekly Coaching Conversation: A Business Fable About Taking Your Game and Your Team to the Next Level.

The idea in it is simple: schedule a dedicated block of 30 minutes every week with each person you’re responsible for coaching. I thought it was worth trying. As it turns out, it was. Providing support, feedback, and advice falls by the wayside if it’s not part of the weekly calendar - at least for me.

Experiment 2: Ask Direct Questions

We start each 30 minute weekly meeting the same way, with a version of these two questions:

On a scale of 1-100 how much of your talent did we utilize vs. waste this week?

This question is useful because it’s direct feedback from the person I’m trying to coach. I can get a sense of what they need. Most of the time, what is holding them back is either me, or something I can support them with, such as: more clarity on the mission, an introduction to a subject-matter expert, some time to spitball ideas, or just some space to explore. This is also a helpful question to ask, because when the person I’m coaching is excited and thriving, I get to ask them why, and do more of it.

What’s one way you’re better than the person you were last week?

This question is useful because it helps make on-the-job learning more explicit and concrete. We get to unpack results and really see tangible progress. Additionally, I get a sense of what the person I’m coaching cares about getting better at which allows me to tailor how I coach them.

Experiment 3: Stop controlling the agenda

At the beginning, I would suggest an agenda for our weekly coaching sessions. But over the course of 3-5 weeks, I transitioned responsibility for setting the agenda to the person I’m coaching. This works out better because we end up focusing our time on what matters to them, rather than what I think matters to them (which is good, because I’m usually wrong about what matters to them).

It also works out well because my colleagues are in the driver’s seat for their own development. And that fosters intrinsic motivation for them, which is really important for fueling real growth. I certainly raise issues if I see them, but it frees up my headspace and my time to be responsive to what they ask of me.

I still have a lot of improvement to do here, but I spend a lot less time talking and much more time asking questions and being a sounding board by letting go of control of the agenda. Which seems to work out better for my colleagues’ growth.

What I’m thinking about now (I haven’t figured it out) how do I know that my support is actually working, and leading to real growth and development?

—

I am absolutely determined to discover ways to stop wasting talent, in my immediate surroundings and across the organizational world. It’s a moral issue for me. And I figure a world with less wasted talent starts with me wasting less talent.

I’ll continue to share reflections on what I’m experimenting with so all of us that care about unlocking the potential of people and teams have an excuse to find and talk to each other.

Management is moral

These are the three questions I think about a lot, with regard to my professional role as a people manager:

1. Am I here to enrich the lives of others (customers, colleagues, owners) or my own?

2. Are my expectations for my team (starting with myself) going to be high or low?

3. When my team doesn’t meet my expectations (which is bound to happen sometime) am I committed to coaching them, or merely shaming them into compliance with my wishes?

Don’t be fooled, these decisions are all moral in nature. Being a manager is not merely transactional, tactical, or even just strategic. Management is moral. Or I should say, depending on how one answers these questions, management might be moral. In my view, it ought to be.

As managers we are the stewards of whether the talent of the people we manage is wasted or not. And we steward tens of thousands of dollars worth of people’s time, if not more. For that reason, I think management ought to be a moral endeavor where we consider its moral implications.

And it starts with the expectations we set for ourselves and, in turn, others.

I persist, management is moral. We should take it that seriously.

A Covid-19 Family Continuity Plan

For four months, when day schools were closed, we treaded water and tried our best to work with our boys at home. It will probably be 2-3 years before I fully process what just happened to us (assuming there’s not more weird stuff to come, which is probably wishful thinking).

A few weeks ago, we sent our kids back to school, and that was a really hard decision. A week or two after we sent our boys back to school, we had the presence of mind to think through what we would do if we needed to pull the kids out of school again. We made a sort of a family continuity plan.

Robyn and I had to put our family continuity plan practice last week. I highly recommend you talk about this with your spouse / partner. Ours is geared toward decisions around kids, but the underlying principles are generally applicable.

I have not shared all of our “answers” - but message me separately if that’s something that would be helpful for you to talk about. Instead, I’ve shared the framework we developed for making decisions for our family.

I hope it is helpful to you. Our framework is at the bottom of this post.

This most demanding part of this exercise was not figuring out what was best for our family. That was easy. And we’re lucky - we can work from home or pull our kids from school if we need to. I acknowledge that’s not a luxury everyone has.

The hardest part of our exercise was to answer a different question: what do we owe other families?

Robyn and I grappled with this question explicitly. Because in this pandemic especially, our decisions don’t just affect our immediate friends and family, our decisions affect the other families at our childrens’ school - most of whom we don’t know personally. But because of the nature of this virus, we depend on them and they depend on us.

And what makes this question hard is that it compelled us to prepare to make real sacrifices, like potentially pulling the kids from school (again) or isoloating from our friends and family (again).

We certainly didn’t write this plan down when we discussed it a few weeks ago. But we had to execute the plan last week, and talking about it before was extremely helpful. This plan - which is a reconstruction of our lived experience - helped us to live out the values we believe matter, and the value we expect of others.

Again, it’s tailored to our circumstances, but I hope it’s helpful to you.

Family Continuity Plan and Framework for Decision Making

Core Principles for Making Decisions

• Avoid becoming infected

• Avoid become an asymptomic vector of the disease

• If there is reason to contemplate it, assume we or others are infected until data proves otherwise

• Make decisions quickly, communicate transparently

Triggers

• If there is a likely exposure at work

• If there is a Covid exposure within our school community

• If there is a Covid exposure within our friends and family that live locally

• If there is a substantial change in local case / death data (e.g., government mandates change)

Questions to Ask

• What are the facts?

• Who was exposed to whom, and when?

• What was the nature of the exposure? Was transmission possible or highly unlikely?

• Has anyone involved taken a test? What were the results? When were the tests taken?

• Were we exposed when someone was likely infectious?

• Is anyone showing symptoms?

• Where have we been since exposure who have we seen?

Evaluate answers above against pre-determined core principles. If necessary, execute relevant steps in the protocol.

Protocol

• Take a deep breath.

• Who do we need to notify to prevent spread? School, work, family, friends? Contact them.

• Do we need immediate medical attention? Seek it.

• Do we need to take a test to determine our health status? Schedule It.

• Do we need supplies? Provision them, and request help if necessary.

• Determine who will manage child care if kids are pulled from school.

• Come up with a workable schedule for managing work and home responsibilities.

  • Cancel / reschedule necessary social events.

  • Cancel / reschedule necessary work meetings.

  • Determine minimum home responsibilities / chores.

  • Reset expectations on bigger projects (e.g., yard, home improvement)

• Set a schedule for check-in on information updates. This is important so we do not overconsume information in a crisis.

• Lay out key milestones for next 2-3 weeks. What are big events that cannot be messed up.

• Determine level of information the kids need to know and can understand. Explain what is necessary.

• Determine criteria that have to be met to return to previous activities. Document them so it’s not as easy to “cheat” if things are difficult.

• Take a deep breath.

In this election, no touchdown dances from me

I want to say this now, to my friends, before election day. This is what you can expect from me:

• I am voting on election day.

• I will not be voting for the incumbent President, President Trump.

• If the incumbent President is reelected in a free and fair election, I will not complain or bellyache or make excuses. I will not act like a sore loser.

• If the incumbent President is not reelected in a free and fair election, I will not rub anyone’s nose in it. No “I told you so”, no taunting, no finger wagging, no touchdown dances. I will not act like a sore winner.

Why? Because I don’t think that’s what it’s about.

For me, the real victory is holding a free and fair election, with a peaceful transition of power. And, the whole point of a free and fair election is for all of us to vote freely and fairly. The tactic of potentially casting you as a shameful outsider because you don’t vote the same way as I do is a tactic, I think, that’s inconsistent with the spirit of a free and fair election. I won’t do it.

Moreover, an election is not the end of a journey to celebrate (save for the people who worked hard on the campaign, in private, perhaps). The election is the beginning of a new season, where someone has earned privilege and responsibility to govern for four years. I don’t celebrate at the beginning of a long hike up a mountain, I rejoice after our crew has safely returned home. I can’t think of a reason why elections would be any different.

Which brings me to a final point in conclusion. I’m not the sort of person who relishes competition, or is motivated by winning. So, this attitude of no touchdown dances is not something that’s unique to this election. It’s how I operate in all aspects of my life. So why bother writing this post?

Because I’m not really writing this with my Republican friends in mind. I’m intending to speak most directly to my friends who are also not planning to reelect the incumbent President.

And to you, my Democratic friends - no matter how you act during this election, I’m not going to judge you (and the same goes for friends who are not Democratic supporters).

But I ask that you don’t act like a sore winner or a sore loser. And it will be easy for us to fall into doing both.

Because at the end of the day, I think we all have to think of ourselves as being on the same team. We’re trying to create a country where we can live free lives. A country where people don’t die senseless deaths. And perhaps even a country that contributes to an international community that cooperates to defend our species and planet against existential threats. None of these are guarantees, as we’ve seen during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The universe is a dangerous and lonely place, as far as we know. Our republic, our planet, and our species are fragile. We have to work hard to have a chance of any of the three surviving in perpetuity.

The challenges ahead of us are really quite difficult. We have to play as one team to increase the long-run chances that our still nascent, free republic and we as a species, survive. No team I’ve ever been on plays its best when there’s infighting about the starting lineup.

I don’t want to start the next four years with infighting.

Of course, I know that I can’t control anybody’s actions but my own, nor do I want to. My hope here is that by laying out my intentions in advance and explaining my rationale it may lead others to carefully set intentions for their own conduct.

Simple over SMART

I like New Years Resolutions, But for most of my life I wasn’t very good at achieving them.

This year, for the first time ever, I remembered what my resolution even was (get a new job) at the end of the year and I actually achieved it.

Why?

1. It was simple enough to actually remember. There was also only one.

2. It was specific. I could actually know when the goal was achieved. When my paycheck had another company name on it, I was done. Boom.

3. It was really important. It took a long time to convince myself, but I realized that I needed to make a change.

4. It was urgent. Even though it took a long time, I felt compelled to work on it every day and week.

SSIU is not a catchy acronym like SMART. But in my personal experience SMART goals are so complicated to write well, I often don’t remember them after a week.

In fact, an acronym might even be unnecessary in the first place. If a goal is simple, the specificity, the importance, and urgency take care of themselves.

Simple is not only enough, simple might be better than smart.

—

Friends,

If you follow my work you might be interested to know my resolution this year: publishing this book. It’s drafted, but it still needs to be transcribed, edited, laid out, and shared.

If you have advice or encouragement on how to do this, I would love to talk with you.

Touchdowns vs. First downs

First downs are not touchdowns. That is obvious.

No football team ever has won a game when they make progress down the field but never score any points.

On teams, first downs often can feel like touchdowns and be celebrated as such, but they’re not the same.

Touchdowns take courage. To say it’s done, shipped. To deliver and present. To go to market. To make a decision. To make the change. To be specific. To put it into the world and be on the hook for it. To commit and forsake all others. Courage.

First downs merely require making progress, gaining yardage, keeping the wheels turning. Whatever that loosely means.

To be sure, first downs are important. But only if they put us in position to take a real shot at the end zone and achieve the goal that actually matters.

Consequently, it’s REALLY important to REALLY understand what tasks are touchdowns and which ones are merely first downs. Otherwise, we’ll have spent our lives being busy, without actually making anything better.

Landing On Mars

I’m forming a landing party and going to Mars. Will you come?

Full disclosure: I’m not actually going to Mars (shocker). But let’s play out this thought experiment as if I were.

Before making a decision you’d ask me a lot of questions, some would probably be these:

• Are you serious?

• Why are we going to Mars?

• Are we coming back?

• How are we going to make the journey safely?

• Why are you asking me, and what would be my role in the mission?

• Why should I trust you to make this happen?

• When are we going and coming back?

• If I agree to this, what do you need me to do now?

In organizations and community we ask others to go to Mars all the time. We just call them new “projects” or new “programs.”

Those new projects we want to start are not as audacious as actually going to Mars. But to those we want and need to bring along, it might feel as if it were.

And because it feels like going to Mars for them, we need to answer those questions and build up their trust in us before we ask them to enlist. If we don’t, we should expect them to say no, and they honestly ought to.

“Leader” is a title, leadership is taking responsibility

I could prepare, read, study, interview experts, take a standardized test, get a degree, get a fellowship, and then get a placement and then take responsibility for something.

That would make me a leader. It is one path.

On the other extreme, I could take responsibility for something today that needs responsibility taken, and then take responsibility for getting better at it. Even something really small. Then I could do the same thing tomorrow, the next day, and the next day.

That would make me a leader today, and an even better leader tomorrow. That just puts me on the hook today, instead of 5 or 10 years from now.

Title or not, we’re not leaders until we take responsibility for something that needs responsibility taken. The second we take responsibility, we instantly become a leader.