When you're moving to a new role — be it as an individual contributor to a manager, or a manager to another part of the organisation — your move is often fraught with uncertainty.
This week, we talk about a method for increasing the odds of your success: seek out the people who have failed in similar situations, and ask for their stories.
]]>Why is it that certain people can't seem to get better at management? Why are there so many bad managers out there?
A year or so ago, I came across the first plausible explanation for this observation, from Ben Horowitz, a VC with Andreesen Horowitz.
We take a look at why this framework seems plausible, and how to use it when it comes to evaluating management skills — be it yours or others.
]]>In our last episode, we talked about transitioning from a physical workplace to a remote work configuration.
This week's episode is about taking care of yourself before you take on the responsibility of taking care of others. This applies to managers who have to do one-on-ones, but it's also more generic. I keep thinking to the analogy of 'putting on your own oxygen masks' before you help the person next to you.
We cover things to do to help reduce the mental weight of this trying period.
Imagine that you're working on a task — and you've got a nice backlog of things to do for the next couple of days.
Your boss walks into the room. His eyes are all lit up and you can tell he's excited about something. You have a bad feeling about this.
“Mary!” he exclaims. “So I was just talking to Gloria the other day, and she had this fantastic suggestion for our company website that shouldn’t be terribly difficult to do! Stop what you’re working on! We’ve got to do this now!”
Your heart sinks. You realise that you’re about to shift tasks; your entire backlog isn’t going to get done anytime soon. Normally, this would be alright, except that this is the third time you've done so this month.
This is an ‘idea bomb’, and in the context of a startup, it is a terrible, terrible thing to do.
In early 2019, Hiten Shah wrote a blog post titled My Billion Dollar Mistake. In it, he tells the story of Kissmetrics — a venture-funded company he started with his friend Neil Patel … and in particular the story of the ‘Hiten bomb’, the thing that nearly destroyed his team.
Hiten is an amazing entrepreneur. Before Kissmetrics, he started CrazyEgg, and now runs FYI. But as I read the blog post, what he said about his ‘Hiten bombs’ leapt out at me, if only because I’ve had the same experience countless times in my career. Hiten writes:
Every week. Actually, it was usually daily. I would drop a bomb on someone in the company. It would be some new idea, some new direction, some new brilliant thing I came up with. Something we absolutely had to do right now.
A new feature I thought would help us grow. (But really, it wouldn’t).
A competitor-inspired idea. (A feature that wasn’t actually game changing).
Something I had heard from an investor, advisor or friend. (And it seemed really cool at the time, I swear… but still, worthless).
At best, it was an idea I had gotten from an important customer the day before.
This was constant. Went on for months. It got so bad that the jokes made their way to me. The whole company started calling them Hiten Bombs. I heard it in the halls and walking by people’s desks.
I didn’t realise it at the time, but to my team the barrage of random ideas seemed like they were coming completely out of left field.
Good or bad, none of my ideas were based on any kind of framework or filter. I was shooting from the hip. Thinking that I was helping us focus and execute.
I was dead wrong.
Hiten bombs (or, more generally, ‘idea bombs’ or ‘founder bombs’) is the tendency for managers and founders to dump shiny new ideas on their subordinates, forcing them to stop whatever they’re doing in order to chase the shiny new thing.
This is obviously a bad idea — in a small company, it’s pretty important to be disciplined in execution. Execution takes a couple of weeks, at the very least, before you can even evaluate if the idea you worked on was doing any good. Constant idea bombs prevent that from happening.
In Kissmetrics, Hiten attributes the eventual failure of the company to his constantly dropping idea bombs on his team. It got so bad that a team member eventually had to write a company-wide memo, warning them against Hiten’s bad habits. Much later, Hiten reflected on his behaviour and said that he was effectively destroying the company’s focus. As a result, Kissmetrics squandered their two year lead, and ultimately lost to the competition.
I think Hiten’s behaviour isn’t new to you if you’ve ever been a subordinate in a free-wheeling startup. So let’s flip this question on its head: now that you’re a founder, or a manager, how do you prevent yourself from doing this to your subordinates?
To prevent idea bombs from happening, we need to talk about why they happen in the first place. Why do founders and managers spin on a dime? Why do they feel the need to constantly tweak direction?
The truth is that turning on a dime is exactly what you’re supposed to do in a startup. When you’re starting out, you are constantly learning new things about your customers, your competitors, and your product. So scrapping old plans and moving quickly in new directions is expected startup behaviour — to a point.
The problem is when this happens excessively. When you start on plans, and — before completing them — spin to start on a new initiative … this is bad. Like Hiten, you're actively destroying your team's focus.
It seems almost trivial to say this, but when you choose to change directions, make sure that you:
This sounds incredibly subjective, but in practice isn’t as difficult as you might think. Your teammates will push back if they feel like you’re changing directions too much. Your job is to pick up on this discomfort. Spend your one-on-ones listening for this displeasure, to ensure that you aren’t overdoing it — and those complaints will come, as there’s nothing more disheartening than the feeling of going around in circles.
(Unless, of course, you’re a toxic boss who shuts down criticism — but if that's the case, then you’ve got bigger problems than mere idea bombs).
Nothing I’m writing about here is theoretical. In my previous company, I was good at executing on new directions that my boss had decided on — but quick to push back when I felt we were changing directions too quickly. If anything, my bias (and weakness — or so my ex-boss would say!) was towards staying the course.
I think it’s obvious that you need a mix of both staying and fluid adaption, but I’d like to think that I was a successful balancing force against my boss’s desire for constant change. With that in mind, here are three techniques that I found most useful in my role:
Like most people, I get incredibly excited over new ideas. With time, however, I’ve found that it’s more useful to let new ideas prove their worth to me before I act on them. Let ideas sit. Let them stew. Learn to rein in your excitement and put the idea on a bench for a bit.
(If you’re afraid of forgetting your new ideas, put them in a notes app, or set a reminder for yourself to circle back in a week or two).
Good ideas will continue to seem like good ideas once time has passed. Bad ideas will lose their shine after a few days on the bench. Learn to use the bench to your advantage.
If you do talk about new ideas with your subordinates, make it very clear that you’re still intensely focused on the current plan.
The best way to do this is to show through actions, not tell through words. This is to say that if you spend your lunch break talking about some new customer acquisition strategy — make sure that when you’re back at the office and heads down on execution that you remain 100% committed to the current set of priorities.
This is the quickest — and best! — way to tell your subordinates that ideas on the horizon may exist, but execution on the current set of tasks remain foremost in your mind.
My last trick is to save the brainstorming for peers, not subordinates. My definition of ‘peer’ here is more loosely defined than you might expect — what I mean by it is that you can brainstorm with anyone who you do not hold positional power over.
This includes people at a level below yours in a different part of the company; it also means friends who work at other companies.
The reason this matters is because positional power complicates things. When you’re debating ideas with subordinates, they might feel inclined to agree with whatever you’re saying. But if you debate new ideas with ‘peers’ (again, people who you do not hold positional power over), you will find that they are more willing to push back against you.
This does two things: first, it takes the sheen off new ideas quicker than if you were to merely bench said ideas. There’s nothing quite like a critical peer to make you see your ideas as they truly are.
Second, it removes the risk of your subordinates thinking you want to execute on this new idea. This risk will exist for as long as you hold positional power over them. For instance, if I tell my subordinates to debate with me on the merits of changing our deployment workflow, I might think that I’m engaging in a session of good-spirited theoretical discussion. They, on the other hand, might think that I’m seriously considering changing up our deployment in the near future.
Protecting against idea bombs is really a specialised instance of a more pernicious problem in startup leadership. When you’re in charge of an organisation, you fear that you might be making the wrong decision, or take the wrong path. So you dither. You hedge your bets. You try multiple options in quick succession.
That fear is perfectly understandable, but I’m afraid that my advice here won’t help with that. That terror you feel in the face of uncertainty is a leadership problem, not a management one.
Thankfully, the management problem is what we’ve dealt with today. It is easier to deal with. Remember how it feels like to be a subordinate under a boss who keeps changing directions. Then use the three methods I’ve talked above above to prevent yourself from becoming that boss.
Good luck, and godspeed.
Note: a related podcast may be found here — #31 Beware Idea Bombs.
]]>The COVID-19 pandemic has hit most of us pretty hard. If you're in a startup, depending on your industry, you're likely worried about the solvency of your business. And there are many more, of course, who are affected by this pandemic — front-line workers, restaurant staff, and employees in the hospitality sector.
It's highly likely that you're working from home right now. If you're in a company that isn't normally set up for remote work, this can be quite jarring for you. I want to talk about three things you can do as a manager when you're stuck under a work-from-home or stay-at-home order:
Note that this guide isn't written for the individual contributor — for that, I recommend Glenn Fleishman's Take Control of Working From Home Temporarily. Fleishman has released that as a free ebook, and it's filled with incredibly basic but incredibly effective tips for those who aren't used to working from home.
This post is targeted to the startup manager. It's about maintaining team productivity, not individual productivity. Let's get started.
One of the most annoying things about shifting to a remote work configuration is just how much work depends on informal, casual communication at the office. This is the sort of thing that happens when you're talking on the way to lunch, when you're discussing some work issue while at lunch, or when you walk over to Mary's desk in order to decide on some minutia related to work, and Joe overhears your conversation and takes it into account when planning for his tasks.
All of that ambient decision-making and information-sharing goes away when you're forced to work remotely. This is why remote companies have policies and processes that encourage explicit information sharing, in order to deal with the lack of ambient information transfer when everyone is working from home. It also means that you have to take up the slack when you first switch to a remote-first environment. As manager, you must be the person who shores up the lack of information transfer during this period of transition.
Why should you do this? You should do this because you are the manager — and the job of the manager is to increase the output of the team.
During this period of transition, it is inevitable that your team's productivity will dip. That's ok. But it's your job to make sure it doesn't dip too much.
As a stop-gap measure, make it your job to be responsible for this invisible communications work. It is now your duty to take every decision, every piece of new information, and route it to the stakeholders in your team (or outside your team!) who need to know. How you do this is up to you; you could, for instance:
The most important thing here, however, is to not be too verbose. Writing concisely is good even in the best of times, but it's essential to cut down on useless words if you want your daily updates to be read consistently.
If you write 3000 word essays every day, people will quickly learn to stop reading and skim. This leads us to our next point:
While it's possible to record short videos and do large teleconference calls today, a huge part of remote work communication will inevitably be via writing.
Now is a good a time as any to brush up on your written communication skills.
I recommend writing updates to your team in point-form, to arrest the tendency for people to skim long blocks of text. But more importantly, you should look into basic writing guides, and use this period of remote work as an opportunity to put everything to practice.
Here a bunch of useful recommendations:
I've written extensively about one-on-ones in my Starter Manager Guide. Here's a quick recap: the primary benefit of a one-on-one is to prevent blow-ups from happening. In other words, good managers use one-on-ones to catch problems before they happen.
A transition to remote work is exactly the sort of thing that might lead to show-stopping problems down the road. You should wait a week for people to settle in, and another week for problems to start showing up. Of course — the people with terrible problems (they fall ill, or they have to take care of a loved one) are likely to report them within the first week. But I'm also thinking about more subtle problems — like communications issues, or coordination issues — that may affect your team in the weeks to come.
This is why I'm recommending waiting two weeks instead of one — but the important thing to remember here is to stay vigilant and conduct one-on-ones regularly(!) in order to catch potential problems before they occur.
What kinds of problems may pop up? Here's a small sample:
Be a good manager. Be there for your people.
As a final note, doing regular check-ups is simply good hygiene as a manager. Your subordinates are people, and they are likely to be affected by this situation in various ways. Be there for them, and cut them some slack when their productivity is affected by this pandemic.
Good luck, stay safe, and take care of your team (and loved ones!) in this time of the coronavirus. This disaster will eventually pass. The goal is to get through this together.
Godspeed.
PS: a podcast version of this episode may be found here.
]]>Many of us are stuck working from home this week, as the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps across the globe.
This week's episode is about managing your team from this position — especially if you're not used to working remotely. What should you do? What should you watch out for? We talk about three things to handle this transition.
(Also: sorry for not updating for so long. I've been stranded in my hometown without podcasting equipment for a few months, and had to source for new gear when I realised I was going to be stuck for some time).
Idea bombs, or founder bombs, is the tendency for you to tell your subordinates about this great big idea you have, and then distract them from execution.
In this episode, we explore three methods for resisting this nearly universal urge.
Hiten Shah's My Billion Dollar Mistake (where he talks about 'Hiten bombs')
MFS: The Positional Power Barrier, and the podcast episode on the same topic.
Notes on One-on-Ones.
]]>In my previous episode about my new book, Keep Your People, I mentioned that 'mission is an overrated tool for employee retention'. This was a throwaway comment that I realise should properly be explained. This episode, I spend some time unpacking the assumptions and arguments in that single sentence.
Links I mentioned in the episode:
]]>I launched Keep Your People — The Startup Manager's Guide to Employee Retention last Friday, and the book is available on the MFS website here.
In this episode of the MFS podcast, we cover a quick overview of the argument I make in the book, as well as my apology for not updating the site and the podcast for so many months.
]]>I'm happy to announce that Keep Your People — The Startup Manager's Guide to Retention is available for purchase right now!
I started writing KYP roughly a year ago, when I realised that I had developed a framework for predicting departures in my team, that other managers found useful. So I started thinking that it might be cool to put this into a book, for others to read and use.
You may buy it here at $25 for an individual license, or $55 for a corporate license! These prices are 10% off for 7 days, because launch.
FAQ: what's the difference? Well, the individual license is if you're buying it for yourself, and the corporate license is if you're in a startup and you want to buy the book for all the managers in your company. Apart from that there are no differences; both versions have the exact same ebook formats and are DRM free (I trust you, and anyway DRM sucks).
So what's in the book? Here's the full list of chapters:
Want to try before you buy? You may download an excerpt here.
If you're ready to purchase the book, you can do it right here. And of course, you can read the entire book description over at the book page, right here.
Now go forth and never fear a teammate leaving, ever again!
]]>Giving good instructions is difficult! This week, we look at 'executive intent', an adaptation of 'Commander's Intent', a technique that was developed by the US Army for better, clearer instructions.
The two books referenced during the episode:
]]>We spend a great deal of time as managers forming accurate models of the people we work with. It's important to resist the urge to stick to the first narrative we generate.
This episode, we explore how to resist the narrative fallacy, and why it's important to do so.
]]>Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos popularised the idea of 'disagree and commit' in his 2016 shareholder's letter. It's a fascinating idea, but it isn't the most common form of 'disagree and commit' that you'd experience as a middle manager.
No, the most common scenario is one where you don't agree with your boss, but you're forced to execute his directives anyway. Facebook engineering leader Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth wrote about this in his post 'How Not To Disagree', and I want to talk about that today.
How do you deal with this situation? What should you do if your subordinates don't like what your boss wants to happen? Read the related post here.
]]>Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a fairly famous thing that he calls “disagree and commit.” In his 2016 shareholders letter, Bezos wrote:
This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.
This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.
The interesting thing about this is that Bezos inverts the typical ‘disagree and commit’ scenario that most of us experience in the workplace. If you think about it, ‘disagree and commit’ is rare in the situations that he describes: as a manager dealing with a proposal from a subordinate, or from a subordinate attempting to get buy-in from her peers and her boss. In those situations, the technique is novel and designed to speed up decision-making, and Bezos’s point in his letter was to encourage its broader use within Amazon.
But that doesn’t hide the fact that Bezos describes two fairly niche scenarios. Most of the time, us middle managers have to deal with something much more mundane: we find ourselves committing to something handed to us from above, something we vehemently disagree with.
This is exactly the scenario that Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth writes about in How Not to Disagree:
Imagine a simple scenario. Your manager is proposing changes to your roadmap. Those changes would negate months of work by your team. You lead the team and don't agree with the new direction. Following a robust discussion your manager makes the change over your objections. How do you proceed?
This is a common occurrence in business. It is also grounds for one of the most common mistakes I see.
In this scenario, many leaders sell out their management and rally the team. They say management sucks, but don't worry, we will make progress in spite of them. This approach is staggeringly effective.
Until it isn't.
Boz is right, and I think he’s probably understating the problem. In many startups, managers have more context than their peers in larger companies, and would often have strong opinions on the broader company strategy in ways that big company employees would not. In my previous role I was not only involved in the company’s product roadmap, I also knew the competitive landscape we were operating in — including the problems that our salespeople faced every day in the field. This additional context led to all sorts of nuanced disagreement when it came to company direction — to the point where my boss dreaded pitching several ideas to me.
In fairness, I never said or implied that ‘we would make progress in spite of company leadership’ to my people; in fact, I executed every strategic direction that was asked of me, no matter how much I disagreed with it.
But my failing was in some ways just as bad: I grouched about my disagreements with my boss … to my entire team.
Grouching publicly is something I regard as my biggest flaw as manager. If I could go back in time to change something about my previous tenure, this is the one thing that I would do over.
How did I realise I had gone too far? Well, not too long ago I met up with an old subordinate of mine, and he told me that he was now dealing directly with my ex-boss … and found him eminently reasonable.
“You know,” this person told me, “The impression that I got from you was that (our boss) was really bad. But he listens, and he can be persuaded.”
It was in that instant that I knew that I had overreached. I realised that I had inadvertently painted a negative picture of my previous boss, one that wasn’t fair to him at all; my grouching meant that I had failed in aligning my team with broader company objectives.
I vowed to never repeat this again.
I don’t mean to say that this would be easy, however. Boz points out that you might have had months of work invested in some decision that is now overturned. In my situation, the difficult thing for me was that the objections I raised in response to many of my boss’s proposals were valid, real issues! When things blew up, I took a small amount of pleasure in saying (or at least thinking!) “I told you so.” The schadenfreude was real.
As my boss continued to push his plans through — sometimes against the protests of my subordinates — I began to feel increasingly frustrated. The real challenge here isn’t committing to something that you ‘disagree’ with. The real challenge is to commit to a company strategy that you feel — deep in your bones — is the wrong path to take.
So what do you do when you’re in such a situation?
Boz describes a scenario where a manager doesn't truly commit to a boss’s decision, and instead creates an ‘us against them’ scenario. This didn't happen with me, because my actions spoke louder than my words: I went all in on whatever direction my boss pointed me towards even as I complained bitterly about it.
This was one thing that I did right, I think, and it’s something that I won’t change if I were to go back to redo things. But it's worth asking if this is possible for you. If it isn’t, is it because:
There is a point at which the only solution to an inability to ‘disagree and commit’ is to quit the company and leave. As a manager, you exercise significant leverage on the output of your team. Not being able to ‘disagree and commit’ with your boss’s direction is a failure in company dynamics, and it likely means that you are now at odds with the broader organisational direction.
To put this another way, staying in your company when you feel this way is a disservice to yourself, to your company, and to the subordinates who might not share your views. My personal view is that a manager should leave if he or she is no longer effective; not being able to ‘disagree and commit’ with your boss is one sure sign of ineffectiveness.
But let’s say that you can disagree and commit. Let’s say that you are able to swallow the bitter pill and commit totally to whatever it is your boss has in mind. How might you do that without making my mistakes?
On reflection, I think I would do two things differently if I were allowed a do-over. (This is also what I intend to do going forward in my next role, and for the rest of my career, so there).
The first thing I would do differently is to express my disagreement but limit it to a sentence or less. In some cases — ones where my subordinates are not likely to know or care about my disagreements — I would leave all mentions of my opinion out of communications to the team. Like most such things this sounds easy but probably isn’t; as I’ve mentioned earlier, trying to commit on something you feel deep in your bones to be wrong is difficult.
(There’s also the added complication of wanting to be open with my subordinates; I’ve covered this elsewhere but note that it might’ve been a factor in my behaviour).
The second thing I would do differently is to ask for my boss’s reasoning in all such cases. Most startups are busy places and we weren’t any different — sometimes my boss would push things through and forget to explain his mental calculus to me. This made it a lot more difficult to communicate the full context of his decision-making to the rest of my team; that I was running the engineering from Vietnam and he was in Singapore didn’t help things one bit.
I think what’s interesting here is that this topic really highlights how management matters in the small — you can disagree and commit, but it’s the nuances of how you do so that ultimately matter. As Boz puts it, only once you commit can you truly lead; to which I would add: only once you disagree properly can you truly say you’ve done right by your leaders.
Listen to the related podcast episode here, or subscribe to the MFS Newsletter for updates.
]]>We all have down days. When you're an individual contributor, this isn't so bad. But when you're a manager, your entire team depends on you. How do you deal with motivational issues when you're hit with an inevitable down day?
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