Work Principles
This is part two of my desire to outline my principles in life and work. Part one is here. The inspiration came from Ray Dalio, one of the most brilliant people I have followed for most of my career. You can read about Ray here. His principles, although not easy to adopt, challenge the paradigms most people and organizations use to manage their lives and team members.
Dalio’s work principle’s can be summed up as creating an idea-meritocratic machine that is focused on attaining meaningful goals and meaningful relationships. Disagreements are seen as a source of coming together and decisions are made based on a believability weighted ratings. Moreover, radical truth and transparency requires everybody to be open about weaknesses and strengths. This leads to an organization where the best ideas float to the top, accuracy and the truth are of utmost importance, and nothing short of excellent work is expected.
Only a select few people I know would thrive in the type of environment. Even though Ray’s firm gets the best of the best candidates, he also admits there is a high attrition rate (~1/3). However, it is a proven way to success. Thus, even though not all of his principles may work for you and your organization, some inevitably will and can help your personal ambitions and organization.
Nowhere could these principles in his book be more aptly applied than to software development. No other industry have I seen the need to work together with other human beings more critical than typing into a computer. Just like a hedge fund, some of the best ideas are ones where disagreement leads to a better idea than any one person can come up with themselves. Developing “soft”ware is “hard” and implementing principles across your team with the right management structure to design, implement, and ensure principles are followed by everybody can reap huge benefits.
At the broadest level, my goal is to produce excellent results through passion, discipline, teamwork, and teaching. So, without further adieu, here are my work principles, many of which are similar to Ray’s principles and apply at the individual and organizational level.
Ensure other team members are in sync with your principles
The most important reason to have principles is that other people need to be aware of who you are. If colleagues are not aware of your principles, misunderstandings can be quite common as evidenced by one example in Ray’s book. So be open and make it known that these are the things you care about when looking at other people’s work and also identify the things you don’t care about. This allows you to be consistent and, if you are in a position to lead a team, gives your co-workers a clear expectation of how to work with the standards you expect. On the other hand, if you are not in a position to lead, ensure you’re principles line up with the team’s principles and that you have an agreement amongst your team to act in accordance with those principles. Make your principles known and be disciplined!
Be hearty with approbation and honest with your feedback
High fives, congratulations, and genuine interest in another’s life is a great start to developing meaningful work relationships. However, a leader’s or co-workers job isn’t to be likable all of the time. If someone does great work, they should be praised not matter how small or large. On the other hand, if they don’t do great work, they should receive clear feedback to help them evolve their career. As Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom, put it, there is a silent cost for being nice. So don’t hand out shit sandwiches. Be honest, open, and fair in your feedback.
Be assertive and open minded
If you are only open minded, ideas easily fall into the abyss. If you are only assertive, then you are close minded. Without both it is hard to come to a solution that is better than any one person can come up with. I can name countless examples where being assertive and open minded led to a better decision than the solution I came up with. It pushes people to think of ideas that may have been hard to come by otherwise.
However, being assertive during disagreements can seem like an attack or ignoring another person’s perspective even if you recognize the value of their argument. Thus, …
The purpose of disagreements is to get in sync
Usually disagreements are seen as a source of conflict. Without management principles that clarify disagreements as a source of learning, our emotional side takes over and can lead to messy results. So it best to ensure disagreements are a source of your team coming together. Once team members can be honest and assertive, disagreements can be resolved through …
Believability weighted decisions
I used to refer to this as one’s area of expertise. However, I recently heard it described more aptly in Ray’s book Principles as believability weighted decision making. I firmly believe autocratic and democratic decision making leads to sub optimal decisions and can wastes valuable time spinning wheels.
This is to say everybody should have input; however, in the end somebody that, as Ray describes, 1. Has demonstrated the ability to be successful at the problem you are looking at and 2. Can describe the problem and solution in clear detail is usually the best person to make the final decision if disagreement arises. This person should be picked carefully though. They should have a strong ability to synthesize multiple points of view and revise their past decisions based on everybody’s input.
Structure you group like a sports team
You don’t want a team with a bunch of people that simply say good job and attaboy. You want colleagues that have different viewpoints and experiences in life that can challenge ideas and eventually come together towards a common goal based on your team principles.
Some of the best work I have done is through pairing with team members that think differently than me. You may be a task oriented person that focuses on the intricate details while the person thinks at a much higher level and has trouble groking those details. Knowing who the other person is allows you to effectively work with them.
On the flip side, many work conflicts I have seen are because others don’t recognize the value that someone who thinks differently brings. If you aren’t in sync with team principles, then I would recommend getting in sync before thinking about your personality differences. If you are already in sync about your team principles, then you may not recognize the other person is very detail oriented or perhaps they only work really well in the abstract. After understanding those differences in how others think, you can then tailor your communication with that person based on those differences. Once you have a diverse team that is aware of various personalities that will help make your machine run, it is then possible to …
Understand everybody’s strengths and weaknesses
Knowing and understanding others strengths and weaknesses is an important first step towards managing people and doing excellent work. This is where Myers Briggs test and the like come into play. If you want to understand your team and their relative strengths and weaknesses, these assessments are a much better evaluation than anecdotal evidence. Apart from having an assessment in your hand while dealing with others, writing down their strengths and weaknesses through your work interactions is also a good first step.
If everybody is aware of what strengths and weaknesses each member brings to the table, they will be more empathetic to those differences. Managers can also help to improve those weaknesses or put up guardrails by pairing you with someone who is strong where you are weak.
Moreover, weaknesses may not be personal weaknesses at all, but rather organizational weaknesses. “John Doe is lacking in his ability to estimate when his work will be done” might mean your team lacks the infrastructure to help everybody estimate when their work will be done and bringing these problems to the surface will inevitably allow your team to evolve.
Moreover, understanding relative strengths and weaknesses allows you to place your team members in situations they are most likely to succeed. This may be helped by personality assessments. If a phase of discovery is required, it may not be best to put somebody who is bad at abstract thinking unless they are paired with someone who can put up the guardrails for them.
If you have a reason to be frustrated with a co-worker, come up with 3 reasons they are awesome
No matter who I have had the pleasure of working with, I love all of them. When paired with “John Doe is having trouble estimating when his work will be done but, my gosh, his work is some of the best I have seen”, it can lead to amazing changes in your ways of thinking.
Most people desire to do good. Differences in how we think, who we have been mentored by, and our skills/abilities affect why we might be good at our job. In spite of this, we all have strengths and properly identifying those strengths and how we can improve on our weaknesses can lead to a much better work environment.
Accuracy can be kindness
This one is harder to swallow; however, I see its merit so I wanted to write it down. Countless times I have observed the desire to make one feel comfortable in place of a great learning opportunity or a successful result. This might be called tough love, but when paired with being kind, treating team members like extended family, celebrating all wins, and them knowing you are there to pass on knowledge, helping team members progress their career is preferable to making them feel comfortable. Not doing so is a dis-service to the co-worker, organization, and product you are working on. Some of my best mentors are the ones that pushed me over a ledge I was unwilling to walk over before.
However, this is one of those “It depends”. You need to analyze the team, specifics of the situation, and understand who may or may not be open to being uncomfortable. Some people are happy with what they are doing, and they should stay that way as long as they are still doing great work!
Don’t confuse caution signs with accusations
Have you ever seen a “Caution” sign and gotten angry at it? I hope not. In the work environment, “Caution” or “Watch Out!” is seen many times as an accusation. When I encounter this situation with my friends and colleagues, I remind myself they are putting up a caution sign and not trying to say “Caution your careless person”.
Worry when you aren’t worrying
If I’m not worrying, then I may not be doing my job. The machine and the people cranking the gears need to evolve. Hidden problems need uncovering. Too often I see the lack of worry or calm as evidence that things are going well. It is in fact quite the opposite. This doesn’t mean that everything should be treated like a fire. What it does mean is that having a systematic approach to evolving your team and organization by worrying what can be improved is a good principle to adopt.
I truly believe to succeed in the workplace, you need to first be transparent with who you are and what you care about. Some of the best relationships I have had were with people that understood my principles, allowing us to be in sync and easily get pass disagreements, thus allowing us to produce beautiful music. Let’s hear your work principles!
Footnotes:
https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_where_the_best_ideas_win
