Skippers — Number Three

Skippers are a curated set of articles I found interesting. I originally shared a similar set of articles with some commentary among the leaders in our R&D team (aka “The Skippers”). To goal was to help us become better leaders and managers, or at a minimum be thought provoking.

Career Conversations

Three Powerful Conversations Managers Must Have To Develop Their People covers advice by Russ Laraway. You may not have heard about him. Together with Kim Scott, he created Candor Inc, the company popularizing the Radical Candor concept.

Managers have a powerful tool, Career Conversations, to work with their best employees. Doing so can extend the life of employees at your company, but also bring clarity to how and when they should embark on the next stage in pursuit of their dreams.

“I’ve seen this play out in practice over and over and over. People are surprised that they can grow towards their dreams and stay put in their current role,” says Laraway. “This is one of the side benefits to this approach to career conversations. It can reduce any ants-in-the-pants of wanting to leave or be promoted. As a manager, one of your prime jobs is to help the people on your team develop.”

The article discusses three career conversations managers should have with their employees. 1. Be their Barbara Walters. Take an hour to get to know your employees — deeply. 2. Spot their lighthouse and bring it into focus. Articulating a clear vision for an employee’s future is the most important step. Ask your employee about their dreams. 3. Create a career action plan. At Candor they use a four step method to writing a career action plan.

The hard things about hard things

This is a book I have been reading, by Ben Horowitz. He has an interesting career. The book has lot of great advise for CEOs. Here are few recent topics I found interesting.

Training

“Training is the boss’s job”, Andy Grove once wrote, “Yet, most managers seem to feel that training employees is a job that should be left to others. I on the other hand, strongly believe that the manager should do it himself.”

Training is important because: 1. It directly impacts productivity. 2. It is a form of performance management, as you get to clearly set expectations. 3. It affects the product quality. 4. It improves employee retention.

Management debt

Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. There are three popular examples among smaller companies: 1. Putting two in the box is when you do not have a clear org chart and decide to put e.g., a world-class architect and an outstanding operational person together in charge of a team. You create confusion on who makes the decisions, and who is ultimately accountable. 2. Overcompensating a key employee, because he/she gets another job offer 3. No performance management or employee feedback process.

Good product manager, bad product manager

Good product manager, bad product manager is a popular article, and is also part of the book. While it may not pertain to your job specifically, it does provide some perspective on the job of the product manager. It helped me clarify what I should expect from the product manager role.

I’m too busy

Are you too busy? is a short article about how people sometimes choose busywork intentionally to save face. As covered in the book, Slack, the hyper efficient organization has its dangers in that it kills innovation or thinking about big or important problems.

“In such organizations, it is in fact safer to do a lot of low-level work. If you do things like compiling data, or formatting documents, or moving Outlook appointments from Monday to Wednesday, everybody can see you are busy. You create tangible output — of a certain kind, at least. Nobody will blame you if you do not find the time to coach people, or to have discussions with your peer managers about the direction of your department or your organization. In a hurried environment, you would not impress anybody with that.”

The story made me think about Mad Men. I recently have been watching the happenings of the Madison Avenue advertising gang of Don Draper. (I am typically a decade behind watching popular television shows.) The show follows the deal making and advertising pitches of an advertising agency in the 60s. Execs poor whisky from their liquor trays before lunch. There is plenty of 60s-era misogyny. You will also see Don Draper plenty of times “slacking off”, laying down on his couch, or heading out of the office early. After such episode, he’ll come up with some incredible advertising pitch.

Back to the article. Don’t strive for perfect efficiency.

This is what Slack is about, at its core: Instead of striving for perfect efficiency and 100% utilization, you should allow for some slack in your organization. Slack time is the time in which reinvention and innovation happen. Slack gives you flexibility and responsiveness, and allows your organization to correct its course. Only people who are not 100% busy can think about necessary organizational redesign. And, as a side effect, allowing for some slack will lead to better people retention and less burn-out.