How to be the Boss that Gets Stuff Done
by Jacob Kattampilly, Software Engineer at Cisco ThousandEyes
Recently, our company, ThousandEyes, was acquired by Cisco. We are in the midst of a transformation and during one of our BU meetings, our SVP of Enterprise Networking and Cloud, Todd Nightingale, recommended reading a book called Radical Candor by Kim Scott, which had several tidbits of great wisdom. I wanted to share some of them here, and discuss how we’ve embraced many of these ideas into our Engineering team’s processes and culture.
How can the concept of radical candor teach you how to get stuff done? According to Scott, it is the prerequisite for a thriving collaborative team. Radical candor is explained with a graph that is hinted at on the cover of the book.
If you care deeply and challenge directly, then you are being radically candid. It’s elegantly explained using the graph, but hard to soak in and embrace. Everyone exists at different points in this graph, at different times, when giving feedback. I usually stay in the ruinous empathy zone, and sometimes move into the obnoxious aggression zone. But looking back to the situations I have unknowingly been in the radical candor zone, I may have changed lives for the better. So it’s great to have a visual compass to remind us to constantly correct ourselves to stay in the compassionate candor quadrant.
Being radically candid is more of a culture thing. If everyone in the team aligns themselves to accepting and doling out radical candor, they are setting themselves up for success and to work at their best. The book provides several suggestions on how to inculcate Radical Candor into your team, which cannot be compressed into this blog. But suppose we achieve this within our team. How then does a radically candid team execute and achieve results collaboratively in a dynamic environment? Scott uses her experiences from Apple and Google and suggests a seven-step process called the GSD (get stuff done) Wheel that teams should use to drive innovation.
When presented with a problem, there is a natural tendency, especially in a fast-paced environment, to jump right into the problem and execute, but Scott says the key is to avoid this tendency and instead cycle through all the different steps of the GSD wheel in order to be more successful as a team.
First, we have to listen to everyone’s ideas. Then we need to create a space where the team can clarify the ideas so everyone involved in the decision-making process understands the ideas properly. Then we need to debate the ideas and test their validity. After this, the decision-makers need to decide on the way forward. It is important to keep a separation between the debates and the decision — as debates can get intense, having the separation gives some space for thought and relieves the pressure during debates. Not everyone would be involved in the decision-making process, so next, it’s important to persuade everyone involved in executing it that this is the best way forward. Finally, after the execution, we need to learn from the task and restart the process again.
Those are a lot of steps, but it’s meant to be cycled through quickly. Dragging any of these steps out may feel like paying a collaboration tax. It’s also important not to skip any step. If we do, we will waste time later. Scott suggests a set of meetings to cover each of these steps.
1-on-1 Meetings
Scott says these are ‘must do’ meetings for any leader. These meetings are a good opportunity for leaders to exercise the ‘Care Personally’ part of Radical Candor and the `Listen` part of the GSD Wheel. Scott says leaders should generally avoid piling up negative feedback for these meetings. Instead, she suggests that such feedback should be given as soon as you are sure it is needed, using quick 5 minute catch ups.
Staff Meetings
In order to have effective staff meetings, Scott suggests that they be divided into 3 parts:
- Learn — Review how things have gone the previous week.
- Listen — Allow people to share important updates.
- Clarify — Force the team to clarify the most important decisions and debates for the coming week.
Don’t debate and don’t try to make big decisions in these meetings.
Big Debate Meetings
Separating out debate and decision meetings lowers the tension in decision meetings. It allows you to slow down key decisions when appropriate. It also fosters a culture of debate that is required for a well-functioning team.
Big Decision Meetings
Many times it may be hard to figure out when to stop debating and start deciding. Having a separate meeting ensures that at some point the debating stops and the decisions are made. There should be a clear leader/decider in the meeting (selected during the staff meetings) who will make the final decision. In my opinion, decisions should be made by the people closest to the facts of the problem. Check egos at the door. There are no winners or losers in a team.
All-Hands Meetings
The all-hands meetings usually include two parts: presentations to persuade everyone that the company is moving in the right direction, and Q&A sessions where leaders can hear concerns early and meet them head-on.
No-Meeting Time — Execute!
We should be careful that meeting proliferation does not harm the team’s ability to execute. So it’s important that the team carve out time for actual execution. One recommended approach is to block off ‘think time’ and ‘execution time’ on our calendars.
Kanban Boards
As an engineering team that embraces the Scrum methodology and who uses the JIRA project management system, we are no strangers to the Kanban board. At a very basic level, it consists of color-coded sticky notes that are moved around in the To-Do, In Progress, and Done states.
Getting Stuff Done At ThousandEyes
We follow many of the steps of the GSD wheel at ThousandEyes. For example, we do one-on-one meetings and our all-hands meetings follow a very similar structure to that mentioned in the book. We also follow the Scrum methodology for our engineering teams.
Some of the steps mentioned in the GSD wheel could be mapped to Scrum meetings that we conduct during each sprint cycle. For example, the Learn and Listen steps could be mapped to sprint retrospectives and standup meetings. Kanban boards are also an integral part of everyone’s lives at ThousandEyes engineering.
We also do meetings at the product level called 3-in-a-box, where representatives from product, engineering, and design huddle together to make decisions. We could consider these as debate/decision meetings.
Of course, there’s always room for improvement. At ThousandEyes we strive for excellence, not perfection. One useful insight I got from this book was to have a clear separation between debate and decision meetings. There are also some ways in which we could improve our existing meetings by incorporating suggestions from this book.
Kim Scott has been a CEO coach at Twitter, Dropbox, Qualtrics, and several other growth companies. She has been a member of the faculty at Apple University and has led the AdSense, YouTube, and DoubleClick teams at Google. So the advice is meant for all levels of leaders. The book is a great read, where Scott provides a peek into her extensive and rich experiences. If you are or wish to be part of a team that works on innovative products, I would highly recommend reading this book.
