book-notes

Three Powerful Conversations Managers Must Have To Develop Their People

http://firstround.com/review/three-powerful-conversations-managers-must-have-to-develop-their-people/

by Russ Laraway

• Have career conversations, or deep, meaningful dialogue coupled with action plans around measurable goals, to keep your employees around for longer.
• You shouldn’t avoid career conversations, because those people will grow with or without you.
• Ways to screw up career conversations include not having them at all, limiting them to the near future, just checking the box, or improvising in a half-baked way.
• Each step below requires an hour of investment approximately two weeks apart form one another, and explores the employee’s past, present, and future.
• First, ask “Starting with kindergarten, tell me about your life.”
• Probe with more questions when they talk about pivots. Look for the patterns that give you a strong signal and write them down.
• Second, ask the employee what he or she would be doing at the pinnacle of his or her career, when feeling challenged, engaged, and not wanting anything else.
• Ask what size company they want to work for, what industry they want to work in, and whether they want to be a in a senior IC role or a senior management role?
• Ideally you can place the employee in a position that will deliver experiences that will compound and prepare him or her for where he or she is headed.
• Third, create a detailed action plan, which shows how your employee is going to reach that vision for themselves. It is a roadmap to self-actualization.
• To develop a career action plan, first develop their role, or make adjustments to take them toward the end goal in their career.
• Second, enhance their network, helping them identify the people who can inform and influence where they’re trying to go.
• Third, define their immediate next step, which can involve advocating for them to make a lateral or vertical move, or giving them goalposts to hit on a quarterly basis.
• Finally, enlist others to help hone their skills, such as sending your employees to training like conferences or workshops.
• You must intently invest in each employee, and make sure they’re getting the tools and experiences they need to advance in the way they aspire to advance.

Power Up Your Team with Nonviolent Communication Principles

http://firstround.com/review/power-up-your-team-with-nonviolent-communication-principles/

by Ann Mehl and Jerry Colonna

• A closed question is a yes/no question, to which there is a wrong and right answer, and it makes you tense, agitated, and defensive.
• An open question acknowledge the level of effort you’re already putting in and offers to help. It asks for more than a one-word reply, and seeks valuable input.
• When someone leads from a place of fear, they will ask closed questions and get closed answers.
• There are four ingredients of nonviolent communication, or sometimes called compassionate communication.
• First, observe. Record these observations in your mind without assigning value to them, and hold back from judgment or evaluation. For example, “What I’m hearing you ask me is…”
• Second, perform an emotional audit. Choose words that are specific to your experience — not words that insinuate what another is doing. For example, “I am feeling tired because…”
• Third, list the needs that are connected to the feelings you’ve identified. What is lacking? For example, “Because I value my happiness, I need…”
• Fourth, define the requests, which you use to get your needs. You want to take the other person’s feelings and needs into account, so build flexibility and freedom into your ask. For example, “I am wondering if…”
• Watch out for the first step, because the jump from observation to judgment happens almost immediately.
• Nonviolent communication strips away the narrative people automatically build in their heads, which disables you from working effectively.
• When conflict arises in the workplace, people either address it head on without any filter (fight), or hide and hope it dissipates (flight).
• The A-E-I-O-U method assumes that both sides of any argument mean well. It stands for Acknowledge, Express, Identify, Outcome, and Understanding.
• Acknowledge: Announce that you know the person is trying to do good, and that you do have a grasp on why they are doing what they’re doing.
• Express: Affirm the positive intention and express your own specific concern. Start statements with “I think…” or “I feel…” to make clear that the words are your own.
• Identify: Clearly define your objectives and recommendations. Use “I would like…” instead of “I want…” Try to build consensus by demonstrating how your solution will resolve everyone’s concerns.
• Outcome: Outline the benefits of what’s in it for your opposition if they accommodate you. Include simple recognition such as “Thanks, I appreciate your flexibility on this issue.”
• Understanding: Ask for feedback, and solidify a next action or step, or work together to develop alternatives.
• During this process keep calm, and apply active listening skills by continuing to rephrase things to ensure crystal clear understanding.
• One way to signal a shift is to ask colleagues to repeat back what you just said to ensure you were fully understood. Emphasize it’s so that you can improve the way you relay information, and not because you’re afraid they won’t understand.
• Another is to say early and often that all staff members are welcome to speak up in any situation.
• Finally, pay attention to all non-verbal communication when talking with someone, and remember how critical it is to observe without judgment.
• The earlier you start using these techniques the better, because each new employee you onboard will be initiated to your improved, clear style of communication.

Radical Candor: The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss

http://firstround.com/review/radical-candor-the-surprising-secret-to-being-a-good-boss/

by Kim Scott

• The single most important thing a boss can do if focus on guidance: Giving it, receiving it, and encouraging it.
• If you imagine a graph with the vertical axis as caring personally and the horizontal axis as challenging directly, radical candor is in the top right.
• By caring personally, or “giving a damn,” you build up the capital to challenge directly, or “be willing to piss people off.”
• HHIPP: Radical candor is humble, helpful, immediate, in person (in private if it’s criticism and in public if it’s praise) and it doesn’t personalize.
• Challenging directly without caring personally is the quadrant of obnoxious aggression. Caring personally without challenging directly is the quadrant of ruinous empathy.
• The final quadrant, of neither caring personally nor challenging directly, is manipulative insincerity.
• There are four things a manager can do to create an environment of meaningful guidance.
• First, find opportunities for impromptu feedback. The goal with day-to-day guidance is to push toward radical candor.
• Second, make backstabbing impossible. Squelch political or passive behavior, and stop acting as well-meaning but ultimately harmful go-betweens.
• Have the employees try to resole things between themselves, and then if that fails, become involved with both parties present.
• At that point, make a strong effort to find a solution, or else conflicts will become too difficult to resolve, people will avoid them, and you’ll create a passive-aggressive culture.
• Third, make it easier to speak truth to power. If you are managing managers, institute skip-level meetings with their direct reports.
• Ask the direct reports for one or two things they’d like their boss to do differently, and then have the boss institute an action plan, and over-communicate it with his or her team.
• Fourth, put your own oxygen mask on first. You can’t give a damn about other people if you don’t give a damn about yourself.

This is How Effective Leaders Move Beyond Blame

http://firstround.com/review/this-is-how-effective-leaders-move-beyond-blame/

by Dave Zwieback

• Blame and biasses, such as hindsight bias, gives us a convenient story about what happened in any negative situation. To the extent that a story is comfortable, we believe that it’s true.
• Blame and bias can short-circuit any real learning. Those with information that could materially improve future outcomes now have more reasons to withhold it because they don’t want to be punished.
• It’s impossible to learn without all the data, without the full account of what happened. This is why information is more important than punishment.
• By shifting the role of the individual in an incident from suspect to witness, the process of learning becomes inclusive and far richer.
• To banish blame, convert your traditional postmortem into a learning review by following three steps.
• First, set the context: Figure out what contributed to a successful iteration so that we can feed this learning back into our organization and systems, and make subsequent iterations even better.
• Remind your team that they’re all operating within complex systems, and that the way they function and fail is often unpredictable.
• Human error is a symptom, and never the cause, of trouble deeper within the system. We accept that no person wants to do a bad job.
• Second, build a timeline: It should capture what people were thinking at the time it was happening, namely what each person knew, when they knew it, and how they knew it.
• During the learning review, listen for and help participants avoid blaming, cognitive biases, and counter-factuals such as “we could have,” “we should have,” “if only,” and “we didn’t.”
• Third, close the loop: Determine and prioritize the remediation items, and then publish the learning review as widely as possible.
• If the incident impacted customers, use the 3 Rs to structure the writeup, namely Regret, Reason, and Remedy from Drop the Pink Elephant by Bill McFarlan.
• If the magnitude of a mishap or success is great, then you can be sure that the opportunity to learn will be, too.