Being clear is not only helpful, it's actually being kind. Being unclear about expectations, fuzzy on what you really need, or skirting around an issue, is actually unkind — it sets people up to fail, and creates problems in the future.

If you don't give clear feedback then you're holding that person back from improving. If you say two weeks, but you're really expecting one week, then you'll resent it when it's not done in time. If you say it's really fine when it's not then you'll continue to be upset about how things are going.

Clear is kind is a simple reminder, though by no means always easy, of how being clear in your communication is the generous, brave, helpful, and kind thing to do.

I learned clear is kind, and unclear is unkind, from Brené Brown in Dare to Lead, and she said she first heard it in a 12-steps meeting. I borrowed the dancing emphasis from the always excellent Eva-Lotta Lamm.

Clear is kind

Extrinsic motivation is the carrot or the stick — when the motivation for doing something is an IF/THEN reward or punishment. We use extrinsic motivation all the time like paying people to come into work, or issuing speeding fines to make people slow down. It can work well for simple problems, basic compliance, and short-term results.

However, when you need long-term behaviour change, when creativity is needed, or you're tackling complex problems, external rewards and the threat of punishments can even decrease performance and productivity. Rewards only go so far if you want to inspire a hit album, create the next Oscar-winning film, or create a breakthrough product. That is, for most of the important work we do in our lives, including I believe parenting, using extrinsic motivators of rewards or punishments is likely to be far less effective than tapping into intrinsic motivation — motivation that comes from inside ourselves.

I like Dan Pink's Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose framework for intrinsic motivation. His TED talk on the Puzzle of Motivation is also a fun and interesting watch.

Extrinsic motivation

I've read that Steve Jobs used to tell a story to new VPs about a janitor and a CEO. If you were the janitor and were asked to clean an office, it's reasonable to have not cleaned it if you found the door was locked and you didn't have the key. However, somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, the reasons or excuses for why something happened or couldn't be done stop mattering. It probably isn't your fault that the system went down, or that you didn't have access to the office, but as a leader it's your responsibility to make things happen and mistakes are now your responsibility too.

The sketch is not meant to downplay the role or attitude of janitors in any way or say that this is the difference between janitors and CEOs. Here's more on how Steve explains it.

The story is a nice example of the accountability ladder.

I learned this from the excellent Julie Zhou.

Reasons stop mattering

Bosses push information up to authority. Leaders push authority down to information.

This little gem is from ex-submarine captain turned leadership guru, David Marquet. Pretty much any talk by him is great, but here's an entertaining and thought-provoking talk by him I enjoyed.

See his book Turn the ship around!: A True Story of Turning Followers Into Leaders

Push authority to information

Much of the success of a good manager or leader is making sure your team can get the right work done. The demands on a team, say a product team in a tech company, increase as organisations grow. Before you know it there are requests from all sides that can sap a team's time, energy, and ability to get the key work done.

Todd Jackson, former product manager of Gmail, memorably shared that a manager can be an umbrella or a funnel. The umbrella protects their team to let them get work done and the funnel lets everything pour through.

All of us want autonomy to choose our own actions but none of us want to be overwhelmed.

Umbrellas and funnels

In Manager Time a day is neatly sliced up into hourly chunks according to the calendar. Meeting someone is as easy as finding a free slot that coincides. You don’t have to worry too much about what you’ll be doing next as your calendar will tell you.

In Maker Time a day is an open book to get something hard and meaningful done. Even thinking when a meeting might be and remembering to go can distract from getting on with making. Long, uninterrupted chunks of time, not sliced and diced by meetings on the hour are ideal to make progress on hard problems and tackle something new. Even a single meeting in the middle of an afternoon can disrupt that long meaningful chunk into two that make it harder to tackle something big as you have to context switch and pick up where you left off.

Most modern offices operate on Manager Time. It’s great for meetings but comes at a cost for getting meaningful work done. If you’re a maker you may associate with the feeling that to get some real work done you feel you need to do it at the weekend, or in an evening after everyone’s gone home, when you’ll be free of interruptions.

If you’re a manager, consider your makers when you schedule your next meeting.

If you haven’t already, you should read the original article Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, by Paul Graham from whom this excellent observation is from.

Manager time, maker time

This acronym acts as a handy checklist to consider and clarify roles and responsibilities for projects. You could even build a table — a Responsibility Assignment Matrix —  with what needs to happen and the people who are involved identifying what relationship each person has for each task. In particular, sometimes making it clear who doesn’t have a say can be the most helpful thing to do. It breaks down somewhat like this:

Responsible
Who will actually be responsible for doing the task.

Accountable
Who is accountable for it being completed and achieving its goals.

Consulted
Whose opinion will be sought for the task, though they won’t be doing it themselves.

Informed
Who doesn’t get a say in the task, but will be kept informed of how it’s going.

RACI

The more transparent your workplace the less transparent your employees. In an age of trackers, wearables, online monitoring, workplace chat and always-on devices it turns out that not only does a more transparent workplace actually drive people to more secretive behaviours, but that adding a little more privacy actually may improve productivity also.

Very simply, the transparency paradox is the idea that increasingly transparent, open, observable workplaces can create less transparent employees.

See Harvard prof Ethan Bernstein’s The Transparency Paradox study (pdf) or I learned about it from the Freakonomics podcast: Yes, the Open Office Is Terrible — But It Doesn’t Have to Be.

The transparency paradox

Originally an observation meant as satire, the Peter Principle (book) states that “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Someone who is good at their job is likely to get promoted. But the promoted position will likely require different skills. If they’re good they may get promoted again, but if not, there they will stay. Then at some point each employee in an organisation will be incompetent at their position. I like this short take on the Peter Principle by Tim Harford.

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The Peter Principle

Named after the brilliant Clay Shirky his principle broadly states that:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Sometimes this may manifest itself as blindness towards new or different ways of doing things, other times it’s the challenge of and innate resistance to making oneself obsolete. Examples include there being more money in life-long illnesses than cures, traditional newspapers’ resistance to alternative online news forms, planned obsolescence of products, committees requiring the presence of committees, or resistance to self-checkouts at a supermarket.

Some exceptions include Vitality health insurance in the UK that  rewards a healthy lifestyle, and the lightbulb industry, in its move towards ultra long-lasting and efficient LED lights, boldly eliminating the need to replace most of its products for a lifetime. I’m still waiting for a breakdown service to reward people for taking care of their cars rather than focusing on fixing the breakdowns.

The Shirky Principle

In Dan Pink’s book Drive, he looks at scientific studies showing that the all too common approach to motivating people involving rewards and punishments, or the carrot and stick approach, ultimately doesn’t help motivate people for the tasks and work we have to do today.

Instead, we do our best work when driven by intrinsic motivation — motivation from inside us, rather than imposed externally like rewards or punishments. And the 3 facets he highlights that help intrinsic motivation are:

Autonomy: being in control and able to guide both what we do and how we do it

Mastery: our desire to continually be improving and learning and bettering ourselves

Purpose: working towards something we think is worthwhile. Having a North star to aim for and a reason it’s worth doing what we’re doing.

I find it a useful framework to think through whenever I’m not feeling motivated, or when I want to help make sure the people I’m working with are motivated.

Also see: flow at work, Goldilocks tasks, the zone of proximal development, on parenting

What drives us: autonomy, mastery, purpose

Conway was mostly observing software development, but I would think it has some application to any large project: cruise ship design, car design, space shuttle design, heck maybe even governments and law.

Law is kind of a strong word for an observation, but in any case, here are some other ‘laws’: Fitt’s law, Metcalfe’s law, Goodhart’s Law, Muphry’s law, Moore’s law, Koomey’s law, the law of diminishing brownies, the law of lockers and, my favourite, Hofstadter’s Law.

PS: As you read this I may be cycling mid-lake and trying not to sink to raise money for charity: www.cycleorsink.com

Conway’s Law

Smaller software releases generally means fewer bugs, and bugs that are easier to fix. The number of bugs created typically increases with the complexity of interactions of code, which in turn increases with the size of release. This means that a number of smaller releases can hopefully get you to a large change in a safer way with less bugs, and less problematic bugs, created along the way than a single release with the whole lot. There’s probably a somewhat more general relationship with amount of unexpected problems created and the size of any change.

Bugs and releases

A way of helping decide what to do next based on Must do, Should do, Could do and Would do.

Strangely, so many of the things you’d really like to do when put in this organisation end up in the Would bucket.

MOSCOW Prioritisation.

I love Flow. This simple framework comes from Good Business by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Match challenge with skills for Flow at work

Ask for what you need or it’s on you if you don’t get it.

The frame change for me was that you’re not owed anything. It’s on you to help yourself and help others out in the process.

Ask for what you need

Hofstadter's Law is one of my favourites.

“It always takes longer than you expect, even when you account for Hofstadter’s Law.”

Hofstadter’s Law

Learned this lovely process at Jump Associates thanks to Sarah Singer Nourie. Do it, do it!

Sketchplanations tagged with management