This week we discussed the first part of Chapter 4 (driving results collaboratively — telling people what to do doesn’t work).
Telling people what to do didn’t work at Google
- We wondered whether Kim’s experience at Google and Facebook are relevant to 2020.
- Dennis likes both approaches — times where you’re told what to do, and times where you choose your own path. It’s likely never one or the other all the time, and there’s a two-way conversation between where the work is done and management.
- “‘There’s a fine line between success and failure.’ Now I saw what he meant. By any normal measure, our growth was great, but it quickly became clear it could be a lot better if we operated less like a soccer team of seven-year-olds: all of us chasing the ball, none of us in position.” Geoff thinks there’s a fine line between anyone can own anything and defined roles and responsibilities.
- Clever analogy… “‘Kim, you’re moving too fast. It’s like you’re spinning a long rope…It doesn’t seem like the rope is going that fast to you because you’re in the center holding it…but if you’re at the end of the rope, you’re hanging on for dear life.'” Many of us have experienced this “end of the rope” experience, especially when you work with people focused on the granular rather than the coarse (i.e., trees for the forrest).
- Jameson liked this situation where the team didn’t like Kim’s approach, so they all left her team. This exposes poor management; she learned from this and changed her approach. You need to consider your team, not just assign them work “or else.”
- “…even if you work at a place that allows you to act in a more authoritarian way, you’ll get better results if you lay your power down and work more collaboratively.”
Telling people what to do didn’t work for Steve Jobs either
- “Like anyone, he is wrong sometimes, be he insists and not gently either, that people tell him when he’s wrong, so he always gets it right in the end.” Geoff calls bullshit on this false dichotomy. Decisions are right for some aspects and wrong for others; they are not mutually exclusive.
- Jameson likes the idea of Jobs asking others to come up with ideas that are the best approach as opposed to coming up with the ideas himself.
- “…Steve marched into his office and started yelling. ‘But his was your idea,’ said my colleague. ‘Yes, and it was your job to convince me I was wrong,’ Steve replied, ‘and you failed!'” Classic Steve Jobs, where he screwed up and puts the blame on someone else. Houston said maybe this is a new category: “Radically obnoxious.”
The art of getting stuff done without telling people what to do
- Cycle: listen, clarify, debate, decide, persuade, execute, learn
Listen
- Technique 1: quiet listening
- Jamie stated his boss does this now and he doesn’t particularly care much for it; however, he wished he was better at it. Jameson said the author stated that most people are not comfortable with it — people like to fill in the silence. Group size may matter; it may be common for most of the group to be quietly listening in the background.
- Sometimes you need to push boundaries a bit to see where people’s comfort zones are. As a manager you need to tease out information for people that are not speaking.
- Technique 2: loud listening
- Jamie said Steve Jobs is likely a loud listener.
- “If you are a loud listener, how do you deal with people who are either constitutionally unable to stand up to an aggressive boss or whose position is too marginal to allow them to feel secure, even if the larger culture welcomes this behavior?” Geoff said as a peacemaker type, he is generally in the camp of not speaking up.
- “Paul Saffo, an engineering professor at Stanford, describes a technique he calls ‘strong opinions, weekly held’. Saffo has made the point that expressing strong, some might say outrageous, positions with others is a good way to get to a better answer.” Geoff was reminded of a corollary, Cunningham’s Law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.”
- Jamie likes to debate, so the “strong opinions weekly held” concept resonates with him. Jameson said it helps to make sure your audience knows your style because they’ll avoid confrontation because it feels like aggression.
- Jameson said sometimes you need time later to process things because you may not come up with the best response in the moment. You need more context ahead of time and after the fact. Having one meeting to discuss, and another to decide is a helpful framework.
- It’s helpful to read articles/books for your opinion and against your opinion to help you with critical thinking.
- Technique 3: create a culture of listening
- We liked the “ideas team” concept where you get lots of small innovation that can create benefits where thousands of tweaks come together for big improvements over time. This is similar to the TEP-LARB (Technology Evaluation Process-Lead Architecture Review Board) concept from The Phoenix Project.
- “…the team used a combination of votes and judgment to select the best ideas.” This sounds similar to dot-voting, a technique used in Lean Coffee. You get a good mixture of known vs. novel.
- Technique 4: adapt to a culture of listening
Clarify
- “As the boss, you are the editor, not the author.”
- Technique 1: Be clear in your own mind (create a safe space to nurture new ideas)
- “…I told them, bring me three solutions an a recommendation. ‘But then you’re not helping people innovate,’ Russ explained. ‘You’re asking them to make decisions before they’ve had time to think things through. When do they get to just talk, brainstorm with you?'” Jameson said the person that found the problem may not actually know how to fix it, much less the up-/downstream effects introduced by those solutions.
- “Poking holes in new ideas doesn’t necessarily kill them — it can push people to clarify their thinking.” See also: deliberative strength
- Technique 2: Be clear to others (make thoughts ideas/drop-dead easy for others to comprehend)
- When economist John Keynes was explaining his policies to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president was not persuaded. “Whose fault was it? FDR’s for not understanding, or Keynes’s for not explaining it well?” Geoff disagrees that it’s not only the teller’s responsibility. If Keynes had explained it well but FDR was closed-minded, you’d get the same result.
- “The essence of making an idea clear requires a deep understanding not only of the idea but also of the person to whom one is explaining the idea.”
- Houston said the form of “plussing” is something Houston uses in D&D and is from improvisation — “yes and” as well as “no but.” Instead of shutting down ideas, you build on top of them no matter what the idea is.