The Team that Managed Itself: A Story of Leadership (Empowered Teams)

by Christina Wodtke

You ever read Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule?” A blank look from Mick. “By Paul Graham.” A hint of interest. Famous VC=worth his attention. She continued. “Look it up. Basically, it says people who make things need time to get their head around the problem. If you interrupt them every five minutes, they can’t concentrate and can’t get work done.”

it’s called GROW.

It’s for coaching. So, this tennis coach guy realized his coaching style could be used for coaching anything, because he just got people to coach themselves.”

“It’s how you run a coaching session. G is for goals. You ask people what their goals for the session are.

R is for reality. What are the factors that are making this so difficult?”

“O is for options. What do you think you can do in this situation?”

“The W is for ‘What will you do?’ Knowing what you know about the reality of the situation, and your options, what will you do to meet your goal?”

A role, a job, it has three parts. Set, check, and correct. You set the role and hire someone into it.”

“So you’ve hired someone. Now you want to have regular check-ins to give feedback to make sure you get what you need from the role.”

What everyone does is grab a job description off the Internet, hire whomever the team likes, then live with the results.”

“You have to define the role and then interview the person so you can make sure they can fulfill it. Then you use that same role description for one-on-ones and performance reviews.”

“Programming is not managing. It’s an orthogonal skill.”

“Lots of individual contributors can’t get the handle on managing. The skills are different. For example, if you are in meetings all day as a programmer, you aren’t doing your job. If you are in meetings all day as a manager, you’re doing your job perfectly. You have to be able to talk to people. Give them feedback. Broker deals with other teams. You go from typing code to speaking it.”

“A bad employee will bring down two good ones. How much worse is it at the exec level? He doesn’t understand that the CTO is a people manager. People write code. People need to be inspired, to be coached, to be focused.”

“You do want to scare people off—people who will fail in the job. Don’t throw a wide net. Throw a tight one and catch the person you really want.”

“You have to make the information modular so you can find the hidden patterns. Copy the stuff you highlighted onto the Post-Its. ONE idea per Post-It. Just one! Modular!”

“When you see big groups and small groups, look closely,” Kendra lectured. “Big groups often need to be broken up, small groups expanded.” “Where is this coming from?” “This is just like making personas. We’re creating an art director persona!”

if someone has been doing a crappy job and you have not been giving them warnings, you are also doing a crappy job. Letting bad behavior continue is sanctioning bad behavior.”

‘Feedback is about behavior.’

“Ed helped me see that my job was not to be first among equals. My job was to be a coach to the best people I could find. To help them reach their potential, so the company can thrive. I had to become a servant leader.”

This Is what i want to do

we don’t give anyone feedback on what they’re doing wrong. And then once a year we do annual performance reviews, and all the stuff we have been sitting on, all that resentment, we bundle it up and dump it on some poor schlub’s head! And then he’s gobsmacked, has a nervous breakdown for a week, and the manager feels guilty and is extra-nice, or worse, avoids him, and there we are!”

“What’s the alternative?” Everyone did annuals. Every place she’d worked at, anyhow.

“Continuous feedback.” Yosi paused dramatically. “When an employee acts in a way that will make him less successful, we must give that feedback instantly. You see, two ...

One,” he held up a thumb, in the European manner, “no one remembers what happened six or nine months ago. An ‘annual’ review,’” and here he did scare quotes around “annual,” “is really only a quarter of a review, unless something dreadful enough to be memorable happened. And if it was that dreadful...

That’s the second thing wrong with formal reviews. It’s too much feedback. It’s overwhelming.” Now he opened his hands wide, in a gesture of a reveal. “If you hear one thing when it happens, you can really hear it and change. If you hear twenty things you get overwhelmed. You’ll probably just work on one or two. In fact, three!” Now he held up three fingers. “You are so worried about your raise, you probably are hardly listening at all, anyway. We get flooded emotionally, and then listening is too hard.”

“Quarterly reviews are like retrospective, or grading OKRs. They are a formal closing, a chance to reflect. When matched with regular feedback, they can increase organizational learning.”

“First, you have to change your thinking. There are no bad employees. There are employees who don’t know things yet. And there are employees who resist change, but don’t know that they are losing power and influence because of their behavior. They conflate behavior with identity. And there are employees who are a bad fit. This last one is very difficult.”

“It’s not about firing, it’s about giving clear feedback. And then making sure that there are consequences to a person’s behavior if they choose to ignore the feedback.”

Most people use feedback as a way to tell you what they don’t like about you. But you know what? It’s still information. It’s a single data point, but it’s a data point.”

“So feedback is like that. You can get some information on how you are seen, and you can decide what to do with it. It’s a clue to what might be holding you back.”

“Depends what kind of feedback it is. The simplest format for feedback is behavior, reaction, consequence. ‘You did this thing’—something that is observable, that is not a matter of opinion. ‘You’re an asshole’ is an opinion. ‘You’re trying to mess with me’ is also an opinion, because it speaks to intent. You can’t know what someone is thinking. You can only know what you can observe. But keeping to what you can observe, people will feel less judged, less misunderstood. And they can’t argue. They may have done something in order to mess with you, but they can deny it and there is no winning that argument. But if they did something that did mess you up, well, there it is. Observable facts.”

“That’s where the other two parts of feedback come in handy. You might say, ‘Brent, when you interrupted me in the meeting, I felt hurt. I’m worried you don’t respect my thinking, and that would make it hard for me to work with you effectively.’”

Don’t know, don’t want, can’t. Okay, so if you never give feedback, people don’t realize what they are doing that could be holding them back.

We all have quirks. Some are innocuous, but some get in the way of your ability to be effective.

“Because you keep letting Kendra get away with being late, you’ve given her a message it’s okay. That’s why I suggested you make it clear to her what the consequences are, both in your perception of her and in the world’s perception. An observation without consequences is just a fun fact.”

“What are norms?” “They are rules of behavior, either emergent or agreed upon. Every group has norms. I had this experience when I was out campaigning for Obama. The guy who trained us how to go door-to-door, Andre something, anyhow, he first had us create norms for our learning experience. We talked about what we liked and didn’t like about classrooms. Then we wrote up some rules for our classroom. I really loved it. I’ve been trying to figure out where else to use it.”

All service groups worshiped process, and business teams worshiped results. Everyone fixated on the thing that affected their compensation. It was the way of the world. “Okay, so, we set the goals, roles, and norms at the beginning of each quarter. We check them weekly. And we do a formal review end of quarter. Do a norm report card along with performance reviews and grading OKRs.”

Trust good intent: Clarify before you criticize. Meetings start within five minutes of the agreed-on time no matter what. Make time to be people together—daily coffee klatch. Be respectful in delivering what you promised and when holding others accountable. Work is work: Disagreements and critique are not personal. Don’t make it or take it so. Argue, decide, commit.

started with GROW. “So what do you want to get out of today’s meeting?” What were his goals?

“Okay, so what are they saying?” What was the reality of the situation? What did he know?

“Do you have ideas of what to try next?” What were your options?

W is what will you do next. And sometimes, though not in this case, Who can help you? “Because I said so” is not a sustainable

People management has three core components: hiring, firing, and feedback in between.

You don’t want a gang of robots all behaving the same, or a crew of “not my jobbers.” You want a smart group of people all teaching each other their superpowers.

It’s not enough to become a functional team. We want to be a learning team, a growing team, an ever-getting-better team. That doesn’t happen by accident. It takes clear role setting, good hiring, regular feedback, and sometimes, corrective action. I’m going to go through each one, with its related cadence.

Rethink the Process Instead of thinking about hiring a person for a job description, think of hiring as the first step in defining and refining a role. We create a description of a role as we currently imagine it, including what goals, responsibilities, skills, and industry knowledge is needed to be successful. Then we evolve that description in partnership with the person inhabiting it via a weekly one-on-one. Finally, we have regular formal check-ins where we evaluate the person’s fit with the role and determine what should be changed.

Do the work. The right person makes the team stronger and the work easier for everyone. The wrong person does the reverse, and you’ll be dealing with the fallout for months to years. Ask for help early or pay the consequences.

Among other findings, they discovered the language of competition was off-putting to women and the language of cooperation was appealing.

This “extra work” will end up saving time in miscommunication and arguments as well as making happier and more productive workplaces. Slow down to go faster.

Design the team you want to be part of. Design the team you need to succeed. Design the life you want to live every day. Or choose to accept whatever dysfunction (and inaction) shows up.