This is Kommon People — the newsletter from Kommon which highlights stories about people, organisations, technology and business which will make you a better manager. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
It’s hard to believe it’s nearly Christmas. Albeit whatever warped version of the holiday season we’re all experiencing.
What would usually be a period to at least take some time off, has for many been replaced with worries about how to manage the effects on family and friends of the ongoing pandemic. Especially in various countries where we know rising cases and new lockdown measures are placing renewed pressures on our readers.
In the face of all this, we’ll admit writing a pre-Christmas newsletter on management which feels relevant and useful to you has been difficult. But we’ve given it a shot. You’ll see that there is a bit of a theme through both the feature and some of the news stories we’ve picked out (this was unintentional, although perhaps not coincidental).
Our feature article this week is about the blessing and curse of today’s focus on productivity. Your teammates are probably placing more pressure on themselves than you think, and it’s up to managers to offer some perspective. Especially at this time of year. We also dip into how the UK postal service caused untold harm by believing the data rather than its people, and some lessons about how to spend your time from John le Carré, the much-loved spy novelist who sadly passed away several days ago.
We obviously think this is all a fascinating read. But collectively it’s also a gentle reminder that as managers we have the opportunity to check-in on people personally and make sure that they’re making the most of whatever relief this holiday might bring. We can really make a difference. Even if their Slack messages might be full of smiling emojis, it might take a conversation to find out that they need some help with a couple of things.
We hope you all enjoy the holidays, and we’ll see you in the next issue.
Unsurprisingly as patterns of work have shifted dramatically this year, discussions about how to stay productive have spiked. As with many changes during the pandemic, it’s accelerated a longer term trend in knowledge work of trying to use technology to optimise your professional life. However, one person’s productivity hack can be a teammate’s nightmare.
We dig into how we got here, and the importance of the manager in defining productivity as a team sport, monitoring it appropriately, and making sure individuals aren’t unnecessarily burning out themselves and their teammates in the search for productivity perfection. Particularly over the holidays.
Some of our readers are probably aware of Benedict Evans, former venture capitalist-turned analyst and author of a popular tech newsletter. This week it was pleasing to see him highlight a horrific, but very local, scandal in the UK about what can happen when institutions place too much trust in software over the word of their workers.
In short, in 1999 the UK Post Office began forcing the managers of its branches (known as sub-postmasters) to use a buggy software system from Fujitsu to manage their accounting. When the system started (erroneously) showing discrepancies in branch accounts, despite the protests they’d done nothing wrong, hundreds of sub-postmasters were charged with accounting fraud and theft. Some, including one pregnant woman, were jailed. Many others suffered years of turmoil, financial ruin, damaged mental health and even suicide. In 2019, after a civil claim, the Post Office agreed to pay £58 million in compensation to 550 sub-postmasters, and this year some of those criminal convictions have finally begun to be overturned.
The story bears wider repeating because it’s a tale of how in spite of no other evidence of wrongdoing, rather than believing their workforce, a company instead doubled down on trusting the software, causing untold harm.
Whilst leaps in technology offer the promise of enabling us to run ever more productive workforces, it’s a reminder that at a time when we’re all being encouraged to be more data-driven (often for very good reason!) software can fail. We shouldn’t always trust the metrics we are given as managers in situations where there may also be a more nuanced human explanation.
In large organisations, software will always scale faster than good management and human empathy. Particularly when it comes to controversies and disputes, it will often be up to individual managers to remember that the numbers tell only part of the story.
P.S. If you’re interested in reading more about the scandal, the fantastic British investigative magazine Private Eye has been covering it in detail for more than 20 years, and has a special report here.
The great novelist John Le Carré died on 12 December at the age of 89, after an acclaimed literary career spanning 25 novels and nearly six decades. His fame derives from his exquisitely crafted spy novels. His books were informed by his own time in the British secret services. Not in how they disclosed any secrets (they didn’t), but in their human portrayal of spies not as glamorous James Bonds but:
‘a squalid procession of vain fools, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.’
So what's this got to do with management?
The connection is tenuous, we’ll admit. But Le Carré’s dry, wry sense of humour and writing style has led to a number of his quotes being reposted online in the aftermath of his death. You might have seen ‘A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world’ doing the rounds (and very true it is too).
But for our purposes we wanted to relate another story. Whilst he was working for the British secret services, Le Carré was already writing. He found that that was where his real interest lay. He said:
"To give the best of your day to your work is important... If I could write for an hour and a half on the train, I was already completely jaded by the time I got to the office to start work. I was always very careful to give my country my second-best."
A pithy and lovely reminder that we’re at our happiest when we make sure we spend our best time, doing what we’re best at.
First Round Capital is a seed-stage venture firm based in San Francisco. Dare we say it, but we wouldn’t always look to VC firms for management advice. But somehow First Round balance their investing with providing genuinely insightful, relevant advice for founders through their First Round Review - much of it around management.
Their latest post tackles the tricky topic of ‘managing up’ and is well worth a read if it’s something you or your team members find challenging. Like Kommon People, the Review has an emphasis on learning through story-telling so there’s plenty of advice in there from others who’ve experienced the same issues you have.
We suspect that if everyone just followed this one piece of advice from Julie Zhuo, workplaces would run much more effectively, and there’s plenty more where that came from.
"Make sure you and your manager have the same answers to these two key questions: 1) What is success for me personally? 2) What is success for my manager’s team? If you aren’t sure your manager knows what you care about, or you don’t know what your manager cares about, ask."
What’s Christmas without a tree, mince pies and a detailed discussion of the calendar functionality in one-on-one features. Because that’s essentially how we’ve been getting in the festive spirit.
At the core of building Kommon is a drive to make things easier for managers, and we can only really do that if it sits neatly in all your other workflows. And in terms of everyone organising their time (and therefore their one-on-one meetings) for many the calendar remains king.
So we’ve had to think really carefully about the actions that we think users will want to take in Kommon, and jobs that you’ll still want to do in your calendar. Numerous tickets have been scratched off backlog boards with the note ‘We are not a Calendar App’.
Hopefully we’ve struck the right balance between the two and our MVP will help you build relationships with your team whilst still fitting well into how you organise the rest of your work.
As always if you have any particular thoughts on this, please let us know - all feedback is invaluable!
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