Lessons from Rands, Small Comments, Individual Contributors, and Rituals
Posted on
October 21, 2021
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In this Issue
8 Leadership lessons from Rands: noted engineering author and leader Michael Lopp (aka Rands) sat down with Suzan Bond for a conversation about his management career. It was as clear and insightful as you would hope.
Small comments can lead to big impacts: one leader at Shopify gives us a case study in how throwaway comments can affect your impact as a leader.
Managing individual contributors: Camille Fournier’s latest is excellent on how to approach leading those who don’t ultimately want to be managers but want to build their technical skills.
Smells like team spirit: team rituals can play an important role in creating a shared sense of mission and purpose. You might have some already, even if you don’t know it.
8 Leadership Lessons from Rands
Noted author and Apple engineering leader Michael Lopp (aka Rands) recently sat down with Suzan Bond to talk about all things management.
Unsurprisingly it was a very insightful conversation. We tuned in and took away eight lessons.
Invest in feedback and performance reviews: Lopp recalled a time early in his management career when by his own admission he ‘phoned in’ his performance reviews. The first person he spoke to was so ‘offended’ at his lack of effort, and Lopp was so ashamed, that he went away and redid all of them. He realised that any time he’s asked to give feedback is when he ‘gets to show up and really help’, and from then on, he’s made the most of every opportunity.
Let go of your legos, especially in crisis: the biggest challenge for any new manager is relinquishing the delivery responsibilities you used to have. As Lopp acknowledged, this is particularly tough when something blows up, but you have to do it. If you dive back in and take the reins, it shows you don’t trust your team, they miss out on the opportunity to learn, and you miss out on learning how to lead in a crisis. It’s a lose-lose-lose.
Always make your 1:1s: committing your time to your team members is the surest way to start building trust. It was interesting to hear Lopp, who has done thousands of 1:1s, acknowledge that when he first starts meeting with people, they rarely bring topics to discuss. (See, we told you silent 1:1s affect everyone). This isn’t because he’s a bad leader, but because the trust isn’t there to underpin the conversation. As his direct reports start to raise topics, he sees that as a crucial sign that their relationship is growing.
Give more compliments: he marvelled at the unexpected benefits that come from giving a co-worker a compliment, whether someone in your team or in the wider company. He recounted an incident where he complimented someone on their management of a situation, and they immediately set up a 1:1 with him to discuss their other work. We’ve said it before, everyone should probably give more compliments.
In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott has a great line:
‘In some ways, becoming a boss is like getting arrested. Everything you say or do can and will be used against you.’
To be clear, she isn’t suggesting this is in any way unfair. She’s just describing the reality that as a manager, people will listen intently to what you say and scrutinise what you do.
It’s worth remembering, because if you forget it can affect your reputation and alter your ability to lead your team (even if temporarily).
One VP of Product at Shopify seems to have given us an example this week. In response to a tweet about a Canadian politician exploring working a four day week, he tweeted:
Now, as he went on to discuss in his replies, the basic point he wanted to make was that hard work should be celebrated. That’s all very well and good.
But he didn’t just say that.
Instead we got a tweet which:
Seemed to endorse a 72 hour work week: at a time when one of the principal employee concerns is burnout, this isn’t a great look. More than that though, it conflicts with the company culture which Tobi Lütke, the Shopify CEO, is on record as trying to build. In this tweet thread, Lütke explicitly tries to bust the myth that ‘you have to work 80 hours a week to be successful’. Awkward.
Defined a 4 day week as ‘not hard work’: tell that to Buffer, Atlassian, and all the other successful organisations who seem to be working plenty hard enough building great companies four days a week.
Mused on what led to the development of the West: now there’s a pandora’s box if ever we saw one. Friendly watercooler chat about geopolitics, slavery, and exploitation vs protestant work ethic anyone?
We don’t work at Shopify, and the ramifications of this one tweet probably weren’t that great, but then again...
Now assuming we’ve got the right TWEET (fingers crossed…), it seems that at least some people at Shopify were unhappy with Nejatian’s comments, and it seems to have provoked some discussion about working conditions at the company.
Are we reading too much into one guy’s tweet? Possibly. But that’s not snowflakery, it’s exactly the point. When you’re in a leadership position, people will do precisely that and it can have unintended consequences.
Precise, thoughtful communication is a wonderful tool for being a better manager.
The opposite is, well, the opposite.
5 Ways to Fail at Managing Individual Contributors
If you’ve read this newsletter for any length of time, you’ll know we’re huge fans of Camille Fournier and her fantastic book The Manager’s Path.
She recently published a piece warning of some of the pitfalls in managing individual contributors - i.e. those who don’t want to follow a path into management but want to build their technical skills.
We’d recommend reading the whole thing, but in summary she speaks about:
Doing all the technical work yourself: see above on ‘letting go of your legos’. Your team members won’t progress if you don’t give them experience in the areas they want to be developing.
Doing all the project management yourself: although individual contributors won’t be expected to manage people, they will almost certainly be expected to lead more complex projects. You will need to give them opportunities to design solutions, delegate, and execute. Yes, again, all things you might like to do yourself, especially if it’s interesting work.
Neglecting to give feedback: as Fournier elaborates, you will need to give feedback beyond an individual’s technical skills. Individual contributors will still need to develop their collaboration, communication, and project management skills to progress, and it’s up to you to guide them in doing that.
Hoarding information: ok so this one isn’t specific to ICs - one of your key roles as a manager is to pass on context your team members need to perform effectively. Especially if you receive the information in a forum they don’t have access to.
Focusing too much on your personal output: Fournier puts it perfectly: ‘As a manager, your output is not measured by your individual work. Rather, your output is measured by the work of your team and the people that you influence. The work you choose to do, and the work you choose to neglect or delegate, will lead to amplified outcomes in both positive and negative directions.’ You should be providing multiplicative value by training and coaching your team, not additive value by doing extensions of their roles.
Smells like Team Spirit
Building team connections and relationships can be challenging at the best of times, but over the past eighteen months, the move to remote work has made it even more complicated.
To help with this, many teams have started focussing on certain rituals which help bring them together and reinforce their sense of shared mission and purpose.
But what if you don’t have any rituals?
Erica Keswin is a workplace strategist, executive coach, and the author of Rituals Roadmap. In a recent interview, she revealed her key question for working out what those moments are.
She recounted asking it to Marissa Andrada, the head of HR at Chipotle, and one of the co-founders of Allbirds:
‘'When do employees at Chipotle feel most Chipotle-ish?... Most Allbirds-ish?’
It seems like an odd question, but it gets at the essence of what it means to work in your team and when your team members are most likely to feel it.
For Chipotle, it was a 10:15 am meal which was shared between staff before a 10:30 customer rush. For Allbirds, it was a four o’clock break which connected the company.
Try working out when your team feels most ‘your team-ish’ or ‘your company-ish’. You might find you’ve got a greater opportunity to foster team spirit at that point than you think.