The Best Thing, High Performance, Rejecting Candidates, and Meetings
Posted on
September 23, 2021
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In this Issue
What’s the best thing a manager has ever done for you: we analyse hundreds of responses to this question and the trends tell us a lot about what our teams want to see from us as managers.
Swear more and drink more to increase performance: a survey of high-performing teams turns up some interesting results.
How to reject internal candidates: if you reject an internal candidate for a role, they’re twice as likely to leave your company. Fortunately, there’s two things you can do about it.
One way to avoid too many meetings: one company makes all meetings optional, maybe you should ask your team about something similar.
What’s the Best Thing a Manager Has Ever Done for You?
As managers we often learn the most from others. Everyone from the terrible bosses we vowed never to imitate, to brilliant peers running happy teams, to the feedback from our own team members.
So wouldn’t it be great if we could ask thousands of people about the best thing their manager has ever done for them.
We’d probably learn a lot.
Julie Zhuo, celebrated author of The Making of a Manager, did exactly that.
She got over 500 replies, detailing exactly what people most appreciate from their managers.
We’ve categorised and analysed all those tweets.
The trends and the individual stories are a timely reminder of all the things our teams want to see from us as their managers, in their own words.
One of the hardest questions we face as managers is whether we’re actually doing a good job. Surveys like this give us some insights into the characteristics of other well-run teams which we can then compare to our own.
Here’s some highlights:
Comfortable showing emotions: whilst not unexpectedly the survey found that higher-perfoming teams communicated more often than others, more interesting were the types of communication. These teams appeared more comfortable expressing both positive and negative emotions to their teammates. They were more likely to tell jokes and tease their colleagues, but also to use sarcasm, complain and use curse words with each other. So should you swear more in meetings to raise performance? Probably fuck no. It's more about getting your team to a point where they know each other well enough that they're comfortable expressing themselves honestly with one another.
Frequently sharing appreciation: people in high-performing teams received nearly twice as much appreciation from their teammates, and twice as much from their managers, than those in other teams. This ties in with last week’s piece on the importance of compliments and praising our teams more.
Working hard but with balance: 53% of those in high-performing teams strongly agreed that their teammates ‘pulled their weight’ compared to 23% for other teams. However, they were also twice as likely to believe that their teammates valued work-life balance. This survey suggests that the best teams don’t have a ‘win at all costs’ mentality, but rather one of working hard yet respecting each others’ boundaries.
Taking time to check-in: 65% of high-performing teams started meetings by checking-in on their teammates rather than jumping straight into the work, compared to 42% of other teams. This chimes with other research we’ve seen about the importance of small talk to positive meetings.
More Social activities: high-performing teams showed that they were more likely to engage in a variety of non-work activities. They grabbed tea or coffee more often (35% vs 24%), had alcoholic drinks (24% to 15%) and even discussed books together (23% to 15%). Does this conclusively prove going to the bar raises team performance? Yes it does.
Clarity on how they contribute: teammates in the best teams had more clarity on three vectors: how their work related to their team’s goals; how their team’s work lined up with their company’s mission; and how their company contributed to making the world a better place. This is echoed in plenty of other management literature, and as we recently examined, appears to be of rising importance to employees
How to Reject Internal Candidates
At some point, we’re all likely to run a hiring process which includes internal candidates.
As one study recently showed, this needs handling very carefully.
The first thing to say is that hiring from within is great. It sends a very positive message about progression within our companies and internal candidates have existing context and relationships which help them have a more immediate impact than an external candidate.
However, if you’re interviewing internal candidates, at some point you’re also going to reject some of them - either in favour of another internal candidate, or an external one.
It’s here that it gets tricky.
After analysing more than 9,000 rejection experiences of employees at a Fortune 100 company over a five-year period, researchers at Cornell’s Industrial and Labor Relations school found that rejected internal candidates were twice as likely to leave their company than those who hadn’t interviewed.
As the authors make clear though, the answer is not to stop hiring external candidates who might be a better fit, but to best manage the inevitable rejections of internal ones.
They found two areas which halved the likelihood of a rejected candidate leaving the company:
They were interviewed: getting to the interview stage of the process signals to candidates that although they didn’t get the job this time, they have many of the characteristics to get it in the future. It also offers an opportunity for detailed feedback on any areas of improvement, which doesn’t occur if a candidate is rejected without an interview. Both these dynamics encourage the individual to stick around and work on those areas with hope for the future, rather than feeling the door is closed to their progression.
They were passed over for another internal candidate: if their organisation favours an external candidate, the individual may assume they will have to face external competition for similar jobs in the future, lowering their own chances of being hired. This again encourages candidates to look elsewhere for career progression rather than staying at their company. Choosing an internal candidate instead removes this dynamic. The authors’ conclusion: ‘organisations should carefully consider whether to hire an external candidate when there is a viable internal candidate’.
One Way to Avoid Too Many Meetings
You don’t need us to tell you that Zoom-fatigue is real and most managers feel they have too many meetings. Here’s one way to help.
This was inspired by a recent story about 30-person startup Convictional. To help their team focus on their work, the company has minimised meetings and doesn’t use any messaging tools like Slack.
The company has one all-hands meeting every three weeks, and each employee has a weekly 1:1 with their manager, otherwise all meetings are optional. That’s right, even if the CEO invites you.
If you don’t feel it’s a worthwhile use of your time, the company’s norms are:
You can reject the invite in the first place
You can leave the meeting whenever you want when it stops being valuable. Yes, you can just walk out/hang up.
Now if that sounds a bit radical for your team, we think there’s a lighter version of this to get started.
For any meeting you organise, why not ask your team members:
‘If this meeting was optional, would you attend?’
You might learn a lot about which meetings your team members actually value.