Crucial conversations
High output management
What is management
StrengthFinder 2.0 – Tom Rath
The no asshole rule – Robert Sutton
Standout – Marcus Buckingham
Lean In – Sheryl Sandberb
Mindset – Carol Dweck

💡 Great managers are made, not born.

→ Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets, not the calls he makes.

Did we achieve our aspirations in creating valuable, easy-to-use, and well-crafted design work?

Did I do a good job hiring and developing individuals, and was my team happy and working well together?
→ The first criterion looks at the team’s present outcomes; the second criterion asks whether we’re set up for great outcomes in the future.

5 conditions that increase a team’s odds of success:

1. having a real team(with clear boundaries and stable membership)
2. a compelling direction
3. an enabling structure
4. a supportive organizational context
5. expert coaching

purpose, people, and process.

Purpose → the outcome your team is trying to accomplish; why.

To prevent misalignments, you’ll need to get your team on board with what you truly care about.

Ensure your team knows what success looks like and cares about achieving it.

You must develop trusting relationships with the team, understand their strengths and weaknesses, make good decisions about who should do what, and coach individuals to do their best.

Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it.

Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.

You have to enjoy the day-to-day management and want to do it.
→ “Do I find it more motivating to achieve a particular outcome or to play a specific role?”

Adaptability is a key trait of great managers.

“Do I like talking with people?”

Your responsibility is to ensure that the individuals you support are able to thrive.

Listening to and talking with them are a core part of the job.

“Can I provide stability for an emotionally challenging situation?”

You will need to face hard conversations that can be extremely emotionally charged.

Many organizations today, particularly those that seek to attract highly skilled or creative talent, have paths for advancement that don’t require managing others.

The best outcomes come from inspiring people to action, not telling them what to do.

Leadership must be earned. People must want to follow you.

Only when you have built trust with your reports will you have the credibility to help them achieve more together.

Make a list of all the things that are awesome about the current state of the business.
Create a list of all the things that could be better.

You should have a plan for how to scale back your individual contributor responsibilities so that you can be the best manager for your people.

When building a team:

• What qualities do I want in a team member?
• What skills does our team need to complement my own?
• How should this team look and function in a year?
• How will my own role and responsibilities evolve?

When doing 1:1 with team members:

• What did you and your past manager discuss that was most helpful to you?
• What are the ways in which you’d like to be supported?
• How do you like to be recognized for great work?
• What kind of feedback is most useful for you?
• Imagine that you and I had an amazing relationship. What would that look like?
• What does it mean to do a great job versus an average or poor job? Can you give me some examples?
• Can you share your impressions of how you think Project X or Meeting Y went? Why do you think that?
• I noticed that Z happened the other day. Is that normal or should I be concerned?
• What keeps you up at night? Why?
• How do you determine which things to prioritize?

You will be far more successful aspiring to be the leader you want to be and playing to your strengths than trying to live up to some other ideal.

What gets in the of good work? There are only two possibilities:

1. People don’t know how to do good work.
2. They know how, but they aren’t motivated.

Help your report learn those skills or hire somebody else with the skills you need.

Is it a matter of motivation or skill?

“You must trust people, or life becomes impossible.” – Anton Chekhov

If your reports don’t tell you how they’re really feeling, you can’t help them.

Strive for all your 1:1 meetings to feel a little awkward.

Caring is doing your best to help your report become successful and fulfilled in her work. Taking the time to learn what she cares about.

Some topics to discuss with your report:

• Discuss top priorities: What is the ONE THING the most critical outcome for your report and how can you help her tackle these challenges?
• Calibrate what “great” looks like: Do you have a shared vision of what you’re working toward? Are you in sync about goals or expectations?
• Share feedback: What feedback can you give that will help your report, and what can your report tell you that will make you more effective as a manager?
• Reflect on how things are going: Once in a while, it’s useful to zoom out and talk about your report’s general state of mind, how is he feeling on the whole? What’s making him satisfied or dissatisfied? Have any of his goals changed? What has he learned recently and what does he want to learn going forward?

A coach’s best tool for understanding what’s going on is to ask.

Your job as a manager is to empower your report to find the answer.

Identify: These questions focus on what really matters for your report and what topics are worth spending more time on:

• What’s top of mind for you right now?
• What priorities are you thinking about this week?
• What’s the best use of our time today?

Understand: Once you’ve identified a topic to discuss, these next questions get at the root of the problem and what can be done about it. What does your ideal outcome look like? What’s hard for you in getting to that outcome? What do you really care about? What do you think is the best course of action? What’s the worst-case scenario you’re worried about?

Support: These questions zero in on how you can be of the greatest service to your report. How can I help you? What can I do to make you more successful? What was the most useful part of our conversation today?”

Your report should have a clear sense at all times of what your expectations are and where he stands.

→ Empathy.

There is enormous power in expressing vulnerability.

Determine the strengths and weaknesses of all team members.

Humans are wired to see the bad more clearly than the good.

Recognition for hard work, valuable skills, helpful advice, or good values can be hugely motivating if it feels genuine and specific.

People are more likely to succeed when using their strengths.

“There is one quality that sets truly great managers apart from the rest: they discover what is unique about each person and then capitalize it”

The job of a manager is to turn one person’s particular talent into performance.

Don’t let the worst performers dominate your time, try to diagnose, address, and resolve their issues as swiftly as you can. Yes, this is counterintuitive.

The rising stars on your team may not be clamoring for your attention, but if you help them to dream bigger and become more capable leaders, you’ll be amazed at how much your team can do as a whole.

Personal and organizational values play a huge role in whether someone will be happy on a given team.

At the end of the day, if you don’t believe someone is set up to succeed in his current role, the kindest thing you can do is, to be honest with him and support him in moving on.

If this person were not already at the organization would I recommend that another team hire him knowing what I know?

For a leader, giving feedback both when things are going well and when they aren’t is one of the most fundamental aspects of the job.

The feedback inspired you to change your behavior which resulted in your life getting better.

Praise is often more motivating than criticism.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the feedback process should begin before any work does. At that point, you should agree on what success looks like—whether for a given project or for a given time period—get ahead of any expected issues, and lay the foundation for productive feedback sessions in the future. It’s like starting a journey with a well-marked map versus blindly walking a few miles and then asking if you’re on track. During this phase, make sure you address the following:

• What a great job looks like for your report, compared to a mediocre or bad job
• What advice do you have to help your report get started on the right foot?

Common pitfalls your report should avoid In your first three months on the job, I expect that you’ll build good relationships with your team, be able to ramp up on a small-scale “starter” project, and then share your first design iteration for review. I don’t expect that you’ll get the green light on it right away, but if you do, that would be knocking it out of the park.

Here’s what success looks like for the next meeting you run: the different options are framed clearly, everyone feels like their point of view is well represented, and a decision is made.

Many companies run a 360-feedback process once or twice a year. If it’s not formally done, you can gather the feedback yourself. Every quarter, for each report, I send a short email to a handful of his or her closest collaborators asking: a) What is X doing especially well that X should do more of?, and b) What should X change or stop doing?

Let your report know how you’re planning to be involved. Be explicit that you’d like to review the work twice a week and talk through the most important problems together. Tell him which decisions you expect to make, and which he should make.

• Where did I miss out on setting clear expectations and how might I do better in the future?
• The mark of a great coach is that others improve under your guidance.
• How could your manager better support you?
• “I want to have conversations about my career goals and how to achieve them.”
• Single 1:1 every month to just discussing behavioral feedback and career goals.

The best way to make your feedback heard is to make the listener feel safe, and to show that you’re saying it because you care bout her and want her to succeed.

Positive feedback is so effective.

Recognizing what’s going well is more likely to change behavior than only pointing out mistakes. reinforces.

• Does this feedback resonate with you? Why or Why not?
• What are your takeaways and next step?
• Would you be comfortable sharing the feedback directly with X?

How to ensure your feedback can be implemented

1. Make your feedback as specific as possible.
2. Clarify what success looks and feels like.
3. Suggest the next steps.

Don’t engage when you are upset. “Let’s talk about this later.”

Plainly say what you perceive the issue to be, what made you feel that way, and how you’d like to work together to resolve the concern.

Being a great manager is a highly personal journey, and if you’d have a good handle on yourself, you won’t have a good handle on how to best support your team.

No matter what obstacles you face, you first need to get deep with knowing yourself, your strengths, your values, your comfort zones, your blind spots, and your biases. When you fully understand yourself, you’ll know where your true north lies.

The key is to understand what works best with what you have.

The first part of understanding how you lead is to know your strengths and the things you’re talented at and love to do.

Great management typically comes from playing to your strengths rather than from fixing your weaknesses.

Ask your manager to help you calibrate yourself through the following questions:

• What opportunities do you see for me to do more of what I do well?
• What do you think are the biggest things holding me back from having a greater impact?
• What skills do you think a hypothetical perfect person in my role would have?
• For each skill, how would you rate me against that ideal on a scale of one to five?
  Ask if they’d be willing to share some feedback to help you improve.
  Ask for task-specific feedback to calibrate yourself on specific skills.

Over the years, here’s what I’ve learned about what enables me to be my best:

• I’ve received at least eight hours of sleep the night before.
• I’ve done something productive early in the day, which motivates me to keep the momentum going.
• I know what my desired outcome looks like before I start.
• I have trust and camaraderie with the people I work with.
• I’m able to process information alone (and through writing) before big discussions or decisions.
• I feel like I’m learning and growing.

Once I understood those facts, I was able to change a few habits to make it easier for me to operate in my ideal environment. Here are some examples:

• I set up multiple “prepare for bed” alarms at 10:00 p.m., 10:15 p.m., and 10:30 p.m. so that my head can hit the pillow at 11:00 p.m. sharp.
• I exercise for ten to fifteen minutes in the morning right after I wake up. It’s not much, but it gives me a sense of accomplishment that anchors the rest of the day.
• I schedule half an hour of “daily prep” into my calendar so I can study my day and visualize how I want each meeting or work task to go.
• I make an effort to become friends with my colleagues and learn about their lives outside of work.
• I schedule “thinking time” blocks on my calendar so I can sort through and write down my thoughts on big problems.
• Twice a year, I look back on the past six months and reflect on what I’ve gotten better at. Then, I set new learning goals for the next six months.

If you’re not sure what your ideal environment looks like, ask yourself the following:

• Which six-month period of my life did I feel the most energetic and productive? What gave me that energy?
• In the past month, what moments stand out as highlights? What conditions enabled those moments to happen, and are they re-creatable?
• In the past week, when was I in a state of deep focus? How did I get there?

We can trick ourselves into getting some of the benefits of an activity simply by closing our eyes and imagining it in our heads.

Studies show that if you write down five things you’re grateful for every night, you’ll feel happier in the long run. When you need to build your confidence, remember to do the same by focusing on all the things that you are doing well.

When people feel more positive, they are more likely to be creative.
“How can I be twice as good?”

Remember to ask for both task-specific and behavioral feedback.
“What skills do you think I should work on in order to have more impact?”
“What hard problems are you facing these days?”

Nobody wants to be asked “Will you be my mentor?” because it sounds needy and time-consuming. But ask for specific advice instead, and you’ll find tons of people willing to help.

People in your peer group, those with a similar job to yours, can be an excellent source of support and advice.

I hold weekly office-hour blocks as a result of a direct tip from her.

I like to schedule an hour on my calendar at the end of every week to think about what I accomplished what I’m satisfied or dissatisfied with, and what I’m taking away for next week. I then jot down some notes in an email to my team as an easy way to keep up the habit.

I also set personal goals and do bigger look-backs every six months, which gives me a longer time frame to tackle ambitious projects and learn new skills.

It might seem obvious that formal training is helpful but it also rarely feels urgent or necessary. Besides costing time, it also tends to cost money.

If spending ten hours being trained helps you be even 1 percent more efficient at your job, then it’s a good return on investment.(1 percent of time saved per year is about 20 hours.)

Training, the question that should be asked “One year from now, will I be happy I did this? When framed that way, the choice tends to be clearer.

When you invest in your personal learning and growth, you’re not just investing in your own future but also the future of your team. The better you hear, the more you’re able to support others.

Strengthening relationships: Team lunches, dinners, and other social events serve this purpose, as do some 1:1s and team meetings.

When we all understand each other a little better as human beings, when we’ve invested time to learn about our colleagues’ values, hobbies, families, life stories, etc. then working together also becomes easier and more enjoyable.

In the last few minutes of a meeting, get into the habit of asking “So before we break, let’s make sure we agree on the next steps.”

After the meeting, send out a recap to the attendees with a summary of the discussion, a list of specific action items and who is responsible for each, and when the next check-in will be.

At a growing organization, hiring well is the single most important thing you can do.

Since every hire is already a gamble, reject any weak hires. While they’re not likely to bomb, they’re also not likely to add much. If you’re going to make a bet, bet on someone with a passionate advocate behind her.

If you’re looking for a starting point on what to ask, these are my favorite all-purpose questions:

• What kinds of challenges are interesting to you and why? Can you describe a favorite project?
  This tells me what a candidate is passionate about.

• What do you consider your greatest strengths? What would your peers agree are your areas of growth?
  This question gets both at a candidate’s self-awareness and what his actual strengths and weaknesses might be.

• Imagine yourself in three years. What do you hope will be different about you then compared to now?
  This lets me understand the candidate’s ambitions as well as how goal-oriented and self-reflective she is.

• What was the hardest conflict you’ve had in the past year? How did it end, and what did you learn from the experience?
  This gives me a sense of how the candidate works with other people and how he approaches conflict.

• What’s something that’s inspired you in your work recently?
  This sheds light on what the candidate thinks is interesting or valuable.

As a manager, one of the smartest ways to multiply your team’s impact is to hire the best people and empower them to do more and more until you stretch the limits of their capabilities.

Any feat of complexity(football game, giving birth, airplane flights), requires a playbook that lays out in clear detail what all the right steps are given the current variables.

As a manager, part of your job will be the cultivation of such playbooks: how to run a team meeting, how to close a new hire, and how to complete a project on time and on budget.

If you find yourself doing a similar thing over and over again, chances are good that it can be codified into an instruction manual or checklist that can make the task go smoother in the future. Another bonus of doing this: you can pass the playbook to others to learn and execute.

Tell everyone else that she should now be considered the owner of the problem. Doing so creates accountability, but also the public declaration empowers the delegate.

• What are the biggest priorities right now for our team?
• Are we aligned in how we think about people, purpose, and process?
• Does your report know what matters to you when it comes to team building?
• Does he understand what you expect of him as a coach for his own reports?
• Do you see eye to eye on which of his team members are thriving and which aren’t?

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

Growing great teams means that you are constantly looking for ways to replace yourself in the job you are currently doing.

💡Try to double your leadership capacity every year.

The rule of thumb for delegation goes like this: spend your time and energy on the intersection

1. what’s more important to the organization
2. what you’re uniquely able to do better than anyone else.

Anything your report can do just as well or better than you, you should delegate.

💡An organization’s culture is best understood not from reading what’s written on its corporate website but from seeing what it’s willing to give up for its values.