Photo by Felix Mittermeier.
One of the stranger parts of our day jobs is trying to find relevant models for our business. Tech doesn’t teach you this. Tech teaches you that the incumbents in your space are fat and slow and ripe for disruption. We flip the table before we even look to check out what’s on the table. And as a result, we make all the same mistakes and a whole host of new ones. And then we throw our hands up in the air and say, “Who could have known?”
We’re kind of over being told to throw our hands up in the air. We didn’t want to build Raw Signal Group that way. So we looked for models. Who does what we do? Who has built a business that’s out there trying to help people do better by themselves and others? Who still stands at the front and runs the program, instead of farming that out to staff (which is the obvious, scalable version)?
And then a friend mentioned I’m Not Your Guru, the Tony Robbins documentary on Netflix. Here’s someone up at the front running a bigger program than we ever have. We studied that thing with notebooks in hand. How many attendees per staff member? How long are the days? How do they approaching seating, and catering, and shit disturbers? He had a 30-year playbook and we wanted to learn from it.
He’s not the only one we studied, of course. We’ve studied everyone from Oprah to Hannah Gadsby to Theodor Herzl, Beyoncé to Brené. But when we studied Tony, it left us feeling unsettled. His machine is very good, but his message isn’t. Personal accountability is great, but the heteronormative bullshit and the hyper-masculine posturing sucks. Empowerment is good, but asking people to re-live trauma in front of 2500 strangers is irresponsible.
Buzzfeed put out a huge exposé on Tony Robbins this week. It’s a very long read but the headline gives you the gist. Reasonably creepy, incredibly powerful, and litigious AF. It’s one thing to use charm to get people to open up. It’s another thing entirely to then turn around and use their vulnerability as a weapon.
There are whole swaths of modern life that aren’t working for people (work, relationships, you name it). It’s natural to look for people with answers. We all need change, and far be it from us to tell you not to buy a ticket to Tony if you feel like his schtick works for you. But here’s what we know:
In the transformation business, you need people to be vulnerable, and there are only two ways to get there. One way is to tear them down. Mess with their sleep and their eating, humiliate them, belittle their pain. You make them vulnerable by taking away their safety. It’s fast, and it often works. But the collateral damage is ghoulish.
The other way to get people to be vulnerable is to make them safe. It’s slower. It’s harder work, since people need different things to feel safe. It means not inviting some people. We’re 3 years into our company and Tony’s 30 years into his but we know which of these models speaks to us. We’ve seen what’s on it and now we’re ready to flip some fucking tables.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
I love 1:1s. They are one of the single most effective tools in the management toolkit. They are one of the best ways orgs can build muscle around alignment, communication, and accountability. They are one of the ways you achieve a tight link between strategy and execution. And they are how you help high ambiguity tech workers to do hard and innovative things, even as the sands shift beneath their feet.
I love them so much that I run in-depth workshops on them. And yet, no element of modern management theory has such a level of near religiosity on what you must always, never, or sometimes do.
I blame Rands. The first time I read about 1:1s, it was in Managing Humans. For the old timers in tech, Managing Humans was the only shred of light we had in an otherwise dark, dark cave of first time management. Most of us had been individual contributors and many of had come up through tech and startup. Heaven help us, our management role models were <clears throat> woefully limited.
And then Managing Humans came out and Michael Lopp (Rands) had declarative things to say about 1:1s. He told us what we must, might, should, could, and oughtn’t do. And in 2008, I did those things. Over the next ten years, my style evolved. In part because I grew more confident. And in part because I discovered what worked and what didn’t as I managed bigger and more diverse teams.
There’s a set of things where the prescriptive folks are right. “Have them” is a good rule. “Don’t be late” is another good idea. But there’s a bunch in this article from the Radical Candor blog that had me wincing.
Telling bosses in fast-paced, high growth orgs that it’s ok to cancel their 1:1s is not perfect. Not because you can never miss one (tho Rands advises you not to). But because humans are very bad at reasoning about long term consequences. The short term need to get more time back in my day because things are so busy comes at the expense of having a tight loop with my team around priorities, blockers, engagement. and organizational resilience.
The advice to get out of the office isn’t wrong, per se. It’s just that it fights the other rule on making it a time where your employee can bring up hard stuff. I have never met an employee who was excited about the idea of crying with their boss in a Starbucks. I have met many who just shelved the hard conversation for a few more weeks.
And then their boss cancelled the next 1:1.
And then that recruiter called…
What Johnathan’s reading
Two articles that seem to be about different things but are really about the same thing:
1. Philadelphia is passing “just-cause” protections for parking lot workers
This is a law that says you need a reason to fire someone. At least in Philadelphia. At least in the parking industry. It might sound surprising to you that Philadelphia needs a law for that. Of course you should have a reason for firing someone, right? Well, not really. Most of my work and management life has been under various forms of “at will” employment. Outside of some pretty minimal severance rules, and protections against overt discrimination, most people in non-union gigs can be fired for any reason or not reason at all throughout most of North America.
2. Uber/Lyft drivers logging off en masse to trigger surge pricing
This is about groups of drivers hacking back. They work for software, not managers, now. Code determines what they get paid. Code determines their performance. Code decides whether they’re still eligible to work. And, in the absence of a human manager they can appeal to, they are hacking the code.
For me the thing these articles have in common is: dignity. It’s not wrong to want dignity in your work. It’s core to who we are (and we’ve talked about it in this newsletter before). We want to be seen, to be treated ethically and with respect.
What I hear from the parking workers story is that they live in fear of arbitrary firing if they ever speak up for their own interests. That’s not dignity. What I hear from the uber/lyft driver story is frustration at being measured, and manipulated, by an algorithm incapable of ethics or respect. That’s not dignity.
Uber tells on itself in its quote at the end of the second piece. “This behavior is neither widespread or permissible on the uber platform, and we have technical safeguards in place to help prevent it from happening.”
Yeah. Maybe you do. Maybe you do have more code to ensure that your people don’t step out of line. But that’s not dignity, either.
Don’t bet your business on stripping others of their dignity. It’s gross. It’s unnecessary. And one way or another, people will take it back.
