Photo by Mengliu Di.
Well, we did a podcast interview together.
Great Leadership Can Be Learned – The SimpleLeadership Podcast
We’ll keep the intro short this week since that there link is 47 minutes and 36 seconds of Nightingales talking about some of our favourite topics. At least twice during this interview we had to moderate ourselves to let our host get a word in. We should be embarrassed but honestly this is very on-brand for us.
Christian’s show notes, from his post about the episode:
[1:50] The winding path that brought Johnathan & Melissa to their current roles
[7:18] Leadership skills can be learned across disciplines
[13:19] The point Johnathan and Melissa realized a gap existed in tech leadership
[16:56] What are the mistakes that happen over and over in tech leadership?
[24:35] The most important thing for new managers to focus on the first 90 days
[36:00] Leadership is not about good intentions
[40:40] How can managers contribute more to family planning and maternity leave issues?
[43:15] How Raw Signal Group can build better bosses for tech companies
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
Make Friends With the Monster Chewing on Your Leg, and Other Tips for Surviving Startups
Molly Graham, yes of give-away-your-legos fame, is back. And she’s in a FirstRound piece talking about monsters, extreme emotions, and the rollercoaster ride of startup.Â
If you’ve ever worked with an executive or life coach, there’s a bunch in here you’ll recognize. She talks about naming your monster. Finding the things that trigger your worst behaviors at work – those information hoarding, insecure, imposter syndrome, quick to yell, reactionary, ready-fire-aim moments. And then anthropomorphizing the traits so you can better see them coming.
That visibility is useful. If you know when you’re at your worst, you can spot it early and keep your head, even when everyone else is losing theirs.
There’s also some pretty problematic advice in there to keep your head down, give away credit, and assume that good things will come. This advice sounds good but sadly (and statistically) doesn’t tend to turn out well for a large portion of the population. Spoiler alert, it’s ladies.
The article closes with Molly encouraging startup folks to talk about the ups and downs, the crushing failures, the uncertainty, the stresses, and not just the mega success.Â
She’s in good company. There’s a macrotrend of vulnerability in leadership right now. There’s Brene’s Netflix special. There’s Chamath’s Recode interview. There’s Scott’s new book. For the most part, I’m here for it.Â
For decades, so much of our startup storytelling was an exercise in survivorship bias. You’d read about Zappos, not the hundreds of other companies that tried and failed to adopt holacracy. Or hear all about the shiny Netflix culture deck, not the culture of abject fear it helped create.
When we’re talking to founders, they often want to know why they can’t just copy/paste something from another company into theirs. It worked for them, goes the thinking. Maybe it can work for us too.Â
Johnathan’s got a line I really like so imma give him the last word here. He says, just make sure you’re not comparing someone else’s highlight reel to your blooper reel. Amen.
What Johnathan’s reading
The 5 Whys of Organizational Design
Kellan is an interesting fellow and he writes smart things from time to time. They’re cerebral and engineering-focused because that’s his wheelhouse, and they always basically sound like this. If this is your bag, you should follow him. If it isn’t, well, the scenery isn’t going to change. But whether you like his style or not, he’s saying an important thing: many organizations aren’t clear on why they do what they do.
I remember working with a manager once who was struggling with setting goals for the team. I did what I often do, and went back to first principles. “Why does your team exist?” Teams exist to do stuff. Someone at some point decided to start carrying a bunch of payroll and taking up a bunch of seats and laptops. Why? What’s it for? They didn’t know.
A lot of managers don’t know. Some people give you a What instead of a Why (“We’re finance, we do finance stuff”, “We’re QA, we QA things”). Some people give you a How (“we take down the bug backlog in 2 week sprints”). Some people get irritated because it feels like a trick question, or some corporate-spiritual nonsense.
It’s not a trick.
Why does your team exist? Dig for it. It’s there somewhere. Kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight. Why are we getting paid? Why do we need to hire a customer success team, I thought we already had a customer success team? Someone has the answers to these questions! They will either be good and illuminating ones, or awful and illuminating ones. But we will get lit either way!
A bad answer, as Kellan notes, is “because Jamie’s underwater so we hired around that team.” Or, “We needed more CS folks so now we have two CS teams.” But what if there’s a great answer in there?
Sometimes the answer is, “We now know that there are two different phases to adoption. We want your team to nurture new customers through phase 1 and get them ready for phase 2.” I swear to god there are teams out there with a purpose that crystal clear and no one on the team knows it. The original manager left to start a beet farm before we’d hired a replacement and we dropped the ball. There are 14 people in the org who could answer that question but they don’t even know it’s an issue. They’ve just been talking about how “the Phase 1 CS team seems to have gone downhill lately.”
This shit happens all the time and I’m dying just thinking about it.
Do you know your why? I hope so. If you don’t, I hope you go find it. Fight for it. Ask anyone who might know. I can draw a straight line between the times I’ve done my best work, and the times I’ve known why I was doing it. And when I think about the times I struggled to get shit done without knowing what it was actually for, I can see how much of that work was wasted. I don’t waste time like that any more, and I hope you won’t either.
