You can't outsource interpersonal connection to the interns, and your team can't outsource it to you.
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If we want to understand the nagging sense, the underlying frustration, the thing that's screaming in blinky red lights. We're gonna have to say it out loud.
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When we talk with bosses about their work today, we don't hear about commutes. We don't hear about summer hours, or four-day-work-weeks, either.
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Anywhere your senior leaders are not giving their full-throated support to a thing, you should be prepared for a clapback.
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We're hearing from the bosses and people and culture teams asked to implement the Bums-in-Seats directive. Even when they, themselves, are skeptical.
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Faced with that blandness, a lot of leaders are pushing back-to-office plans. They have nostalgia for the flavour of a packed and humming office, and feel like if people would just get back in there, it would fix things.
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Assumptions and predictions are two tools to get at the same thing. Both try to crystallize how you think about the world today, in case it changes. But writing down an assumption is passive, it's descriptive. Making a prediction is active.
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Every organization has costs, but there’s a lot of power in how they’re labelled. The labels people use bake in assumptions about whether those costs are internal or external. They tell you who we think should pay those costs.
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Demand for management tips and tricks is at an all-time high. People looking for any balm that can soothe the dry, chaffed state of leading a team in 2021. And while there are absolutely tips and tricks and techniques that can help, the first one is the most important. And none of the tools work until you let this one in. Here it is. You can't fight math.
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We're in the midst of a massive renegotiation of the rules of work. And the central focus of that negotiation isn't back to office plans, or international salary parity, or vaccine mandates. It's power.
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Today, our second book comes out. It's an ender chest. It is a full year of these newsletters, from the first lockdown to the anniversary of those lockdowns. It is a place to put down some of what the past 18 months have felt like.
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There's an adage in business that any decision is better than no decision. Because even if you're wrong, you can always make a different decision further down the road.
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Can we get to a place where we start to reimagine the thing? Whatever the thing is that you miss, you can reinvent it without starting from zero. Pay attention to the ache of the thing that's missing. What was important about it?
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We told leaders to be empathetic. We told them to be understanding. And they are doing that. They are phenomenal about understanding the conditions for underperformance in their teams. But it's not working...
They are patient to a fault.
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Now's a bad time to lean on your employee's sense of loyalty, but a good time to lean on their sense of possibility. New opportunity, high-quality networking, exposure to different ideas. That's what people in a liminal space can actually engage with.
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People who are frustrated. Sharp. Daring someone to call them on it and spoiling for a fight. If you're managing a group of people, you see it in slack messages. The passive aggressive ones. But also the aggressive aggressive ones.
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Every company is a community that needs rules. And, as bosses, making the rules of engagement clear is our job. That's true whether your company is remote, in-office, or a mix of the two.
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Right now, every company is trying to figure out their return-to-office, fully-remote, or hybrid strategy. And while those approaches have implications for the people working there today, nowhere is the conversation hotter than around what it means for prospective hires.
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There's a grand re-integration coming. As the normalcy of exterior life returns it's gonna let us focus on what a mess we've made of the place, internally.
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Fully remote, fully in person, or a mix of the two. This is the question that will dominate the rest of this year and into the next. The extremes are the easiest to navigate.
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