Stop saying "That's just what they are like"

Recently, I had an issue with some people on the sales team. They were repeatedly making suggestions that we had already told them were unhelpful (hiring a development team in India) and spending a lot of time telling us that we weren't doing the right things on the product program.

Let's get a few facts clear for people who don't live in the R&D world:

1. Just adding people to a problem generally doesn't solve it (it's like having a baby, if you get two women to do it you can't halve the time).
2. Indian development outsourcing is a very risky proposition for a small team. You have to deal with people 12 hours away. It's hard enough getting developers to talk to each other when they sit next to each other (often not the most outgoing chatty folks); getting them to talk to people in the middle of the night is another thing. 
3. Product programs are not owned by R&D. They are owned by product managers. If you are bugging the R&D team, it's like bugging your brother or sister to get your parents to change their mind. It may work, but everyone gets annoyed. 

When I reached out to the sales lead, he was willing to talk but said "their comments come from a good place", as in, they were really trying to help (yes, I am sure that is what mansplainers think too). And he also noted, "I really don't have time for this". When I talked to other executives, they said "Just ignore it. That is what sales guys are like". 

Here I am a co-founder of a company, who has a viewpoint and desire to see a different type of culture at the company, and I am confronted with this lack of support.

For the record, I did not want them to change because of the two items noted but because of the two items on top of the a seemingly endless list  - not following any corporate guidelines without constant reminding, not using corporate tools, not heeding any advice (and eventually coming around to the same position 9 months later thereby wasting the scarce resource of time), trying to force our product into a me-too (which never wins), making everything a last-minute crisis for everyone else - to name a few. 

I got thinking about why it is this way:

1. Are the sales people so valuable to my company that we can't afford to challenge them? I just don't believe that. 
2. Is this our biggest problem? The answer is absolutely not. 
3. Would it be difficult to get them to change their behaviour? And the answer here is yes. 

I am being told "that's just what they are like" because that is the easy way out. Changing them is possible but it's difficult. The easier choice given everything we have on our plates is just to let it go. 

If we all thought that way, our companies and our products would never progress. In R&D, we have redesigned how we work based on our experiences and the experiences of other companies and have built a very different model for releasing product. (side note: our VC have said our approach in R&D is world class).  We have also innovated around the delivery of our service. We dared to challenge the status quo and we are better for it.  It was often very hard and we met lots of opposition, but we persisted because we believed it was right. 

Will allowing the sales team to continue their behaviours be damaging - to a certain extent yes, I think it will hurt the culture of the company and probably cause some rifts,  but in the end, we will still be successful as a business.  Will people get hurt? No, perhaps a few feelings but nothing permanent. After consideration, I have decided to let it go and not pursue getting them to change.  As I noted - no one will get hurt and the damage will not be that large. 

You are now probably wondering, what the heck? Why write a blog to say that you gave up? Where is the lesson?

Well, I decided not to pursue this particular issue because the consequences of not doing it are minimal. But it has raised a much greater concern for me. I was so shocked at how quickly everyone was willing to accept the status quo.  "It's just the way they are, Kim".  Because changing behaviour and calling out people on their behaviour is hard. It is much easier to just let things continue as they are. 

When you look around IRL (as my kids say), the consequence of accepting how things just are can be extremely damaging. Be very careful before you join in and say its ok too (implicitly, often,  by not saying anything).  Sometimes it will be EXTREMELY HARD, but you have to go against the status quo, STAND UP FOR WHAT IS RIGHT,  and WORK FOR CHANGE.  And if you don't know what I mean, let me leave you with a few names to ponder  ... Jian Ghomeshi, Travis Kalanick, Harvey Weinstein, and Donald Trump.  If only, much earlier, someone had stopped saying "that is just what they are like".

 

Life is too short to drink bad wine

"Life is too short to drink bad wine" has become a motto for me. I love a good glass of wine. If I get a bad glass or bottle, I will simply get rid of it.  My friends have gasped as I poured out an expensive, yet terrible tasting, bottle. But why drink it? It may seem like I am wasting money but in fact, I am trying not to waste my time or ruin my enjoyment. I value those things more than the money spent on the wine.

This saying is great literally and will spare you choking down a bad wine choice but it is also a great saying metaphorically. Life is short. It may not seem that way when you are a teenager or in your twenties but as you age, it becomes very clear. And with such a short time, you should not waste any time doing things that make you sad, unhappy, or bored. Do things that you enjoy, that make you happy, or bring you fulfillment. 

I realize that there are practical realities that dictate that you need to earn money so that you can have shelter, food, and transportation. And I know that there can be tough times to go throw in pursuit of a bigger goal (like that horrible university course you need to take to graduate, the bad, yet honest, performance review you need to give to an employee at work, or surviving the teenage years of your children because, well, they are too old for you to give them up for adoption). But if you are really not enjoying yourself, think about it. Figure out what you like and don't like, and determine if it is just a temporary rough patch, or if you just need a change. 

When people who work for me ask for a change or to be involved in a particular project or task, I will try hard to get them what they want. I appreciate them advocating for themselves. I would far rather hear about the issue before they get into the task than hear the complaining as they begrudgingly complete the work.  Unless you are in a very rigid job, your boss will likely try to accommodate your requests.  

So don't wait any longer. If you are unhappy or unfulfilled or wasting your time, please make a change. Because life is really too short. And whatever you do, don't drink bad wine. 

Common sense?

Common sense is defined in Merriam-Webster as "the ability to think and behave in a reasonable way and to make good decisions".  Despite its name, common sense is not that common. And it is best to remember that.

I was going to draw on the current White House administration for examples of how uncommon it is, but that is so depressing. I will leave SNL to deal with them.

Instead, let me share a sign that I saw at the Santa Clara Marriott Pool last November.

I have stayed at many Marriott hotels and many California hotels and have never seen a similar sign. So, I am certain that the posting of this sign was born of necessity (a collective "Ewwww" heard). They appear to have learned the hard way that common sense is not that common.

If you want something done in a particular way or you are counting on a specific outcome from your team, do not leave it up to their "common sense". You must state your expectations clearly. Let people know what you want. It may seem like overkill but you will be much happier with the results. Don't learn the hard way!

p.s. I did go in the pool and the water was beautiful and clear!

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging

The first law of holes is "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging".  That is, if you find yourself in an untenable position, it is best to stop carrying on and exacerbating the situation.  This is an incredibly useful law both personally and professionally.

It may seem obvious, but it is surprising how many people don't follow this law. I have been known not to follow it. Sometimes you just can't seem to stop digging; sometimes you don't even see the hole.

Quite often,  holes are easy to spot. Suppose you are in an argument and everything you say makes the person you are arguing with angrier and there is no resolution in sight. Assuming that you are not arguing just for sport (yes, I do have family members who do this for sport), you would stop the argument. You see that you are not getting anywhere (i.e. in a hole) and you stop digging.

A couple of years ago I hurt my knee quite badly. I took over the counter pain medicine, I continued doing exercise that hurt the knee, and I "soldiered through" right up to the point where I could no longer straighten my leg or walk without a limp. I knew I was in a hole but I had basically just kept digging instead of stopping and addressing the issue. I hoped it would get better on its own (oh to be young again). It took spousal intervention for me to get a grip and stop digging this particular hole. And because I had waited so long, it took many medical appointments and 12 full months to have a straight leg, minimal pain and no limp.

Now, consider a small team of developers with a small code base.  They develop a single automated test suite that ensures everything works as expected before the code is released. It catches problems and takes less than 10 minutes to run. Perfect. Other developers join the team and follow the test example. The code base gets larger and now the release test suite takes 2 hours to run. Developers start to complain about it. So they restructure how the test suite runs and get the time reduced to 15 minutes. Great work. Problem solved. Then more code is developed and more developers join the team. The suite takes longer and has to be restructured again.  Test times are now 30 minutes. Not too bad. But the cycle continues. More developers, more tests, more complaining, more reduction. And now the test time is 120 minutes. This is bad. This is a HOLE and it is getting bigger every day. This is not a hypothetical; this is the hole that my team and I dug together for 3 years. We moved some dirt around at times, but we never stopped digging. It was not until we were at a crisis point that I actually saw the hole. We all talked about how we could stop making it worse. After 4 months of considerable effort,  we had a plan which allowed us to add new code in a way that allowed our testing to scale as we needed. We had finally stopped digging. And then we developed a 12-month plan to get out of the hole. If we had stopped a year sooner, the problem would have been significantly easier to resolve. As a result of this experience, the team is now always looking for holes and thinking about how to stop digging.

Learning to spot holes and realizing when to stop digging are skills that you can develop. But they do require awareness. So start looking out for them.  Listen when someone tells you that you might be in a hole. And when you find yourself there, do yourself a favour and stop digging!

Guess who's back?

Well, it has been a while since I posted. Turns out being a partner in a startup is hard work. In fact, as interesting and exhilarating as it is, it is equally time-consuming and exhausting. I have decided to ratchet back my involvement a bit in the startup and decided to fill some of my extra time with writing. And so here I am posting again.

For a long time, I have talked about writing a book. My mother-in-law thinks I am a gifted writer based on my Christmas card letters. Yes, really. I almost bought into that thought, since she was so insistent, and once entered a CBC short story writing contest. I thought my story was awesome and submitted it with pride. I lost. From what I can tell, I lost badly. In the general tips on writing short stories that one of the judges posted after the contest, I had followed 100% of "never do this" tips. Turns out I am not a gifted writer. So there will not be a book. But I still have things to say. And this is where I can do it using my own not-award-winning style.

The impetus for posting today, of all days, was that yesterday I read about startups that allow you to record messages and send them to people after you die. I loved the movie P.S. I Love You (so much that I went to the Irish countryside to see where they met).  But honestly, for me, probably since I am in good health, the concept of recording messages for after my death does not sit well. I think it would be best if I passed on my wisdom and messages while I was alive and kicking. So I am doing just that, starting today.

The next set of posts will be "pearls of wisdom" for life and for work.  These pearls, I believe, should be passed on. They have served me well. So kids ... get ready to start reading and learning ...

The value of handwritten notes

Four years ago, I heard an interview with Seth Godin on the CBC. It was a New Year's Day show and he was asked what one thing he would recommend for business people as a new habit. His answer was a bit of a surprise for me; he suggested handing out handwritten thank you notes every day. I remember him saying "just give it a try and see what happens". I could not resist.

For the first thirty days of that year, I gave a handwritten note to someone in the company to thank them for something they had done that day. Each note was a nice thank you card that I filled in with a special message specifically for the person and then put into an envelope and dropped on their desk (or snail mailed to people in other physical locations).  I congratulated developers for solving a particularly hard problem or for volunteering for a necessary but mundane task. I thanked testers for spending extra hours to ensure our release was ready to go out on time. I thanked the admin assistant for bringing in lunch. I expressed sincere appreciation to the marketing person for giving me some goodies to give away at a recruiting event. I thanked our program manager for working with a particularly difficult team to resolve a longstanding problem. I congratulated a manager for adeptly handling a sensitive situation with one of his team members. Most of my thank you notes, as you can see, were for things that you would expect people to do as part of their regular job, but still, each day as I sat down to think about it, these were the things that I was grateful had been done. And, as I began to realize, these were the things that I rarely explicitly thanked people for doing.

Two things happened. The first and most pleasant outcome (for me and my family) was that I consistently left the office on a positive note. Despite what had happened during the day, my last thoughts before leaving were reflecting on the great things people had done that day as I wrote my daily thank you note. And the second, and more important outcome, was the impact that it had on my team. People really appreciated that I had noticed what they had done and had thanked them personally.  They began to go out of their way to be more helpful than normal. As the notes started to be hung up in cubes, others noticed them and tried to get them. It was not an experiment that resulted in everyone getting a card; some people got multiples and some got none. Overall my immediate team became more helpful to the team and more appreciate of one another. And the extended team was much more willing than they had been in the past to help me or my team out because they knew it was genuinely appreciated.

After 30 days, I ended the experiment but I did keep a stash of thank you cards around and used them on a regular but far less frequent basis for the rest of my time at the company.

In the past month I had two colleagues mention these notes. For each of them the note had connected me to them in a more significant way that I had imagined. One told me that he had started to write notes in his new company and was glad I had taught him the lesson of being appreciative and the importance of expressing it personally. And the other just wanted to thank me for the good work my team had done and to say he missed the personal connection with the team that no longer seemed to exist.

I was reminded today of the important of handwritten notes by a post in the Harvard Business Review. You can check it out here.

Handwritten notes can be a valuable way to express your gratitude and to help build a cohesive team. They take time but they are worth it. I highly recommend that you give it a try.


P.S. Just FYI, handwritten notes actually require you to spend time and write something meaningful. Expect to spend 15 to 20 minutes and to throw some notes out if you make an error or your handwriting is illegible due to lack of practice. Dropping a pre-printed note without writing a little message or without signing it will not work. You don't get points by handwriting someone's name or address on the front of the envelope. If you can't be bothered to do this well, don't do it. Each holiday season,  I roll my eyes when someone sends me an unsigned Christmas card. Whether the sender knows it or not the message is clear "My life is too busy to connect with you, but, hey, I got the darn cards off my holiday to-do checklist". Because even my chiropodist, who I have visited only twice and who probably would not recognize me if I walked past him on the street, went to the trouble of personally signing the card he sent to me. 

How Poor Leaders become Good Leaders

It is possible to improve if you are not a good leader. Here are some tips from an HBR blog post:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/02/how_poor_leaders_become_good_l.html

Many of these items are what I believe make a good leader so it is good to see that HBR agrees with me!

Management v. Leadership

Many people confuse leadership with management.  In this blog post on Management and Leadership rom HBR, John Kotter shares his frustration with this confusion  It is important to know the difference particularly if you are a manager and you want to be a leader.

Leadership is essential for defining the right thing to do and management is critical to getting things done well. There are many great leaders who are not great managers and vice versa. 

I have seen far too many instances of a good manager coming up with a great plan and executing it but all for not, since the feature added was of little value or did not meet the customers needs.  Basically the manager did the wrong thing very well. Now, you could argue that they did their job and it was the leaders, the other guys, who did their job incorrectly. True perhaps but its a bit hollow given the wasted development effort.

If you find yourself in this position, that is, doing the wrong thing, you need to find the internal fortitude to speak up and to work toward a solution that makes sense. It may be hard, it may be challenging but it is what a leader would do. 

Keep in mind this phrase that a wise man once told me "a poorly executed brilliant plan is vastly superior to a brilliantly executed poor plan".

Stop Being Nice

I suppose it is not the right time of year to telling people this, but stop being nice. Niceness is not correlated to success. All of us know someone who is really nice, but being nice is not the same as being effective or being a good leader/manager. It may be hard to make the adjustment, but it is necessary (I know because as young woman I worked hard at being very nice). You can be genuine, you can care about people, and you can do great things all without being nice. Now, that doesn't mean being rude or offensive, but it does mean standing your ground and saying what you think. And that may just mean that sometimes people won't like you. Its time to get over needing to be liked by everyone. Check out the following:

From HBR Blog "The Morning Advantage" Dec 3, 2012 by Sarah Green

"Being liked is overrated," writes Jessica Valenti in The Nation. She's primarily writing about women — for whom likability is negatively correlated with success — but her advice is useful for the yes-men out there, too. Valenti, the founder of the blog Feministing, admits to wasting hours online responding to every commenter, giving equal time and attention to both the thoughtful people and the snarkiest trolls. "It pains me to think of what I could have achieved if I had that time back."

When we adjust our behavior to be more likable — withholding our most deeply held opinions so as not to offend, agonizing over every bit of negative feedback, eventually "tempering our thoughts" as well as our words — we stunt our selves, our careers, our impact in the world. "The truth is that we don’t need everyone to like us," she writes, "We need a few people to love us."

I'll give Valenti the last word: "Yes, the more successful you are — or the stronger, the more opinionated — the less you will be generally liked. All of a sudden people will think you’re too 'braggy,' too loud, too something. But the trade off is undoubtedly worth it. Power and authenticity are worth it." It's a piece worth "liking."

Time for reflection

Usually at this time of year, I am working on a speech for the company holiday party. My goal is always to give a meaningful and entertaining message. So I begin to reflect on the past year - all the things we accomplished, the occasional disappointment, the new people we added to the team, the people who left. The speech gets done but more importantly, I am compelled to review the year, put it in perspective, and consider what my team and I should be doing differently in the future.

At my current company, our development process includes a biweekly retrospective, where we review the engineering processes and procedures and make changes as needed. There are places to look at the company's progress from a financial standpoint on a regular basis. But there is no place in the business where we look at how we are doing as leaders. I am going to make a change so that on a quarterly basis we do take time out to do a level set to "measure and learn" so that it becomes part of the overall company process. The details are not yet figured out but it will be something simple. More importantly, I believe it will be something that is effective as we are working hard to establish a culture that accepts change and thrives on continuous learning and improvement. 

I encourage all of you to do some reflection at this time of year (and on a more regular basis).  If you need some help on what kinds of things to do, here is a year-end checklist from Inc. to give you some ideas. 

Be Prepared

As a leader you need to think ahead, work out contingency plans, see when a course correction is needed, and generally always be prepared for what is to come. At work, this comes naturally to me.

Home is a bit different. The recent devastation of Hurricane Sandy coupled with my daughter doing a talk for her English class on the Zombie Apocalypse made me think about my personal emergency preparedness. Was I ready? The answer was a resounding no. Today, I made it a priority. It was not that hard. Within a few hours I had a decent kit ready and enough food and water for my family for 72 hours. The food has been labelled so that I can either eat it or donate it to the food bank in advance of it expiring.  And I have a really cool urban multitool. I should have done this years ago. But now I am ready.

If you do not have an emergency kit, don't delay any longer. Information is available to help you get started at http://www.getprepared.gc.ca/index-eng.aspx.

Be ready when the Zombies attack!

The importance of networking

In this day and age of social media, it is pretty easy to have a large network of contacts. Without trying I have 287 LinkedIn connections and 117 Facebook friends. But I recommend having real connections with real people. It is easy to do that with the people who surround you at work, but having more widespread connections is really what you should strive for as that is a lot more valuable. Why? Well, you never know when you will want to hire someone, change jobs, need some advice, and without a wide and very real network it will be difficult for you. How do I know? As with most of my lessons, I learned it the hard way.

In my previous company, in the last 5 years, I made no real effort to get out and actively network with people in the technology community. I had many excuses which included:
-"I don't need to network, I have great people right here at work if I need anything"
-"I want to give the opportunities that I see to some of the younger people here; they should do the networking"
-"I am too tired to go to a breakfast meeting and then work my regular long hours"
-"LinkedIn is a great way to network"

As you can see the excuses were weak. Truth be told, I just didn't feel like doing it. I got lazy. And that was fine until I decided to change my career and partner in a startup. I wish now, that I had spent more time keeping up my connections instead of cocooning for the past five years. Because I did that then, now in my new company hiring was harder, getting advice on lawyers and accountants to use in the area was harder,  getting first hand experience in what we should do in our startup was harder.   My LinkedIn connections were pretty useless as I mostly had connected with people who I knew at work or people who did not live in my local community and so could not help with the problem at hand (side note: LinkedIn turned out to be a valuable tool for recruiting but not until I built a good local network and paid them for additional services).

I am not the only one in this position. In the last short while, as I build my local network, I have met many people who did not nurture their personal local network and now are having to start over. For some who find themselves without jobs, the struggle to build a real network is immediate and when you are under pressure it can be a daunting chore.

The good news, however, is that with just a bit of work, it is straightforward to fix. You need to get out there, reach out to people you once new, get introductions, go out to coffee, go out for lunch, join the local community groups, join local interest groups, talk to people you don't know but would like to know, join a breakfast group, watch the twitter feeds from local organizations to learn about events, etc. I found it quite tiring at first - too many new people, too many new things .... but the real problem was me. As usual, I was trying to accomplish something immediately with my contacts. That will never work. Just put yourself out there, but don't force it - make contacts naturally, and see what comes of it. The goal is to build a network of local contacts that you might someday use or that you might someday help. It is a two way street. Since this "epiphany" my network building has been a lot more interesting and fun. And I consider it a valuable use of my time and part of my work, not just a side activity.

From my new network I have gotten some great advice; I have been put in touch with some talented people that I might some day hire;  I have learned about interesting tools that I now use on a daily basis; and I have a newfound respect for what is going on in technology in my community. A lot of upside for a small amount of consistent effort.

If you don't have a local network, start building one before you really need it. If you have one, good for you, but don't forget to keep it going. Social media is interesting and provides a lot of unique opportunities. But good old fashioned face to face networking is irreplaceable.

What women know about leadership that men don't

I read and enjoyed this article from the HBR.

http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2012/10/what-women-know-that-men-dont.html

Trust

A while back, Eric asked what I thought the role of trust is in a dynamic organization. And can trust scale?

I believe that trust is an important part of an organization culture. With real trust:

• employees have great job satisfaction
• they can focus on doing their job well, confident that others are doing theirs well
• they can ask questions and make suggestions to help the product or the business, without being considered overly critical (i.e. they are free to speak their mind without recrimination)
• they can innovate and pursue freely in their area of responsibility

• organizations are streamlined
• there is very little overhead needed for management at any level
• no need for policing functions (as HR can sometimes grow to become in an organization)

I have worked in organizations where there has been real trust:

1. As a student, I worked for a Telecom company who was rolling in money. Our management was young, enthusiastic, and had the ability to decide what our team would do without any interference from upper management. The team was smart, the work was interesting and we made great progress. We were confident and no one questioned what we were doing. It was invigorating. But then the company's resources began to dry up and as cuts began, trust began to erode.  Although our work may have furthered the company's goals, the path to success was not clear and there was another group attacking the same problem in a different way. Instead of cooperating together, we were essentially competing, using  at least twice the necessary resources to achieve the results. Throughout the company there were many projects that were duplications, dead ends, or seemingly unrelated to the goals of the company. Groups were cut, budgets slashed, command and control replaced trust. The company did survive but it was a completely different type of company after that.  
2. Early in my career, I worked for a consulting company which gave me well defined constraints: the scope of work, the delivery schedule, and the resources. Once I was given a project, they fully trusted me and my team with completing the work, as long as we reported good progress each month. However, it was pretty easy to trust everyone, since there was so little room for any variation or any innovation. 
3. I also worked for company that had been stripped to the bare bones with cutbacks and all we had left were the people who wanted to make the company a success, a leader who we believed in, and a plan that we thought would work. We had no choice but to trust each other to do their part of the plan as we were under resourced in all areas. Everyone was motivated and criticism was all taken as constructive. After we turned around the company, trust continued for a short while, but then we started to grow quite rapidly, we hired more haphazardly, we brought in executives who were micro managers and the trust that we had evaporated. Trust had not been a core value of the company but more of a side effect of the position we had found ourselves in.

Although I have seen organizations with real trust, I have not seen it scale for any length of time. For trust to scale I believe that

• everyone needs to have clear direction and needs to be working toward the goals of the company
• it should not be as restrictive as my consulting company example, but it should not be a "free for all" like my Telecom company example
• trust must be a core value of the culture
• and you must work to ensure it stays that way; even though there may be trust at some point, if it is not key to the company culture, it can erode as in my comeback story
•  you must have a great hiring process
• you need to make sure that you hire talented people that fit in and share your values

Leaders are readers

Good leaders are always learning. They are avid readers. 

Needs some ideas on what to read?

Here are some ideas from HBR Blogger, John Coleman, on what leaders should read. 

I checked out the the curriculum and reading list from David Gergen's leadership course and thought it looked excellent. (Side note: I am a big David Gergen fan. I can even tolerate CNN political coverage if David Gergen is there, as I find him to be thoughtful, sensible, and balanced)

But reading does not need to be just about leadership. Below is a consensus cloud visualization of several top 100 books lists on the interweb (put together by David McCandless of Information is Beautiful - for the full data set check here). 

I have often thought of picking a top 100 book list and reading it as a New Year's Resolution. I probably will never do that but reviewing these book lists has inspired me to read To Kill a Mockingbird (hard to believe I have not read that) and True North: Discover your Authentic Leadership. 

Don't ask if you are not ready for the answer

When I was a young teenager, I remember asking my Dad to make a decision for me although the decision really could have been all mine. He chose an answer that I detested and I proceeded to throw a fit. When he saw my reaction he told me "Never ask a question if you are not prepared for the answer". I have long forgotten the question I asked but I have always remembered his great advice.

If you are a leader or manager this is very important. If you are not prepared to accept the answer to a question you have asked your team, then you should never have asked. Asking and then dismissing can be quite demoralizing.

Recently, my daughter was asked by the leader of her division if she would like the opportunity to take on a new expanded role in the company. He asked her to do some research and paint a picture of what the role and responsibilities would be. Two levels of management above her had left in the course of the previous 9 months, and she had taken on many of their responsibilities but there were more to take on. Her interim performance reviews had been stellar. She took him at his word, went and defined the role, picked a title and found out what the competition paid for a comparable job. She reviewed her findings with me and it all seemed very reasonable. Since she was new to the position, she was going to ask for a a lower than average salary until she could prove that she could handle all aspects of the job. The promotion would result in a $15k increase in salary (yet still $15k below the average salary for the work).

As requested, she sent her findings to the division head in advance of their scheduled meeting. He called her after seeing what she sent, said he was shocked, and there was no way she could possibly expect that she could get that big a raise. He said she should just be grateful for the opportunity he had given her. The meeting did happen but he pretty much said the same thing to her in person as he had said on the phone. Eventually, she got a token raise along with no title change yet he was more than willing to give her all the responsibilities of the job she had defined.  She was also told if she increased profits she could possibly get a raise (but profit sharing bonuses were not available to someone at her level). My daughter told me "well, it was better than a kick in the pants".

Why then had she been asked to "paint a picture"? The only reason that I can come up with is that the division head needed a job description and this was a way to get it. The net result is that although the opportunity is good, it has clearly taught her that he doesn't care and cannot be fully trusted; and she is now somewhat demotivated although still putting in a good effort. My take on what we learned about her division head and her company is pretty colourful in tone and not appropriate for this blog (I have also recommended a resume update). Clearly he never should have asked the question, because he was not prepared for the answer. The result was that a young enthusiastic employee feels under appreciated and overworked. She lost something in the experience; her division head lost something in the experience; and the business lost as well. All because of a question that never should have been asked.

Decision Making

Found this short blog post from Seth Godin on decision and thought it had some very good points. Check it out.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/10/waiting-for-all-the-facts.html

The Importance of Team

The team is everything. This is not news. In order to get things done, you need to have a solid team. In order to do great things, you need to have an outstanding team. Most people know this. Most people fully agree with this ... why then do we have so many problems with our teams?

The number one problem I have seen is that people become willing to compromise and take any interchangeable carbon unit just to fill the job. Perhaps they are tired of interviewing (it can be a very tedious process). Perhaps they just figure they will never find the right person so the kinda ok person is fine. But most of the time, no-one is better than the wrong person. It may be hard to see, but there is a real drain on the team to bring a new person up to speed, and to get them going, particularly if they are not a good fit for the team.  The effort of covering the empty spot is often quite a bit less than dealing with a bad fit.

The second problem that I see is that insecurity will stop people from hiring outstanding candidates. I learned a long time ago that you want to surround yourself with individuals who are smarter than you are. It can be intimidating at first, but the results are fantastic. I have seen hiring managers who say they only want A players but in fact they are hiring B+ players so that they maintain the status of the smartest in the room. The difference may appear subtle but the results are not. Development teams should be built of incredibly smart people. 

The third problem is that when hiring managers make a mistake and somehow the wrong person gets on board. Very few are then willing to deal with it in a timely fashion. It is hard to let someone go.  But keeping a bad fit on your team is almost always damaging to the team, the product, and to you (because people either see you as unable to act [i.e. make a f**king decision] or worse, unable to see the issue).

I sympathize with the first problem.  I am struggling with this right now. I am building out an R&D team in a startup. The opportunity for people joining is fantastic, in my humble opinion, because of the responsibility and the potential financial upside. But getting the candidate stream flowing, and finding people with the breadth of skills I would like to have with the right personality fit for the team continues to be an arduous task. 

I keep reminding myself that my patience will pay off. I remind myself that if I do hire the wrong person, I may be stuck with the third problem above - having to remove them from the team. But I am also rethinking the criteria for hiring. I am willing to give up on skills that I would like to have if I can get someone who is smart, adaptable, with the right attitude, solid experience, and who has a personality fit with the rest of the team. Skills can be learned, but you cannot change personalities and you most certainly cannot "teach smart". 

Remember the importance of team. The best way to be successful is to surround yourself with great individuals who mesh together to form a stellar team. 

Are you sure you're not a bad boss (from HBR)

This article lists what makes a bad boss in terms of what they did not do. It is pretty consistent with my views.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/08/are_you_sure_youre_not_a_bad_b.html

Make a F**king Decision

You have probably been in a situation where you just wish someone would make a decision so everyone can move forward. It is frustrating. The lack of decision can stop a lot of work, and waste a lot of time.

If you are a leader, you need to be able to make decisions. And you need to make them promptly. The real issue for you may be that there doesn't seem to be enough information to make the right decision. That is often the case; but taking time to get a lot more information can result in delays which may be just as detrimental as the wrong decision.

Early in my career, I used to hem and haw before making a decision. Nine times out of ten, the decision I would have made was the same as the one that I eventually made (but much later). I had to learn to trust my instincts, rely on the advice of others, and take a leap. I also had to learn that when the wrong decision was made, I had to admit I was wrong, suck it up, and reset the course. That may seem hard, but it actually works well. People will appreciate this way of working and will appreciate having you as their leader.

I recently met up with an ex-colleague who said he had not fully understood how great it was to have decisions made until he worked for another manager (after I left) and prompt decisions became rare. In my group, decisions were made quickly and things got done. My colleague hadn't really noticed that anything special was happening - it seemed like the natural way to work. However, when he changed groups, he really noticed the difference. When decisions didn't get made, developers made their own micro-decisions and the group did not all work toward the same goal; the results were terrible - virtually no forward progress was made in months.  I know the managers in this group and they are all good, smart people. What they are not, however, is bold. I have seen them get trapped in "analysis paralysis" more than once. Being decisive takes courage and is hard to do. But it is essential, if you want to be a great leader.

Some good advice I got once from my husband (a colleague at the time) was "Lead, follow, or get out of the way". He had been in the Navy for a while and this was one of many useful lessons he took away (as a side note, he is also an excellent bed maker and can iron like a pro!).  I always remember this. This is a mantra worth repeating and teaching others.

So go out there and make decisions. Lead. Be bold. And occasionally, if you are wrong, admit it, change course, and move on.

P.S. My post title was inspired by Adam Mansbach's book "Go the F**k to Sleep". Check out Samuel Jackson reading this book on YouTube if you are not familiar with the book. It is pretty funny.