Category: Work

Management vs. Leadership

I was listening to The Critical Path podcast last week while at the gym and had a thought.
(at 22:00) Horace Dediu says the following,
“The dilemma is that management and leadership are one of these water and oil types of things. It turns out that distinction between management and leadership: – Management is keeping things running. Leadership is breaking things and not keeping things running the way they are. 
Leadership is about change, management is about the avoidance of change. Many times we embody with the word manager both of these things. so there’s an almost implicit recognition of the duality of management.”
I keep hearing folks talking about how frustrated they are when dealing with management in relationship to the work they do. Some managers get the bigger picture, others are totally heads down and don’t want to be bothered.
Are we expecting too much out of managers? People whose job is to keep the status quo vs. leaders – those whose job is to disrupt that work?
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I sent the above to a few co-workers I admire. One of them had the following to say,

“My adage on organizational hierarchies:

If you aren’t thinking past the work of “management” then you shouldn’t be promoted past the level of “manager.”

Have I over-simplified sufficiently? “
Spot on.

Email is Dead, Long Live Email

Note: I originally posted this to our internal discussion board at work looking for feedback. I wanted to share and archive it here as I think it’s a common problem for a lot of people and organizations.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about how we communicate as an organization and would like to publicly decree that I’m out to kill how we use email. No, I’m not going to go dismantle the Exchange server or anything like that, but rather I’d like to help figure out what went wrong when email was unleashed upon the world and take back control of our time and attention.

Like some villainous fungus sprung up in a night we have no natural defenses against it. We check it so frequently that it’s become an almost Pavlovian response to look at a screen when you hear a small chime. We use it to send out time sensitive and critical information, yet it was designed to be a passive asynchronous medium. We check it at work and at play – a times of the day where you can’t do anything about it other than fret. I’ve even been in meetings where people are checking email for other work and not paying attention to the work at hand!

What can we do to establish a more productive and sane email culture? I realize it’s not solely email’s fault for our difficulty in focusing on one thing at a time (and don’t get me started on the myth of multitasking), but we have to start somewhere.

So let’s start. Please join me and share you best advice for handling email. What tips and tricks do you use to help keep your head above the water and remain a well-functioning and communicative co-worker?

I’ll kick off with a few ideas of my own.

  • How do you create intelligent subject lines?
    Are you asking a question? Start the subject with “Question – blah blah blah”. Meeting invite? “Meeting Invite – blah blah blah”
  • Best practices for managing inbox cruft?
    You’ll never read those 113 newsletters you subscribed to about. Unsubscribe now, it’s ok. Use filters to automatically prioritize work. Email from a person or thing (like MTS Alerts) that are often high priority – filter them to an “Important” sub-folder. Med or low priority to a “Not So Important” sub-folder.
  • What’s the socially acceptable way to reply to a confirmation of something?
    Answer: single sentence email replies – bad. Elaborate or don’t bother to reply.
  • Did anyone ever attend “How to use Email and not go Totally Insane 101” when they first got email?
    No!? Why not? Should we host a Communities of Knowledge or workshop around email best practices?

Here’s some recent and related articles I’ve been reading that has me all riled up. I don’t have all the answers on how we can better leverage our time – and more importantly our attention, but here’s to a start.

And of course the always excellent Merlin Mann’s “Inbox Zero” (YouTube)

 

Can’t Tell Them What They Don’t Know

Having far surpassed my early formative years, I look back at the advice I was given in a different light. I now find myself sometimes in the role of advice giver1 and I try to be a good role model for those that come after me.

There are a few times in your life when you can tell someone about an experience you’ve had in hopes of giving them some insight into their own future.

The three that I can think of off the top of my head are as follows:

  • A teenager about life in general – specifically about being yourself and love/relationships
  • A first-time expecting parent on what raising a child is like
  • A person starting at a new company

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As girls became less of a weird fascination and more of a “Hello there” <insert Flynn Rider voice> interest, my father would often repeat the following nugget of advice.

“They’re (women) are just as afraid and nervous about talking to you as you are of them. Go talk to them. The worst that could happen is they say no.”

Looking back, this is some of the best advice I’ve ever been given. I wish2 I would have learned to put aside my fears of talking to people – especially people I liked – and just go and say hello. Not just in romantic relationships either, but for all situations where a simple hello would have gotten me much farther than awkward shoe-gazing.

Case in point. Last summer I got to meet a designer and all around excellent guy at a conference where he presented. I, a grown adult, was sweating bullets as I approached him after his speech. I introduced myself and said that I was jealous of the city from which he hails and that I’d love to visit it again someday. He said thanks and invited me to contact him if he was ever in town. This summer I hope to do exactly that.

Had I not made such a simple effort I would have regretted it much more than any possible ‘no’ of embarrassment. I need to do this more often.

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The feeling of watching over your daughter as she sleeps can be explained in great detail, but it isn’t until you experience it for yourself that the impact can be felt. There’s a feeling that no tale can invoke and all attempts to are shallow and pale. But I shall try.

Knowing that a decision was made that led to, out of billions of possible outcomes, the life of this little thing. A being who at one moment can amaze you with naiveté and a depth of curiosity, frustrate you with misunderstanding and shorten your patience in the space of a second.
That’s part of being a parent that can never be explained in a guide to parenting or book about child development. It has to be experienced.
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The expression “the grass is always greener” is perplexing. I understand the meaning, but in my experience it’s more like “the grass is always grass”. They are all different, but the same in so many ways.
I joined a much larger non-profit than the prior one I worked at. 10x larger in the number of employees across 4 states instead of two campuses and in a totally different sector of business. Yet some of the same struggles I faced in the smaller and more tightly knit community I see in the larger and more dispersed organization.
When you’re thinking about joining a new organization you hopefully can do some legwork to find out more about what the organization does, what kind of people work there and what the general culture is like. You’ll compare it to past jobs, past relationships and past experiences in general. It won’t be until you’re at the new place of work for some time until you fully realize what you’ve gotten yourself into.
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After getting the nerve to ask someone on a date and having it go well – you get this feeling.
When you read your child a familiar story and they laugh at a joke they missed before – you get this feeling.
After stressing about your role in the organization and the boss congratulates you on completing a project or task at work – you get this feeling.
That feeling is important. It’s you leveling up. Experience is gained. The kind that can’t be read from a guide or bypassed with any shortcut.

A Certain Kind of Someone

It seems to me that the old way of being successful was to gain as much knowledge as you needed about something, keep it tightly to your chest and keep your head down. Follow that and before you know it you’d be at a company for 30 years.

Getting a new job was much simpler. You’d write-up a resume, attach some references and send it off. If you’re lucky, you’d get called in for an interview and those direct references would shine on about how great you were.

This allowed you to keep things close, the only people who would be called on to speak about you were people who were close. The network and portfolio of work would be kept small. The tools of dissemination made it harder to show everyone everything great you’ve ever done.

Today, we create content all the time, a dribble shot here, a blog post about an interest or work topic there1 and we leave a long body of work in our wake.

Not all of it is on purpose either! Most people don’t close accounts for web services, or use the ones they sign up for regularly.

This content, directly intended for self-promotion or not, gives potential employers (and employees!) a much larger canvas to examine. They can find out more about who you are, what you’re thinking about, where you’ve been in the past.

So if you’re the kind of person who keeps things close to their chest, who doesn’t blog or instagram or tweet – who doesn’t see value in stuff like that, I ask you the following. Who is more likely to get hired? A person with good qualifications and a few good references or a person with equal qualifications and recommendations who, when you Google them, leaves behind a vast trail of personality?

Who would you hire?

Once you’re hired, who’s more likely to get noticed or promoted? The co-worker who communicates their work, who collaborates and creates relationships?

Somebody who can sell to people inside the organization and articulate in a public way their value to the organization will be championed by more of the community than those that keep it bottled up.

Related: The Diva Paradox by Seth Godin.

Ideas of March

I’m all for bandwagons and blogs, so here’s my entry for Ideas of March. Chris Shiflett (Obviously a member of the Chris Club) came up with the idea to encourage more people to write more frequently.

Like most citizens of the Internet, I’m a heavy reader. RSS, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Draw Something (Wait, does that count?) I’m a reader of many personal blogs of people I find to be interesting and who have good things to say about the work they do. The simple act of consuming the thoughts and ideas from people whom I respect and admire acts as a fuel to create and share the things that I have in my own world.

I know I’m no Gruber or Kottke, but that’s OK. I’m not writing for them or anyone else on the Internet. I write for myself and my close friends and family.1

Seth Godin has this to say about blogging, “what matters is the humility that comes from writing it. What matters is the metacognition of thinking about what you’re going to say.” in such that the mere act of putting words to paper (or screen) is why you should write. It helps you form your thoughts around an idea or concept that empower you when conversing with others around the topic.

Writing for me is also about the enjoyment of life, the understanding of my short trip here on Earth and how lucky I am to be working in a profession that allows for such excitement and intrigue. I write because I love life and work and all the other wonderful experiences of being human.

Even if you don’t love to write, you do love something and there’s no better way to show that you love something than to tell the world about it. So write.