#39 - Handcrafted
"People break into two buckets. Some come at life as a series of transactions. And some come at life as about building relationships. You can have a successful life doing transactions, but the only way to have a great life is on the relationship side" (Jim Collins)
Building great relationships - in life in general and at work in particular - is somewhat like gardening: strong relationships cannot thrive without a focused, sustained and personalised care. Building great relationships needs good understanding of others, and also good self-awareness, clarity about our own values and beliefs, our expectations, emotional reactions, communication styles. While it takes effort, nothing can be more rewarding.
In this newsletter, I've curated a few ideas and resources that help answer a few important questions:
What are our key relationships at work? Why are they so important? And why great managers are so important?
What makes a good relationship? Which mental models can we use to evaluate a relationship?
Can we build great relationships at scale? as a manager? as a business? And what if the scale was not the goal at all?
We'll talk about the need to be seen, about management as one of the noblest of professions, the concepts of trust battery, dynamic duos, and your span of control. We'll see that frequency can trump quality and that we should worry about scale only after having created something noteworthy.
Happy reading!
The Truth: we work really well in small teams with great managers
"In the last two years, (...) the confusion on all of our parts, the complexity of the world has seemingly turned up to 11. That's what's changed. What hasn't changed - a few fundamentals. First of all, if you don't have a customer, you don't have a company. That hasn't changed. (...) Managers. What's stays the same in terms of what humans need. Humans need individualized attention from a person who's bringing them the work. And in many many many cases that's the manager. And whether you call this person a supervisor, a team lead, or a manager, we work so much better in response to another human being (...) It's the manager, stupid. And if we get that right, so many things go right. And if we get that wrong, it almost does not matter what you're trying to do, everything is diminished. (...) Who's going to be the glue that pulls everyone together who are working remotely or hybridly, or dynamically? Who's going to be the one that builds trust? (...)That role's tremendously important. We work really really well in small teams with great managers. That's really where humans thrive. When you push that aside when you ignore that truth today, we run into all sorts of obstacles.
Redefining HR Podcast by Lars Schmidt with Marcus Buckingham
Not everybody wants to be looked at. Everybody wants to be seen
"There is a difference between wanting to be looked at and wanting to be seen. When you are looked at, your eyes can stay blissfully closed. You suck the energy, you steal the spotlight. When you are seen, your eyes must be open, as you are seeing and recognizing your witness. You accept energy and generate energy. You create light. One is exhibitionism, other is connection. Not everybody wants to be looked at. Everybody wants to be seen."
Amanda Palmer, "The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help"
How will you measure your life?
"If you want to help other people, be a manager. If done well, management is among the most noble of professions. You are in a position where you have eight hours every day from every person who works for you. You have the opportunity to frame each person's work so that, at the end of every day, your employees will go home feeling like (...) living a life filled with motivators.
... while many of us might default to measuring our own lives by summary statistics, such as number of people presided over, number of awards, or dollars accumulated in the bank, and so on, the only metrics that will truly matter to my life are the individuals whom I have been able to help, one by one, to become better people. When I have my interview with God, our conversation will focus on the individuals whose self-esteem I was able to strengthen, whose faith I was able to reinforce, and whose discomfort I was able to assuage - a doer of good, regardless of what assignment I had. These are the metrics that matter in measuring my life".
Clayton Christensen, “How Will You Measure Your Life?
What makes a great relationship?
... a great relationship is one when you ask each person independently who benefits more from that relationship, they would each say, "Well, I do"... the reason both people can answer that way is because both people are putting into the relationship, not for what they're getting from it, but for what they can give into it. Because both people are doing that, both people would feel that the are the ones who are the ultimate beneficiary because of how much the other person gives."
Jim Collins: Relationships vs. Transactions (The Knowledge Project)
The Trust Battery concept is an interesting mental model to think about the quality of our work relationships.
The Trust Battery
"Ever been in a relationship where you're endlessly annoyed by every little thing the other person does? In isolation, the irritating things aren't objectively annoying. But in those cases it's never really about little things. There's something else going on.
The same thing can happen at work. Someone says something, or acts in a certain way, and someone else blows up about it. From afar, it looks like an overreaction. You can't figure out what the big deal is. There's something else going on.
Here's what's going on: your trust battery is dead.
Tobias Lütke, CEO at Shopify, coined the term. Here's how he explained it in a New York Times interview: 'Another concept we talk a lot about is something called a 'trust battery'. It's charged at 50 percent when people are first hired. And then every time you work with someone at the company, the trust battery between the two of you is charged or discharged, based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise."
(...) The reality is that the trust battery is a summary of all interactions to date. If you want to recharge the battery, you have to do different things in the future. Only new actions and new attitudes count.
Plus, it's personal (...) the work of recharging relationships is mostly one to one."
Jason Freed & David Heinemeier Hansson, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work
As we build relationships and develop trust mostly one to one, a strong team is impossible without strong duos that help us produce brilliant work.
Dynamic Duos
"A duo is the relationship between two people - the basic atomic unit of trust. We believe a team's foundation is based on the strength of the duos within it."
I loved the IDEO U course "From Superpowers to Great Teams" and the concept of dynamic duos it introduces. Once you have identified your own "superpowers" and before thinking assessing your team, a necessary step is to identify your duos, evaluate the strength of each bond - whether it is unbreakable, strong, weak or broken, identify patterns in each category, explore what triggers you and how your actions might trigger others, and finally, make a plan to strengthen your duos. I heartily recommend this course to everyone focused on building strong relationships and great teams.
From Superpowers to Great Teams, a course by IDEO U
So, you are committed to building great relationships at work. As a manager, what's your scale? And does it always need to be perfect?
Your Span of Control: Frequency Trumps Quality
"Your role as a team leader is the most important role in any company. And who your company chooses to make team leader is the most important decision it ever makes. You have by far the greatest influence on the distinctive local experience of your team.
If you study the best team leaders, you'll discover that many of them share a similarly frequent sense-making ritual - not with two thousand people, but with two. It's called a check-in, and in simple terms it's frequent, one-on-one conversation about near term future work between a team leader and a team member, during which they ask two simple questions: What are the priorities this week? How can I help?
How frequent? Every week. Check-ins can be short - ten to fifteen minutes - but that's plenty of time to do a little real-time learning and coaching.
(...) This leads us to one of the most important insights shared by the best team leaders: frequency trumps quality. It's less important that each check-in is perfectly executed than that it happens, every week. In the intelligence business, frequency is king.
(...) By pinpointing the weekly check-in as the single most powerful ritual of the world's best team leaders, we can now know the exact span of control that's right for every single team leader: it's the number of people that YOU, and only you can check in every week. It isn't a theoretical, one-size-fits-all thing. It's practical, function-of-team-leader's-capacity-to-give-attention thing. You span of control is your span of attention."
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall, "Nine Lies About Work"
And finally, what about the business? Should scale be our first priority or ultimate goal?
Handcrafted
"If you want your company to truly scale, you have to do things that DON'T scale. Handcraft the core experience. Serve your customers one by one. And don't stop until you know exactly what they want."
Brian Chesky on Masters of Scale With Reid Hoffman
What If Scale Wasn't the Goal?
"From restaurants to direct mail, there's pressure to be scalable, to be efficient, to create something easily replicated.
Which is often used as the reason it's not very good. "Well, we'd like to spend more time/more care/more focus on this, but we need to get bigger."
What if you started in the other direction?
What would happen if you created something noteworthy and worried about scale only after you've figured out how to make a difference?"
As usual, we are wrapping up with a nice song.