Part of the reason there is so much interpersonal conflict in the workplace is because conversations quickly move from debating decisions to debating if one or the other person is right or wrong. The personification of an objective decision makes it unnecessarily subjective.

The good news is that it is easy to detect when this is happening. Usually you can see the tensions rise, and you might even see this in your own distinct physiological response (eg. heart rate rising, sweating, etc). Noticing this trigger can be empowering because you can predictably interrupt the conversation before it becomes toxic to ask — “what is the principle we will use to make this decision?”

This has worked pretty reliably in most situations for me for the past few years, and it occurred to me that I’ve offered it as a technique at least a dozen times this past year in 1:1 mentorship relationships as it seems to be a common occurrence and theme across most organizations.

1. Pick a domain that intrinsically motivates you to be proactive and driven
2. Align your own goals with making your manager successful

Products that compete for the same consumer demand go through periods of natural divergence (differentiation) and convergence (modularity) of solutions in the market.

During incubation, competing products pick unique attributes to compete on with the hope of resonating with specific groups of users that can start a new demand cycle. However, as innovation slows, for products to remain relevant they must offer more parity so they continue appealing to existing users evaluating other solutions based on other attributes. At this point, solutions in the market start to look a lot like each other, and the one that achieves more economies of scale and still sustains a higher profit margin dries out competitors to becomes the most popular commodity. Being largely modular at this point, demand from competitors shifts to this product at a more compelling price point.

Savvier incumbents who anticipate being disrupted will partner proactively to retain top-of-funnel demand, so they continue maintaining a relationship with their users. This is what’s happening with Waymo offering a modular solution on Uber’s marketplace after having already disrupted Uber’s own autonomous vehicle division.

Policies are created for fairness and to prevent people from taking advantage of the company’s trust in them. What they are explicitly not designed to do is prevent sensible utilization of resources that the policy might seemingly disallow. This is why any good manager will approve exceptions to the policy-principle when you can clearly articulate the supplementary principle that warrants it.

Managers that tend to enforce policy without exception, only do so because they either do not understand the principles governing the policy (to understand where the policy helps and where it is likely to repeatedly fail to benefit teams it applies to) or feel a limited sense of autonomy. Of course another common failure state occurs within the multilayered dysfunctional org where the different layers between policy makers and policy enforcers can’t state the principles consistently.

We say yes to doing more in the future (including pushing what we’re already subscribed to), based on believing our own lie that there will somehow be more time available to us than the present; the reality is that the future becomes present quickly and time available remains constant; you can only fit in as many tasks then as you might reasonably be able to today. We say yes to doing these things not because we want to, but because it sounds nice to us and those we’re making these commitments to, and because it’s far easier than saying no—which is what we should really be doing, to make the space for what is truly important, today.

People often prioritize themselves when they assume the rewards are zero-sum. This is generally a mistake. If you’re an individual, you might try to hoard impact so only you can have it, but it is quite likely it takes four times as long to achieve when compared to working with just one additional person. Similarly, if you are a leader, you might try to build the largest team to demonstrate your ability to lead at scale, but take twice as long to achieve your goals because to get scale you traded off pace by incurring significant costs from coordination.

This myopic view is usually a defensive play after having witnessed a recent adverse event. For example: a peer advancing enough to feel like they may not be peers any more, someone taking credit for work that wasn’t theirs and benefiting from all the finite rewards, etc.

Even if these events are true (in many cases, we tell ourselves stories that are believable but untrue), I would resist the temptation to prioritize what is in one’s own interest and at the cost of the team or company. There are far more benefits to helping everyone you work with succeed: where you might normally have tried to keep a bigger slice of an existing pie for yourself, what if you instead made the pie bigger for everyone? Isn’t it more like that your slice of this bigger pie is already much bigger?

This is the general idea of Ship, Shipmates, Self, and it extends far beyond the navy. If you prioritize what is good for the ship, first and foremost, and then what might be good for your shipmates, it is likely your journey will yield you more benefit and fulfillment than if you only tried to prioritize yourself. This is hard to see in everyday metrics, but felt more easily on a longer time horizon. Paraphrasing @drgurner: A world that is generally focused about feeling good short-term creates exceptional rewards for the few that relentlessly pursue greatness long-term.

Seeing a colleague at Stripe set them up as their own background recently, I was reminded of the beautiful posters that Facebook teams plastered in gorgeous type on the physical walls in offices around the world. From Menlo Park to Mumbai, each of them offered visceral reminders of specific ideas that drove individuals on each team and how they wanted to show up every day as individuals and as a team. Whether it be choosing action over the alternative, to taking ownership of any of the company’s problems as one’s own (and doubly so if one’s own team might benefit from it), or blaming and fixing systems rather than point fingers on people; each statement and provocation was handcrafted by individuals that cared enough to walk in to the Analog Laboratory to print the start of a new conversation they wanted the company to have. Some more powerful then others, some gaining enough engagement and popularity to find themselves on everyone’s walls — a physical reincarnation of the original Facebook wall.

Now as I am trying to nurture culture with my team, I’m trying to put up my own metaphorical posters. What I’m finding is that physical walls make a much better surface for these than the virtual ones I now frequent.

Stumbled upon this goldmine index of exec coaching 101 tutorials this year, which I’ve found is a great input if you manage a team of any size.

I say input because, as with any advice, you should feel free to take it or leave it, or better still tweak it to fit your situation. The mistake I’ve sometimes made earlier in my career is to think of compelling playbooks as recipes that deliver sureshot results.

In any bottoms-up organization, it’s common to see an escalation as a failure state: an inability for individual team members to come to a consensus on their view of which direction to pursue, despite having seemingly complete agency on their execution. Usually, this feeling is a function of cognitive disonnance that emerges from having to reconcile opposing ideas from multiple parties because they want to maintain their agency, even though they might be missing necessary inputs that can only be provided elsewhere (and usually at a higher leadership vantage point). The solution is of course to escalate sooner when different individuals, disciplines or teams disagree with the approach, rather than wait for the inputs you need to magically appear.

But even for teams that recognize the value of escalations done well, the term carries the connotation of unnecessary physical and emotional overhead, which often makes it a tool employes as a last resort. This is usually because one or both of two things happening:

1. Teams that need to escalate do so with incomplete and incoherent inputs.
2. Leaders that need to drive decisions do so through debate rather than dialectic.

Via Brené Brown:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.” —Viktor Frankl*

This tweet from Mark Brooks came up on my timeline, quoting his own tweet from a while back:

Managers often respond to bad behavior by one employee by implementing policy that addresses the behavior rather than dealing with the employee.

Don’t hamstring good people with policies designed for bad people. Deal with the actual problem.

I agree with this wholeheartedly, with the nuance that ‘bad’ could be anywhere between pushing the subjective boundaries of “fiscally responsible” to doing things without integrity. For the latter, no policy will be enough. But for the former, as with any growing organization, it may be the case that ideals in behavior that may have been understood implicitly at 500 people, may have to be laid out as explicit guidelines at 10000 people. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

In a recent conversation about my observation about political correctness not being all bad, someone quipped about the reason the term got a bad name:

The problem is that there are very few people who are both politically correct and intellectually honest.

This is a simple explanation stated confidently so that anyone would believe it—but also one that didn’t feel like it encompassed a universal truth. So I tried to add a bit more nuance to the theory: Even while I don’t believe it, let’s assume the cynical statement “there are very few people who are both politically correct and intellectually honest” is true. I think it is likely that the number of people that are politically correct and intellectually dishonest is also very small. Intuitively, it would follow that the number of people who are intellectually honest but not politically correct is much bigger. Then, if the majority are intellectually honest, isn’t it possible that a vocal minority is creating the biased connotation for the term?

Two seemingly competing ideas that are helpful for most people to try to reconcile as complementary:

• You don’t need anyone else’s permission to live the life you want.
• The only person you can unequivocally change is yourself.

It’s probably too hard to rid the term political correctness of its negative connotations—among other things, it is often conflated with being dishonest or having low integrity, which in my opinion is a drastic generalization of a few bad examples—but I do wish we can somehow preserve one aspect about it: that you can simultaneously deliver hard feedback and articulate it in terms that would make a person other than yourself want to hear it.

As we often say to define cultures of kindness: to be kind is to say things respectfully but directly to help someone else grow. To be nice is to just say things another person wants to hear even if it is different from reality and is going to hold them back.

Conviction is your ability to draw a line in the sand and not falter from the side you choose to stand on, unless you receive substantial new information that makes it pragmatic to revisit your position.

Neither Samiksha nor I had (and still haven’t) watched Top Gun, so we decided to skip watching Maverick in the theater and wait till it became available to stream. While we’d planned to binge watch both movies in quick succession, when we saw Maverick became available to buy, we jumped right in! Whereas we expected to be left trying to fill in the blanks, the movie was really written to feel good standalone. After watching it the first time with a few interruptions and over two days (umm don’t judge. post-baby life requires prioritizing meal time, soothing and diaper changes!), then a second time with a few guests over one sitting (this still didn’t feel uninterruped), we watched it a third time just the two of us and…it was glorious!

This might be my favorite movie from the past few years, but certainly in 2022 (still pending on watchlist: Wakanda Forever). Probably going to watch it a fourth time in the next few weeks. So good.

Somehow missed this gem of a film in 2018, which I stumbled upon in Tony Fadell’s new book Build, which talks about the value and simultaneous risk of idealism, and the ability for our failures to be the start of something bigger.

Everyday we posit absolutes we believe with utmost certainty, and just like we do for any quips that pique our curiosity, we grant them overreaching engagement that they neither deserve nor ask for, to make them part of our collective attention: pondering over them, internalizing them, repeating them and making them our own. Up and until time inevitably teaches us that there are in fact no absolutes.

In prioritizing tasks, appreciate that not all tasks are made equal. Articulate the parameters you understand (eg. project size, complexity), but also discuss those that you don’t (eg. strategy, skill needed, etc) so your team can converge on a shared view that separates what is truly important from that which is simply urgent.

The framework I use is typically a table with rows enumerating projects/tasks and columns with confidence levels for execution, strategy, org alignment and market conditions. A high-leverage task is one where you have high confidence on most columns. A low-impact task is one where you have low to medium confidence on two or more dimensions. When something stands out as low-impact but shouldn’t be, you’re able to escalate and have the right conversations to change dimensions that were off-balance. Parameterizing your tasks and writing down your assumptions about them help everyone get on the same page faster, and ensure you aren’t accidentally prioritizing overhead.

Avoid extrinsically motivated changes to your life, and build an internal compass that is unwavering and principled.

This is a statement I’ve internalized and tried to live by the past few years to yield a lot more personal satisfaction. I realized that the easiest way for what I’m doing to feel dissonant with my values is using what others want as my personal yardstick. This has happened innocently and unbeknownst to me when acting on the suggestions of friends, family or coworkers or following their footsteps without sufficient introspection.

The culprit was and remains asking a flavor of the question “what do you think I should do?” and to do as they tell me, to belong with and feel validated by them. Whereas gathering what others think is useful as mutual knowledge to operate on, I’ve learned to counteract the instinct to treat it as a benchmark; instead I explore if there might be any upside beyond status quo as there so often is. It becomes much more fulfilling to work from a different vantage point and to strive for a higher order goal.

Anyone in a creative field that has high standards of craft, likely has an indelible urge to refine what they’re working on to perfection, even when their idea is simply a seedling and in its very early stages. While this urge is the strength that helps them make some of the nicest things ever to exist on this planet, it can also be a curse because that delays getting started.

Andy Matuschak describes a trick to turn off your editing brain:

One thing I really like about audio notes is that they remove my editing instincts. If I’m trying to write something even here, not on a walk and I’m struggling to figure out how to say what I’m intending, then I will often start dictation on my computer and then turn away from my computer, and walk out here with an AirPod in my ear and just walk in big circles. And I’ll come back and a thousand words of texts will have been generated, I will probably use none of them, but at this point I’m ready to sit down and start typing.

I do something similar and can attest that choosing a format which reduces your ability to edit is effective at helping you making progress when stuck. I personally use Google Docs audio transcription (as it auto-corrects based on context and understands my Indian accent much better than alternatives) or pen-on-paper, when I sense I have an urge to edit thoughts I have barely begun to formulate. This usually frees my mind enough to enumerate all the subject matter, even if in the form of largely disconnected blocks. The next round of writing is 70% faster, because I can draw from what I know is already pretty comprehensive.

There is only one rule to adhere to when re-organizing your team – design what your team(s) needs to look like to be successful, before deciding where specific people fit.

A remarkable number of leaders get this wrong by doing the reverse: elevating specific people first and designing the rest of the org around them. I understand why people might think this is a good idea: a reorg will inevitably create new focus areas, and investing first and foremost in the highest performers is an excellent retention lever. While this might be true, resist this urge at all costs. You might promote someone for exhibiting behaviors at the next level. Then separately, as a new opportunity opens up for someone at this level in your new organization design, this person might fit right in. But these should remain separate events. Thinking about both simultaneously creates all sorts of perverse incentives and bias, which often create blind spots that are at odds with diversity and inclusion.