My Management Lessons from Google, Apple, Dropbox, Twitter and Square
firstround.com
firstround.com
However, my takeaway (what I learned) was the graph at the bottom. Ask hard question if someone ranks as mediocre for 8 quarters.
This is counter-intuitive, as most people are, by mathematical necessity, average within a standard deviation or two. Thus, shouldn't we expect our talent curves to be a bell curve?
But, mediocre to me might not be mediocre to you. If I have someone with enormous attention to detail but this position need a high degree of creativity and experimentation, that person might perform as mediocre. But you may have a position that needs that attention to detail. We can both shuffle our directs and change our team ratings from 3(out of 5) each, to 4 or more (where 4 is better).
I don't know how much I buy it, yet, but it is at least important to think about. To be clear, I don't buy into every company stating "we only hire rock stars" - we know that is statistically impossible, and so that gives me pause in regards to this advice.
Let's face it; it is a big risk these days to let somebody go that is performing okay, in the hopes of finding a great hire. Right now on the front page we have this article advocating letting people go, and another article warning how difficult it is to find and hire people. There is a bit of dissonance between the two, I find.
A lot depends on the company. Are you a Whatsapp with 55 engineers and $19 billion in market capital? Or are you Accenture, with $300k (give or take) in market cap per employee? Each has a very different take on the value per employee, what they pay them, and where on the superstar versus superteam spectrum they are.
Overall a very good article. There are managers who clearly don't give a damn. They have to be Steve Jobs superstars to keep their people. On the flip side, you have to produce success to keep a team moving. I've had to replace managers who were well loved, but had angry clients due to a lack of results by their teams.
This is the point of the upper left quadrant. If you feel like the person is good but in the wrong place then you look at yourself. Is your management style not working for them? Do they need to be in a different position?
One thing I do disagree with is this: "A lot of management training ties you in knots trying to say things just right. Just let it go. Just say it." Some people are either naturally better, or more experienced at communicating in a way that connects and motivates people. Others (like myself) need to really parse what we say before we say it.
There's something to be said for read, fire, aim rather than ready, aim, fire. You can only aim if you have a good perspective on the issue, which you probably don't if you lack expertise.
Bad news upfront.
As someone who spends all my time thinking about decision-making group dynamics, I thought this excerpt was totally spot-on:
---------- The Big Decision Meeting. Scott created this after recognizing all the angst around her staff meetings. Everyone wanted to be included because they felt like big decisions were getting made there, but this was hardly ever the case. “Make fewer decisions in your staff meeting and create a second meeting explicitly to deal with important decisions,” she says. “Delegate these decisions to people who are closer to the information.”
Consider using your staff meeting to set the agenda for the big decision meeting. Identify the three most important decisions that need to get made that week, and who should make those decisions. Who is closest to the work involved? “This is how you push decision-making into the facts,” she says.
Citing James March’s book A Primer on Decision Making, she recommends that managers exclude themselves from big decisions as much as possible. “Somehow people’s egos get invested in making decisions,” Scott says. “If they get left out, they feel almost a loss of personhood. So you get ego-based decisions instead of fact-based decisions. The more you push yourself and your managers out of the process, the better your decisions will be.”
Most of all, don’t let decisions get pushed up. “A lot of times you see decisions get kicked up to the more senior level, and so they get made by people who happen to be sitting around a certain table, not the people who know the facts. Don’t let this happen.”
Really?
I think it's not true and is a common misconception in the engineering-business relationship. It's always good to ask, but don't assume too much. They may want a promotion, just not in a job title kind of sense.