Author: alearningaday

One of the truths about the markets is that when the Federal Reserve Bank has to come out and say “everything is okay,” it probably isn’t.

When a CEO has to make a statement during a difficult time saying something isn’t a problem, it often is.

And when a football manager comes out to say they’re fully behind a player or when a board member says they’re fully behind a manager, it is a sign of trouble in the background.

Beware public endorsements that attempt to showcase trust. When things are going good, they’re not necessary. By the time they show up, they’re often a desperate attempt at arresting the slide.

One of my favorite excerpts about culture in Will Guidara’s “Unreasonable Hospitality” was about the unique language they used in Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group.

“Constant, gentle pressure” was Danny’s version of the Japanese phrase kaizen, the idea that everyone in the organization should always be improving, getting a little better all the time.

“Athletic hospitality” meant always looking for a win, whether you were playing offense (making a great experience even better) or defense (apologizing for and fixing an error).

“Be the swan” reminded everyone that all the guest should see was a gracefully curved neck and meticulous white feathers sailing across the pond’s surface – not the webbed feet, churning furiously below, driving the glide.

“Make the charitable assumption” was a reminder to assume the best of people, even when (or perhaps especially when) they weren’t behaving particularly well.

The simplest way to describe culture is the phrase “this is how we do things here.” And all these phrases made it easy for everyone at USHG to understand that how.

Language creates culture.

WordPress sent me an email as part of a new email campaign this week – “April Site Stats.” As soon as I got the email, I went straight to the bottom of the email and clicked unsubscribe.

The WordPress team does emails well – they are thoughtful about their campaigns and use nice designs and good copy. And this campaign is a smart idea – give people stats and they’ll typically focus on how they can optimize them.

However, in my case, this is exactly what I don’t want to do.

I’m approaching 15 years of daily notes on this blog. And the only periods when I had a decidedly negative experience writing were during 3 short bursts when I attempted to optimize reach. The last of these was over 7 years ago and I have no intention of reliving that phase.

Optimization of any kind brings trade-offs. Choose what you optimize carefully.

The single hardest kind of honesty is honesty to self.

It is much easier to see things as we want them to be instead of how they are.

Choosing to tell ourselves the truth – even when uncomfortable – instead of what we want to hear is an act of great courage.

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” | Marcus Aurelius

I was pondering this today – at what point does it become worse to worry about a worst case outcome vs. simply experiencing that outcome?

More often than not, better is faster in the long run.

Not always.

But more often than not.

In a world where information is just a click or scroll away, it is just as important to be clear about what we want to be stupid about as it is to be clear about what we want to be smart about.

Claire Hughes Johnson, in her book Scaling People, said something interesting about good managers “say the things you think you cannot say.”

It is a fascinating way to describe communication as a manager.

It got me thinking about a story from venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s post titled “Leading from the Heart.”

One of my favorite stories about this comes from a particularly difficult moment in my career where I had to transition a founder out of the company they started. It was the night before the all-hands where the CEO transition was going to be announced. I asked the founder if they were going to attend the all-hands and the founder said no. I then asked the founder what I should tell the team. The founder said, “tell them you fired me because that is what happened”.

The next day I stood up in front of the entire company and told the team the Board had asked the founder to leave the company they started and that the Board had asked a member of the team to step into the CEO role.

After the all-hands ended, there was a line of about twenty or thirty people long to talk to me. And every single one of them waited in line to tell me the same thing which was “thank you for telling us the truth.”

It was a powerful lesson for me. And like most of the lessons I’ve learned in business, I learned it from a founder and their team.

If you are struggling to build the level of trust you want with the team in your company, try a little more transparency, vulnerability, and honesty in your communication style. It will pay dividends.

As a recipient of many messages from leadership over the years, I’ve learnt that I prefer the truth. Plain and simple. No dressing required.

It is often there to see anyway. The camouflage just gets frustrating after a point.

It is why Claire’s idea and Fred’s story resonate deeply with me. I love the idea of saying things that people don’t normally say. And I think Fred is spot on about communicating with more transparency, vulnerability, and honesty.

It doesn’t mean it always works. There are many instances when it has backfired for me.

But, in the long run, I think it creates better cultures and higher trust environments. And that makes the juice worth the squeeze.

I’ll start the week tomorrow morning with a priority list for the week. But it is highly unlikely that the priorities in the list will survive the week. I think of this as the tension between deliberate priorities and emergent priorities.

Emergent priorities are priorities that show up because of some new stimulus in the system. New information came up, something broke, someone decided to do something different, and so on.

There are 2 challenges with emergent priorities –

(1) It is tempting to resist them. That’s futile. Circumstances change. It is best to accept this reality and move on.

(2) It is equally tempting to just throw away our deliberate priorities and deal with the emergent priorities instead. That extreme also is rarely the right answer. Some emergent priorities do demand our attention. Others require a bit of attention to better understand the problem so they can find their spot on the list or perhaps be ignored entirely.

The key with dealing with emergent priorities as we plan for our weeks is to know that they’ll show up. And when they show up, our first reaction will often be one of frustration.

That knowledge helps us welcome them with equanimity and deal with them.

In the final analysis, that’s all we can hope to do. Keep calm and keep plugging away.

If enough people use a system, they’ll find a way to exploit it.

Therein lies the challenge for a system designer. As a system scales, you’ll have to keep modifying your system to account for incentives instead of relying on good intent.

Incentives eat intent for breakfast.