Once more with feeling

Photo by Pixabay.

Before it was cool to hate OKRs, it was cool to love them. And before EOS, we had MBOs. And before rocks, there were OPSPs. Are you loving NCTs? That's great for you.

The thing we've said all along is that a framework is not a panacea. You can use whatever goals system you like. Truly. But if those goals don't show up in the day-to-day decision-making of your team, they don't matter. And, as Molly notes, if you set goals but never talk about them again, they aren't real.

Last week, our team had a quarterly work week. This is a tradition we first learned at Mozilla though we've adapted it over time. The original version was about giving far-flung teams an opportunity to come together. And that's useful all on its own. But a quarterly cadence maps beautifully to other parts of the business. So over the years, we changed how we do them.

Our work weeks now include a day when we come into the office and do a top-to-bottom review of the business. That means we run through OKRs, financials, pipeline, CSR commitments, and all major strategic initiatives. It is a chewy day.

But it's also really important. You want alignment? You want a sense of urgency? You want goals that everyone believes in? Well, this is part of how you get those things.

The evening before the full business review, we were at home talking about how the next day would go. Q1 was a weird quarter. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a lying liar who lies. Weird because we work with startups, sure. That's definitely part of it. But also weird because it was energetically all over the place. Big wins, big setbacks, often in the same day, sometimes in the same hour.

How do you stare at a spreadsheet and capture all of the past quarter? If the numbers look good, does that negate the struggle that got us to that spot? And if the numbers look bad, is there any room to acknowledge the flock of black swans in the corner? And how do we get to an accurate and comprehensive picture when we all work on different parts of the business?

Before, not over

Feelings before numbers.

Wait, what?

Stop the screen share. Before we get into the dashboards and reporting, we should go around and talk about how this quarter felt.

So we did. We each took a moment to talk about how the quarter felt. A qualitative interlude before we dove into the quantitative. Co-founders spoke last.

The exercise forced us to put words to "energetically all over the place." To get crisp about, and name, the wins. So that they didn't get lost in the setbacks. And, importantly, to face our setbacks so we could learn from them and adapt our plans.

Feelings before numbers. Not because the numbers aren't important. But because there's incredibly important data hiding in the feels.

Microdosing clarity

If you're a huggybear manager you maybe just leaned into the screen a little bit, and got ready to forward this to your team. And if you're a person generally skeptical of huggybear bullshit at work, you might be narrowing your eyes right now. Trying to decide whether to archive this newsletter away.

We get it. Feelings at work. It's a polarizing topic. But to be clear — both for the bosses who love sharing circles, and the ones who think the only circles that belong at work are OODA loops — we're doing something specific here.

Asking someone how they feel about a quarter's worth of work does two things that numbers on their own can't. First, it activates their intuition, instead of their analysis. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman calls this System 1. That intuition is full of biases and rational faults — it shouldn't be your only input. But it is just killer effective at spotting patterns and trends, and identifying the risks that don't have a number to attach themselves to, yet.

The second thing that happens when you ask someone how they feel is that you prompt reflection. That little interior moment you have when someone asks you how you feel and you stop and think, "Well, how do I feel?" That's important work happening, there. Rummaging through memories of the last few months to see if there's something coherent to say about all of it, or not, is a little microdose of synthesis and clarity.

And when you have a team talking about their varied responses to that question, you get some very important signal.

A raw signal, if you will

The most immediate win that comes from any team opening a review this way is that we learn whether we're on the same page or not. Six people feeling clear and calm about how the quarter went is a story. Four people feeling clear and calm, while the other two feel worried and underwater, is a different one. And the numbers won't necessarily tell you which story we're reading.

To make this work, you may need to design against groupthink. In many workplaces junior folks will quickly, even subconsciously, realign themselves to what more senior people are saying. You can answer in reverse order of seniority, or tenure, or by whose birthday is next, just to shuffle it up. Or you may have a team who can all talk about their feelings openly without any of those shenanigans. If so, gold star for you, that's a great spot to be!

Either way, the general N-way calibration and alignment you get by asking this question is good all on its own. But as a boss, you also get a specific kind of signal, of the form: does my team see the business the way I do? And if not, what does that mean? Especially when we can all see the same numbers.

There's this famous old story about when Lou Gerstner came in as CEO at IBM in the 90s. Every VP waited for their turn to walk Lou through the state of their division. And as each one would come in, they would set up to run through their 120-slide deck. And Lou would say, "Lose the fucking deck. Tell me about your business." And some of them could, and some of them couldn't. And that was illuminating. Proctor and Gamble has a similar story about A.G. Lafley.

It's not that the details don't matter. We love a good structured, analytical, System 2-ish review of your goals. They're vital conversations to have, and we have plenty of them ourselves. But if Lou had let those executives jump right into their slideshow, well. You can hide a lot of misalignment in 120 slides.

It's early April, which means the first quarterly review for a lot of teams. If you haven't done yours yet, now's your chance. How does your team feel about Q1? And how do you know? And if there isn't a clear space for those feelings to show up, independent of the numbers, where will you make one?

Once more. Feelings before numbers. Not because the numbers aren't important. But because there's incredibly important data hiding in the feels.

- Melissa and Johnathan