Photo by Felix Mittermeier.
This morning we went to an epic meeting. One of those meetings where you’re not sure you are going to actually attend but then you do and are so happy you did.
It was the monthly tenants meeting for the historic district where we work. Most of the other tenants in the district are retail. The meeting usually happens in the evenings. But then this month, they switched it to be a morning meeting. We’ve been wanting to attend one since we moved into our office in 2018.
“I wonder how this will go,” I mused as we left the office. Our shared guess as we walked over was: “probably not well.” We under-calibrated. A lot.
The first 90% of the meeting was pleasant enough. It was a recap of recent marketing efforts to drive interest to the retail district. Some of them had worked pretty well. Some hadn’t worked as expected. And the guy presenting acknowledged that there was (of course) more to do. I leaned over and whispered “this would never pass in a board meeting with investors.”
But the people attending the meeting weren’t a board. They are tenants. The guy presenting works for the landlords. So maybe the rules here are different? Maybe they’re buying it?
It turns out, no. They were not buying it.
The presentation ends, we get to Q&A, and the room erupts. The tenants take turns asking questions that could have been anticipated. The presenter has no answers. He’s getting paler. And fumbling. And the resolve in the room is growing. He’s lost them.
We have to get back to the office so we duck out as a few other folks are leaving.
“Is it always like that?” we ask. They smile. Yes. It’s always like that.
The guy who was presenting is gonna go home and talk about how much he hates those meetings. How unfair the tenants are. How they have it out for him. I’m sure of it.
The tenants are going to go home and talk about how incompetent the district management is. How aloof they are. How they don’t understand the needs of retail businesses. I’m sure of it.
And that’s how we end up with a meeting that’s always like that.
Two take-aways for my boss people.
One: if you are going into a high stakes meeting, spend time anticipating the questions people might have. This is an empathy moment. It’s hard, but it’s important. Anticipate their questions, and then build the answers into your deck. Don’t make people wade through 40 minutes of deck before getting to the stuff they care about.
Two: If you’ve created a Groundhog Day of a meeting where it’s always a disaster and you keep hoping it’ll be different but it never is…who are you waiting for? If you lead the meeting, it’s on you to fix it. Doing the same thing and praying for different results is unlikely to work. Get clear on what success would look like, and start taking steps to make it great.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
Don’t Demonize Employees Who Raise Problems
Every boss feels like they should say they agree with this piece from Harvard Business Review. The title is a riff on “don’t shoot the messenger.” Most of us can all remember a time when we had to deliver bad news to our own boss. And it’s not too hard to figure out that leaders who make it impossible to deliver disappointing news end up in the dark about a bunch of things.
But at the same time, there’s a lot of pressure to be happy at work. There’s a whole cottage industry about happiness at work. And an endless slew of thought pieces about the laws of attraction. If you believe it can happen, it will happen. If you build it, they will come. And if you don’t believe it, well, you’re being a real drag. Or worse, if you see danger and flag it, now you’ve attracted it to us. One mention of icebergs, and Leo, well, now look what you did.
The tension in the modern workforce – both for staff and for bosses – is real. You need to toe the party line. You need to cheerlead and champion. But you also need to keep an eye on gaps so you can address them.
In my early management days, I struggled with this. On the one hand, I wanted mine to be a team where people could raise issues. On the other, I wanted people to feel empowered and accountable to bring solutions/ideas. too. But the way you create the conditions for people to bring you problems is the same way you create the conditions for them to bring you solutions.
After articulating the tension, the author describes how to reframe and respond to criticism and dissent in the workplace. All while keeping it constructive.
Part of what she’s describing are concrete steps to help to build psychological safety within your org. We’ve talked about it before – psychological safety doesn’t mean no one ever tells me no. It is not about managing snowflakes. And it doesn’t mean I don’t get feedback on things. Quite the opposite. In a psychologically safe environment, I feel comfortable raising issues. Without fear of judgement.
From Google’s Project Oxygen research on high performing teams:
In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.
There’s a bunch of good prompts sprinkled throughout the piece. One that caught my eye was: Do management/key status reports explicitly name open issues that could significantly affect the future of the business?
I’ve worked in orgs where we could tackle issues head-on. And I’ve worked places where I felt pressure to deliver the shiniest version of things possible. It is only from a place of being able to talk about things that we can improve. That doesn’t mean your people are attracting icebergs. It means they are actively working to spot them and then steer the ship away from them.
What Johnathan’s reading
The folks at Kickstarter did the thing:
Kickstarter employees win historic union election
About a year ago, just as Kickstarter employees were starting to organize, we wrote about the growing union movement we saw in tech. We said that we definitely saw a movement forming, but that we weren’t yet convinced we’d see mass unionizing per se in tech. I’ve thought about that newsletter a lot since then. About which parts we got right and which parts we got wrong.
On the one hand, there’s some stuff we got right. The spread has not happened nearly as quickly as people were talking about, back then. Kickstarter unionized, that’s true. But that same day, the nytimes was writing about how the organizers of the watershed Google walkout were being quietly fired one by one. Tech, big tech in general, clearly does not plan to go gently.
And yet. There’s stuff we got wrong, too. For my part, I focused too narrowly on the economic drivers of unionizing. I still believe that most tech workers aren’t going to sign a union card on the promise of higher wages. But they are signing them on the promise of equitable wages. They’re signing them for more say about who a company does business with. They’re signing them for better processes to deal with toxicity and harassment in their workplaces.
And it’s working. And I love that. Those are wins we should all celebrate.
These days Kickstarter’s CEO sounds magnanimous in quotes about the union vote. But a few months ago he was saying this:
“The union framework is inherently adversarial. That dynamic doesn’t reflect who we are as a company, how we interact, how we make decisions, or where we need to go. We believe that in many ways it would set us back, and that the us vs. them binary already has.”
There’s a lot of you who read this newsletter these days. Most of you are bosses, or aspiring bosses. And some of you might read a statement like that and agree with a lot of it. You might have worked in union shops in the past that were adversarial. And you might be carrying that expectation forward. I know I did.
But look around. Look at the state of work in 2020. A lot of assumptions about work, and how it works, are changing very swiftly. And I guess what I want to say to you is this: it’s worth a think about which stuff you’re getting right and which stuff you’re getting wrong.
