We have been to a lot of corporate all-hands, gatherings, conferences, and un-conferences. Some of them have been incredibly well-run. Some of them have been a rolling shit-show. But holy shit what if you did this?
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There is some design work to do if we want to build new connections, and rebuild the ones we miss.
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The solution is to acknowledge and process the change. To integrate it and come back to something newly coherent. And the way you do that is reflection.
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This Quiet Quitting thing may be the topic du jour, but it's not universal. There are people out there doing engaged, enthusiastic work. There are organizations shining bright and without burning out. If you're sweating it, worried that it's happening with your team, here's our advice.
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Threats. Dismissiveness. Burnout. Micromanagement. Yelling. Every bad boss behaviour is going to come out of the woodwork in the next few months.
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One of us has COVID and so far, thanks in large part to the basement (and boosters! and masking! and updated rapid test procedures!), no one else in the house does.
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Faced with that blandness, a lot of leaders are pushing back-to-office plans. They have nostalgia for the flavour of a packed and humming office, and feel like if people would just get back in there, it would fix things.
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If we're right about this prediction, the amount of energy coming at you is going to be intense. The question to ask is: do you have somewhere for that energy to go?
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Resignations. Competitive talent markets. The structure of the org chart. All of these things can feel bigger than you, as an individual leader trying to get things done in your organization. We get that. But be skeptical of any advice that takes them as fixed.
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Assumptions and predictions are two tools to get at the same thing. Both try to crystallize how you think about the world today, in case it changes. But writing down an assumption is passive, it's descriptive. Making a prediction is active.
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People send us the links in part because, haha, you build better bosses. Here's the literal CEO of Better and seems like he could have used some management training. Hardy har har. But some of them also want to know, "Is this normal?" And if so, how often does this happen? And why?
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We know that rest is transformative. We can point to periods of downtime in our lives as the places when we got to clarity. Where we had space. Space to breathe, and to take stock.
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Every organization has costs, but there’s a lot of power in how they’re labelled. The labels people use bake in assumptions about whether those costs are internal or external. They tell you who we think should pay those costs.
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Demand for management tips and tricks is at an all-time high. People looking for any balm that can soothe the dry, chaffed state of leading a team in 2021. And while there are absolutely tips and tricks and techniques that can help, the first one is the most important. And none of the tools work until you let this one in. Here it is. You can't fight math.
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We're in the midst of a massive renegotiation of the rules of work. And the central focus of that negotiation isn't back to office plans, or international salary parity, or vaccine mandates. It's power.
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Today, our second book comes out. It's an ender chest. It is a full year of these newsletters, from the first lockdown to the anniversary of those lockdowns. It is a place to put down some of what the past 18 months have felt like.
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There's an adage in business that any decision is better than no decision. Because even if you're wrong, you can always make a different decision further down the road.
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Can we get to a place where we start to reimagine the thing? Whatever the thing is that you miss, you can reinvent it without starting from zero. Pay attention to the ache of the thing that's missing. What was important about it?
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We told leaders to be empathetic. We told them to be understanding. And they are doing that. They are phenomenal about understanding the conditions for underperformance in their teams. But it's not working...
They are patient to a fault.
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Now's a bad time to lean on your employee's sense of loyalty, but a good time to lean on their sense of possibility. New opportunity, high-quality networking, exposure to different ideas. That's what people in a liminal space can actually engage with.
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