The cure for a structurally overwhelmed team is a better structure. It's clarity about what matters most, and permission to hand off or put down the work that doesn't.
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We tell bosses that if they choose management as a career, every aspect of the human condition will at some point show up for someone they manage.
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Either, we're running as fast as we can toward clear targets. Or we're running as fast as we can without clear targets.
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You can't live in hypervigilance. Well, let's rephrase that. You can, it's possible. But it's unpleasant to be around someone who has stayed in that state for too long.
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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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If you start from the assumption that you need to make your team happy – that happiness is an input to work that you need to maximize – you reach for one set of tools. Tools that reduce stress, remove discomfort, avoid conflict. And maybe at a birthday party, or a summer camp, those would be appropriate.
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The massive competition for talent has every HR and Talent leader running after the same ball. And the visual effect, from up here on the hill, looks a lot like Bunch Ball.
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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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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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We hear from managers who want strategies for dealing with the burnt out folks on their teams. Doing the equivalent of the trolley problem every time a new project pops up. How do you give someone new work even as they're drowning under the existing work?
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Right now, every company is trying to figure out their return-to-office, fully-remote, or hybrid strategy. And while those approaches have implications for the people working there today, nowhere is the conversation hotter than around what it means for prospective hires.
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Look around. Where are you running an outdated plan? Do the priorities your team has right now make sense, right now? Does the composition of your team still make sense? Does your job description? Does your company?
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There's a grand re-integration coming. As the normalcy of exterior life returns it's gonna let us focus on what a mess we've made of the place, internally.
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Fully remote, fully in person, or a mix of the two. This is the question that will dominate the rest of this year and into the next. The extremes are the easiest to navigate.
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