Photo by Tomasz Filipek.
There’s a part of our early founding story that most folks don’t know. You may know that the second kid came a few months before the blog. And that the blog came before the book. And that the company showed up around the same time as the first amazon pre-orders.
What people don’t know is that before the book and before the company, there was New Years of 2017. Well, there was the week before New Years 2017. Let’s call it late December 2016. There was an evening where the house was quiet, just after the chaos of the holidays. We sat around talking about all the people who had been amazing at times when life felt less than amazing. The bosses and colleagues who had helped shape and steer and clear the way. And the random strangers who had touched our lives and maybe never knew.
By the end of the evening, we had over a hundred names. Of people who needed to hear that it mattered. However long it had been, we wanted them to head into 2017 knowing.
On Jan 1, we sent out one hundred messages. One hundred tiny shreds floated out into the universe. And over the next few weeks, an incredible thing happened. Some people wrote a quick note of thanks back. Some people sent long updates about the past decade and what they’d been doing. And some people didn’t write back at all.
But tucked in the experiment was a lesson that informs so much of our philosophy as entrepreneurs and parents and friends. You gotta plant a lot of seeds. More than you think you need. Because you have no idea which ones will grow.
Last week, I was picking up our little kid from school and she was holding one hand in a closed fist. I asked if she could open her hand to put her arm through her jacket sleeve. She said she found apple seeds and didn’t want to drop them. She wanted to plant them when we got home. Nevermind that the ground is frozen. She wanted to see if apple trees would grow. So I offered to hold them and she unfurled her tiny fist into my hand.
I looked down and found two popcorn kernels.
Oh, babe. These won’t grow apple trees. These aren’t apple seeds. They’re popcorn kernels.
Well, do you think we can grow popcorn trees?
Let’s see, kiddo. Let’s see.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
Harvard Business Review could have saved themselves some ink. Or pixels. The title of the article is How to Be Friends with Someone Who Works for You. And what follows is about 900 words of constructed anecdotes and hedging.
The hard part about the piece is that the headline is what every manager desperately wants to hear. They want it to be possible to be friends with their staff. They were friends before the promotion and they still want to hang out. Or they were friends before the job and they were the reason the person applied in the first place.
There’s so much that’s relatable. For most bosses, the struggle is not in the power hungry sociopathic version of things. It’s in the “I still wanna be one of the guys/gals/pals” version. I still wanna be cool. I still want to be liked.
One of the core realities of management is that you have power over other people. It’s an uncomfortable reality and it’s one that people try to avoid. But humans are very good at social hierarchy. I guarantee your people have figured out that you’re in a position of authority or power. And the least respectful thing in that moment is to pretend they’re not smart enough to notice.
From a place of accepting that the role means you have different responsibilities, you can then work out how you want to show up in that role. Everything from how approachable and friendly and social you want to be with your reports. To how you want to deliver hard feedback and show up in performance conversations.
But we start by getting right with being a boss. Letting into our heads that it’s a big job. That many people do it poorly. And that part of the way they often fail is by not taking it seriously.
There’s a two word version of the HBR article that is less appealing but a lot more honest.
You can’t.
What Johnathan’s reading
Late last week a twitter thread started bouncing around all my HR and management people:
“… It turns out the HR dept adopted screening software that asks a bunch of random questions that applicants must answer quickly, the results of which determine a suitability score. Only those deemed suitable are sent through to the department for interview…”
I know sometimes we link 10,000 word novellas but this one is really a pretty quick read. Long time readers will recognize this. We’re back into the land of management horoscopes.
ASIDE
Okay so in psychology there’s a whole sub-discipline around building tests for people. That’s psychometrics. And while it has a deeply problematic history (and present!) it is not 100% hokum. The psychometrics folks who are trying to do good work focus on two things: reliability and validity.
Reliability is “does the test give you the same score/put you in the same bucket every time”? Doesn’t say anything about whether the test is useful. Just “does it measure a thing consistently?” IQ tests tend to be pretty reliable. They’re inextricably tied racism, sure, but you’ll get similar scores over time unless something Medically Interesting happens to your brain. Myers Briggs tests are reasonably reliable, too. Then again, so are horoscopes. Same result every time.
Validity is “does the thing measured suit the purpose you’re using it for?” Basically, does it matter? And this is a kicker. You can get a very reliable number from an IQ test. But that doesn’t tell you anything about whether it’s a good idea to use it for credit scores, or scholarships, or employment offers. It could be a valid test for some of those things and not for others. Or maybe you should base things on my Myers Briggs type. Or my horoscope. Or my height. Having a point of view about why one of those is a better choice than another is having a point of view about validity.
OKAY BACK TO THE PLOT
I don’t know which product the company in this thread was using, or what methodology it’s based on, but I suspect it’s malarkey. I predict it has okayreliability, and very low validity. With good sales and marketing you could float a business like this for years, even with a snake oil product, because it’s very hard to hold accountable. If it lets in a bad candidate you can always blame the hiring manager. And if it filters out a great one, it takes a coincidence like the one in the thread to ever spot what could have been.
I’m sure it has a great dashboard that makes it look very valuable.
So here’s the thing. Pick your poison. Myers Briggs. Horoscopes. Enneagrams. “Which Harry Potter house are you?” quizzes. Over the years Melissa and I have done them all. And I would bundle them up in a bag and trade them all for an hour of individual conversation with a trained interviewer and a structured hiring process. Every time. I don’t think it’s valid to use them in hiring. I think it’s yet another thing we make candidates suffer through and I wish we’d all cut it out.
But. And it’s an important but. I don’t think they’re without value. I think it’s totally fair game to use them… on yourself. All of them. Any of them. Sometimes you take a test and it awakens something. Whether it’s scientific or not. It makes sense of something for you that didn’t make sense before. Or surprises you by telling you that you aren’t who you thought you were (Hufflepuff?!) And that can be a gift.
A tool that brings you some self-knowledge is a great thing, and by all means, take it in any form that works. Fill your boots. Tell your friends. Maybe they’ll have a similar awakening.
Just please, for the love of anything resembling a modern and respectful hiring process, do not make your candidates talk to the sorting hat.
