Photo by Bruno Cantuária.
Holy crap it’s 2020. We’re writing this on New Year’s Eve. Because we love you. And because we promised that today would be the newsletter where we reveal the new Betterboss venue. And because our 4 year old can’t really do cocktail parties yet. And because we’re introverts anyhow. But mostly because we love you.
We are going to keep this one short, though. There’s cava chilling in the fridge and an honest-to-god homemade christmas pudding coming up to temp. We have our own reflection and celebration to do. We hope, by the time you read this, you’ve had a chance to do some reflection and celebration of your own.
Before we get to celebrating, we wanted to talk about three things every boss needs to think about as they enter a new year. Wishes. Moments. And one weird trick that we can’t reveal until the end.
Wishes
Every year we hear from bosses who are struggling to set goals. We’ve talked about it before. We see leaders adopt goals frameworks and abandon them more than any other management tool. KPI dashboards. OKRs. OPSPs. Rocks. BHAGs. The conversations inevitably go,
“Yeah, we rolled out OKRs about a year ago. The first quarter was strong, but the second quarter less so. I think engineering still sort of does them, but I’m not sure anyone looks at them.”
We know this life because we’ve lived this life. And the advice out there for how to write better ones is almost universally awful. Use more action words. Only have one goal. Never have one goal. John Doerr says to measure what matters. But doesn’t Goodhart’s Law say that once you target the thing you measure, it stops mattering?
No wonder goals processes tend to be hateful.
Try this instead: wish. What is a wish you have for yourself, personally, this year? Just a wish. Like there was a genie (preferably a de-colonized one) here who could grant it. And then for work. For your team, or for your company or organization. Forget the action words – what do you wish were true? If it helps, say the words “I wish” out loud and then see what other words tumble out of your mouth.
What’s powerful about wishes is that there’s an important nugget in there. Your wishes might be short- or long-term. High- or low-probability. But if you don’t try to outsmart the exercise. If you genuinely just close your eyes and think about what you would wish for, you cut through the noise.
Try it. Open your notes app or your Raw Signal Group notebook. And just sit for a minute. It’s honestly a 5 minute exercise. 3 wishes for your life. 3 wishes for your work. Honest, not-too-clever-for-your-own-good wishes.
Then feed those into your favourite goals framework and watch how much more excited you get about the action words.
Moments
You’re about to get a freebie. And most bosses will miss this one. But it’s a mistake. How often in the course of managing and leading people do you feel like you get something without trying too hard? Basically never.
OK, so listen up. The freebie coming your way is happening tomorrow, or Monday. Depending when your team gets back into the office.
A lot of you are carrying things into the new year. An announcement you need to make. The roll out of a new process, or refreshed corporate values. Or just a sense that there are parts of how we operate that we’ve outgrown. One where can’t let go of the old thing, because it feels like a betrayal of the past, but we need to.
Humans are narrative creatures. If you need us to mark a change, turn a page, or work differently than we have before, attaching that shift to moment helps.
If you’re a boss with some of that on your shoulders: this is your moment.
Moments are everywhere, but a new year (a new decade! in some calendars!) is a particularly universal one. The first meetings you have when everyone’s back in the office are an opportunity to talk about new ideas. You can start conversations with, “Over the break I was thinking about..” or “This year I’d like us to try…”
Your people have these things on their shoulders, too. They need a moment that feels safe to express it, and suitably reflective to allow for change to happen. You can give that to them, before everyone’s back in the flow of the old way of doing things and a big change would be disruptive.
This is your moment. Don’t waste it.
One weird trick
Management is not a thing that anyone is born knowing how to do. I mean, it turns out that babies are pretty good at telling their parents what to do. But that hardly scales to the modern workplace and they tend to make disruptive coworkers.
Same is true for leadership. Though our youngest child did once try to lead other toddlers in a coup at preschool (long story). Toddler coups notwithstanding, when people talk about born leaders, this is often a stand in for bias. They generally mean people who look and sound like what society has conditioned them to expect leaders look and sound like.
“You’ve got it or you don’t” is an absurd leadership development mantra. This is lazy thinking for at least two reasons. The first is that it lets us off the hook when we fail to invest in new leaders. And when those leaders inevitably fall on their faces, well, hey, guess they were in the “you don’t” part of that mantra. The second is that we are way too quick to shut down people who would be great bosses if they were only given the chance. Just because they don’t line up to our mental model for what the “you’ve got it” part looks like.
So much of the work we do is about eradicating “you’ve got it or you don’t” from the face of the earth as it relates to managing and leading teams. The one weird trick that will make you a better boss than any “natural leader” is knowing the truth: You can learn this stuff. People on your team can learn this stuff. We can all get better.
To that end, two things before we go pop that cava…
Betterboss is happening March 2-4, 2020 and you should come. Or you should send the people on your team who need a chance to be great.
Oh and the venue? We already told you there’d be natural light and high ceilings but we’ve been sitting on a secret. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write a biweekly newsletter and hold onto a secret???
We’re hosting at the Art Gallery of Ontario. We get started before the gallery opens. So when you arrive on the first day, museum security will let you in. They’ll walk you through the Walker Court. Past the Frank Gehry staircase. And then take a right at the Rodin sculpture gallery to get to the elevators. We can’t wait to see you there.
Happy new year, folks. Thanks for reading.
— Melissa & Johnathan
