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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People who are frustrated. Sharp. Daring someone to call them on it and spoiling for a fight. If you're managing a group of people, you see it in slack messages. The passive aggressive ones. But also the aggressive aggressive ones.
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Every company is a community that needs rules. And, as bosses, making the rules of engagement clear is our job. That's true whether your company is remote, in-office, or a mix of the two.
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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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After a year of being burnt out, crispy fried, work from home, but mostly living at work, employers are asking if we're ready to come back. Back to commutes and shitty coffee and incompetent management (working on that last one as fast as we can).
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The short answer is no. The Basecamp stuff isn't some evil genius strategy playing out according to plan.
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When people write the bumper stickers about management versus leadership, this is what they mean. The willingness to make the hard call, to do the unpopular thing, not from a place of taking big swings.
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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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That we're at the one year mark for the first lockdowns and it feels like everyone is quitting, well, we can't say we're surprised. But it's our full time job to pay attention to this stuff. And what we're hearing from a lot of you is: why now?
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