Pull a Fixler
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I was part of the team at Etsy. The customers were amazing. The Kool-Aid was delicious.
We were smallish then, but growing fast, and meeting creep was kicking in. Anyone who has experienced a startup transitioning from 50 people to 150 people knows exactly what I'm talking about.
Five or ten minutes into many meetings at Etsy, Eric Fixler, a senior software engineer at the time, would pick up his stuff and just walk out the door, mumbling something about not being useful here. If he had nothing to contribute, he went and found a better use of his, and our, time... teaching me a valuable lesson along the way.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away I was part of the team at Etsy. The customers were amazing. The Kool-Aid was delicious.
We were smallish then, but growing fast, and meeting creep was kicking in. Anyone who has experienced a startup transitioning from 50 people to 150 people knows exactly what I'm talking about.
“[Meeting creep] is a medically diagnosable condition with the primary symptom being the inexplicable expansion of meetings into every crevice and corner of your schedule.”
Five or ten minutes into many meetings at Etsy, Eric Fixler, a senior software engineer at the time, would pick up his stuff and just walk out the door, mumbling something about not being useful here. If he had nothing to contribute, he went and found a better use of his, and our, time... teaching me a valuable lesson along the way.
There is no reason to sit in a meeting to which you add no value. Everyone invited should be there for a reason, and if you are there for a reason, you should be actively contributing, regardless of role or seniority. We hired you for your experience and insight, not to be a wallflower. If you can't actively contribute to this particular discussion, there should be nothing wrong with leaving. We certainly don't want to be wasting anyone's time. Everyone at a startup has a million things to do.
Thus was born The Fixler, a simple and powerful rule: If you are sitting around a conference table and your presence isn't necessary nor adds value to the others in the room, you may get up, say 'Fixler', and walk out without explanation or penalty.
Go ahead, pull a Fixler, and feel the liberation.
Everything You Create Is A Product
I’m obsessed with office reception.
I've come to realize that I’m a product manager. The org is my product. The employee is my customer. If I facilitate the creation of the right DNA and structure. the team is freed to be their creative best in service of their customer, knowing that the resources, infrastructure, and long-term personal and professional development they need to be their best selves are the very foundation upon which they sit. I find this work utterly delightful.
I believe every employee should consider themselves a product manager. I don't quite agree when Marc Pincus says every employee should be CEO of something or when Ben Horowitz says every product manager is a CEO. CEOs have absolute authority. Product managers, on the other hand, are part of a larger collective, and when plugged together allow one plus one to equal three. Product managers, like CEOs, must champion a big vision, but they must also focus on executing short-term strategy and getting the details right while obsessing over what their customer will do.
Reception, for example, is one of the most important products your company produces. Every morning it sets the tone for your employees' day. Every day it sets first impressions for every prospective employee that visits. Since talent is the key asset that feeds your company’s growth (not to mention your biggest expense), how can you not obsess over reception?
I’m obsessed with office reception.
I've come to realize that I’m a product manager. The org is my product. The employee is my customer. If I facilitate the creation of the right DNA and structure. the team is freed to be their creative best in service of their customer, knowing that the resources, infrastructure, and long-term personal and professional development they need to be their best selves are the very foundation upon which they sit. I find this work utterly delightful.
I believe every employee should consider themselves a product manager. I don't quite agree when Marc Pincus says every employee should be CEO of something or when Ben Horowitz says every product manager is a CEO. CEOs have absolute authority. Product managers, on the other hand, are part of a larger collective, and when plugged together allow one plus one to equal three. Product managers, like CEOs, must champion a big vision, but they must also focus on executing short-term strategy and getting the details right while obsessing over what their customer will do.
“What am I obsessing over that will embody the company’s values and continuously lead to new customer delight? ”
Reception, for example, is one of the most important products your company produces. Every morning it sets the tone for your employees' day. Every day it sets first impressions for every prospective employee that visits. Since talent is the key asset that feeds your company’s growth (not to mention your biggest expense), how can you not obsess over reception?
My former colleague Blanche is a brilliant product manager. She understands that reception reflects the brand in countless ways. She groks the big picture and sweats the details. Everyone is greeted warmly and their needs attended to. The desk is picture perfect uncluttered, chairs aligned, curtains drawn, light bulbs working, books straight, drinks stocked, packages out of sight. Reception’s personality and aesthetic matches the brand and the company's customer service orientation, and thus sets the right tone for everyone who comes through those doors.
Take a moment and ask yourself these questions: What is my product? Who is my customer? What am I obsessing over that will embody the company's values and continuously lead to new customer delight? If you don’t know the answers to these questions, you won't achieve peak performance, for without the answers to these questions, how can you think big, think small, communicate effectively, prioritize, forecast, execute, and measure?
Everything you create is a product and every product has a customer for whom you must deliver value – regardless if you work in devops or marketing, sales or SRE, customer service or design, human resources or engineering. Therefore, everyone is a product manager. They just haven’t all realized it yet.
(I really am obsessed with office reception. I had all our entryways repainted at least once a year. Perhaps no one noticed besides me, but I doubt that. Details matter, which is why customers delight in them.)
Humility and Fierce Resolve
I pulled out my notes on Good to Great to find a quote or two for yesterday's blog post on self-awareness. Inevitably I found other quotes meaningful to me. They speak for themselves and since my drafts queue is full of half-finished ideas, allow me to simply share them with you below. You'll find my brief comments in italics. The title of this post refers to the two key qualities found in all of Collins' Level 5 leaders.
Management and leadership is not about those doing the managing and leading, but rather about those being managed and led.
... Level 5 leaders have ambition not for themselves but for their companies ... Level 5 leaders want to see their companies become even more successful in the next generation and are comfortable with the idea that most people won’t even know that the roots of that success trace back to them. As one Level 5 CEO said, “I want to look from my porch, see the company as one of the great companies in the world someday, and be able to say, ‘I used to work there.’ ”
I pulled out my notes on Good to Great to find a quote or two for yesterday's blog post on self-awareness. Inevitably I found other quotes meaningful to me. They speak for themselves and since my drafts queue is full of half-finished ideas, allow me to simply share them with you below. You'll find my brief comments in italics. The title of this post refers to the two key qualities found in all of Collins' Level 5 leaders.
Management and leadership is not about those doing the managing and leading, but rather about those being managed and led.
... Level 5 leaders have ambition not for themselves but for their companies ... Level 5 leaders want to see their companies become even more successful in the next generation and are comfortable with the idea that most people won’t even know that the roots of that success trace back to them. As one Level 5 CEO said, “I want to look from my porch, see the company as one of the great companies in the world someday, and be able to say, ‘I used to work there.’ ”
The hardest thing a manager has to do is let someone go. It is always gut-wrenching for both parties. To be great you must relentlessly focus on the long-term ambitions of the company. As a result tough decisions become necessary and obvious.
Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.
When it comes to product, Squarespace's Anthony Casalena embodies this lesson more than any founder I know.
Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don't have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don't have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.
Only rocket science is rocket science and only saving lives is saving lives. The rest of us should remember that work is just work. Don't overthink it. Focus on your family and choose work that is deeply meaningful to you. The rest will follow. For me that means choosing to help grow teams creating innovative software that has tangible and meaningful impact on the lives of the individuals who use it.
When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you’ve had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.
On Self-Awareness
"What is your damage, Heather?" -Veronica Sawyer
Those of a certain age <ahem> will remember this comeback from the halls of high school. The question, however, is critical. Those who achieve self-awareness likely have spent a significant portion of their lives exploring the answer.
Jim Collins discusses the role of self-awareness in leadership in his seminal book Good to Great. “Level 5 leaders [Collins' highest order] are a study in duality: modest and willful, shy and fearless.” Leaders able to project conviction yet be truly and constantly receptive to dissent and ideas from throughout the organization cannot exist without high degrees of self-awareness.
Self-awareness is my number one predictor of future success because it essentially predetermines one’s capacity for growth. Combine self-awareness with exceedingly high levels of intellect and curiosity and – BOOM – you’ve got a winner on your hands. Add experience and the necessary winning personality to the mix and you should do all you can to prevent the candidate from walking out the door. But please don't break the law like Veronica and J.D. did.
Without knowing your damage, you may be capable of determining what makes you tick but you will be blind to what makes you react.
“What is your damage, Heather?”
Those of a certain age <ahem> will remember this comeback from the halls of high school. The question, however, is critical. Those who achieve self-awareness likely have spent a significant portion of their lives exploring the answer.
Jim Collins discusses the role of self-awareness in leadership in his seminal book Good to Great. “Level 5 leaders [Collins' highest order] are a study in duality: modest and willful, shy and fearless.” Leaders able to project conviction yet be truly and constantly receptive to dissent and ideas from throughout the organization cannot exist without high degrees of self-awareness.
“Without knowing your damage, you may be capable of determining what makes you tick but you will be blind to what makes you react.”
Self-awareness is my number one predictor of future success because it essentially predetermines one’s capacity for growth. Combine self-awareness with exceedingly high levels of intellect and curiosity and – BOOM – you’ve got a winner on your hands. Add experience and the necessary winning personality to the mix and you should do all you can to prevent the candidate from walking out the door. But please don't break the law like Veronica and J.D. did.
Without knowing your damage, you may be capable of determining what makes you tick but you will be blind to what makes you react. If you’ve often found yourself angry, defensive, or aggressive, there is a deep seated fear that is being triggered. Walling it off may have saved you as a child but it’s limiting you as an adult. The truthful exploration of your joys and traumas, your desires and needs, and your habits and peccadillos is necessary to understand why you do the things you do.
Collins posits that great companies "became relentlessly disciplined at confronting the most brutal facts of their current reality." I say this is true of great leaders as well. I devote considerable energy to this exploration. The mind doesn’t want to walk down these unpleasant avenues. The psyche is built to defend itself. Reflecting on your shortcomings is a choice you must make. How can you improve a habit if you don’t understand its origins? You empower yourself to internalize life’s lessons and achieve new levels of personal and professional success if you can closely and critically observe yourself, particularly when you are exposing the raw wounds of the damage holding you back.
Too much unexplored damage and, one way or another, your behavior will change to the point where it's noticeable to others. If you aren’t self-aware, it means your mood is being affected by something you don’t know (or want to know) is bothering you. If you are self-aware however, you are constantly practicing being your best self and rising to the occasion. If one is conscious as to who they are, how they think, and what they fear, they have the tools to affect their own change. Self improvement is impossible without self awareness.
“The mind doesn’t want to walk down these unpleasant avenues. The psyche is built to defend itself. Reflecting on your shortcomings is a choice you must make. ”
Self-aware teams persevere through adversity and learn at ever increasing rates. Self-aware managers know how to build effective teams because they challenge their teams to become ever more aware of what motivates and stifles them (collectively and as individuals) and thus their decision making. A highly functioning team knows who each team member truly is, how they think, and how the combos of those thinking modes interact. Highly functioning teams have the courage to own their behavior and they use this collective self-awareness to be the change they wish for. Smart, curious, self-aware teams can achieve any goal and carry out any plan.
I've previously written about wanting to build heterogeneous teams of people who are continuously exploring their gifts and their shortcomings and building each other up as a result of those explorations. How do you identify these candidates? Brains and experience and niceness can all be tested. Here are just a few of the questions I mix into a 60-90 minute conversation that I believe expose a candidate's level of and capacity for self-awareness:
- What's the single most important thing you do every day?
- Describe a time you felt you were right but you still had to follow someone else's directions.
- What were you doing the last time you looked at a clock and realized you had lost all track of time?
- What business do you fantasize starting?
- What would you most like to learn working at MyCo that will help you in your future after MyCo?
- Where do you not want to be in five years?
- What would you say is the biggest misperception people have of you?
- Without thinking quickly name three reasons why I should not hire you.
- Tell me about the last time a co-worker or customer got angry with you. What happened?
- What do you enjoy most about working and what do you enjoy least?
- Are you nice? When are you not nice? Tell me about the last time you were not nice.
Self-reflection can take place anywhere at any time. I’m getting better at the habit of writing a few things down when I’m feeling agitated and reacting emotionally. It’s difficult, and the answer isn’t always there. But growth starts with asking ‘Why?’. If I can learn to spend more time seeking to understand rather than to be right, I’ll end up understanding and being right more often.