Astronomical Clock (Photo credit: simpologist)

A few years back, I realized I was killing my staff.

I thought I had found the ultimate in productivity. In order to manage my completely ridiculous inbox, I found a system.  Each night, I’d leave the office late and go wait for the bus. While I was waiting, I would use my trusty Blackberry to clear out my inbox. I would merrily send emails as follow-ups, delete things, and set myself up for a pretty darn productive next day. Hey – I’ve always loved the concept of Inbox Zero (even though practicing it in Outlook is pretty much impossible). This made me, well, happy.

I’d go home, make (well, order) dinner, and relax, knowing that I was prepared for the next day.

And then something really annoying would start happening – my Blackberry would start going off. My team, fresh from their own dinners, would start replying to my email. Being a rather Type A personality, I’d then feel the need to read the email, which kind-of messed with my evening, but I got enough email from others that it didn’t mess it up that much. I’d ignore the email until the next day (except for urgent ones), and go to bed.

The next morning, I’d walk into the office, perfectly chipper because I knew what my day entailed. On my way to my office, I’d do my usual check-ins with my team (my office was at the end of the hall, so I did morning drive-bys).

Oddly, I found exhausted people who would immediately ask me if their response was OK, or expect me to have responded to their responses.

Sometimes I can be a bit slow, but after a few weeks (months?), I realized that my team was stressed and becoming less productive.  I eventually even realized it was my fault. When I was replying to email after hours, they assumed I expected them to do the same. Sadly, they were already working enough, and I wasn’t expecting it. But I was the manager, and that’s what I was doing.

So I stopped. It was downright painful to have to come in each morning with a full inbox and deal with things I could have dealt with the night before, but the change in my staff was worth it. Their stress levels went down, they eased into their mornings, and they became more productive because they stopped working stupidly.

Here’s the thing with being a manager – YOU are the mold. You are what your team attempts to replicate. If you work stupidly, they work stupidly. If you work late, they work late. If you answer email at all hours, they answer email at all hours.If you manage stupidly, you’ll eventually kill them with stress. Or at least lose them to your competitors.

It’s easy to manage stupidly. Are you managing stupidly without realizing it?

burning a candle at both ends (Photo credit: Mayaevening)

I have a confession to make: I’ve been working stupidly. For a while now, I’ve been working all hours. Sometimes I start at 5am and end at 7pm. Sometimes I put in 60 hours and then work another 10 on the weekend. Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night and check my email.

Quite frankly, this is DUMB.  I realized how dumb when I started at 9am and left at 6pm a couple of days last week and then did NOT work more at home.  You know what happened when I did that? I was more productive.  Yup. I got more work done at a higher quality when I cut time OFF my day. I spent last week producing a kick-butt set of graphs and various other analyses that are going to make up a foundational document for my role.

At the same time, however, I felt horrendously guilty. There I was, waltzing out of the office at 6 to go home, read a book, and recharge, and there my co-workers were, still in the office. Still toiling away at their desks.  Even knowing that I’m a better asset when I restrict my hours, I felt awful leaving.

I know that restricting my hours makes sense.  When I restrict my hours, all sorts of things happen:

• I am able to work crazy hours and get crazy things done during emergencies, because my tank isn’t empty.
• I am a much smarter person! My insights are brilliant, my documents beautifully written, and my analyses are razor-sharp. (Well, smarter, better, and sharper, anyhow.)
• I am easier to get along with. I don’t snap at folks as often.
• I understand what my co-workers are saying much faster.
• I have a better attention span.
• I have time to geek out reading all the new leadership books and resources.

I’m hoping that, by writing this post, I can stop being dumb. I can stop buying into the cult of overwork and be more valuable to my company, my co-workers, and my spouse. I also secretly (well, not secretly any more) hope that my co-workers read this and start leaving the office at sane hours, but I need to realize that I am responsible for my own actions. Therefore, I need to leave the office at a reasonable hour, limit working from home, and STOP BEING STUPID.

Argument (Photo credit: andrewmalone)

1. Think about timing. Running up to someone and saying, “Hey! Here’s this great idea!” may not be the best plan, especially if your proposal is going to turn his world upside-down. If you have a Really Big Idea, ask to grab a cup of coffee or schedule some time on his calendar to run something by him so that he doesn’t lose an hour unexpectedly the day before a big proposal is due.
2. Watch how you start. “I’m about to tell you about this completely awesome idea because I’m awesome,” (well, or something like that) isn’t a great way to start talking about your idea. “Hey, I think this thing will rock for <something she cares about> and I wanted your thoughts,” is a much better way to come at it. Telling her you’re awesome out front will probably gain you an eye-roll and an unreceptive ear.
3. Always remember WIIFM. Honestly, your target wants to know “what’s in it for me?” (WIIFM) immediately, if not sooner. If you’re asked, “How does that help my department?”, your answer really shouldn’t be, “It doesn’t.” Because you know what happens next? He’ll say, “No,” and instantly work on finding counter-arguments. (More about that in an old post On Feet.)
4. LISTEN. That’s in all caps because your target will be much more willing to listen to your thoughts on your proposal if you, in turn listen to hers. She might even have great ideas that build on your proposal or that will massively help you make your argument to others, and not listening means that you’re hurting yourself. You’re running this by her in order to get her opinion, so listen to it. Which leads me to my next point…
5. Never–ever–be disparaging. You’ve probably worked, “That’s dumb!” out of your vocabulary (okay, fine, I’m still working on that one), but you need to realize that telling your target that something will be easy for his team (when you don’t actually know how his team’s systems work) is equally disparaging and frustrating. Likewise, belittling his arguments (no matter how dumb you think they are) will only tick him off, which will guarantee that you lose him as a listener, partner, and advocate.
6. Please don’t yell. Yes, your idea is WICKED exciting, and your voice might get loud because you’re excited. But try to remember to breathe and not to yell. Especially if you’ve ignored points 1-5, yelling just makes listening to your argument a miserable experience, and your target will be less likely to listen to your other ideas in the future.

I’m sure I’ve missed some. What are other ineffective ways to make business proposals?

Image via CrunchBase

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.

Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices. If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps. And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration. Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices.

I’ve heard lots of good and bad points about this, but several things just boggle my mind. Here’s my list.  In order to attempt to be entertaining, I’ll start each point with my actual knee-jerk thoughts.

• “Well, there goes your recruiting.” I have to admit that I didn’t quite understand the work from home (WFH) culture while I was at law firms, since most firms have a pretty strict not-working-from-home policy for non-lawyers (we’ll get into the nightmares of that haves vs. have-nots culture some other day). Now that I’ve worked at tech companies (HubSpot and Amazon), I’ve realized that being able to WFH or work remotely is an essential part of recruiting top talent. Your candidate for kick-butt lead engineer needs to take care of his mom in Tuscon? Let him work from there 3 weeks a month. Or permanently. He’ll work better with an easier life, and you don’t miss out on his awesome talent.
• “Dude, if people aren’t being productive remotely, MANAGE THEM BETTER!” I don’t think Yahoo’s primary problem is with remote workers – I think it’s with craptastic managers.  As Jim points out, “Effectively managing remote workers requires more effort and overhead.” Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it. To me, it doesn’t sound like the problem is with remote workers, but with crappy managers. This is an awfully expensive and ham-fisted way to save your bad managers’ jobs.
• “If you need to lay people off, lay them off. Don’t do this BS that makes you look like you’re managing in the stone ages.” Yeah, so I went to a kick-butt business school that made it really clear to me that remote workforces and the ability to WFH is truly the wave of the future. It doesn’t mean that you have to go to business school to realize that this is a giant leap backwards in modern management practices.  I mean, do we not have videoconferencing, phones, planes, instant messenger, and the ability and money to use these?
• “Yes, face-to-face has kinda neat value. However, if your employees don’t value that enough to come in more regularly, you have a culture problem.” If your culture lacks the collaborative spirit that makes employees value corporate visits and coming in regularly, you have a larger culture problem. Ticking them off by instating this policy isn’t going to fix your culture.

I realize that very little of this hasn’t been said already, but I just had to contribute to the discussion.  Am I right? Am I crazier than usual?

Microsoft Arc wireless mouse. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In this story, the user insists on keeping her mouse pad, even though it doesn’t play with her new wireless mouse, which came in a wireless keyboard/mouse combo.  What does the geek do?  He walks out of her office.

Seriously? No, really, seriously?

He doesn’t say, “Okay, we’ll use your old mouse, then,” swap it, and then walk out with a great story to tell over drinks to other geeks.  He walks out, because he couldn’t get beyond what he saw as stupidity and stubbornness.  He decided to be stupid and stubborn right back.

Quite frankly, if one of my geeks had done that, he would have received a stern talking to, if not an HR write-up. Solving her problem is this geek’s job. Maybe it’s annoying as all heck to have to cater to “stupid users,” but it’s your job, so suck it up.  Try to figure out a way to actually solve the problem.  If you can’t move the mountain, go to the darn thing, will you? If you can’t budge the crazy user, at least try to make her happy.  TRY. If you fail, chances are that she’ll be way more likely to swap mouse pads.

I see behavior like this more and more. We have arguments where we should actually negotiate. We complain about problems rather than actually trying to fix things.

Stop it already, okay?

English: Chute spillway of Pando dam (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Stuff Chutes

Especially if you’re a new manager, is is incredibly easy to be a stuff chute. If you’re a chute, you take all the stuff generated above you, concentrate it, and direct it directly at your staff. You’re a chute if you:

• Always tell your team about any and all stress/upset by the Powers That Be (PTBs)
• Use implied pressure from the Powers That Be to motivate your staff (note: NOT motivating. NOT. No way, no how.)
• Ensure that the Powers That Be know exactly who did anything wrong (who wasn’t you)

If you haven’t figured it out, you don’t want to be a chute. Maybe you think you’re doing things right by being transparent about the “hair on fire” attitude of the PTBs, but what you’re really doing is concentrating all of the stuff from them and stressing out your team with it. Unfortunately, chutes tend to have stressed out staff who dislike their employers, which leads to morale and retention problems.

E3 2011 – Captain America’s shield from Captain America: the First Avenger (Sega) (Photo credit: Pop Culture Geek)

Stuff Shields

It’s definitely harder to be a stuff shield. You have to walk the tightrope between transparency with your team and shielding them from the stuff from above. You’re a shield if you:

• Give your team credit for everything that goes right while taking the blame for everything that doesn’t
• When the PTBs go into panic mode, indicate that there’s stress above, but don’t go into enough detail to pass that stress along
• Motivate your team positively, rather than with threats

In the battle of the corporate world, shields sometimes fail (as you might), but you can always re-arm.  (Did I push that metaphor too far? Sorry about that…)

Closed red curtain at the Coolidge Corner Theatre – landscape (Photo credit: brokentrinkets)

Stuff Shows

The most annoying managers create their own stuff, so I call them stuff shows. They might also be chutes – or even (rarely) shields – but they primarily function as shows. You might be a show if you:

• Regularly lose your temper or show your extreme stress to your team, especially in the context of trying to make them do things
• Give your staff instructions, only to change them afterwards (possibly multiple times) with no justification or explanation to help them understand why the change is necessary
• Expect your team to read your mind, and chastise them for not conforming to your (secret) requirements

I can come up with an almost endless list of how to be a show, but I’m hoping you get the idea.

Clearly, you’d rather be a shield than a chute or a show. Unfortunately, I’ve seen very few managers who are shields who haven’t spent significant time and effort on meeting the needs of their team. How to be a shield, however, is a post for another day.

bottleneck (Photo credit: DailyM = Differentieel + JeeeM)

You have become a bottleneck.

You probably meant well.  Or maybe your team is new.  Or maybe you suck at documentation (heck, I sure do).  You probably have great reasons for it, but it’s still an issue – geeks get incredibly frustrated when their boss becomes a bottleneck.

Honestly, it’s going to take significant effort to stop being a bottleneck.  However, it’s entirely worth it – your team will be happier, your stress will be lower, and everyone will get a heck of a lot more done.  Here’s what you need to work on:

• Trust. Look, you have to trust your geeks.  You have to trust that they’ll do their jobs, and you have to communicate that trust to them.  Yes, this means you have to accept that they might not do things exactly the same way you will, but if you don’t trust, well, get used to having to hire replacements.
• Communicate. Your geeks must be clear about your expectations, or they’ll constantly double-check things with you.  Proactively communicate about what you expect to see from their work.
• Establish Patterns. If each project has a different reporting mechanism, you’ll get stuck telling everyone how to report on each new task.  You’ll also get stuck double-checking their work, since they’ll never know what constitutes acceptable results and reporting.
• Teach. Giving someone step-by-step instructions differs from truly teaching someone. Spending extra time making sure your geeks understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, how you think about problems like the ones they’re trying to solve, and what success looks like means that they can pattern-match for subsequent tasks. And that means that they won’t queue outside your office as much.

Investing this time will certainly help with frustration, stress, and constant questions.  You should note, however, that you’ll still need a good way to keep tabs on projects and problems once your geeks no longer ask you about everything. The best advice I’ve ever read on how to do that is in The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey. It’s a quick read, and totally worth it (even if it’s not on Kindle yet.  Grrrrr.)!

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,400 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 4 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

My main takeaway?  Get off my butt and BLOG in 2013!

WRONG WAY (Photo credit: CarbonNYC)

A few days ago, someone corrected a mistake that I made. I nodded and said, “Now I know.”

Perhaps this doesn’t seem like a strange situation to you, but it represents a lot of personal growth for me.

I have spent most of my life sucking at being wrong. I don’t think that this is unusual for many geeks – we build our self-esteem on our brains, and our brains are rarely wrong. Therefore, we seriously lack practice. It can be embarrassing to be wrong as well. When I was in elementary school, my friends would giggle with glee if I was wrong about something, and they’d tease me about it for days.

I got to the point that I would be defensive about being wrong. It was never that I was actually wrong, but that there were circumstances beyond my control. Like aliens stole my brain, or this other person was wrong and told me the wrong things. In retrospect, I’m sure I looked even more ridiculous by being defensive, but I would do just about anything to avoid admitting that I made a mistake.

I was in a singing group in college (with a bunch of other geeks – our name was a calculus term), and we used to always tell each other to sing more loudly by saying, “If you’re going to be wrong, be wrong loud enough that you can tell and fix it!” This was hard for me, as my mistakes would be (gasp) heard! Before I could fix them! But I eventually realized it was better to be wrong in practice and corrected than to carry the mistake over to our performance.

While I would love to say that I got better immediately after this experience, that wouldn’t be honest. I’m sure I could tell you lots of stories of my being in denial about being wrong over the years, but I’ve apparently blocked them out.

Eventually, however, I made another step. I realized that if I didn’t know that I was doing something wrong, I couldn’t fix it. I would just continue to do the wrong thing, and the consequences could be rough. Folks could quit if they disliked how I treated them, or I could really blow a budget or project based on an incorrect assumption. I developed a pretty strict policy of, “If I don’t know about it, I can’t fix it.”

By developing this policy and treating being wrong (and finding out about it) as a learning experience, I eventually came to value being corrected. I’ve also worked at a few non-law firm companies now, where being wrong is treated as more of a learning experience than an exercise in shifting blame, which has helped me a lot. I can’t say that it doesn’t still embarrass me – I did blush when I was corrected earlier this week – but I have finally learned to accept it and move on.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

I think I came to this conclusion in college.  During my junior and senior years, I was a lab TA for the intro biology lab at MIT (7.02). This class had four major experiments (that I’ll call units), and the TAs would rotate between groups of students for each unit.  During my junior year’s class, one group of students had a 3-person team (all others were 2) that was known as being a complete disaster.  They had no idea what they were doing, and the other TAs would be constantly frustrated by getting them to work successfully on their experiments.

I’ve always been a bit rebellious, so when I rotated to this group on the third rotation, I decided that I wasn’t going to let the other TAs’ frustrations influence me.  I spent the first day of that rotation watching and listening to them.  I discovered that they were struggling to take the protocols designed for two people and expand them to three without being confused.  I started working with them to try to more effectively divide and conquer each day’s tasks (and I had the advantage of having the best teacher for this myself – my lab partner the previous year had been SO GOOD at strategizing in the lab that I had learned some amazing ways to do it).  At the end of that unit, when it came time to grade them, I was able to grade each of them a full letter grade higher than anyone had been able to during the first two units.

My experience with the “disaster” team convinced me that setting up the right circumstances could help pretty much anyone be successful. It (along with my experiences later) taught me that, to make people successful, I needed to:

1. Watch and learn. Had I not taken the time to watch the “disaster” team to find out what was going wrong, I never would have been able to figure out how to fix it.
2. Identify the real problem or challenge. And I don’t mean identify the problem that I thought existed before going into the situation . With the “disaster” team, we honestly just assumed they weren’t very good at biology lab. It turned out that their real problem was struggling with logistics.
3. Communicate. Quite frankly, the “disaster” team knew that they were pretty disastrous.  By talking to them about what I’d observed and the problems I’d identified, I got their buy-in to try to fix the problem together.
4. Change the circumstances. Once we decided to try to fix the problem together , the “disaster” team and I talked every day about ways to solve it. As time went by, they felt more comfortable proposing their own solutions and asking me questions.

I’m not saying that my “disaster” team all pulled their grades up to As.  But they definitely improved because we were working together to create successful circumstances for them.

In the business world, I’ve learned that successful circumstances don’t always include the current role for someone. The strategies I’ve used to address that (after I’ve exhausted the above) include giving negative feedback and, eventually, terminating the person. Luckily, however, I’ve found that more often I can (with the help of the person) create an environment that helps make him or her successful.