Tag: Strive To Be Earth's Best Employer

Dig In

Dig In

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Getting to know your professional colleagues at a personal level is risky. I regularly read advice to avoid it. That’s a reasonable strategy to avoid some of the lows of gainful employment, but it also hamstrings the chance to achieve truly beautiful successes, not to mention it forfeits a potent antidote to loneliness.

So yeah, not only am I going to ignore that advice, I’m doubling down on getting better at being a student of other people. To that end, last week I started reading How to Know a Person, from which I extracted the following list of conversation starters:

  • Which of your five senses is strongest?
  • What are you most self-confident about?
  • What’s working really well in your life?
  • What is the “no” you keep postponing?
  • What have you said “yes” to that you no longer really believe in?
  • What forgiveness are you withholding?
  • Tell me about a time you adapted to change?
  • Have you ever been solitary without feeling lonely?
  • Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?
  • What crossroads are you at?
  • What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
  • If we meet a year from now, what will we be celebrating?
  • If the next 5 years is a chapter in your life, what is that chapter about?
  • What has become clearer to you as you have aged?
  • What is the best way to grow old?
  • If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?

Full credit to David Brooks here, I’m just repeating his excellent ideas. Keep learning, friends!

Life Hack

Life Hack

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It may not seem like much, but you never know the lives you touch
just by always showing up, even on the days you feel so small.
Turns out it all matters after all.

– Derek Webb

Want an easy way to be perceived as good at your job? Set aggressive goals for being responsive across all your communication media, and especially strive to avoid failing to respond or missing messages altogether.

My own personal targets are the following:

  • Slack / Text: 5 minutes ideally, 1 hour median, never more than 24 hours
  • Email / Voicemail: 4 hours ideally, 24 hours median, never more than 3 days

Even just an “I got it, will have you a better response by X time” goes a long way (assuming of course that you do indeed follow-up). Liberal use of tools like reminders, snoozed messages, and do-not-disturb / notification settings make this achievable without completely giving up on work/life balance.

I call the approach “radical responsiveness”. In my experience, it’s a simple way to earn trust with colleagues and customers alike. It works across levels and roles, though it’s particularly helpful when being attentive is part of the job, like sales positions, and especially critical for people management. Be the boss that always responds quickly and your team will be imminently thankful.

Of course you won’t be able to meet these objectives 100% of the time, but being known as a responsive person 95% of the time usually means others will assume the best of you for the 5% of time you fail.

Praise And Thanksgiving

Praise And Thanksgiving

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Never pass up an opportunity to express gratefulness, especially in the workplace. In my (almost) 45 years of life, I’ve never heard someone say “You say thanks too much, please tone it down.” Do it often, do it out loud, and do it in front of an audience.

That being said, the object of your expressed gratefulness matters. What you praise is what you encourage to happen more often. But the converse is true too, what you don’t praise you will discourage. And if your praise for a person’s work is disproportionately towards things less important to their job, you may be having the side effect of making them feel they aren’t actually doing a good job with the things that do matter.

Of course, that may literally be true. You may be using praise of the inconsequential as a defense mechanism to avoid hard feedback of what is consequential. Or you may not be. But if your praise quotient is out of alignment, the individual you’re praising will have to guess. And that ambiguity can be disheartening.

Taste The Rainbow

Taste The Rainbow

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I’m sure there’s research out there that says people do better work when they’re happy. But anecdotally, it’s an obvious truth. Of course there are limits (“fun with respect to work” will almost always be “work with respect to fun”). But in general, fostering a positive work environment and encouraging employees to take care of themselves is good business.

Last week a colleague of mine was revising the spreadsheet we use for high-level estimation, and as part of her adjustments added a few splashes of color. The highlights had a functional purpose, yes, but they were also simply more pleasant to look at. It made me want to work on the spreadsheet at a subconscious level.

Isn’t that nice? I suppose the 49″ ultrawide monitor doesn’t hurt either. 😛

Another obvious example of this phenomenon is font quality and syntax highlighting. Take a look at the following “identical” code samples; which one would you rather work with?

Literally as I was drafting this blog I learned about Monaspace. Taking code aesthetics to the next level, I dig it. Describing the process of adjusting glyph widths as “texture healing” is an especially humanizing touch. Happiness matters!

Give And Ye Shall Receive

Give And Ye Shall Receive

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Open rebuke is better than secret love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend.

We’re in the midst of performance review season, a process I enjoy. Really! Of course performance conversations can happen throughout the year, but there’s something especially valuable about a concentrated time of reflection and intense discussion. Describing strengths, celebrating successes, identifying growth opportunities, rooting out behaviors that are holding someone back; these are all reasons I became a manager in the first place.

It isn’t just a manager’s job, though. It’s incumbent on us all to both be seeking feedback on ourselves (especially critical feedback), and to give feedback to others. The responsibility of Radical Candor applies to everyone.

This responsibility can feel like a chore, if not a terrible annoyance. Pointing out shortcomings or negative behaviors in colleagues is uncomfortable at best, and if not done with grace and from a foundation of trust, can be damaging and career limiting. But when the feedback is honest, timely, actionable, and includes both positives and critiques, it is a great gift to the receiver An act of love, even. We don’t use that word often in the workplace, and that’s unfortunate. Genuine human connection is the foundation of anything worth doing. It’s good for you, it’s good for your colleagues, and it’s also good business.

If you don’t know where to begin giving feedback, I recommend the SBI framework for guidance. And no matter if you discuss in person or provide in writing, you should give your feedback some thought ahead of time (and maybe take a few notes). I promise that it gets easier the more experiences you have giving it, though it will always be an emotional process, and that’s a good thing.

School’s In Session

School’s In Session

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Tonight I kick off a class from Stanford called Ethics, Technology, and Public Policy for Practitioners. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve been involved with formal education (about 10 years actually), but I’m pretty excited. Not just for the learning, but for the people I’ll meet along the way, who appear to be a fantastically variegated bunch based on what I’ve seen on Slack so far.

Here’s the course description from the syllabus:

Our goal is to explore the ethical and social impacts of technological innovation. We will integrate perspectives from computer science, philosophy, and social science to provide learning experiences that robustly and holistically examine the impact of technology on humans and societies.

Basically it’s Jud catnip. If it sounds interesting to you, I think it’s offered periodically. Here’s a link for future reference.

Avengers Assemble

Avengers Assemble

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Back in June, I reflected on the importance of professional friendships, and teased that I’d have more to say “soon” about it. Well, the day has come (and yes, I realize to some, a six week delay might not feel like soon, but in programmer terms, I think I delivered pretty quickly).

I’m excited to announce the launch of 4S Tech. It’s mission is to cultivate a community of technical leaders who live in 4S Ranch though encouraging them to get to know one another, discover each other’s work, and share ideas for collaboration.

Our meetings will begin on August 24 and every Thursday after that from 2-4pm. If you’re anywhere near the area, I’d love to have you stop by for casual conversation, networking, and co-working at the terrace outside Mostra Coffee. They also sell beer if that’s your thing, and there’s a number of other food and drink options nearby if you want to hang longer.

If you’ve got any questions or ideas, please let me know. Here’s to establishing connections!

Work In Progress

Work In Progress

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Two things can be true at the same time.

On one hand, I’m thrilled to be working in the most diverse organization I’ve ever been a part of. Our founder and chair of the board is a woman. My boss (the CEO) is a woman. I’m the only man in the C-suite. Our broader leadership team is 75% women. And the company at a whole sits at roughly 50/50.

On the other hand, I recognize we can still do better. The language and metrics I just used, for example, which reflect a binary that isn’t representative of the richness of human form and experience, let alone all the other dimensions of diversity that aren’t as varied on the team. The levers we can pull as a small organization are constrained, but at least we’re starting from a good place; as opportunity arises I intend to make further improvements.

Celebrate the wins yet strive for more, because when it comes to being Earth’s best employer, it’s always day one.

In Remembrance

In Remembrance

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When I was laid off back in early 2019, my emotions ran the gamut from sadness to fear to anger. That isn’t terribly surprising. But one feeling caught me off guard, and it took me a couple weeks of unemployment to name it: loneliness.

It’s not as if I was truly alone; I still had my family, who are awesome, and friends I saw regularly. But so much time is spent with coworkers, time that requires no planning or effort in the way that maintaining other friendships requires, that inevitably colleagues become a significant slice of a person’s social circle, and when that’s suddenly taken away it can be a shock.

While not as acute, there’s a similar feeling when a job is left voluntarily. As soon as word got out about my departure from my previous job, even though I was sticking around for a couple weeks to ease transitions, my interactions with coworkers changed, an unspoken realization that further investment in these relationships had limited value. “Let’s stay in touch” is a common refrain, but to do so takes effort that usually doesn’t get made. Not matter how strong the connections may seem (and given the nature of things like mutual goal pursuit and shared trauma, they can feel quite strong), once the bond of shared employment and daily interaction is broken, that’s usually the end of it.

Nevertheless, I truly value the “work friendships” I’ve had during my career, even if they only last for a season. I was enjoying an afternoon coffee a while back reflecting on this topic, and a wave of nostalgia hit me hard enough that I decided to do something about it, sending out a bunch of LinkedIn “hey how’s it going?” notes and planning a happy hour get-together for former employees of the startup I worked at from 2014 to 2019. The latter happened this past week and it was delightful catching up with folks, most of whom I hadn’t seen in years.

Besides the upheaval that comes with job changes (voluntary or otherwise), the nature of work friendships are changing thanks to remote employment. I’m a big fan of ditching the commute and having a flexible schedule, but it does comes at the cost of the communal benefits of an in-person office. For many folks social circles are shrinking (see Bowling Alone for a deep dive on this phenomenon in America); not going to an office isn’t helping.

The above has me thinking about alternatives ways to help people fill this gap, tech people in particular, and tech leaders especially, since their potential for loneliness is compounded by being in positions where they can’t be completely transparent with the majority of their colleagues. More to come on this soon.