I joined project management expert, friend, and coworker Cesar Abeid to talk about leadership, remote work, product/program management, and more on his “PM for the Masses” podcast, episode 137.
Besides sharing their own expertise with me and the audience, we try to understand the recipe for their success and do what us project managers do best: break their success down into manageable chunks and see how we can take similar steps.
Inspired by John Kotter in A Sense of Urgency (2008), read from the local library in March 2021. 4 stars on Goodreads.
What URGENCY is not:
Frantic wheel spinning
Constantly questioning
Complacency
Ambiguous
Only about data (mind)
Slow
Busy
Status quo
Anxious or angry
Versus what is TRULY URGENT:
Patient daily progress
Not anxious
Aimed at winning
Alert
Whole-hearted
Speedy
Clear my calendar
Alert, proactive, fast
Ready to move and win
Tactics to make a sense of urgency into a daily habit:
Purge and delegate
Move with speed
Speak with passion
Match words to deeds
Let everyone see it
A true sense of urgency is about starting today; grab opportunities and avoid hazards, and shed low-priority activities to move faster and smarter, now.
John Kotter in A Sense of Urgency
Stuck? Go back to the reasons you started. Try a different angle. Keep moving, even with small wins, to generate momentum. Be opportunistic.
My take? True urgency means to stay alert, bring outside oxygen in, address both heads and hearts, and prioritize movement towards what matters most. Ready to move faster and smarter.
Clarity and humanity live at the center of our vocabulary when we talk about people. Automattic prefers a friendlier approach to the typical jargon for talking about staffing, hiring, and moving people. We avoid ambiguity by using a specific word or phrase to communicate the exact need.
I contributed to the public anti-glossary because I believe words matter. How we talk about people in a group, company, organization frames — and reveals our values.
My favorite example is “replace” instead of “backfill.”
Backfill — Simpler and more clear to use a verb such as replace. A common reason would be to hire or move someone after a departure.
A friendlier, more clear approach to how we speak about each other.
Enjoyed this timely and practical organizational leadership guide from McKinsey.
Key elements include priorities, roles, time, and energy.
Deliberate calm: How to steer into the storm. Bounded optimism: How to mix confidence and hope with realism
As human beings, we can practice integrative awareness before, in, and after the moment.
Screenshot from the McKinsey study on personal operating models.
Six steps:
Adapt your personal operating model.
Set your intention.
Regulate your reactions.
Practice reflection.
Reframe your perspective.
Manage your energy.
Leadership in a crisis like this is an enormous responsibility, yet it can also be seen as a great privilege. Integrative awareness keeps leaders centered in the storm, giving them the focus they need to take care of themselves and the people and organizations they lead.
Grief is inevitable. Unresolved grief doesn’t have to be. To overcome grief, leaders must become consciously aware of the problem; accept the pain of the loss; and take actions to first let go of the past, and then to find new meaning from the experience.
The outward shift described here resonates with me as an action I can take every day. Under my control to break the inner gaze — the running loop of emotions in my mind — with frequent pauses to stop the cycle. Like an athlete would: train, play, rest, and recuperate to replace depleted energy. Same thing, but mentally.
Opening up emotionally allows those who have suffered from unresolved grief to restart the process of bonding with other people. As their focus shifts outward, their internal dialogue shifts from defensive to positive. This brings calm, clarity, gratitude, and even playfulness.
Thought-provoking prompt from McKinsey for anyone feeling overwhelmed, grief-sick, and exhausted: Hidden perils of unresolved grief. Food for thought for leaders and our teammates alike. “Grief can be a creative force that turns loss into inspiration.”
When analyzing my work with teams, projects, and my own contributions I often try to find the bottleneck in the system. What’s blocked? How could we move faster? What’s are the important decisions?
Kathleen Eisenhardt is a professor at Stanford University who dives deep into these questions, and more. Below are two examples that share insights from her work around complex systems, decision making, and how simple rules can make all the difference.
Phil Knight: “We have so much opportunity, but we’re having a terrible time getting managers who can seize the opportunities. We try people from the outside, but they fail, because our culture is so different.” Mr. Hayami: “See those bamboo trees up there?” “Yes.” “Next year they will be one foot higher.”
I understood. When I returned… I tried hard to cultivate and grow the management team we had, slowly, with more patience, with an eye toward more training and more long-term planning. I took the wider, longer view. It worked.
Nike founder Phil Knight describing a learning moment in his memoir Shoe Dog.
Love this view of better results from growing leaders up from the people already around you, slowly and surely building a strong bench. Not simply expecting new faces to show up and solve everything.
Automattic is hiring engineers across mobile and web, frontend and backend. Recently we partnered with Key Values to highlight our top values, from open communication and open source all the way to flexible work location and a focus on teams.
Open communication: As a distributed company, communication is our oxygen.
Open source contributor: We believe open source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation.
Committed to personal growth: The first line of our creed: “I’ll never stop learning.”
Flexible work arrangements: Set up remotely in a way that works for you — and take the time off you need.
High employee retention: Automattic employees tend to stay at Automattic: Our retention rate for Code Wranglers and JS Engineers is 86% over the last 5 years.
Heavily team oriented: Teams are how we organize our work, communication, meetups, and impact.
Engages with community: We are more motivated by impact than money.
Engineering-driven: First and foremost, we are an engineering company. Engineers are the ambassadors of our company and community.
In Brave New Work Aaron Dignan describes a wonderfully clear way to use an “advice process” to make better decisions.
Watch a short video on YouTube where author Aaron Dignan illustrates the advice process (at minute 4:45).
Start with consent by asking for agreement. Get buy-in and move things forward. This not consensus or everyone is 100% happy with it, instead it means it is safe to try.
Use an advice process. Whenever you’re about to make a decision that’s irreversible or could damage things, go seek advice from those who’ve done it before. And, seek advice from those affected by it.
This replaces the waiting and expectation for a leader to do something—top-down decision making—with your own judgement and responsibility.
The Sensible Leader 