- Team success requires acting like a community, putting aside individual diffs and obsessing with what’s best for the team and company.
- Lack of community is a leading factor of burnout.
- Primary job of a manager is to help people be effective, grow, and develop. Liberate and amplify their energy.
- Understand people’s unique goals and be sensitive to life choices. Help achieve their goals in a way consistent with the company’s needs.
- What are your people thinking and feeling, and how can I make them the best they can be?
- Use staff meetings to tackle the most important challenges and opportunities, especially to give the team practice together. Important issues cut across functions. Use team meetings to understand what’s going on outside the team, etc.
- Rule of 2: get the 2 most closely involved in a decision to work through it and come back a week or two later.
- Group consensus causes groupthink and inferior decisions. Instead, get the best idea by getting all ideas out in the open, discuss honestly, have everyone provide opinions, and strive for the best one.
- If discussing a problem with your team, be the last one to speak. Allow the team to come together and have the whole team on the same page.
- Always stick to “first principles” (values, truths, etc.) and remind folks if applicable to a decision.
- Try to coach past aberrant behavior. But if you spend a lot of time controlling the damage, time to part ways.
- If you have the right product for the right market, move as fast as you can. Speed essential, and allow minor things to go wrong.
- Product and marketing teams should describe the problems they’re seeing and give context, but not the solution. Advocate for customers, then stand by and let engineering teams do their thing.
- If letting someone go, treat them well (both for their sake and the team morale’s sake), but need to move forward and do not apologize too much.
- No one ever succeeds at their third chance.
- Trust: people feel safe to be vulnerable. Doesn’t mean you agree, but safe to disagree.
- Safe for interpersonal risk taking and comfortable being themselves.
- Leadership not about you, but about service to company and team — something bigger.
- Coach: tells you what you don’t want to hear, has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be
- Coachable: can see they’re a part of something bigger than themselves, even if they still have an ego
- Asking questions is a better listener, promoting discovery and insight
- Asking open questions and listening important for feelings of competence, relatedness, and autonomy
- Coach in the moment, don’t wait. Real and more authentic. Don’t wait for official meetings or reviews.
- After feedback and asking questions, don’t tell them what to do. Let them create a plan and ask why questions.
- Leader’s job to push the team to be more courageous and being safe to take risks. Evangelist for courage.
- Be the person who gives energy, not who takes it away
- Work the team first, not the problem
- Don’t overemphasize experience. Instead project what someone can become.
- Negativity is a problem to tackle in and of itself. Redirect energy to being solution focused. Get the issues out, but don’t dwell on it. Stay relentlessly positive. Negativity is infectious. Get to the heart of the problem, but in a positive way.
- It’s amazing what can be accomplished when you don’t care who gets the credit.
- When you’re losing, recommit to the cause and lead
- Listen, observe, and fill in the communication gaps between people, especially to correct wrong perceptions about the way something was said, etc.
- Acknowledge when something doesn’t go their way, empathize that it sucks, but remind to buck up and soldier on for the team.
- Effective giver: don’t be a yes man, but make sure benefits of helping outweigh the costs to you. Be generous, but know your limits. Look for high-impact, low-cost ways of giving to sustain generosity.
- The highest-performing people can feel the most alone. Have relationships, but feel more independent and separate. Egos and confidence to drive success, but paired with insecurities and uncertainty.
- Don’t do a portfolio of things. Be selective, have accountability, and drive it.
- Don’t waste time worrying about the future. Turning points usually cannot be predicted or controlled.