What is the root cause of a 10x engineer? It is questioned whether “10x Engineers” are mythical creatures that exist only in our imagination or are real but simply elusive. If elusive, how do we find them?

People in high growth and highly successful companies swear they have seen them. Having worked at various such companies, I absolutely believe they exist. As leaders, I believe one can find them, hire them, inspire them, develop them. Similarly, one can also take the wind out of their sails if we’re not careful. One objective of this blog is to look into various avenues to inspire, develop and leverage such people. In my experience in various startups including helping take a company from Pre-IPO to a $26B valuation, I witnessed multiple occurrences where 5 engineers outperformed 50 – so, I’m a believer.

What is the Root Cause of the 10x Engineer?

There is talk about finding a 10x engineer, recognizing them and hiring them. There’s not much root cause analysis of what allows someone to become and remain a 10x engineer. What sets them apart and how did they become that way? Understanding that can help in developing and keeping them happy where they are. Once you have a unicorn, you certainly want to retain them. Also, it’s not really that someone is 10x “smarter” or “better.” They are 10x plus as impactful as others in how they apply their knowledge and abilities. They have the mindset and potential to have a 10x impact if provided with the right environment, processes, and support to allow it to come to bear.

Hence, it helps to understand how to find, hire, inspire those with the potential to be 10X-ers that will thrive in a world changing at an accelerating pace. Hiring and inspiring people capable of Human Transformation is particularly relevant in the age of Digital Transformation.

Bill Gates, Reed Hastings and Marty Cagan on the 10x Engineer

A couple of years after I originally posted this, I came across Reed Hastings’ take on 10x Engineers in a CNBC article: Netflix CEO on paying sky-high salaries: ‘The best are easily 10 times better than average’

“With a fixed amount of money for salaries and a project I needed to complete, I had a choice: Hire 10 to 25 average engineers, or hire one “rock-star” and pay significantly more than what I’d pay the others, if necessary.

In his book Empowered in Chapter 26: Competence and Character, Marty Cagan refers to the 10x employee. As quoted by Silicon Valley Product Group

“To be clear, there is most definitely such a thing as 10X employees.  
These are people that have demonstrated their ability to contribute on the order of 10X more than their peers.  However, it’s also no secret that having a 10X employee does not necessarily translate into having 10X results.“

10x Engineer Mindsets

During my hiatus into teaching, I learned  about Carol Dweck’s notion of learners possessing “fixed mindsets” or “growth mindsets.” Those with a fixed mindset believe we have an innate intelligence and set of skills. Whereas those with a growth mindset believe our intelligence and skills can be developed. If you’re endowed with certain intelligence and abilities, those more readily develop if you push beyond the challenges you meet. That are various differences between the two illustrated in the graphic below. What is key is understanding how to develop and foster the growth mindset.

Telling a child getting an A (or an engineer solving a tough problem) that they’re smart implies an innate intelligence. Remarking on the effort or approach creates a mindset encouraging taking on challenges and overcoming them. Saying someone hasn’t achieved something “yet” implies they can achieve it. People with growth mindsets thrive in uncertainty; they have a hunger for overcoming challenges and a high tolerance for risk. For them, failures are mere setbacks telling them they need to try a different approach. They welcome criticism as it helps them recognize they’re on the wrong path and allows them to course correct sooner. There is a wealth of information out there if you look for Carol Dweck and Growth Mindset…

Turning our Confidence Villains into our heroes converts Radical Candor into energy that makes us 10x-ers. See Also: How Microsoft Uses a Growth Mindset to Develop Leaders (Carol Dweck, Kathleen Hogan)

10x Companies and 10x Leaders

In his book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins also refers to 10x companies and 10x leaders:

“We labeled our high-performing study cases with the moniker “10X” because they didn’t merely get by or just become successful. They truly thrived. Every 10X case beat its industry index by at least 10 times.” …
“We labeled our high-performing study cases with the moniker “10X” because they didn’t merely get by or just become successful. They truly thrived. Every 10X case beat its industry index by at least 10 times.” …
“On the one hand, 10X-ers understand that they face continuous uncertainty and that they cannot control, and cannot accurately predict, significant aspects of the world around them. On the other hand, they reject the idea that forces outside their control or chance events will determine their results; they accept full responsibility for their own fate.“

In his case studies, it is clear that 10x leaders are not only very conscious of how they choose their teams, but it also become how they role model for and inspire they teams to greatness to outperform other teams by 10x or more.

10x Engineer Risk Tolerance

While studying cultural diversity, I recognized that only a very small minority were born in Silicon Valley, and a disproportionate number come from other countries. The founding fathers left behind the safety and known world in Europe. They risked crossing the ocean into an unknown environment. They came willing to take risks and overcome challenges to attain something they didn’t have before. Often the immigrant leaves behind their home, family, friends and culture. They’re eager to conquer challenges in an unknown world to attain something more at the cost of what leave behind. This could also be a high-school graduate from Arkansas or West Virginia… These are entrepreneurs and pioneers arriving at new ideas and approaches, breaking new ground and creating great companies.

People with a high risk tolerance aren’t afraid of change. In fact, they often seek it out as a life without challenge would seem dull to them. They are drawn to a life composed of a series of paradigm shifts that evoke and require continuous human transformation These thrill-seekers may be ideally suited to thrive in the Age of Digital Transformation.

In Munich, we loved hiring engineers from East Germany. They were consistently very eager to succeed in a new and unknown world. Many had often undergone great risk and left behind family and friends to find something better for themselves. After the wall came down, the desire to hire people from the East faded. Many from the East no longer had to risk much to get there. They often weren’t used to jobs rewarding engagement and risk taking. The Berlin Wall had been a barrier to those faint of heart, much like the ocean to the pioneers. Once gone, coming from East Germany was no longer a valid differentiator to find ambitious risk takers.

10x Engineer Hiring

Hiring 10x-ers, it’s key to recognize what sets them apart.  Take the candidate outside their comfort zone with structured questions. This allows various avenues and depths for the interviewer to go. You learn a great deal more than if you probe them for what knowledge they have. Candidates taken down a path beyond their existing knowledge need to collaborate with the interviewer. They need to first understand the problem and then explore possible solutions.

People with fixed mindsets quickly stall or give up when you take them down this path.  People with a growth mindset will derive energy from a new challenge. They’re able to grasp specifics of problems they’ve never seen before with a willingness to be vulnerable in potentially failing as they explore possible solutions. The ultimate question is if they are drained or energized by collaborating and exploring solutions. To get ahead, you need to solve problems others haven’t solved and/or to solve them in ways others haven’t solved them before. Hence, hire those eager to explore the unknown and learn and discover than to hire someone who knows existing answers to existing problems.

Other Perspectives on Hiring 10x-ers

Dan Slate, from Wealthfront asks: “What’s the most important thing you’ve learned from a peer and how have you used that lesson in your day-to-day life?” It shows a willingness to learn from others (rather than be threatened by them).

Similarly, in How to Hire for Growth Mindset With One Interview Question Jessica Tower uses a prompt: “tell me about a failure;” a question that I also like using.

Jeff Boss determines a growth mindset during the interview; it seems his questions could also be done by a coached recruiter during a phone screen: 5 Questions That Identify Growth-Minded Employees.

Jonathan Fulton former SVP Product & Engineering at Storyblocks suggests a process we also used at IMVU in 7 Steps to Hiring 10x Engineers, , . In the post-interview huddle, we required a champion for a candidate and allowed anyone to veto. I’d also go around the room asking each interviewer how they would feel if they would be the new-hire’s spin-up buddy. Engineers tend to be analytical in assessing others, but this question to accessed their intuition. Great hires were consistently ones people would want to buddy with.

I don’t entirely agree with Fulton’s closing statement that he pulled from Steve Jobs: “You know what’s interesting, you know who the best managers are? They’re the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them.” In my experience, the best managers are often started as the best engineers. Great managers also benefit from a 10x Mindset; however, great managers, like any 10x-er, love what they do no matter what it is. I have yet to meet a great manager that hates their job.

Keystone Developers

In Peter Seibel’s Let a thousand flowers bloom, then rip 999 of them outhe points out:

“The top tier of developers are far more than 10x more valuable than the average developer. Not because they produce 10x more lines of code, or “crush” 10x as many bugs or sprint points, but because they build. better. systems. Period.“

One common scenario that Seibel suggests involving such “keystone” developers:

“There’s a tiny team or a startup working on an ambitious product. Despite their limited resources they produce something of significant value and quality, something that normally would require a much vaster number of average developers working for much longer to achieve a similar result. This leads to runaway success.“

Let a thousand flowers bloom, then rip 999 of them out

Helping the Newly Hired 10x Engineer Become Effective

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen in both startups and large organizations is not having a thorough and thoughtful process on how to spin up new hires. Having dealt with this in the past, I put a great deal of thought into this while at IMVU/The Lean Startup. I’ve carried forward the process of effectively spinning up new hires to several other orgs.

Hiring for a Growth Mindset

Carol Dweck speaks to hiring for the Growth Mindset as part of her talk The Growth Mindset at Google.

In my experience, a key contributing factor contributing to what makes a 10x individual may well be a 10x manager, teacher, coach or parent…

Here is my take on The Five Why’s Behind a Growth Mindset:

1. Why can one 10x engineer be so much more productive than another?
   Because they approach problems differently.
2. Why does a 10x engineer approach problems so differently?
   Because they have a fundamentally different Mindset.
3. Why is it that they have a different Mindset?
   Because they come from an environment that fosters a different perspective and experienced the rewards that this mindset brings.
4. Why is this environment so different leading to such a different outcome?
   Because they have been influenced by parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, teachers, mentors, role models, coaches, peers, and/or managers. People that help them recognize the values of not fearing failure, embracing challenges, and seeking to understand the unknown.Those that support their willingness to take risks, be inspired by others, persist in the face of setbacks, be open-minded to trying novel approaches. Supporters that help them learn from criticism, find lessons and inspiration from the successes of others.Ultimately it helps that they experience that this has helped them overcome challenges they may have previously seen as insurmountable.
5. Why are these influencers so different from other people?
   Because they understand what has helped them succeed and are willing and able to invest in sharing these insights with others.

Happiness and the 10x Engineer

When I interview manager or director candidates, I ask them how they would differentiate an engineer they cannot find a way to help succeed and one they would love to clone. Some say they are smart or hard-working or highly skilled. If those are the answers, I like to ask: What do you think makes them that way? What is the root cause behind someone having all these qualities? More experience/insightful managers will offer passionate or motivated. Ultimately, people that love what they’re doing are more likely to work hard, learn, be engaged become skilled, … They have or develop a Growth Mindset or they are simply happy at whatever they do.

I listened to a Udemy course on management where an experienced manager stated “I’ve never seen anyone get fired that was happy in their job.” Comparatively, you may discover that resonates with your experience. The conclusion being that people that love their jobs will succeed and will be valued. I found some related research below.

Planting the seeds for 10x Engineers

As teachers, coaches, managers, parents, adults, humans, … we find ourselve in a unique position. We may plant a sense of confidence, potential, almost invincibility and sense of worthiness in those looking up to us. We can help them  appreciate that within them lies the ability to unlock potential they previously didn’t realize they possessed.

Studies have shown that employees, especially highly desirable engineers may join a company, but they leave a manager. The number one reason for leaving a job is the manager.

Google researched what makes the most effective and desirable managers that develop and retain the most effective engineers. They came up with:

Eight Habits of a Highly Effective Google Manager:
1. Be a good coach
2. Empower your team and don’t micro-manage
3. Express interest in employees’ success and well-being
4. Be productive and results-oriented
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team
6. Help your employees with career development
7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Have key technical skills, so you can help advise the team.

Developing the 10x Engineer

Talent Code is a book where Daniel Coyle describes deep learning through short repetitions and feedback loops. His examples include repeated sources of top athletes and musicians. I have applied this approach in coaching sports and in business. As leaders, understanding how to apply the talent code can help us enable 10x talent to develop more quickly than through brute-force hard work.

Josh Waitzkin won his first National Chess Championship at age nine; later he became World Champion of Tai Chi Chuan. In The Art of Learning, Josh insists he wasn’t a prodigy and that we can all achieve these levels of accomplishment with the right approach.

“The moment we believe that success is determined by an ingrained level of ability, we will be brittle in the face of adversity.”- Josh Waitzkin

Are You Missing the Point?

If you read this hoping to learn how to get the most out of your employees, then you’re missing the point. When that’s your motivation, you’ll discover it’s hard to motivate those you lead. If you’re hoping to create the best environment for them to flourish, you may find yourself in a virtuous cycle.

How do I get the most out of my people
vs
How do I help my people work at their natural best?

How do I get somebody to do something?
I hear this all the time?
I get this question,
How do I get the most out of my people?
How do I get the best out my people?

They’re not a towel.
You don’t wring them.
You don’t see how much you can get out of them.

How do I help my people work at their natural best?
That’s the right question, and it profoundly changes the answers you’ll come up simply by changing the question.

So, you might be coming up with all the right answers to all the wrong questions. That’s the problem.
How do I get the best out of my people?
Well, you can whip them; that’s works.
It works really well. Try it. It does; it does. Try it.
But, it’s not sustainable.
Teachers will become demoralized, they’ll quit.
Or, they’ll just become bad teachers.

Simon Sinek – Simon Sinek- Getting the most out of your team?

The Happy Demise of the 10x Engineer?

Sam Gerstenzang of Andreesen Horowitz writes about The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer. He refers to how Software eats software development suggesting 10x engineers are no longer needed given ever increasing enabling technology. While this holds for many non-deep-tech endeavors, it also actually underscores that the engineers that the engineers building all that infrastructure may be 1,000x engineers as their work hugely multiplies the work of others.

Gerstenzang argues:

“As the leverage of the individual software engineer increases, the barriers to becoming a code creator are falling fast. The same software foundation (open source software, development tools like Github, infrastructure as a service provided by the likes of Digital Ocean, and more) that allowed Whatsapp and Imgur to scale, means that experience and skill writing software become less important.”

It might seem we only need a few of these in the industry, and we don’t need them in our company. However, for “deep-tech” companies, they are valuable within the company. In his book Super Founders What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups, Ali Tamaseb speaks of Level of Engineering at various Unicorn Tech.

“The level of engineering/scientific innovation and work varies and we can find all types, from pure system integration (where the value-add is mostly in business model) to hard-tech companies where the main value is a new technology that was not available before. Based on the overall number of deep-tech companies that get founded every year (not that many), a disproportionately high number of billion dollar companies are deep-tech.”

So, my counter to Gerstenzang’s points is that for deep/highly technical companies, the 10x engineer still has an opportunity and place for impact. Furthermore, the engineers building generically available enabling technology may be 100x++ engineers.

How a 10x-er Approaches the Job from Hell

I was presented this question in an Organizational Psychology course and was surprised how few leaders appreciated why a good employee would excel in what they believed to be the job from hell:

If you took your least productive employee and asked them to describe their dream job, and you took your most product employee and asked them to describe the job from hell.
If you then created both jobs and put the least productive employee into their dream job and the most productive employee in the job from hell, after two months in those jobs, who do you think would be more productive?

Akin to the Navy Seal exercise, it’s not about the challenge, but how someone chooses to approach it.

For the 10x-er, I’d expect them to define a very mundane job that isn’t challenging and possibly repetitive. Once put into that job, a 10x-ers will typically find a way to systematize or automate the task to make it happen more quickly with less effort to free time up for more challenging work. Doing this, rather than just doing the job is at the core of what makes a 10x-er a 10x-er. The automated/systematized task will often be completely 10x as fast as when done manually.

Similarly, consider that It’s very rare for someone who loved their job to be let go (Exceptions: Layoffs that are true Reductions in Force). The corollary is: It’s very rare for someone who hated their job to be promoted.

Does the 1/10th Engineer Exist?

Another way to look at whether 10x engineers exist is to consider if there are 1/10th engineers. Engineers that are one tenth as productive as others we’ve seen. I would argue this too is not only a real possibility, but I’ve discovered these as well. Often if you have a team or single engineer that is operating without motivation, with an extremely high interrupt level, within a poor environment or in code heavily laden with tech debt, or mismanaged, and/or constantly being asked to start something new before the previous work was completed, … Then it is easy to imagine them performing at 1/10th or even less of their potential, capacity or ability.

I believe for many of us, the 1/10th engineer is easier to imagine than a 10x engineer, and yet it all boils down to the same basics. If we do the inverse of filling our engineers’ sails with winds then we can take all the wind out of their sails. When we do that, we shouldn’t be surprised when that ship appears motionlessly adrift.

If, as leaders, we look for the root cause of a 1/10 engineer,
we may well find ourselves looking into the mirror.

A boat crew analogy of how, as leaders, we can create 1/10 engineers or 10x engineers – Jocko Willink and Leif Babin explain how leadership can directly effect the success of a team. The above analogy from Jocko Willink and Leif Babin comes from their first book Extreme Ownership. Afterwards, they realized there were subtle yet critical nuances they had left out of that book which actually created poor leadership practices. So, they decided to write second book to speak to some of these critically important nuances: The Dichotomy of Leadership. If you’ve only read that book, you missed the boat.

10x Leaders at Startups

Startups can come with challenges to leadership that will test resilience and perseverance. Of all that startups I’ve been at, I believe everyone has been dangerously close to the point of complete failure at least once. There are many similar stories told about famous companies by famous entrepreneurs:

• Ben Horowitz: The Hard Thing About Hard Things Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
• Andy Grove: Only the Paranoid Survive How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company
• Ed Catmull: Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

Not being oblivious to the dangers (a la Only the Paranoid Survive) while not being overcome by the challenges can require an even keel to sail the ship through various storms. In these situations, “Fear is healthy and panic is deadly.” Apprehension and mitigation plans can be good, but anxiety and either indecision or hasty decisions can sink the ship. Being able to maintain that balance not only within yourself but also within you peers, your investors and your team requires a high degree of emotional intelligence and grit. That’s what it takes to keep playing The Infinite Game. The fastest ship may ot win the race; it may simply be the one that survives the storms.

10x Founders

Ali speaks of “Super Founders” as he dives into understand what contributes to a founder having a larger outcome / exit which he sets at the $1B level. He collected over 30,000 data points from non-unicorn startups and then interviewed founders of 15 billion dollar startups including Zoom, Nest, GitHub, Cloudflare, PayPal, Affirm, Brex, Kite Pharma, Instacart, as well as VCs like Peter Thiel, Elad Gil, and Alfred Lin (Sequoia Capital), Keith Rabois (Founders Fund).

In so doing, he debunked come myths around these 10x founders but also found some interesting commonalities. To learn more, check out:

• Ali Tamaseb: Blog Post: Land of the “Super Founders“— A Data-Driven Approach to Uncover the Secrets of Billion Dollar Startups

• Ali Tamaseb: Book: Super Founders What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

Some of his findings correlate to what I’ve seen with non-founding 10x leaders and engineers.

CD

Quotes

A 10X-er is “that rare person with outsized skills, an abnormally positive attitude, and lots of vision, balanced with enough humility to pivot when great advice comes along.  When great advice doesn’t come organically, the 10x-er solicits it, knowing where and how to look for feedback that will help most.  Deep curiosity and enthusiasm are always part of the 10x-er’s game-changing makeup.  10x-ers often work harder and smarter than everyone else in the room.  From their perspective, inefficiency is just a bug they’d love to squash.  They see a world filled with opportunities and can move on to the next available own when things don’t go their way.  They are fundamentally reasonable and willing to accept responsibility for their role in outcomes.  In essence, the 10x-er alone has the raw materials to go from very good to great to excellent to sublime and beyond.”

Michael Solomon and Rishon Blumberg in their book Game Changer: How To Be 10X In The Talent Economy,

Further they call out differences in leaders as follows:

“We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us.
We don’t like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.”

Paul G. Stoltz tells us in his book Put Your Mindset to Work

“Ability to persevere begins with you, the individual. However, change is rarely easy. In fact, sometimes it is downright formidable.“

Daniel Coyle premise in The Talent Code is that “Greatness isn’t born, it’s grown”.

Perspectives on Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset

• Benchmark One: 10 Interview Questions That Will Unlock Any Candidate’s True Colors
• CEO-Sage: A Complete Guide to Changing Your Fixed Mindset into a Growth Mindset
• Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve | Carol Dweck
• Entrepreneur: 5 Questions That Identify Growth-Minded Employees
• Forbes: Are You Trapped In A Fixed Mindset? Fix It!
• Harvard Business School: Toxic Workers
• Inc: Caution: Are You the Victim of a Fixed Mindset? (Here’s What You Can Do About It)
• Inc: Find Out If You Have a Fixed or Growth Mindset. The Clues Are in Your Language
• Inc: Shift to a Growth Mindset With These 8 Powerful Strategies
• InformED: 25 Ways to Develop a Growth Mindset
• Jennifer Smith: Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset – How what you think affects what you achieve
• Jessica Tower: How to Hire for Growth Mindset With One Interview Question
• Learning Mind: 5 Signs You Have a Fixed Mindset and How You Can Challenge It
• London Academy: Interactive Quiz: Fixed vs Growth Mindsets
• Medium: 5 Steps to Free Yourself From a Fixed Mindset
• Psychology Today: 15 Ways to Build a Growth Mindset
• The Simplifiers: Fixed Mindset or Growth Mindset. Which One Are You?
• Weevr: How to Hire for a Growth Mindset: 4 Interview Questions to Ask

References for Motivation/Happiness vs Productivity Correlation

• Fortune: Study: Being happy at work really makes you more productive
• World Economic Forum:
• Happy workers are more productive, research shows
• A sociable workplace is happier and more productive. Here’s why
• This organisation increased employee productivity, happiness and trust by making just one change
• This is the link between happiness and professional success
• This is how Google creates happier, more productive employees
• Harvard Business Review:
• Being Engaged at Work Is Not the Same as Being Productive
• The Research We’ve Ignored About Happiness at Work
• Forbes:
• How Offices Are Innovating To Improve Our Happiness, Productivity And Well Being
• The Connection Between Happiness And Performance For Millennials
• Promoting Employee Happiness Benefits Everyone
• Science X: Rise in worker happiness leads to an increase in productivity
• Oxford University:
• Happy workers 13% more productive, finds Oxford Saïd research
• Does Employee Happiness Have an Impact on Productivity?
• Warwick University:
• New study shows we work harder when we are happy
• Happiness & Productivity
• Happiness and Productivity: Understanding the Happy-Productive Worker
• Julia K. Boehm and Sonja Lyubomirsky
• Does Happiness Promote Career Success?
• Does Happiness Promote Career Success? Revisiting the Evidence
• Is Happiness a Consequence or Cause of Career Success?
• Dan Pink
• RSA Animate: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
• Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• Lior Gavish
• 5 Non-Obvious Ways to Make Data Engineers Love Working for You

10x Employees – Other Perspectives

• CD: Why are 10x-ers so rare?
• 7pace: The “10X Engineer” Has Officially Become a Meme
• Andrew Dong: How to become a “10x engineer”
• Anthony Heston: 10x: What Successful People Do That You Don’t
• Ari-Pekka Koponen: Busting the 10x Software Engineer Myth
• Auren Hoffman: How Can You Become a 10x-er?
• CODE517E: What makes “10x” engineers. A complete hypothesis
• The Elder Scripts: How to become a 10x engineer
• Engineer Calcs:What is a 10X Engineer? The Truth You Need to Know!
• Fabio Cicerchia: 10x Software Engineer: A journey through thoughts and suggestions off the beaten path to make your developer life easier
• Game Changer: How to be 10x in the Talent Economy – What Every 10x-ers Should Know About Their Worth
• Jeff Bezos: People who are ‘right a lot’ make decisions differently than everyone else—here’s how
• Jeff Foster: The origins of the 10x developer
• Jeff Haden: The Motivation Myth – How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win
• Johann Schleier Smith: The myth and the reality of the 10x engineer
• Jonathan Fulton: 7 Steps to Hiring 10x Engineers
• Justin Etheredge: The 10x Programmer Myth
• Marine Sobas: Lessons Learned Shadowing the Mythical 10x Programmer
• Rishon Blumberg and Michael Solomon: Game Changer How to Be 10x in the Talent Economy
• Rishon Blumberg and Michael Solomon: How to Manage a 10x Employee: Flow States, Deep Work, and Massive Productivity
• TEDx Talk – Rishon Blumberg: Managing Tech “Rock Stars” like Real Rock Stars
• Sackman, Erikson, Grant – ACM: Exploratory experimental studies comparing online and offline programming performance
  Shahar Talmi: The 10x Engineer
• Stay SaaSy: Things 10x People Do
• Tech Crunch: 10X-ers’ Secret To Achieving Next-Level Productivity Doesn’t Cost A Thing
• Team CodeGiant: How To Become A 10X Engineer [The 10X Engineer Meme and Definition]
• Will Seitz: What is a 10X-er?

Hiring 10x Engineers – Other Perspectives

• 7 Steps to Hiring 10x Engineers
• The 10X engineers you are trying to hire are gone. Deal with it!
• The Candidate Whisperer: The Power of the Job Post
• The Science Behind Hiring “10X Engineer

New hires present the best opportunity to put employees on their path to achieve their greatest potential. There are three very impactful people in determining the joy, success and fulfillment an employee finds in their job…

Typically, none of the three appreciates the honor and responsibility bestowed upon them to have this impact on another human.

These three are crucial people in determining whether new hires enjoy their job, are successful and find fulfillment. For, the joy, success and fulfillment an employee derives from their job greatly impacts their life. Employees spend more of their waking hours at work than they do with their life partner and family.

I believe these three people are in order:

1. The New Hire Employee Themselves

New hires often don’t fully appreciate their ability and role in determining their own joy, success and fulfillment at work. As leaders, our most important task is to help those we lead appreciate their ability to impact their own destiny. By enabling a growth mindset, we let them feel the joy, success and fulfillment they derive from their job. We enable them discover their ability to succeed, we are allowing them to get in their own way. They can be their own worst enemy or own best champion.

2. The New Hire’s Manager

Sadly, as managers we often overlook the honor and responsibility bestowed upon us in hiring and managing a new hire. Each employee does spend more waking hours at work than anywhere else in their life. We, as their managers, bear a huge responsibility in making that experience enjoyable, fruitful and fulfilling. Successfully helping a team member find fulfillment in their job, we ourselves may derive a great deal from that experience. More on the manager’s responsibility at Where to Begin the Journey.

3. The Spin-Up Buddy or Mentor

The first three months can be the most influential in whether new hires find joy, success and fulfillment at work. Yes, they themselves and their manager bear a huge responsibility in this endeavor. However, success is greatly increased for a new hire when assigned a buddy / mentor. Ideally this is someone that works closely with them in a similar role. They show them the ropes, they introduce them to people they should know to succeed. They help ensure they find their feet in doing their job.

Often the person honored to be a new hire’s spin-up buddy becomes that new hire’s most trusted confidant at work. Often that relationship continues on well after either or both of those individuals have moved on.

The opportunity of consciously choosing and assigning someone into this third role is often over looked. Sometimes we refer to these buddies as mentors; however, that implies it must be someone more senior than the new hire. It can also be a peer or someone at a lower level.

I’ve been asked how, at a fast-growing startup, one can afford to take time from the best engineers to spin up new engineers. First of all, it’s a great investment, but perhaps more importantly, a well spun-up new hire, even if fresh out of college, makes for a great mentor for the next hire. They simply repeat what they went through with their own improvements.

The New Hire’s Team

In addition, the team plays the fourth most influential role. It takes a village. Enabling an employee to find fulfillment the team finds itself in a symbiotic relationship – one that is truly mutually beneficial. Each employee themselves should not overlook their own responsibility here.

Spinning Up New Hires at IMVU

On joining IMVU, the expectation was to make a change and push it to production on my first day. There are a few objectives with doing that:

• The new hire push ensures everything is right in terms of system, accounts etc.
• It ensures your mentor has a change ready for you.
• It allows you to see that it’s possible to make a change, add testing for it, and run a complete set of tests.

New hire change emails go to all employees, and responses are a lot of “Welcome to IMVU” emails from Execs and people across all functions. You become an employee not when you show up at the office, but when you’ve made your first impact. New hires are given a frame of mind of having impact (not to do paperwork).

I uncovered a few glitches in the spin-up process, and I decided to improve the documentation and process. I then made the improvement the first thing in the spin-up document. It’s new hire’s and mentor’s responsibility to leave the spin-up process in a better state. I’ve carried the practice of new hires improving the new hire process to Twitch, Pure Storage and Prosper.

At Twitch, I set the target for a new hire make their first production change on Day 1. There was concern that this would end up as a disappointment for the new hire and the mentor. However, folks didn’t realize that I’d been having new hires fine tune the process for some time. It proved to be a success. And so, my notion of framing this as Leave a Trace began.

Have New Hires Leave a Trace

As new hires, please view it as your responsibility as a new hire to make improvements to this process. Add missing steps, make corrections, or clarifying things so as to improve the spin up for the next person. To this affect, please feel free to enlist your mentor.

This also sets expectation that encountering anything that could use improvement, it’s your responsibility to im prove it.

At IMVU, a mentor’s primary task during spin-up to make the new hire completely self-sufficient and fully-functional as an engineer. That supersedes the priority of any other work. There is good, long-term ROI to sooner have two fully functioning engineers instead of one. We have even had success with a mentor spinning up three engineers at the same time.

Spin-up work Buddies for New Hires in Munich

When I started my job at Softlab  at Arabellastraße in Munich in 1983, I realized how influential the colleague I shared an office with was in determining how much joy, success and fulfillment I found in my job. When I learned that the next engineer we hired was to sit alone in a two person office until we bought on another new hire, I decided to take it upon myself to move into that office with them to help get them started. Note: Softlab was all about enabling developer productivity as it’s core product Maestro I was the first integrated development environment in the history of computing. One of my first changes at Softlab was to get the company to dog-food it’s own product.

Note: At Softlab, we were very conscious of facilitating engineering productivity. Our flagship product Maestro I, was the world’s first integrated software development environment. By the time I left in 1989, Maestro I had been installed by 22,000 programmers worldwide. Until 1989 there were 6,000 facilities in the Federal Republic of Germany. Maestro was probably the world leader in this field in the 1970s and 1980s. 

Higher Productivity Work Environments

When Softlab achieved enough success that we could hire an architect to design a new building for us at 120 Zamodorferstraße, we had several discussions around the configuration of that office space. One of the considerations was whether we should have one, two or three person offices. Initially most people feeling inclined toward having individual offices. This would solve for quiet and focused space that improve engineering productivity. Three people offices would increase collaboration. We ultimately decided the best experience for all would be had by having pairs of mentors and new hires working together. For collaboration, the German laws about needing to regular breaks during the day (e.g. for coffee, tea or lunch) allowed for impromptu collaboration time.

Even in open space offices, I hate to interrupt engineers. When I see an engineer I want to catch up with grab their coffee mug, I grab mine and tag along.

Note, there we also other factors that went into designing that building to aid in creating the most productive work space possible – such as the width of the hallways, the location of the restrooms, the location of the raised floor computer room (we worked very close to the hardware of the the systems we were designing), …Softlab became the second most successful independent software company at its time (behind SAP) to then get acquired by BMW.My uncle, Carl Martin Dolezalek, made quite a nice living up until the 1970s by advising businesses and factories how to lay out work space so as to gain efficiency as he described in his book “Planung von Fabrikanlagen” first published in 1973. His income was derived from a minor percentage of any increases in output due to higher productivity that resulted from changes he suggested.

How Hiring Impacts Spin-Up

The ability for a new hire to spin up is also greatly influenced by their mindset and approach to learning new things. As mentioned in 10x Engineer – The Root Cause, there are ways to find and hire engineers with a Growth Mindset. This mindset that comes with curiosity and a desire to learn new things contributes significantly to how quickly someone spins up. Also, the well-defined spin-up process itself will reveal if the hiring process truly found the person you want to have on your team.

Furthermore, the “burden” or interviewing can also greatly impact an existing team. As such, it helps to spin up new hires to become certified as qualified to ask certain interview questions. This is not to be taken lightly, as the interview questions we use have been developed for over 12 years. The continuous improvement of questions and the manager close process is key in finding and hiring the best engineers.

Ensuring New Hires don’t Slow Down Accelerated Growth

Rapidly on-boarding new engineers generating new designs and code can create a burden on the existing team. I have found myself in a few situations where rapid growth is required, but existing/senior staff are also critical to move the company forward in its rapid growth phase. At Twitch, I came up with the ideal that the nth hire could be best suited and least impactful in spinning up hire n+1. This proved to work, with a good spin-up process even when the next hire started only two weeks later. Their mentor was also still being spun up but had very recently learned what they needed to learn and made improvements to the spin-up process they would now be teaching.

Another challenge in rapid growth companies comes with finding the time to review designs and pull-requests. The is much new code being produced and an ever-shrinking percentage of engineers with tenure. Therefore, it’s crucial to include how to review designs and pull-requests as part of the new hire process. Good hires should already come with the ability to comment on general design and coding principles. The mentor should also provide context relevant to the design and architecture of the system in place and being extended. It’s also important that the mentor impart that design and code reviews are essentially continuous spin-up processes. Comments and suggestions should be given as coming from a place of helping (not criticizing). Exchanging comments and feedback through design and code review feed the continuous and incremental growth of the entire team. It also leads to an ever-improving code-base and system.

This continuous investment in employees feeds a virtuous cycle spinning a developer-productivity and code quality flywheel. It also helps reinforce the mindset of always keep learning and always keep teaching.

A Culture of Learning and Growth

The spin-up process fosters the notion of always learning and improving things. This is furthered beyond hiring and spin-up in a supportive culture of Human Transformation. An overall culture of learning with the organization fosters the mindset of continuous growth and learning. This includes training existing staff and new hires to do design and code reviews from a place of helping rather than criticizing. It includes doing one-on-ones starting with trust. The trust is that leaders have the best interests of everyone at heart. See Start with Trust.

This is further supported by clear and communicated rubrics of various levels within an org and what is expected at each level. The creates a structure for leaders to find opportunities along various vectors of growth. Also, Radical Candor in support of growth also enables upward mobility.

Grooming new New Managers also provides another avenue of growth for certain individuals.

These considerations are crucial along with growing an org through hiring and spinning up. Retention and motivation is critical among existing staff as new staff members are added. Also, when this culture is present among existing employees, it comes across both in the interview process and tends to infect new hires with an excitement based in collaboration and growth.

Engineering Productivity Enables New Hires to Have Greater Impact

Having comprehensive testing in place, reduces the odds of new hires inadvertently breaking code and systems they aren’t familiar with. This too frees up existing engineers to take on other challenges. Furthermore, good architecture, such as cookie-cutting templates for new services and frameworks for front-end design increase engineering efficiency. These help avoid a hodgepodge of coding styles as you continuously add new hires to your engineering team. They also enable moving engineers to new areas quickly if there is a need to shift or pivot focus in various stages of growth. Spinning up people quickly as they move to new areas within a company not only increases efficiency but benefits morale as well.

Reliably removing obstacles and burdens to getting to ever-increasing productivity is what it’s all about.

Background

I have a long-standing passion around spinning up new engineers and increasing engineering efficiency dating back to joining Softlab, GmbH in 1983 with its flagship product Maestro the first integrated development environment in the history of computing. I got engineering at Softlab to dog food Maestro and trained customers’ engineering teams to be more efficient through Maestro. A passion for helping new-hires spin-up also developed as Softlab became the second fastest growing software company in Germany (behind SAP) to be acquired by BMW.

That passion continued as I moved to Silicon Valley and again became critical as I joined BroadVision Pre-IPO and helped it grow to the fastest growing software company on Nasdaq during dot com and branching it out into 7 product lines and achieving a $26B valuation.

After the rapid growth and success of BroadVision, I became more interested in how people lean and decided to get educated as a schoolteacher. I struck up a good relationship with one of my professors, Patricia Swanson who had worked at Stanford with Carol Dweck. Patty got me inspired to learn more about Dweck’s notion of the Growth Mindset. Dweck later published the first edition of The Growth Mindset in 2006. The notion of the Growth Mindset has made its way into business with particular relevance in rapidly evolving fields.

Return to Tech

After my sabbatical of diving into teaching, I came back into tech at Intuit where I grew an internal startup. A few years later, I came to IMVU aka The Lean Startup where I developed the notion of more rigor around the ever-improving spin-up process. Here too came the introduction to interview questions targeting at finding candidates with a hunger and ability to learn – those questions have continued to evolve over the last 12 years. My experience at The Lean Startup helped develop my notion around Lean Staffing.

I brought these concepts of growth to Twitch which had been struggling to hire in its early days and I was able to triple the engineering team within one year. I employed and enhanced many of the spin-up principles during this rapid growth and came up with the 8practice of the nth hire spins up hire n+1. The successful growth led to a unicorn acquisition by Amazon.

My next stop at Pure Storage, came with further development of the spin-up processes where I developed an approach to a Manager Close which I was then asked to teach in classes for all hiring managers across both business units.

Also, while at Pure, I developed an interest in coaching. This came to mind after learning about Google’s Project Oxygen where they concluded after much research that the most important behavior exhibited by their best managers was being a good coach. I began and completed the training as a coach. Again, another angle on how to enable people to grow beyond what they believe was possible.

Another arena where spinning up new players and building world-class teams came into play was as a competitive athlete where I ended up coaching two teams to winning national championships.

See Also

• 10x Engineer – The Root Cause
• Talent Code Applied
• Where to Begin the Journey
• The Developer Productivity Manifesto by Nnamdi Iregbulem, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Maximizing Developer Effectiveness by Tim Cochran , Technical Director, Thoughtworks

New managers face a paradigm shift from one set of responsibilities to an entirely different set of challenges. Naturally, we want our employees to develop and grow and explore unknowns in their careers. We want them to set them up for success in whatever new endeavors they explore. If it turns out not to be for them, there are valuable lessons they’ll walk away with.

The transition from engineering into management should not be the only way to level up. New managers should also not feel this is a less challenging job. They should be inspired by the complexities and uncertainties of helping diverse groups of humans navigate and conquer challenges.

Is Becoming a New Manager Right for You?

A great way to help engineers appreciate how different being a manager is from being an engineer can be challenging. Hopefully, you’ll help them appreciate it’s best to ease into a new thing before discovering if it’s the right move. I like to start by telling them they should try before they buy. That starts with choosing management tasks they can take on to see if they like it and could succeed. To succeed, they need time for the chosen task and hence let go of some of their engineering work.

They should consider things they do and which ones they’d like to let go to take on a management task. More importantly, they should be clear what they absolutely want to hold on to. Monday, ask them what they decided they absolutely didn’t want to let go. Now, tell them, that is what you’re asking them to let go. Yeah, that’s their first disappointment as a manager.

It’s critical they appreciate why this is a good choice. To succeed as a manager, you need to think more about making others successful than making yourself successful. How excited and engaged will someone be to work on your least favorite task? Conversely, the thing you didn’t want to let go, is likely something pretty cool. It’s likely something your passionate about. Something you’d hate to see fail, is something you’ll be motivated to help someone else succeed with. Additionally, it’ll be something they’ll be excited to take on.

This is an opportunity to discover if you can find a passion for making someone else successful. It will be good to know if that exceeds your passion for doing it yourself. Here is one point where you might discover management is not as appealing to yours you first thought.

The Trial Period

Trial tasks are much less painful than making someone “acting manager” and then having it not work out. Also, a try-before-you-buy allows them to learn in gradual transition. There is value in making the first trial task/project an exciting and enticing one. So, you might want to model giving up something you enjoy.

People Management for New Managers

OK, so let’s say you succeed at a few tasks and tests thrown your way and you’re ready to try people management. It’s not ideal to use existing employees as guinea pigs for your fantasies of becoming a people manager – that may not be a nice thing to do to them. It’s less impactful to learn people management with interns. You need to commit to sticking with it through the internship. The interns gain the experience with a single manager for their internship. A good internship is also something that encompasses a project from concept to completion. This too is another good experience opportunity for a fledgling manager.

The Intern Trial

As a new manager managing interns, there are two primary objectives. The intern should love the experience, and the new manager must decide whether they should return.

Trial Objective

At the end of the internship, interns should be very excited to come back. You should leave them with this desire regardless of how they fare. A good experience will help sway them to return. Furthermore, a good experience for less stellar interns allows them to return to school saying good things about your company.

Trial End

At the end of the internship, you’ll decide if we should make an offer to return full-time. Also,if they do come back and don’t succeed, it won’t reflect so well on your ability to assess their abilities. Much more importantly though, I will make it clear to you what burden of responsibility this places on you. Imagine a college grad all excited about their first job (if you did your job well in 1. above). You may have to disappoint them and let them know you won’t be extending an offer.

Conversely, if you do extend an offer, they may have to move a great distance to start. It may be a job that they excitedly tell all their friends and family about. It is their first real job in the real world. Now imagine they don’t succeed and you have to let them go. What did you just do to that human? What impact did you just have on them in their very first real job and start in life? How they will be viewed by friends and family? Imagine now that they end up in a strange city with few, if any, friends outside of work. Yeah, not such a great thing to feel you’ve just done to another human.

Trial Conclusion

Being a manager comes with tremendous responsibility that can feel like a real burden. Keeping them despite challenges after returning is also not a great experience for them or their colleagues or the business. Bearing the burden of such responsibilities for others is part of being a new manager. If, however, such decisions don’t phase you then I’d also argue, management is also not a good choice for you.

New Managers – Starting with Trust

Many factors influence whether you’d make a good or great manager and whether you discover a passion for it. Some of us discover a passion for helping others grow and go through Human Transformation. Similarly, helping someone else discover if being a Transformer is the path for them can require some maneuvering. It’s not the ideal path for everyone.

Help them appreciate that you have their best interest at heart in becoming a manager. This can also serve as good modeling for them. For them to have great relationships and success with their employees, they too should Start with Trust. It is such a powerful starting place for any new manager

For managers in an Agile organization, you may also find The Dark Side of Agile of interest.

See Also

Other key aspects for being an effective manager

• Start with Trust
• Radical Candor, Meaningful Conversations
• The Room Where it Happens
• The Growth Whisperers podcast – 123 Seven important things to develop your mid managers
• The ‘Millennial Whisperer’ discusses what business leaders need to do to attract and retain their young talent
• The Direct-Report Whisperer: The Manager’s Role as Coach and Counselor
• Becoming a “People Whisperer”: How to Communicate So People Care About—and Act On—What You Say
• Forbes – Ten Things New Managers Need To Know
• Harvard Business Review – Becoming the Boss
• Business News Daily – Characteristics of a Good Leader: Tips for New Managers
• New managers: The complete guide
• 9 Tips for New Managers to Succeed

Here are two good blog posts specifically for developing new managers in product management.

• Advice for New Managers and Leaders
• Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader

Radical Candor is an overlooked asset in creating high-performance teams when that candor is built upon a foundation of trust. I’ve discovered that evoking transformation can often require radical candor. However, when properly applied, the transformation can resemble a metamorphosis. The Harvard Business Review article One Out of Every Two Managers Is Terrible at Accountability starts with:

“Out of all the things we expect of leaders — taking charge, setting strategy, empowering people, driving execution, you name it. What one single behavior would you guess is most often neglected or avoided among executives? Seeing the big picture? No. Delegating? Not either. Mapping out detailed project plans? No again. Although many upper-level managers don’t do these things enough, by far and away the single-most shirked responsibility of executives is holding people accountable.“

While we often think of having tough conversations with low performers, these conversations may be equally valid with top performers. When someone isn’t “meeting expectations” one should ask what expectations does one have? It’s reasonable to have high expectations for top performers and to help them step up to meet their potential.  Since Kim Scott published Radical Candor – Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, leaders are expected to leverage “Radical Candor.“

Radical Candor – Four foundational elements

1. Establish a relationship of trust
   In order to have any successful candid conversation, there must be mutual trust. The journey should begin in all cases by establishing trust.
2. Have the employee’s best interest at heart
   Note, if you don’t start with believing it yourself, you’ll not be able to convince them. Once you are sure you have their best interest at heart, you can start to ensure they also recognize that.
3. Believe in them
   As John Maxwell put it “When you believe in someone and demonstrate that belief, they begin believing in themselves too.” Note, they also then start believing in you
4. Differentiate between Intent and Impact
   Without establishing that you believe they have good intent, they will be defensive and not able to absorb constructive feedback.

These things are relatively easy to do for our top performers; why should they not apply to others? As part of leadership development at Pure Storage, Laura from Bi-Jingo, LTD gave us a few Performance Based Training sessions. These were on Meaningful Check-ins and Feedback Conversations (I can highly recommend these). Laura opened the session with a question. Raise your hand if you cringe at the thought of a conversation with a challenged employee that holds upward aspirations. As all the hands went up, I reluctantly raised mine as well. I was actually lying by doing so. In truth, I actually enjoy those conversations tremendously.

Key take-away if we hope to be high-impact managers:

We worked through four scenarios in separate groups. One employee that showed promise, had high aspirations and expectations. However, they also faced with challenges that prevented them from operating at the level they saw themselves.
We may cringe at the thought of being candid with an employee with challenges. We may be preventing them from actually performing at the level where they see themselves. Perhaps it is us that are not performing as the high-impact managers we’d like to believe we are. Should we not relish these opportunities?

Tough conversations are one of many opportunities for leaders to take on a challenge and have an impact. We can leave an employee empowered and excited to overcome obstacles preventing them from performing at the next level. Approach these conversations from the perspective of having discovered an opportunity to help. Entering the conversation with an optimistic mindset may help the recipient be less defensive and more receptive to feedback.

5 Questions to ask before giving feedback

1. Is your intent to deliver feedback that will help the recipient of the feedback?
2. Do you believe that whatever you’re giving feedback on was rooted in good intent even if the outcome was sub-optimal?
3. Will delivering feedback bring value to the recipient?
4. Are you the best person to deliver this feedback such that the most value be derived?
5. Is now the best time to deliver this feedback such that the most value be derived?

Radical Candor – Leaving the Comfort Zone in Interviews

When interviewing engineers, strive to get them out of their comfort zone. Presenting them with problems they haven’t seen . Use variations until we find something that they’re entirely unfamiliar with. We solve new, hard problems as we innovate. We want to hire engineers who love the challenge of solving really hard problems in innovative ways. Some are exhausted at the end of a day of really tough questions. Challenges may not give them energy. If they’re excited about the opportunity to stretch the limits of their abilities, then they’ve come to the right place.

Similarly for managers; we want managers that love challenges. I’m not saying we have incredibly difficult engineers that pose challenges unlike any manager has seen before 😉 We want to hire/promote managers up to the challenge of taking top talent and finding ways to inspire/challenge them. We’d like to enable them to be great at innovating, collaborating, solving tough problems. We should help them grow past limits that were only imagined.

Growing includes leveraging trainers and bringing in teams like Laura’s to expand our manager tool-set for meeting such challenges. Managers are learning to use radical candor and discovering a love and passion for working through challenges. We learn to see the positive impact that can have when leveraged appropriately. Kim Scott, executive coach and author of Radical Candor believes it’s about caring personally when delivering feedback.

Radical Candor – Where to Begin the Journey

I was asked if saying things positively just comes naturally in a recent coaching/mentoring conversation. It seems to come from a place of genuinely having good intent to help the person we’re delivering feedback to. As described in Where to Begin the Journey, I believe if you don’t have that intention, people will know it. It will help to genuinely state your intention to be helpful; this is a premise that both Scott and Grant underscore. Scott also advises us to be humble as we may be wrong in what we perceived as an issue. Ray Dalio also underscores the cornerstone values of “radical truth” and “radical transparency” in Principles – Life and Work.

In Eric Schmidt’s Trillion Dollar Coach he underscores Bill’s caring with candor. Bill excelled at and modeled building close connections of trust. However, he also provided very direct feedback that may have seemed harsh but always came from a place of caring. At Intuit, I had the privilege of experiencing how that approach permeated management. This was particularly in my time with Brad Smith whom Bill had groomed. I highly recommend Eric’s book to gain further insight into Bill’s hugely successful approach to leadership.

Understand the Root Causes and Influences

If any employee’s performance has changed, there may be other influences at work that can both affect their performance and any feedback conversations. Similarly, even what happened on the way to work for yourself and/or the other person can influence how a conversation starts out. As such it may also be of value to ask open-ended questions that could help you root cause what other vectors may be at play – see Vectors of Influence.

VP of Engineering, Rukmini Reddy describes the challenges she faced in Becoming a bad-ass engineering leader: 5 tried and true lessons from a woman of color. She makes a clear distinction: Candor is not criticism from her experience. “The difference between feedback that is meant to keep you in your place (criticism) and feedback that is meant to help you grow (candor).”

In High Output Management, Andy Grove makes the distinction

When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it.
The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.
To determine which, we can employ a simple mental test:
if the person’s life depended on doing the work, could he do it?
If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if the answer is no, he is not capable.
This insight enables a manager to dramatically focus her efforts.
All you can do to improve the output of an employee if motivate and train.
There is nothing else.

Learning to Love Criticism

As managers, we should strive to find opportunities to dish out constructive criticism in such a way that our employees not only internalize it as inspiration to do more but actually seek out and crave that kind of criticism. Much as employees have learned to love criticism at Bridgewater according to Adam Grant. Or love to foster creativity as it’s done on the Daily Show by not fearing criticism; we should strive for the same.

Naturally, not every approach works with everyone in every situation. We strive to build relationships of trust and understanding so that we have the context to customize the interactions to the best outcome. Likewise, we need to navigate each situation according what we discover works in that specific conversation for we may not be conscious of the impact of something that may have transpired at home before work that day for us or our employee that completely changes the frame of mind we each bring into the conversation. As Steven Covey described with the man on the subway in his 7 Habits book, we shouldn’t assume we are aware of all the factors influencing someone else’s behavior.

We strive to hire 10x engineers who love challenges and foster an environment to grow great engineers into phenomenal engineers to become and remain 10x engineers by being 10x managers that also love the challenges of working on various fronts to keep us being a 10x business. Positivity and productivity exist where transparency and challenges are sought out.

Radical Candor Aided by Curiosity

Sheila Heen in her course on Difficult Conversations, makes the point that we should enter a difficult conversation with a curiosity to understand the other person’s perspective (which typically differs from ours) rather than with the intent to convince them of our perspective. In my experience to be curious about how they feel, where they’re coming from, why their perspective differs from mine and not only be enlightening for me, but it can also reduce the defensive barriers that lets the other person also become more curious about where I’m coming from and why… Sheila further goes on to suggest from coming from a place of seeking blame (looking backwards) to Joint Contribution which assumes that in most situations everyone somehow contributed to a discord.

Intent vs Impact

In an ally training at work, we were asked some hypothetical questions. One of them was” “If someone were you approach you and say to your face: ‘You are a racist and a bigot!’ how would you feel?” The visceral reaction is of course one of defensiveness. The idea was for us to empathize with someone we might call out. I prefered a reframing: “I’d like to help you understand what you just said could be heard as racist.” This can shift from defensiveness to curiosity, It is a shift from head on confronting them by implying we know another person’s intent when they do or say things to standing next to them and considering the possible impact on others. Regardless of whatever the actual intent may be, this is more likely to allow for a constructive conversation.

The other kind of “Impact” that can be helpful here is helping the other person appreciate the positive impact a change can have on their effectiveness and career.

This can apply in many situations including the workplace. When addressing an issue at work, it can be very different to stand shoulder to shoulder with an employee when looking at a bad outcome from the perspective of together let’s figure out what went wrong to help avoid it in the future – seeing it as an opportunity. It’s more likely to initiate a productive conversation that a face-to-face, finger pointing confrontation a la “you messed up!”

Nose-to-Nose vs Shoulder-to-Shoulder

When there is conflict in the workplace, it is vital for success to first establish within ourselves that we believe in the other person/people having good intent at their core. Only then should we attempt a conversation with any hope of establishing trust or providing constructive feedback that you hope to be received in a positive manner. Holding this belief ourselves helps us convey our intent of being helpful; this is crucial in allowing others to receive. As humans, our egos have us shut down to feedback and go into defensive or denial mode when we feel attacked.

There are two fundamental questions to ask of all participants before entering into a potentially conflict-laden discussion:

1. Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind whether everyone here is genuinely solving for the best outcome for the business?
2. Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind that no one here harbors ill will towards anyone else here?

If everyone feels clear that the answers to both questions above are “no”, then the search for the best outcome will occur shoulder-to-shoulder. If the answer to either question above is “yes” for anyone in the conversation, that needs to be resolved first. Without getting to the bottom of a “yes” to either question, the odds of getting to the optimal solution are very slim.

Note, If the answer are both unanimous “no”s then perhaps there are two follow-on questions:
3. Even with good intentions, does someone believe harm was caused to the business?
4. Even with good intentions, does someone believe harm was caused to another person?

Vectors of Influence

No matter how carefully you think through, word and time your feedback, it may not land well, and there may be things beyond your control that influence the receptiveness. There may also be things beyond the conversation that influence your ability to deliver the feedback in the moment to that person. So, no matter how much you prepared in advance for the timing and delivery, its also important to check your gut at the start of the conversation on whether the person is in a good state to receive relative to how they usually are. See more at Vectors of Influence.

Fear is Healthy, Panic is Deadly

In the movie Chasing Mavericks, the young surfer returns to the boat after a bad spill. His mentor asks, Why did you panic? The young surfer embarrassingly admits that he was afraid. His mentor comments: “Fear is healthy, panic is deadly.“

When a startup is going through challenging times where staying the course can lead to failure, it is healthy to recognize the risk and consciously course correct – fear is healthy. On the other hand, over-reacting and looking for the first thing or person to point a finger at may cause you to swerve back-and-fourth on your path and also crash – panic is deadly. Or, it could cause you to overlook a more fundamental issue or root cause and you continue on your path towards failure.

So too with giving and receiving feedback. Looking for reasons to be concerned and making course corrections is healthy. Relying on quick, harsh feedback and drastic corrective measures can also be deadly.

Receiving Radical Candor

In my post at Villains.blog, I speak to another way to deal with a confrontation...

In various marital arts, one learns to redirect the opponent’s energy. The harder they come at you, the more they’ll be off balance and the more energy you’ll have to work with. This technique is used in various martial arts including Tai Chi Chuan, Aikido, and Ju Jitsu. Using your opponents’ movements, momentum and focus to your advantage need not be limited to the physical realm. Josh Waitzkin, who include the use of this technique to win the Tai Chi Chuan world championships, would also in chess, on his path to winning nationals, find ways to take advantage of his opponents sense that they had made an effective attack to lure them into a false sense of security causing them to let their guard down and overlook his subtle redirection until it was too late.

In a verbal attack, taking the force head on is typically less effective than of you welcome and even agree with the attack. If someone accuses you of being unethical, the expected response is a defensive one. Instead, if you counter with, “thank you for pointing that out, I didn’t realize what I was saying could be unethical” you have begun to disarm them. You can follow with “that wasn’t my intent, but I’d love to hear your perspective…” you shift from a head-on confrontation to standing shoulder-to-shoulder with them looking at what you said, how it could be interpreted or heard. I have found that often in agreeing with a verbal attack on you, that energy can often be shifted in your favor.

Difficult Conversations – What is Heard

What is heard carries more weight than what is said. Understanding how others hear your words can help you learn to adapt your language and approach. In the end, we may discover that what was heard was more inferred than implied. By agreeing with an attacker’s assault, you may find yourself standing shoulder to shoulder next to them and may have converted an adversary into an ally. You can allow your villains to weaken or strengthen you – it all depends on which wolf you feed.

In Difficult Conversations – How to Discuss What Matters Most, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen also speak to viewing any conflict from a perspective of “contribution” rather than blame – the assumption being that all parties involved typically contribute to some degree to any conflict. When we keep this in mind, it’s also easier to take a shoulder-to-shoulder perspective. Here too though, they focus on contributing factors directly related to the conflict between the two parties and don’t address the other potential Vectors of Influence that may be contributing.

There’s a great TED talk on delivering a receiving criticism as a good thing that challenges us to be better: Adam Grant – WorkLife: How to love criticism.

The Power of “Yet”

Imagine receiving feedback of “you’re not good at giving presentations”, “you’re no expert at running meetings”, “you’re not manager material”, … That phrasing is most likely deflating, taken as criticism, and taken personally. If, however, a slightly altered message it delivered: “you’re not good at giving presentations yet”, “you’re no expert at running meetings yet”, “you’re not manager material yet”, … It can evoke a curiosity. An eagerness to discover what’s missing may result. The impact is lessened and the intent can now be easily framed as helpful. Again, solving a problem or making an improvement is better done in shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration than in face-to-face confrontation. Including “yet” helps establish that you believe in them and their intent.

We’ve since invited Bi-Jingo back a few times to have more classes with actors acting out being the employee receiving feedback and not quite hearing it as exercises for our managers, and everyone has found it to be a very effective way to work through improving on such conversations.

Kim Scott’s Radical Candor

In her book Radical Candor – Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, Kim Scott describes four quadrants for feedback. Scott explains how caring for someone and remaining silent in terms of providing constructive criticism is actually holding them back from improving. She refers to it as “Ruinous Empathy.” She also describes the opposite of that where you don’t care at all and provide feedback obnoxiously and aggressively. Scott further goes on to also speak to how we receive feedback.

Over the years in sports, business and private life, I’ve discovered that with a simple twist in perspective, I can receive feedback delivered as “Obnoxious Aggression” with the positive benefits of Radical Candor. I seek the value I can extract and recognize that every time someone points out a weakness or failing of mine, they are actually doing me a favor by showing me where I can work on being stronger and more successful. This also dis-empowers any aggressive intent to tear me down. Yes, it sounds easier than it is at first, but once you realize you can do it, it becomes a lot easier.

As Helen Reddy once put it

“You can bend but never break me
‘Cause it only serves to make me
More determined to achieve my final goal
And I come back even stronger
Not a novice any longer
‘Cause you’ve deepened the conviction in my soul”

Feedforward instead of Feedback

In “”Try feedforward instead-feedback” Marshall Goldsmith suggests:

“There is a fundamental problem with all types of feedback: it focuses on the past, on what has already occurred—not on the infinite variety of opportunities that can happen in the future. As such, feedback can be limited and static, as opposed to expansive and dynamic.“

While I appreciate the notion and thought that stands behind it, part of the premise is that feedback focuses on mistakes in the past that we can’t change and that we’d rather not be reminded of. Instead, the premise I’m putting forward here is that we see them as gifts of learning opportunities. That being said, seeing them as learning opportunities is actually looking forward as these gifts won’t change the past. However, the value in the gift is that it will change the future.

What does the collective wisdom in Generative AI say?

In today’s world of Digital Transformation happening in parallel to Human Transformation, I decided to get an opinion from two Generative AI sources:

CD: What personality type works best in a work culture of “radical transparency” and “radical candor”?
Note: Bard and ChatGPT had different answers to this question – see below:

Google’s Bard’s Response:

Personality types that work best in a work culture of radical transparency and radical candor are those that are open, honest, and direct. These personality types are able to give and receive feedback in a constructive way, and they are not afraid to challenge the status quo. Some of the personality types that are well-suited for this type of work culture include:

• ENTJ: ENTJs are natural leaders who are comfortable taking charge and making decisions. They are also good at giving feedback and challenging others.
• ENTP: ENTPs are creative and innovative thinkers who are always looking for new ways to do things. They are also good at giving feedback and challenging others.
• INTJ: INTJs are logical and analytical thinkers who are good at seeing the big picture. They are also good at giving feedback and challenging others.
• INFJ: INFJs are empathetic and compassionate listeners who are good at understanding the needs of others. They are also good at giving feedback in a way that is supportive and constructive.
• ISFP: ISFPs are genuine and authentic individuals who are good at expressing their feelings. They are also good at giving feedback in a way that is honest and direct.

However, it is important to note that no single personality type is perfect for a work culture of radical transparency and radical candor. The most important thing is to be willing to be open, honest, and direct, regardless of your personality type.

Google’s Bard follows with …

Here are some tips for thriving in a work culture of radical transparency and radical candor:

• Be clear about your expectations. When you are giving feedback, be clear about what you are trying to achieve. Are you trying to help the person improve their performance? Are you trying to build a better relationship?
• Be specific. Don’t just say “good job” or “you need to improve.” Be specific about what the person did well or what they need to work on.
• Be respectful. Even if you are giving negative feedback, be respectful of the person’s feelings. Remember that they are trying their best, and they want to improve.
• Be open to feedback yourself. If you are open to feedback, others will be more likely to be open to your feedback.

Radical transparency and radical candor can be a challenging work culture, but it can also be very rewarding. If you are willing to be open, honest, and direct, you can thrive in this type of environment.

Open AI’s ChatGPT Response:

A work culture of “radical transparency” and “radical candor” values open and honest communication, direct feedback, and a willingness to confront difficult issues head-on. In such a culture, certain personality traits and characteristics are particularly well-suited:

Traits:

• Assertiveness: Individuals who are comfortable expressing their thoughts and opinions clearly and confidently are often successful in cultures of radical transparency. They don’t shy away from difficult conversations and are willing to speak up when necessary
• Empathy: While radical transparency promotes honesty, it’s essential that individuals also demonstrate empathy and understanding toward their colleagues. Being able to deliver candid feedback in a way that considers others’ feelings and perspectives is crucial
• Resilience: In a culture where direct feedback is the norm, individuals need to be resilient. They should be able to accept criticism constructively, learn from it, and bounce back from setbacks without becoming overly defensive.
• Open-Mindedness: People who are open to new ideas, different perspectives, and alternative solutions thrive in a culture of radical transparency. They are more likely to embrace change and adapt to evolving situations.
• Communication Skills: Strong communication skills are vital in a culture where candid conversations are encouraged. Effective communicators can express their thoughts clearly and listen actively to others, fostering productive dialogue.
• Self-Awareness: Knowing one’s own strengths and weaknesses is crucial in a culture that values self-reflection and feedback. Self-aware individuals are more likely to acknowledge their areas for improvement and work on them.
• High Integrity: A commitment to honesty and ethical behavior is a foundational requirement in a culture of radical transparency. Individuals with high integrity are more likely to maintain trust and credibility.
• Courage: It takes courage to provide honest feedback and to be open about one’s own mistakes. Individuals who aren’t afraid to face uncomfortable situations and make tough decisions are valuable in such a culture.
• Adaptability: Organizations with radical transparency often evolve rapidly. Those who can adapt to changing circumstances, technologies, and strategies are better equipped to thrive in this environment.
• Team Orientation: While individual accountability is crucial, collaboration is also essential. People who can balance direct feedback with a sense of teamwork and collaboration tend to excel in this culture.
• Leadership Skills: In a culture of radical transparency, leaders must lead by example. Leaders who are open, approachable, and willing to receive feedback themselves set a positive tone for the entire organization.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT concludes:

It’s important to note that not everyone’s personality traits align perfectly with such a culture, and that’s okay. Diversity in personality and communication styles can be beneficial, as long as there is a shared commitment to the principles of radical transparency and radical candor. Additionally, organizations should provide training and support to help employees develop the skills necessary to thrive in this culture and create a safe and constructive environment for candid communication.

Radical Candor in Coaching

The Co-Active Training Institute, is the oldest and largest international organization to train coaches to be in service of their clients in helping them grow. Much of the coaching terminology is about being candid, holding the client and accountable and challenging them. Clients pay their coaches to help them grow. Being candid and challenging, when done appropriately, is in service of the client. As leaders and managers, we create a win-win scenario when we see the relationship as being symbiotic. We can and should be candid with and challenge those we lead. Even in coaching, Kim Scott’s notion of ruinous empathy exists in that if we only coddle and never challenge our clients implies that we are not really helping them.

Aspects of Candid Coaching

Co-Active Coaching includes various aspects of being candid and challenging clients:

• Accountability – holding clients to account for what they said they were going to do.
• Asking Permission – opening the door to access areas of focus. For example, “May I tell you a hard truth?”
• Challenging – requesting that a client stretch way beyond his or her self-imposed limits, AND SHAKES UP THE WAY THEY SEE THEMSELVES.
• Commitment – asking a client “What are you committed to?”
• Evoking Transformation – a coach’s job is to call forth the greatest possibility for the client.
• Forwarding Action & Deepening Learning – moving the client forward.
• Goal Setting – keeping clients focused and on track toward who they are becoming.
• Holding Focus – the coach’s job is to keep the client on track and true to that course.
• Inquiring – to provoke further reflection.
• Intruding – a coach may need to intrude, to interrupt or wake up a client who is going on and on, or who is kidding himself or herself.
• Powerful Questions – holding the client’s agenda and either forward the client’s action or deepen their learning.
• Requesting – designed to forward the client’s action. The request includes a specified action, conditions of satisfaction and a date or time by which it will be done.
• Taking Charge – a coach may need to take charge and direct the coaching back to what is most meaningful to the client.

Pure Storage’s Founder’s Take

“As we all go through our journey at Pure, remember that we are evolving and changing.
We will never reach perfection, but we should always be striving to do better.
This concept of evolution and change is something that we have incorporated into our company values in
everything you should be asking yourself:
Is there a better way? Can we improve this?
Great ideas for improvement come from all of us. Never be satisfied with the way everyone else has done it. Be satisfied with the right way, the best way and please drive that spirit into everything we do.”

– Coz – Founder and CTO, Pure Storage

Radical Candor, Meaningful Conversations with Your Boss

One of the most difficult forms of feedback can be “Upward Radical Candor.” People in leadership or authority roles who may also have lots of experience may feel their perspectives hold more weight. They might also have a certain ego that may helped them get to the level they are at. Furthermore, they may have a very direct power over your destiny within an organization, they could control whether you get a raise or promotion. They could determine what interesting assignments you get, or not. If they feel challenged by you, that could influence how much you enjoy your job.

Having them appreciate and trust that you’re coming from a place of wanting to help may be seem and often be trickier than providing feedback to a subordinate or even peer. However, if done effectively, it can greatly improve the work environment, how things are done and truly help the person receiving the feedback. No one is always “right” in every decision they make or perspective they hold. We all can and should continuously learn and grow.

One approach I’ve found useful is the “help me understand …” approach. If you hear or observe something that you feel could be done “better,” you could lead with “Help me understand as I thinking I’m missing something. I would be inclined to take a different approach, and I would appreciate learning the benefits of your approach. Of course, if used too often, they’ll see through it, but will tend to still appreciate this approach as it leaves all perspectives open to consideration without declaring one ass better or worse.

Radical Candor by the Numbers

P.S. Laura from Bi-Jingo in opening, also mentioned a study that showed managers could have a 39% impact on employee productivity through meaningful conversations. Searching finds the study Managing for High Performance and Retention An HR Toolkit for Supporting the Line Manager which pulled from Datasets with more than 90,000 employees from 135 organizations supported the analyses presented with that report. I do believe there can be very substantial impact on employee performance through good management. However, I’m skeptical the causality could be isolated and measured that precisely. It’s an interesting read nonetheless.

CD

See Also

• Where to Begin the Journey (CD)
• The Room Where it Happens (CD)
• Powerful Questions and Active Listening (CD)
• Carol Dweck – The Power of Yet
• Kerry Patterson – Crucial Conversations
• Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen – Difficult ConversationsHow to Discuss What Matters Most
• Kim Scott – 6 Tips for Giving Helpful Feedback
• Kim Scott – RadicalCandor.com
• Website: Radical Candor
• Book: Kim Scott Radical Candor – Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
• Adele Faber, Elaine Mazlish – How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk 
• Rand – Say the Hard Thing.
• Adam Grant – WorkLife: How to love criticism | TED Talk
• Adam Grant – The Most Undervalued Employee in Your Business
  Wharton professor Adam Grant reveals the kind of person who’s really the key to making teams succeed.
• Ray Dalio – Principles – Life and Work
• Eric Schmidt: Trillion Dollar Coach – The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell
• John Dickson: Humilitas – A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership
• Ian Leslie: Curious – The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It
• Hugh Molotsi – Receiving feedback graciously can be hard, but it’s an absolutely vital professional and life skill
• Nobel Coaching – The Growth Mindset – The Power Of Yet
• Jennifer Jabaley – Laws of Leadership: Tips for Improving How You Manage Your Practice
• John Maxwell – The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
• Chris Shenton – Gen Z in the workplace: Culture needs to be ‘frequent feedback’ focussed
• First Round Review: On Receiving (and Truly Hearing) Radical Candor

On Upward Candor:

• Brandi Neal: How to Practice Radical Candor With Your Boss
• Angela Lötscher: How to Practice Radical Candor with Your Boss
• Kim Scott: How to Practice Radical Candor With Your Boss
• Forbes: How To Deliver Constructive Feedback To Your Manager
• Harvard Business Review: How to Give Your Boss Feedback
• Indeed: How To Give Your Manager Feedback (With Examples)
• BetterUp: How to give feedback to your boss: tips for getting started
• Lattice: How to Give Your Boss Feedback Without Sounding Like a Jerk

On the need for holding people accountable and why leaders struggle with it:

• HBR: One Out of Every Two Managers Is Terrible at Accountability
• First Round: Our 6 Must Reads for Cutting Through Conflict and Tough Conversations
• Entrepreneur: 6 Actions Even the Least Confrontational Managers Must Take to Hold Employees Accountable
• Forbes: How To Improve Management Accountability In Your Organization
• Medium: How to Really Hold People Accountable
• Predictive Index: Holding employees accountable: where most leaders fail
• Insperity: How to improve accountability in the workplace in 5 steps
• HR Bartender: Hold Managers Accountable For Developing Talent
• Thought Leader: 4 Reasons Why You Can’t Hold People Accountable
• HBR: The Right Way to Hold People Accountable
• INC: Why Great Leaders Struggle to Hold Their Employees Accountable
• INC: The No. 1 Mistake Managers Make When Holding Their Staff Accountable
• Forbes: The Best Managers – Always – Hold People Accountable

Radical Candor in Coaching

The Co-Active Training Institute, is the oldest and largest international organization to train coaches to be in service of their clients in helping them grow. Much of the coaching terminology is about being candid, holding the client and accountable and challenging them. Clients pay their coaches to help them grow. Being candid and challenging, when done appropriately, is in service of the client. As leaders and managers, we create a win-win scenario when we see the relationship as being symbiotic. We can and should be candid with and challenge those we lead. Even in coaching, Kim Scott’s notion of ruinous empathy exists in that if we only coddle and never challenge our clients implies that we are not really helping them.

Aspects of Candid Coaching

Co-Active Coaching includes various aspects of being candid and challenging clients:

• Accountability – holding clients to account for what they said they were going to do.
• Asking Permission – opening the door to access areas of focus. For example, “May I tell you a hard truth?”
• Challenging – requesting that a client stretch way beyond his or her self-imposed limits, AND SHAKES UP THE WAY THEY SEE THEMSELVES.
• Commitment – asking a client “What are you committed to?”
• Evoking Transformation – a coach’s job is to call forth the greatest possibility for the client.
• Forwarding Action & Deepening Learning – moving the client forward.
• Goal Setting – keeping clients focused and on track toward who they are becoming.
• Holding Focus – the coach’s job is to keep the client on track and true to that course.
• Inquiring – to provoke further reflection.
• Intruding – a coach may need to intrude, to interrupt or wake up a client who is going on and on, or who is kidding himself or herself.
• Powerful Questions – holding the client’s agenda and either forward the client’s action or deepen their learning.
• Requesting – designed to forward the client’s action. The request includes a specified action, conditions of satisfaction and a date or time by which it will be done.
• Taking Charge – a coach may need to take charge and direct the coaching back to what is most meaningful to the client.

Radical Candor, Meaningful Conversations with Your Boss

One of the most difficult forms of feedback can be “Upward Radical Candor.” People in leadership or authority roles who may also have lots of experience may feel their perspectives hold more weight. They might also have a certain ego that may helped them get to the level they are at. Furthermore, they may have a very direct power over your destiny within an organization, they could control whether you get a raise or promotion. They could determine what interesting assignments you get, or not. If they feel challenged by you, that could influence how much you enjoy your job.

Having them appreciate and trust that you’re coming from a place of wanting to help may be seem and often be trickier than providing feedback to a subordinate or even peer. However, if done effectively, it can greatly improve the work environment, how things are done and truly help the person receiving the feedback. No one is always “right” in every decision they make or perspective they hold. We all can and should continuously learn and grow.

One approach I’ve found useful is the “help me understand …” approach. If you hear or observe something that you feel could be done “better,” you could lead with “Help me understand as I thinking I’m missing something. I would be inclined to take a different approach, and I would appreciate learning the benefits of your approach. Of course, if used too often, they’ll see through it, but will tend to still appreciate this approach as it leaves all perspectives open to consideration without declaring one ass better or worse.

Radical Candor by the Numbers

P.S. Laura from Bi-Jingo in opening, also mentioned a study that showed managers could have a 39% impact on employee productivity through meaningful conversations. Searching finds the study Managing for High Performance and Retention An HR Toolkit for Supporting the Line Manager which pulled from Datasets with more than 90,000 employees from 135 organizations supported the analyses presented with that report. I do believe there can be very substantial impact on employee performance through good management. However, I’m skeptical the causality could be isolated and measured that precisely. It’s an interesting read nonetheless.

CD

See Also

• Where to Begin the Journey (CD)
• The Room Where it Happens (CD)
• Powerful Questions and Active Listening (CD)
• Carol Dweck – The Power of Yet
• Kerry Patterson – Crucial Conversations
• Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen – Difficult ConversationsHow to Discuss What Matters Most
• Kim Scott – 6 Tips for Giving Helpful Feedback
• Kim Scott – RadicalCandor.com
• Website: Radical Candor
• Book: Kim Scott Radical Candor – Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
• Adele Faber, Elaine Mazlish – How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk 
• Rand – Say the Hard Thing.
• Adam Grant – WorkLife: How to love criticism | TED Talk
• Adam Grant – The Most Undervalued Employee in Your Business
  Wharton professor Adam Grant reveals the kind of person who’s really the key to making teams succeed.
• Ray Dalio – Principles – Life and Work
• Eric Schmidt: Trillion Dollar Coach – The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell
• John Dickson: Humilitas – A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership
• Ian Leslie: Curious – The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It
• Hugh Molotsi – Receiving feedback graciously can be hard, but it’s an absolutely vital professional and life skill
• Nobel Coaching – The Growth Mindset – The Power Of Yet
• Jennifer Jabaley – Laws of Leadership: Tips for Improving How You Manage Your Practice
• John Maxwell – The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
• Chris Shenton – Gen Z in the workplace: Culture needs to be ‘frequent feedback’ focussed
• First Round Review: On Receiving (and Truly Hearing) Radical Candor

On Upward Candor:

• Brandi Neal: How to Practice Radical Candor With Your Boss
• Angela Lötscher: How to Practice Radical Candor with Your Boss
• Kim Scott: How to Practice Radical Candor With Your Boss
• Forbes: How To Deliver Constructive Feedback To Your Manager
• Harvard Business Review: How to Give Your Boss Feedback
• Indeed: How To Give Your Manager Feedback (With Examples)
• BetterUp: How to give feedback to your boss: tips for getting started
• Lattice: How to Give Your Boss Feedback Without Sounding Like a Jerk

On the need for holding people accountable and why leaders struggle with it:

• HBR: One Out of Every Two Managers Is Terrible at Accountability
• First Round: Our 6 Must Reads for Cutting Through Conflict and Tough Conversations
• Entrepreneur: 6 Actions Even the Least Confrontational Managers Must Take to Hold Employees Accountable
• Forbes: How To Improve Management Accountability In Your Organization
• Medium: How to Really Hold People Accountable
• Predictive Index: Holding employees accountable: where most leaders fail
• Insperity: How to improve accountability in the workplace in 5 steps
• HR Bartender: Hold Managers Accountable For Developing Talent
• Thought Leader: 4 Reasons Why You Can’t Hold People Accountable
• HBR: The Right Way to Hold People Accountable
• INC: Why Great Leaders Struggle to Hold Their Employees Accountable
• INC: The No. 1 Mistake Managers Make When Holding Their Staff Accountable
• Forbes: The Best Managers – Always – Hold People Accountable

The WEF estimates that it will take the U.S. another 208 years to reach gender equality; so, women and minorities may need to lean in for some time. As leaders though, we should lean out to create space so others may lean in.

I’ve had the uncommon pleasure in my career of reporting into five women VPs of Engineering. In my fourth role as VP of Engineering. I continue to appreciate the lessons I received from my mentors. My partner and our three girls continually inspire me with their strength, conviction, and empathy.

Collaborative leadership is gaining traction in market where technological changes are accelerating. In areas needing continuing innovation and pivoting, top-down management is a thing of the past, and Meghan Casserly wrote for Forbes that the Majority of Americans Would Rather Fire their Boss Than Get a Raise.

I was dismayed at my first impression of  Lean In – Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. I thought I should write a blog post entitled Lean Out – Men Learning a More Collaborative Approach. It seemed Sheryl Sandberg was advocating women behave more like the stereotypical, traditional, Type-A, white American male. The value of diversity as described in Diversity: The New Global Mindset offers a contrast, and since the publication of Lean In, much more has been written on qualities of leaders. In her course Radical Candor Kim Scott points out that Sheryl Sandberg managed her from a place of caring. 

Should we lean in “up” and lean out “down?”

After reading Liz Wiseman’s Multipliers – How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, I arrived at a refined perspective on how and when to lean. The refined perspective: one should indeed lean in when finding ourselves amongst more senior staff. This creates opportunity to inject new ideas and be heard. As a quiet person, I was coached to be more heard by a retired exec from IBM. In 29 years of management, I’ve learned that Leaning Out is empowering for those I lead.

As leaders, we should lean out to empower quieter or more junior colleagues, and we create space for them to lean in. Leaning in, we diminish and dis-empower – denying our team members and junior colleagues opportunity to lean in and contribute. Wiseman speaks of the overly assertive, proactive, vocal leaders as Diminishers. She argues that they continue to operate in a one brain, many hands organizational model. This stunts growth of intelligence and talent around them, and Wiseman suggests multiplying value by creating opportunity and space to be more proactive and participatory.

The moment of lift

In The Moment of Lift – How Empowering Women Changes the World Melinda Gates uses examples from many situations around the world where oppressed women did need to lean in. Leaning into oppressive situations can lift them out of their circumstances. This ultimately came to great benefit to their communities including those that had oppressed them.

Girls and women benefit from having self-confidence as Reshma Saujani describes in her Ted talk, and I have experience teaching K-8. She also writes about this in her book Brave not Perfect. VP of Engineering, Rukmini Reddy describes the challenges she faced. She describes them in Becoming a bad-ass engineering leader: 5 tried and true lessons from a woman of color. The #MeToo movement also underscores the need to speak up, and lean in.

Many like to believe we’re past biases in today’s world. The hierarchy of deference and unconscious bias plays out on sidewalks of cities every day. Split second decisions are made by the billions on who will alter their course to avoid a collision. Choices are made based on culture, gender, age, race, attire, posture, eye contact, stride, physical size, pace, facial expression, …

As teachers, coaches, managers, parents, adults, humans, … we should recognize we’re in a position to plant new ideas. We can foster confidence, potential, almost invincibility and sense of worthiness in those that look up to us. We can help them recognize the potential within them to unlock abilities they previously didn’t realize they possessed.

Lean out by being the last to speak

Simon Sinek advises “be the last to speak” (lean out) so those of us who are rarely or never heard to speak (to lean in).

“I see it in boardrooms every day of the week, even people who consider themselves to be good leaders, who may actually be decent leaders, will walk into the room and say, ‘Here’s the problem. Here’s what I think, but I’m interested in your opinion. Let’s go around the room.’ It’s too late,”

In Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic brings up the distinction between competence and confidence. He suggests that men typically have a confidence that exceeds what their competence might warrant and vice versa. Many cases that can be made for why women should lean in more to break through barriers. We should lean out for those we lead to create the space to become empowered and impactful without needing to lean in so hard. Don’t give into confidence villains, but also don’t become one.

Leaning out doesn’t equate to not needing to be candid. Built on a relationship of trust, radical candor can come from a place of caring that allows it to be better received in Radically Candid Conversations. Likewise, listening and observing to more senior mentors and leaders also has its value.

Lean out and remain competitive

Leaning out in a business that wants to aggressively move forward can be challenging. A knowledgeable leader is often more expedient leaning into any situation to provide the solution. Our good intent may prevent our teams to arrive there on their own. Perhaps it’s better to ask with open questions: What would you do? What about potential challenges? It is still more expedient to just tell them the “right” answer. By disempowering others, we remain required for every decision and it becomes less expedient over even a short period of time. It can hard to resist that temptation when we are eager to move forward quickly, and you may be missing great opportunities for more innovative and/or effective approaches.

Leaning out and in

On another note regarding leaning in or out, in Katty Kay’s and Claire Shipman’s book The Confidence Code – The Science and Art of Self-Assurance – What Women Should Know they make reference to a Stanford Business School Study that revealed that women who combined the qualities typically found in men (assertion, aggression, confidence) along with qualities more typically found in women (collaboration, process-orientation, persuasion, humility) do better than others. Note, oddly, the study did not reveal this advantage when men adoption both sets of traits – though I still suspect they’re missing something there. Note, as I point out in confidence villains, I think Kay and Shipman miss the power that can be derived from “confidence villains.”

Patty Azzarello provides a great perspective on managing up, down and across in her book Rise – 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life. Her views of leveraging the strengths of her team – leaning out, while focusing on the impact you can make as a leader – including influencing across and up akin to leaning in.

Leaning out according to the Athena Doctrine

In The Athena Doctrine – How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future John Gerzema and Michael D’Antonio present survey results. They spanned age, gender and culture what the found as shared belief in Lean Out Leadership Qualities of the ideal modern leader:

• A person who is patient, flexible, intuitive, reasonable, passionate, empathetic, selfless, loyal…
• Across the globe, people want a more expressive style of leader:
• Someone who shares their feelings and emotions openly & honestly.
• They want to connect with those in power more personally
• They want leaders who will break a gridlock through reason not ideology
• A long-term thinker who plans for a sustainable future (not posturing for expediency)
• Cause-driven leaders (not self focused)
• Leaders that are flexible, that listen, build consensus
• Decisiveness and resilience (considered more masculine traits) are important but the data highlighted the definition of “winning” is changing

  • It’s becoming about a more inclusive construct than a zero-sum game!
  • It’s more effective to collaborate and share credit than to show aggression and control.

Lean out to create well over a trillion dollars in market value

In Trillion Dollar Coach, Eric Schmidt describes how Bill Campbell built relationships of trust founded on lean-out principles. I had the pleasure of working at Intuit while Bill was at the helm and under Brad Smith whom he groomed as his replacement. Bill and Brad both lead from the heart. These leaders could be brutally honest, but that it always came from a lean out place of caring. As I describe in greater detail at RadicalCandor.blog, if you lay a foundation of trust, that tough love can be very helpful. See Also – Slideshare: Eric Schmidt – Trillion Dollar Coach Book (Bill Campbell)

Going counter to hierarchy in Germany

A few months into my first full time tech job in Munich, our HR person passed me in the hallway. She shook her finger at me and just said “Just wait, I’ll figure it out!” She had been confused how I held such influence given her background in sociology. Being the clearly youngest in a hierarchical society, I still managed to hold quite a bit of influence. She concluded I did it through love. She said it was clear to everyone that I would gladly help anyone in any situation and hence, they in turn seemed very happy to help me with anything I might ever need.

Being compassionate and collaborative has been an lean out cornerstone of my style of leadership. I feel good about my impact on others – when I leading through influence rather than by edict or title. I have certainly since experienced what others are willing to do for me once they realize that I will do whatever I can to help them. In The Moment of Lift, Melinda Gates says “Love is the most powerful and underused force for change in the world.” She also describes characteristics typically attributed to women in various cultures around the globe. She points out how they have been a force of change for the better. She also speaks to her husband, Bill Gates, as having many “Lean Out” qualities.

Leaning out on the battle-front

In Simon Sinek’s Why good leaders make you feel safe, he references Medal of Honor recipient Army Major William D. Swenson, who brought his wounded sergeant, Kenneth Westbrook to a helicopter for evacuation, kissed him on the forehead before returning to the “kill zone” for more trips in an unarmored vehicle to evacuate additional wounded. When Sinek asked others in the military willing to go under fire to rescue their comrades “why did you do it?” They all said because they would’ve done it for me.

In Dare to Lead Brené Brown references humanness in the Air Force Manual 35-15.  Written in 1948, these words no longer exists in the latest version of the manual. “A discussion of feeling – how men would feel – was referred to 147 times. The importance of creating a sense of belonging was mentioned 21 times. The fear of combat, the fear of exclusion, the fear of life in a profession of arms will bring was mentioned 35 times. Love – what it means as a leader to love your men – was brought up 13 times.” Even the post World War II war machine of the USAF recognized these leadership traits as being important.

In their own summary of their book The Dichotomy of Leadership – Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin point out leaders must “Care deeply about their people and their individual success and livelihoods, yet look out for the good of the overall team and above all accomplish the strategic mission.” Compassionate leaders are often seen as weak; however, these traits are often leveraged and underscored by some of the strongest leaders facing life and death situations as being critical to success.

Lean out traits

Google did extensive research together with the Harvard Business Review published in Project Oxygen. As described in Michael Schneider’s Google Spent Years Studying Effective Bosses. Now They Teach New Managers These 6 Things The transition to management requires a transformation of thought, Google has since arrived at the following six things to teach their managers:

1. Mindset and Values revolving around Carol Dweck’s philosophy around Growth Mindsets that I came across almost 20 years ago as an educator.
2. Emotional Intelligence as based upon Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: What Makes a Leader?
3. Manager Transition making managers more comfortable with being vulnerable and honest as per their new manager’s guide.
4. Coaching as revealed through Project Oxygen, the number one quality of effective managers is being a good coach. 
5. Feedback in recognition of a manager’s potential build or destroy.
6. Decision making leveraging effective collaboration through ensuring judgments aren’t made in a vacuum.

Lean out traits called out by speakers and authors

Well-know authors and speakers make strong cases (often based in much research) for leveraging lean out traits as ways for leaders to achieve success are illustrated using multiple examples from today’s business world…

Culture  

Daniel Coyle describes and illustrates how a cohesive, motivated culture is the foundation of highly successful groups in The Culture Code – The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups.

Curiosity

Ian Leslie looks at what feeds and starves both epistemic curiosity (which relies on effort and persistence) and empathic curiosity (which leads us to wonder about the thoughts and feelings of others). Both forms of curiosity can be empowering in life and business. In Curious – The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It, based on research from psychology, sociology, and business.

Diversity

Tiffany Pham has built a highly successful recruiting firm around the notion that hiring diverse talent brings diverse perspectives and approaches into how everything is done within your organization. In You Are a Mogul – How to Do the Impossible, Do It Yourself, and Do It Now  she describes how she herself was able to leverage her perspectives and approaches in building a successful business.

Emotion

Daniel Goleman, as the first to identify emotional intelligence as a critical factor in leadership performance and success, underscores how emotional intelligence can be more impactful than one’s IQ in his classic Emotional Intelligence: What Makes a Leader?,

Empathy

Michael Ventura not only speaks to empathy within a company as an effective means of achieving success but also empathy with customers. His business Sub Rosa have leveraged empathy to help businesses such as Delta, General Electric, Levi’s New Balance, and Nike find great success in connecting with their customer base in Applied Empathy.

Simon Sinek underscores the need for empathy. He explains the downsides of the traditional “how do I get the best out of my people” of the past of primary focus being on increasing share-holder value to “how do I help my people be at their natural best” which is how I, as a leader, can enable others to be more effective and impactful in his talk, Most leaders don’t even know the game they are in,

Harmony – Or, lack thereof?  

Darko Lovric references research that shows creativity and innovation can be enhanced by reducing team harmony some discord can feed creativity; naturally, the occurs best in a supportive environment of trust. A team that seems very peaceful may actually be a team doesn’t feel free to express their opinions. In my experience, discord is actually often a sign of a deeper, healthy harmony. A good leader may often elicit healthy conflict and adversity by welcoming challenges to his/her perspectives. Darko suggests that “Psychological safety creates an atmosphere of participation and trust that allows members to actively engage in risky social behaviors such as disagreements and criticisms, as well as non-defensive and open responses to those risky behaviors” in Too Much Team Harmony Can Kill Creativity 

Humility

John Dickson describes how his research of highly successful leaders lead him to conclude that without humility, many people fail to develop their true leadership potential and miss out on genuine fulfillment in their lives and their relationships. Leaning out so others may lean in is an act of humility in Humilitas – A Lost Key to Life, Love, and Leadership,

Inspiration

Simon Sinek‘s Start with Why was the third most popular TED video of all time. He makes the case that being inspired by a meaningful “why” / purpose,  people and organizations are more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others in Start with Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action,

Integrity

A core value without which all the others lose their foundation. Warren Buffett Says This Is the Most Important Leadership Trait You Should Have. Most businesses tout Integrity as a core value. There are many things written about how one can demonstrate integrity, but integrity can be emulated – people will figure it out over time and many sense it at a first encounter.

Ownership

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin use several example from the field and business to underscore the value of leaders taking ownership. They “own it” when thing go wrong instead of attributing it to others or circumstances beyond their control. In their follow-up book, The Dichotomy of Leadership they call out things shouldn’t be taken to the extreme, but are very contextual. It’s a follow-up to Extreme Ownership – How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

Trust

In The Speed of Trust – The One Thing that Changes Everything, Stephen M. R. Covey makes a strong case that trust greatly accelerates and amplifies success. Creating space and enabling others to lean in comes from a place of trust.  

Joel Peterson, Chairman, JetBlue Airways, also underscores the critically of establishing and maintaining trust as a leader and suggests in his book, The 10 Laws of TrustBuilding the Bonds That Make a Business Great

Start with integrity
Invest in respect
Empower everyone
Require accountability
Create a winning vision
Keep everyone informed
Budget in line with expectations
Embrace conflict
Forget “you” to become an effective leader

Truth

Ray Dalio describes “radical truth” and “radical transparency.” He makes the case for these as the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams in Principles – Life and Work,

Vulnerability

Brené Brown helps us appreciate vulnerable leaders Those who responsibly recognize potential in people and ideas and have the courage to develop that potential.  She explains how when we dare to lead, we don’t pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. Instead of seeing power as finite and hoarding it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. Avoiding difficult conversations and situations is one option; or, we lean into vulnerability when it’s necessary to do good work.  Leaning out requires us to have some degree of vulnerability in Dare to Lead – Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts,

Lean out by whispering

If we want to ride a wild mustang, we can break the horse’s spirit. Or, we can choose the approach of a horse whisperer that will lean out to slowly builds a relationship of trust. This allows that mustang’s spirit to live on. In today’s world where talent is expensive and hard to hire, develop and retain. Organizations do better when they keep alive and feed spirit, innovation, drive and willingness to take risks. In my relationship to horses and people, I have found reward in the approach of the Whisperer. Leaders are better served if we acted as Talent Whisperers.

We may need to lean in to create space for ourselves to grow upward, to challenge norms in the interest of continuous improvement, but we should also remember that leaning in one direction is facilitated by leaning away from another. If we lean out to create space for those we lead, we empower them to lean in/grow and strengthen the team. Hence the notion of lean in “up” and lean out “down” is a win-win approach.

CD

See also:

Videos and Ted Talks on leaning out:

• Sheryl Sandberg – Why we have too few women leaders 
• Liz Wiseman – Multipliers: How the best leaders make everyone smarter
• Simon Sinek – Why good leaders make you feel safe
• Daniel Coyle – The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups | RSA Replay
• Simon Sinek – Most leaders don’t even know the game they are in,
• Review for The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell
• Frances Frei: How to build (and rebuild) trust

Lean out Books:

• Sheryl Sandberg – Lean In – Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
• Liz Wiseman: Multipliers – How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
• Patty Azzarello – Rise – 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career Standing Out as a Leader, and Liking Your Life
• Tiffany Pham –  You Are a Mogul – How to Do the Impossible, Do It Yourself, and Do It Now
• Daniel Coyle – The Culture Code – The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
• Katty Kay and Claire Shipman – The Confidence Code- The Science and Art of Self-Assurance – What Women Should Know
• Kim Scott – Radical Candor – Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
• Ken Blanchard, Renee Broadwell Servant Leadership in Action – How You Can Achieve Great Relationships and Results
• Mark C. Crowley – Lead From The Heart: Transformational Leadership For The 21st Century.
• Reshma Saujani: Brave, Not Perfect – Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder
• Emily Chang: Brotopia – Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley. Chang describes a silicon valley that really makes you appreciate the Lean In and MeToo movements.
• Sydney Finkelstein: Superbosses – How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent. Finkelstein points out that “Glorious Bastards” can also be revered, respected and highly successful. However, in his examples, their successes are largely derived from those they inspired, mentored and challenged.
• Marissa Orr – Lean Out – The Truth About Women, Power, and the Workplace – “With female-dominant strengths such as empathy and consensus-building being the future of business, the headlines forecast that women will dominate the future generations of corporate leaders. But that won’t happen until prescriptions for success stop requiring women to act more like men, mistaking traits such as empathy as signals of weakness.”

Lean out Articles:

• The Cut: Michelle Obama Is Done With the Gospel of ‘Lean In.’
• Diversity: The New Global Mindset
• Center for Talent Innovation – CTI’s research explores challenges posed by gender, generation, culture, and sexual orientation differences.
• Adam Grant WorkLife podcast How to love criticism
• Vivian Kane – Michelle Obama Is Absolutely Right About “That Lean In Sh**””That whole ‘so you can have it all.’ … That’s a lie.”
• Michael Schneider – Google Spent Years Studying Effective Bosses. Now They Teach New Managers These 6 Things The transition to management requires a transformation of thought.
• Brad Smith, Intuit CEO: How To Be A Great Leader: Get Out Of The Way
• Don Peppers Assume Good Intentions in Others
• Rasmus Hougaard, Jacqueline Carter, Vince Brewerton – Why Do So Many Managers Forget They’re Human Beings?
• Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic – Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?
• Darko Lovric – Too Much Team Harmony Can Kill Creativity
• Meghan Casserly – Majority Of Americans Would Rather Fire their Boss Than Get A Raise
• Jim Goodnight: How SAS Became The World’s Best Place To Work
• Praseeda Nair: 4 leadership lessons from horse whispering
• Ellen Degeneres: Leading By Heart – Leading For The People: Be kind to one another.
• Marissa Orr – Stereotypes Surrounding Working Women
• Marissa Orr – Facebook And Google Veteran –  The Truth About Women, Power And The Workplace In “Lean Out”

Other lean out reference information

The Center for Talent Innovation’s Research & Insights has a collection of related reference material. Their mission is “to drive ground-breaking research that leverages talent across the divides of gender, generation, geography and culture; and to create a community of senior executives united by an understanding that full utilization of the global talent pool is at the heart of competitive success.“

I also keep a list of books I recommend is at TalentWhisperers.com/Books.  I continually read and learn as I feel we can really only effectively grow others if we continue to grow ourselves. American author Alvin Toffler said: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

The University of Washington’s Resilience Lab‘s graphic and research behind it captures much of what we want to enable as leaders to lean out, empower and support.Women, Power And The Workplace In “Lean Out”

Talent Code is a book where Daniel Coyle describes deep learning through short repetitions and feedback loops. I have applied this approach in coaching sports and in business.

Talent Code’s REPS approach (Reaching/Repeating, Engagement, Purposefulness, Strong, direct feedback) can be applied in software development, and it can also grow the talent in your business / engineering organization This is referred to in The Lean Startup as the Build/Measure/Learn feedback cycle, and though the focus there is on learning, innovating and improving on customer needs, the same applies to the teams iterating through the process of finding the best way on executing delivery to that end.

I applied this approach on a ski trip with my friend Joe for whom it was his second time on skis. Instead of doing a few runs on the bunny slope, we went to the top of the mountain is did very many, very short traverses going down the hill. That approach resulted in well over 100 falls on that day, but after each traverse that initially ended in a fall, there was opportunity for very immediate and relevant feedback.

Talent Code on the Slopes

Not everyone learning to ski would have followed me to the top of the mountain in near gale force winds for their second time skiing ever. Most who have heard this story tell me they don’t want to learn to ski with me. However, Joe trusted me and followed me up there, was willing to fall, get up, listen to what I had to say, and he would go again knowing full well the most likely outcome would be another fall.

Joe got up from each fall, and he didn’t think about the last or next fall even – he was thinking about getting feedback on what went wrong so he could do it better on the next stretch. Not everyone has the perseverance and courage to do that, and I give Joe a lot of credit for that. It does also help to have established a relationship of trust that I was solving for his learning and growth. That foundation of trust is vital if you hope to guide individuals into trying new things they may not be comfortable with.

I later came across an interview with Tim Ferriss included at the end of The Art of Learning – An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by chess and Tai Chi world champion Josh Waitzkin. Josh relates his experience skiing with ’60s Olympic legend Billy Kidd. Billy asked him:

“Josh, what do you think are the three most important turns of a ski run?”

Billy points out: “if your last three turns are precise, then what you’re internalizing on the lift ride up is precision.” We did many short traverses instead of a couple of long runs, and we reviewed each one. He was able to internalize what he did right and what he needed to improve after each fall.

Range – David Epstein’s Perspective

In his book Range – Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein sites a longs list of examples across multiple fields that demonstrate the value of not focusing on becoming an expert in one field and that leads us to see things from a narrow perspectives. He writes of musicians and athletes that benefits from having learned multiple instruments or sports before settling on one to perfect. The notion is that we learn to learn even better when the patterns we are discovering vary greatly.

In Joe’s runs down the expert slope, each traverse was different in what skiers and snow-boarders crossed his path when, how steep it was, how many moguls lay in the path, what lay at the end of the traverse, etc. Next time we may try snow boards, then wake-boarding and surfing, etc. Combining multiple, short iterations of learning along with variation reinforces our ability to recognize and master patterns in a world of ever changing paradigms.

See Also:

• David Epstein’s TED Talk
• Sports Illustrated: What the Childhood Years of Tiger Woods and Roger Federer Can Teach Us About Success

Coyle’s Qualities of a Master Coach

Daniel Coyle describes four qualities of a master coach when coaching within a specific sport or field.

1. The Matrix:  Coaches with deep, task-specific knowledge utilize innovative responses to a student’s efforts to evoke deeper learning. These coaches had typically spent many years mastering their craft and myelinating their own circuits.
2. Perceptiveness: Master coaches are curious about individuals and leverage insights about their students to tailor their coaching.
3. GPS Reflex: Coaches reflexively give immediate feedback to help students navigate challenges as they practice.
4. Theatrical Honesty: Coaches with theatrical flair leverage drama and character to give honest feedback to their students while being morally honest when pointing out errors.

Talent Code’s REPS

Daniel Coyle also describes four aspects of coaching/learning: REPS: R – Reaching/Repeating, E – Engagement, P -Purposefulness, and S – S – Strong, Direct, Immediate Feedback. These REPS also lend themselves well in the filed of software development.

R – Reaching/Repeating

• MVPs Developing Minimal Viable Products that you deliver to customers gets fast feedback, and you can learn and improve in small increments and the heightened importance of delivering quality to a customer can also serve as a primal cue.
• Agile Sprints Iterating in short development sprints further shortens the cycle.
• Discrete Tasks
  Breaking sprint objectives into discrete tasks that are followed by tests runs can further tighten the feedback loop.
• Microservices Deploying new functionality incrementally in the form of independent micro-services also increases the ability for tighter, more focused loops, and this speeds up learning and establishing processes that are continuously being improved and optimized.
  Uber employs their Micro Deploy cycles to leverage microservices for Continuous Delivery in their application of the Talent Code.

E – Engagement

• Autonomy Don’t provide your engineers with the technical solution they implement, but rather with a clear statement of the problem. Allow them to arrive at the best solution, and this will empower them through the Multiplier approach. Providing the solution is a dis-empowering Diminisher approach.
• Challenge and Mastery Engineers love to improve their craft, and if you focus first on time to delivery, you’re sending a message that time trumps quality. Instead lead them with the objective of finding the most efficient, elegant and sound solution, and you’ll feed their drive.
  Dan Pink underscores that Autonomy, Challenge and Mastery motivates people much more that monetary gain.

P – Purposefulness

• Clear Problem Statements Provide a clear understanding the value to the business, and the customer will empower and motivate engineers to come up with the best solutions in striving to solve for an understood purpose.
  Dan Pink refers this as the “Purpose Motive”

S – Strong, Direct, Immediate Feedback

• Feedback from MVPs to Customer Deliver MVPs and incremental improvements to your customers, and you get the fastest real feedback on how well your solutions are received by your customers. Sometimes, this can result is very strong, clear feedback that allows us to learn and course correct before we invest further down an errant path and we learn more quickly.
• Sprint Retrospectives One of the most valuable aspects of doing Agile Sprints is what a team can learn from a retrospective. Here the team decides what worked well – to keep, what – didn’t – to stop, and what could be improved – to change. When I ran Yahoo!Games, I brought the release cycle down from months to releasing at changes at the end of every sprint. The learning of the loop came through adding customer feedback to the retrospective at the end of a sprint, and we then continued to tighten that loop to daily releases to production.
• Running Tests After Each Completed Task A fast way to get strong, clear and immediate feedback is to break work down into discrete tasks that include tests written to stress and break the code that was just written. This can enable a feedback, learning cycle that can occur on a daily basis and it is another reason to break down work and not leaving the testing and validation to the end of a lengthy product development cycle.
• Code Reviews on Each Submit Another very fast turn-around can come in the form of code reviews any time an engineer submits a change.

Applying The Talent Code at IMVU: Methods of Rapid and Continuous Feedback

Continuous Deployments at IMVU
When I joined IMVU (The Lean Startup), we were not only doing MVPs (Minimal Viable Products), but we were deploying code to production in incremental changes every ~40 minutes. I helped bring that down under 9 minute cycles, and those pushes were typically in the form of A/B experiments where we could quickly learn which were more effective at improving customer experience. We also had an Immune System which would automatically rollback changes that went out of bounds in terms of memory or disc usage, customer sessions times, etc.

5-Why’s in Blameless Post Mortems are another key aspect of a Lean Startup. Learning is also greatly enhanced when things go wrong and we as quickly as possible do a Post Mortem where we get to the root cause of what went wrong with the objective of learning (not blaming). This too facilitates learning through a feedback cycle, and it serves to make individuals and the team stronger. The energy right after a major issue can also serve as a primal cue to help ignite deep learning.

Kaizen as it Relates to Talent Code

The notion of many small, incremental improvements is known as Kaizen from lean manufacturing, and it also works well with the approach of many small reps with lots of opportunities for small incremental improvement also aligns well with the REPS described in The Talent Code.

John Boyd’s OODA Loop

Boyd’s “Observe, Orient, Decide, Act” also underscores the benefits of repetitive learning cycles/loops similar to those in The Talent Code …

Firing Bullets then Cannonballs

In his book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins uses the following metaphor (backed by lots of real world examples):

Excerpt from Great by Choice: Picture yourself at sea, a hostile ship bearing down on you. You have a limited amount of gunpowder. You take all your gunpowder and use it to fire a big cannonball. The cannonball flies out over the ocean…and misses the target, off by 40 degrees. You turn to your stockpile and discover that you’re out of gunpowder. You die. But suppose instead that when you see the ship bearing down, you take a little bit of gunpowder and fire a bullet. It misses by 40 degrees. You make another bullet and fire. It misses by 30 degrees. You make a third bullet and fire, missing by only 10 degrees. The next bullet hits—ping!—the hull of the oncoming ship. Now, you take all the remaining gunpowder and fire a big cannonball along the same line of sight, which sinks the enemy ship. You live. 

Referring back to the example of Joe at the top of the hill. We could have chosen to point our skis straight downhill and just go for it. That may have been the fastest means to get to the bottom of the hill, much as starting by firing the cannonball. It likewise could have ended in demise or serious injury for Joe. The short traverses were the equivalent of firing bullets first. “First, you fire bullets (low-cost, low-risk, low-distraction experiments) to figure out what will work—calibrating your line of sight by taking small shots.“

Build, Measure, Learn

Another perspective on the feedback cycle is that of “Build, Measure, Learn” (BML). “BML is a process of building a product, measuring consumer metrics and learning from them to better respond to customer needs and improve the product for the ultimate sustainability of the company.” See: Definition: Build-Measure-Learn (BML).

Talent Code, OKRs and the Superbowl

If you start a season with winning the Superbowl as your big Objective. You can break that objective into Key Results of winning games against competitors each with unique strengths and weaknesses.

With each game win as an Objective, each possession becomes a contributing Key Result. The Objective of scoring on each possession is broken down into Key Results of gaining yards on every play. Each player contributes in their own way to the effectiveness of the play.

Now, you’re down to the level of quick iterations with learning potential – the huddle can serve as a quick retrospective or post mortem on what worked and didn’t in that play as a means of Strong Feedback. Likewise, each player can apply their learnings on the last play to be more effective on the next.

Now, your team is applying Talent Code’s REPS approach (Reaching/Repeating, Engagement, Purposefulness, Strong, direct feedback)

CD

See also:

Talent Code – Building Myelin 

• Book: Daniel Coyle – The Talent Code
• Summary: DanielCoyle.com/The-Talent-Code
• Summary: DanielCoyle.com/2011/05/31/A-Gauge-for-Measuring-Effective-Practice
• Book: Daniel Coyle – The Culture CodeThe Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
• Book: Josh Waitzkin – The Art of Learning – An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance
• Michael OBrien The Last Three Turns — Leadership SHIFT Tip
• Josh Waitzkin Interview – Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast)

Rapid Iteration in Software Development

• Blog: Jan Bosch – Why Fast Feedback Cycles Matter
• Book: Jan Bosch – Speed, Data, and Ecosystems: Excelling in a Software-Driven World (Chapman & Hall/CRC Innovations in Software Engineering and Software Development Series)
• Book: Eric Ries – The Lean Startup – How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
• Pivotal Labs: Should that be a Microservice? Part 3: Independent Life Cycles
• Uber Blog Post: Uber Engineering’s Micro Deploy: Deploying Daily with Confidence

Drive – What Motivates us

• Book: Daniel Pink – Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• Video Summary: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

Multipliers – Leaders that Empower Others

• Book: Liz Wiseman – Multipliers, How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
• Video Summary: Liz Wiseman – Multipliers Highlight Reel
• Video Summary: Liz Wiseman – The Accidental Diminisher

Outliers and 10,000 Hours of Practice

The Talent Code provides an alternative to Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule.

• Malcolm Gladwell – Outliers – The Story of Success
• BBC: Why Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule is wrong
• 2014 Drake Baer – Study Destroys Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule

OODA (Obeserve, Orient, Decide, Act) Loop

John Boyd’s OODA Loop is another parallell to the ideas present in Coyle’s The Talent Code

• Wikipedia OODA Loop
• Robert Coram-  Boyd – The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
• David K. Williams, Forbes – What A Fighter Pilot Knows About Business: The OODA Loop
• Management Study Guide – Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) Loop Explained in Detail
• Gene Hughson – OODA vs PDCA – What’s the Difference?
• Leadership Forces – Roderic Yapp – How do you Win in an Ever-Changing World?
• Leadership Forces – Roderic Yapp – The OODA Loop is one of the most valuable – yet poorly understood – theories that exists.
• Harvard Business Review – Mark Bonchek and Chris Fussell – Decision Making, Top Gun Style
• Business Insider – Richard Feloni and Anaele Pelisson – A retired Marine and elite fighter pilot breaks down the OODA Loop, the military decision-making process that guides ‘every single thing’ in life

Kaizen

• Bob Maurer, Leigh Ann Hirschman – The Spirit of Kaizen – Creating Lasting Excellence One Small Step at a Time
• Robert Maurer – Building a Quality Culture One Small Step at a Time
• Doanh Do – The Lean Way Blog – What is Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)
• Wikipedia on Kaizen

Beyond the Talent Code

Applying the Talent Code by itself is of course only one ingredient for everything to come together to make an effective learning environment and success business.

• Villains – turning the villains that might challenge success into wins
• Leaning Out – creating a supportive culture to multiply strengths
• Radical Candor – creating an environment of open communication
• 10x Engineers – understanding what makes people excel

Start with trust to set the foundations of a relationships when a new person joins your team. The first impression you make on them sets the foundation for the rest of your journey together. Before you impress upon them your intentions and objectives as a leader, you should first establish with yourself what you believe to be the foundation of such as relationship.

See also New Hires for thoughts on the three most impactful people in determining the joy, success and fulfillment an employee finds in their job.

As a leader, begin with deciding if you buy into the notion that solving for the team member’s best interest is also in your own and your organization’s best interest. In other words, do you believe that the most effective people are those that love what they do and the more they have passion for what they do, the greater their value to the organization is likely to be. If you don’t believe with conviction that helping your team members (be they subordinates or peers) find and achieve their goals, you will be hampered in your own success and that of your team. They will know the difference subconsciously or consciously.

Lou Holtz also starts with trust

Legendary football coach Lou Holtz, now retired and in the College Football Hall of Fame, had an uncanny ability to turn losing teams into winners. During his college coaching career, he compiled a record of 249 wins, 132 losses, and 7 ties. Holtz’s 1988 Notre Dame team was undefeated and determined to be the consensus national champion.
Holtz too believes you should start with trust. He said that players had three implicit questions about a new coach:

1. “Can I trust you?”
2. “Are you committed?”
3. “Do you care about me?”

This brings to mind two quotes about thinking well of others and the impact it may have on them…Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great.– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Thinking too well of people often allows them to be better than they otherwise would.
– Nelson Mandela

Start with Trust for Effective Communication

Effective communication is often addressed in the form of tools you can use such as active listening, empathic listening, powerful questions, making eye contact, not interrupting, paying attention, withholding judgement, echoing back, radical candor, … At the core of effectively using any of these techniques is our genuine interest to hear what the other person is saying and to have genuine concern for their well-being. If we’re not genuinely interested, they will know, even if only subconsciously.

Clever Hans (in German: der Kluge Hans) was an Orlov Trotterhorse that was claimed to have performed arithmetic and other intellectual tasks. After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologistOskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reactions of his trainer.

Start with Trust Within Yourself

If you don’t believe with conviction, it might help to dig deeper into some of the the well researched books about teams and working with others before continuing here. Note, there have been successful teams built around amazing players such as those described in Tim Grover’s Relentless – From Good to Great to Unstoppable and there is much to be learned there as well, but for that type of team, please refer to Grover’s book.

Hans’ ability to stop stomping out the “right” answer was cued by the audience changing demeanor once he arrived at it. Horses and humans take non-verbal cues as to our intent. All those techniques that serve as cues will come more naturally, be more convincing and effective if our interest in those we lead, live and work with can sense it’s genuine.

Horse Whisperers Start with Trust

In her article 4 Leadership Lessons from Horse Whispering, Praseeda Nair points out…

Studies into human communication reveals that only 7 per cent of any communication is conveyed though actual words; 93 per cent are conveyed non-verbally, through facial expressions, posture and tone.

Horse whispering is all about communicating using non-verbal cues and body language. Natural Horsemen also start with trust. They believe horses are as unique as individuals, so it’s easy to extrapolate this form of communication for interpersonal conversations.

Trainers say that leading a horse only requires three main things: establishing trust, demonstrating respect, and communicating directions clearly. Here are the main leadership lessons to learn from communicating with horses.

Once you have the conviction that you’re solving for the other, you can start to get them on board by telling and showing them that their best interest is in your best interest.

Once you are both clear on your intent, the journey can begin either at the first interview with a powerful question. It can certainly also begin later with a first “real” powerful conversation in your first 1-on-1 (if you weren’t part of the interview process). Towards the end of the first interaction, I like to arrive at asking an employee or candidate to relate a time or experience that fundamentally changed who they are. You often get the most amazing stories, you also learn who they are and what they value, and you feel you should share something in return yourself. Now, you have a foundation of genuine interest in the person upon which a relationship of trust can be built. A question that reveals who they are and what they want in life also provides the context in which more immediate goals can be framed. Now, when you might need to have a difficult conversation, it won’t be a conflict of one opinion against the other in a battle of offense and defensiveness, but rather a mutual objective of getting past the challenge. If the question/conversation is truly powerful, it can lead to a self realization for that person about what matters to them, what gives them energy and clarity on why their near term objectives are important to them. Simon Sinek also believes you should start with trust. He says building relationships is hard work on How to Establish Trust When Building Relationships. As Brené Brown  puts it in The power of vulnerability, in order to connect, we have to be seen.

Start with Trust in the Very First Interaction

Towards the end of the first interaction, I like to arrive at asking an employee or candidate to relate a time or experience that fundamentally changed who they are. You often get the most amazing stories, you also learn who they are and what they value, and you feel you should share something in return yourself. Now, you have a foundation of genuine interest in the person upon which a relationship of trust can be built. A question that reveals who they are and what they want in life also provides the context in which more immediate goals can be framed. Now, when you might need to have a difficult conversation, it won’t be a conflict of one opinion against the other in a battle of offense and defensiveness, but rather a mutual objective of getting past the challenge. If the question/conversation is truly powerful, it can lead to a self realization for that person about what matters to them, what gives them energy and clarity on why their near term objectives are important to them. Simon Sinek says building relationships is hard work on How to Establish Trust When Building Relationships. As Brené Brown  puts it in The power of vulnerability, in order to connect, we have to be seen.

Where should that conversation end?

Ideally, the person you’re hoping to lead or already leading walks away with a feeling of genuine trust that you are going to solve for their best interest together with them. It’s ok if they understand their success will benefit the business and you, but that should be the outcome and not the objective. When they believe your benefit and the business are the primary objective and their success is an outcome and not the objective, you will discover they are not nearly as motivated. Your intent may be good, but it is the impact that matters. In closing, it can be good to ask them if they genuinely believe you are interested in and will solve for what’s best for them. If they don’t, and you might tell by how they say it more than the words they use, you know have something to work on. Until that foundation of trust is there, all other conversations will be much less impactful.

Caveat – What if it doesn’t turn out?

When you hire someone or engage with them as a client, you should be convinced it will work out such that they are successful and you should solve to that end. However, you should also let them know you don’t have a crystal ball, and no matter how how you try to set them up for success, there is no guarantee it will work. Ultimately, if they are succeeding, you have a responsibility to them, others on the team and yourself to recognize that could leave you in a place where you believe that engagement isn’t successful. You should both accept that’s a possible outcome from day one.

At SAS – 37 consecutive years of record earnings–$2.8 billion in 2012.

As CEO Jim Goodnight points out in How SAS Became The World’s Best Place To Work  “the diagnosis from Gallup is just as dire: Fewer than 3 in 10 workers admit to having their hearts in their jobs. This lack of employee engagement will cost business upwards of $300 billion this year alone.” He also suggests Value People Above All Else and Trust Above All Things – The foundation of employee happiness at SAS, Goodnight believes, is its culture of trust.

In a team setting

Start with trust in team settings. You might have everyone go around the room – possibly over lunch –  relating something about themselves no one else in the room knows. This can help the team feel more connected. A fun alternative is to have everyone write their experience on a piece of paper that each person will then pull one to read and the team guesses who it might be. It may help to open by giving an example or two from your own life to provide context for the types of things people might say or write down.

At some of the companies I’ve worked, we’ve also had new hires get up in the company to tell a story that no one knows with bonus points if it’s embarrassing – this too can help provide a foundation for a more human connection.

Trust In the Classroom

When teaching, especially 8th graders, if you want to have any hope of reaching your students, start with trust. It’s hard to make progress in the classroom if there isn’t a connection established. I remember a school event where parents where dumbfounded that their 8th graders were asking me to be in selfies with them. If you can have that kind of connection with 8th graders, you can also help them appreciate that your objective is to prepare them for life and help them learn how to learn.

National award-winning Palo Alto teacher takes unusual approach

In another classroom – Growing Roses from Concrete.

My first assignment as a student teacher was to work with a teacher that had a special class of students with “learning issues.” On the day I showed up, the principal informed me that the teacher had quit the previous day and asked if I’d be willing to still lead the class. I was also told that these were 8th graders that other teachers had given up on being able to manage in their classrooms in a school where most student came from very tough backgrounds. They all later confided in me that everyone of them was in a gang and they figured they’d be lucky to live to the age of 18, and hence, education wasn’t a big priority for them – and education beyond high school was beyond their wildest dreams. So, if I want to develop their talent, how to I establish that necessary foundation of connection and trust?

I remembered a book one of my professors had suggested that she used when she taught at juvenile hall. It was Tupac Shakur‘s book of poetry The Rose That Grew From Concrete.

I bought enough used copies of the book so each student could have once to keep as their own. The students were surprised that I even knew who Tupac was and that I knew lots of his material, but they were really surprised that I had bought them this book for them to keep. They didn’t know that Pac wrote poetry, they had really not expected me to be showing them something from Pac they hadn’t know about. When I next saw them, most of these 8th graders told me it was the first book they ever read. They were proud to carry it around with them, and they had selected their favorite poem. Some had also been inspired to write their first poem after reading it. I could not read any of their poems without tears coming to my eyes – pretty amazing stuff.

Some pointed out that this was cool, and the only other reading of poetry some previous teachers had tried to foist on them was some junk by Shakespeare. I pointed out that Shakespeare just grew up in a different time, in another country and on another type of “concrete”. That tweaked their curiosity, and now a door was open to expand their horizons and awareness.

Know your audience and find a connection is a valid context to find a place to start any dialog. Embrace the challenge, enjoy the fruits of your investments.

See Also:

• Video: Simon Sinek – First why and then trust
• Legendary Leadership: The Wisdom of Brad Smith

When a new person joins, the first impression you make on them sets the foundation for the rest of your journey together. So, the question arises: Where to Begin the Journey? Before expressing your objectives as a leader, first establish with yourself what you believe to be the foundation of such as relationship.

See also New Hires for thoughts on the three most impactful people in determining the joy, success and fulfillment an employee finds in their job.

Begin with deciding if you buy into the notion that solving for the team member’s best interest is also in your own and your organization’s best interest. Do you believe that the most effective people are those that love what they do and the more they have passion for what they do, the greater their value to the organization is likely to be. If you don’t believe this with conviction, you will be hampered in your own success and that of your team. They will know the difference subconsciously or consciously.

Trust

Legendary football coach Lou Holtz, now retired and in the College Football Hall of Fame, had an uncanny ability to turn losing teams into winners. During his college coaching career, he compiled a record of 249 wins, 132 losses, and 7 ties. Holtz’s 1988 Notre Dame team was undefeated and determined to be the consensus national champion.
Holtz said that players had three implicit questions about a new coach:

1. “Can I trust you?”
2. “Are you committed?”
3. “Do you care about me?”

This brings to mind two quotes about thinking well of others and the impact it may have on them…

• Trust men and they will be true to you; treat them greatly and they will show themselves great. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Thinking too well of people often allows them to be better than they otherwise would.
  – Nelson Mandela

Effective Communication

Effective communication is often addressed in the form of tools you can use. These include active listening, empathic listening, powerful questions, making eye contact, not interrupting, paying attention, withholding judgement, echoing back, radical candor, … To effectively use any of these techniques is our genuine interest to hear what the other person is saying and to have genuine concern for their well-being. If we’re not genuinely interested, they will know, even if only subconsciously.

If you don’t believe with conviction, it might help to dig deeper into some of the the well researched books about teams. Note, successful teams have been built around amazing players such as those described in Tim Grover’s Relentless – From Good to Great to Unstoppable and there is much to be learned there as well, but for that type of team, please refer to Grover’s book.

Hans’ ability to stop stomping out the “right” answer was cued by the audience changing demeanor once he arrived at it. Horses and humans take non-verbal cues as to our intent. All those techniques that serve as cues will come more naturally, be more convincing and effective if our interest in those we lead, live and work with can sense it’s genuine.

Whispering

In her article 4 Leadership Lessons from Horse Whispering, Praseeda Nair points out…

• Studies into human communication reveals that only 7 per cent of any communication is conveyed though actual words; 93 per cent are conveyed non-verbally, through facial expressions, posture and tone.
• Horse whispering is all about communicating using non-verbal cues and body language. Trainers believe horses are as unique as individuals, so it’s easy to extrapolate this form of communication for between interpersonal conversations.
• Trainers say that leading a horse only requires three main things: establishing trust, demonstrating respect, and communicating directions clearly. Here are the main leadership lessons to learn from communicating with horses.

Start with who you’re solving for

Once you have the conviction that you’re solving for the other, you can start to get them on board by telling and showing them that their best interest is in your best interest.

A Powerful Question

Once you are both clear on your intent, the journey can begin either at the first interview with a powerful question. It can certainly also begin later with a first “real” powerful conversation in your first 1-on-1 (if you weren’t part of the interview process).

Towards the end of the first interaction, I like to arrive at asking an employee or candidate to relate a time or experience that fundamentally changed who they are. You often get the most amazing stories, you also learn who they are and what they value, and you feel you should share something in return yourself. Now, you have a foundation of genuine interest in the person upon which a relationship of trust can be built.

A question that reveals who they are and what they want in life also provides the context in which more immediate goals can be framed. Now, when you might need to have a difficult conversation, it won’t be a conflict of one opinion against the other in a battle of offense and defensiveness, but rather a mutual objective of getting past the challenge. If the question/conversation is truly powerful, it can lead to a self realization for that person about what matters to them, what gives them energy and clarity on why their near term objectives are important to them. Simon Sinek says building relationships is hard work on How to Establish Trust When Building Relationships. As Brené Brown  puts it in The power of vulnerability, in order to connect, we have to be seen.

What changed you?

Towards the end of the first interaction, I like to arrive at asking an employee or candidate to relate a time or experience that fundamentally changed who they are. You often get the most amazing stories, you also learn who they are and what they value, and you feel you should share something in return yourself. Now, you have a foundation of genuine interest in the person upon which a relationship of trust can be built.

A question that reveals who they are and what they want in life also provides the context in which more immediate goals can be framed. Now, when you might need to have a difficult conversation, it won’t be a conflict of one opinion against the other in a battle of offense and defensiveness, but rather a mutual objective of getting past the challenge. If the question/conversation is truly powerful, it can lead to a self realization for that person about what matters to them, what gives them energy and clarity on why their near term objectives are important to them. Simon Sinek says building relationships is hard work on How to Establish Trust When Building Relationships. As Brené Brown  puts it in The power of vulnerability, in order to connect, we have to be seen.

Where should that conversation end?

Ideally, the person you’re hoping to lead or already leading walks away with a feeling of genuine trust that you are going to solve for their best interest together with them. It’s ok if they understand their success will benefit the business and you, but that should be the outcome and not the objective. When they believe your benefit and the business are the primary objective and their success is an outcome and not the objective, you will discover they are not nearly as motivated.

Your intent may be good, but it is the impact that matters. In closing, it can be good to ask them if they genuinely believe you are interested in and will solve for what’s best for them. If they don’t, and you might tell by how they say it more than the words they use, you know have something to work on. Until that foundation of trust is there, all other conversations will be much less impactful.

Caveat – What if it doesn’t turn out?

When you hire someone or engage with them as a client, you should be convinced it will work out such that they are successful and you should solve to that end. However, you should also let them know you don’t have a crystal ball, and no matter how how you try to set them up for success, there is no guarantee it will work. Ultimately, if they are succeeding, you have a responsibility to them, others on the team and yourself to recognize that could leave you in a place where you believe that engagement isn’t successful. You should both accept that’s a possible outcome from day one.

At SAS – 37 consecutive years of record earnings–$2.8 billion in 2012.

Something like this can also be done in a team setting where everyone goes around the room – possibly over lunch –  relating something about themselves no one else in the room knows. This can help the team feel more connected. A fun alternative is to have everyone write their experience on a piece of paper that each person will then pull one to read and the team guesses who it might be. It may help to open by giving an example or two from your own life to provide context for the types of things people might say or write down.

At some of the companies I’ve worked, we’ve also had new hires get up in the company to tell a story that no one knows with bonus points if it’s embarrassing – this too can help provide a foundation for a more human connection.

In the Classroom

Similarly, when teaching, especially 8th graders, it’s hard to make progress in the classroom if there isn’t a connection established. I remember a school event where parents where dumbfounded that their 8th graders were asking me to be in selfies with them. If you can have that kind of connection with 8th graders, you can also help the appreciate that you’re objective is to prepare them for life and help them learn how to learn.

National award-winning Palo Alto teacher takes unusual approach

In another classroom – Growing Roses from Concrete

I showed up for my first teaching assignment to learn the teacher had quit the previous day and asked if I’d be willing to lead the class. The class was made of 8th graders that other teachers had given up on being able to manage in their classrooms. The students later confided in me that every one of them was in a gang and they figured they’d be lucky to live to the age of 18. Hence, education wasn’t a big priority for them – and education beyond high school was beyond their wildest dreams.

I remembered a book one of my professors had suggested that she used when she taught at juvenile hall. It was Tupac Shakur‘s book of poetry The Rose That Grew From Concrete.

The students were surprised that I bought them each a copy and that I even knew who Tupac was. They didn’t know that Pac wrote poetry, they had not expected me to be showing them something from Pac they hadn’t know about. Most of these 8th graders told me it was the first book they ever read. They were proud to carry it around with them, and they had selected their favorite poem. Some had also been inspired to write their first poem after reading it. I could not read any of their poems without tears coming to my eyes – amazing stuff.

Some pointed out that this was cool, and the only other reading of poetry some previous teachers had tried to foist on them was some junk by Shakespeare. I pointed out that Shakespeare just grew up in a different time, in another country and on another type of “concrete”. That tweaked their curiosity, and now a door was open to expand their horizons and awareness.

See Also:

• Video: Simon Sinek – First why and then trust
• Legendary Leadership: The Wisdom of Brad Smith

Telling someone that they are amazing, naturally creative, resourceful and whole with unbounded potential is NOT an acknowledgement.

A few years ago, a senior leader said he observed that members of my team loved me and would do just about anything for me. He wanted to know how that came to be. My initial inclination was to tell him that it needs to start with letting them know and trust that their growth and success is very important to you.

However, luckily, I realized that statement would have been wrong.

Instead, I recognized and said, it starts with it actually being truly important to you that they grow and succeed. To his credit, he was honest enough to say that he had never seen that as an aspect of leadership. Your team will not believe you care unless you actually do. Once they recognize you care for them and their success, they will care more for themselves and their own success.

So, back to my original statement:

Telling someone that they are amazing, naturally creative, resourceful and whole with unbounded potential is NOT an acknowledgement.

You yourself recognizing, truly believing and internalizing that they are amazing, naturally creative, resourceful and whole with unbounded potential is the actual acknowledgement. Telling them that they are amazing is a statement of acknowledgement. Without first appreciating it, the statement is hollow with little impact.

Nonetheless, the magic doesn’t really happen until they themselves recognize, acknowledge and truly believe in their own ability to grow, achieve and succeed without bound. When you truly recognize another person’s magnificence, they are much more likely to also see it themselves.

Acknowledgement in the Classroom

When teaching, especially 8th graders, if you want to have any hope of reaching your students, you need their trust. Start with first acknowledging yourself that they are fully capable individuals. This is a necessary foundation for establishing genuine trust. It’s hard to make progress in the classroom if there isn’t a connection established. I remember a school event where parents where dumbfounded that their 8th graders were asking me to be in selfies with them. If you can have that kind of connection with 8th graders, you can also help them appreciate that your objective is to enable them to discover they are ready for life. Now you can begin evoking the transformation to help them learn how to learn.

National award-winning Palo Alto teacher takes unusual approach

The way you do anything is the way you do everything

When we look closely at another or their actions, we get a window into the whole person. Everything the say or do in some way sheds more light. The values driving small actions and choices are the same as those driving small and large decisions in other parts of their life. As the saying goes “the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.“

When we look deeply into another’s eyes we may see their soul; when we look at, understand, appreciate and acknowledge small achievements we may have just opened a window into what lies inside waiting to venture out. The Zulu greeting Sawubona means “I see you, you are important to me and I value you.” It’s a way to make the other person visible and to accept them as they are with their virtues, nuances, and flaws. In my experience if you truly see and accept someone, it opens the door for them to become visible to themselves.

When we observe others and acknowledge and appreciate their potential and allow them to recognize what we truly see in them, they may come to recognize their own potential. By truly seeing them, you enable them to evoke transformation in themselves. See them.

When I stood face to face with the Dalai Lama many years ago and he looked into my eyes, he certainly evoked transformation in me with that look, an acknowledging smile and nod.

– I see you –
CD

Inspiration, curiosity and drive for someone with a growth mindset can be sparked or fed by role models. Here are just a few of the many role models that inspired me

If we consider the possibility that the potential lies within each of us to be a Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai if we were willing to assert ourselves, one might think that could be tremendously inspiring.

However, I believe it can also be depressing and disheartening to think we are making impacts such as those role models, simply because we don’t have the conviction and stamina to do it. It’s much luck saying “Happiness is a Choice.”

If it’s truly that simple, then what’s holding us back? If you embrace the possibility, it’s also very daunting; where do 10xers draw the courage to try? Why then do some get up, why do they actually enjoy the challenge, what allows them to believe that is the only sure way to break through to the next level?

I would argue it’s because these people have all somewhere in their lives had someone that role modeled that it’s possible, that helped them find the way, a mentor, advocate, coach, teacher, parent, manager, partner, supportive friend, etc.

Role Models I Met or Worked with

Another person that inspired me by the shear impact of a brief personal encounter with him is the Dalai Lama whom I crossed paths with as a student. Though I’d not heard of him when we met, the impact of that encounter remains fresh in my memory as a reminder of how powerful a simple encounter can be.

One person that inspired me in business is Brad Smith, the CEO of Intuit  (currently at an over $50B). Brad was also mentored by Bill Campbell (aka Trillion Dollar Coach) who Intuit’s Chairman of the Board at thhe time. For quite some time, I had the privilege of meeting with Brad weekly as he reviewed the internal start-up I was running at Intuit named SB-Connect. Where did Brad find his inspiration? It could his amazing Alma-mater football team that rose from the ashes – the We Are Marshall! Where did they find their inspiration, perhaps it was their coach… Or, did Brad also find inspiration from the former CEO of Intuit Steve Bennet who re-energized Intuit before him and who was Brad’s Mentor. Where did Steve find his inspiration? Perhaps it was getting inspired by Jack Welch during whose tenure at GE, the company’s value rose 4,000% .

Other inspirations in business came from the five women who were VPs of Engineering that I reported to in my career.

One person who really opened my eyes to various theories on how we learn and how we can help others learn has been Patty Swanson, Chair of Teacher Eduction at San Jose State whom I was lucky to have as a professor as I was working toward my teaching credentials. Among the things Patty introduced me to in 2002-2003 was work of her former colleague’s at Stanford – Carol Dweck‘s notion of Fixed and Growth Mindsets which she published in her book a few years later.

Family Role Models

Another source of my inspiration came from my father who was a physicist known by some as the father of atmospheric electricity. I was fourth generation physicist with a history of changing the world. My father was also inspired by his father’s colleague, Albert Einstein – my father remembered Einstein coming to dinner at their house. Certainly I was also inspired by my mother who also has a tremendous history to be proud of – on her side of the family, I’m fifth generation teacher.

I’ve also had the rare privilege of my career in software engineering to have reported into five different women as my VPs of Engineering. Each of them had to persevere in this field to make it to that level. I suspect they all had some mentors, role models and/or advocates in their lives that inspired them.

I also had a tremendous collection of teachers throughout my schooling at Groveton High School in Virginia. However, the person that has consistently inspired me the most is someone I believe to be the most talented, curious and fascinating engineer I’ve met in my 35+ years in software engineering. She was one of the first engineers in the field of Artificial Intelligence in the mid-80s at Intellicorp. She is also one of the most self-driven athletes I know. I’m lucky to have her as my partner, even though I often feel like an imposter that needs to pinch myself that I could be so lucky.

It’s also important in thinking about motivating others that we consider in Inspiring The Future to Redraw The Balance (a great short video to watch) so that those among us we may discount due to cultural or historical biases, not get get unduly discounted. One of our inspiring board members, Anita Sands, gave a great talk on finding not only mentors but also advocates. I believe in taking that a step further to also being a mentor and an advocate.

So, if it’s the people in our lives that inspire us to do more, then is it not true that some of us are luckier than other for those that we have in our lives? I believe their is some truth to that.

Radical Candor in the Mirror is about not being delusional or self-destructive. Instead, it’s about recognizing opportunities for continuous growth within ourselves. It’s about positive self-reflection.

When we think of looking in the mirror, we often think of Narcissism. This is Delusional Self-Love and seeing ourselves as far better and above all others with no need or room for growth. However, we also know we can beat ourselves up. We create images of not being good enough, not believing in ourselves, seeing how everyone else is better. This lacking of hope, giving up and seeing no way out is Self-Destructive Minimalization of who we are and what we’re capable of. Sometimes, we experience the temptation to pump ourselves up and remind ourselves of how wonderful and great we are. We may feel we are protecting ourselves and lifting ourselves up through self-empathy in what is often Ruinous, Self-Loving Denial.

There is an alternative to all of these. We can choose an Opportunity Embracing Growth-Mindset. We allow ourselves to look into the mirror seeking areas of improvement while recognizing we have within ourselves the ability to continuously and incrementally improve on our journey of Human Transformation. Framing this in Kim Scott’s Radical Candor 2×2 allows us to leverage Scott’s insights. We can be radically candid in giving feedback to others in service of the recipients. However, also in being radically candid with ourselves in service of ourselves by fostering a Growth Mindset within ourselves.

See Also:

My post on Radical Candor, Meaningful Conversations speaks to empathetically applying radical candor to others.

What the Mirror Can Teach You About Yourself: Advice from a Mirror Gazing Expert

After writing this post on Radical Candor in the Mirror, I discovered some related posts by Tara Well in Psychology Today and other sources. Dr. Tara Well is an associate professor of psychology at Barnard College of Columbia University where she developed the mirror-based meditation called “a revelation” in the New York Times.

• What Mirror Meditation Can Teach You – Coming face-to-face with yourself is powerful.
• Why Looking in the Mirror Can Help Fight Despair – A counterintuitive approach to dealing with a new reality
• Why Is Seeing Your Own Reflection So Important? Four research findings from neuroscience that you need to know
• Compassion at the Mirror – Does it really work?
• Mirror Meditation – A research-based meditation
• Podcast X91: Mirror Meditation for Self-Reflection and Seeing Your True Self with Tara Well
• Podcast: Dr. Tara Well, PhD – Psychologist, Mirror Meditation Expert, and TED Speaker
• Book: Mirror Meditation: The Power of Neuroscience and Self-Reflection to Overcome Self-Criticism, Gain Confidence, and See Yourself with Compassion
• TEDx Talk: What Mirror Meditation Can Teach You