People Management

Here's how to manage, build and grow your team in a human and effective way.

We'll give you concrete and unconventional tips from the most innovative companies and backed by the science of what motivates people.

Start here with our management guide and how to take back your work day.

Remote Work is Here to Stay

July 23, 2020 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Remote work is increasing across the globe, in every industry that can manage it—and it isn’t just the pandemic that’s making it happen.

Sure, the pandemic forced an increase in speed and breadth of adoption, but this snowball has been rolling down the hill for years. Employees expect more flexibility; employers need to prepare for a massive change in the average worker’s schedule, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Industrial Revolution.

Whether you’re a team leader, an investor, or a business owner, you have to understand this: Remote work is here to stay. And it can be very effective, too—especially with the use of tools to help you and your workers maximize their morale and production, no matter where they’re logging on from.

3 Stages of Successful Team Bonding

April 30, 2020 by Jonathan Figliolino Leave a Comment

Your team won’t stay together just because they work together. If you don’t give your team a chance to bond, you’ll spend more time handling workplace drama and politics instead of getting work done. You can use team bonding activities to encourage cooperation outside of the office and strengthen workplace bonds.

Team building helps everyone get to know and trust their fellow coworkers, but you don’t build trust overnight. Your team goes through gradual stages as they grow from a collection of strangers to efficient collaborators. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman’s team building model describes three stages — forming, norming, and performing—to show how teams can become more united over time.

Entrepreneurs Share the Only Thing that Matters

April 14, 2020 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

The journey of the entrepreneur is to figure out what matters. We know that starting a company requires extreme focus and prioritization. We know that a focused culture can make an unbeatable team. We know that humility creates adaptability. But figuring that “one thing that matters” is no easy task. We have to navigate a jumble of possibilities and complexities of running a business, on top of the cottage industry of abundant, contradictory, and just plain bad business advice. These pieces are the thoughtful reflection of industry leaders on what matters, above all else, in building a successful company from scratch. Continue Reading

Bad Managers Talk, Good Managers Write

March 9, 2020 by I Done This Support 13 Comments

The exemplary manager is often shown as the outgoing guy that gives his team pep talks and high fives. In truth, though, that stereotype couldn’t be farther from the truth.

To four highly effective, seasoned, and successful executives, being a good talker isn’t just overvalued, it can actually be detrimental. Rather, there’s a subtle, often-overlooked ability that’s one of the most vital skills you can have as a manager — the ability to write.

Writing creates a permanent knowledge-base

“Written communication to engineering is superior [to verbal communication] because it is more consistent across an entire product team, it is more lasting, it raises accountability.”

—Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz

When managers write, you create work product — white papers, product requirement documents, FAQs, presentations — that lasts and is accessible to everyone in the organization. From marketing to sales to QA to engineering, everyone has a single document off which they can work and consult.

The upshot is that the manager also takes public responsibility for what happens when the rest of the team executes on the point of view taken by the documents. That ratchets up accountability through the organization.

To Horowitz, author of Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager, the distinction between written and verbal communication is stark and, in fact, it’s what separates the wheat from the chaff. Good managers want to be held accountable and aren’t looking for ways to weasel out of responsibility. And so, good managers write, while “[b]ad product managers voice their opinion verbally and lament … the ‘powers that be’.”

The Shit Sandwich and Other Terrible Ways to Give Feedback

January 23, 2020 by I Done This Support 5 Comments

Contrary to common misconception, giving feedback—insightful, useful feedback—is surprisingly difficult. Why? Because, as legendary venture capitalist Ben Horowitz once observed, it’s completely, utterly unnatural.

“If your buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say: ‘Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the build up then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it and present it to me again tomorrow.’ Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do.”

Sometimes it’s tempting to feed our employees a shit sandwich—more on this momentarily—and give vital feedback in other completely awful ways, but it’s crucial to your career as a manager that you resist the urge to do so. As a cautionary tale, here are three uniquely terrible ways that inexperienced managers often give feedback and how you can avoid doing this yourself.

Written Communication Channels at Work – Where Your Intranet Fits

December 19, 2019 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

This is a guest post from Lisa Banks, an expert in workplace communication and writer at content marketing agency Animalz.

Good communication is vital to a productive, healthy workplace. But where that communication takes place — the channel or medium used to convey the message — can make a big difference in how successful it is.

Written communication channels have risen to the forefront in recent years. Many people now prefer written communication over phone calls and would rather read an email than have a meeting. And thanks to technology, there are more tools available now than ever before that let you tap out a message to your co-worker without having to get together in person or on the phone.

But the plethora of tools have also complicated the choices we must make when choosing the right communication channel. With teams moving to instant messaging, social intranets, and even texting as a way to communicate, the written communication channel alone brings a multitude of decisions: Should I text Sharon about this? Should I try her on Slack first? Do I need to also follow up with email? What happened to that document where we discussed this same topic last week…?

It’s as important as ever to match the message to the medium. So, how does your team know which written channel to use when they have something to say? And how does your intranet fit into the mix?

12 Business Psychology Books For Managers Who Want To Lead

September 25, 2019 by Walter Leave a Comment

If you’re not careful, you can spend your entire day trying to keep up.

As a manager, your to-do list never really seems to shrink. You know your success somehow lies in getting ahead—that’s what keeps you coming back to the list—but chipping away at that mountain of tasks can quickly become unproductive.

Sometimes, being a good manager means taking the time to step away from your daily tasks. Counterintuitively, one of the best ways to get ahead is to look backward.

Books might not seem to contain the most pressing information, but with a close reading, you can learn more deeply than other mediums allow. With their lessons, experiences, and principles in mind, you can transform your management style in a way that gets you further ahead in the long-term.

We’ve gathered 12 of the best business psychology books that’ll give you insight into management, hiring, and persuasion.

7 Teamwork Ted Talks To Inspire Your Remote Team

September 6, 2019 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Remote skeptics are dwindling in number, but that doesn’t mean we have remote work figured out yet.

A recurring challenge is collaboration. An in-person office has some real advantages when it comes to teamwork. Leaning across a desk or poking your head above a cubicle is easy. Managers can call a meeting and file all relevant team members into a conference room in minutes.

Distance doesn’t make teamwork impossible. It just means you might need to be a little more creative with your resources and a little more deliberate with your principles. At iDoneThis, we’ve written numerous times about how core psychological and motivational principles can improve your approach to remote work.

Here, we’re sharing 7 lectures about work and collaboration from the venerable folks at TED. Along the way, we’ll pull out some of the best insights these TED talks on teamwork can provide remote managers and workers.

Jeff Bezos’s Peculiar Management Tool for Self-Discipline at Amazon Meetings

May 31, 2019 by I Done This Support 6 Comments

We originally published this piece in 2017. Two years later, we added fresh advice for managers.

The modern workplace’s vogue is informal information exchange. We sit in open floor plan offices so that we can spontaneously collide, chat, and collaborate. An office setup for generating ideas can be fizzy and energizing, though when sparks aren’t flying, the colliding can be noisy and distracting. Jeff Bezos takes a totally different approach to management at Amazon meetings — far from that madding crowd. He has a contrarian management technique that’s peculiarly old school — write it down.

[Image via Forbes] In senior executive meetings at Amazon, before any conversation or discussion begins, everyone sits for 30 minutes in total silence, carefully reading six-page printed memos. Reading together in the meeting guarantees everyone’s undivided attention to the issues at hand, but the real magic happens before the meeting ever starts. It happens when the author is writing the memo. Continue Reading

What Managers Are Getting Wrong About The World’s Greatest Job Ad

May 29, 2019 by Blake Thorne 10 Comments

This piece was originally published in 2015. It has been updated with new data and advice for 2019.

[Image Source]

Here’s how the story usually goes. Sometime in the early 20th century, British explorer Ernest Shackleton needed to hire a crew for an upcoming expedition to the South Pole. So he placed a newspaper ad:

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in event of success.”

The copywriting — and its strong, direct language — has been printed, reprinted, and talked about for decades. It’s beautiful. Possibly the world’s greatest job ad.

Though his accomplishments went largely uncelebrated in the years after his death, Shackleton, in recent years, has become a revered leadership figure thanks to new literature on his life and career.

The Shackleton ad copy has taken on a life of its own, with hiring managers and entrepreneurs pointing to it as an example of how to lure exceptional people to your organization.

But there are two problems here. For one, the ad probably never existed. Even if it did, many people — it seems — are missing the point.