Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
The rise of the culture hacker.
The antidote to burnout is progress.
Check in with people. Don’t check up on them.
Want to be an excellent leader? Read these 10 books.
Teach why startups fail.
Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Have you checked out your word cloud to see your language of getting stuff done? Just sign into iDoneThis, click on “Visuals”, and then click on “Word Cloud”. Which words are most prominent?
We’ve seen an interesting trend at companies that are extremely culture-focused: the culture hacker. Software developers have built internal developer productivity tools since time immemorial because great engineering cultures push for automation and improving iteration speed. But now developers are turning their attention to addressing team dynamics and how the whole company functions and works together on the whole — in a word, culture.
At many companies, company values are just words on a piece of paper tacked to a wall somewhere. At Zappos, they’re extremely thoughtful about giving their values bite. For example, they’re famous for paying new employees to quit. After new employee training ends, each employee is offered the opportunity to quit their job and walk away with $1,000. They do this because one of the Zappos core values is “be passionate and determined”, and paying people to quit ensures that those who remain are incredibly enthusiastic about their work and in it for the long haul.
Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!
3 Reasons to Shut up and Listen Well.
Self-control depletes itself and your motivation. How to refuel from within.
5 hard questions to ask yourself during a conflict.
Why your phone is snuffing your creativity (and is an endless supply of Cheetos).
The perks at Buffer? Daily improvement and free books.
Dundee’s Tip of the Week: Hey IDT teams! Do you only want to see certain team members show up in your email digest? Log into I Done This, and under the calendar, click on “unfollow” or “follow” to choose whose dones you want to see in your digest.
The way you listen is telling, a compass that points to the true focus of your attention. For good listeners, that needle points to the person talking. For bad listeners, that needle points to themselves.
The thing is that it’s really obvious. Great listening requires you to show that it’s happening, and that it’s happening sincerely. Much of that sincere communication comes down to lighting up to show “message received”. Instead, some people fall into a bad habit of putting on a show of listening, mumbling sounds of non-contextual agreement, or interrupting with “yes, but —”, or pretending to be attentive but mishearing everything.
Listening isn’t simply waiting for your turn to say something or show off your brilliance but engaging with what’s being said, building on it, reacting with thoughts and emotions, and showing that you understand or want to know more.
While the art of listening is touted in business, it’s rarely practiced. Bad listening is bad business, and here’s why:
[S]top telling people what to do and … start asking them their opinion about the best way to get something done.
Josh Patrick, founder of Stage 2 Planning Partners, on the value of asking and actually listening to your employees.
When you ask first, you’ll learn instead of assume. And while it’s tough to trust employees, mistakes are important learning opportunities.
Set and communicate greater expectations for your team members, and their performance will reach greater heights.
The productivity industry doesn’t do this work to entertain us. They’re trying hard to help you get more done better. Emphasis on done.
Recently, an internal memo from Yahoo announcing a ban on working from home has sparked a feisty debate about the merits of working remotely. The explanation given for the policy change comes down to one sentence in the memo: “To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side.”
As a distributed team ourselves, serving many great companies with flexible work arrangements, we don’t think people’s physical presence in one place is necessary to create the best workplace or the best work. Where we do agree with Yahoo is how vital communication and collaboration are to a company’s success.
The nature of remote work actually compels companies to grapple with and figure out how people communicate and collaborate best. Fortunately, connection and communication are what technology and the web have made so much easier. Finding the right communication tools becomes even more pressing for distributed companies since that toolbox helps create our shared space.
As a follow-up to our ode to distributed companies, we thought we’d share what communication tools we use to stay connected, creative, and collaborative together. These communication tools are great not just for managing remote workers but for any teams, since no matter the physical working arrangement, strong team connection and communication are key to accountability, productivity, and innovation and great customer service.
Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That’s not management, that’s dealmaking. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it’s a magnificent profession.
The peculiar challenge of knowledge work is that so much of it takes place in our heads and out of sight. In contrast to the era of factory work, knowledge work is nowhere near as visible. You can’t discern the state of progress by looking at tangible output or product.
This poses a particular problem for managers, whose job it is to support their employees and enable progress. You can’t properly manage what you can’t see. Otherwise the result is directives and orders that don’t make sense, veering toward irrelevance and away from the reality of the situation. Leading blindly without understanding the status of projects and the context in which people are working makes as much sense as managing a production line without seeing the state and quality of a product as it is being assembled.
When it comes to project management, it’s so much cheaper to learn from someone else’s mistakes. So here are a few of mine!
I’ve been running projects for my whole adult life. I started with computer games at IG. After ten years I switched to marketing and copywriting projects at Articulate Marketing, which I still run. On top of that, I’m now also CEO of Turbine, an online app for purchases, expenses, time off management and HR record-keeping.
Photo: Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig
Project management is the art, craft and science of getting stuff done by teams. And it’s also like walking through a minefield. These tips – based on my own experience over 20 years – will help you find your way through it.