It’s fascinating to me how certain cultural ideas and values trickle down through time and against other forces. I’m part Japanese. Though as of writing, I’ve never been to Japan. You have to go back a very long way in my family tree to find people who were born in Japan rather than the United States or who didn’t grow up learning English as native speakers.
Yet there are moments where, at least from what I understand about Japanese culture, it looks to me like certain ideas have stuck around after more than a century of the Japanese part of my family living in the US.
I have a distinct memory of folding cards with one of my older cousins when I was maybe ten years old. It wasn’t anything complicated. We had pieces of card stock that needed to be folded in half. It’s the sort of thing that you could delegate to a 10 year old without too much concern.
But my cousin wasn’t happy with the results. She pointed out that I hadn’t exactly matched the corners. The cards could’ve been folded more neatly and nicely. Importantly, though, the failure — such as it was — wasn’t about me, or my ability to fold paper. It wasn’t about her being mean or my failure in the crafts department. No, we had let down the art of paper folding. It was about something bigger than her or me.
I think about this story a lot when I’m trying to explain my management style. People talk a lot about separating behavior from the person, in terms of delivering feedback. Especially when it’s negative. A person isn’t good or bad. It’s what they did that has a normative value.
That’s easier said than done, of course. You may have good intentions, but people can’t read that. If what you say or how you say it feels personal rather than specific to an action, it doesn’t matter. Perception is everything.
Developing a broader anchor helps steer these conversations in the right way. Whether that’s values, a mission, or agreed upon standards. It helps emphasize that an issue isn’t about you and them, or that there’s a fixed, per se problem with something they haven’t mastered yet. It gives you a common problem to work against together, rather than something that feels — especially to the person in the weaker half of the power dynamic — like a criticism of their character rather than their actions.
For starters, I think this is a great reason to foster a shared sense of purpose and (much as 18-year-old me would want to run away) cultivate company values.
And I think this works in both directions. Even when someone or a group does a good job, it can be easy to make it seem like they’re the golden children. The project went well because the “good” team was working on it, rather than (you hope) because they did a better job of understanding the mission and hewing to values that have made your organization successful. You miss potential learning opportunities because the people who aren’t as far along the learning curve can’t see themselves in that level of execution.
On the flip side, being able to point to something like “quality over speed” when someone rushes out a bug fix that fails and makes a problem worse, helps frame the conversation. It provides a common reference point to work against. It’s you and them trying to live up to an ideal,
The same could be said with something like a career ladder. If you have clear criteria for each level and each function, it makes it a lot easier to have conversations about what’s working and what’s not. People aren’t surprised: they’ve seen it and have — hopefully explicitly — signed onto that as a set of group standards. The assessment moves from being arbitrary and capricious to one centered on something bigger than the manager-managed dyad.
Importantly, this isn’t magic. Simply having values or a career ladder won’t cut it. People need to believe in them. If you have values that people don’t buy, it’s not going to seem like you’re working toward a common goal. Instead, it will feel like yet another cudgel being used to get the point across.
This is perhaps my inner mathematician and engineer coming through. Get the basics and foundation right — solve the problem at its root — and it’s a lot easier in the cut and thrust of the day to day. But you have to start early. It’s not something you can turn on a dime, and it requires effort and investment.
All this came to a head a few years ago when I was doing a performance check in with one of my reports.
Like anyone operating to best practices — and, more sincerely, because I want to get better too — I’m always eager to get notes from the people who reported to me.
In this conversation, he told me I wasn’t mean enough when we checked in every week. And that, in not being meaner and more demeaning, it was hampering his ability to improve and progress.
This surprised me for many reasons, not least because most people generally have feedback in the opposite direction, both in general and to me. I’ve come to appreciate that my intensity and proclivity to seek out logical rigor don’t always read the way I intend them to, especially with people who don’t know me well. Curiosity and excellence can read as harsh.
Digging deeper, though, we had a breakthrough. Taking a step back, I helped him see that he had improved. Much of that had come through exactly the kinds of conversations I mentioned above, centered on the two of us working towards a bigger mission — the “why” behind the features he was developing — and the values of our engineering team. It was simply a style he’d never experienced. Not to toot my own horn too much, for the worse. It was a great moment for both of us.
I’m a firm believer than we can do great things and go far without destroying people’s souls. For every tyrannical kitchen nightmare of a head chef, there’s someone like Ruthie Rogers or Eric Ripert showing that there’s a different way. If you’ve ever had the privilege of eating at The River Cafe or Le Bernardin, there’s no way you could say they don’t achieve excellence.
There’s a lot that goes into that, of course. I’d like to think one path goes through finding these broader reference points — a bigger idea — to help frame conversations. It certainly improved my card folding skills.
Bonus: Something for the coders
While I’m usually pretty averse to worrying about the minutiae of my development environment, I can’t help recommending this super cool new set of monospace fonts from the team at GitHub-Microsoft. They’re using features of modern font standards to make everything a little nicer when you’re staring at thousands of lines of code.
Enjoy this? Have an idea for something you’d like a perspective on? Drop me a line: I’d love to hear from you.