What do you need a review for?

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I’ve always found the idea of employee quarterly reviews to be very interesting, particularly at smaller companies like ours. We’re aware of what everyone is doing, and we make corrections as necessary as part of our day-to-day work. It seems silly to me to save up the good and bad for a quarterly review rather than correct and praise as needed.

It turns out that Steve Jobs had similar thoughts. In “Becoming Steve Jobs“, they share this bit about reviews:

Where’s your annual reviews and all that? I told him that I’d never had an annual review! Steve didn’t believe in reviews. He disliked all that formality. His feeling was, ‘I give you feedback all the time, so what do you need a review for?’

Based on that, it seems that Jobs didn’t do any kind of quarterly review, whereas we still do. While it’s not a “review” by any means, it’s a good change to catch up, make sure things are going well, set goals for the upcoming quarter, and otherwise just make sure all is steady. Any issues have been resolved at the time of the issue, so there’s no need to make someone nervous about how their performance has been — they should already know.

What are your thoughts on quarterly reviews? What’s the best kind of content to include in them?

A culture cannot be mandated

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Most companies think that they have great work cultures, and many do. For those that want to improve the culture of their team there are many ways to go about it, but forcing it isn’t likely to work.

I’m sure you’ve heard the very old saying “the beatings will continue until morale improves“, which is just a funny way of saying that you can’t force a great culture.

In the book he wrote about his own company, “Four Seasons“, Isadore Sharp shared many great lessons and I encourage you to pick up a copy. Among other things, he shares:

A culture cannot be mandated as a policy. It must grow from within, based on the actions of the company’s people over a long period of time.

In many cases, this means it’s based on the actions of the founder(s) and grows out from there. When it comes to GreenMellen, it means that Ali and I have worked hard to showcase the qualities that we wish to see from our team, because simply making rules is far less sustainable in the long run.

I’m thankful that as our team has grown, they’ve learned to push back on pieces of culture as needed as well to help keep us moving in the right direction. We all have the same goals and desires, which makes things easier to grow.

Sharp was a brilliant man and his book is full of great insights, so check it out if you can.

You train an animal, you teach a person

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With the rise of AI and robotics, the need to “train” a person is fading quickly. Jobs that can be easily trained are quickly being replaced by machines, while jobs that require deeper insights and skill continue to grow.

Sol Price, the founder of Price Club (which became Costco) said it simply:

“You train an animal, you teach a person”

Or as Seth Godin said in his book “Linchpin”:

“There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do.”

Related is a quote from Jim Sinegal, one of the other cofounders of Costco, who said:

“If you’re not spending 90% of your time teaching, you’re not doing your job.”

Training is what we needed in the last century, but things are very different today. A few years ago, Seth wrote and shared a long post about the purpose of school and how things need to change. For decades, the purpose of school was to train obedience so that students would become good factory workers. That worked well for that stated purpose, but it’s no longer the goal. Training students to be obedient is training them for jobs that no longer exist.

Seth also did a TEDx talk years ago with some great examples from the post, which you can watch here:

If you feel like you have to “train” your employees, you have roles that aren’t going to be around much longer.

Principles before methods

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There are a lot of easy ways to put things in the wrong order. For example, if you start working on tactics before you unpack the overall strategy, you’re likely to have a bad time. Similarly, Josh Kaufman shares a quote in “The Personal MBA” from Ralph Waldo Emerson that compares methods and principles:

“As to methods, there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

I see principles and methods being very similar to strategies and tactics. If a principle is your fundamental belief about something, it makes perfect sense to sort it out before you get into specific methods. Like the rush to tactics, though, it’s easy to jump to methods and get to work because the strategies and principles don’t show immediate results.

Move the dirt

It reminds me a bit of when I was moving dirt in my backyard a few years ago. I had two options:

  • Get out there with a shovel and wheelbarrow and get to work.
  • Research, call, and schedule a time for a guy with a bobcat to come out and do it for me.

The first option shows immediate results but with a subpar outcome, like jumping straight to tactics.

The second option will take more time, and show no results for a day or two, but ultimately led to a faster and better outcome.

Keeping a high level view on principles before methods may seem slower, but will actually open up a world of possibilities. It’s like how our website development process, which can feel a bit constraining at times, is actually the key to wider creativity and better outcomes.

Keep the first things first, and then rest will fall into place much more smoothly.

Leadership is serving those in your charge, not being in charge

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A few years ago Marie Forleo interviewed Simon Sinek on her podcast and they discussed “The Environment Good Leaders Create“. It was a short (12 min) fascinating discussion, and you can listen to it here.

Here are a few things that I pulled from it:

“Most leaders think leadership is about being in charge. No, it’s not. It’s about taking care of those in your charge. Most leaders think everybody works for them. No, you work for the people in your organization. It is your responsibility to take care of them, make them feel safe, and they will naturally want to cooperate and work hard and give you their blood and sweat and tears to advance your vision.”

Related, he also added:

“Leadership is the practice of putting the lives of others sometimes ahead of our interests.”

The last piece from the podcast that I’ll share reminded me a lot of the concept of Sonder; the moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours.

“So practicing leadership is like driving to work in the morning and someone wants to cut in your lane. Do you go forward or do you pull back? That’s leadership. Like, we don’t know. Maybe they’re running late for a big interview and they’ve been unemployed for six months. Maybe their boss is an ogre and they left late because their kids had trouble getting out to school today.”

Taking time to understand what might really be going on behind the scenes of someone else can make a huge difference in your outlook on the world. Using the car example in that last quote, I intentionally let people get away with all kinds of stuff when I’m driving, as it keeps me safer and keeps my stress levels down. All told, it makes my trips in the car last like 10 seconds longer because someone cut in front of me. I really don’t understand why people let things build up to the point of “road rage”.

Take care of those around you, understand that everyone has a full and complicated life, and things will go better on every front.

You should interrupt others, but just a little bit

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I kind of enjoy when I’m reading a book and it seems to contradict what I’ve read in another book. This happened recently while reading “The JOLT Effect“, followed by “The Charisma Myth“. Both are great books, but they seem to offer competing advice about interrupting others.

From the JOLT Effect and some thoughts on “cooperative overlapping”:

This term was coined by Georgetown University linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, who explains that “cooperative overlapping occurs when the listener starts talking along with the speaker, not to cut them off but rather to validate or show they’re engaged in what the other person is saying.” Tannen says another way to think about cooperative overlapping is “enthusiastic listenership” or “participatory listenership.” Others have described this technique as communicating with somebody as opposed to at somebody, and that not cooperatively overlapping can have the unintended consequence of making the other person feel alone.

Then, from The Charisma Myth:

Good listeners know never, ever to interrupt—not even if the impulse to do so comes from excitement about something the other person just said. No matter how congratulatory and warm your input, it will always result in their feeling at least a twinge of resentment or frustration at not having been allowed to complete their sentence. One of my clients told me: “This one practice alone is worth its weight gold. To stop interrupting others could be the single most important skill I’ve learned from working with you.”

So you have one book saying “here is how to interrupt” and the other saying to “never, ever interrupt”. However, I think they’re both right.

The JOLT Effect isn’t really suggesting that you interrupt, and more just go along with them. As they say above, “not to cut them off”, which is exactly what The Charisma Myth encourages.

I’ve been thinking about both of those in recent conversations with folks, but it seems that they’re on the same page so I’ll keep trying to hone my skill of “cooperative overlapping” without actually interrupting what the other person is saying.

Present with Word, not PowerPoint

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PowerPoint (and Keynote and Google Slides) can be a powerful tool, but it’s very often misused. Beyond just presentations, I’ve seen it used to design layouts and even create logos. However, it can be even worse when people use it to avoid having to really think through an issue.

In the book “Working Backwards” about the history of Amazon, they share some thoughts on why Word can be a better choice for sharing information than PowerPoint.

First, Edward Tufte offered some advice on how to get started:

“Making this transition in large organizations requires a straightforward executive order: From now on your presentation software is Microsoft Word, not PowerPoint, Get used to it.”

Jeff Bezos explained further:

“The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than “writing” a 20 page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related. PowerPoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.”

As shared in a Forbes article from a few years ago, this works because Bezos starts every leadership meeting with 15 minutes of silence while everyone reading the document that explains what they’re here to discuss.

Of course, that’s not to say that PowerPoint has no value. I still use it frequently when presenting to groups, and I intend to for the foreseeable future. I think it might be weird to start a presentation for a business group by asking everyone to take a few minutes to read a handout first, but maybe not. It’d be different, for sure, but could it be effective in that kind of situation or does this only really work for focused leadership teams?

It’s not a game show

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The need to have instant answers, particularly in a business setting, is a strange thing. While companies need to move forward, taking a few minutes to find the right solution shouldn’t be a problem.

I see similar with political candidates. While I expect them to be well-informed on various aspects of their role, if they need to ponder a question and get back with an answer later, that should be perfectly fine.

Seth Godin summed this up in a recent podcast, where he said:

“Well, why exactly do we need to produce the answer in real time? It’s not a game show. That in fact, when we go asynchronous, not all at once, but when we have it ready using a system like Slack, it’s easy to show that we could be more productive if we want to be.”

As an enneagram 5, I often feel the need to have the answers to everything, but I know that it’s a fool’s errand. If my team needs an answer to something, taking a few minutes to research the proper solution should never be an issue.

Speed shouldn’t be a measure

It’s similar to what Malcolm Gladwell shared regarding lawyers, and how silly it is that they’re measured on how quickly they can answer questions. Speed should be a factor, sure, but the main thing is getting the answer correct and that’s simply not valued as highly on tests like the LSAT. His main thought from there is that “when we decide who is smart enough to be a lawyer, we use a stopwatch“. Why?

2D vs 3D content

I think much of Seth’s concern, as he alluded to with his comment about Slack, is that we’re holding unnecessary meetings. If we need to talk through deep ideas, a real-time conversation might be valuable. If straight answers are all that is needed, then an asynchronous solution (like Slack or email) is likely a far better way to go.

Metcalfe’s Law for staff?

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Metcalfe’s Law, coined by Robert Metcalfe in 1980, says that:

“the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system:

In other words, as you add more people to a network (like a phone system or Facebook), the value of that network goes up much faster than the number of people added. Using his example, if you have 10 people on a network the value is “100”, but if you have 20 people on a network the value is “400” — four times higher.

I tend to agree. With something like a social network, it becomes way more valuable as more of my friends join, as I suspect it does for you as well.

For teams too?

In a recent conversation with a few marketing friends, I came to the idea that this might also be true for the size of your team, but rather than increasing in value, it increases in complexity.

I’ve talked to a variety of people that have grown relatively large agencies, and almost all of them agree that their life with 20-30 staff is way more complex than it was with 10. It’s not 2 or 3 times harder, but more like 10 times harder. Adding staff creates more challenges at a faster rate than your raw headcount.

There are certainly going to be some exceptions, but it’s an interesting way to look at things. Do you agree? Does Metcalfe’s Law sort of work with team size as well?

I haven’t heard anybody complain

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Hearing complaints from your customers can be a good thing. While we ideally don’t want to hear any because we’re doing a great job, complaints can be a great way to improve your systems for the next person.

However, a lack of complaints doesn’t mean you’re doing things perfectly — you may just be not hearing them.

From a recent podcast of his, Jay Acunzo puts it like this:

“But you know, I haven’t heard anybody complain. And I’m like, boy, should you learn about a concept called non-response bias. Just because you haven’t heard people say anything negative doesn’t mean you’re not leaving a wake of damage in your trail.”

It could be that people are afraid to give you bad news, or they don’t know how to reach out, or any number of reasons. Perhaps things are indeed going very well, but there are likely complaints out there that you’re missing, and tracking them down to resolve them would be a great thing for everyone involved.