Occasional articles about leadership, with a focus on fostering psychological safety, creating healthy teams and processes, and improving corporate culture.
One of the best things about being retired is the perspective it gives you. You can look back across your entire career – 38 years of it, in my case, and think about what really mattered, now that it's over. If I’m being honest, the success I’ve had in my career can be pinned on two factors: hard work, and luck. Most people like to focus on the role that hard work played in their success and…
Trading off Power and Comfort for Honesty and Engagement Years ago, when I was promoted to Director at the Big Tech Company that employed me, one of the perks that came with the job was my own office. I could close my door and not have to listen to the chatter and white noise of our open-concept workspace. The quiet privacy was a wonderful improvement to my working day. Comfort has always been a…
Tips for Riding the Storm Last May, after learning that most new managers get no training on key skills, I reached out and interviewed forty experienced people managers to ask them what they wish they had known when they first started managing people. Over the last year I’ve been taking what I’ve learned from those interviews, and making a series of articles for new managers, or people thinking…
Everyone's Different In the first part of this article, I talked about the relationship between a manager and their team as a whole. In this second part, I want to talk about the relationship between a manager and their individual employees. What do your individual team members need from you to be successful? One common theme that came up when I asked forty experienced people managers what they…
A to-do list for new managers How do I set up my team for success? This was one of the big topics that was raised when I asked forty experienced people managers what they wished they had known when they first started managing. (This article contains anonymized quotes from those interviews.) Many new managers think that the way they set up their team for success is by telling them to do the right…
When your feedback style needs feedback Feedback can be hard – hard to give, and hard to receive. People want feedback so that they know if they’re meeting expectations and improve, but dread getting bad news. Annual performance reviews do more harm than good. So it’s no surprise that when I interviewed forty people managers and asked them what they wish they had known when they first started…
You can't know everything, and that's okay When I recently interviewed 40 managers and asked them what they wished they had known when they first started managing, many people talked to me about how heavy the new responsibility felt to them. They wanted to really do right by their teams, but found themselves overwhelmed. As one said to me: “I tried too hard to be perfect, to be all things for each…
Everything television told you about being a manager was wrong When I recently interviewed 40 managers and asked them what they wished they had known when they first started managing, one of the most common answers I got was “I wish I had known what the job actually entails”. New managers are frequently surprised when management is not at all what they expected. And sometimes, too late, they…
What People Managers Wish They Had Known When They First Started Managing My latest research project arose after a conversation I had with Minette Norman, one of the co-authors of The Psychological Safety Playbook . I had commented that her book would be a great resource for any new manager, since the ability to foster psychological safety was key to managerial success. When I was first promoted…
The Problem with Bringing Your Whole Self to Work The first time I heard the phrase “bring your whole self to work”, I rolled my eyes a little. It just sounded like another vague, pleasant-sounding, motherhood-and-apple-pie platitude being thrown around in the business blogosphere. I don’t feel that way any more. While the phrase is still thrown around carelessly, it does have a specific meaning,…
Micromanagement happens when a manager treats skilled, experienced employees as if they are unskilled novices who require constant oversight, instruction, and correction. Instead of strategic direction, micromanagers give only tactical instruction. They don’t trust their staff to make decisions or act autonomously. It’s paternalistic, infuriating and demoralizing for team members. Years of…
I remember one time in my career, when I found myself sitting in the office of a development manager at my company. He was super-smart, and leading a team of great talent, but he had a blind spot around design. I was trying to convince him that he needed to let some UX designers get involved in his project early, and he wasn’t having it. The developers were already making key decisions about how…
Many companies publish (internally or externally) a list of their core values – principles that the company claims guide their actions. Those core values are there to inspire employees and demonstrate that when the going gets tough, the company will do the right thing. There are dozens of articles about how to select the right organizational core values and how to communicate them effectively.…
It’s such a common problem that it’s almost a cliché – a meeting room (possibly virtual) full of people trying to accomplish something. But only two or three people are doing all the talking. The others are just observing, or looking at their phones, or sitting with their arms crossed and an annoyed expression. The conversation is going down rabbit holes. Or one person has staked out a position,…
Getting rid of toxic employees or managers is only the first step to team recovery. This article looks at the residual damage left by toxic staff, and what you can do to overcome it.
If you are a team leader and you want to know if your team is Psychologically Safe, this scorecard might be for you.
It's not enough to want Psychological Safety on your teams. You need to know how to foster it. This article is about how some leaders get it wrong.