Tag: communication

Incentives: Invisible and Important

Incentives: Invisible and Important

I’ve had the good fortune of getting a lot of advice from folks who are farther along in their careers – either greater velocity, higher heights, more reps on the work, really a diverse crew of mentors and advisors.

During one of these conversations I was given the advice, to shift my thinking when it came to partners and stakeholders within the company, away from broader business goals, and instead try to focus on and get crisp on individual peoples’ incentives. Incentives, they pointed out, often illustrate someone’s motivation and behavior better than any other factor.

Teams at the end of the day are collections of people, and people (not teams) have relationships – but we have to remember that they also have motivations and incentives to do the things that they do. Especially at work, no one is a chaos agent, not really; folks are busy, and are trying to do the right thing for themselves, and for their team, and for their family.

I’m sure pure spite-based actions have happened, but the vast majority of the time, no one is actively working to frustrate or bypass you, your team, or your work. It’s true when we tell our kids and it’s true as adults: no one is thinking about you as much as you are. There is almost always a more parsimonious explanation that does not involve malicious intent. And, since malice and spite are not good predictors of future behavior, they’re not super useful in your mental model.

Like Heinlein tells us, we’re better off understanding and appealing to someone else’s self interest – similarly to how Ferrazzi describes co-elevation in “Leading Without Authority” (a great read for anyone working across multiple teams or organizations in any context), you have to understand what someone else perceives as valuable before you can start to explore what a mutual win would look like.

It feels obvious in retrospect – folks want to achieve a win, and we of course want to pursue our own success, but figuring out the way that those puzzle pieces can fit together can be much less clear. The problem of course, is that incentives are invisible. We don’t always even understand why we ourselves do what we do, how can we possibly hope to understand what is driving other people?

We have two kids (the featured image is us at Meow Wolf in March!) – they’re nine and seven. Our daughter, unbelievably, turns ten in May! They sometimes experience a flavor of this same social space. If a friend is unexpectedly unkind, or a coach or teacher says something that surprises them, we like to use the “Something Missing” framework to think it through.

“That doesn’t sound like something she would normally do – is there something missing that would help explain it?”

… often for kiddos it’s something like, having trouble with another friend, or losing in a game, and for teachers and coaches it’s often grounded in wanting a particular goal for the whole class or team. In a way that a lot of things start to stitch together, this Something Missing prompt also become a useful framework for me to think about my relationships in the workplace – “What incentive is missing here? What part of their landscape am I not seeing, that explains this behavior?”

Often the simple act of prompting myself to accept that there may exist some invisible factor that is not yet known to me, can be helpful to set aside my own (sometimes hurt!) feelings, and instead move into investigation and resolution.

Teams Don’t Talk, People Do

Teams Don’t Talk, People Do

“Oh, that project is behind because Platform Widgets doesn’t talk to us.”

As humans, we do this thing, where we ascribe people-ness to things that aren’t people, and we talk about those things in ways that we would talk about other people. Pets are a great example of this – and wild animals too, but it’s also true for inanimate things, like cars, and also things that aren’t things at all, but just, abstract concepts, like “New York State” or “HR”

“Everybody knows if Subscriber Acceleration is involved, our timelines will go out the window.”

This can be a nice way to make our lives more interesting – naming your car as a teenager felt like almost a rite of passage in the early 2000s! – but it carries some risk when we start to let our understanding of how humans interact and work over to more abstract concepts, especially in the workplace or when working with governmental or nonprofit organizations.

“Why can’t Global Avian Legal get their story straight?”

The problem is, when we start to think about “other teams” as singular, seamless atomic units, we start to make some simple mistakes:

  • We assume the whole team has the same opinion on a project or priority
  • We assume everyone on a team has the same knowledge and is equally informed
  • We begin to set up a mental model where teams relate to one another directly

But that’s the thing – teams don’t relate to one another. In some very real way, teams don’t even exist, they’re a collection of people, and people are complicated, and messy, and have differing incentives and mindsets. You can’t talk to a team. You can’t take a team out to coffee. You can only relate to individual humans who are a part of that team.

When I first started at Disney, in my initial listening tour, I asked a senior colleague of mine if he could recommend any books or blog posts that would help me to navigate working at Disney, which felt like a huge battleship compared to the tiny fishing boats I’d worked on before. He recommended Ferrazzi’s now-classic Leading Without Authority (which I would also recommend to any PMs or aspiring PMs!)

One of the pieces that Ferrazzi touches on repeatedly in the book is this idea of listening to pursue co-elevating, his model of finding opportunities to achieve shared successes. “To influence others, you must first build strong relationships,” he says.

The thing is, you can’t build a relationship with a team – only with another person. This is especially important for folks who work across many teams or business units to accomplish big initiatives and build big impactful solutions – you need to find ways to stay grounded to the actual folks doing the work, and push back (in your own mind at least!) on the anthropomorphizing of teams.

The best way to know that it’s time to build a relationship with another person, or to encourage a leader working with you to develop a 1:1 relationship, is when you start hearing people say things like those called out above.

When you yourself, or someone working with you, starts assigning motivations or personality traits to a team, be alert! An opportunity for greater collaboration and clarity awaits if you dig one layer deeper:

“Who on Platform Widgets did you talk to?”

“Who on Subscriber Acceleration usually sets timelines?”

…and then, go talk to that person!

End Every One on One the Same Way

I think about communication a lot!

It’s such a huge, and hard, and important topic for anyone trying to become a better leader. Especially in 2016, as the ideas of “management” and “leadership” become murkier and more difficult to nail down, and the tools we use to communicate with one another are exploding in number (if not quality) – it’s always on my mind.

Continue reading “End Every One on One the Same Way” →

Working from Home and Phatic Communication

Working from home, being what’s called a remote worker, is a really fascinating frontier of Work. It’s fascinating both because as a paradigm, it creates new challenges, and it also makes visible ways in which more traditional work spaces overcome old challenges.

Working remotely has helped me understand traditional work places much better – if only because in stepping outside of what we see as the usual way of doing business, many of the previously invisible advantages of shared space come into stark relief.

Something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot recently is the idea of phatic conversations – that is, talk whose whole purpose is the talk itself, and not to a larger end (find something out from a colleague, accomplish a shared goal, communicate time away from work.)

I’ve written about communication with remote teams a couple other times lately:

Communicating with Remote Teams: One on Ones

Work from Home but Still Eat with Friends

This term, phatic conversation, is a new one for me, and I should say that I heard it for the first time via a podcast. It was one of those moments when someone else touches on and explains something that immediately brings your own thoughts from a mess into order. This is the thing I’ve been wandering around the outside of.

In a traditional workplace, phatic conversations happen in virtue of being around people, and they serve as a real social lubricant that is mutually beneficial and builds trust and sociability over time.

You have tons of these interactions: not all with colleagues, and not even all verbal. That neighbor that checks the mail at the same time as you? Those nods and waves are phatic communication.

We can even see things like small talk as part of this: when you engage in small talk with a stranger or with someone you’ve known for a long time, part of the purpose of that talk is the talk itself. 

It outlines a safe space. It’s a little back and forth to establish shared norms, we-are-the-same-tribe-right? 

The same is true of colleagues; when a meeting goes long due to some inane banter on an off topic, sharing a joke and a laugh on the way to lunch – this counts, there’s a real value there.

When you work next to someone, in the same building or the same floor, you sort of get phatic conversations for free.

When we think about this concept in a remote environment, where some or all of the folks working in an organization are scattered here and there geographically, this calculus changes.

Remote workers have to get our phatic conversations on purpose – we have to reach out to one another, to grab a virtual coffee or a video-conferenced lunch. It’s really interesting, right? When I was working in more traditional environments, I would have never identified small talk or waiting in line at the copy machine as ways my workplace solved a problem.

Phatic conversations are still important – they grease the wheels and create more shared experiences, and help to humanize folks you maybe don’t work with all that often. This is important!

It’s important not just socially, not just because it’s good to get to know your colleagues for your own sense of belonging and social in-grouping. It’s important because it opens up streams of communication, it gives you and your new connection access to more and different viewpoints and parts of the company (and, if you’re sufficiently distributed, different parts of the world.)

There’s value there – real, demonstrable value for the company or organization. Getting fresh eyes and fresh ears on problems is where innovation comes from. It’s by combining diverse viewpoints that we’re able to approach our problems and obstacles in new and exciting ways.

I have a few scheduled lunches every week where I sit and eat my lunch on camera with someone else (they’re not always eating, time zones means that lunch is relative!) – it’s a really nice way to spend lunch, and I’ve gotten to know folks a lot better this way.

Over the next few months, I’m going to start reaching out to folks specifically to have a coffee, and make it clear that it’s a chat to have a chat. Not people I already count as friends, but really intentionally folks I wouldn’t otherwise ever have face time with.

I don’t want to pull their developers away. I don’t want their designer to work on my project. I just want to have a coffee, to see how their day is going. It feels like this is a way to stoke the fires of serendipity a little, allowing space for unusual combinations to surface and flourish.

If you work in a remote environment, I encourage you to do this, too – it’s just coffee 🙂

Communicating in 2016: Leave Good Messages

Communicating in 2016: Leave Good Messages

Subtitled; Never Just Say ‘Ping’

I was chatting with my friend Dan today, who works for one of the biggest publishing houses in the world. I’ve known Dan for a really long time. Here’s a picture of us from almost ten years ago:

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Dan was telling me that his subsection of the company was starting to use Slack for communication at work. You know Slack right? We’ve been using Slack for a while at Automattic (for a time, the open source WordPress project was the biggest single group using Slack – or so I heard. Couldn’t tell you if that’s still true!).

Continue reading “Communicating in 2016: Leave Good Messages” →