Photo by Patrick Perkins.

As professionals we often put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Be it customers, peers, managers. We benefit from empathy and critical thinking. I like playing devil’s advocate. This often requires challenging own core beliefs.

Many of us are blessed with working with a team of smart people. And smart people are darn difficult to argue with. They have good arguments and often juxtaposed valid perspectives. Navigating this sometimes requires (😱) changing our own minds.

Here’s a few ideas I’ve come across recently that have challenged some common beliefs core to my work. Have fun.

We may not need teams anymore

HBR: Do We Still Need Teams?

As we’ve stated in past research, true teams have a shared mindset, a compelling joint mission, defined roles, stable membership, high interdependence, and clear norms. Co-acting groups represent a loose confederation of employees who dip in and out of collaborative interactions as a project or initiative unfolds.

This reminds me of the notion of “dynamic teams” I read about in uni. It’s startling to say that we don’t need teams. And it’s also not quite like that. There are some interesting benefits, though. Co-acting groups band and disband rapidly based on desired outcomes. I’d venture that start-ups are much better at this than larger corporations. There is potential of making disruptive re-orgs a thing of the past. Co-acting groups, or dynamic work comunities, are an enviable organizational capability.

The open office is not great for workers

NYT: Opinion | The Immortal Awfulness of Open Plan Workplaces

For decades, research has found that open plan offices are bad for companies, bad for workers, bad for health and bad for morale. And yet they just won’t die.

I admit this something that’s not new to me, ever since Peopleware at least. Yet, I also understand the challenges that drive us towards the open space multi-func spaces of today. There is no one-size-fits-all solution and we need to be respectful of this. However when was the last time your company experimented with private offices. (I’m not laughing, you are laughing. 😀)

Objectives and metrics may prevent us from achieving our higher goals

Kenneth Stanley: Set The Right Objectives [The Knowledge Project Ep. #148]

“Actually the subjective judgments are the interesting ones because the objective judgments are easy. You don’t need a degree to just measure something.”

Objectives and metrics may restrict the required creativity when dealing with complex problems. Our good-intentioned drive for objectivity can also trip us up. Subjective judgements and experiences are super valuable. “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.”… Really?? I beg to differ. By the way, I’m an active participant and proponent of rolling out OKRs in our organization. It definitely helps to keep the hype in check.

It is a common notion that a manager’s most important job is protecting their team from distractions. It popped up recently in a conversation with a teammate who thought I’m doing it well. This triggered me in 2 ways. First, I’m not actively shielding the team from anything. Second, I’ve always found this idea at odds with transparency and empowerment.

The key point to make here is that a change of perspective can achieve better results. Consider a shift from filtering noise to enabling working systems. By another common saying, the product of a team’s manager is their team. Instead of being a local shield, a manager can achieve positive network effects in the wider organization by improving the system, i.e. ways of working.

There is indeed a problem to solve. The cognitive demands on anyone in a highly connected workplace can be overwhelming. Therefore, a manager benefits from high tolerance to uncertainty. And their focus should be on helping the team make sense of the world. The firehose of information could be available to most in a company. The way for a manager to bring value is to give their take on a cohesive narrative.

In summary, instead of being a shield to your team - be a sense-maker and enabler for the whole organization.

Photo by Jonathan Allison.

💻 What better way to spend Sunday evening… than to fiddle with cross-posting to LinkedIn. 🙃 In this iteration:

• IFTTT picks up the new post from the blog category RSS feed
• IFTTT sends to a Buffer queue
• Buffer will eventually post to LinkedIn based on its schedule

Curious how images and links will perform through the pipeline. If it works, this would be neat as Buffer would add an extra level of control. However, it’a annoying and complicated to have so many tools in the process. At least, this all should work with the free tiers.

Photo by Sergey Zolkin

💻🎙 Marshall Goldsmith: The Essentials Of Leadership [The Knowledge Project Ep. #142]

Happened to listen to this podcast episode again “by mistake” today. It packs a lot of wisdom on leadership and coaching. Too much to process on a single listen. It was easy to just let it play once I realized what it was. Some personal highlights:

• if you want to change be rigorous about follow-up
• you can make an idea 5% better by providing your input but diminish the commitment of others by 50%
• breathe, let it go
• never start a sentence with “no”, “but”, “however”
• never base your value as a human on actual outcomes; do your best
• we are here to make a positive difference in the world, not to prove how right or smart we are

Photo by Josie Weiss

I recently read an overall excellent guide on burnout for managers. Here’s a few of my key take-aways.

Burnout is a psychological state caused by prolonged stress from a job.

There are three key characteristics of burnout:

• Overwhelming exhaustion.
• Feelings of cynicism.
• And a sense of ineffectiveness.

The above characteristics could manifest in different combinations. Also the intensity could be distributed unevenly. This was illustrated well in the stories in the guide. I suppose, ultimately, burnout incapacitates us beyond a sense of ineffectiveness.

burnout is really a ‘stress experience within a social environment’.

Burnout occurs in the context of one’s environment. People have different responses and levels of resilience. It is, however, unfair to put the full responsibility of burning out onto the individual.

The JD-R model classifies every occupation into two general categories: job demands and job resources.

This model of looking at the problem is simple. I like it because it intuitively feels as first principles. Managers can affect the context in which potential burnout occurs by affecting the job demands and job resources. This is the balancing act of every team manager. What resources can be made available for people such that we can cope with high job demands?

Here’s the bad news: we know very little about recovering from burnout. What we do know are two things:

• Individual interventions don’t work — and by individual interventions we mean interventions while the person continues to be at the workplace that caused the burnout.
• If you remove yourself from that working environment, you will recover.

The second point is crucial. Something needs to change and it doesn’t mean a person needs to resign. It means adapting or changing the role of the individual significantly enough so that they can recover. You can’t expect that a person will just regain their step in the same environment that led them to burn out in the first place.

An aspect I would have wished for the guide to cover is circumstances outside of work. There is no deficit of what to worry about on an any given day. The pandemic, war, climate crisis… all cause substantial anxiety in the lives of many of us. In that sense, factors outside of the work place also could contribute to burnout.

Remember to replenish your resources.

Photo by Steve Johnson