“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal When I first moved into a management position, I struggled. I felt everybody was bringing their problems to me now, and I had to solve them. I was still a rookie as you can tell — I still used the term “problem” instead of “challenge.” Those were the days. Ping! A question.

In 2008 the world went through a severe financial crisis. A large part of our economy collapsed, in large part because financial institutions had created a pretty unsustainable system of mortgage-backed securities. It was pretty bad. Fingers were pointed; new rules put in place; people yelled at. “Oh them financial folk, they’re all the same!” we said. “They only care about the money. Evil, evil people! They will be the ruin of us all!

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” ― Steve Jobs Any book that covers management at some point has to mention Frederick Taylor’s Scientific management, often simply referred to as Taylorism. At the end of the 19th century, Taylor closely studied how physical workers in factories performed their manual tasks.

Think of the three people in your organization that you consider your top performers. The three people that if they’d tell you they’d quit, they would leave a significant hole in your organization. Got them in mind? Alright, now pick one of them, and compare them to their job description, and the the level in your organization’s competency matrix where their current role and seniority level fits. Does their job description and competency matrix level accurately describe what you appreciate in them the most?

“I think what you’re attempting to do here is really great…” “But…?” “Right… but I think it’s not going to work.” This is one of those classic aha moments when people first learn about it during some communication training: if there’s a “but” in your communication, people will fail to hear whatever preceded it. People have become so used to the omnipresence of buts that they can see one coming a mile away.

There are all sorts of reasons for managers to dread performance reviews. For one, it’s a lot of work. In preparation you need to request people to send peer feedback, write peer feedback for others, and write your own self reflection. Then comes the real fun part: the judgment, the writing, the calibration with other managers, and then the delivery. At this point, you think you’re done, but no — throughout the remainder of the year, you need to deal with the aftermath.

One of the key ideas of Nonviolent Communication is to remove judgment from our language when we want to communicate constructively. I gave an example of this in Judgment is a Silent Killer: I shared feedback with a customer on our cooperation thus far — all intended as very constructive. However, I made a mistake: I slipped in one piece of judgement, and that ended up being the only thing being heard by the customer.

Wikipedia: Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process relying on software requirements being converted to test cases before software is fully developed, and tracking all software development by repeatedly testing the software against all test cases. This is opposed to software being developed first and test cases created later. Once you get into it, TDD is a beautifully satisfying experience: we write the specification of software to be built in the form of programmatic tests; these tests will all initially fail (turn red).

The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. These are essentially the first sentences in the first book on leadership I ever read: Leadership is an Art by Max Depree, probably about 8 years ago. “Define reality” — what does that really mean? Isn’t there just one, like, “real” reality — and some see it, and some don’t? Case study: Donald J.

“Praise in public, criticize in private.” Take any feedback training, read almost any management book, this is the advice you’ll find. It’s so wide-spread that it’s just considered fact. This how things ought to be done. Period. But should it? Think back to your school years. You sit in the classroom and your teacher is handing out the graded papers you submitted a week earlier. He stops in front your desk and rather than giving your paper to you, he holds it up in the air.

An exercise: Stand in front of a group, and say something meaningful on a topic the audience cares about. No, no, that’s not all, here comes the hard part: Now, look around the room (realistically: zoom room). Hopefully you see familiar faces. Now do this exercise in empathic listening: for each audience member (yes, this is a foreach loop), mentally put yourself in their shoes, or ears, or whatever.

I am very disappointed in all of you. Just a few years ago, when Joe had a baby, the whole company would chip in. We were able to buy a great present. And now, just 17 people out of 120!? What happened to you, why don’t you care? This is the gist of an email sent as part of a company-wide email thread attempting to collect some money to buy a present for a first-time father.

In April I wrote about the No More Feedback book. Ever since it’s been in the back of my mind, and I’ve played with and researched some ideas on this topic. Let me share some of my musings and insights. A brief recap of the core idea of “No More Feedback” (in case you haven’t lost sleep over it like I have) — again, this is my summary of the book, not my own conclusion (although I do buy into it):

In a previous company, I had an engineer work on a feature for the better part of three months. The feature was well-specified, all requirements were clear. When the work was done, and the feature delivered, a demo session was organized. As the product manager demoed the feature, describing the scenario in which our customer would use it, the engineer said: “Oh, that’s what it’s used for? I could have built something different that filled that need in three days.

In a previous post I wrote about the “No More Feedback” book. I’m not done with this topic yet. In fact, I skipped a concept Carol Sanford focuses on quite a bit in the book: your essence. I realize how hippie this may sound, but as usual: bear with me. So, dear reader, let’s continue our journey to make sense of a world without feedback, a world where everything you assumed to be “right” is turned up-side-down.

At OLX I send out a weekly update email every Friday. It is an attempt to be transparent about what I’ve been working on that week and helps me reflect. Sometimes I also muse a bit on more broader topics I’ve been thinking about, or books I’ve read. This is an excerpt of this Friday’s email, I thought it may be interesting for people outside of the company as well.

Or: How to fight the hierarchy of disappointment Chances are that in your company, once it hits a certain size, the hierarchy of disappointment makes an appearance — and, not to be hyperbolic about it, it is slowly killing your company. “What the hell is the hierarchy of disappointment!?” At the top of this hierarchy is the Business. In the Business we identify opportunities in the market that are going to be huge (some would say yuge).

The hardest part of my job is not technical — it’s communication, specifically: giving feedback. I fail at this over and over, and I see other people having trouble as well. In fact, I fear that giving effective feedback is so hard that people are too scared to do it. That’s a loss, because giving feedback, in my view, is an essential mechanism to improve. And I like to believe that everybody wants to improve.

So, you decided to build a real application. Not a toy. Not a hobby project. Something that’s supposed to last, supposed to scale, supposed to work and remain reliable. If you’re in any way like me, I bet right now you’re browsing the interwebs like crazy to find the hottest new technology you get your hands on to use in this new venture. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity!