Listen now!

In this episode:

1. The five ways meetings can go south and
2. What to do to keep your next meeting on track

Resources:

• Download the white paper
• Bryan Field’s website. – https://www.meetingresult.com/
• Bryan’s book: “Powerfully Simple Meetings” on Amazon
• Don’t miss Tom’s FREE online course Simply Effective Meetings 101
• 4 Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader – This easy-to-read graphic clearly illustrates the 4 Levels of Thinking, individually breaking down each level.
  .

Listen now!

In this episode:

I’m sharing three key lessons I’ve learned in the aftermath of having a serious accident in my workshop.

What good can come from an incident leading to surgery and months of rehab?  Listen now!

Resources:

4 Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader – This easy-to-read graphic clearly illustrates the 4 Levels of Thinking, individually breaking down each level.

.

Transcript

[00:00:12]
Announcer: Becoming a Geek Leader.

Sponsored by Geek to Great

[00:00:15]
Tom: Have you ever had one of those really annoying customers who always seems to be looking to start an argument. Have you ever had a team member who just couldn’t let go and delegate work, but was always complaining about being buried? I’ve been there and I know how frustrating that can feel. I also know these things don’t generally get better on their own. People need help learning exactly how to communicate, delegate, manage conflict with others and plan more effectively. Now you know it would be great if you had a simple plan to address those needs, but you’re crazy busy, too, right? That’s why I created the Geek to Great 101 program. It’s a simple system designed for you to take a portion of your already scheduled team meetings, to play a video for your team, ask a few questions from the leader’s guide, and your team members will be able to fill in their own personalized action plan. It’s a great way to put a simple professional development program in place. Your team members will be able to share their plan with you and you can help them actually do it. Train your whole team for less than \$500. Find out more information and get immediate access to your first free lesson at brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks. That’s brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks.

[00:01:41]
Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people, too. Ready?

Family segment.

[00:02:22]
Tom: Hi and welcome to Becoming A Geek Leader. This is another special episode in season two. Today is going to be a little bit different from most of the podcast episodes. This one I’m recording as I’m preparing to recover from a pretty serious mistake that I made. So I wanted to share with you three lessons that I learned from incurring a serious injury in my wood shop. These are ideas that you can apply even at level one, that individual contributor level of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader. So I want to thank you for joining me and I want to start out by saying that I’m gonna be fine. So lots of stuff to cover, so let’s get started.

[00:03:04]
Announcer: Level One, Individual. At level one, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level one focuses you on improving your technical skills.

[00:03:18]
Tom: If you’ve been listening to my podcast for a while, you may have heard me talk about my pop. My mom’s dad. He was a research chemist and he was a hard-core geek, man. He could geek out with the rest of ’em. He had a bumper sticker on the back of his car about Avogadro’s number. Man. But what pop liked to do in his spare time was he did woodworking and one regret that I have is that I didn’t actually ask him to teach me more when he was alive. But after my grandfather passed away many years ago, I inherited many of his shop tools and I had always been involved in doing some work with my hands, but I really had not done a lot of fine work. And my grandfather was a cabinet maker. He did a lot of fine, detailed carpentry-type work. So over the last few years, I have enjoyed being able to start to grow my skills in that area and so I spend a decent amount of my spare time in my wood shop doing some wood projects.

[00:04:17]
So of late, I’ve been working on a project for my wife. We have…she would love to have a desk to work on and we’ve got an area in the house that would be perfect for it, but we just couldn’t find a piece of furniture that really worked. And so I said, “Well, why don’t I make something that’s custom for that space?” So this is a pretty big table. It’s about 10 feet across and it’s about 2 and a half feet deep and we’re making it out of oak and it is just, the wood is just beautiful. I can’t wait to be able to get the whole thing put together. But if this gonna be more of a table and actually a desk, it’s gonna need to have drawers. So Holly found a set of cabinets that we could cut down to fit to make work underneath the tabletop as a desk. So I’ve gotten far enough in the project where I’ve got the tabletop built and I’m working on the cabinets. And I was very pleased on Saturday to discover that I could set up my table saw in a way that I could cut the cabinets down to be short enough to fit nicely under the tabletop. And that’s really where our story begins.

[00:05:16]
So as I was working on that, I had the cabinet up on the table saw and I was working my way through the four cuts that I needed to make. And it was on the fourth cut that I made a serious misjudgement and I managed to cut my hand on the table saw blade. Pretty severely, in fact. I managed to cut through a tendon on my left thumb and what’s really unfortunate is I’m left-handed, so that puts me at a significant disadvantage going forward. And this brings me to my first of the three lessons from a serious injury in my wood shop. Lesson one, it only takes one second to make a misjudgement. It only takes one second to make a misjudgement. I have used a table saw for years and years and years, safely. I’m actually fairly careful in my shop. I insist that everybody wears protective gear. We’ve got ear protection and eye protection and hand protection. I have push sticks by my table saw…by all my saws actually. And I’m very careful to instruct my kids on safe workmanship in the shop. In spite of those precautions, in spite of not working when I’m tired, in spite of all the things that I’ve done, it just took one second for me to make a bad choice about where to put my hand. Now it was combined with other choices that I’d made as well, but fundamentally it just takes a second.

[00:06:38]
Now what’s interesting to me about this particular lesson is that everybody makes mistakes. Everybody make misjudgements. Now I’ve got to be honest about my reaction. I was in pain and then as I was on my way to get care, I was angry with myself for having made a mistake, but the fact is that we all make mistakes. Sometimes they’re big mistakes. Sometimes they’re little mistakes. I’ve made mistakes in the shop before and I’ve been fortunate that some of the mistakes I’ve made haven’t been more serious. In this case, it was a pretty serious implication. You know, what’s interesting is in the last week since this happened, I’ve had discussions with friends about this mishap and what I heard is two of my friends had incidents with a chainsaw that could have been debilitating and one of my friends, who I know is very careful, managed to cut himself with an axe just in the last week as well. So everybody makes mistakes and you can’t focus on the mistake and you can’t beat yourself up because the fact of the matter is there’s no point in looking in the rear view mirror because that’s not the direction I’m going.

[00:07:44]
I got a good lesson in this kind of attitude from my uncle. My uncle is in his 70s and he got an infection in his left arm. He was left-handed and ended up having to lose his left arm to that. So here he is in his 70s, learning to live his life as a right-handed person because he doesn’t have a left hand anymore. And he’s got a great attitude and he said, “Don’t focus on what you can’t do. Focus on what you can do. Don’t focus on what happened yesterday. Focus on what change you can do today to make things better for tomorrow.” And I just love that attitude and that approach. So really it just takes a second to make a misjudgement and everybody makes mistakes. Not only does everybody make mistakes, but nobody likes it. Once you make a mistake, you can’t focus on the mistake. You got to turn your attention to thinking forward.

[00:08:35]
Now let’s talk about lesson two. When a crisis happens, it’s too late to prepare. When a crisis happens, it’s too late to prepare. Now I will tell you that I was very surprised when it happened and I was in pain and not happy about that, but all that time that I had spent working with Boy Scouts, learning about and teaching first aid really paid off because I didn’t have time to say, “Oh, what do you do when you get hurt? What do you do to deal with this type of injury? What is going to happen physiologically to me after this thing happens?” Because I had already made the investments in thinking about what could go wrong and what I needed to do when it went wrong, I was ready. And that included knowing who to call, knowing where to go and knowing how to get there. I’m grateful for the help that I had in the process in getting quick medical care from professionals who could say, “Nope, that’s too serious for us to deal with at the urgent care center. You need to go see somebody in the emergency room.” And even the emergency room person said, “That’s too serious for me to deal with for you. We need to get you to a surgeon,” and I’m preparing to have surgery even tomorrow to work on this.

[00:09:43]
So my question for you around this is what is your plan for when the yogurt hits the fan? As you’re thinking about your projects and the work that you’re doing, what risks are you overlooking or are you pretending just don’t exist? I’ve told my kids for years, as they’ve been working with me in the wood shop, that you don’t have to be terrified of the tools, but you do have to respect ’em, that the reality is that the tools are unforgiving and they are very dangerous, and so you’ve got to be wise about the way you use them and I was actually unwise. So what is it you need to prepare for next? What is the thing you need to do? So you know, for me, one of the things is it just reinforces how important more detailed first aid training is for my kids. They need to know, what do you do when somebody’s had a serious injury? How do you respond? What’s important to matter?

[00:10:38]
Another lesson for me around this, you know, when crisis happens, it’s too late for prepare, is I should have had more help in the shop. I did that reading about Sully and what happened in the Miracle on the Hudson and I was really interested in what the NTSB had to say and one of the points that I read about, as I was doing the research about for that other bonus episode of that podcast, is that a lot of times, pilots who are in crisis situations get overwhelmed with all the things that are going on and they forget to fly the aircraft. In this situation, I got overwhelmed because the complexity of the cut was too much for me to manage by myself. Physiologically manipulating this stuff, it was just too much and my brain overloaded and I made a bad choice. Another thing for me to think about from preparation perspective is do I need to invest in better safety gear? There are tools that will make my saw safer and maybe I should be looking at making those changes, too. But I have to be thinking about what I’m gonna do to prepare for what happens next. 

[00:11:45]
So we talked about it only takes a second for a misjudgement and you’ve got to focus forward and not backward. We talked about when a crisis happens, it’s too late to prepare. And now let’s talk about lesson three, it takes a team to get back on track. You know, from the moment that I had this injury, from the very moment I had this injury, my mother in-law said, “Hey, do you need help?” Yes, I need help. To everything…she helped organize and helped my kids get the stuff they needed emotionally and physiologically to take care of the needs that I had. My wife was terrific about standing by my side and getting me to where I needed to be. My mother in-law was great about suggesting that my eldest son come with us to the hospital. And Joel was great. He was terrific to be with my wife and me, to be an encouragement to us and help us navigate that journey that we were on. It took a team just to get us from the moment of crisis forward. And because I had built a team, because we had worked together as a team, because we were prepared for it, we could respond when the opportunity came. Now I should have had a team in the shop with me. Realistically I was working by myself and if I’d had some help, I probably would not have gotten overloaded. If I had planned better, I probably wouldn’t have gotten overloaded. But having that team there to support me would make a big difference. And even today, I’m working with a team. I met with a surgeon yesterday. We’re making preparations to connect with a physical therapist post-surgery and it goes on and on and on. And even as I go through this, I’ve had friends reach out to me to say, “Hey, Tom, we know you’re laid up because you only have one hand and it’s your good hand,” so much as…as good my left hand is. “Can we help you?” And being willing to accept help is challenging for me, but it’s a good thing for me to do and I’m grateful that I’ve got the team kind of coming alongside of me.

[00:13:45]
Now the prognosis for my recovery is actually very good. I’ve talked with some friends and I’ve talked with a surgeon and basically what they tell me is that the likelihood is that I’m gonna get most if not all the functionality back in my left thumb, but we’re really not gonna know for several weeks. So those are the three lessons I have from my serious injury in the workshop. Lesson one, it only takes a second for a misjudgement and you got to focus forward, not backward because everybody makes mistakes. Lesson twp, when a crisis happens, it’s too late to prepare. You’ve got to be ready before the crisis hits. And lesson three, it takes a team to get back on track. So those are the three lessons and I hope they’re helpful to you. 

Episode Hack.

[00:14:47]
Tom: For today’s Episode Hack, I really wanna focus on lesson two. When a crisis happens, it’s too late to prepare. So what I want you to think about is in your projects, in the things that you’re doing, what are some things that could go wrong? Is there anything you need to simplify? When it comes to thinking about working with your team, what areas would be helpful if you had trained team members who could step in and do work with you or for you? And when it comes to those areas where team members could help you, who are you gonna train? On what? And by when? Just to be very practical, thinking about this project I’ve been working on for my wife, realistically I’m not gonna be able to get back to it for a couple of months, is my guess. Unless I can train the kids to help me do some of the projects that are ongoing and so I can supervise and help them, but maybe this is a great opportunity for me to invest with my kids. Think about for you and your projects and the work that you are doing, who on your team needs to know something? What do they need to know and when are you gonna teach ’em? And that’s today’s Episode Hack.

[00:16:02]
Thanks for listening to the podcast. I appreciate having you on the journey. Now I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen in the next steps for me from a recovery perspective. As I mentioned, my surgery’s tomorrow and I’ll be working on physical therapy after that as well. But in a future episode, I’ll make sure that I include a Family segment that talks about what’s happening in my recovery and maybe there’ll be some lessons I can learn and apply from that, too. Thanks for listening.

Closeout

[00:16:26]
Hey, can I ask you something? Did you hear something helpful on today’s episode? Why not share it with a friend? On my iPhone, it’s as simple as hitting the three little dots on the bottom right of the screen, selecting “Share Episode,” enter your friend’s email and hit “Send.” Why do this? Two reasons. One, your friend or co-worker will thank you. You’ll be seen as a source of helpful and valuable information and they will appreciate you for it. And number two, I need you to help me get the word out about this podcast. I’m working hard to bring great ideas and great content to you and it’s a big help to me if more people hear those ideas. Go ahead. Share it now. I’ll wait…Thanks.

[00:17:17]
This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

Listen now!

In this episode:

Resources:

4 Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader – This easy-to-read graphic clearly illustrates the 4 Levels of Thinking, individually breaking down each level.

.

Season 1 Episode 9 – tips to delegate well

How purpose is tied to how well your team members work.

Giving great feedback to team members

Joel Peterson’s top ten tips for giving good feedback 

1.  What information do I need to get?  What information do I need to share?
2. Is it a good time to talk about their professional development?
3. Are they stuck?  Do they need my help with anything today?
4. How are we doing on goals – is it time to check in on progress (at least 1/quarter)
5. What do I need them to do next? (delegation)

1. “This is your time.  My goal is to be accessible to you, to help you and for you to use this time to your benefit.  I expect that you’ll come to this meeting prepared to talk to me about what YOU need. In fact, the first 10 minutes are dedicated to YOU – the meeting starts with your agenda.  Come prepared to talk about:
   1. What do you need from me?  Where can I clear roadblocks for you?  What information or contacts can I give you?
   2. What do you need me to know?
   3. What is next for you?  How can I help you with your goals/professional development?

Transcript

[00:00:00]
Becoming a Geek Leader, Season 2, Episode 10.

Sponsored by Geek to Great

Tom: I spoke with doctor Pierre Bamberger from Tel Aviv University’s Business school about engineers becoming leaders and he said…

[00:00:13]
Pierre: If you take an engineer and you want to turn him into a leader in an organization, you can’t just assume that [inaudible 00:00:21] know or sort of learn over time how to become a leader.

[00:00:42]
Tom: Right.

[00:00:25]
Pierre: Some of them will. The vast majority won’t.

[00:00:28]
Tom: Some of them will but the vast majority won’t. So here you are. You’re a talented engineer. Maybe you’re running a team of technical folks but the fact is they won’t magically get better at things like communicating clearly or delegating effectively or dealing with conflict in a healthy way. They need to learn those skills. That’s why I created Geek to Great 101. It’s a simple way for you to help your team members with an easy plan to improve these skills and more. For less than $500, your team can start to make progress. Find more information and get immediate access to your first free lesson at brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks. That’s brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks.

[00:01:19] 
Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people too. Ready?

Introduction

[00:01:41] 
In today’s episode I’m talking about tools that a manager can use to help lead your team well. Now, if you’re not a manager today or even if you don’t want to be a manager, stay tuned because even if you’re not the boss you can use these ideas too. Let’s say your boss isn’t doing these things well now. You can take advantage of the ideas I’m about to share with you to help your boss do a better job being your boss. And if you hang with me, I’ll show you how you can get your boss to start using these ideas and how you can have more success, too.

[00:02:15] 
Also, I want to take a moment to note that this podcast marks the end of season two. I can’t believe we’ve already covered two seasons together. I went back and looked over some of the topics that I’ve covered so far in the first two seasons. Things like performance reviews, dealing with disrespectful team members, what to do when you make a mistake to make up for it, networking, listening and how to get promoted. We’ve covered a lot and as I’m working with my clients, new ideas come up all the time and I’m excited to share time with you and I appreciate you for including me in your life. I just want to say thank you for bringing me with you today.

[00:02:55] 
In this episode I’m going to cover two ideas. First, in a mentoring segment I’m going to talk about how to deal with employee performance problems on your team. In the coach’s mailbox segment, I’m going to answer a burning question from Samuel about “How am I supposed to do one on one meetings? I don’t have time for that?” And also including a behind-the-scenes segment where I’m going to talk a little bit about the technology that enables people to find a podcast like this one and how I get the word out about the podcast. I’ve got a lot to cover so let’s get started.

[00:03:30] 
In today’s episode, I’m talking predominantly about what a manager can do to get better performance from team members. Now, these skills are skills you’ll use if you’re at level three of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:03:48] 
Level three, team leader. Level three, as the boss of a team, your job is to recruit and develop individuals and team members who follow your lead.

Mentoring segment.

[00:04:20] 

Tom: As I work with clients, one of the issues that comes up over and over again is team members who simply aren’t delivering. Now, we’ve all had that time when we thought we delegated a job but it turned out that delegatee didn’t deliver what we wanted. When you’re the boss, that’s your problem to solve.

[00:04:41] 
So let’s say that you’re a boss and you have a team member who just isn’t performing. Why is it that they’re not performing? Are they lazy? Are they unmotivated? Are they unskilled? Unfortunately, because you’re the boss, it’s your job to figure that out. there are three reasons that employees do not perform well. First, they just don’t know what you want them to do. Second, they don’t know how to do it and three, they don’t know why it should matter to them or the team or the company. I want to tackle these in order.

[00:05:16] 
In a previous episode, I mentioned that I once worked for a boss who insisted that he was “crystal clear” about his expectations. He wasn’t. it was not clear to me exactly what he considered excellent work, and I did struggle to deliver what he wanted. Sometimes I nailed it and other times, well, not really. So one problem is your team member might not understand exactly what it is you want. The one thing you can do to tackle this is to ask them to repeat back the assignment. I point out that many times a boss gives an assignment but doesn’t define how they will know when the assignment is complete. It’s a good idea for you to be specific and clear about exactly how you’ll know it’s done. Let me give you an example. You might say to a team member “This month, I need you to take ownership of creating the monthly report. You’ll need to collect input from everyone on the team, combine their input into a single report showing our accomplishments this month and then I need you to edit it so that I can forward it to my boss without having to make major changes. The report is due on the 30th. That means I’ll need a final draft from you no later than the 25th so that we’ll have time to make any last minute changes and still deliver it on time.”

[00:06:39] 
Here I’m clear, specific and I’m including a due date. What is it that needs to be done? The next problem is people might not know how to do the work. If this is the case, if you have a team member who is not skilled enough to do the work clearly and properly…let me point you to season one, episode nine where I talk about delegation. You can go to the website brighthillgroup.com, you can search for delegation. That will bring up season one, episode nine. I’ll also include a link to that in the show notes for today’s show. In that episode, I talk about ways that you can delegate work effectively even if a team member’s not well skilled or you can help uplevel their skills and minimize the amount of time you spend doing or redoing their work. So that should tackle helping a team member know how to do the work.

[00:07:36] 
And the last problem is one of motivation. I want to say here that no one can motivate someone else. There’s been a lot of work done in this area. I recommend the book Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us by Dan Pink. There’s some good research that he covers in that book and it’s a good read too but let me just say that you can’t make someone else feel motivated. There’s nothing you can do to do that. You can set up an environment that unleashes their internal intrinsic motivation but you just can’t create motivation in another person. A while ago I wrote a little bit about this in a blog post which talked about three things you need to do to retain great employees and I will include a link to that post in the show notes as well.

[00:08:30] 
So you can’t motivate me and I can’t motivate you. Motivation is an inside job. It’s an internal thing. So what can you do to unleash my motivation? Here’s all you have to do. Get your stuff in alignment with what they want. Now, I don’t have time in this episode to go into all the detail of how to do this but I do have a couple of ideas that can be of help to you. First, answer the question “Why does this task matter? Why should we do it at all?” It might be that it’s for regulatory compliance and if it is, that’s table stakes. You don’t get to play the game unless you put up the stakes. If you’re out of compliance, you’re out of business so some things are not negotiable and they’re a requirement in order to function.

[00:09:25] 
But let’s say that it’s not regulation. Let’s say it’s something else. For example, getting that software release done is going to have a business impact, right. Launching that new product is going to have a business impact, right. What is the reason behind the request? Why is it that you’re asking this person to do something? What is it that you’re hoping to get out of it in order to deliver value? If you can identify that for your team member, it’s going to open the door for them to align their feelings with the request so that they say “Oh, now I get why I should do it and they work hard on it.”

[00:10:03] 
In a perfect world, you would have clear and direct path between the organization’s goals, your department goals, your personal goals and all the goals of your team members. I know that that’s not always the case but what you can do is look for ways to link the work assignment to something bigger and when you do that, you touch on purpose. Why do we do it? People want to have a purpose that’s bigger than the task itself. Nobody wants their work waster and when you link the task to a higher purpose, that is a great way to get people to buy into doing the work. When your team member is not performing, there’s a very good chance that you’ve not made clear what they need to do or you haven’t made clear how to do it or you haven’t aligned their work with a bigger why. Why do this task at all?

[00:11:04] 
Now, let’s say that you have done your job properly. You’ve made sure that they know what to do and how to do it and why to do it and they still aren’t delivering well. You probably need to give them better feedback and that comes down to being specific about what you wanted, noting how what they did didn’t match expectations and then telling them that you want them to do better next time.

[00:11:29] 
I was talking with a client one time and she said: “I specifically told my team member to do X.” But she did the exact opposite of X. Now, I was dumbfounded. I mean, it is upsetting to think that you would tell somebody to do X and then have them do the exact opposite of X, right. I asked her “How did you respond when you found out what your team member did?” My client replied “I didn’t say anything about it.” “Wow. You did nothing? You said nothing? Fascinating.” Now, let me ask you this. Do you think that problem went away? It sure didn’t.

[00:12:14] 
For some more details about how to give feedback, in the show notes I’m going to include a link to an article I wrote on how to give feedback and in that article I’ve embedded a short video on the topic as well also including a story about a time that I got some feedback at work that wasn’t so great.

[00:12:32] 
So let’s go back to that report I mentioned above. Let’s say you gave that assignment to a team member and they’ve done a report before so they definitely know how to do it and they understand the importance of the report but in this case, it was due to you on the 25th, right, because you said “I need it by the 25th in order to get it done and turned in on time by the 30th.” But in this case, they sent you a document on the 26th, so it’s a day late, and they did it at the end of the day and it doesn’t have everybody’s input. It only has some of the team members and what they did was they just copied and pasted all the updates from the team members they did talk to and emailed it to you at the end of your work day.

[00:13:17] 
So I’ll go back and ask you how are you going to respond in this situation. After scanning that so-called report, I’d be pretty unhappy and I’d want to understand what happened because, clearly, something got disconnected somewhere. Now, I would want to respond in person. Not over the phone and not via email. Sometimes you have to but any time you’re providing correction, correction is best delivered verbally and in person. If you put it in writing, all sorts of things can go sideways. You sometimes have to put it in writing if you’re dealing with HR or you have to document a performance problem but we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about giving some feedback to a team member as part of their regular work.

[00:14:06] 
So I would let them know that I need to speak with them preferably in person, not via email, and definitely not on the evening on the 26th, right. When you first get it, you’re hot about the fact that they’ve totally screwed the whole thing up. you don’t want to do that but let’s say, in this case, the next morning, the morning of the 27th, you swing by that person’s office and you say “Hey, when you get a minute, can you please stop by my office? I want to catch up about the status report.” Now, when they arrive, you can say “I got your email last night and the report wasn’t exactly what I expected. I’m curious. What do you remember about the assignment?” Now, here you’re not judging them, you’re not criticizing them, you’re not condemning them. in fact, what you’re doing is communicating curiously. Now, clearly, you had a set of expectations and, clearly, they didn’t meet them but your job here is to determine why that happened. Did they not understand it? Did they blow it off? What happened there?

[00:15:07] 
Now what’ll probably happen is they’ll probably know that they’ve dropped the ball and they probably will have a ton of excuses about it. Your job here is to listen to what they have to say and repeat back their recollection about the assignment and, by the way, if they don’t actually ever answer that question, I would ask the question again. “Hey, I appreciate your reasons for not getting it done. I’m curious, though, I didn’t hear your answer to my question. What do you remember about the assignment?”

[00:15:38] 
So you repeat back their recollection and you can repeat back an excuse or two. “Your dog ate your homework, your kid was sick, the car broke down.” Whatever it is, right? Then ask them this “May I offer you some feedback?” Now, they will say “Yes.” They will. Almost a 100% of the time at this point of the conversation they will say yes. If they say no, which they won’t…but if they say no, your next conversation is with your HR rep. Seriously. You’re trying to give some direct feedback to a team member and they’re flatly refusing to accept that feedback? That’s a conversation for HR.

[00:16:12] 
Now, feedback, when you’re giving it to a team member, needs to be direct, it needs to be honest and it needs to be kind and here’s an example of how you can be direct, honest and kind. You can say something like this. “My expectation was…” And repeat the expectation as you originally assigned it to them. “We talked about it being on the 25th and we talked about it incorporating input from everybody and we talked about editing, right. All those pieces that we talked about in that original assignment.” You just say “My expectation was…” And then you say “I can’t help but notice that you missed a deadline. The content is not edited in a way that I can send it to management and it’s not complete because it doesn’t include everybody.” Just being specific. You’re not giving out an opinion. You’re saying “I noticed these facts.” Then you say “I need your report done properly. I have to send it to my boss in three days. How soon can I expect to get your new, final draft?” You don’t have to get mad at this point. You are the authority. You don’t have to get mad if you’re the boss because you are the boss and you’re not giving them an opinion. You’re not saying “Hey, that report stinks, right.” You’re not doing that. You got a report that was not according to measurable criteria and you’ve been clear and you’ve set the expectation. Now, at this point, they can propose a date. If you’re okay with the date they propose, fine. If not, tell them when it needs to be in your hands. You’re not being mean. You’re holding people accountable. It’s good for them and it’s good for you. When you define your expectations upfront, you make sure they know how and why to do the work and then hold people accountable, that’s a formula for getting more great work from your team members and that’s today’s mentoring segment.

Coach’s mailbox.

[00:18:38]
Tom: In the coach’s mailbox today I’ve got an email from Samuel and Samuel writes “Tom, I’ve heard you mention the idea that I should be having one on one meetings with my team members but I don’t see how I can ever make the time to do that. My boss expects me to get stuff done and taking time during work hours to meet with team member, time that neither one of us is actually working on work seems like a real waste of time. Is there some way that I can make one on one meetings productive? I mean, is it okay to combine that in a working session?”

[00:19:13] 
Well, Samuel, thanks for the email and I can appreciate where you’re coming from because it can seem like time talking is just time wasted especially when you and I have both been in meetings that were a total waste of our time. Most meetings, they’re actually useless. There, I said it. If I had a nickel for every useless meeting I’ve sat through, well, I’d have a lot of nickels. Although I guess I did get paid for attending most of those meetings so I guess I already got those nickels but let’s go back to your question. Why bother having one on one meetings at all? Your goal really ought to be using those one-on-one meetings to make your team more productive and your one on one sessions ought to be directly linked to better team performance and if they aren’t, then it is a waste of time and you shouldn’t do them. So let’s talk a little bit about what a good one on one meeting looks like.

[00:20:14] 
Having a regularly scheduled one on one meeting with a team member is going to help you achieve a number of goals but only, only if you do it right. So let’s talk about what’s the purpose of a one on one meeting. I can think of five possible reasons to have any meeting with a team member. Here are the five reasons. One, a status update or to give them feedback on the status. Two, planning their professional development or maybe teaching them something they need for development. Three, collaborative problem solving. Four, goal setting or task planning or five, delegation or giving them a work assignment. Those are the only five reasons I can think of that you would want to meet with people.

[00:21:00] 
Now, in a series of well-planned one on one meetings, you can realistically tackle all five of them but you cannot tackle all five in a single one on one session which is why I think you need a process because your process is the key. If you have a simple and repeatable process for one on one meetings, you’ll find that they can be time really well spent and if you have a formula for those meetings and you follow the formula, it’s going to be simple for you and simple for your team members too. it’s going to pay big dividends to you in terms of your productivity.

[00:21:37] 
Now, Samuel, you mentioned number three, collaboration. Now, collaboration can be a good thing but generally speaking, I recommend that a collaboration or brainstorming or a teamwork session, not happen in the one on one. If you stray too far from the core purpose of the one on one which is about individual performance, then you’ll forget why you’re there and then the meeting roams all over the place and you don’t get the value that you’re after but if team member’s stuck and they bring it up in a one on one, that is a good time to collaborate. If you find that the question they’ve asked is a bigger question or it’s going to take a longer time to resolve, you might need to schedule a separate working session just on that particular topic. You want to make sure that your one on one is focused and stays on its original schedule.

[00:22:27] 
Also, when it comes to collaboration, most of the time it’s relevant to have more than just you and that one person involved. So setting a specific meeting up just for that collaboration can be more effective than just doing it in a one on one setting with your team member. So let’s say that you schedule a 30 minute one on one meeting with your team members every other week. Even if you have 10 people who report to you, that’s only about a day a month and that investment of 10 hours should pay back at least double that in terms of productivity, better quality and less rework and if it doesn’t, then either you’re doing it wrong or you just need to stop doing one on ones.

[00:23:07] 
For your one on one meeting, you need to have an agenda and I’ve got a list of questions that you can ask yourself as you’re preparing for the agenda. So these questions are going to be in the show notes, so feel free to look at the show notes for that information and here are the questions, questions you’re going to ask yourself. One, what information do I need to get from my team member? During this one on one, what do I need to learn from my team member? Also, what information do I need to share with my team member? What is an update from the business, from the leadership, from the project status, whatever it is, other people in the team, what information do I need to convey to the team member?

[00:23:49] 
Second, is now a good time to talk about professional development? Third, are they stuck, do they need help with anything? Now, maybe you’re going to have to hear that from them or maybe you’ve observed that there are some things that haven’t gotten done on time and if that’s the case, maybe they’re stuck and maybe you can help them. Fourth, how are we doing on our annual goals? Is it time to check in on progress? Now, your progress on goals ought to happen at least once a quarter.

[00:24:18] 
And then five, what do I need them to do next? What’s something that I need to delegate? What’s a task I need to delegate to them? So those are the five questions and as I said, I’ll include those questions in today’s show notes. I know you’re busy right this second and your hands aren’t free to write this down. I also promise you this. If you make the time to think through these questions before each one on one, you’re going to find that time is very well spent. In fact, I’m guessing that you’ll have so much to talk about that it’s going to be tough fitting it into 30 minutes which is fine because you’re going to have another one on one in a couple of weeks so if you can’t get to everything on the agenda today, you can roll it into the next one on one. It’s not a problem.

[00:25:02] 
Now, how do you get your team members to engage in the one on ones so that their time is used well? Well, I recommend you position your one on ones with your team members like this. You could say something like this “This one on one session is your time. My goal is to be accessible to you, to help you and for you to use this time for your benefit. I expect that you’ll come to this meeting prepared to talk to me about what you need. In fact, the first 10 minutes are dedicated entirely to you. The meeting starts with your agenda. Come prepared to talk about one, what do you need from me, where can I clear a roadblock for you, what information or contacts can I give you? What do you need from me? Two, what do you need me to know? Is there a status update, is there a place that things are working or not working that you need me to know about? Three, what is next for you? How can I help you with your goals, with your professional development or your work planning, prioritization? My goal is to help you and I need to know from you these three questions. What do you need from me, what do you need me to know and what’s next for you?”

[00:26:15] 
And again, these questions are going to be in the show notes so you can grab them from the show notes and use them. The other thing I would say in that, as I’m introducing this concept to my team is “The first 10 minutes are for you as my team member. The next 10 minutes are for me as your boss and the final 10 minutes are for us to recap action items and ownership from our conversation. If we end up not using the time, that’s fine. I will let you go as soon as we’re done. Deal?”

[00:26:45] 
Again, all this information is going to be in the show notes and I encourage you to go back and look at that to help you as you’re planning your one on ones. Here’s the thing. If you take the time to answer these questions and create your agenda, you’re going to find that there’s so much to talk about and you should have a clear and tangible list of action items that are going to help you and your team member prepare for the meeting and also have a clear path forward after the meeting. You’ll feel like you are actually doing stuff and not just making a list of things or even worse, just having a conversation about nothing. That would be a supreme waste.

[00:27:21] 
One final note on this concept of one on ones. Remember I touched on the idea of process? What I want you to do as the boss is go ahead and schedule two recurring reminders. Each of them once a quarter, four times a year. Reminder one is “Check on progress toward annual goals.” And when that comes up, you’ll set up your agenda for that next one on one right after that happens and you’re going to bring up our progress toward annual goals as part of your agenda. This is a simple system that’s going to help you.

[00:27:51] 
Reminder number two “Review progress toward professional development goals.” And when that reminder comes up, you want to add that to your agenda. Oh, and to make it simple for you, go ahead and create a recurring reminder for your goals now and then when you create that second reminder for professional development, set that to happen two weeks after the one about annual goals and that way they’re not going to hit during the same one on one because you don’t want to cram too much into each one on one and remember, there’s another one on one coming.

[00:28:25] 
So Samuel, I hope that answers your question and I hope that you find that one on ones you set up are going to be effective and efficient too and that’s today’s coach’s mailbox.

Mentoring segment.

[00:28:52]
Tom: Okay. So I promised that even if you aren’t the boss, you’d be able to get value from today’s episode and I just want to thank you for having in there. This segment is going to help you if you’re at level two of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:29:07]
Man: Level two, team member.

[00:29:10]
Man: Level two is where you work well with others and together you all succeed.

[00:29:17]
Tom: One of the things I like to say is that the boss factory has a quality control issue. Sometimes it produces a great boss and other times, well, not so much. So what do you do if your boss isn’t one of those great ones? Well, here’s how to use these ideas even if your boss won’t. First, let’s talk about a boss that doesn’t give you feedback. This one’s easy. If your boss doesn’t give you enough information, try this. First, listen carefully to what the boss is asking you to do. When he’s giving you the work assignment, ask enough questions to make sure that you know at least generally what your boss wants from you but don’t wear your out with a ton of details at this point. After your boss has given you the assignment, go back to your desk and answer these questions. First, do you know exactly what the boss asked you to do? Do you need any examples, instruction or training to do it properly? Do you know why it matters? Do you know how your boss is going to measure your progress? How will your boss know when it’s done? And do you know when it needs to be done?

[00:30:25] 
So let’s say, for example, the boss says “Joe, I need you take care of the status report.” But doesn’t tell you anything else. Now, you know it goes out monthly and you’ve seen or you can easily see previous copies of these status reports so you’ll have some example of what it looks like and what it contains but even with all that, you might realize you’re not clear on when the boss wants it or what exactly the process is to get it ready to go out. So you can go to your boss after you’ve thought about this a little bit and you can say “Boss, I have a couple of questions about the status report. I want to do it well and I just want to make sure that you and I are on the same page. Do you have a second?” And then you say “I know it has to be done monthly, but when do you need to see a copy of it to make sure that it gets done on time? Also, I want to make sure I use your time well and I haven’t done this before and I want to make sure that I do it right so my question is, is there somebody else on the team who does a great job with it because I can collaborate with them and make sure that the draft that I send you is done properly.”

[00:31:31] 
In this example, what you’re doing is you’re taking ownership of the process and then you’re going to your boss with a list of specific questions and helping your boss to efficiently clear up any confusion that you have and I hope that answers the question about how to get clear assignments from your boss. Once the assignment is clear, then the follow throughout to be pretty clear as well and if you’ve been able to set up a pattern with your boss of getting good assignments where you’re clear on exactly what’s wanted and how it’s going to be measured and when it’s needed, then it ought to be pretty easy for you even if your boss doesn’t give you a lot of pats on the back. You should be able to know clearly that you’re delivering what your boss wants. When you’re specific about what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it, that builds trust with your boss and that’s going to put you in a better position for your boss to give you positive feedback.

[00:32:26] 
So now let’s talk about the challenge of your boss is too busy to do one on one meetings and just won’t even plan them. You want more time with your boss but your boss is just too busy. This one’s pretty easy too. What I want you to do is go back to the show notes and look over the questions for the one on one and then schedule a one on one with your boss. You tell your boss you’re just asking for 30 minutes and that you promise that if you get through your list of questions faster than 30 minutes, you’ll get out of there and give him time back on his calendar. Now, you take the time answering those questions to prepare your agenda. You want to be really clear and specific about the goals you have for the time you’re going to be with your boss. Take whatever time you need to make sure that process goes really, really efficiently. You want your boss to buy in on this, and the only way your boss is going to do it again is if it goes well the first time.

[00:33:21] 
Also, make sure that you stick to your agenda. Stick to the time allotted in the agenda. If you’re running out of time say “Hey boss, I’m running out of time. I’ll put that on the list to talk to you about next time.” Or you might say “Can I set up a separate meeting just to resolve this one particular thing?” Here’s what you’re going to find. It’s going to go well and as long as you’re intentional about spending the time at the end of the time together to wrap up with your specific action points from the conversation, I’m betting your boss is going to feel it was time well spent.

[00:33:56] 
Now, I want to be very, very clear about this. If you’re not willing to create the agenda thoughtfully and thoroughly before you sit down with your boss, do not bother to ask for a one on one. Seriously. Having no agenda is a recipe for your boss refusing to attend future one on one discussions.

[00:34:18] 
So what I’m telling you is if your boss is not willing to do the right stuff, you can take the initiative to get clarity about what your boss wants and to schedule you own one on one meetings. I’m telling you this process is effective. It helps. It really, really works and that’s today’s mentoring segment. Well, the second mentoring segment that is.

Behind the scenes segment.

[00:34:51] 
Tom: As those who podcast, there are a number of ways to let people know that a podcast exists. For example, I might send you an email letting you know a podcast episode has been released and letting you know exactly what you’re going to miss out on if you don’t listen. If you’re not already getting those emails from me every week, let me ask you to jump over to brighthillgroup.com/join and sign up. That’s brighthillgroup.com/join. Another way to find out about a new episode is to pick it up from one of the podcast directories. The biggest directory is iTunes but Stitcher in Google Play have both been gaining in popularity. I wasn’t able to find specific stats to show the size or the ranking of either one of these but most users pick their podcast from one of these three.

[00:35:35] 
Now, there are others and people do use them but there are people who still use Word Perfect too. Now, if you’re a passionate Word Perfect user, please email me at HYPERLINK “mailto:coach@brighthillgroup.com” coach@brighthillgroup.com . I’d love to catch up. I used to be one of the first Word Perfect certified systems engineers in the US. I had demonstrated skills in all the Word Perfect tools including their amazing and now dead email technology but I digress.

[00:36:01] 
Getting back to podcast directories. If you’re a podcast host and you want to be found, you have to be in the directory. Now, most of you know about the directories but I want to talk for a second about how podcasts work. As a creator of podcast, I have to generate two things. One, an .mp3 file that people want to listen to and two, a website with an RSS feed that correctly describes each episode. It’s this RSS feed that lets the podcast directory people know where to find the .mp3 file, what the title is and a lot more information about it as well. The .mp3 file gets hosted on my website so the actual download that your podcast player is doing comes directly from my website. The directory only becomes a pointer to my website.

[00:36:50] 
Now, once the .mp3 file and the RSS feed exist, as the creator, I have to apply to let the directory include my podcast and basically, this is just a filter that allows the directory managers to block people who might abuse the directory. When I launched the podcast, I applied to be included in iTunes and a few months ago, when Google Play announced that they were accepting submissions, I applied for them as well and a few weeks ago I was approved as a content creator for Stitcher. So folks like you search for interesting podcasts in the podcast directories and that’s why you hear me asking for ratings and reviews. Very, very few people who listen actually go to the trouble to create a rating or a review but that rating or a review is one key way the directory managers know who likes which podcast and those ratings and reviews make a big difference in where the podcast shows up in the listings and those listings are how new listeners find me.

[00:37:45] 
So one thing you could do for me that would be helpful is to tell somebody about the podcast. Word of mouth is even more powerful than any search tool and it’s pretty simple. If you’re listening on iOS, all you have to do is in your podcast player which you’re probably using right this second, all you have to do is on the bottom right, there’s a little icon with three little dots. Hit that and then select share episode, select email and then type in your friend’s name and hit send. It’s simple and it’s easy and it’s a great way to help share some information with people who might find it valuable and that’s today’s behind the scenes segment.

Episode hack.

[00:38:39]
Tom: In today’s episode I talked about how to set expectations for team members. Now, most of the time that people fail to perform, it’s because they didn’t know what you wanted, they didn’t know how to do it or they didn’t know why It mattered. Generally speaking, if you can solve those three problems, you’ll directly address any performance problems you’ve got on your team. We also talked about how to give feedback when they’re not delivering what you need and I talked about how to have effective one on ones. I mentioned the process for your one on one is key. If you create a simple and repeatable process for one on one meetings, you’ll find that time well spent.

[00:39:17] 
Now, to prove this, for today’s episode hack, I want to encourage you to schedule a series of at least three recurring one on one meetings with at least one of your team members. Now, to prove this idea is actually useful and beneficial to you, I want you to pick your worst team member, the one you think is the least likely to respond. The one you feel like is a time suck, right. Take that person and I know it seems counterintuitive but bear with me. Schedule your meetings a couple of weeks apart. In the first one, you introduce the concept of a one on one and you introduce them to their part of the agenda. You tell them you’re going to stick to the time rigidly. You’re going to get in and out in 30 minutes or less like a Domino’s pizza order and what you’re going to find is your time is well spent and you’re going to get a lot accomplished in just 30 minutes or less. I want you to schedule those first few one on ones even with your most difficult team member and that is today’s episode hack.

Closeout

[00:40:16] 
Hey, can I ask you something? Did you hear something helpful on today’s episode? Why not share it with a friend? On my iPhone, it’s as simple as hitting the three little dots on the bottom right of the screen, selecting share episode, enter your friend’s email and hit send. Why do this? Two reasons. One, your friend or coworker will thank you. You’ll be seen as a source of helpful and valuable information and they will appreciate you for it and number two, I need you to help me get the word out about this podcast. I’m working hard to bring great ideas and great content to you and it’s a big help to me if more people hear those ideas. Go ahead. Share it now. I’ll wait.

[00:41:03] 
Thanks. This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

Listen now!

In this episode:

What would it be like if your team had an amazing sense of teamwork?  In this episode I talk about how (even if you’re not “the boss” you can help establish the ground rules to help your team really function well as a team.

Have you ever had an “email war” with someone?  A back-and-forth that led to frustration, anger and generally going off the rails?  I talk about a simple rule that will help you stay on track.

Resources:

4 Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader – This easy-to-read graphic clearly illustrates the 4 Levels of Thinking, individually breaking down each level.

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Transcript

[00:00:00]

Man: Becoming a Geek Leader, Season 2, Episode 9.

[00:01:32]

Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people too. Ready?

Introduction

[00:01:54]

In today’s episode, I want to share a couple of ideas that are gonna help you improve teamwork and reduce miscommunication. In the Coach’s Mailbox segment, I’m gonna answer Bill’s email about how to handle it when somebody’s copying the universe on an email chain, leading to Bill getting in trouble with his boss. And in the mentoring segment, I’m gonna talk about how you can create a team culture that brings people together and gets your brilliant experts on your team to work as a team rather than just as individual contributors. Let’s jump right in.

[00:02:24]

Mentoring segment.

[00:02:42]

Tom: Let’s talk about culture. In an ideal world, your senior leaders have determined ahead of time what the culture of the organization is gonna be, and they have carefully shepherded that culture throughout the entire life of the organization up to the time that you join. Realistically, that rarely happens. And even though culture-setting is something that theoretically ought to happen at the most senior levels of the organization, this is a skill that you can start to use when you’re at level two of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:03:15]

Man: Level two, team member. Level two is where you work well with others and together you all succeed.

[00:03:24]

Tom: Have you ever worked on a team or in a group that really didn’t seem to like each other very much? Have you ever worked for a company that has a terrible culture where people seem to look for ways to throw each other under the bus or undermine each other or make other people look bad? Maybe it’s a company where people seem to take particular pleasure in the failures of other departments. If that’s true for you even where you are now, I might ask you, “Well, why do you want to work for a company like that?” But let’s say for the sake of argument that these types of problems are isolated or this company really is your best option. So what do you do then?

[00:04:03]

When it comes to culture, culture is really the expression of the values we hold. And values are all about answering the question “How are we going to treat each other along the way?” In most organizations, there is a difference between the values that are on the wall or on the website and the values that you actually practice. And I’m talking about the values that you actually use as you and your teammates work together. In a perfect world, the values that your organization actually puts into practice would match your personal values. That would be the best-case scenario. Now, in practice, that doesn’t actually work out that way, but the best thing to do is to make sure that there’s as much alignment as possible between the things that you value and the things that the organization values.

[00:04:58]

And, moreover, in that perfect theoretical environment, you would have good examples of values in practice, and you would have support for making decisions that would enforce those values. Your team members would share the same values. You could recruit people who were high performers who also shared those values. And with those values as a guide, you would work together as a cohesive team to get things done.

[00:05:24]

Now, that’s the ideal situation, and I’ll just say here that it’s probable that you work for an organization that doesn’t quite have that. Maybe you work in an organization that doesn’t treat people very well, where there’s a value system that says it’s okay sometimes to throw people under the bus. So what do you do in that situation? Well, my mom always used to say, “The speed of the leader is the speed of the group.” If you want to establish a positive team culture, you are going to have to set an example. You’re gonna have to live out a specific set of values and challenge people to live up to those values too.

[00:06:02]

In my career, as I worked with highly technical experts, there were multiple times that I found teams or so-called teams where people really acted as individual super star performers but not as a cohesive team. In a recent episode, I mentioned the idea that geeks are an interesting bunch to lead because they’re able to be influenced by logic, but they’re driven by ego. Now, ego can be very, very valuable because it encourages us to pursue excellence and to create things that are beautifully elegant in their efficiency. But, unfortunately, there’s also a dark side to the ego.

[00:06:43]

One time I was working with a couple of engineers who were responsible for building a certain tool. And they had worked together, and they had done a great job because even though they never said it out loud, they actually shared one core value. That value was they aspired to perfection. Now, this aspiration, never articulated or specifically expressed, that drove them for their egos to work extremely hard to eliminate all errors from the final product.

[00:07:14]

Interestingly, this organization’s values did not require perfection from the tool. However, these geeks felt that perfection was so important that they insisted on pushing themselves and pushing each other to deliver an increasingly perfect product. As geeks, we think perfection’s good, right? But the challenge we run into is sometimes the cost of delivering perfection is far higher than the value received by having the product be perfect. If we’re talking about NASA or pacemakers or some other form of lifesaving device, I suppose perfection is something that really is worthwhile. However, I would submit to you that the majority of the projects we work on, the systems that we’re building, it’s really a lot more like making chocolate milk.

[00:08:02]

Now, I have to say I’m confident there’s some ideal ratio of cold milk to chocolate syrup which allows you to make the perfect glass of chocolate milk. Too little syrup, and you just get a slightly gray-brown glass of milk. And too much syrup, and you’re basically just drinking sugar, so there’s probably an ideal ratio, whatever that is, between the milk and the syrup. But when I’m making a bunch of chocolate milk to give to my kids, I’m really not particular about hitting a precise ratio. There’s a pretty wide tolerance between the minimum amount and an overwhelming amount of chocolate going into the chocolate milk, and I’m confident my kids would lean toward the overwhelming amount of chocolate, but along as there’s enough chocolate in the milk, they’re gonna be happy.

[00:08:46]

Getting back to that product my engineers were building, their tolerance for error was more like NASA, and the organization was more interested in getting some cold chocolate milk served and getting that milk served quickly. In fact, the amount of work that the company was demanding from that team was growing, and it was growing so fast that the engineers who were working on that product just couldn’t keep up. So in hindsight, I think one of the challenges they really ran into was their standards were just too high, and that made their pace of work too slow. And it probably would have been worthwhile to fight the battle of challenging them to lower their standards to improve productivity, but I didn’t really get into it that far at that time.

[00:09:25]

I tried a number of different things with them to improve their throughput, and eventually we settled on adding another team member to the engineering team. Now, unfortunately, the new guy didn’t hold the same standard of perfection that the other two guys had. In fact, because those first two team members personally held that value of perfection so highly, they never even needed to say it out loud. It was an unspoken, expected requirement. Well, you can predict what happened next.

[00:09:54]

The new guy joins the team. He gets the list of requirements, and he starts building. And when he believes his contributions are good enough, he submits them. And the original two team members take a look at what he’s produced, and they are disgusted by the low quality that’s been produced. They don’t say anything to the offender. No, no, that’d be way too easy. Instead, they mock him, and they belittle him, and they disrespect him, and they say he’s stupid. They’re far superior to this new person, and their response to his unacceptable work is ridicule and anger.

[00:10:24]

Now put yourself in the new guy’s shoes. You’ve been assigned to do some work, and you deliver what you think is good work product. And your new team members, who are already in trouble and needed your help, are not satisfied with the work you’re doing, but instead they criticize you, and they’re angry with you, and they don’t appreciate you. So the whole team now is confused, bitter, and angry, not exactly what I was looking for.

[00:10:48]

As I tried to get to the bottom of the problem and I talked to the original two team members, they scoffed. They said, “This guy’s a moron. His work is crap. There’s no way we could use anything an idiot like that produced.” Now, was this new guy an idiot? Actually, no. Fundamentally, his values were much more in line with the values of the organization. He focused on delivering on productivity even when it meant delivering something that wasn’t perfect. He got it. He understood that the organization really wanted chocolate milk served, not perfect chocolate milk but milk that could be served quickly.

[00:11:21]

So how does this relate to culture? Well, I definitely had my work cut out for me, and in this example, we were not working as a unified team, but we were a group of primadonnas. So I started to answer the question, “How are we gonna treat each other along the way?” Now, clearly, it’s not okay to have contempt for somebody who’s supposed to be a team member. Here’s the principle. You have to say it out loud. I had to say it out loud. I had to say, “We don’t throw each other under the bus. We don’t say bad things about each other in public. If we have a problem with a specific person, the first place to go, to that person. And if that doesn’t work, then we can get some help from a leader. But either way, we don’t talk trash about each other. That’s not what we do. That’s not who we are. We don’t do it.”

[00:12:09]

Now, I call this the little brother principle. This is the example of where big brothers sometimes harass or bug or pick on their little brothers at home, but at school or on the playground or anywhere else, if somebody messes with my little brother, there’s gonna be trouble. At work, this translates to, during our team meetings, we’re kind of in the house, and we can argue and discuss and campaign for, passionately advocate for our ideas. And there might be table pounding, and there might be raised voices, and people getting frustrated and angry, and inside those closed doors that’s fine. That’s in the family. That’s our internal discussions, and we can be open and specific and direct, and we can even challenge each other in a respectful way.

[00:12:52]

But once we open those doors, we are all one team. That means we don’t say bad things about team members in front of other people. That means when somebody makes a mistake, we share responsibility for the mistake. Rather than saying, “I can’t believe Joe did that. That was really dumb. Joe should never have done that,” wouldn’t say that if Joe’s on the team. We say things like, “That’s the decision we made. Now we get it. We see that’s not the best decision. We’re gonna do a better job next time. And in the interim, this is what we’re gonna do to try and fix it.” By not throwing Joe under the bus, what this does is it builds a sense of team, and it helps develop trust because we all want to feel like our team members are gonna have our back.

[00:13:37]

Now, it’s easy to talk about, but it’s not simple to do because we have to remember to do it. Let’s go back to my engineers who were building that product. They had to start to say out loud what their standards were. And once they said it out loud, boy, did we have work to do because, first, we had to align their standards with the company’s standards. We had to help them see that they were making chocolate milk and they weren’t making a medical device. Now, this was a big challenge because, remember I said ego matters? Well, they were saying things like, “Well, I’m not putting my name on that. I’m not gonna sign off on anything that’s that terrible.” So we had to reframe it and get them to buy in to the idea that they were making chocolate milk, that they were making something that had to be good enough, but we couldn’t afford perfect. So once we aligned their standards, then we had to ask ourselves, “How good is good enough?” And we had to be specific. We had to say out loud what we would tolerate and what we wouldn’t, how wide is the tolerance for error.

[00:14:38]

Now here’s what’s really interesting. Once we said it out loud, the new guy had no difficulty meeting that standard. He was able to meet the standard from the beginning, but his internal standard just didn’t happen to match the internal standard of the other guys who were on the team. And I want to point out that it’s not even that either of the standards was right or wrong. Neither one of them was bad, but we had to agree as a team what our standards would be, and that is part of developing team culture.

[00:15:10]

On an upcoming episode, I’m gonna talk about how to define the types of skills and competencies that are needed for a well-rounded, highly performing technical team, and I’ll talk also about what I did to help identify those skills and competencies and challenge my team members to stretch in those directions. But for today, I’m gonna summarize it by saying this. First, you have to define your operating values, and if you’re not the boss, you can still agree with your team members about what the operating values are. In the example I gave, mine involved working as a team, supporting each other, not saying bad things about each other in public. We use the say it out loud principle to agree about our quality standards and expectations. And we use the little brother principle to make sure that we weren’t gonna let anybody beat up on our little brother outside in public even if we might have picked on him behind closed doors and at home.

[00:16:01]

Just starting with these key principles, we developed a culture that was much more unified than other teams in the organization, and that improved our trust and improved our overall productivity. So as you think about your role on the team and the team that you’re working on, what’s something that you need to say out loud? Culture matters, and that’s today’s mentoring segment.

[00:16:27]

Coach’s Mailbox

[00:16:57]

Tom: Email challenges. We all have them, and the letter that I’m gonna be answering today is a set of skills that you can use when you’re at level one of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:17:11]

Man: Level one, individual. At level one, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level one focuses you on improving your technical skills.

[00:17:25]

Today we have an email from Bill. Bill writes, “Tom, my boss gets upset with me when I CC him on emails. He says he gets too many emails already, but the problem is that other people copy their boss and my boss, and then I get in trouble. My boss is telling me I need to solve more of these things without him, but I’m stuck. What am I supposed to do when the other guy is copying his boss and then I end up getting in trouble? I can’t win. Help.”

[00:17:51]

Dave, I understand. I have been in many email battles back in my day. I remember working for a large company, and things would definitely escalate. I tried to remember, and I went back and looked at my email archive. Found one message that had 192 people on the CC line, 192. Seriously, you cannot make this stuff up. And I remember how it works. It starts with a miscommunication. You meant A. They hear B. They expect B. They get upset when B doesn’t happen. They send a terse email calling you out for failing to deliver B. You reply to explain it. They copy their boss, and the next thing you know, their boss is talking to your boss about why you can’t deliver on what you promised, for heaven’s sake. You can tell I’ve been in a few of these, and they generally don’t lead to good memories.

[00:18:44]

And you know if you’ve ever been involved in one of these that it takes a huge amount of time to read what the other person wrote and craft a response, a reply, to the points that they raised and then bring up the specific details that support your point and prove that they’re totally and completely wrong. So, Bill, I want to talk about how you can avoid this situation in the future, and there are two things that you can do, and they won’t take much time at all, and, in fact, they’re gonna save you a huge amount of time and emotional energy. These two tips are gonna let you be able to improve your team communication, deliver better results, and get things done faster. And not only that, but they’ll keep your boss off the CC line, and they’re gonna keep you from getting chewed out too.

[00:19:25]

So here we go. Let’s start with emails. Early in my career, one of my best bosses ever, Mike Wakefield, he instituted the one reply rule for email. And what’s the one reply rule? Mike said, “You’re allowed to hit reply one time. Only once. If, after that reply, the matter’s not settled, you have to talk to the other person. You can’t text them. You can’t hit them up on Slack, IM them. You can’t use any other electronic communication.” Now, you might be permitted to call them on the phone, but it’s preferable for you to get off your butt and walk over to where they are and speak with them directly about the miscommunication. I can tell you that our team fought this idea. We were really unhappy about the idea of having to waste our time by going to see people who it’d just be easier for us to write an email. But here’s what we found.

[00:20:20]

It turned out that when we stopped hitting reply and when we stopped adding additional people on the CC line, our communication actually got better. The idea that that one reply only meant that we’d have to interact with them directly forced us to think about what we wanted to say and what we had to do to resolve the conflict. One benefit of speaking with the other person on the phone or seeing them in person is we could hear their tone of voice, and we’d understand the urgency behind some of the things they were saying, and we could help identify the priorities they had so we could address the specific concerns and the exact needs that they had. That type of communication was critical.

[00:21:06]

Email is just text. Emojis don’t count. And you don’t get any sense of emphasis or tone of voice or priority in that email, and I know from my personal experience that if I’m in a bad mood, I’m gonna automatically add grumpiness to the message as I read it. And that might not at all be what the original author intended, but I brought it in. And since there was no other mechanism to help me think about exactly what tone of voice might be there except my own grumpy attitude, then all of a sudden I’m reading it as if they’re intending it to be grumpy, and that’s not good. Also, sometimes if we’re not clear about the motive that the other person has, then we’re gonna apply negative motives to them, and that’s gonna cause us to react in a defensive way.

[00:21:55]

By going and having a personal conversation with that other person helps me to get more information about their reasoning, their motives, and their goals. The problem is that we’re more comfortable sitting in our office and investing that time to write a response. It’s less risky, right? It doesn’t take the time. It might be a waste of time to go to their office and find they’re not there. But here’s the thing. After a couple of these reply wars that go on, each side tends to get so wound up with the other one, they don’t even read what the other person says. And I’m reminded of a Bugs Bunny cartoon where Daffy Duck shows up with a knife, and then all of a sudden there’s Yosemite Sam with a pistol. And then before you know it, you got Elmer Fudd with his shotgun, and Bugs Bunny shows up with a cannon.

[00:22:42]

In these email reply wars, we set out bigger and bigger weapons as we escalate to prove how right we are. And the thing is what could’ve been resolved in a minute or two of conversation ends up taking hours of time for six or eight or a dozen people or more. So let me encourage you to try it. Try the one reply rule. After a single reply, if somebody hits reply a second time or if you want to hit reply a second time, before you do that, pick up the phone or, more valuably, go see the other person. Most of the time what you’re gonna find is you get to resolution a lot faster.

[00:23:24]

Now, this next tip is related. After you’re both on the same page, how are you gonna remember what you talked about? I recently attended a conference where a speaker shared with me the idea that… It’s an idea he called the same-day summary. The same-day summary is where you summarize in an email what you talked to somebody about that day. Now, I have always been a big fan of keeping meeting minutes in a big meeting. The person who writes the minutes controls history. If you’ve got the opportunity to write down what happened in the meeting and you share that with others, whatever you wrote becomes the official record of what happened. And the same-day summary is just a smaller, simpler version of those meeting minutes. It’s a meeting minutes for the one-on-one meeting you had with that other person.

[00:24:11]

So let’s say that you’re having a conflict with somebody about getting work done by a specific time, and it’s clear from the email exchange that you have a difference of opinion with the other person about what’s required and exactly when it’s due. If you follow the one email reply rule, you go see the other person. You negotiate a little bit, and you agree on exactly what is gonna be done and exactly when it will be done.

[00:24:35]

So let me make this a little bit more specific. Let’s say you get an email from Julie about moving a server from one lab to another. And Julie says, “You’re not doing your job properly because this task was already supposed to be completed, and now you’re holding up other people.” And Julie needs you to get that done and right now. And you reply, and you say, “My understanding was that Chet and Steve were responsible for coordinating the move, and they told me that it was scheduled to happen next week. Yeah, I’m the contact for that server, but I didn’t commit to getting it done. Check with Chet and Steve, but I’m guessing it will be done next week.” Now, that’s the one reply.

[00:25:09]

Julie sends another reply, and on that one she copies her boss, and your boss, and she says, “Look, Bill, you’re the contact. The project plan called for this to be done last week. You need to do whatever it takes to get this done, and we can’t wait for next week.” Now right then, right then when you want to hit reply and tell her what an idiot she is because you already told her that it’s not your job, I want you to stop, and I want you to go see Julie because we’ve already surpassed that one-reply rule.

[00:25:37]

Now, in this example, let’s say Julie works in another state, so you give her a call. And during that call, you clear up the miscommunication. You negotiate a little bit. By the end of the conversation you’re on the same page that while it’s not technically your job and you didn’t commit to get the work done, you’ll reach out to Chet, because Chet works in your office, to see what he can do about getting things done faster.

[00:25:59]

Now at this point, most of us would feel pretty good because we took care of that problem. We felt like we got to understanding, and there was no more work required, right? But let me suggest that you take just a minute or two to right a quick email. Write the same-day summary. And in that email, you copy the entire CC list, and you summarize the conversation. In this example, you might say something like this. “Julie, thanks for taking the time to chat about that server move today. As we discussed, I recognize the project has slowed down because the task is not complete, and we talked about how the right person to talk to about that box is actually either Chet or Steve. Since Chet’s office is down the hall from me, I will go see him, find out if he can expedite the move, and I’ll ask him to follow up with you. I will email you with what I find out from Chet. Bill.”

[00:26:51]

Now I’m telling you this email will take you two minutes to write, but I promise that it will save you a ton of hassle later. Taking the time to write a same-day summary documents that the conversation took place, what was discussed, and what the planned next steps are. In this example, I just gave you five sentences. Just five sentences, and these sentences show the leaders the issue is closed or at least in its progress. They’ll also show the leaders that you took initiative to head off an escalating problem. And it also provides backup later when Julie remembers something different from whatever it is that you remember. So, Bill, I hope this helps. The one, two punch of the one email reply rule and the same-day summary should keep you out of hot water with your boss, and that’s today’s Coach’s mailbox.

[00:27:42]

Episode Hack

[00:28:05]

Tom: In today’s episode, we talked about creating a team culture, how to move beyond frustrated team members and create a sense of one team. We also talked about how you need to say it out loud and apply the little brother principle when you back each other up if a different team wants to pick on one of your team members. In today’s episode hack, I want to challenge you to use the one email reply rule. Look at an email chain that’s in your inbox right now, and take a moment to visit with or call the person on the other side of the issue. If you take just a few minutes to get to the bottom of the misunderstanding and then use the same-day summary, you’ll be glad you did. And that’s today’s episode hack.

Closeout

[00:28:47]

Is the podcast helping you? Make sure you don’t miss out on the latest info. Head over right now to brighthillgroup.com/join to be sure that you stay in the loop. When you do, you’ll get my PDF “Become a Geek Leader in Two Easy Steps,” and you’ll be notified as soon as new podcast episodes are available. Plus, you’ll get updates and ideas that I don’t share on the podcast. Head over to brighthillgroup.com/join right now.

[00:29:21]

This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.

Listen now!

In this episode:

We all hate conflict.  Learn how to disarm the conflict and get back to being on the same page.

Hear about a new way to take advantage of a helpful tool in your toolkit – a tool that that will multiply your effectiveness.

I also talk about the behind the scenes of the podcast and share some tools that I use to document some of the processes required to make the podcast run well.

Resources:

4 Levels of Thinking as a Geek Leader – This easy-to-read graphic clearly illustrates the 4 Levels of Thinking, individually breaking down each level.

.

How to Resolve Conflicts at Work (& How to Delegate Effectively) – Sea1Ep:9

Conflict Resolution Worksheet – Got a conflict to work out? This worksheet helps you figure out how to use the CORE and XYZ methods for your specific situation.

DISC assessment video

Clarify software

Articles – How to: Resolve Conflicts at Work by Emma Johnson, Engineering Management May be the Most Unnatural Act of All by Michael Driscoll

Link to Shotgun sound effect

Transcript

[00:00:01]

Becoming a Geek Leader, Season 2, Episode 8.

Sponsored by Geek to Great

Tom: I spoke with Dr. Peter Bamberger, from Tel Aviv University’s Business School, about engineers becoming leaders and he said…

[00:00:13]

Dr. Bamberger: If you take an engineer, and you want to turn them into a leader in an organization, you tend to presume that you promote them and they’ll sort of learn overtime how to become a leader.

[00:00:24]

Tom: Right.

[00:00:25]

Dr. Bamberger: Some of them will. The vast majority won’t.

[00:00:27]

Tom: Some of them will, but the vast majority won’t. So here you are. You’re a talented engineer. Maybe you’re running a team of technical folks. But the fact is, they won’t magically get better at things like communicating clearly or delegating effectively, or dealing with conflict in a healthy way. They need to learn those skills. That’s why I created Geek to Great 101. It’s a simple way for you to help your team members with an easy plan to improve these skills and more. For less than $500, your team can start to make progress. Find more information and get immediate access to your first free lesson at brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks. That’s brighthillgroup.com/helpinggeeks.

[00:01:20]

Welcome to the Becoming a Geek Leader Podcast. My name is Tom Cooper. As a geek, I’m on a mission to figure out better ways to lead others at work and at home. Through the Becoming a Geek Leader Podcast, I’m sharing what I’m learning so I can help make you more effective at leading people too. Ready?

Introduction

[00:01:43]

This episode is a powerful one on conflict. Conflict, we all have it. Most of us hate it, and even when we find ourselves in a lot of conflict most of us would rather avoid it. Today, I’m going to cover some great ideas about how to lead your way through conflict. And I’ll also be covering a very simple way for you to increase your effectiveness using a tool that you’ve already got in your toolbox. Let’s get started.

[00:02:12]

Mentoring Segment.

[00:02:30]

Tom: I’m talking about conflict again today. Why? Because we all have conflict. We hate it, but it happens. I like to say, where you have people, you have problems. One study found that U.S. workers spend 2.8 hours per week dealing with conflict. That’s almost an hour a day of conflict. Now, what does that do to morale or to overall team performance? Well, whatever it is, I can tell you it’s not good. Learning to manage conflict with others is a skill you can really leverage when you get to Level 2 of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:03:08]

Announcer: Level 2: Team Member. Level 2 is where you work well with others, and together you all succeed.

[00:03:11]

Tom: In my life, I have made a lot of mistakes when it comes to conflict. I remember years ago I was working for Price Waterhouse. At that time, I shared an office with a technically brilliant, but pretty abrasive engineer. He really liked to push people’s buttons. Just for fun, he hooked up speakers to his desktop, that was back before most computers had soundcards, and he set up his new mail sound to be the sound of a shotgun cocking. Imagine having this sound behind your back intermittently all day long. [shotgun cocking]

[00:03:53]

This guy was smart, and he was hard-working. He did a ton of great work. But he used that great work as a weapon to compel management to tolerate his antisocial behavior. Now, one day, I remember I was having a particularly bad day, and I had had enough of his pushiness, and I snapped. I turned around and I said something nasty. Now, conveniently, I guess I don’t remember the details of exactly what I said, but I’m sure it was not nice. He responded in kind and before you knew it, we were both standing up and yelling at each other.

[00:04:26]

As we were proceeding in this dangerous game, he got closer and closer to me, and at one point he was a couple inches away from my face and he was yelling at me. I remember thinking, “Is he going to hit me?” and then thinking, “Well, if he hits me, am I going to hit him back?” I immediately decided that I was not going to blows over this, but we were at a pride standstill and it was tense. Thankfully, that conflict eventually deescalated without punches being thrown. But how much work do you think we got done that afternoon?

[00:05:06]

I saw a quote the other day in an article on TechCrunch that said, “Engineers are a unique bunch, persuadable by logic, yet driven by ego.” I can remember a ton of times where ego got in the way of the results. Today, I want to share some ideas that came from an article in SUCCESS magazine called “How to Resolve Conflicts at Work.” In the article, Emma Johnson outlines 11 tips for refereeing office disputes, and I’ll include a link to both articles in the show notes for today. Johnson says disputes can’t be avoided, so we have to deal with them when they occur. She also says we can’t expect team members to just get over it.

[00:05:48]

I have to inject some commentary here. This is right on the money. I believe you have to teach people every little thing. Recently, I had a client ask me, “Why is this so hard? Aren’t these people grown adults?” Actually, no. My mentor, John Maxwell, says, “People claim with age comes wisdom. They are wrong. Sometimes age comes alone.” As influencers, sometimes we need to step in and to help mediate the conflict, to help take the edge off and equip people with the skills they need to fix the problem, rather than just back away and stay mad at each other.

[00:06:30]

Tip number four, make each person acknowledge the other person. That other person has strengths, and that other person is worthy of being heard out. Number five, focus on expectations. Man, that is the truth. The gap between what we expect and what we experience is a huge contributor to the conflict we have. Let me just say that again. The gap between what we expect and what we experience is a huge contributor to the conflict we have. Number six Johnson suggests is, challenge the people having the conflict to come up with a solution. Let them find some common ground and come up with a plan, even if their plan is not as good as your plan. Because if it’s your plan, they’re not going to be as bought in. It’s good to have them do it.

[00:07:21]

Number seven, help them say it out loud. What’s the plan, and what are the next steps? Who is going to do what, and by when? Number eight, do not separate the people having the conflict. I can’t help but think of a time we were on a road trip. Boy, you can’t get separated when you’re inside the car. Right? Two of my boys were bickering endlessly. Oh, it was so frustrating. So I decided that when we got to the hotel we were going to get to the bottom of this. When we got there, I made them stand in the bathtub, balancing on one foot, until they found a way to work it out. You can’t get away with that at your office. But find ways to get the people who are having the conflict to be together to try and work it out.

[00:08:12]

Number nine, Johnson says, “Unite them in solving a crisis bigger than the argument.” Find a common enemy, find a dragon they can work together to slay. Number 10, Johnson says, “Consider personality assessments like a disk assessment to help them find ways to communicate more effectively based on the other person’s style.” Now, that’s something I can help your team with and I’ve got a link that I’ll put into a video about disk assessments in the show notes as well. Number 11, teach them how to do it. I always ask my complaining kid, “Have you spoken to your sibling about this?” They know the rule is they have to talk to each other before they escalate to me, and you can challenge your team members to do the exact same thing. “If you’re upset with somebody on the team, go talk to them before you come talk to me.”

[00:09:07]

Now, check out Johnson’s article. She’s got more information in the article, and some examples of these principles in action. Again, there’s a link in the show notes to the article. I highly recommend it. Conflict is sometimes no fun. But it’s also the key to innovation and disruption of the old ways of doing things. Teaching your team members to work it out can have a big impact on performance. I’m also including in the show notes a downloadable worksheet that’s going to help you work out conflicts, and that is today’s Mentoring Segment.

[00:09:41]

Thought Leader Segment.

[00:10:01]

Today’s Thought Leader Segment describes a skill you can start to use when you’re at Level 1 of the four levels of thinking as a geek leader.

[00:10:10]

Announcer: Level 1: Individual. At Level 1, you may even be a superstar technical resource. Level 1 focuses you on improving your technical skills.

[00:10:12]

Tom: The U.S. Government decided to set up a research facility to understand more about how software is created. Through funding from the U.S. Government, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University was created. Now, they came up with the Capability Maturity Model for software development. If you haven’t ever heard of it or you’ve never looked at it, it’s fascinating. It describes the process of what does it take to be really good at writing software.

[00:10:56]

In addition, because software projects have so many people problems, they’ve created the People Capability Maturity Model, and that identifies the key components that lead to excellent people and processes around people in organizations. Like the CMMI for software, the PCMMI for people outlines the things that you need to know to lead to outstanding performance. Now, there are a ton of great ideas in the PCMMI, and today I want to talk about one specific idea, and that is repeatability.

[00:11:36]

As geeks, we are used to using our expert judgement to create repeatable processes using technology. That’s what we do. That’s what code is. Right? That’s what machines are. Machines are systems that automate the work. Our job, as highly technical experts, is to come up with tools to make it easier for other people. These systems we build make it so that you don’t have to have that expert judgement at every single step along the way. You can repeat a set of steps without having to make that expert judgement decision every single time about what should be done next.

[00:12:12]

A major idea inside the PCMMI is that we need to have repeatable processes that we can use over and over again to make it so we don’t have to make decisions over and over, and over again. You might be thinking, “Well, that’s kind of intellectually interesting, Tom. But I’m not sure how it relates to me.” One of the things that I try to do in this podcast is make sure that the information I give you is actionable. So what can you do to make your work more scalable? How can you make your work impact more people, more processes, more projects, without having to work crazy hours? There’s a simple tool that I bet you’re already using, at least a little bit, that will improve your influence and your effectiveness. What’s the tool? It’s a checklist.

[00:13:02]

Really? A checklist? I mean, come on, Tom. You’re kidding, right? Back in 2007, Dr. Atul Gawande published the story of another doctor, this one from Johns Hopkins by the name of Peter Provonost. Provonost realized that to safely install a central line, medical personnel needed to complete a series of five steps perfectly. Now, a central line is used for patients that get a lot of drugs put in their system, and it’s a fairly common procedure. But apparently, it’s also relatively dangerous. On observation, in more than a third of patients, doctors consistently skipped at least one of five steps. See, our memory is just not quite good enough to remember to do everything all the time.

[00:13:46]

In combination with some cultural change, the results were incredible. To quote from The New Yorker article by Dr. Gawande, “The results were so dramatic that they weren’t sure whether to believe them. The 10-day line infection rate went from 11% to 0%.” So they followed patients for 15 more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that in this one hospital the checklist had prevented 43 infections and 8 deaths, and it saved $2 million in costs. Think about that for just a minute. Implementation of a five-step checklist saved lives, eight lives, and millions in costs. Now, in fairness, without the extreme commitment to cultural change that went along with creation of the checklist, because creating the checklist isn’t enough…But without that commitment to cultural change, other hospitals have not seen the same scale of results.

[00:14:50]

But the principle is that we as people forget things. Sometimes, something as simple as a checklist becomes a really powerful and effective tool. Let me ask you this. What are some things you’re doing today that could be improved by using a checklist? Back in 1994, I was working as a wide area network guy. My employer had a group of software engineering centers across the U.S. and in international locations too, and one of my jobs was to upgrade the routers at each location. Now, I didn’t have the luxury of complete documentation. The system had been set up originally before I had started with the company, and frankly I wasn’t an expert in all the different hardware models that we had in each location.

[00:15:36]

My ego, however, couldn’t stand the impact of failure. There were a million details that had to be just right in order to make the upgrade process a success. I had to fly in to each location, swap out hardware as needed, upgrade the operating system on the router, and then make sure the network links all came back online before the developers needed to access those systems that were onsite. I remember as I was getting ready for those trips, I was always a little bit nervous. I over-packed. I took extras of just about everything that I could think of, just to make sure that I wouldn’t run into difficulty. Now, I wasn’t sure about the exact cables that I’d need, so I had a big variety of them that I took with me. I took backup copies of the software and extra disks, and everything I needed. I was consistently surprised when things went wrong.

[00:16:24]

Every time, I had to scramble to overcome yet another unexpected problem. That was stressful. I think I got through maybe four of those upgrades, when I went to my boss and I said, “Hey, boss, I think maybe I should make a list of things to remember.” Really? I was going to rely on my intellect and my technical skills. I did manage to pull things off that frankly should have failed it. I was lucky, except for that one time in Chicago when the phone company had installed a link between our location and their office, but hadn’t extended the network back to Bethesda.

[00:16:58]

I was able to get everything done pretty much in one trip. But have you ever tried to get the phone company to make a fast change to anything. That one required a second trip. But how would it have been different if I had created a checklist that included, “Confirm the technical requirements of the LAN link with the phone company two weeks before the upgrade date?” It wouldn’t have been that tough, and it certainly could’ve saved me a trip to Chicago. Checklists can be a huge help.

[00:17:27]

Going back to that New Yorker article, Gawande relates the story of the B-17 Flying Fortress. This was an incredible aircraft. It was faster, it had longer range, and it had five times the payload capacity that the Army Air Corps even requested. This plane had tremendous promise. It was going to be an amazing tool for warfare. That’s how it got the name the Flying Fortress. During the flight competition, they really believed that the Flying Fortress was going to so outperform the competition that it was not even up for grabs, that the Flying Fortress was so much better than the alternatives.

[00:18:07]

But here’s what happened. For the demonstration flight, the plane took off smoothly, it climbed to 300 feet, and then stalled before a spectacular crash that killed two of the five crew members. This pilot was an unquestionable expert in aircraft and flight. He was the head of test flights for the Army Air Corps. But he had forgotten a single step in the operation of this crazy complex machine. If he’d remembered to unlock the elevator and rudder controls, he’d have been fine. But he forgot, because he’s a person and people forget things. Now, this incident was almost the end of the aircraft, which had been believed to be one of the future aircraft to help us fight wars that were coming up.

[00:18:50]

But what happened instead was the introduction, for the very first time in our aircraft operation, the creation of a checklist to help remember the myriad details. Once that checklist was implemented and adopted, that cultural change that I talked about, the Flying Fortress flew 1.8 million miles without any incidents. Let’s take a moment right now, and just spend just a moment or two thinking about your work. I know how it is. You are probably swamped. You’re pressed for time. You’re overwhelmed, too much to do. How is creating a checklist going to help you?

[00:19:30]

Many years ago, I worked in Fortune 500 IT, and we had a major project to roll out that required new servers to be built. These servers were finicky. We needed our installation process to work perfectly. If you didn’t install and configure every single component in exactly the right order, the process just would not work. Now, when we started the process, we looked at expert judgement, time and again, “Okay. What steps should we do next? Exactly how are we going to go about that? How do we configure this? What are the settings for that?” We did eventually create a repeatable process through trial and error, and I can remember installing that iTMS software, oh, dozens of times to be able to get it down.

[00:20:17]

What we learned is that even when we as experts knew what to do, we still managed to blow it sometimes, and that led to unpredictable results. Now, we had become really knowledgeable and even we had trouble getting things done perfectly. It was too complex for us to do it right. So that meant there was no way we could ever delegate it. Right? Actually, after we realized how frequently we missed a step, or we missed several steps, we decided to create a server build guide that included every single step, every step, from specifying power and networking requirements before the box was actually put into place, to the operating system and installation options, to configuration files, specific software tools, and manual settings, every single step, one at a time, and in order.

[00:21:05]

Now, using that build guide, our success rate for server build went up so high that we were able to hand off installations to the operations team, rather than depend on expert engineers to make the right choices all the way along the way. Handing that off to the operations team allowed us to tackle other even more complex tasks. Let’s get back to your task list. What tasks are on your list? What things could you document? What task, no matter how complex, would you be able to hand off to somebody else who’s not quite the expert that you are? What would it take for you to document the process, so you don’t have to be involved in every single step?

[00:21:44]

Now, you might say, “Well, Tom, I can’t do that, because it’s just far too complex.” Okay. Let me assume that that’s true. I’m not sure it’s true, but let me assume it’s true. Could you document 80% of it and hand off 80% of it, and only get called in for that portion that required your expert judgement? What would that do to free you up? Using a checklist solved my iTM server build problem, and a checklist definitely would’ve helped me with my network upgrades. It helped the Army Air Corps master the Flying Fortress, and it saved lives and millions at Johns Hopkins. Repeatability and consistent performance, isn’t that part of the elegance we seek as engineers? Finding a way to package our expert judgement and pass it along to others is one way that you can improve your effectiveness. Checklists do that, and that is today’s Thought Leader Segment.

[00:22:36]

Family Segment.

[00:22:51]

Tom: As I record this episode, we’re in the dog days of summer. My teenage son, Joel, as you know, is the producer for this podcast. That means he’s responsible for all the post-production edits and mixing the episodes, as well as making sure that all the technical bits of getting the recordings posted online actually happen on time so that you get your episode when you’re expecting it. Now, as you might think, our routines have been pretty disrupted by our summer activities. Over the last couple months, Joel has been handling some school work, and he’s been involved in two different week-long camps as well.

[00:23:24]

When I created the podcast, one of the first things I had to do was figure out all the technical bits, all the processes I wanted to follow, and how I was going to go about doing each podcast episode. When I wanted to bring Joel in to be the producer, I wanted to create a process and document that process. So I’ve used some cool software called Clarify. It makes it simple to take screenshots and mark them up. You can add detailed notes about exactly what to do and in what order. It turns out that there are about a zillion little things you need to do to make the podcast run really smoothly.

[00:24:00]

While Joel has been gone, I’ve had to step back into the technical editing process in posting some of these episodes. Now, I’ve told you before that I am not a detailed guy. I generally operate at a pretty high level. I can do details, but they just make me tired. But because Joel was busy doing other things, I jumped right in with both feet and I edited the first episode I had edited in a while. It was after I posted it that I discovered I’d forgotten one of the steps in the edits to the introduction. If you go back a couple of podcast episodes ago and the very beginning of the episode doesn’t sound exactly like the rest of the episodes, yep. That’s me.

[00:24:34]

In the next episode, after I posted it, I realized I’d forgotten to add ID3 tags to the MP3 file. Oops. I guess that will screw up my SEO. Now, let me ask you. Do you think I actually used my checklist? Nope. You’d think I’d know better. I mean, I created a checklist and I remembered almost everything. But that reminds me of a story my Uncle David told me. My Uncle David is a flight instructor, and he had a friend who was a pilot, who refused to use a landing checklist. I guess he didn’t get the memo about the Flying Fortress. Right?

[00:25:09]

Now, my uncle’s friend had flown for years and years, and years successfully, and he landed well over and over, and over again, until that one day where he landed his plane with no landing gear. After that, he switched to using a checklist. My Uncle David says there are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots, and that is today’s Family Segment.

[00:25:36]

Episode Hack.

[00:25:57]

Tom: In today’s episode, we talked about conflict. Why? Leading geeks is a unique challenge. We’re persuadable by logic, but frequently driven by ego and pride. Where you have people, you have problems, and improving your conflict resolution skills is a great way to improve team performance. For the Episode Hack today, I want to challenge you to think about something you do frequently, something you’ve been reluctant to ask anybody else to do because you’re too important to the process. For that activity, I want you to take some time and document the steps into a checklist. Once that checklist exists, you can use it to make sure that it actually works, that you remember to put down your landing gear.

[00:26:35]

After you’ve done that a few times, think about who you could delegate that task to, and use the checklist as a foundation for training them to do it well. That’s today’s Episode Hack. Oh, and I’ve mentioned before that licensing intellectual property matters to me, making sure that the people who create content are recognized and rewarded for the work that they do. I am very grateful for Creative Commons and other public domain-type licenses that make it possible for me to take advantage of sharing great ideas and great content with you. Special thanks today to Rob Sun God for the shotgun sound effect, and for offering it under the attribution-only license, making it free for me to share with you. Thanks for listening.

Closeout

[00:27:20]

If you like the podcast, can I ask you to give me a hand? It turns out it’s a big deal to have a rating in iTunes. Now, I’ve heard other podcasters asking for ratings and reviews, and I wondered why they kept going after it again and again, and again. Do you want to know? Because almost no one actually does it. It only takes a minute and it’s a huge help. So why is that? Great ratings help iTunes decide that this podcast is worth promoting, and when you put a rating or a review, it helps it appear as a top podcast in the iTunes search. Would you please take a moment to do it right now? There are three simple steps. One, go to the iTunes store podcasts. Two, search for “Becoming a Geek Leader”. Three, give the podcast a great rating. Thanks.

[00:28:16]

This is Tom Cooper. Thanks for listening. Be sure to join me next time for another episode of Becoming a Geek Leader. Join me in my mission of discovering better ways to lead others at work and at home.