Month: August 2015

Working Remotely and the Virtue of Aggressive Transparency. Simon writes about the value of aggressive transparency in a distributed team. Great structure for thinking about expertise and performance at work.

The Startup Guide to 1-on-1s. Nice overview of how to think about one-on-one chats in a growing company. Includes a bit about how to do them effectively and an overview of questions that can help prompt conversation.

Talk-to-Think, Think-to-Talk, And Leadership. Two-pronged framework for thinking about communication styles within a team or company. The post is a helpful overview and set of ideas without being dogmatic about the two models.

Stop apologising

When there has been a deliberate change though—one that is important for future development and that almost certainly won’t be changing back—then that sort of apology can be counter productive. If you know that a feature has been removed and is gone for good, it’s unhelpful to offer false hope to a customer of “recording your feedback” and “voting for that to be returned”. It will probably never happen.

Stop apologising to customers and start leading them – Mathew Patterson.

Work vs. Progress

On poorly managed teams conflicting and irrelevant work is allowed to go on because leaders don’t notice, care or take the time to guide people’s efforts in more useful directions. Capable people may work away in their private tasks, believing they’re making progress (and earning bonuses), when in reality they’re doing work that will be thrown away or even hurt the project. When someone puts their head down to work, how fast they’re going doesn’t matter if they’re heading in the wrong direction (or towards a cliff). How a talent is directed can be more important than the size of the talent itself.

Work vs. Progress – Scott Berkun.