things I like to say

*The Priviledge of Delivering Negative Feedback is Earned*
By delivering positive feedback. Good relationships are based on positivity and no manager whose feedback isn’t primarily positive is maximizing output. Remember, as a leader who is admired and respected positive feedback inspires your directs.

*Positive Feedback is Harder Than Negative Feedback*
For the grand moral judge inside your head, positive performance might mean “doing your job” while negative performance is “not doing your job”. Positive feedback is then very hard to earn and negative feedback comes after every minor stumble. That’s backwards. It takes real discipline not to move onto the next battle after small wins. Positive feedback requires me to pause, zoom out and talk to a direct about positive performance. My greatest weakness as a manager is not doing this enough.

There’s also the fear that too much positive feedback raises a direct’s expectations of compensation and advancement. That happened to me, actually, and I realized that I didn’t understand what drove advancement within my own firm. So I figured it out, clarified it with the direct, and now feedback in advancement-related skill development is special stuff. I love handing that out.

*Organizations exist to solve problems, leaders look for problems to solve*
The most important important thing an organization needs to figure out is what problems to work on. Finding good problems and maintaining focus on them is what we trust our leaders to do for us. This separates the most senior leadership from the rest of the organization a bit because they ‘don’t do any work’. As individual contributors, the highest value function is lightening the burden above us to increase the total resource the organization can devote to the highest value activities. Push your boss up the pyramid.

*Politics is Managing Relationships with Opponents*
Take opponents here to mean groups without perfectly overlapping interests. Manager tools say politics are what executives call collaboration. There’s no point in complaining about politics. Work on the relationship instead.

 

*Communication doesn’t need to be pretty to work*
I envy people that aren’t scared of failure. I’m terrified of it. By far my biggest personal flaw is the fear of feeling stupid. It’s doubly destructive because it’s a communication-related phobia. If I was scared of heights or turtles or something I could easily just avoid the triggers and get on with my life. But *I* get saddled with a fear of using the most powerful tool available for human achievement (communicating). So much of my life has been wasted in over-preparing myself, over-training myself, overworking myself to build this unassailable wall of expertise only so I’d feel comfortable communiating more. Even typing this out I shake my head in disbelief. Fool.

Anyway, the point here is to keep your eye on the ball. Very few problems involve communicating for its own sake. Really you’re communicating to get something done and you really can overcome confusing, awkward communication with communication quantity. You’ll get the right message across eventually, just keep pumping away.

*[Stolen/Adapted] Communicating is what the listener does*
This is from Mark Horstman of Manager Tools (if you haven’t heard of Manager Tools drop everything and download and listen to those podcasts). I like it because it’s also wrong and thought provoking. The point here is when I say communicate above I don’t mean blabbing away at people. You need to listen to learn. One-way communicating is absolutely worthless, I cannot emphasize it enough.

*Relationships are the sum of all communication*
Simple enough so I’ll draw out another idea: not all channels are equal. If communciation is flow of water, text based communication is a trickle, phone calls are rivers and in person meetings are Niagara Falls. When I say communicate more I mean, to extend the metaphor, douse the sucker with water. Let’s say your problem is a llama. Takes lots of texts to soak a llama, right? Now stick it under this…

 

*If It Isn’t Communicated It Doesn’t Exist*
Call this an epistemological theory of business. No idea exists unless it’s discussed. No action is complete until you talk about it. No deliverable matters without a communication component.

*Every Problem is a Communication Problem*
My favorite because it’s wrong so it’s a bit jarring. Here’s a corollary: every problem can be solved by communicating more. I like to say “when you’re stuck, think first: ‘who do I need to talk to to solve this problem?'”. One of my mentors had only one solution to any problem: pick up the phone. Genius.

Now, it IS wrong, of course. Somebody has to do the work at some point. Maybe a better way of putting this is that only the easiest problems require real work. Everything else is solved by communicating. Communicating takes hard problems and makes them easy problems, which can then be solved with easy work.

All solutions worth the name are elegant and simple in retrospect. And if you communicate consistently and effectively you’ll get to that simple solution faster. Any domain: sales, financial analysis, teaching kids, physics research, everything. No hard problem ever been solved in a social vacuum.