Traits I Value
15 traits valued by the CTO at Meta:
💼 Ownership: Delegate effectively and trust your team to handle tasks.
🧠 Rigor: Encourage thorough thinking, exploration of alternatives, and understanding limitations.
⏳ Bias for Action: Value urgency in decision-making and recognize when more information isn't worth the delay.
🔄 Systematic: Establish effective processes for information acquisition, problem prioritization, and task completion.
🌟 Strategic: Focus on long-term success aligned with organizational values and consumer needs.
📈 Scalable: Design processes and solutions that can be repeated by individuals with varying levels of experience.
🗣️ Outspoken: Communication skills, both written and verbal, are crucial for scalability and leadership.
❤️ Empathetic: Care about the well-being of all team members and address their concerns.
🤝 In Touch: Invest time in understanding team needs and take personal responsibility for addressing concerns.
🚀 Proactive: Identify and address issues without waiting to be asked, and keep leadership informed.
📚 Voracious: Stay informed by reading widely, listening to internal leaders, and networking.
🤝 Relationship Oriented: Foster positive relationships within and across teams and companies.
💪 Confidence: Display confidence in showing unfinished work and accepting scrutiny.
🌐 Transparent: Foster openness in sharing information and concerns within the leadership team.
🌱 Growing: Prioritize self-awareness, seeking feedback, and continuous improvement among team members.
How To Boss Without Being Bossy
🤝 Leadership is about guiding without imposing, fostering team discussions and idea cultivation.
🌱 The primary role of a leader is to nurture discussions, ensuring a variety of options before converging on a decision.
👂 Effective commands respect the listener, using language that is clear but not abrasive.
🗣️ Body language, tone, and the context of a command significantly influence its reception.
✏️ Direct imperatives offer clarity but can be perceived as harsh; softer alternatives balance command with politeness.
🙏 Adding "please" can transform a command into a polite request, affecting the command's directness and perceived choice.
❓ Phrasing commands as questions or suggestions can lessen harshness but may also reduce clarity.
🛠️ A range of command styles allows leaders to adapt their approach to different situations and team dynamics.
🔍 Experimenting with different command forms helps leaders find a style that suits their personality and team culture.
A Friendly Reminder to Cost-Cutters: Keep the Company a Great Place to Work for Survivor
📉 It's currently peak planning season for 2024, with Silicon Valley in a cost-cutting mood due to scarce and expensive capital.
🚫 The key rule in cost-cutting is to always keep the company a great place to work for the survivors, avoiding myopia that focuses solely on financial targets.
🎯 Cost-cutting plans must be achievable and consider the quality of life at the company, ensuring resources and benefits that make employees want to stay.
🔄 Management needs to shift from incremental to absolute thinking in budget adjustments to realistically address current financial needs.
💡 Real-life mistakes include no raise policies, no backfill policies, reduced travel budgets, unrealistic bonus targets, workflation, cutting internal events, and reducing supporting resources, all of which can negatively impact the company culture and employee morale.
🌱 Always consider the holistic health of the organization when making cuts, ensuring that the company remains a great place to work for those who remain.
🚨 The alternative to thoughtful cost-cutting is losing employees who may leave due to dissatisfaction, potentially making the last round of cuts themselves.
The Slide
“I can guarantee that at some point in your career, you've experienced The Slide. Things stop making sense. Team confidence drops. It becomes hard to know what is going on objectively. Everyone has a pet explanation for what's causing The Slide, but no one is right. Or everyone is right, but no one is RIGHT. The team is in a funk and it it seems like you’re sliding down an endless slide.”
🌀 The Slide is a common career experience where team confidence and clarity decline, leading to a pervasive sense of dysfunction.
🧠 Overwhelm leads to a loss of self-awareness in time and energy investment, increasing mistakes and reducing confidence.
🗣️ Decreased confidence in one's assessments and ideas fosters an environment where existing leadership is doubted, and a desire for new management emerges.
🔍 The influx of new managers without proper context exacerbates issues, contributing to a cycle of diminishing trust and confidence.
🐞 Increasing avoidable mistakes and a lack of trust discourage open discussion of issues, further complicating problem identification and resolution.
📉 Pressure to identify singular causes of problems leads to finger-pointing and a reduction in team cohesion and transparency.
🥜 A "peanut butter" strategy emerges, spreading efforts thinly and increasing work-in-progress, which hampers effectiveness.
🎭 Confirmation bias and territorial behaviors strengthen, limiting openness to diverse solutions and amplifying challenges.
🚫 Decreased transparency and trust hinder effective decision-making and problem-solving, leading to a reliance on workarounds.
🤹♂️ The normalization of high workload and slow progress creates a vicious cycle of increased cognitive load and decreased productivity.
📚 The complexity of problems discourages initiative, leading to a culture of avoidance and reduced engagement.
💡 Changing course requires acknowledging the complexity of the problem and adopting new, more flexible behaviors and mindsets.
How to Build Trust
🏗️ Building trust is foundational in management and involves demonstrating trustworthiness over time, rather than through quick fixes or superficial exercises.
🛠️ Being competent in management basics like honesty, integrity, feedback, and coaching is crucial for building trust.
🔄 Consistency in behavior allows team members to predict managerial reactions, fostering comfort and openness.
🗣️ Clear and transparent communication about company happenings builds trust, while avoiding misinformation or half-truths.
🤝 Reliability in fulfilling promises and commitments is key; failing to do so erodes trust similarly to dishonesty.
⏳ Establishing and respecting work-life boundaries demonstrates respect for team members, aiding in trust building.
🔑 Using role power sparingly and transparently helps maintain trust by avoiding coercion for compliance.
📈 Providing frequent, mostly positive feedback supports team development and trust by highlighting strengths and areas for improvement.
🏆 Giving credit for successes to the team while taking responsibility for failures builds trust in leadership.
🎁 Delegating meaningful tasks and “giving away your toys” shows trust in the team, which is likely to be reciprocated.
📚 Sponsorship and coaching signal investment in team members' growth, further building trust.
🤐 Respecting confidentiality while being clear about its limits establishes a safe space for honest conversations.
❓ Asking for permission before giving feedback or suggestions respects autonomy and smooths the power dynamic, fostering trust.
10 Leadership Styles Every Manager Needs to Know
🔄 Adaptive leadership is key in rapidly changing environments, focusing on flexibility and readiness for change.
📈 Strategic leadership emphasizes long-term vision and planning, balancing future goals with present needs.
🚀 Inspirational leadership is about motivating teams with a compelling vision, balancing inspiration with practicality.
🤝 Democratic leadership values inclusivity and team input, fostering collaboration but may slow decision-making.
🎯 Transactional leadership focuses on clear goals with rewards and penalties, effective for goal-oriented tasks but may stifle creativity.
🗺️ Autocratic leadership is effective in crisis situations for quick decisions, though it can decrease team morale if overused.
🏆 Coaching leadership prioritizes personal growth and development, requiring significant time and effort from the leader.
🌱 Servant leadership focuses on team welfare and development, ensuring support doesn’t come at the expense of organizational goals.
🆓 Laissez-faire leadership grants autonomy to skilled teams, needing balance between freedom and oversight.
🌟 Transformational leadership drives significant change, inspiring innovation while ensuring operational details are managed.
That’s all for this week’s edition
I hope you liked it, and you’ve learned something — if you did, don’t forget to give a thumbs-up and share this issue with your friends and network.
See y’all next week 👋