The best blanket “rule” we’ve been able to come up with is to be friendly with your direct reports, but not friends. If you can do that, you will stay safely appropriate and satisfied with the relationship. (Have we followed that rule throughout our careers? Absolutely not.)
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Today we’re talking about delivering a certain flavor of feedback: the kind where the root behavior is good and worthy of being cultivated, but the results are bad and need to change. It’s a “yes, but no” type of feedback.
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First, you have to get clear about what care is. You can’t evaluate “care” itself because everyone values different things.
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I like that this strategy acts as a January re-set, but it’s not overhauling anything, or starting something from scratch, or rebuilding any processes. It’s just a quick recalibration on the basics.
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I recently had a new engineer join my team who is severely visually impaired. His impairment yields a number of challenges that I am having trouble sorting out.
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Surprisingly, the expectations of a Good Employee don’t really change whether you’re on a team of many at a large corporation, or on a team of one working for yourself. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve.
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Three questions sparked by last week’s newsletter on cc’ing etiquette — plus a bonus primer on bcc’s.
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Let’s do a little test. For the rest of the month, you have to do the following exercise every time you cc someone: Write a complete sentence explaining why they are being included on that email and what they need to do.
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If it’s all getting done at quality, at scale, and on time — and no one is getting injured in the process — there’s not much room to criticize the process.
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What your boss is trying to say is: “You are great. How can we expose more people more often to the way you think and act and work so it will rub off on them?”
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