Year read: 2019
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
(See my list of books I've read, for more.)Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Transparency, transparency, transparency.
It’s impossible for your team to make the appropriate decisions when they are not operating from all information.
Patty recommends sharing the financials all the way to the company’s P&L with your team. By doing this you educate your team in how to read a P&L and show them what they are working towards and from what they are working.
- Use clear, concise, and regular communication. Jargon and acronyms create confusion. Team members may assume you’re referencing an acronym used by another team member.
- Patty does not go as far as Elon Musk outlawing the use of acronyms.
- Communicate constantly about the challenge. Pull the curtain back on what you are struggling with as the company leader. Do not bottle it up and expect your reports to empathize with your situation if you do not share. You expect them to share their blockers with you.
- This is not to be confused with ranting but you already knew that.
- Fact-based arguments do not equal time
- Data is essential in decision making but it’s not everything. Drawing conclusions on data sometimes relies on creativity and your previous experiences (aka, your gut).
- Data is data and not fact. Data is just a collection of information. It is not the law of the land. Data can be manipulated to tell many different stories. Data can also be wrong.
- Team member salary should be influenced by the impact they will have at your company – not only by the market and budget.
- This is easier said than done. This is definitely a battle worth fighting for those once-in-a-blue-moon, rockstar team members.
- The company culture is how you work and how you communicate.
- Your company culture is not ping pong tables or bean bag chairs. It’s how you solve problems, it’s how you disperse information, it’s how you run meetings, it’s how you socialize in the “office” (in quotes for remote teams), etc.
- Your company culture will change as your company grows. You will not have the same culture on Day 1 compared to Day 1,000. Unless your Instagram.
- “When engineers start to whine about a process you’re trying to implement, you want to really dig into what’s bothering them, because they hate senseless bureaucracy and stupid processes. But they don’t mind discipline at all.”
- It’s a matter of identifying the behaviors that you would like to see become consistent practices and then instilling the discipline of actually doing them.”
- A core set of practices that underpin culture:
- Radical honesty
- Strong, fact-based opinions
- Decisions best for the customer and company
- “Clear, continuous communication about the context of the work to be done.”
- Pay upfront for benefits in the future. This can be interpreted in many ways.
- It can be literally a monetary investment up front for future benefits.
- Another way I think of it is, do it the correct way first even if it takes longer. You will save yourself the headache in the future and likely a significant amount of money. You’ll never have time in the future to tear something down and re-do it. You will just continue to patch it. Yuck!
- How much do your team members know about the business? And how their work affects the company’s bottom line. Think specifically about the Customer Support team.
- This goes back to Patty’s suggestion to walk your team through the company’s P&L. It educates them not just on how to read a P&L, but it allows them to think on a similar wavelength as you when solving problems and strategizing.
- If you do not inform your people, there’s a good chance others’ll misinform them.
- People draw assumptions. Don’t rely on them to draw the right assumptions. Be open and transparent.
- Questions to consider and answer
- Where does your company find information on how they stack up against the competition?
- Always rehearse before giving difficult news. Practice makes perfect.
- Rehearsing what you’ll say, out loud, allows you to hear the tone of your voice. It’s useful to record yourself. Don’t forget about your body language.