Monthly Archives: January 2008

Staying Sane: Love Thyself

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(5b of 5 in The Rules of Naked Management)

Trying to stay sane as a manager? This is the first step in doing that.

My Wife Is Flawed

I love my wife deeply; those of you who know me closely know how true that is. We started dating almost fourteen years ago, got married six and a half years ago, and I am more in love with her today than I have ever been.

But allow me to bitch for a moment: my wife isn’t perfect! Were she a diamond in a jeweler’s hand, he’d spot all sorts of inconsistencies, imperfections, and flaws(1).

I know: woe is me!

Aw Shucks…

Yet, I love those inconsistencies, and I love those imperfections. I accept and would not want to change any of those flaws, even though I’ll admit I don’t understand some of them. To me that’s the nature of love: truly accept what you cannot change.

My wife may not be perfect, but I still wouldn’t change a thing: she’s perfect for me.

Filling The Gaps

OK, hopefully you’ve finished throwing up now. Although I do mean what I wrote above, this article is still about Naked Management so let’s get back to the topic.

Let’s talk about personal growth and how most of us approach it.

Early in my career I took a look at myself, set a vision, and asked what I needed to achieve to get there. I then identified gaps to fill, imperfections in myself, and started filling them in.

  • I felt I needed sales experience? Check, I joined a sales team.
  • I felt I didn’t know how to effectively influence executives? Check, I designed a modification of my boss’s organization in my head and then influenced a reorganization.

This was the path I followed for several years until 2004: find the next flaw, the next weakness, and fix it.

Falling Into The Gap

At first I got huge returns on my investments, but gradually “filling the gaps” became harder. For example, in 2002 I got it into my head that I needed to learn more about design and pick up some skills in that area (I picked voice design because that was what was done at my employer). I started (as a sales-engineer) suggesting designs for automated phone system interactions.

Today I’ll happily admit any of my attempts (which took hours of work on my part) were easily bettered by 5-minutes of effort on the part of one of Tellme’s talented designers. Worse, my meddling efforts pissed off several designers, so not only did I fail to pick up this skill, but I did myself measurable political damage.

Talentless Hack

In retrospect the reason I never got good at design is because inherently it’s not a skill; it’s a talent. Some things are inherent talents; you either have it or you don’t. You can improve upon the talent by learning new skills(2) and someday you can become great! But if you don’t have a talent for something, you can work hard, learn all the skills you can, and at best (with a lot of work) you’ll be merely good. Only with an innate talent will you achieve greatness.

And when it comes to interface design, I have anti-talent.

Now the difference between talents and skills is well recognized, and the advice given by many people on it is quite good. I’ll summarize. To become great in your career:

  1. Invest heavily in skills that hone your core-talents; under-invest in skills that attempt to hone talents you don’t have.
  2. Avoid positions and circumstances that require talents you don’t possess; instead try to change the circumstances to rely on talents you possess.

Official management doctrine does not suggest you ignore areas you don’t have talent in; only that you invest up to the point where it is no longer a show-stopper for your career, but no further. Better yet is to avoid (or delegate away) the responsibilities that require a given talent.

But there is one thing extra you must do that I didn’t realize until 2004, and it relates back to the fact that I love my wife.

Anti-Talents

I believe I have a talent (which is not say I’m great at it, only that I have an innate passion and ability for it) that separates me from most people: I love and thrive in times of change and chaos. My adrenaline fires up when things are going wrong and I work hard to bring about change to fix a problem. But this talent(3) comes with two flaws, one of which I always realized, and one of which took me until 2004 to realize.

The first anti-talent, the one I’ve known for years, is that when things are not in chaos or the chaos is something I’ve seen and know how to solve, I get very unhappy. Once a problem is fixed, I get bored. Once the chaos is in order, I’d rather gag myself with a spoon all day than go to work. I’ve learned to work around this by hiring people who love and excel managing during good times, and then getting out of their way.

But I only realized the second flaw in 2004. I (like most people) have a large ego. OK, I have a super large ego. Sue me. And I believe given a little time and some resources, I can solve any new problem. I still believe that today.

But the flaw was I believed I could change anything about myself: I inherently believed every flaw I have was fixable. Every imperfection was smoothable. And as I continued on my path of career growth, and my ability to change some things about myself started to wane, I grew more and more frustrated and threw myself more and more into trying to fix the unfixable. It ate me up alive.

While my burn-out occurred on a spectacularly fucked-up and mismanaged project, the reality is I was headed in that direction anyway by following the personal growth path of fix all flaws.

In short, I did not love myself.

Sanity and Love

And that’s the first trick to staying sane: Accept and love yourself.

I started out this essay by pointing out that I love my wife. That means I love both her good attributes and her imperfections. And I accept those imperfections and don’t try to change them (well, except for her penchant to remind me I’m too wordy in my writing; she’s got to stop that!).

In 2004 I realized I needed to do the same for myself. I needed to accept that although there were things I didn’t like about myself, some of them were unchangeable and I had to accept them. I will never be a great designer. I will always get bored with day-to-day operational tasks.

And my fatal flaw? The one that ultimately felled me in 2004? I will always be compulsively obsessed and addicted to something. In 2004, it was my job. I had no sense of balance and was putting my job before everything else in my life: my wife, my family, and my health.

For me it took of a crisis to jar me to life, but I’ve come to accept this flaw in myself, and now I try to use it as a talent. I’ve been trying to apply my compulsiveness to building a balance of body, mind, spirit and soul, as opposed to just succeeding at a job. And since doing that, I’ve also learned how to be more effective at my jobs, and much more content at my place in the Universe.

For each of us the flaws are different, but the key step in keeping your sanity is the same:

  1. Know your talents
  2. Know your flaws
  3. And while you should always try to improve, accept that you are who you are.

If you can do that, the other steps in keeping your sanity are just details. Really.

– Art

(1) Now, I’m not the world’s smartest man but I’m also not the world’s stupidest man, so I’m not about to detail those flaws here. Suffice it to say she has flaws.

(2) As usual, I’m not the first person to realize the distinction between skills and talents. Here’s another framework recommended to me by my friends Naomi and Rich for understanding the difference, and a tool that helps some people discover their talents versus their skills.

(3) I believe all talents come at a cost, and everyone who is insanely talented in one key area is also fatally flawed in another. And nothing they can do will ever remove the fatal flaw; they just need to manage around it. It’s almost like we were given $100 to spend on talents when we were created, and some of us choose not to spend it evenly on all talents. I imagine Jimi Hendrix choosing to spend $99 of it on musical talent, leaving self-control underinvested in. But on the flip side, if we didn’t do that, how much more boring and ugly would this world be?

The Rules For Keeping Your Sanity

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(5a of 5 in The Rules of Naked Management)

In prior entries I talked about the keys to running naked teams: Figure out the most important thing, run a naked team, grow your naked team, and grow the individuals on your team. With all that stuff to follow, how can the Naked Manager stay sane? That’s what this last article focuses on.

The Management Paradox

A trap awaits the successful Naked Manager. It consists of two truisms:

  1. You will be asked to do more and harder things with each success
  2. You will be able to do less and less with each success

The first truism happens because other managers always give their stars more and more to do – track-records are valued more than anything else. The second truism occurs because the problems get harder, require more time, and require more thought, and despite efforts by scientists to solve the problem, there remains only 24 hours in each day.

Left alone most managers at some point (myself included) fall into the trap of taking on more and more and relying on brute-force, intellect and ego to keep up the track record. Some managers (myself included) eventually cave under the pressure.

It happened to me in 2004. I feel into the trap of working 80+ hour weeks for three months in a row and I spectacularly burned out in my job and had to take 3 months off to recover. It was the second biggest failure of my life(1), but…

Breaking the Paradox

…I had the luxury at the time of working for a company that welcomed me back (which I’ll be forever grateful for) and the time off gave me some time to create a new framework to approach my job (and my life) with, which I applied and tweaked in my next go-round of the management merry-go-round. In reality what happened was one of the best things to ever happen to me.

This series of mini-articles will detail the approach I came up with to stay sane. These are the steps:

I’ll fill in the links as I post the details. I can’t guarantee it’ll work for everyone, but I’ve had some other friends and co-workers adopt the framework and reviews are very positive. Stay tuned for the details…

– Art

(1) I may write one day about the first. However, in both cases, the lessons I learned from the failures far outweighed the pain of the failure. I’m become a real believer that failures are the key to growth in all aspects of life. In the first failure I learned what it means to really love another person (my now wife). In the second failure I learned what it really means to love myself (and no, that’s not a masturbation reference 🙂 ).

Nude Numbers 28

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Summary

Week 6 of the winter plan. In this update I return to the gym, go back on a controlled-diet, change my running plan because I’m worried my old injury is resurfacing, and see my numbers reflect the fact that I ate like a pig over the holidays. But despite all that, I think I’m still mostly on-track for the winter goals. Fun fun… read on for more.

I’ve also changed my blog to make it easy to see all Nude Numbers updates in one page. Click here to see all 28 updates so far.

Subjective Data

I definitely feel the return of the problem in my foot; not pain yet but the beginning of irritation. Also I’m finishing each week more tired than the week before – even with a rest week.

I missed my spinning and swimming goals this week because my pool was closed on New Year’s Day, and on Saturday my back, shoulders and glutes were still sore so I skipped my morning workout.

This was also my first week back on a calorie-controlled (maintenance) diet plan, which was easier than I expected.

Objective Data

Blue lines == actuals; Gray areas == my target range for that week.

Assessment

The pain in my foot is a little concerning, but thankfully I don’t have to be running a lot right now to meet my later goals in the year. I’m going to adjust my running plan to back off for now, and do more stretching to try to get flexibility in my ankle (which my physical therapist thinks is the root cause of the issue).

I was extremely tired come Saturday this week, even with a rest week. It could also be because this was a high-rep (12) with a highish-weight week (65% of 1-rep-max), so my lifting was really exhausting. Since I need to gain weight, I’m going to keep with the plan for now though.

I’m not worried about the blip in swimming numbers this week – it really was schedule related as my long swim day tends to be on Tuesday and I missed it this week.

You can definitely see the results of the 4-week holiday eating binge in my data (and the mirror). Take a look at the Abdomen measurements to see the jump. Starting New Year’s Day I went back on a calorie-controlled diet, and the weight results reflect that. The first week of a diet switch always brings a big change in scale numbers because of the water loss, so I know I need to keep this up for 3-4 weeks to eliminate real fat and get back in range. Hopefully I’ll start to see my abdomen shrink a little between now and February, but this week was a good start as weight gain leveled off.

Plan

I made a major change to plan this week – my running plans has been pushed back at least 4 weeks (here’s the old version if you care), and I’m going to stick to 1-3 miles a week between now and then, treadmill only, with lots of ankle-stretches. I’m also going to change from 3-sport-brick workouts (swim-spin-run) to 3-day alternating 2-sport workouts (swim-spin, run-swim, spin-run) on the advice of my coach.

My lifting plan for next week is 85% of 1-rep-max, 4-rep, 4-set, 60 second rest, which is harder than it sounds 🙂

And I’m continuing on my measured calorie plan: 2,250 to 2,750 calories a week.

Reminders

My aunt will not be able to run the Dublin marathon in October, so I’m still undecided between New York (November) and Dublin Ireland. If you’re interested in running either with me, let me know. I’m not going to decide until around April. Also, if anyone is interested in doing the Philly Triathlon (June) with me, you’re welcome to join the team!

Presentation Notes

These notes are always presented in SOAP Note format. Click here for all the Nude Numbers posts.

Thanks for reading.

– Art

Growing Individuals: Fire Your Stars

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(4f of 5 in The Rules of Naked Management)

You’re Fired!

In the intro to this section, I laid out my argument for why you should “fire your stars”, but to recap:

“Fire your Stars” means tangibly change the responsibilities of the best performer on your team (and optionally change their title and compensation), even if it means transferring them to another group in the company.

This goes counter to most management advice which says retain your stars at all costs, but I say “Fire your Stars” because:

  1. Without action on your part, your stars will leave anyway.
  2. By “Firing Your Stars”, you can control the timing and circumstances.
  3. Your team becomes more resilient.
  4. Your team’s morale increases.
  5. Your team’s performance reaches a higher level than before.
  6. And damn it, it’s the right thing to do for your Stars anyway.

See the intro if you want the background for why these things happen.

Your Goal

This part of Growing Individuals is deceptively simple. You’ve already identified the top performer on your team (you did it as part of Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is). Now, you need to set the following goal for yourself:

Within 12 months since your last top performer changed responsibilities, you will change the responsibilities of your current top performer.

That’s it. Once every 12 months should give you a maintainable rate of change. You can “Fire more Stars” if you think your organization can handle it, but the minimum is one.

Now hitting this isn’t easy, you have to do lots of things:

  1. Understand and anticipate potential opportunities for your Star within your organization or other organizations.
  2. Pre-sell potential stake holders on the change.
  3. Aggressively make your Star fill any gaps that would preclude success in the new role.
  4. Balance the reality of your organization (probably slow moving) with the expectations of your employee (wants fast change).
  5. Handle unexpected realities, such as another person quitting unexpectedly.

Worse, there is no cookbook to follow for this one either, because each individual is unique, each circumstance is unique, and each set of opportunities is unique. In other words, it’s hard.

But it’s the right place to spend your time growing individuals. It means in reality of the time you spend on “growing individuals”, you spend most time on just your top performer. But that’s ok, because by following the other rules you’ve outsourced most of the rest of the work to the other individuals on your team and as a result they are growing nicely on their own.

For The Unbelievers

Some people will try desperately hard to retain their stars through other means. Usually they resort to compensation or title changes without actual changes in responsibility. I know I have before I figured out to Fire them. I can say with certainty, having tried all combinations of ways to keep stars that “Firing Your Stars” actually leads to the best retention for your company (if not your team). Here’s a quick summary of what I’ve experienced when I had a star who wanted to grow and changed some combination of title, compensation or responsibility.

A black circle represents something changed (for example, on the first entry, I changed nothing, resulting in the Star deciding to leave the company on their own):

One Last Caveat

The key thing about “Firing Your Stars” is making sure your Star has new responsibilities. But it only works if your Star feels that they are genuinely new responsibilities, and that some of her old responsibilities no longer need to be done directly by her.

I’ve tried, and seen many managers try, to spin an increase in responsibilities as a “new job” to an employee and they see through that bullshit immediately.

Here’s the key rule of thumb: if your Star does not perceive the change in responsibilities as a real step forward in their career, then you have not “Fired Your Star”, you’ve pissed them off. Very different.

Managing The Naked Team

Still, I believe if you run a naked team, grow a naked team, and grow individuals, you’ll end up with the strongest of teams you could possibly have. But, as GNP pointed out, it’s a lot of steps to follow. How the hell do you do all this without going crazy? That’s the next topic.

– Art