THE LEAFLET

December 21 2023

decision hygiene with dcyde, hire a Chief Clarity Officer, splitting conversations

DECISION HYGIENE WITH DCYDE.COM

For the last couple years, I’ve had teams use dcyde.com to give the candidate a rating out of five stars and a concise summary of the reasoning for their rating. I have liked using this for debriefing these team interviews and improving the group’s decision hygiene.

Here’s what it looks like:

1. Create a ratings poll on dcyde.com and send the link to everyone in the interview group. (5 mins)

2. Everyone rates the candidate out of 5 stars and types a short summary of their reasoning. (3-5 mins)

3. Everyone reads all of the anonymous ratings and summaries once they have been submitted. (3-5 mins)

4. Next, have the folks with the highest and lowest ratings reveal their identities and then talk through their ratings and their rationale. (2 mins)

5. Then, have someone who offered a median rating do the same. (1 min)

I have found that this approach leads to a richer conversation, better calibration among team members, and a much more robust appraisal of the candidate. It’s a nice way to check a bunch of biases at once.

Read the rest here.

HIRE A CHIEF CLARITY OFFICER (YOU)

A thought experiment that has helped me of late: what if my title were CHIEF CLARITY OFFICER? 

Where would I focus my time, attention, and moves? Who would need to hear from me? What would I need to tell them? How would I measure my performance? What would I point to as killer evidence for promoting me or giving me a raise because I had done so stinking well as the CCO?

When I run this experiment, it draws me to the main storyline of the team, and where each character fits into that story. I have a sudden mandate. I have to go tell people:

• Here’s what we’re doing

• Here’s why

• Here’s how it’s going

• Here’s what I need to see from you next (in this meeting or week or quarter or year) 

Read the rest here.

SPLIT HARD CONVERSATIONS TO MAKE THEM EASIER

The most skillful leaders I’ve encountered know when a hard conversation seems hard because it’s actually several conversations. They make some hard things easier on everyone with wise pacing and parceling. They have more than one conversation.

If you were hiring this hard conversation, what is the job you’d be asking it to do? What is this conversation for? 

Often when considering the hard conversations this way, you’ll find you want the conversation to achieve multiple emotionally fraught objectives. What if you narrowed down to just one of those objectives and scheduled a separate conversation (or two) to handle the others? 

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Bard of mental models and former intelligence officer Shane Parrish on getting good:

To rapidly improve and fully internalize the form and technique you’d learn as a fighter, you must work with someone better than you, someone equal to you and someone to whom you can teach.

Poet Wendell Berry on wisdom:

Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.

Poet Adrienne Rich just flexing on all of us:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed.
I have to cast my lot with those who,
age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric