THE LEAFLET
February 22 2024
naming and anonymity, principles and preferences, the next way to be great
NAMING NAMES AND ANONYMITY BOTH HAVE THEIR PLACE
I recently got a 360 review. Ben arranged it for me. He got me to share the email addresses of over a dozen current and former colleagues, then interviewed them. He edited their responses to anonymize them, stripping out telling references to the organizations and written tics that would clue me in to who among the group I sent him had written the comments.
This anonymous feedback was super duper helpful. I loved it. Even if a lot of it was hard to hear. This matched my experience with the last similarly robust 360 I did 7-8 years ago. A transformative moment.
As I’ve thought about this for the last few days, my curmudgeonly resistance to anonymous feedback has weakened. A little.
I now think it can be just the thing in a certain set of conditions:
You’re most interested in patterns, not specific points.
You’ve got a large enough sample size that you’ll have 4 or 5 or more instances in the patterns you observe.
The people submitting the feedback are doing so without expectation of response.
I contend that a 360 review comprised of feedback from over a dozen current and former colleagues meets all three criteria.
My guess is most feedback opportunities on your current team do not.
Read the rest here.
OF PRINCIPLES AND PREFERENCES
When you’ve got a robust feedback culture, it can be easy as a leader to avoid some uncomfortable deciding by deferring to your colleagues. You can also get yourself into a pickle, making your deciding harder, by doing this. It’s pickled because your people want different things. They are good at their jobs, they are good folks, you want to do right by them. You may have your own take on the question at hand, further complicating matters. Whose take should win the day?
I find it helpful to get out of this knot by asking if this is a decision rooted in principles or preferences. The preferential ones you can decide by poll (most popular option wins) or by designating a winner (maybe looking for someone whose preferences don’t get met as often or whose take should get a good test) or by delegation (which is a way of designating a winner).
The principle ones probably shouldn’t be decided by poll. The good news about this is you’re not at the mercy of conflicting opinions (even if you may wisely pay attention to them). An impasse among your teammates need not be an impasse for you.
A decision that calls into question a principle is really a little theater of leadership. If you’re a leader, this is the kind of thing you need to develop skill at doing and communicating - and teaching others to do, too. Poll numbers (or worse, your sense of the vibes from different parts of the organization) are a crummy basis for this critical work.
Consider instead making a call that blends your intuition, facts you’ve gathered, takes/advice/recommendations from others in the org, and an explicit interpretation of the principle (or core value) you think is at play. Tell your people that’s what you’re doing. Tell them further that this is the kind of thing folks should likely be doing in their own work regularly - using the info they have, perspectives they don’t, and shared values to make principled decisions.
You won’t avoid mistakes or bad calls this way. But they’ll likely be more useful mistakes.
Read the rest here.
NAME THE NEXT WAY TO BE GREAT
If you’re in a young or growing organization, your people are probably going to have to do new, weird things that they aren’t yet experts in. Chasing your mission will mean getting yourself and your people into some good trouble.
Great managers I’ve observed have a knack for acknowledging the good moves their people have made recently and forecasting that they will need different good moves in the days ahead. So much the better if the manager knows what those moves are. If they do know them, they name them.
If they don’t know what the next moves are, they instead remind their folks that that energetic ignorance, the not knowing what’s next but knowing we’re going to do what it takes to get good at it, is what makes them great.
This is a way that a leader with big, humane ambition can take a volatile context and make it useful, even inspiring. We get to learn, grow, and build confidence in the face of conditions that cow others.
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Historian Rick Atkinson on the high ground:
In battle, topography is fate.
Buddhist Pema Chodron on the perfect teacher:
Feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are
Philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr on hypocrisy:
Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric