THE LEAFLET
May 09 2024
fix flakiness with frequency, keeping top performers, a cheat sheat for excellence
FIX FLAKINESS WITH FREQUENCY
If you find that you are often dropping meetings with folks on your team and you’re worried about the consequences that might have on morale, consider increasing the frequency and decreasing the duration of the meetings. Instead of an hour-long 1:1 once a week, you could do a daily 10-minute call on your drive home or a 15-minute standing meeting in the mornings. Frequency can build the sense of connection even more than duration. This is true in part because you’re more consistently on their radar. They anticipate connecting with you and can do so consistently instead of intermittently.
There’s risk and reward in this approach, because each meeting you schedule is effectively a promise of your time and attention. Every time you show up, you keep your word. Of course, this means you’re creating more opportunities to keep your word - and to break it. The stakes of each individual commitment are lower though - when you only talk to someone once a week or once a month, canceling is a big loss. Chances are good that if the power differential between you and that person is large, they are making their scarce time with you a priority. They say no to other people and opportunities to stay available for you.
-Ben
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CHEAP WAYS TO KEEP YOUR TOP PERFORMERS
Top performers often leave to join top-performing orgs because they’re bored of feeling like LeBron on the JV team. They join your high-performing org and are initially thrilled by the drink-from-the-fire-hydrant feeling of constant explosive growth surrounded by a team of other A Team’ers. But then, as they continue to become a top performer within your organization, too, they notice the feeling of the slowing rate of their own growth. How do you keep them? Here are two relatively cheap moves that can keep your best people with you and enrich your relationship with them for however much time they will be with you.
Let people know that you think of them as a uniquely high-performer on the team. “I recognize that, and I set you apart.” This alone can have a significant effect on their commitment. Everyone wants to feel seen and, perhaps even more, to feel seen for the thing that is special or distinctive about them.
Have a dream career conversation, at least once a year, maybe as often as once a quarter.
It’s good to do this in an unusually nice, intimate space that’s not a typical meeting room at the office. You want the location to signal that it’s a different kind of conversation for a special, different kind of person. This meeting is distinct from what we normally do.
In the conversation, ask your all-star to describe their future with as much excitement and detail as they can. “Tell me your resume from pre-school to now, focusing on big decisions. When you get to present day, imagine yourself 10 years from now. You come home and had an amazing day. What did that day contain? What are you looking for between now and then?” Note heuristics for them that feel revelatory to them. Tell them you’re invested in what they’ve said and in helping bring it to life.
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HOW TO BUILD A CHEAT SHEET FOR EXCELLENCE
Job descriptions and onboarding materials can be propulsive and culture-building. They can also be crummy boilerplate.
The best, most useful stuff in these documents is usually a list of competencies. This list is the blueprint, the recipe for success, the “How One Gets a Reputation for Being a Badass Around Here” cheat sheet.
The key to making that list really good is putting down the pen and picking up the microphone. Don’t invent a single thing. Get the items on the list inductively by getting them from your best people.
Gather your top performers, the all-stars whose opinions and standards you trust. They understand the mission and understand how far you still have to go to achieve it. You also want people with a good 360-degree view of the org. Typically, this means they need to be folks who have line of sight to more than one division.
Once you’ve assembled this squad, interview them with the following prompts:
Tell me about the mission we’re trying to achieve.
Who have you seen who is most likely to achieve that mission? That is, if we cloned this person, we’d be guaranteed to hit the mission.
What do we see each of those people do on a regular basis that makes them stand out from others? If a documentary film crew followed for a week & you made a highlight reel, what would you include? Split blended or combined behaviors out into individual items (e.g., hungry but humble → 1. Hungry, 2 Humble)
Set your floor behaviors: Who are 2-3 people who didn’t make your list from above? If a year from now they did make the cut, what did they literally start doing to get there?
Now take that list and look for patterns. Form hypotheses.
Share that with the group. Let them reflect. THen turn that into 3-5 competencies / core values.
Note: You can just look at old evals of your top people if you have authentic, detailed performance reviews. That may be even better than the focus group.
-Ben
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Author bell hooks on true love:
A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.
French novelist and diplomat Romain Gary on inhumanity:
As long as we refuse to admit that inhumanity is completely human, we'll just be telling ourselves pious lies.
Californian Joan Didion on California:
Not much about California, on its own preferred terms, has encouraged its children to see themselves as connected to one another.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric