The best way to build trust is to be consistent in your actions and words.

<ul><li>Often, managers don't clearly articulate what they expect from team members, leading to disappointment and frustration on both sides.</li><li>Avoiding clear expectations stems from not wanting to seem like a micromanager and overestimating junior members' abilities.</li><li>The solution is to set clear expectations when assigning tasks by explaining the rationale, defining success, providing examples if possible, and stating deadlines.</li></ul>

Great Expectations

The best managers are those who are able to adapt their management style to the needs of their team members.

<ul><li>Providing timely, constructive feedback is a core management responsibility, even though giving and receiving feedback is difficult.</li><li>We avoid giving feedback to be liked and because individuals struggle receiving it since it threatens the ego.</li><li>Effective feedback is objective, data-driven, and actionable.</li><li>Great managers actively solicit input and praise courageous feedback.</li><li>The key is to just start - it will get easier with practice.</li></ul>

Feedback Is a Gift You Need, Maybe Not One You Want  

<ul><li>Putting employees on performance improvement plans when they underperform is key, though subconscious biases can inhibit objectivity.</li><li>Effective PIPs have a timeline and focus on 3-4 improvement areas with clear action items.</li><li>Celebrate PIP successes and use positive examples to shape the culture.</li></ul>

Managing Performance Anxiety

Understanding an individual's dominant motivational need for achievement, power, or affiliation helps structure work, praise, and rewards.<ul><li>Achievers are motivated by goals and progress.</li><li>The power-motivated care about influence and competition.</li><li>The affiliation-motivated care about community.</li></ul>Discover needs by asking directly or using intake forms.

The Trifecta of Motivation: Achievement, Power, and Affiliation

Goals motivate teams yet can also create unintended consequences like unethical behavior, short-term thinking, and stifled innovation.In startups, static goals poorly fit the dynamic environment. When goal setting, be mindful of downsides and don't force goals if they don't fit the culture.

Goal Interrupted: The Good and the Bad of Setting Goals

Compensation often motivates irrationally. People loathe small losses more than they like equivalent gains, an effect called loss aversion.<ul><li>Employees care more about relative versus absolute pay due to equity theory.</li><li>The perceived fairness of the compensation process itself also matters.</li><li>A philosophy explaining the rationale behind pay decisions is key.</li></ul>

The Complications of Compensation

Promotions and titles strongly motivate achievement-driven employees yet can backfire if handled poorly. Base promotions on demonstrated competence, outperformance of peers, and legitimate new role needs.Set proper expectations around promotions and use competency matrices. Be cautious with titles as they are hard to rescind and easily devalued if given too freely.

The Heavyweight Title Fight

<ul><li>Managers can make daily work meaningful through role design choices like task significance, autonomy, and feedback.</li><li>"Job crafting" helps reframe activities to align with motives and purpose.</li></ul>

Making Work Meaningful

<ul><li>Pressures to hide emotions at work lead to detachment and burnout.</li><li>"Emotional labor" is the gap between felt and required emotions.</li><li>"Emotional contagion" spreads moods rapidly between team members.</li><li>Allow authentic self-expression but limit contagion's impact.</li><li>Recognize emotions exist.</li></ul>

There's No Crying in Baseball

<ul><li>Communication deteriorates as firms grow.</li><li>The key is frequent, repetitive communication.</li><li>Clarify expectations around what will and won't be shared.</li><li>Use specific language to build commitment and closeness.</li><li>Formalize through weekly emails, meeting summaries, and defined strategies.</li></ul>

Talk Is Not Cheap

Bringing Up the Boss: Practical Lessons for New Managers by Rachel Pacheco was published in 2021 by Matt Holt Books. The book provides helpful advice for new managers and covers topics such as leadership, communication, and team-building in the workplace. It includes real-world examples and practical tips to help new managers navigate the challenges of their roles and build successful teams.  

AXIOM BUSINESS BOOK AWARD SILVER MEDALIST — HUMAN RESCOURCES / EMPLOYEE TRAINING Managing is hard. Managing for the first time is even harder. First-timers want to quickly learn what it takes to be a successful manager—like they learned how to code, how to design, how to sell—and put those learnings into practice. But what does it mean to manage, and how do you teach someone to be a good manager? Enter Rachel Pacheco, an expert at helping start-ups solve their management and culture challenges. Pacheco, a former chief people officer and founding team executive at multiple start-ups, conducts research on management and works with CEOs and their managers to build the skills necessary to navigate a rapidly scaling organization. In Bringing Up the Boss: Practical Lessons for New Managers, you’ll learn how to give effective feedback, how to motivate your team members, and how to hire and fire well, among many other critical management skills. You’ll also learn what it means to manage yourself in this new role, and how to navigate the often awkward and sometimes challenging situations that arise in this new position. Pacheco shares what makes a manager great, along with anecdotes, research, tools, and how-to's that help overwhelmed employees become expert managers fast.

teamwork

Teamwork

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Rachel Pacheco

Bringing Up the Boss

Looking probably isn’t something you need to practice. People believe they can apprehend a painting at a glance. They read coworkers’ messages and assume they understand a situation. Or they witness an event and tell others what happened, confident that their memory captured a perfect historical record. Yet, while looking may come naturally, it’s not the same as perceiving.

Looking At Something

Research has shown that people’s <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/">recollection of events</a> is more personal reconstruction than mental recording. Fortunately, perception is a skill you can improve through practice and effort.Visual Intelligence is the ability to assess, analyze, articulate, and adapt to visual information in one’s environment.Visual intelligence can enhance your:<ul><li>Situational awareness (knowing and articulating your physical situation)</li><li>Long-term situational awareness (knowing and articulating your life situation).</li></ul>

More Than What Meets The Eye: Visual Intelligence

<ul>
<li>Assess your situation. Ask: What do I have in front of me? What information is here?</li>
<li>Analyze the information. Break it down and decide what’s important.</li>
<li>Articulate your observations. Put them into words.</li>
<li>Adapt to the situation. Take the information from the first three A’s, make a decision, and act on it.</li>
</ul>

The Four A's Of Visual Intelligence

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

problemsolving

Problem Solving

The Four A’s of visual intelligence

Batching can be explained best when talking about laundry.  You won't do your laundry when you have one pair of dirty socks. You would wait for a certain critical mass of dirty laundry before doing the laundry. The time and labour involved in doing one pair of socks or an entire basket are the same. You want to be effective and efficient with your allocation of resources in many different ways.

Batching

Frequency is personal.  You may be batching daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. Experiment and see what works. For example:<ul><li>You may decide that on a given day, your primary creation period is from the time you wake up until lunch. Then after lunch, you may do administrative tasks such as phone calls, email and calendering.</li><li>Or you may do administrative tasks on day one, HR hiring on day two, product on day three and marketing on day four. On each of those days, you'll focus on themes. </li></ul>

Frequency of batching

Learn what is batching from Tim Ferriss. SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/1dSzTkW About Tim Ferriss: Tim Ferriss is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an early-stage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded 200 million downloads and been selected for “Best of iTunes” three years running. Connect with Tim Ferriss: Visit the Tim Ferriss PODCAST: https://bit.ly/2rYjUBr Visit the Tim Ferriss BLOG: http://bit.ly/17jDHw3 Like Tim Ferriss on FACEBOOK: http://on.fb.me/1avYUxq Follow Tim Ferriss on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/17d94TE Follow Tim Ferriss on INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/2IfH37J

productivity

Productivity

videos

Videos

Learn what is batching from Tim Ferriss.

SUBSCRIBE: http://bit.ly/1dSzTkW
 
About Tim Ferriss:
Tim Ferriss is one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and an early-stage tech investor/advisor in Uber, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ other companies. He is also the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers: The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, Tools of Titans and Tribe of Mentors. The Observer and other media have named him “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of his podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, which has exceeded 200 million downloads and been selected for “Best of iTunes” three years running.

Connect with Tim Ferriss:
Visit the Tim Ferriss PODCAST: https://bit.ly/2rYjUBr
Visit the Tim Ferriss BLOG: http://bit.ly/17jDHw3
Like Tim Ferriss on FACEBOOK: http://on.fb.me/1avYUxq
Follow Tim Ferriss on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/17d94TE
Follow Tim Ferriss on INSTAGRAM: http://bit.ly/2IfH37J

Tim Ferriss has been listed as one of Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Business People” and one of Fortune’s “40 under 40.” He is an early-stage technology investor/advisor (Uber, Facebook, Shopify, Duolingo, Alibaba, and 50+ others) and the author of five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, including The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers. The Observer and other media have called Tim “the Oprah of audio” due to the influence of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast, which is the first business/interview podcast to exceed 100 million downloads. It has now exceeded 800 million downloads. 

Listen to The Tim Ferriss Show podcast: https://tim.blog/podcast
Sign up for Tim's "5-Bullet Friday" free email newsletter with 1.5M+ subscribers: https://tim.blog/friday 


Tim Ferriss

How Batching Can Help You Maximize Your Productivity | Tim Ferriss

One of the most common and unfortunate mistakes with a new contact is commenting on their photo or physical appearance. LinkedIn is not the platform for this, even if the compliment was made with pure intention.There are other better aspects of a profile to comment upon to lead off with, such as their summary or work experience, and it’s best to stay focused on the business side of things. It’s natural to want to start things off on a positive note with a compliment, but it’s best to aim for a different angle with new contacts.

Don’t comment on their photo

There’s nothing worse than receiving a connection request from what seems like an automated robot. When connecting with someone you’ve never met, it’s helpful to personalize your initial message towards the recipient. This doesn’t mean you need to write them an entire letter, but you should read their profile and spend enough time crafting your message so they know you are a human. If you can do this while also letting some of your personality shine, your outreach is far more likely to succeed.Also, be mindful not to send too many requests in a day.

Be personal with your approach

<ul><li>Time is valuable for the business-minded users of LinkedIn, and cutting to chase will be appreciated by your busy audience. </li><li>Let the contact know who you are and what you are looking for right out the gate, whether it be a demo of your services or advice in your field.</li><li>Being direct saves both sides time. This show of respect and transparency will pay dividends down the line for both your immediate connection success rate and long-term reputation in the industry.</li></ul>

Be specific (and honest) about your intent

Providing multiple avenues of contact on your LinkedIn profile does a world of good for your page. Listing your email, phone number, etc., on your profile increases the chance your requests are accepted. In addition, it adds legitimacy that you are a real person who is open to business opportunities.

Make contacting you easy and accessible

Before reaching out to any new contact, remember that the prospective connection will almost certainly scan your post history and profile.Even if someone hasn’t actively commented on your post or looked at your profile, they still can see some of your past activity. So, it never hurts to fine-tune your profile and post history to ensure everything listed is accurate and relevant to your current goals.

Remember your visibility

It can be a bit off-putting to ask for something of value before providing anything of worth to a connection. Getting around this is difficult but not impossible. It can be as little as an insight into a recent post or an idea for collaboration. This moves you from the needy categorization into a more contributive tone, which is far more attractive to new connections.

It’s best to give before taking

Be specific and honest about your intent.

career

Career

communication

Communication

LinkedIn: 6 Things to Keep in Mind When Connecting With Someone You Don't Know

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy are the noise before defeat.”

Strategy is the overarching plan or set of goals. Tactics are the specific actions or steps you undertake to accomplish your strategy.
A personal strategy might be to get into a particular career, whereas your tactics might include choosing your educational path, seeking out a helpful mentor, or distinguishing yourself from the competition.
Without a strategy, you run the risk of ambling through life, confused about your progress. Without tactics, you become dependent on pure luck to implement your strategy.

Strategy And Tactics Are Complementary

“Without a strategy, facing up to any problem or striving for any objective would be considered negligent. Certainly, no military campaign, company investment, or government initiative is likely to receive backing unless there is a strategy to evaluate…. There is a call for strategy every time the path to a given destination is not straightforward.”

About Geoffrey P. Chamberlain offers his perspective on the components of strategy, useful when the strategy is more about a personal goal. He identifies seven parts:
<ul>
<li>A strategy is used within a particular domain.</li>
<li>A strategy has a single, well-defined focus.</li>
<li>A strategy lays out a path to be followed.</li>
<li>A strategy is made up of parts (tactics).</li>
<li>Each of a strategy’s parts pushes towards the defined focus.</li>
<li>A strategy recognizes its sphere of influence.</li>
<li>A strategy is either intentionally formed or emerges naturally.</li>
</ul>

The Components of Strategy

Even the most elegant, well-planned strategy is useless if we do not take thoughtful steps to achieve it. While the overall goal remains stable, the steps we take to achieve it must be flexible enough to adjust to the short-term realities of our situation.
Tactics often center around the efficient use of available resources, whether money, people, time, ammunition, or materials. Tactics also tend to be shorter-term and more specific than strategies.

About Tactics

If you don’t have a strategy, you are part of someone else’s strategy.”

Strategy and tactics are two terms that get thrown around a lot, often used interchangeably. But what exactly do they mean, what is the difference, and why is it important? In this article, we look at the contrast between strategy and tactics, and the most effective ways to use each, whether you're trying to win a war, start a business, or reach any other important objective.

strategy

Strategy

Strategy vs. Tactics: Why the Difference Matters - Farnam Street

Don’t count on any praise from your manager. In a competitive capitalist marketplace, who has time to acknowledge a coworker’s “little hobby” that will probably crash and burn by next year?Most people never start their dream side-hustle, not because they lack the knowledge, but because they’re so afraid of what others will think — of becoming the office fool — that they abandon their beautiful idea altogether. The truth is, no one thinks about you that much.Your coworkers are mostly thinking about themselves. They’re not concerned by what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.

No one will care about your side-hustle

How do you work a side-hustle while keeping a corporate day job. I do it, and it's not easy, but it's super rewarding. If you're thinking about starting a side-hustle here are a few things you should know before starting a side-hustle with a corporate day job.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

The Hard Truth About Creative Side-Hustles While Working A Corporate Day Job

Google made almost all its money from ads. It was a booming business—until it wasn’t. Here’s how things looked right before the most spectacular crash the technology industry had ever seen.&nbsp;

Reporting on Google’s future with today’s facts

Back when Google was still just an idea, its founders <a href="http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html" target="_self">thought</a> that “advertising funded search engines [would] be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”They changed their minds.With that change, Google became one of the wealthiest, most powerful companies in history. Search was Google’s golden goose, as well as its only unambiguous win. So when Amazon <a href="http://www.geekwire.com/2017/amazon-continues-grow-lead-google-starting-point-online-shoppers/" target="_self">rapidly surpassed Google</a> as the top product search destination in 2017, Google’s foundations began to falter.

The Crumbling

A shift from <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/11/google-isnt-safe-from-yahoos-fate/" target="_self">search to discovery</a> also started to take shape in the late 2010s: When shoppers weren’t searching for things directly on Amazon, things were finding them. Advertisers realized that money previously spent on Google’s search ads was better spent either on Amazon ads or <a href="https://www.sharethrough.com/resources/in-feed-ads-vs-banner-ads/" target="_self">native ads in content feeds</a>, like Instagram and Facebook. Google had no engaging content feeds, so it completely missed the wave, just like it had with <a href="https://mashable.com/2015/08/02/google-plus-history/" target="_self">social media</a> and <a href="https://www.engadget.com/2018/12/06/google-allo-messages-rcs-hangouts-mess/" target="_self">instant messaging</a>.

Search Platform Is Hidden

Google’s main competitor in the mobile space—<a href="https://www.wired.com/2015/06/apples-support-ad-blocking-will-upend-web-works/" target="_self">added a feature</a> to their devices that allowed users to block ads.Devices running iOS were responsible for as much as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/technology/personaltech/a-murky-road-ahead-for-android-despite-market-dominance.html" target="_self">75% of Google’s revenue </a>from mobile search ads, which is probably why Google was paying Apple <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/google-rising-tac-and-apple-theory-2017-10" target="_self">billions of dollars</a> every year to remain the default search engine on Apple devices. By making this move, Apple altered the <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/24/apple-lays-the-groundwork-to-kill-online-advertising/" target="_self">future of online advertising</a>.This move from Apple reflected the <a href="https://pagefair.com/blog/2016/mobile-adblocking-report/" target="_self">unprecedented mainstream adoption</a> of ad blocking software happening at the time.

No More Ads

Google’s products were free, innovative, and used by billions of people. In order to get access to these free products, people had to give up their personal data and their valuable attention. Google’s ads weren’t something its users wanted—they were simply a tax for accessing the Google ecosystem.

The Tides Are Turning

Google was enticing people into trading their privacy, data, and attention for the convenience of its amazing free products and services, some of which had no good alternatives. However, scandal after scandal after scandal proved that the trade might not be worth it, and people started to question what they were giving up by clicking “I agree.”

You Are The Product

If losing a major portion of their audience and annoying the rest wasn’t bad enough, Google also failed to get ahead of one of the biggest shifts in the internet’s history.Google’s strategy since day one could be summed up as “aggregate and advertise,” as George Gilder put it in Life After Google. Every word uttered to Google Assistant, every action in any of Google’s numerous apps, and every data point about every one of their billions of users was stored and analyzed in the name of more accurate advertising.

Mistake After Mistake

True attribution and accurate targeting used to be rocket science, black magic, and nearly impossible.The breakthrough was this: If everything from interest matching to ad placement happened inside the user’s device, it would be possible to show the user ads they would actually find relevant and understand exactly which ads they interacted with and how, all without the user’s private data ever leaving the device.

Black Magic Ads

Google made almost all its money from ads. It was a booming business — until it wasn’t. Here’s how things looked right before the most spectacular crash the technology industry had ever seen.

remotework

Remote Work

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

This Is How Google Will Collapse

Data is useless without the ability to visualize and act on it. The success of future industries will combine advanced data collection with better user experience, and the data table comprises much of this user experience.Good data tables allow users to scan, analyze, compare, filter, sort, and manipulate information to derive insights and commit actions. This article presents a list of design structures, interaction patterns, and techniques to help you design better data tables.

Data is useless without the ability to visualize and act on it

Good user interface design is based on human goals and behavior. The user interface in-turn affects behavior, which drives further design decisions. In subtle and unconscious ways, user experience alters how humans make decisions. What is seen, where it is presented, and how interactions are afforded, influence actions. It is important we make design decisions that lead to a better world, one data table design at a time.

Good user interface 

Data is useless without the ability to visualize and act on it. The success of future industries will couple advanced data collection with a better user experience.

product

Product & Design

Design better data tables

More often than not, these aren’t too far off from each other. For example, you might be talking about setting a goal of optimizing conversion rate on a registration page by X%. Said another way, what you’re trying to do is to remove the barriers that make it hard for users to sign up for your service. But see, the language here matters. Make it easier for users to sign up vs.

To speak the language of designers, stop talking about metrics and start talking about users

These strengths should be applied to the right problems.Design encompasses many things, including:<ol><li>Visual design: typography, contrast, hierarchy, and the good ol’ does it look good? falls into this category. Are the details crisp or are they sloppy? </li><li>Interaction design: is it easy and clear for a user to do X? Is the navigation system robust? Do transitions and animations feel satisfying and make the app feel more intuitive to use?</li><li>Product design: does the design successfully solve a problem? Is the thing that is designed useful? Does it have a clear vision? Does it contribute value?</li></ol>

Designers have different strengths

A senior designer will be highly generative with ideas and solutions if they feel a deep ownership with the product vision and strategy. Conversely, if a senior designer is given a junior-level task (like ‘design a form’) but feels that a form is entirely the wrong way to go about solving the problem, then they’ll probably be deeply unhappy with what they’re doing, and possibly not do that great a job either.

The more senior the designer, the more abstract the problem they should be solving.

Critique, and designers giving other designers feedback is one of the most important and effective tools for improvement. If a designer is working alone and never showing their work to other designers, it’s pretty much guaranteed that their work won’t be as strong as if they were engaging in regular feedback sessions.

The more time a designer spends with other designers, the better the work (and the designer)

That is because a designer’s goal is a quality experience—not just in one aspect of the app, but throughout their entire experience, and not just short-term, but also down the road.

A lot of what designers value and strive for in their work is hard to measure

Once, a long time ago, I was a product manager. Then, I was an engineer. For the past seven years, I’ve been in design. Every single day, I work with people in all of these roles. Every single day, I…

Bringing Up the Boss

The Four A’s of visual intelligence

How Batching Can Help You Maximize Your Productivity | Tim Ferriss

LinkedIn: 6 Things to Keep in Mind When Connecting With Someone You Don't Know

Strategy vs. Tactics: Why the Difference Matters - Farnam Street

Danielle Murray