Leadership, First Thoughts

Welcome to the Duha One leadership substack!

I've been looking for a platform to help my leadership clients and readers of 1% Leadership connect a little more deeply with the content, with each other, and with me, so I'm experimenting with substack as a platform. There will be both free and paid content available here; every post will start with free content, and continue with a section for paying subscribers. I promise no cliffhangers - the paid content will be additional sections, but I won’t split an essay between the two.

Contents

• Leadership Moments: Google’s layoff

• One Minute Pro Tip: Meeting Scheduling

• Chapter Teaser: Values

• Appearances

• Coaching Guide: Physical Burnout (paid, but free today!)

Leadership Moments: Google’s layoff

Leadership Moments will look at a recent event, and provide relevant thoughts on leadership.

You may have seen that, like many tech companies, Google began laying off about 6% of its workforce. 6% doesn’t sound like a lot, until you realize that’s 12,000 humans. In the chaos of an event like a mass layoff, there are opportunities to clearly communicate the why of making seriously hard tradeoffs. From Sundar Pichai’s note (available in the link above), it sounds like cuts were targeted at products and services that were underperforming. In any large company, that’s actually healthy: you make bets, they don’t pay off, and you move on. In a wise business, you try to move on before you also have an economic crisis, because you’d like to give your employees the opportunity to move to new business units. Tying an economic freeze to a business restructuring may seem “easy” as you kill two birds with one stone, but it leads to you letting go high performers who had the ill luck to be in a business unit that wasn’t as high performing as you’d like.

Don’t wait until outside conditions force your hand to execute on a difficult decision. If Google had badly performing businesses, those should have been restructured already. At the manager level, managers often don’t want to manage out a poor performer, and they wait for a layoff to easily let them go – which then deprives the manager of the opportunity to hire a replacement who might be more effective.

One Minute Pro Tip: Meeting Scheduling

One Minute Pro Tip will give you a quick change you can make. In this case, to how you run meetings.

Stop running meetings wall-to-wall. Just because Outlook first defaulted us to half-hour and hour meetings, there’s a tendency to try to start a meeting “on time” and run right up until the next meeting. Your people are human, and need both bio-breaks and mental switching time.

If you’re not the leader of an org, you can’t change the standard, but you can change how you run meetings. Start N minutes late (I like 3, but maybe you go 4 or 5), and tell people you’re doing so. If everyone is “on time”, use the late start for social chit chat, or play music (video meetings can be great for this if you have someone with a sound board), and then make sure you also end early, by the same margin. I know others who just schedule meetings from X:05 to X:45 - that gives a 5 minute passing period before, and 15 minutes to write down and distribute notes.

If you’re an organizational leader, set a standard, hold yourself to it (if you run your meetings over, you basically shaft your entire organization), and make that the norm.

Chapter Teaser: Values

Chapter Teaser gives a preview of lessons from 1% Leadership, but told in a different way. The first sentence here is the actual chapter title, but rather than an excerpt from the book, the lesson is presented in a slightly different way. This enables you to see the lesson in multiple ways, and still have a reason to go buy the book.

Chapter 41: Values are the trail markers that keep you from going the wrong way, even when the wrong path looks more attractive.

Ironically, the original quote for this chapter was Google’s original motto: Don’t Be Evil.

When most organizations draft their values, they like to be positive, upbeat, and use language that sounds awesome. Integrity – who can argue with that as a value? Or Innovation, which as a tech company, of course you’d write down as a value. Maybe Customer Focus makes it in, because we love the people who pay us money.

Those are all awful values. Values get used as a bludgeon when they’re aligned with what your managers already want to do. Innovation becomes an excuse to not invest in maintenance, increasing your deferred risk/technical debt. Customer Focus means you’ll chase any dollar, even if it isn’t sustainable revenue. Integrity never seems to be about corporate integrity, and instead is weaponized against employees.

Good values are ones that are uncomfortable. If your employees are frustrated with management, they should be able to point at a value and see that the company wasn’t following the value. Transparency might mean that they understand why you made a decision, for instance. When you make decisions that they don’t understand, and you didn’t explain them, they’ll see that you let them down on the value of Transparency.

Appearances

This section will cover both past appearances (if there is a recording/content available), as well as appearances in the near future.

• January 18th, as host of Cloud Security Reinvented, interviewing Jeremy Turner, Deputy CISO of Paidy.

• January 24th, webinar host: Budgeting for Cloud Security in 2023,

• January 30-February 1, CyberTech Tel Aviv

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That divider above would normally be where the paywall starts. Down here is where I’ll add in bonus content: drafts from a coaching guide, outtakes from 1% Leadership (about 30% of the words I wrote didn’t make it in the book), and other leadership specials.

1% Coach: Physical Burnout (paid)

1% Coach is a coach’s handbook to accompany 1% Leadership. It is designed for coaches at all levels: individuals coaching themselves, mentors and professional coaches, team leaders, HR staff, and even parents. 1% Coach contains a set of 1 page reference sheets, each one discussing a scenario, suggesting an approach, and giving reference chapters in 1% Leadership that may be relevant.

Physical Burnout

Challenge: Sometimes, you have a person who is working themselves too hard.  They end up with low energy, and maybe they’re getting sick, often at crunch time.  You can’t know for certain that they’re burning their candle at both ends hard enough to trigger whatever ailment is taking them away from work, but you suspect, just based on timing, that there might be some correlation.  They might be the best expert at an important and urgent task, and feeling like they can’t drop this task may be contributing to their burnout. 

Approach: Tackle this with caution!  People can be very sensitive to criticisms about how they are taking care of their own health, and you might trigger enough defensiveness just in bringing up the topic that they aren’t going to be able to really listen to any guidance you might want to give.  Sometimes, it can be better to beat around the bush for some of these lessons – share them with a wider community that includes your person.

Primary Chapters:

• 13: Your wellness is one of the greatest assets you control.

• 21: Four days of great work now are rarely more important than four months of good work down the road.

• 33: Delegated work won’t happen the way you would do it – but it will get done.

• 38: Don’t be irreplaceable; be uncloneable.

Secondary Chapters:

• 16: Practice the future to face adversity with grace.

• 25: The best available outcomes often involve finding hard compromises between groups you advocate for.

• 41: Values are the trail markers that keep you from going the wrong way, even when the wrong path looks more attractive.

• 51: Embrace the heroism of boring maintenance.

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Thanks for checking out this inaugural version of the Duha One leadership substack. Subscribe so you won’t miss an episode. If you liked this length, you’ll love 1% Leadership. Only three of its chapters, plus the introduction, are longer than this. You can preorder now for April 18th, 2023 delivery.