Letters to my sons
A collection of thoughts and lessons I've learned along the way for my little men, and anyone else that's interested.
Posts tagged with #Teams
My sons,
We live in a world that expects instant results. Whether it is startup life where companies are expected to achieve 8 figure revenues in their first year of existence, corporate life where employees are expected to turn around problematic behaviors or troublesome team dynamics in the next quarter, or personal life where we expect same day delivery, instant meals, high speed wireless internet, and every other instant gratification method we can think of, our world has been barreling down the path of bigger, better, faster, and more instantaneous.
In such a cultural dynamic, it is often difficult to pause, to take the time to think, and to expend the effort required to make decisions that are holistic and focused on the long term.
The value of patience
Fortunately, with a little bit of effort to expand our field of view, we can find many examples of outcomes that were only made possible with persistence, grit, and a steadfast commitment to stay the course. A number of age old adages come to mind:
“Rome wasn’t built in a day” “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step” “Slow and steady wins the race”
Every one of these points us to the fact that nothing truly great can be rushed. Whether we’re talking about industry changing products, society changing cultural adjustments, or even life changing romances, every single thing that lasts, that is remarkable, that is revolutionary takes time.
Constant, gentle pressure
When I was younger, I believed in the epic moment, the great reveal, the climactic prestige. Everything around me pointed to it, and much of my surroundings and inputs led me to place a lot of value in it. Hollywood taught me that no matter how dire things got, a grand gesture (romantic or otherwise) can save the day, repair a relationship, or turn the tide of battle. I was repeatedly fed the myth that a hero could take any bad situation - a failed relationship, a lifelong rivalry, a generations-old conflict - and completely turn it around and be victorious. And they could do it in style, with a flair that was immediately daring and yet attainable, and all in the movie goer friendly timespan of two hours. Cue the credits.
Sadly, real life doesn’t work that way.
Real life works over the span of a lifetime. It works through the duration of a career, over the course of one’s academic tenure, and over the full cycles of our economic process. It requires a collection of little things, of the steadfast and persistent determination that is willing to do the unglamorous, of the grit required to slog it out. Not some heroic flash bang effort.
Success in real life requires constant and gentle pressure.
Slow cooking my steak
I love steak. When my brother got his first paycheck at his college internship, he took my parents and I to Ruth’s Chris steakhouse. While I’ve never solved the mysteries of who Ruth is, and what a “Chris steakhouse” is, that experience got me hooked onto steak for life. Throughout my young adult years I ventured into as many steakhouses as I could afford, lucky as I was to have work pay for many of these experiences in the guise of a work trip (I’ve been to every steakhouse in Cedar Rapids Iowa, Boulder Colorado, and even Mountain View and Sunnyvale California).
As I got older and became more financially responsible, I decided to learn how to recreate these culinary delights myself. I went through all sorts of books and articles, watched any number of master chefs argue for their method being the best, and experimented with everything from the reverse sear to direct grilling to baking and using my Searzall.
But then one fateful day during the COVID pandemic, I discovered the Sous Vide, and my life was changed forever. Picture perfect steak, cooked consistently all the way through, every single time. Heaven. The secret? Constant and gentle pressure. Well, constant low temperature water bath anyway. But you get the point.
The small things
As a dad, I’ve discovered that model to be an extremely effective one that works across a myriad of scenarios raising my children. My son now pitches for his select baseball team. But 6 years ago when we started, he hated baseball. Never wanted to play catch, didn’t want to go to practices. But over those years, several times a week I’d coax him outside to throw 20 balls with me each time. Slowly - painfully slowly - he started coming around to it, to the point where much of his identity is wrapped up in baseball, in his team, in his development.
Constant, gentle pressure.
As a leader and a manager, one of my strengths is in building great teams. We live in a world where nothing meaningful can be done on one’s own. Everything requires teams, and the more effective the team, the better the outcome.
A technique I stole from the late great Bill Campbell is the practice of starting every staff meeting with 90 seconds around the room of non-work stuff. There is much research that has shown that the greatest teams are the ones that have a strong amount of psychological safety. The root of psychological safety is trust and vulnerability - you need to trust that when you share your open and honest view that your teammates will respond well, regardless of whether they agree or violently disagree with the point at hand. Freedom to express without fear of retribution.
How do we build trust and vulnerability? By getting to know each other on a human level. Turns out when you hear 90s a week about a person’s life and you engage with them on those small tidbits, over the course of a year or two, you’ve actually gotten to know quite a lot about that person. I now know more than I could have imagined about fishing, about the types of gear, the different techniques, when one fishes from a boat vs shore etc, and I’ve never held a fishing rod in my adult life because every week for the better part of 4 years, one of my teammates would tell us all about his fishing adventures.
Constant, gentle pressure.
Turning on the pressure
A few thoughts on how to effectively start your own slow cooking process:
- Be transparent about your intentions. Whether you’re looking to improve the effectiveness of your team, to teach your children some great habits, or to elevate the conversations of your friend group, being transparent about your intentions up front is crucial. No one wants to feel hoodwinked, and if your intentions are good, generally you’ll get people to lean in simply by sharing with them what you’re trying to do.
- Start small. Remember, it’s gentle pressure. In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg shows us that the way to change our habits is to start small. Want to lose weight? Don’t start by trying to cut out all your favorite snacks and move to green smoothies. Start simply by stepping on the weight scale every morning after you shower.
- Be consistent. Whether we’re talking about raising children, growing teams, or managing customers, consistency matters. A lot. If you’re a notoriously chaotic person, then you’ve got to develop systems that will help you maintain that consistency despite your personal working style.
We see this phenomenon in nature as well. Places like Antelope Canyon in Arizona are breathtaking in their natural beauty. It took hundreds of thousands of years filled with flowing water, windblown sand, and natural erosion to produce something so marvelous. Let’s take a page from mother nature’s playbook and apply that same constant, gentle pressure to the beautiful things that we endeavor to build!
My sons,
We’ve been discussing the concept of hospitality, first generally and then as it applies to work. We shift our focus now to how it applies in life.
I’ve always desired to be hospitable. When I was younger, I lived in a tiny 500 sqft studio apartment, but would regularly host groups of 4-5 of my friends to have a home cooked dinner and to play board games until late into the evening. I didn’t even own a dining table, so we all sat cross legged on the floor around my coffee table, which doubled as our board game surface once dinner was done. Every home I’ve had since then has been purchased with a view of how I can entertain people, and how I can grow the set of things as I learned to be more hospitable.
The more I’ve learned though, the more I’ve discovered that my view of hospitality was limited and very, very incomplete.
For whatever reason, my view of hospitality was that it was simply the willingness/desire for people to host others in their home. This was almost a direct reflection of a few traits:
- Willingness to clean up after people leave
- Enjoyment of making food or having food delivered
- Comfort letting others into your space
As I learned more about what it really means to be hospitable, I realized that hospitality is not just about your willingness to physically serve others. It is a mindset. The hospitality mindset is one of putting people at ease, of being more interested in the lives of others than in telling others about our own lives, and of having the thoughtfulness to think of others even when you’re not physically with them.
How to cultivate a mindset of hospitality
One of the hardest things to do in this life is to adjust one’s mindset. There are a myriad books out there that talk about this - Think Again by Adam Grant and Switch by Dan and Chip Heath are two of my favorites and provide great insight into the psychology of our default behaviors as well as some greatly actionable advice on how to challenge and change our own thinking and behaviors.
Once we’ve identified, acknowledged, and determined the need to change our mindset and have understood the mechanics of changing our behaviors, we need to determine what new habits to instill, and what the goals of those habits are.
1. Build a rich thought life
One of my favorite books of all time is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. I first read this book in my teen years, and again many times since, but that very first reading changed my life. In the book, our hero Edmond Dantes is wrongfully imprisoned for several years, and during that time he meets a prisoner that has been there even longer than he, yet who seems to have discovered a way to avoid the madness and depression that isolation typically brings. Instead, he has developed a rich thought life, one that keeps him busy studying, inventing, analyzing, and exploring, all within the recesses of his mind.
I loved that example and aspired to have that same richness in my thought life. As a teen, I realized that there were any number of mundane times where I was left alone without anything to distract. Whether it was sitting on the bus on the way to school, showering every morning, or the minutes dozing before falling asleep at night, there were many daily spaces that could be utilized better, so as often as I could remember, I started making adjustments.
I started small. I simply got myself to think about an idea instead of a situation. Instead of reliving the day on my bus ride home, I’d take an idea and work it out. Instead of imagining waking up early and playing my favorite epic video game (Final Fantasy 2) while falling asleep Friday evening, I’d think about the themes of the game (loyalty, betrayal, love) and ruminate on how I’d seen those themes play out in my life.
Over the years my thought life has developed to the point where I no longer experience boredom acutely, and where I welcome times of inactivity throughout my day so that I can spend time expanding on these ideas, themes, and debates in my mind. This is constantly challenged by the temptation of picking up that little rectangular device and being entertained by it, but the combination of identity (I believe that I am not a person that wastes time on my phone) and habit (I have a daily ritual of reclining in my Eames chair with a glass of wine to read) has helped me fend that off pretty effectively.
2. Put yourself in a position to experience hospitality from others
There are many great things about our hyper connected world and the technologies that enable it. One down side however, is that it enables - nay, causes - our world to become smaller. Why go through the discomfort of striking up a conversation with a stranger at a coffee shop when your little rectangular device enables you to interact with people you already know? Why put yourself through the stress of not understanding everything on the menu at a new restaurant when you can eat at your favorite haunt again, or can eat at home on your own?
By shrinking our world, we experience the hospitality of others less. By staying in the same small social circles, we limit our understanding and experience of hospitality to those we already know.
In contrast, expanding our world allows us to experience new ways of being hospitable. By trying new restaurants, by meeting new people and being invited to share in their hospitality, and by going to different countries to see how other cultures behave, we grow our awareness and understanding of hospitality and further our own style in how we demonstrate it to others.
3. Talk about it with others
In many ways, hospitality has fallen out of fashion in our modern world. Just the other day, we went to a digital food court. The whole idea is that you order your food via touch screen and the machine assigns you a locker number. Once you’ve ordered, someone somewhere prepares your food and deposits the food into the locker through the back and triggers the notification so that your locker lights up and you can open the front door to retrieve your food. Completely contact-less.
Why this is a feature and a desired experience I don’t know, but it was a reminder of just how much technology has enabled our world to become less hospitable.
As such, it becomes incredibly important for us to discuss, to share our experiences, and to talk about our ideas of hospitality with others! We are a social species. We learn from others. We think through talking. If we want to grow our mindset of hospitality, we need to be discussing it with others.
Making magic
Hospitality is about making magic for others. It is about caring for another’s experience. It is about thoughtfully surprising others with how valued, cared for, and known they are. And it is contagious!
Every child has wanted to be a magician at one point in their lives. Some entertain the thought for a mere minute while others spend summers at magic camp. But regardless of how intense the interaction, when one experiences the pure delight and joy that magic brings, one immediately desires to replicate and to be able to perform such feats themselves.
So too is the magic brought from hospitality. When we experience a truly magical moment of hospitality we are compelled to share it. Let us then discuss these moments with others, and let us arm ourselves with the skills to recreate these moments so that we can bring more magic to our world.
My sons,
Anything in our world that is worth doing requires teams. We are past the age where any one person can do something truly impactful on their own. Yes, we can tinker, we can prototype, we can come up with ideas on our own (that too is arguable - whether any thought is truly done in isolation is debatable, but that’s another topic for another day), but we cannot build anything worth mentioning on our own.
We need teams.
I’ve been in the business of building, managing, cultivating, and leading teams for almost two decades now, and have been in the study of excellence on the subject for at least as long. I’ve read books and articles dedicated to the subject, listened to the leading experts in the fields of leadership, human psychology, and business, and have experimented with many approaches within my teams. The undeniable truth about all the best teams is this: they have a high amount of psychological safety.
The best of the best actively and intentionally cultivate, nurture, and grow that safety, and are proactive in weeding out individuals, practices, and experiences that take away from it. At the root of that safety is a strong web of relationships built on trust, humility, and shared experiences.
Learning from the best
I once sat in a large exec review with our Senior Vice President with about 20 other people reviewing our organization’s roadmap doc, a small section of which I was responsible for. As we reviewed, our SVP had a question about something in my section. After I answered, he looked over at me and said, “hey, sorry, I know we’ve met before cause I’ve seen you in these meetings a bunch, but we haven’t actually been introduced. What’s your name? … Great to meet you, Sam. Okay, so, I know you know your stuff, and everyone else seems to be nodding at your answer, but I don’t get it yet. Do me a favor will you? In the next month or so, write me a quick doc explaining this to me.”
I would follow that guy anywhere.
In a room of 20 people, probably 6-7 of which were VPs themselves, he took the time to make me feel seen and heard. It took him all of 2 minutes, and I’m sure he’s done that a thousand times and doesn’t remember the incident, but for me, that was magic. That is a moment that I will likely remember for the rest of my career.
Undoubtedly one of the reasons he’s so beloved and successful is that he has intentionally cultivated a practice of hospitality. I’m sure that not only has he reaped the rewards of that, but he has brought that same type of magical experience into the lives of many others.
Hospitality pays
We live in a world where a large majority of our GDP is coming from the service industry and that the most important capital in our world is human capital. It is widely recognized that companies and industries rise and fall because of the teams of people that they are able to hire, attract, and retain. In that world, people matter. Teams matter.
And yet these skills are as undervalued as they are important!
Why do so many companies and teams undervalue these traits? The simple answer is because they are hard to measure, especially in the short term. It’s hard to quantify the gain that we get by investing the time and resources necessary to create a hospitable culture because culture is not a yes or no thing. There’s no measuring before and after because that distinction is binary, and cultural change is a gradient.
There are many examples of companies and industries that are moving towards building sustainable, helpful, fulfilling businesses in a way that values culture and integrity as much as they value profits. In his book Screw Business as usual, Sir Richard Branson talks about the work that he and many others like him have been doing to rethink the way we build teams, companies, and industries, and the impact that those endeavors have on local and global communities. While most of us will likely never be able to build multiple companies and industries in our lifetime, there are many lessons that we can learn from those that do.
1. Make sure everyone knows the goal.
The first and foremost important thing is to ensure that everyone on your team knows what the goal is. The goal is not to build a great product. It is to build a great product that customers will love, so that they will love your brand and the impact it has on their lives and will purchase, so that your company can make money. The goal is not to create a great recipe that is delicious. It is to create a great recipe that is delicious, so that the front of house can offer it to guests at a rate which guests will love, so that guests have a great overall dining experience, so that they will recommend the restaurant to their friends, so that their friends will come and pack the house, so that the restaurant will make money.
Even if you are working at a non-profit, there is the uber goal of the organization that everyone needs to be keenly aware of so that they can take ownership of their space. It is only by knowing the true goal that individuals on our teams can see how their hospitable practices move the needle and impact the thing that really matters.
2. Give lots of credit where it’s due.
Give credit where it’s due. No matter how much value you bring to a team yourself, it is to the team. When there are individuals that do great work, go out of your way to recognize that. As a leader on the team, you naturally get enough spotlight and attention - take every opportunity to shine the spotlight for greatness in other people’s direction.
As leaders, we need to take pride in creating an environment where greatness can happen and can flourish - that is the mark and reward of a great leader, and is the mark of a team that people love, take ownership of, and do their best work for.
3. Deeply understand what it means to be right a lot.
This one tends to trip people up a lot. Especially if you’re a tech person, you’ll have been bombarded with messages telling you that being right is critically important. At Amazon, it’s even one of the leadership principles.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with being right about the topic at hand. It’s a good thing to have good instincts and intuition, and to be objectively right. But there’s much more to being situationally right than just the objective debate at hand.
Being right is irrelevant when you break the relationship. This is true in our personal relationships as well as our professional ones. When you are hospitable and charitable to people, you often will be the one that needs to suck it up and adjust, even when you’re objectively right. This is always going to be best in the long run.
This is especially hard in the business context, because we often believe that when we’re seen as being in the wrong, it will reflect poorly on our performance. This is multiplied if your manager is the one that is seeing you as being in the wrong. This is amplified further if you’re seen as wrong in a large meeting with multiple stakeholders/leaders.
I am fundamentally a long game player, and the long game is all about relationships. Being right is irrelevant when you break the relationship. When you are hospitable and charitable to people, you often will be the one that needs to suck it up and adjust, even when you’re clearly right.
I’ll go even further.
If you’ve corrected someone because you don’t want them to think you’ve made a mistake, you’ve made a much bigger mistake.
The common response to this is that “sucking it up when I know I’m right feels demeaning” - yes, true, but the benefit you get to the relationship far outweighs any you lose from making a so-called mistake, especially if/when the other party realizes or discovers that they were actually wrong in the matter. The feeling you leave them with is a far greater testament to your impact than you proving that you are right.
I’m not saying that we should not go back and correct the error - do that, but do it in private. And do it in a way that preserves, and even strengthens the relationship.
Being right a lot isn’t about being objectively right. It’s not about being seen as right. It is about being relationally, long term right. It is about having the tact to know when to correct, and how to continually strengthen the relationship. And that is the definition of hospitality at work.