Category: General

The Culture Map is an excellent book by Erin Meyer. As my current team evolves in an international context, I had the idea to use the culture map as an icebreaker to start one of our quarterly meetings.

The team is composed of people from France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and The Netherlands. The team has to interact daily with a lot of people from the US, and nearly all countries in the EMEA area.

We used a Miro board and one of the culture map provided in Erin’s book (reproduced below).

I gave a short explanation of the first scale: Communicating. Either you are in a Low-Context culture where the communication is precise, simple, and clear, or you are in a High-Context culture where the communication is sophisticated, nuanced, and layered (you are expected to read between the lines).

Then, I asked one question: Where the US would be?

All the team members connected to the Miro board can see the cursors of the others, and so I asked them to move their cursors to the position they thought the right answer would be.

After some discussion, people started to position the US in comparison with other countries. Of course, we covered the fact that a country cannot be a point on a scale but more a range on the scale. We also covered that all people are different and that the more you know a country, the more you can appreciate the subtle differences of the different regions.

We continued to iterate with the next scales:

• Evaluating: How people give direct or indirect negative feedback.
• Persuading: How people are trained to begin with the theory or to begin with facts or statements.
• Leading: How people are used to an Egalitarian or a Hierarchical model.
• Deciding: How people are used to decisions made in a Consensual way or Top-down.
• Trusting: How trust could be built either though business related activities or through sharing meals and drinks.
• Disagreeing: How people are used to see debates and confrontation as positive for the team, or as negative for the team and inappropriate.
• Scheduling: How people see the time as linear (everything is scheduled and you stick to it) or flexible (everything can be approached in a flexible manner.

It was a very good opportunity for the team members to express their preferences, and a good reminder that wherever you are on the scale, you have to accept that others could be at another position because they value that position more. They are no “good” position or “bad” position.

A very good starting point to appreciate the diversity of the strengths of the team.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful is a book by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter published in 2007.

The trouble with successful people is that they tend to believe that their “bad” habits are not so “bad.” They have proof of that. They are successful. So, what could they do, or more precisely, what could they stop doing to be more successful?

The book presents The Twenty Habits That Hold You Back From The Top:

1. Winning too much: The need to win at all costs and in all situations – when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s totally beside the point.
2. Adding too much value: The overwhelming desire to add our two cents to every discussion.
3. Passing judgment: The need to rate others and impose our standards on them
4. Making destructive comments: The needless sarcasm and cutting remarks that we think make us sound sharp and witty.
5. Starting with “No,” “But,” or “However”: The overuse of these negative qualifiers which secretly say to everyone, “I’m right. You’re wrong.”
6. Telling the world how smart we are: The need to show people we’re smarter than they think we are.
7. Speaking when angry: Using emotional volatility as a management tool.
8. Negativity, or “Let me explain why that won’t work”: The need to share our negative thoughts even when we weren’t asked.
9. Withholding information: The refusal to share information in order to maintain an advantage over others.
10. Failing to give proper recognition: The inability to praise and reward.
11. Claiming credit that we don’t deserve: The most annoying way to overestimate our contribution to any success.
12. Making excuses: The need to reposition our annoying behavior as a permanent fixture so people excuse us for it.
13. Clinging to the past: The need to deflect blame away from ourselves and onto events and people from our past; a subset of blaming everyone else.
14. Playing favorites: Failing to see that we are treating someone unfairly.
15. Refusing to express regret: The inability to take responsibility for our actions, admit when we’re wrong, or recognize how our actions affect others.
16. Not listening: The most passive-aggressive form of disrespect for colleagues.
17. Failing to express gratitude: The most basic form of bad manners.
18. Punishing the messenger: The misguided need to attack the innocent who are usually trying to help us.
19. Passing the buck: The need to blame everyone but ourselves.
20. An excessive need to be “me”: Exalting our faults as virtues simply because they’re who we are.

The “twenty-first” habit is goal obsession.

The idea that being obsessed with a high-level goal makes you forget the here and now. The present in which you are, indeed, destroying all your chances of reaching your goals.

I love to use books with people I work with. I used The Five Dysfunctions of A Team or The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. I also used Radical Candor by Kim Scott.

I decided to use the twenty habits with a leadership team I just met.

The first part of the session was reviewing and discussing the habits. Listening to the questions and discussions can teach a lot about the people in the room.

The second part was for the team members to identify for each other, through an anonymous survey, what habit they thought the others in the team should focus on removing.

The third part was for the team members to discover the results, and pick the habit they will want to work on during the next quarter.

The last part was to select their accountability partner to work with to achieve the goal.

I am happy with the results so far. If you try the practice, let me know through the usual means: email or Linkedin.

Michael Doyle and I are launching a new book in May 2020. The book is I am a Software Engineer and I am in Charge: The book that helps increase your impact and satisfaction at work.

Some people told us that it was not the perfect timing as people surely have other things on their minds. Others told us it was the right timing because people will want something to read. As a result, I think I don’t really know if it is good or bad. I only hope that the book will find its audience and have the impact we wished for when we wrote it.

For April’s fool, we thought about what kind of joke we could make. We opted for a merch store with announces on Twitter using quotes from movies. We thought everybody would guess the joke and laugh with us.

I don’t think it worked. The products were named, the first, the of, and the month. Maybe people did not even get to the page and saw that?

Let’s not all of them, because someone ask it was for real, and if it was possible to order something 🙂 Yes, it is for real and we updated the page with real product names!

Here are two links for if you want to learn more about the book and why we decided to write it.

In this article, I would like to provide information and pointers to information on the Chief of Staff’s role in the tech industry. As a member of the Engineering Leadership Team at Red Hat, I have been in that kind of role for almost three years for the SVP of Engineering.

People instantly connect the role to the one that John R. Steelman was the first to hold in 1946: White House Chief of Staff. The definition of the role varies immensely between every presidency. Even more, as Chris Whipple states in the subtitle of his book The Gatekeepers, “The White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”

As for the White House, the job depends on the company and executive the Chiefs of Staff serve. The general acceleration of the pace of business is the main reason mentioned for the emergence of the role in tech companies. CEO and Executive tend to shift their focus from inside their organization to outside. They need someone trusted to cover for them. Mark Organ, the CEO of Influitive, describes the Chief of Staff job as making him a superhero.

Rob Dickins, who served as Chief of Staff for several executives at Autodesk, describes the role using three orientations. I find the framework useful to structure the conversations with other Chief of Staffs, or with executives looking for Chief of Staffs (CoS).

The first orientation focuses on the executive the CoS reports. How do we make the executive operate at the highest level of performance?

The second orientation includes, in addition, the executive’s leadership team. I love that aspect of the job, transforming a group of people reporting to an executive into a true team leading the company or the business unit. Being part of a team, each member levels up his game and benefits from the diversity of the group.

The third orientation is the organization itself aiming at answering the question: How do we best set the organization to accomplish its objectives. One aspect of that is why I love using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to establish a continuous two-way street dialog between the people in the organization and their leadership team. The dialogue helps to clarify the strategy and to evaluate what are the right things to do to implement it.

Julia DeWhal, Chief of Staff to the CEO at Opendoor, describes the role as the right-hand person and the force multiplier. Brian Rumao, Chief of Staff to the CEO at LinkedIn, uses the same description in the short course he made available, and adds, that the CoS have to stand in for their executive as needed. Mark Organ even says that the CoS is his stunt double.

As Ben Casnocha, who was the Chief of Staff for Reid Hoffman, surfaces very well, the more connected the Chief of Staff is with the executive he or she served, enable better decision making and better tradeoffs.

What are the attributes you will want as or for a Chief of Staff:

• Expert Facilitator: you manage conversations, synthesize multiple points of view, align on strategic orientation, either in-person or remotely,
• Trusted Organizer: you bring order to things, you get things done, and you manage sensitive information in confidence and discretion.
• Strategic Thinker: you can see the big picture, evaluate importance and urgency, and provide context for decisions.

I often wondered how Elon Musk was managing his time between his three main companies: SpaceX, Tesla, and The Boring Company. Surprisingly, Sam Teller was the Director of the Office of the CEO for the three companies.

It seems that the “Alter Egos” were doing well together. Jonah Bromwich used the term in his New York Time article, Hail to the Chief of Staff, The title is suddenly everywhere. It can mean almost anything.

Can it mean almost anything? Yes. So it means that you can define a role so that your contribution has the most significant impact on your organization.

To find out more about the Chief of Staff role in tech, follow the CoS Tech Forum.

Edit on April 20: Here is another article to add to the references. This is from the Harvard Business Review: The Case for a Chief of Staff. The three-level model makes a lot of sense to refine the role.

I have been asked thousands of times to facilitate small or large gatherings. When I worked on Changing Your Team From The Inside, I wanted to make clear that self-organization is the most powerful way for people to organize, but that based on their history, you will need to help them get there. You will need to create the conditions for self-organization to happen.

Chapter nine of the book is titled Organize because self-organization requires organization. I focused the chapter on meetings because it is something easier to change, to adjust, to experiment on, than to change the whole organization. And I believe it is much more impactful to change the way we meet than to change the reporting structure.

The Art of Gathering, by Priya Parker, is a perfect book. The structure brings you gently to think about all the aspects that matter about your gathering.

It starts with the purpose of the gathering. Why do we really gather? And, of course, the answer is not because it is Monday.

Then you cover the uncomfortable question of who should join. And, no, inviting everybody is not an inclusive option. It is even the opposite. Why would someone who attends a meeting on which he or she will bring no value should feel included?

In the role of the host, you have power, and you have to use that power to serve the purpose of the gathering and your guests.

The time of the gathering is a temporary alternative world in which the traditional rules are not necessarily valid. You can, and in fact, you have to create rules that once again will serve the purpose and the guests. The author gives a ton of inspiring examples.

I know that, and even knowing it, I understood reading the chapter that I was not investing smartly enough on the openings of my gatherings.

In conferences or other gatherings, my frustration level grows each minute that passes. Why that? Because people are not true and authentic. Okay, I am over-generalizing. Not all people are manipulative and insincere. And not all people behave all the time the same way. The big idea is that it takes intentional efforts to create conditions for people to be true and authentic.

In meetings, when we stay on the surface of things, we can be very polite and respectful, avoid any potential conflicts and keep the status quo forever. If keeping the status quo is what you need, you probably don’t have to push hard to get to that. If not, then it is on you to organize the controversy so we can really discuss what matters and initiate a change.

We are approaching the end of the post, and you have to know that ends matter a lot. I would like to, once again, thank the author for having created that perfect book. I would like to thank you for reading and sharing this post. I would like to encourage you to read the book, and to share what you learned and how it affects your next gatherings. Working on ending the meeting properly is probably one thing I would change in Chapter 9 of Changing Your Team From The Inside.

And finally, what I would love is to have Priya Parker on Le Podcast to discuss how to apply her expertise and experience to online gatherings. But I guess you will all have to ask for it to happen!