The Leaflet #118: finding your true priority, trust-but-verify in servant leadership, prepping candidates for direct feedback

1. An exercise for finding and committing to your true priority (not a list)

I. In your own informal words, write one sentence describing the most important goals for you to reach by the end of the year. Don’t get lost writing detailed bullet points of metrics. What would you say if a friend asked you, “What is it that you would feel most proud of to measure your success by the end of this year?”

II. Now you get to make a really tough choice. Choose only one activity you can perform between now and the end of the year to maximize this goal. An activity might be development meetings. It might be training. It might be data analysis. It might be observation of your reports. It might be hiring. If there is only one activity you can spend your time on for the remainder of the year to maximize this goal, what is it? Write it down.

If you had to make a really tough choice between two things, put the second one down underneath the first. And finally, if you had a third one that was just begging for acknowledgment, you may write that down as well. No more after that.

III. Take two minutes now to answer this one: If between now and the end of the year, you had to spend 30 hours a week and you couldn’t spend time on anything but these three things, how would you set up your week? Assume that others on your team will be extremely gracious about filling in the gaps you’re leaving. This is a blank slate. There’s nothing else on your calendar yet. You need to fill up 30 hours of your week with these three things. You can write bullet points. You can even draw a five-day calendar span. What would that look like? How would you block it?

IV. Now write down one to two things you must do before you could make a wholesale change like this. Maybe it’s prep somebody to handle another major block of your work that this leaves out. Maybe it’s completely sunset one major activity at your organization, team, or school. Maybe it’s hire an additional person.

-ben

2. Servant leadership, trust but verify, and training

In the servant leadership model, a founder starts out a priori with the mission of the organization — you are responsible for the whole of it. All the goals are yours. As you add people to your team, you’re essentially putting those people between you and the mission. They take on some of the goals that you once had yourself.

The trick of servant leadership is that you actually keep all those goals on your plate. You participate in the alchemy that all great teachers practice. They convince their students that the responsibility is 100% the students’ while they (the teachers) in fact retain ultimate responsibility for their students’ success.

What that generally means for a leader is you are a) setting goals for those you lead and b) meeting all legitimate needs they have to reach those goals.

Of course this begs the question: how do I maintain that magical alchemy where they believe these are 100% their goals and that it’s not my job to do their work for them, while remaining vigilant and ensuring that they don’t fail to meet those goals?

The most common way to do this is trust but verify. You give them their goals. You have reason to believe they are competent enough to achieve those goals. You set up, say, a monthly check-in point to verify that they are in fact on track to hit those goals.

Let’s say you start to see very quickly that doing this once a month is actually lowering the chances that they will be on track. In fact, they probably need this weekly, so you switch to weekly. If we continued along this trajectory you end up with checking in once a day with this person.

At that point, the truth is you actually just need to train this person. They weren’t ready for trust-but-verify yet. You need to teach them how to do their job well.

Let’s imagine you’ve gone through that with three people on staff. You’ve tried to do the monthly, you had to switch to weekly, had to switch to daily, and you finally decided, nope, I just need to give this person a boot camp on how to do this job well. When you hire the next person, what might be more prudent to do?

Spend ample time in the beginning making sure they know how to do the job before you go into that trust-but-verify space. And use that moment to gauge to what degree you’re going to need to verify on a regular basis.

-ben

3. Setting people up for direct feedback during hiring

The best way to get people to initially buy in to getting feedback really directly is to expose them to how potent and positive it is in their work. The hiring process is a great time for this. During the hiring process, have somebody in a position to receive feedback from you, give it to them extremely directly, watch them implement and improve from it. Then give them the meta-feedback of how powerful that was to see. Next, inoculate them, by suggesting an interpretation of the that feedback experience.

Look, if that whole cycle was extremely positive for you, that’s a good sign. If it was hard and you don’t want to picture yourself doing that every day, then I think that’s a bad sign.

This way, everybody who self-selects into this feedback pattern is doing so with a chosen identity that they’re going to like this feedback and want it. A softer way to do this is to hold a meeting with somebody you already work with who receives feedback incredibly well. You deliver feedback to this person while the job candidate observes.

When I onboarded people, I would do a model one-on-one for the new hire to observe and usually I’d do this with somebody who was very direct. I give them this experience so that they can picture themselves being in the shoes of my report, getting this direct critique handling it super well, just like their peer is doing.

-ben

COMPELLING QUOTATIONS

Founder-ologist Paul Graham on branding:

Brand age watches look strange because they have no practical function. Their function is to express brand, and while that is certainly a constraint, it’s not the clean kind of constraint that generates good things. The constraints imposed by brand ultimately depend on some of the worst features of human psychology. So when you have a world defined only by brand, it’s going to be a weird, bad world.

Writer Sam Kriss on the difference between Americans and Brits:

The only way an American can really encounter pessimism is by hiring a British person to perform it for them. That’s what I do, basically.

Novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky

The worst sin is that you destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.