A sentence good teachers and coaches don’t allow themselves
Good teachers and good coaches and good managers tend to be high agency folks. They don’t disempower themselves in the face of poor results.
When I managed outstanding teachers or visited schools loaded with them, there was a sentence I never heard from them that always seemed to be on the tip of the tongue of crummy teachers. The good ones never say, “I taught it but they didn’t learn it.”
The good teachers were not necessarily harder on themselves. The sentence was simply unavailable to them; it didn’t compute; it wasn’t of interest. They took full responsibility for the development of the people they worked with. They focused their energy on the thing they could most directly control: their own behavior.
Of course, there’s a bit of a paradox here, or maybe a trick. Great teachers have great agency and take that full measure of responsibility for student outcomes. But the students only get those outcomes when they develop great agency and apply it successfully.
-ben
A coaching requirement that can make clients squirm
I need to see a fair amount of your work in real time. This can be recorded meetings you send me asynchronously or a draft document you’re currently putting together. It needs to be something live. I’m pretty insistent about this, to the point that it becomes a dealbreaker for some.
The reason I insist comes straight from my time in schools. When I was a school principal, I would never have had a teacher come to my office, describe aloud how things in their classroom were going, take my advice, and then expect good results. A teacher’s account of their classroom is not the classroom. Rather, it’s a reconstruction, assembled by the person whose blind spots I’m responsible for addressing.
A core premise of having a coach (or a manager) is that at least some of the things that will improve your performance are things you will not notice on your own. You’ve got blind spots; your coach/manager can see things you can’t.
One obvious objection to turning over live examples of work is confidentiality, but in practice this hasn’t been much of a barrier, even with clients in extremely buttoned-up parts of government. There’s almost always something shareable whether it’s interviews with prospective hires, external communications, a redacted document, or live role play.
I not only insist on this, I think it’s total hackery when a coach doesn’t do it. Without this, we’re play-acting a coach-coachee relationship. With it, we have the essential material needed to actually build new skills.
-ben
Prompt your reports to distinguish wants and needs and bring you the needs
A leader I work with was being pulled in five directions at once and told me what she wanted was some kind of edict from on high confirming she was prioritizing correctly.
A first thing I told her is helping with this is her boss’s bread and butter. Making sure highly effective leaders are working on the right things is his single most important responsibility and his best lever for moving team performance. To reduce it further: helping his people prioritize is pretty much his job. If you manage people, that’s probably true for you, too.
To make this go best for managers and reports, I recommend that managers tell their reports something like this: “Before you walk into our 1:1, distinguish for yourself between what you want and what you need. Then lead with the need.”
In the prioritization example I’m using above, the difference between want and need often looks like this:
WANT: I want to be able to do all of this and not have it overwhelm me, and not have any part of it suffer because of the rest. I want somebody to make these problems go away.
NEED: What I need from you is help prioritizing, because there’s a real chance that if I don’t get it, the work is going to suffer and so am I. That version names the consequence, and it names it for both the work and the person, which is what makes it a need rather than a complaint.
It has been remarkable to me how well smart people make this distinction, essentially every time, once they’re asked. They’re just not taking the time to do so without you prompting it.
-ben
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Investor Auren Hoffman on moats:
Castles did not slowly decline. they got obsoleted in about fifty years.
once gunpowder artillery got good, a wall that took a generation to build could be knocked down in a week. constantinople had the best walls in the world for a thousand years. the ottomans brought cannons in 1453 and walls stopped mattering.
by 1550 nobody was building tall stone castles anymore. every one of them was still standing. every one of them was worthless.
the cannon for software is AI.
Blogger Zvi Mowshowitz on a law of human stupidity:
Sixth Law of Human Stupidity (that if you say that no one would be so stupid as to, you are always wrong) remains undefeated.
You’ll be so stupid as to because Think of the Potential, and because otherwise someone else will be so stupid as to first. Same as always.
Critic Henry Oliver on Jane Austen:
The more I read Jane Austen, the more I come to appreciate her quietness. Throughout Sense and Sensibility, comments are made about the consideration—or inconsideration—characters give to each other when they are upset. When Elinor is trying to retain her equanimity, when Marianne is hysterical, Austen is alert to who gives them peace, who intrudes, who closes doors with the consideration of silence. She is not just a novelist of what is seen, but of what is unseen. She brings to our attention the various aspects of life that many people never think about, and she shows us how they work upon our inner lives. This is a very English way of living. Her heroines are so often introverts or learn to love the retreat of their mind. Marianne’s resolution at the end is to read for six hours a day and thus to acquire the “instruction” that will tame her “self-provocation.” Solitude is a virtue from the opening page when we hear that the Dashwoods live in the center of their property. That is the spell the opening line casts like a fairy tale. The family of Dashwood had long been settled in Sussex. It sounds like this is all happening once upon a time. Jane Austen’s magic is to make it happen now, with the sort of people who are always intruding upon our solitude, imposing upon our feelings, and with the sort of situations that make us realise we must be the ones to become worthy of being praised.