Introducing a new series: The Top 10 Most Common Leadership Problems in the Global Catastrophic Risks (GCR) sector:
Over the past year I spent about 250 coaching sessions with leaders from some 40 organizations working on global catastrophic risk. That cohort includes AI safety labs and evaluators, teams working on AI policy and governance, biosecurity, and the funders finding and supporting them. Relative to other sectors, this cohort is unusually thoughtful, humble, and well-funded. Yet, each of those assets casts a shadow where some common failure modes lurk - failure modes that crop up in other sectors that may not have these assets in abundance.
Each week ahead, we’ll share one of the top 10 most common problems these leaders encounter, with a proposed solution to address it.
-ben
GCR Problem 10: Improvised governance and unwritten rules
Many of these organizations are about five years old, have grown tenfold, and inherited their governance from a founding group of friends. In the early days, trust and proximity did the job of governance. But now the org is bigger than its founding friendships and it hasn’t adapted its governance accordingly.
This failure mode can manifest a few different ways:
The board loses confidence in the CEO but gives multiple, vibes-y, conflicting reasons for the loss of confidence. This leaves the CEO, absurdly, with the job of teaching the board how to fire them properly.
Senior staff have reporting lines below them but lack a clear line above. Their work gets less focused and useful and they are, in practice, unmanaged.
Great-on-paper hires from outside the movement fail unspoken cultural tests and fall prey to insider-outsider dynamics. These talented folks underperform or quit or get fired. The team burns time and cash and trust on multiple hiring rounds.
The fix here is not glamorous and mostly consists of three moves:
Write the CEO’s scorecard. Have the board ratify it. Have the board use it for a calendared performance evaluation (likely an annual one). The worst version of the board problem is a board that only forms a view of the CEO when it’s unhappy and then can’t articulate why. If you and the board have agreed, in writing, what a good year looks like for you, you and the board can approach the year and make your respective decisions with greater confidence.
Convert tacit operating approaches into transparent, documented rules. Ambiguity that is harmless among a group of five friends who basically work in one continuous group meeting becomes toxic with thirty people arrayed in verticals. Reporting relationships, decision rights, and information flows are three places to bring your attention in particular. (If you’re in a phase of speedy growth, it’s good to name these rules as subject to revision. Things that work well with 30 people can collapse when you get to 100).
Codify unwritten cultural norms. A good place to find these is in the negative space: what’s the concrete, observable thing that unsuccessful outside hires fail to do? That thing is probably (adjacent to) a core value of your team. If there’s a real “us-ness” test that outsiders keep failing, it’s either a value worth stating explicitly (so candidates can self-select and you can hire for it) or a bias worth killing. Nb: What you write here can explicitly be a living document - you don’t have to freeze your team’s culture in place.
-ben
Related:
Fix the acknowledgement asymmetry
Most managers I’ve encountered embrace an unhelpful asymmetry: when something goes wrong, they tell people immediately. When something goes right, they almost never say so. Yet, people are doing worthy things constantly.
I borrowed an idea from The Carrot Principle and made a crude spreadsheet called a recognition frequency chart. For years, using this sheet was the highest-return fifteen minutes of my week.
Here’s what it looks like:
Leftmost column: a list of of my direct reports, plus their direct reports. Those two layers constitute my orbit.
Each column to the right: “week of _____” and the question: “has this teammate done anything worthy of praise that I haven’t yet praised?”
Every Thursday at 9am a calendar event popped up with a link to the sheet. My rule was that I could spend no more than ninety seconds per name. Once I got in the habit, I tended to finish early.
Because the sheet asks what they’ve done that I haven’t yet acknowledged, I’m never making anything up. The sheet isn’t manufacturing fake positivity.
Rows I left blank were a useful signal. If I went more than about three weeks with nothing next to a name, it either meant a) I had low visibility into that person’s work or b) they were underperforming. Both are those were worth knowing and acting to change.
Blanks for my reports’ reports could also prompt a next step. I’d write their manager and ask, “How’s Erica doing?” The manager would then come back with something concrete. Then I’d write Erica directly and say, “I asked your manager how you were doing and he told me you’d gone above and beyond on this.”
The manager economics of this were excellent.
Cost to me: ninety seconds.
Value to the person receiving a specific, sourced piece of praise from their boss’s boss inside a three-week window: enormous.
People treat recognition as temperament (either you’re warm or you aren’t) but a generally warm person can go months without naming a single specific thing someone did well. Default friendliness won’t get you to the right baseline volume of recognition. A recurring calendar event and a simple sheet can.
-ben
the race within the race
I ran my first marathon last Sunday. Before the race, during my training, I read many a Reddit thread and running book that warned of the infamous “bonk” at mile 20, where many first-timers (and veterans, too) find they just can’t go anymore. They might hobble or walk to the finish, but race pace and race goals slip away.
Thankfully, I didn’t bonk Sunday but the splits don’t lie: mile 20 onward was a different animal than all that had preceded it. I ran significantly slower for a few miles, fell meaningfully behind my pace group, and began collecting evidence that I was not going to hit my goal for the day. Half miles melted away in the first couple hours of the marathon; after 20 miles, each of those half-miles felt more like its own challenging movie, with a complete dramatic arc and minute-to-minute intensity.
I learned in a direct way that there’s a race within the race. Or, put differently, that the first 20 or so miles are the prelude to the actual race.
I realized that the four months of training were designed to make the first 20 a prelude. Those months wrote me a license to operate, a permission slip to join the actual race that started after 20 miles were gone.
A thought exercise I’m getting something out of: how do the race within the race and the 4 months of training map onto other endeavors? When I’ve built a team to chase a big mission, what was the hard, time-consuming work that just got us into the Actual Race? What was that Actual Race? How well did I prepare my team for this strange (and for some, infuriating) pattern?
-eric
Related: the second 90 percent
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Journalist Lizzy Goodman on Andre Agassi as philosopher:
… regularly present in our time together was Philosopher Andre — a sage, fluent in self-help speak, who talks younger players through crises, analyzes the game with astonishing emotional clarity and cries easily. Philosopher Andre deals in seemingly self-generated aphorisms like “The human condition is undefeated” and “Epiphanies don’t change your life, but what you do with them can.”
Investor Auren Hoffman on “pronoia”:
The best way to live life is being pronoid (the opposite of paranoid). Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you.
Economist Raj Chetty scrutinizes test scores and privilege:
Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at Ivy-Plus colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, and (3) athletic recruitment.