Here’s a good theory by Bruce Daisley about the real reason why productivity might be falling in organizations:

If you want to understand why productivity is falling, we need to look first at high levels of employee turnover. If we want to solve productivity issues the first step needs to be to lower the resignation rate.

We all know well when people quit their jobs a period of unproductivity commences: bosses and colleagues need to cover the work of the person leaving, the recruitment process takes unproductive attention and new starters take months to ramp up. As Ton says, ‘high employee turnover is ruinous for productivity’.

Blaming “low productivity” on the rise of remote work—like some publications are trying to do instead—seems pretty lazy.

Ravi Mehta’s 4 Effective Product Team Structures is a helpful framework for leaders to figure out how to organize product teams:

Because of the nature of product work, there are two vectors that product teams need to be organized around: area of focus and level of accountability.

1. For area of focus, product teams can align their work with either business outcomes or feature development.
2. When considering the level of accountability part of the structure, product managers either act as fully responsible owners of the work or as facilitators of the work, where they share metrics responsibilities with cross-functional partners.

In the article he goes through the pros and cons of each of the 4 structures.

In Be a thermostat, not a thermometer Lara Hogan provides a helpful analogy for leaders on what to do when meetings go off the rails…

Once you’re able to start noticing when someone’s amygdala-hijacked, or simply that the vibes are off, you can reframe and use “be the thermostat, not the thermometer” for good. Since humans tend to mirror each other, you can intentionally change the energy in the room, setting the thermostat to a more comfortable temperature.

This is such a great post by Will Larson about onboarding executives into a new role. His recommendations for topics to cover in the first two weeks are especially good. Like this:

Where can the new executive find real data to inform themselves, rather than relying on existing narratives? The best executives will listen to you, but won’t fully believe anything until they’re able to find data to substantiate your perspective. That’s not because they don’t trust you, but because any seasoned executive has been burned by trusting someone who fervently believed something that ultimately wasn’t true.”

And this:

Who do they need to spend time with to understand the current state and the company’s implicit power structure? Especially the longest tenured employees who uniquely hold parts of the business in their heads, and individuals who have significant influence over the executive team that wouldn’t be obvious from the reporting hierarchy.

Turns out there’s a Donella Meadows quote for everything:

Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Blake Thorne on The LaunchNotes Podcast. I think I’m a little rusty with the speaking thing, but I did have a lot of fun here. We covered a bunch of topics, including how people got into product management before Inspired was published, how to enable autonomy and ownership in product teams, the value of writing and publishing what you learn, and also somehow… my favorite kettle. Give it a listen if you’re into that sort of thing!

David Poblador writes about The Pitfalls of Hyper-Growth: How Companies Can Do More with Less. Startups tend to operate more with a scarcity mindset at the onset, but as they grow…

As businesses grow, they often rely on flawed indicators of success that do not necessarily correlate with sustainability. One of the most common measures of success is headcount growth. Unfortunately, hiring lots of new employees can create inefficiencies, harm company culture, and reduce productivity. When hiring becomes the only tool to get the job done, it can detract from the most important things, like focusing on priorities and managing the company’s lifecycle.

David’s post led me to a fascinating interview with Jesper Kouthoofd, who is the founder of music-tech company Teenage Engineering. In the interview he talks about why they specifically avoid running after hyper-growth:

We only want to make great products and when you don’t focus only on making money and have reached a certain level, everything becomes about quality. Right now, there is a certain cultural fascination with fast growth, IPOs and so on, but I want to go slow, really slow and think long-term. It takes time to do good things. You see, this cultural phenomenon of speed and growth at all costs is displayed in every startup, they all look the same, it’s like fast food: it looks good, its taste is consistent but then you feel horrible afterwards.

This is obviously not desirable or true for all companies, but it’s worth noticing that there is more than one way to run a business.

Here’s an interesting take by Sheril Mathews on why people often don’t trust their managers, or find them inauthentic:

Managers don’t come across as authentic because more often than not they don’t have an intimate understanding of the day to day realities of how their teams actually get work done.

Sheril goes on to discuss some some great advice on how to show up for our teams in authentic ways (spoiler: it’s about getting our hands dirty in the trenches). But I also wanted to share this 1973 (!!!) quote from Henry Mintzberg in The Nature of Managerial Work, because it really stopped me in my tracks:

The prime occupational hazard of the manager is superficiality. Because of the open-ended nature of the job and because of the responsibility for information processing and strategy-making, the manager is induced to take on a heavy load of work, and to do much of it superficially.

Hence the job of managing does not develop reflective planners; rather it breeds adaptive information manipulators who prefer a stimulus-response milieu.

Sheril’s article—and that quote—is inspiring me to take a real hard look at my own work, and where there could be opportunities to weed out the “superficiality”.

This is a bit of an addendum that I think is valuable enough to add here. I shared the above Mintzberg quote among some friends and the discussion ended up being really interesting. Vince pointed out that as for the assertion that superficiality is an inevitable outcome of management, he prefers Russell Ackoff’s take from 6 years later. Here’s what he said in 1979:

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consists of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. Problems are abstractions extracted from messes by analysis; they are to messes as atoms are to tables and charts … Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

Pete (who I’ve been begging to start a blog, please go yell at him as well) also went the less cynical route with his comments:

As you move up the levels of a company, you move to higher levels of abstraction. Every level takes the output of the level below, and distills and summarises it, passing it up. It also takes direction from above and tries to nudge the processes below in that direction.

I think that’s the just way it is, the way it has to be. I can’t think of any examples where a different model has been applied successfully at scale.

The key to this working successfully though is to make sure that information is correctly analysed, distilled, summarised and communicated at every level.

The problem with superficiality is not abstraction. It’s dillution. If you throw away the good parts and keep the wrong parts when summarising, the system starts fraying. And you’re setting those above you up for making the wrong decisions, and thus setting up those below you for failure.

I’m sure we’ve all seen those “here’s how to work with me” documents (and the controversies around them), but I like this slightly different take. In her post 9 Managers in 4 Years: Creating Continuity in Chaos Genevieve Conley Gambill shares a framework for helping our managers understand our skills, our work, and our career goals:

• Foundation – What are my unique strengths and capabilities?
• Trajectory – How do I view my current role and performance?
• Aspirations – What am I working towards in the future? 
• Support – What do I need to adjust or build on to get there?

She also shares a great Google Doc template with more details. The post goes into more detail on each section of the framework.

In the latest Platformer piece Meta doubles down on layoffs we see a perfect example of why stable software development teams are more effective than “agile teams” where people are seen as interchangeable cogs in a machine. When leaders think that people can be moved around between projects and “initiatives” at will and without knock-on effects, they run headlong into the basics of systems thinking, as shown here by Mark Zuckerberg’s realization:

In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower priority projects. It’s tempting to think that a project is net positive as long as it generates more value than its direct costs. But that project needs a leader, so maybe we take someone great from another team or maybe we take a great engineer and put them into a management role, which both diffuses talent and creates more management layers. […] Indirect costs compound and it’s easy to underestimate them.

As a side note, this is honestly a pretty frustrating thing to read. It seems like such a basic software development concept—was there no one in Mark’s orbit that could tell him about the indirect costs of building VR headsets? And now that epiphany is costing Meta another 10,000 jobs. Ugh.