Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: My experience as a team lead is that if your team is aligned going into a project, you get this incredible execution. It’s fun to do, you know, maybe hard work, but you’re all rowing in the same direction, you’re seeing those results when you put the pieces together, they’re all harmonious.

Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGrenigan. Hey Adam.

So Mark, it’s been snowing recently here in Berlin, quite cold, and of course I need to not only walk a dog 3 times a day, but now take my daughter to Kita, which is kind of a daycare kindergarten thing in the stroller. So spending a lot of time in the cold these days.

How do you feel about kind of places with the full 4 seasons, which I think you grew up in the kind of East Coast United States versus the West Coast or perhaps more southernly lifestyle that is Yeah, I’m a huge fan of the Four Seasons, probably because it’s what I grew up with.

00:01:02 - Speaker 2: Actually, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, now I’m in the inland Pacific Northwest, and it’s just beautiful in the winter with the snow on the evergreens, and it’s very quiet and peaceful. I’m a big fan.

00:01:16 - Speaker 1: I certainly find that change of the seasons just keeps life interesting in a way. There’s something about the passage of that day night cycle. And there’s a similar thing with the 360 something days around the sun, and these quarters, essentially, they each have their own distinctive look and feel, right? The blooming flowers of spring, the high sun of the summertime, the rich autumn leaves in the fall, and then winter with it’s cold and snow and people wanting to stay inside and stay warm and cozy. I don’t know, there’s something about that cyclical aspect that works for me somehow.

00:01:56 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and you’re not only enjoying the current season, there’s an element of anticipation for the next one. So now we’re looking forward to, OK, we’ve shoveled the driveway enough times, we’re looking forward to the snow clearing out, and then perhaps it’ll get hot again, but then once it’s 90 degrees and smoky, you’re like, oh man, I can’t wait for the winter when it’s just cold. So around and around it goes.

00:02:15 - Speaker 1: So our topic today is leadership.

I thought this would be a fun one because this is something both you and I have spent a lot of time on in our careers.

I’ve been in some way or another leading sometimes reluctantly or with some surprise, small teams for over 20 years now. You’ve done quite a bit of that in your career also, and it’s come up a little bit recently in terms of our work on use for teams, in terms of the kinds of people we’re seeing that see the need for this product, we can talk about that. A little bit later, but as always, we like to start with basics. What is leadership? What does that word bring to mind for you?

00:02:51 - Speaker 2: I’d probably say creating an environment where the team achieves success. Now, you can unpack every word in there and it would be a whole podcast in itself, but I think the main idea there is that ultimately you’re accountable for results, that’s why you’re there, and you can’t do it directly, so you have to build the team and create the environment such that it happens.

00:03:13 - Speaker 1: I suspect a lot of people who are successful at being leaders do come to it, not from the perspective of, I just wanted to grow up and be the boss, you know, as a kid I always dreamed of being the one in the corner office or something. I don’t think that happens too much, but rather that you have some end you want to achieve, something you want to do in the world, and in the process of trying to do whatever that thing is, you realize, oh, I can’t do this alone. I need the help of others, and then that leads you to attracting those others to try to help you with that, and that of course leads you into team building and pretty soon you find yourself in this role of a leader.

Another piece of your definition here is the team, and I think implicit in that is the assumption that there is a team, right? And that’s not something that comes from nowhere. I mean, maybe you get hired into some kind of leadership or management role and you inherit a team.

But at least in my thinking, kind of coming from the more entrepreneurial perspective, or even if you are hired into a role, you’re often expected to build a team. And so essentially the pragmatically we can say hiring, but even more broadly, you can say the identifying what kind of people you need to achieve your ends, figuring out where to find those people, figuring out how to attract them, you know, what do you have to offer them that would make them want to join up with whatever it is you’re trying to do and Help you achieve the end, and then the onboarding process, as we talked about in our hiring episode, which is a way bigger deal than a lot of people make it. You don’t just hire someone and then they’re suddenly a fully functioning member of the team. There’s this long process that could take many, many months or even up to a year, I think, where someone can find their place and brings their unique skills to the team in a way that Enhances it, and more than offsets the cost of just having one more person around that needs to be in the loop communication wise, as well as the actual just cost of their salary or fee or whatever.

00:05:11 - Speaker 2: Yes, recruiting team is perhaps the most important aspect of leadership, especially in our domain, and I think that also leads into the ongoing personnel management. There’s a great document called the Netflix Culture deck, which we definitely linked to, and one of the insights from that was that. The things that your company values is not what you put on the plaque in the lobby. It’s what you hire for, it’s what you promote, it’s what you reward, and as a leader, you’re gonna be doing a lot of that and therefore creating and disseminating what are in fact the values of the organization. So by that channel and by other channels, I think setting the values of the group is very important.

00:05:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would list setting vision and values as one of the top jobs of a leader.

There’s obviously many leaders in an organization, particularly as it grows, but here, if we think of a small team, you know, something like the Muse team, for example, that, you know, less than 10 people, there’s probably sort of one person who’s mainly responsible for sort of leading the overall thing, and In that case, yeah, the setting of the vision and the values, the ongoing understanding of the values, which, as you said, are less what you write down or claim are your values and more what you live every day, and it’s partially determining what those are, which sometimes flows out initially from kind of some of the personal values of the founders. Obviously the vision is something that evolves over time as you get better understanding of the problem and work the idea maze.

00:06:41 - Speaker 2: And this matter of vision is very interesting to me.

I think there’s a piece of vision, which is setting out someplace in the distant future, like you go and you sit and you think real hard and, OK, this is where we should be.

That’s kind of the easy part of vision.

I find that the harder part, and where the rubber really meets the road is conviction and belief. It’s actually incredibly hard to believe in something for the amount of time and the amount of work it takes to accomplish great things. Because if you don’t believe in it, why shouldn’t anyone else? So there’s a lot of, basically emotional work you gotta do to get out there and put yourself out there and put your beliefs out there in front of the team.

00:07:19 - Speaker 1: Believing and especially believing in something that is in the beginning, a true article of faith, something you believe in, but you really have no evidence for it, and part of what you’re doing in the entrepreneurial journey is creating that evidence.

And we talked about this with Mario from the generalists when he was on the podcast. We’re talking about narrative and part of the job of a leader, especially a CEO is to create a narrative that captures that vision that is a dream, but an inspiring dream and feels achievable, and there’s a version of that that can become, you know, we’re talking here about faith and belief and narratives and all this starts to sound, you know, a little bit like cult leader like and indeed you can go off the deep end with that, and that is how you get some of these maybe bad examples of companies that seem to suck up all these resources and build this big internal culture of what turns out to be pretty false belief around some cult of personality. That’s like a far extreme, maybe failure case, but there’s a middle ground where you take a visionary, you know, take a Central, kind of almost mythological figure in our field now, which is Steve Jobs, and he would create that reality distortion field, tell that big story, inspire people, and then be able to make that thing come true that seemed impossible at the start.

The balanced version of that is the belief, the faith, believing in front of the team, believing in front of the outside world and especially doing that when the going gets rough. It’s easy to believe in time when things are going well and everything’s up into the right. It’s harder to do that when you’re struggling for some reason or other, and there’s always moments of struggle in every company’s story.

00:09:00 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think it’s also easy to have conviction in a way that’s basically a fantasy. And again, we come back to the importance of results and accountability.

The real reason it’s important is that the variance in human performance and achievement. Potential is enormous, and often people don’t realize it.

Perhaps it’s because they’ve never seen it, they’ve never had anyone that believed they could achieve at a higher level, and the responsibility with vision and belief and foresight is believing that the team can operate at a higher level, and then seeing that they do, in fact, achieve that level.

You gotta do both parts, right? It’s not enough just to say, you know, I believe we can do amazing things. Well, sure, don’t we all? But it’s taking the team there and really achieving it.

OK, well, let’s pull out Adam Wiggins trick here and refer to one of the items from your crou lessons for leadership. I think the document was pull link to it. But one of the things that I remember was make it concrete. So, let’s talk about some concrete leaders that you’ve looked up to or learned from.

00:09:57 - Speaker 1: Well, certainly offhand, I think of people who have been leaders to me, which includes someone like Byron Sebastian, who we hired to be the CEO at Hiroku, and I learned a lot from someone like Ida Tin, who’s the founder and CEO of Clue, and, you know, these were both people that just inspired you, but also made you feel like they personally cared about you because in fact, they did.

And they did for everyone that was on the team, and made it possible for me to do great, great work with under the umbrella of the leadership they were providing.

But I think it’s interesting here to look at maybe public cases, people who are famous enough or maybe just got around to writing their autobiographies that you can sort of reference. We’ve mentioned Steve Jobs already. Bill Gates is another, obviously many folks have questions about maybe some of the ruthlessness he exhibited back in his Microsoft days, but you know, each in their own way, Gates and Jobs, maybe they had some.

Problems with being a little too tyrannical in their own way, but this incredible drive, the vision, the unwillingness to compromise and shaped the computing industry of their eras in their own vision of how they thought things could be better, you know, Bill Gates believed in a computer on every desk and he achieved that, and Steve Jobs put a computer in everyone’s pocket and made design a household word. But those are sort of obvious cases.

I was just flipping through some of the Books I’ve read, particular biographies or autobiographies, and it’s interesting to look at folks maybe outside the tech field as well. One that comes to mind right away is Ruth Handler. She co-founded Mattel, the toy company, and invented the Barbie doll, and also did other entrepreneurial things in her career, but obviously that was the big success, and there’s an excellent biography about her called Barbie and Ruth, the story of the world’s most famous doll, I’ll link that in the show notes. That is a good example of someone who, I guess maybe more an entrepreneurial leader who’s someone who looked at the toy industry as it existed at the time, looked at the dolls that kids, especially little girls were playing with and said, I think there’s a better way here and ended up not only inventing a new product, but founding a whole company around that and that, you know, company went on to essentially change the, the whole industry to match that vision for that better way.

Some other examples there are Bill Walsh, who’s, I think, a coach of some MA football team, and he wrote a book called The Score Takes Care of Itself and the Philosophy of Leadership, lots of interesting stuff in there. That’s kind of what we’ve been talking about already, setting vision and values, you know, we came into kind of a struggling team. And did a bunch of things there in terms of setting a new precedent for how they would collaborate together and what kind of standards they would have, many of which was unrelated to, seemed unrelated directly to just playing the sport. A lot of it was about how they hired people, how they kept their facilities, how they treated each other, that sort of thing. So maybe that comes back to your point about kind of environments.

And then the last one I’ll name is, it’s actually more of a book that covered a few different folks in the television industry, which is called Difficult Men, and this is about showrunners, which showrunners are sort of leaders of these within the media industry, but they’re not like film directors, which are sort of these, you know, one off two hour things and they’re not. Directors of individual episodes, they are owners of these big epic stories like I think a few that were profiled here is like The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, and these are long, long projects with big teams, lots of writers, lots of directors, etc. but of course they’re quite a bit more involved at every level compared to conventional TV. It’s very interesting to read about how they do things and actually one of my takeaways from that book was, and indeed is in the title there is that people with strong vision can often also be very difficult.

In fact, they can be, again, I used the word tyrant earlier, I think that people often use that to talk about Steve Jobs style and you see a lot of that with these folks. Now, one exception I do want to point out there is the showrunner from Breaking Bad, who apparently was kind of the sweetest, kindest person and ran the show there and all of that without all of that kind of classic intense boss stuff, which I like that a lot because it shows it can be done and there’s probably a conventional, probably pretty masculine way of kind of leading that is sometimes based on intimidation and I don’t know, various traits that I find not that compelling. But in any case, these TV shows, which are huge artistic efforts, big budgets to manage and over a very long period of time, right, like something goes for 78 seasons, there’s obviously all the build up before that, pilot episodes and things like that. And so, yeah, I don’t know if it’s quite right to say that I look up to any one of these showrunners specifically or see them as Great role models, but just that there’s good patterns across them. These are people who managed to make something unique in the world through organizing a lot of resources and people, which is something I find inspiring.

00:15:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that domain is incredibly rich, TV and movies, because it’s one where there’s this very complex multidisciplinary, creative, high risk project, and there aren’t that many great analogies, I think, to software development.

It’s kind of a weird thing, but perhaps actually the closest is making a movie or a TV series. So I think there’s a lot we can learn from those domains.

And by the way, This is a pet peeve of mine, you know, people always say, oh, you can’t estimate a software project. There’s no way to know if it will ever, you know, work or when it will be done, you know, you can’t say anything about any of that. I don’t know, man, people estimate complete movies with thousands of people literally filmed all over the world. I don’t know. I sometimes I don’t believe you when you say you can’t estimate a 5 person software project.

00:15:51 - Speaker 1: Do you have anyone that either you’ve worked with personally or is a more public figure, like one of the ones I’ve named there that you find inspiring or anti-examples, people you think that are not effective leaders or have traits that you think are counterproductive.

00:16:07 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’ve certainly worked with a lot of different leaders in my times and feel like I’m developing notions based on those experiences that I try to give things more time and distance before I really weigh in. But what I’ll mention is Peter Van Hartenburgh at the lab. I’ve worked with Peter in several different domains, and he’s someone who’s just like a magician with getting the right team together and getting that alchemy happening. And I don’t know how he does it. And frankly, it’s often pretty messy. Leaders have different styles, but man, somehow people show up and they start doing amazing stuff. It’s really amazing to watch.

00:16:40 - Speaker 1: Yeah, Peter the great one, he comes to mind for me as well, and also to your point about styles, he and I could not be more different.

I’m all about like structure and clarity and so on, and he has this more, you know, warm, but also kind of loose and flowing approach, and indeed we have together been in kind of like co-leadership positions, maybe I’m, you know, leading on the product and design side and he’s more leading. Engineering team to take one example, and there’s ways those styles don’t really fit together, but then when I’m just watching him do his thing and see the results that come out, it’s just undeniable that he’s got something that really works, even though it’s kind of a mystery to me because I come at it from such a different perspective.

00:17:22 - Speaker 2: And I also look a lot to history. I feel like in the case of historical figures, we have more distance and perspective.

Often there’s a lot more data, and because the stakes were often so high, often indeed existential, it really lays everything bare, right? Like there’s no excuses, there’s no ifs ands or buts, there’s no mitigating factors, you know, kind of it is what it is, and it’s settled on the world stage and that’s that.

Whereas, you know, if you’re a leader at a big company, is what you’re doing working well because the company is doing well or, you know, whatever, it’s kind of hard to tell. You need more time and perspective and distance. So one example for me is George Washington, who is an incredible example of, well, a personal character, but also B, this idea of vision and belief, you know, believing that you’re going to create a country contrary to the global superpower and, you know, fight a revolutionary war with farmers and merchants, it’s just an incredible story.

00:18:21 - Speaker 1: And one of the things I love about the Washington example as well is he did what was needed in the moment, right? There was fighting a war, but when the war was over, he didn’t try to continue that because he was pretty good at being a general. He moved into a new kind of leadership position, which was being the president of a young nation and trying to preside over building up a government and building up good processes for this new democracy.

Something I at least aspire to do in my own.

Kind of career as a team lead, which is do what the situation demands, do rise to the moment of what this exact team, this exact company or organization or situation calls for, which often means doing things way outside my comfort zone or having to educate myself about stuff that I have not done in the past, and it would be easier to stick to a thing I know, a skill set I already have, but that’s not what’s really needed in the situation.

00:19:18 - Speaker 2: Another reason that I like to look to history, is that I feel like much of leadership is made in the small details, and unfortunately, we don’t have the small details, we don’t have access to the small details for most contemporary leadership cases. Like the CEO of Microsoft, you know, we don’t really know very much about how he operates unless perhaps you work directly with him at Microsoft.

But if you go back to the historical examples, we have, you know, basically all their papers, we’ve triangulated massively. There’s all these different angles that we have on it. We’ve collected all the accounts and you get a richer sense of how they operated day to day.

So it’s not about just making a few big decisions and that’s it, even though when you zoom out, you’re seeing this huge global event. It’s really about the individual interactions you have each day, you’re hiring and firing decisions, who you promote, who you don’t, you know, how you motivate the one guy who’s struggling.

That’s the really rich texture that I think you need to be able to develop a good sense of leadership. And unless you’re lucky to have a few of those in your life, which I think to varying extent, we’ve been lucky to have that, but there’s this, this incredibly rich historical bounty that we have if we’re willing to go back and look at it.

00:20:26 - Speaker 1: Now going back to a word I think you’ve used a couple times here so far is accountability. I feel like that’s an important one to zoom in on. What does accountability mean in the context of the leader’s job?

00:20:40 - Speaker 2: I think it ultimately means that your success is measured by whether your team achieves the goals that you set out to accomplish. And what’s tough about that is that that being accomplished or not is going to be a function of all the work that the individual people on the team do. So you basically, you’re not directly pulling these levers, that would be responsibility in the management language, right? Like you’re the person actually doing the frontline work, but you still need to be accountable for the results. The sum of all that happens rolls up to you.

00:21:11 - Speaker 1: Roll up is a good word for it, because I think the accountability or holding the organization, the team accountable is a combination of the leader themselves feeling accountable for the overall results, separate from any individual domain that a person might be responsible for, and that includes we just don’t have someone that owns a particular domain, that’s a big gap for us, and we need to do something about that because you’re accountable for what’s there overall.

But then there’s also a holding people on the team accountable, and hopefully the team holds itself accountable.

Individuals do, and they make commitments to each other and want to keep that commitment in terms of what they’re going to deliver and so forth.

But I think the leader’s job is to be accountable themselves, and maybe that somehow goes up to, you know, if you’ve got a board of directors or shareholders or something like that, but in the end, it probably boils down to also just like, if your company fails, you know, that was fundamentally, that was the leader.

Failing more than anyone else, but then that also gets echoed back into holding team members accountable, or if you have whole teams that are sort of under your, again, umbrella of leadership that you’re saying like, OK, look, I don’t necessarily know every detail about how you do your work. I trust that you know your skill and your craft better than I do or ever.

Well, but look, we need to deliver X and here’s the resources we have to do that. And if you don’t think we can accomplish that, we need to come up with a different plan, for example, and then kind of keeping again coming back to that, repeating yourself and the reminders, not just forgetting about it, but coming back to it to say, OK, how are we doing on this?

00:22:50 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think there’s a related idea in there of standards. I think an important role of a leader is setting the level of standards within an organization and holding the team to that, and it’s not as easy as it sounds because, of course, we would like to have infinitely high standards and to see.

Everyone reaching them, but what happens is if you set the standards too high, that is, you know, of course, if they’re not possible to accomplish, or it’s just the team members don’t believe they can do it, or they don’t feel like they have the support to do it, or they don’t feel like they’re gonna be rewarded if they do do it.

Not only are you not reaching the level that you had set as a leader, you’ve lost credibility. So, You need to find the right balance of raising the standards such that the performance of the organization increases but not trying to raise it so high that you detach from reality.

Again, I think this is so important in our domain because the level of variance is enormous, and I think people still, even though we have now several decades of experience and Making software. I think people still underestimate a lot, but it’s possible, how fast it’s possible to move, how high quality the software can be, how fast it can be, how reliable it can be, and so on. And so I still think there’s a lot of work left to be done as leaders in this area.

00:24:05 - Speaker 1: Um, one example that I read just recently is Patrick McKenzie and his nonprofit Vaccinate CA, which was basically a kind of information website for availability of vaccines first in California and later in the rest of the United States during our recent pandemic, and he wrote up a in his His usual sharp and humorous style, the full story of their experience and spinning up this nonprofit, the work that they did, and then eventually shutting down when they weren’t needed anymore. But that concept of what’s possible and what standards we hold ourselves to, I feel like permeated the story because there it really was about speed. And they’re doing kind of like a low tech, fast, but accurate thing that would ultimately result in their organization’s mission, which was to get more shots in arms. And so Patrick as a leader in this case, was holding his organization to the standard of speed because that was just everything in this case, getting this information, getting accurate information out to people as quickly as possible, getting the website built and the infrastructure that went with it. And that that sort of was in contrast to what, for example, is pretty commonplace in, let’s say government organization or even government contractors who are used to long cycles and a lot of process, and he came in and said, no, what’s important here is to do it quickly, and holding his team to that standard through a set of sort of practices allowed them to accomplish things that no one else could.

But importantly there, and I think in most cases, as you said, it’s the trade-off of what standard are we holding ourselves to in the context of how that helps us achieve our mission. It’s not that we want to, for example, make the most beautiful design possible just because, just because we want the highest possible standard. There needs to be some reason, something we accomplish with a lot of craft put into the design, or for another organization, it might be. A beautiful design doesn’t matter very much, and we hold ourselves to high standards on other things. For example, safety might be something that an airline wants to hold themselves to a very high standard for. So I think it has to be set the standards in a way that fit with the reality of the world, but also the mission of the company and what you’re trying to accomplish and what you’re trying to deliver. Well, maybe now would be a good moment to mention why this topic is on my mind to begin with, which is our team has been working on our new product Muse for Teams, and part of what we’ve done in this alpha program is we have a survey where people can essentially fill it out and describe what they do, what their team is like, and how they idea today and so forth and what their frustrations are, and We didn’t really know what kind of people were going to answer that survey, and indeed we’ve had quite a wide mix, just similar to the new user base, architects, doctors, many students, many professors or other people in the academic space. But one pattern I think that we’ve seen quite a lot of is team leads signing up, and this is interesting because it seems that the problem of, let’s say, a shared collaborative whiteboard or shared documents generally to be a space for a team to idea is something that is a problem that team leads are just Very intimately familiar with, they feel this pain most directly, maybe more than the individuals on the team, and that caused me to be kind of reflecting that, OK, well, why is that? And maybe that’s not a coincidence, right? Part of why I’m driven to build this product is I’m also a team lead, and something that I consider a key part of that job is Yeah, manager speak for this would be alignment, you know, getting everyone on the same page or the basic idea that you can bring together a bunch of amazing craftspeople, but if you don’t agree on what you’re building and what you’re doing here and a direction and you have a meeting and you talk about it, but it’s kind of like subtly wrong and then everyone goes off to their individual things and they’re building stuff. And a week later, a month later, whatever you try to put it together or you come back and look at it and realize you just had all these false misaligned, mismatched assumptions about what you’re really doing there and then that slows everything down and people are demoralized and work has to be undone and so forth, and that my experience as a team lead is that If your team is aligned going into a project, you get this incredible execution. It’s fun to do, you know, maybe hard work, but you’re all kind of rowing in the same direction. You’re seeing those results when you put the pieces together, they’re all harmonious, and I think this is something where the historic solution to this called it alignment problem is these analog tools, right? We get together in front of the whiteboard and we talk about it, we go to the conference room, you know, maybe on a bigger scale, you got the all hands or whatever. But then when you come to remote work, OK, now it’s harder to take advantage of some of those, and I think this is where you have shared documents, you know, I got big into Google Docs basically once I got more into remote teams because that could be a kind of like internal memo. I’ve used email for that, that sort of thing in the past, maybe Slack to some extent or some of that, but I think there’s really nothing like a more kind of free form ideation space, and that indeed seems to be what folks who are Filling out our survey, who are founders or CEOs, particularly of small to mid-size teams, are seeing is that OK, I now have this remote team, we have these time zone differences, we do have all these collaboration tools and different kinds of shared documents, but none of them quite have that same flexibility and kind of all encompassing aspect that you can get out of just physical ideation tools. And as a result, that can be a real impairment for remote team to execute well, and again that moving more slowly and undoing work and frustration as people feel like the pieces don’t fit together. I found that very interesting. I’m curious how you see all that.

00:30:18 - Speaker 2: So we talked a while back about this book called Sketching User Experiences, and one of the key ideas from that book was that the medium that you choose to work in, it sort of tunes your wavelengths that you’re listening into and operating on. So, if you have a very precise medium, you think very precisely and you might therefore lose the bigger picture. If you have an extremely messy medium, you might not get concrete enough. And there’s an important middle there, which he called sketching, which has the benefit of being concreteness, but it’s not about being pixel perfect. And so, one of the original ideas with Muse was that you needed the same thing for, well, ideas, for creative thinking, for planning. It wasn’t super linear, like a text document, it wasn’t. Super mechanical, like a Gantt chart, but it also captured the richness of thinking that people and teams have, it’s multimedia and so on. And so, one of the things we’re hearing from team leads is that According to the medium that they choose, that tends to tune the thinking of the team.

So if a team jumps right into Figma, for example, they’re tuned to think about pixels and what’s the radius of this curve and is the shadow rate, or if you jump right into Git and GitHub, you’re thinking, what’s the name of this function be, and so on. Whereas if you center the team around, you know, traditionally it would have been a whiteboard. OK, they’re stepping back a little bit, they’re thinking a little bit more expansively. They’re not worried too much about the details, but it does need to be concrete enough so that you can see where the boxes and arrows are and so forth. So I think the muse does help teams idea on the proper wavelength, if you will, for when you’re brainstorming and forming new ideas and starting to anneal plans together.

00:32:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the sketching user experiences book, which is Bill Buxton, if I’m not mistaken, I’ll link that in the show notes. That’s a great one, a little rambly in a way, but lots of good ideas in it, and he also talks about a sketch as being, it’s not about being a drawing specifically, although it often is, and more that it is a thing that proximates the final shape. So it’s cheap to make, so you can make a lot of them and compare them, but it is, as you said, still concrete and you can look at it and discuss it.

And another important quality of the sketch is that it’s kind of vague, which is good in the sense that it invites a lot of interpretations, so you can have this kind of ideation experience, particularly between two or more people where you think, OK, here’s kind of what I’m thinking and you sketch it in whatever medium you’re using and someone looks at that and says, oh yeah, I see that that would solve the problem this way. You say, oh, no, no, that’s not what I was thinking. But wait, now that I kind of look at it that way too, well, that’s an interesting idea. So like, The sort of open to interpretation aspect of it serves as a launching off point for the kind of divergent thinking that you should be doing when you’re in the early phases of a project.

00:33:15 - Speaker 2: And that reminds me of another important aspect of ideas and plans is that it’s not just about the final artifacts.

It’s about working through it, but I have one called chewing, and if you’re chewing an idea or a plan together as a team, you’ve, well, digested it better to continue with the analogy, right? Like everyone has a better sense of what’s going on, they feel more invested in it. They’re more aware of the trade-offs that you sort of traverse together and things like that.

And so that’s part of the vision with use for teams being multiplayer is that instead of having a team lead, write up a document. And cast it about on the team and everyone going from there, it’s more a matter of the team is building this together incrementally, and not only do they share the artifacts at the end, they share the experience of having worked on it, and are therefore more invested in the final result.

00:34:07 - Speaker 1: And that highlights something that was a major piece of learning for me in my leadership career, which is working through the problem, you know, you start with all the inputs and you think about all the constraints and the opportunities in front of you, and you eventually come up with a solution, which might be a plan of action, it might be a rough design or a vision, it might be specific kind of task assignments, and I would tend to think, OK, well, let me bring this.

To the team that I’m working with, because this is the plan, but actually that doesn’t work very well. You need to make the plan together, because otherwise, the people don’t feel shared ownership. They weren’t there for the process of seeing why we’re doing exactly what we’re doing. And in many cases, all the different disciplines you may have on your team and the different perspectives, those need to be folded in.

Now, it’s not necessarily designed by committee, there does still need to be kind of a central organizing. single mind that can kind of look at everything and make sure it all fits together holistically, but you do need to take into account, you know, the classic example here would be if designers make a design without consulting with engineers, they’re gonna be unaware of both the limitations and the capability of the technology, and they’re gonna ask to be implemented maybe out of step with what’s possible with whatever technology they’re working with, just to take one kind of classic example.

So yeah, that process of planning together as a group.

And coming to that, like, this is our shared plan is immensely valuable, and I even resist the urge, you know, I like to think strategically, I like to think about what’s next after we finish this current work and What have we learned and how do we fold that into what our next step should be, but I’ve really learned that, you know, hold off a little bit, do it with the team because we need to all do it together, and it’s that experience of going through it together that is going to make it so that when you go to execute the plan, you can do that far better.

00:36:04 - Speaker 2: And I think the most effective version of this, by the way, isn’t all or nothing.

The weakest thing you could do is come up with a plan as an individual and cast it over the wall to the whole team. We understand that’s not very strong.

It’s slightly better, but still not very good to jump into a meeting with an entire large team and just start planning from scratch. And then end of the meeting, yes, also a mistake, a mistake, right? And so what actually needs to happen is there’s this very organic process. I use the analogy of the spiral, spiraling outward.

So typically, you start with some kernel of an idea, like you have this notion that the team should move in some direction, and then you go and you balance that idea off one or two of your close trusted advisors. These are people who you trust to, you know, give you candid feedback, but also kind of keep the idea private because you’re still in the process of nurturing it.

And then you might take that idea which is starting to take basic shape and discuss it with your leadership team. And you do some more shaping there, you gather some more data points, and then you might have each of those managers do a brainstorming session with their team and then take the results back to you.

And then you might have, you know, some of the managers talk to each other and then you might develop a draft plan and go message test that with a handful of individual people on the team. And then you might send it out to the whole group, right? This is just one example of how a typical kind of communication development and dissemination process might happen. It has many steps with different size groups with different configurations. So one of the original ideas with Muse was to try to facilitate that better and to create this environment where you can have things that are moving between private, semi-public and public and back, and along the way, accreting information.

00:37:47 - Speaker 1: Indeed, and I feel that also touches on the kind of synchronous versus asynchronous discussion we had in our remote work podcast and certainly has come up a lot on the news for Teams product, which is people have the question, is this mainly for synchronous? We’re all on a call together and we can see our cursors flying around, or is it mainly for asynchronous, we’re gonna Send documents back and forth to each other, and I think some of each is the right answer. I think you get different kinds of ideas, different kinds of consensus and buy-in from each of these, but yeah, I think it’s too, I don’t know, laborious, probably wasteful of time, but also for me as an introvert, I just need time and space to think on my own, and I think many folks.

It’s too much to try to kind of think in a group.

Now you could bring ideas together and that’s where if you’ve all prepared a bit within the new world, you created boards. We do this exact thing, especially for really significant, you know, bigger planning meetings or just discussions about our future, where we say, look, you should think about this on your own if you can, if you can find the time, you know, write up your thoughts, which is could be just. of bullet points, but it could be a really extensive board. We’ll get all those boards, those kind of individual boards together on one shared board, and then we can go through it a bit synchronously and get to shared understanding and hopefully synthesize all of this together into our best solution.

So I think there’s really places for both of those in the ideal work process from my perspective.

Well, maybe a good place to end would be books or other resources that have been helpful to us and discovering our own path to leadership and what works well on teams. I think you’ve already mentioned the Netflix culture deck, I’ve mentioned a few books that I’ll link in the show notes. Do you have any that you think we should mention for our listeners?

00:39:37 - Speaker 2: I’d actually re-emphasize the history idea. I think it’s just incredibly valuable.

And if I was to give concrete advice, it would be to pick some event or time period that you’re really interested in and try to read a half dozen or a dozen books on that same topic, because again, it’s all about getting that richness of Of historical perspectives and angles and information and really understanding the texture of the day to day decisions.

And you can learn a lot of the same things from different periods because people have been and are the same. So just find one that you’re really interested in would be up for reading a dozen books and go for it. If I was to pick some more classic management books, the number one book that I recommend to new managers is Slack. I almost feel like it’s mistitled.

00:40:21 - Speaker 1: I mean, the core thesis of the book is I wanted to briefly interject to point out that this book predates Slack, the software product and is unrelated to it, and instead is about the concept of slack in the system in terms of making your team work at 100% efficiency means there’s no slack in the system and that has all kinds of negative downstream consequences for your business, even besides tired and burned out workers.

00:40:44 - Speaker 2: And if I was to give a bit of an oddball recommendation, I would say principles of product development flow. This is a highly analytical book. It’s a cutheoretic analysis of project management, which I know is quite a ways from what we’ve been talking about today, but there are a lot of important ideas, especially for people who work in engineering type domains. So if you have any affinity at all for that sort of stuff, I really highly recommend it. What about you, Adam?

00:41:10 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think for me I get the most value out of stories, autobiographical or biographical accounts of the lives of leaders or sometimes teams in a particular high stakes situation.

So certainly when you’re talking about history, I think of, I’ve read biographies of Abraham Lincoln, for example, and the challenges of keeping the nation together and everything else going on during his. Presidency.

Another one I really like is about Catherine the Great, who was a really pretty visionary and forward thinking leader for Russia at the time and established a lot of precedents, including writing a super long manifesto about sort of some perspective on making Russia into something a step closer to a modern liberal democracy, which is quite interesting.

So yeah, when you read these stories, they’re not telling you, hey, Lincoln. was effective because of this thing or Catherine did a good job because of this thing and therefore that’s a lesson you should apply to your leadership.

It’s more, I don’t know, just examples and then those may or may not be directly applicable to what you do, but then you can bring those stories to mind sometimes if you find yourself in a dilemma or a circumstance that resembles in some way. What they went through and think about these examples you’ve seen and how they turned out for them and then think, OK, what can I learn from that? How can I apply that to my specific circumstance, my specific leadership style? And I think that tends to work better, or just be more memorable for me maybe than something that’s a little more prescriptive or abstract.

But that said, something a little bit more pragmatic. There are the classic management books, take it, for example, high output Management by Andy Grove or Management by Peter Drucker.

Although that actually leads me to maybe a final question here, Mark, which is, do you think that leadership and management are synonymous, essentially two words for the same thing, or do they represent different disciplines?

00:43:11 - Speaker 2: I think they’re very closely related. I think management done well, is just a superset of leadership. Now, when people use these two words, they’re often saying management in such a tone that they’re quite dismissive of it and think perhaps these circles do not overlap at all. And, you know, perhaps it’s valid based on their experience with managers, but I think management done well, includes all the aspects of leadership that we discussed, plus you necessarily have the people responsibility. What about you?

00:43:39 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I really was curious about this and thinking about how we would cover this topic. I think of it as a Venn diagram to the point of your circles, and there’s quite a bit of overlap, but they aren’t necessarily quite the same thing. I think of leadership as more of forging a new path, and I think of management as something that’s more continuing or having something operate smoothly.

But I think it’s wrong to think that those can be completely separated or unrelated because so much of keeping, whether it’s a business or a property or anything else, kind of thriving is some element of change, some element of reinvention, so there needs to be some forging a new path.

If nothing else, just cause the world is changing around you and you need to keep up with that. And similarly, I think earlier in my career, I, as an entrepreneur, I was so focused on the forge a new path side of things that I didn’t give enough weight and importance to the management side, which includes people management, but also includes Yeah, just what it takes to run a business or keep your offices open or that sort of thing. There is this very pragmatic operating element that is part of what I think of it as management and you can’t really build a thing and lead it without some portion of that. So yeah, I don’t know if that’s enough to do a whole podcast on management in the future or maybe the two are So bound up that it’s not helpful to differentiate between them. But for me, I think it was somewhat of an epiphany moment to realize that there is this discipline called management that it is, as you said, maybe it’s a super set of leadership or maybe it’s just an overlapping piece, and indeed that name or term or concept appears in product management, for example, and I think there’s a Subtle meaning to that that is useful to understand, at least for me, when I did start to understand it, also greatly expanded my understanding of what it means to be a leader and how I wanted to grow in my career. So, yeah, it’s a tricky one.

00:45:44 - Speaker 2: Flipping this around, I think it’s the case that one doesn’t need to be a manager to be a leader. Perhaps that’s a good message to close up the podcast with, but this is something that anyone can step up and do. And indeed, it’s the nature of leadership that people aren’t going to give that to you, something that you have to take on yourself and demonstrate initiatives going back to one of our very first points about vision and belief and conviction.

00:46:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, to me, that’s actually one of the best moments on a team is when someone sort of unexpected steps up, takes ownership of something, takes the lead on something, and they don’t need to be the boss, and they don’t need to have vested authority. They just see a problem, see an opportunity for things to be better on the team and find a way to lead.

In the direction of how that can be improved, and seeing that happen, spontaneously seeing that person grow into whatever that leadership moment is for them is, to me, it’s one of the best parts of being on a team and doing the work we do. Well, let’s wrap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. Join us in Discord to discuss this episode with me, Mark, and our community, the links in the show notes. You can also follow us on Twitter at MA HQ, and Mark, thanks for all the leadership you’ve shown in all the various teams we’ve been on together over the years.

00:47:02 - Speaker 2: Right on, well, learned a lot for you, Adam.