• endless meetings

• wrongfooted by unexpected demands or changing priorities

• wasted work, doing things twice, repairs or rework

• shuttling back and forth to get approvals from separate gateways

Every organisation has these issues, and popular frameworks like Agile et al were created in part to address it.

This is also why the obsession with metrics and data exists - getting people the information they need in a distributed way allows for faster and more targeted responses to change.

Today I am going to share two of my most powerful, proprietary frameworks for getting an organisation to act in concert. Nailing these will solve 80% of this friction and make your communication dramatically more effective.

This works up to organisations of, say, 500 people in a primary geography. It gets more complicated in a fully geographic org, and I’ll talk about tools and techniques for that in a future post.

Framework #1: The Information Network (1-to-few)

An organisation is an information network. Every person in your company is a node and these people connect to other nodes (coworkers, bosses, reports, peers in other functions, etc).

Every person has an information value. We’ll call this a score out of 10, where 10 is highly informed, and 0 for no relevant information.

If we just spoke, your information value will be 10/10, i.e. you will have the freshest and most relevant context (assuming that I shared any!).

Depending on how fast your organisation changes, the relevance of your information decays quickly. In a few days you might be 8/10, a few days after that it might be 5, and in a few weeks your ability to do your job will be seriously impaired without new information.

Every person requires accurate, relevant, and timely information to do their job well. When information becomes old and out of date, this is where wasted work happens - i.e. something changed and nobody told me.

For sure there is a risk of communicating too much information and muddying the focus, but that’s a skill issue - that problem is more about how you deliver the information.

It is much better to communicate too frequently than not frequently enough, and most organisations don’t do enough.

Your Job? Always Be Updating

Always update people you interact with and always prospect to update yourself. When you do this correctly, the organisation understands:

• What we are doing and why

• The bigger picture of what the company is trying to achieve, including commercial drivers

• The environment we are in and what might change

• Who to talk to for more information, or to share new learnings

A pleasant side effect is that, when you do this, you also quickly identify any teams that hoard information to protect their position.

Overall, this approach works very well for 1:few arrangements, for example a manager who speaks with maybe 15 people on a regular basis.

Company-wide communication needs a different approach.

Framework #2: The Story Loop (1-to-Many)

The simplest way to get a group of people to act in a coordinated way is to give them a story that makes sense and explains the actions you want them to take.

• People want to believe that they are part of something bigger than themselves.

• They want to believe that what they do is important and consequently,

• That they as individuals matter.

The easiest way to harness this energy is to place people within the story, and make sure that story is compelling enough that it solves for these human needs. Tell a story using Sean’s Proprietary Three-Step Framework™.

1. Here is where we are at. (Our current situation)

2. Here is where we are going to. (Our destination - the promised land)

3. Here is how we are going to get there. (Our plan for the journey)

4. Here is the latest update on our journey. (Optional - share info on ongoing basis)

This framework sets the context, provides the big picture story, and allows people to create their own meaning and mythology around their contribution.

Simple example:

1. Here is where we are at and why.

We had a bad year last year, as measured by metrics below our goals. The reason it was below our goals was because we had ABC difficulties attracting customers and saw existing customers leave for reasons 1234.

(This explains why we are here, and sets the stage for the changes that we need to make. It also communicates competence and shows that leadership knows what is happening in the org).

2. Here is where we are trying to get to.

We are trying to get $xxm target revenue and be reliably profitable, have great jobs, the business is easier to run, customers love us, and we are beating our competitors.

(This is the promised land - it should be large enough and appealing enough to be motivating, without overpromising or being so ambitious you are guaranteed to fall short).

3. Here is how we are going to get there.

This year, we are going to invest in new capabilities to do XYZ and retain customers. We are also going to explore conferences, partnerships and launch in one new market. We are going to stop doing XYZ because [reasons].

(This explains what is going to change. It builds off the groundwork you have already laid in points 1 and 2 - people understand where we are at, and why change is required. Now you can articulate the plan and the change).

The Reverse Simba™

If that sounds too abstract to you, the story loop is exactly like this.

Business doing well? “That’s the shadowy place over there Simba, we must never go there, we must maintain and strengthen our existing processes etc.”

Business not doing well? “We are in the shadowy place Simba, we must move towards the light - we need to do XYZ.”

Once you have those points laid out, repeat them frequently.

In a slow-moving organisation, you should be repeating this story weekly. In a fast-moving organisation, you should do it several times a day.

That’s it. It’s very simple. Hit people with this every week, at every meeting.

Here is where we are at. Here is where we are going. Here’s how we are going to get there. Here’s how this latest news relates.

Every time something changes? The regulator acted and now we have to stop selling one of our major products? Same thing.

• Here is where we are at.

• Here is where we are trying to get to.

• Here is how we are going to get there.

• Here is the newest information which is likely to change our plans, here’s what we need to do right now, expect more information in the near future.

The bottom line

If you want your organisation to move faster, waste less time, and feel more aligned, these two tools will get you 80% of the way there.

1. Keep every node in your information network updated.

2. Tell an evolving, compelling story that makes sense of the work.

NB. The purpose of this is not to become a storyteller. People always say the leader must be a storyteller and blah blah. That is nonsense. The story is a tool to harness intrinsic motivations and get people pointed in the right direction. There are many other methods; this one is mine.

Do this and you will have a drastically better-informed and more capable organisation - you’re welcome.

In a future post, I’ll look at how to tackle this for a global organisation, and simple automations to take the load off and scale communications without direct input.

Open invite: Let’s get lunch! Every Tuesday I have lunch with a new person I’ve met on the internet. If you’re in Sydney, let’s catch up.

You can send a message here or hit reply to the emails from Substack.

Culture is a competitive advantage to the extent it drives desirable behaviours. A company’s culture is ineffective if it does not do this, and it gets escalatingly more difficult to build and maintain culture as the organisation crosses ~30, ~100, ~1000 people.

A crucial point that organisations often overlook is whether the individuals selected for promotion are culture-carriers. This is something that gets talked about a lot but is very difficult to define because it varies by field and by firm.

In my opinion, a crystal-clear test if someone is ready to be a senior-level individual contributor is simply - do they cast the aura?

• Is the organisation perceptibly better through their presence even without direct contributions?

• If they left tomorrow, would the organization feel less capable, less clear, or less confident?

• Do people naturally turn to them - regardless of their title, but because they trust their judgment?

To succeed as a senior employee - think staff software engineer, VP investment banker, partner at a law firm, or similar - people must learn to have impact and influence that spreads beyond their own work. There are books on this - Staff Engineer’s Path is the one I read most recently, but they tend to be domain-specific and are a fairly plodding read.

Casting the aura is a simpler test, generalises across every organisation, and once you’ve seen it you can’t unsee it.

What is “The Aura”?

The aura is the idea that the organisation is noticeably better because you’re in it, and your colleagues are performing noticeably better simply because you’re around.

If the team is digging a hole and you’re digging a hole with them, you’re probably not casting the aura. If the team is digging a hole and you notice that they are about to hit a water line, and you show them where to find a map and grab a shovel to help them dig around it - before telling their boss that the team is doing smart work by using the map - you might be casting the aura.

It shows up in many different ways and is an advanced technique, idiosyncratic to the person casting it.

Why does The Aura need to be “cast”?

Any sufficiently powerful technology is indistinguishable from magic. I frame it this way because it forces people to think differently. If you are thinking that The Aura is a Specific Thing you can do, like yeah I’ll give some input on key decisions and then I’ll have The Aura, that is not correct and not how The Aura works, and it’s not sufficient for being great as a senior team member.

Getting this framing also helps avoid "moving goalpost syndrome". The classic behaviour of an organisation unsure about promoting a team member is to delay:

"Well you should have more input on key decisions." -> Ok I am having input on decisions, when promotion? "Well you should be more of a team player, and give more feedback." -> OK I am giving feedback and........."Well you need to have more influence" -> fuck me it's been 18 months already, they aren’t going to promote anyone anyway, this process is a sham

In this scenario, this person does not cast the aura and is instead pursuing the narrowly specific behaviours the organisation thinks it is looking for. This doesn't work. Organisations want a Gestalt whole in a senior employee. It's not about acquiring one or more additional skills; it's about operationalising the whole piece to be effective.

In other words - the aura must be cast, a little like Harry Potter but more like spectrum broadcast. It is not a technique or a pattern of behaviour you can imitate but more of a way of being - and people absolutely notice it when they see it.

One example is energy. What does your presence do to a room? Nothing? If you had to spread calm without saying a word, how would you do that?

This is handwavey bullshit?

Yeah but it’s facts dawg. If you want more tangibles, Chad GPT says people who cast the aura have:

• Clarity & Optimism – hearing their take on an issue makes it seem more solvable.

• Presence – Others feel more capable and secure because they’re here; they are steady and confident.

• High Standards – their actions pull others to a higher level. They inspire excellence.

• Context and Judgment – organisational memory and pattern recognition, helping teams avoid mistakes and focus on what matters.

Military literature is full of examples, as you’d expect. Caesar’s De Bello Gallico is a good read - this person sets the standard. It is not a coincidence that he was the senior-most individual contributor in his 4800-person organisation. Most business books overlook the organisational aspects of success; generally they focus on what happened in the organisation (big picture) rather than how each team contributed to the result.

Here is a real example

If you’ve read previous posts you’ll know I like to use examples from outside people’s experience. Bricklaying is a personal favourite - because we are not here to discuss the right way to lay bricks, but the generalisable principles that make a team of bricklayers effective - so this story is about a Roman centurion.

Read the below anecdote, as recorded by Julius Caesar. Pay attention to what you notice. Would you have promoted this person into a senior role? Why?

Here’s what I noticed:

• P. was in hospital for 5 days (low context, absent from decisions)

• Stuff starts going wrong, people panic

• Leaves hospital, doesn’t require permission to act (demonstrates initiative, commitment, outcome focus)

• Goes straight to the gate (demonstrates judgement; does exactly the right thing with no guidance or context)

• Peers follow him; my read is they were already looking around for leadership (demonstrates influence; the situation was already being acted on before explicit authority could be notified or arrive)

• Others in the area imitate his behaviour, begin acting correctly, and continue after he departs (sets the standard, inspires action by example even when no longer present)

Think of how the median manager would handle this situation. My suspicion is the typical formal manager would probably gather the team, conduct a short briefing, take them to the problem, and issue instructions. That’s fine and a great approach, but it’s slow in a crisis and it wasn’t necessary here because the team is well trained and has great senior employees.

P. Sextius Baculus is already a known quantity, which is why the team follow him. In fact, if you read the book, you will see Caesar call out his behaviour on three separate occasions, precisely because he wants the organisation to follow the example this man sets.

Casting the aura: More examples

Rege-Jean Page in the Dungeons & Dragons film is great at this. Watch the way other people watch him. Yeah, it's caricature, but there's a deeper truth to it. It’s interesting how he chose to convey it, because his character is literally supposed to have a holy aura that influences colleagues, thanks to his god’s divine powers.

The CEO in Margin Call casts the Aura, as does his protege Mr Sell-It-All-Today (Simon Baker). Kevin Spacey, noticeably, does not - but he switches it on for a few moments during the fire sale, and Paul Bettany lacks Aura completely (and complains about being passed over for promotion). Notice I did not say they are not skilled.

The main character of Tacitus’ Agricola is a people-manager, and an aura-caster. Outlaw Platoon by Sean Parnell describes why the Aura matters:

Our company’s weeks in training divided the men into cliques, and that created tension…personalities clashed, and some men didn’t give their full measure…. Those who appeared to measure up earned respect. Those who didn’t were regarded with distrust and became outsiders. An inner circle formed around the men who demonstrated they could handle anything thrown at them. They were men of character, and they became the core…. I was lucky; when a platoon coalesces around alpha males who lack character, bad things happen.

This is literally why medals exist; the wearer becomes a walking billboard, and now they have a reputation to live up to. Plus, it shows everybody else who to emulate. Promotions work much the same way in the workplace.

Bottom line:

Culture is a competitive advantage to the extent it drives desirable behaviours. Senior employees must make the organisation better both directly through contribution (frequently assessed) and indirectly through culture and standards (often overlooked).

Casting the aura is how you demonstrate you are one of these people, and looking for the aura is part of how you identify them.

Open invite: Let’s get lunch! Every Tuesday I have lunch with a new person I’ve met on the internet. If you’re in Sydney, let’s catch up.

You can send a message here or hit reply to the emails from Substack.

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Over the past 6 months I’ve met more than 40 managers, ranging from first timers to experienced professionals, to learn about their people management practices. All had a different view on it, typically informed by their local environment. Unsurprisingly, management quality was hugely variable and uneven both across and within organisations.

Unlike most other fields that have moved beyond a craftwork approach with modern frameworks, what I found is that people management is still basically artisanal, sometimes without even the apprenticeship. Pretty much 100% of the managers I have spoken with learned through a homebrew combination of books, observation, and learning by doing. For those with a clear approach, it came initially from a framework like Scrum which provides an objective “right way” but does nothing to alleviate the ambiguities of leading people well.

In this article I want to define what management is, how to manage, and where good management comes from.

Management is a force multiplier

The first thing to understand about Management is that it is a force multiplier. “Good management” creates no value in and of itself - what use are management skills without an organisation?

Management multiplies or divides an organisation’s commercial efforts, resulting in more or less value being created.

Management compounds

The second thing we need to understand is that management compounds. A well-managed organisation will become steadily, almost-imperceptibly more impactful until it dominates its niche. A poorly managed organisation will gradually become slower and slower until one day it simply stops; consumed by its own internal mechanisms.

As a result, it’s often hard to see the positive impact of improving management in the day to day, and over a given timeframe, management quality usually “doesn’t matter”.

Improving your management quality by “10%” will not increase profits by 10%. It will make your organisation more focused and easier to run, though, and make it much more plausible that you will grow profit.

Realistically the goal is to build a business so strong that “any idiot can run it, because sooner or later, one will”. Between now and then, it is enough to understand that management compounds and is a multiplier on your efforts.

What is Management?

So. What is this management thing and why do people struggle with it? Here is an example from Patty McCord’s “Powerful” of a small company trying to train its managers.

“We need better managers.” Cool what are you going to teach them? “Management.” Yeah, but what specifically? “…Managing.” OK but which aspect of management are they worst at? “Well there will be a full training program, of course.”

I’ll link another example here from the early days of Paypal, which was famous for having “no management”. Of course if you read the example, what you will see is actually a crystal clear and rigorously enforced approach to managing. (What Paypal was really trying to avoid is Bureaucracy, which is a technology for enforcing consistency, but that is a story for another time).

Why do companies suck at this? Often, they arrive at their definition of management by starting with the unit of work (e.g. running meetings, managing a budget) and then using that to define the job - which is completely backwards. Meetings are a tool that a manager can use to manage, they are not the output of a successful manager.

Defining Management:

Since 2019, I have reviewed a broad cross-section of the literature (well over 100 sources), and propose a new definition:

“Management is the craft of solving problems by applying and adding leverage to an organisation’s efforts.”

There are three components to this:

Applying Effort: We (the imperial We, the organisation) employ all these people, they must do useful things that add value instead of spinning their wheels doing easy things, things that don’t matter, pulling in opposing directions, etc etc. The easiest way to define “value” is “increase revenue/reduce costs” which I use in this article as shorthand, but obviously there are layers to this (e.g. “reduce the chance of being nuked by lawsuits”, “optimise working capital to free up cash for investment” and so on).

Adding Leverage: Managers typically produce less primary output and command a salary higher than an individual contributor (“IC”). Adding a manager to a team increases costs but value created does not necessarily increase (multiplier). Output goes down as the friction of operating an organisation at scale increases. Simplistically if you are a manager and you manage five people, they must be at least “20%” more effective (higher revenue/lower costs) simply to justify your salary before you start adding value.

In practice this usually means you must alleviate 20% of organisational decay (coordination & communication burden), but the idea is the same.

Solving Problems: The work done by the team must actually solve valuable problems (build the widget, sell the thing, reduce the risk, win the war, etc). The “what” of your role - the problem you solve - must be defined for your function. E.g. I am a sales manager; the problem I solve is making sure we are selling a lot of stuff at good margins. I am an operations manager, the problem I solve is making sure we process things quickly and with high accuracy. (Some people take issue with the word “problem” and prefer to phrase this as “pursuing opportunities”, and it could be framed this way if that works for you.)

The essence of management is: Applying Effort, Adding Leverage, Solving Problems.

How do we manage?

Now that we have defined What management is, How do we do it? At the end of the day, there are really only two ways to manage. Managers manage by:

A) Creating and maintaining positive feedback loops, and
B) Short-circuiting negative feedback loops.

Breaking that down further:

• A) Creating and reinforcing positive feedback loops. To give one example, performance management is a feedback loop process. We source and hire someone good who can add value, train them to get up to speed so that they can contribute more value faster, set a bar for performance and measure it, they do good work, value is created (higher revenue / lower costs), they are rewarded for performance, we move the performance bar higher, if we do this for everyone the organisation gets easier to run & more effective, we can become more ambitious and aim higher, etc → ∞ ad infinitum. The more the loop spins, the better the company gets.

• B) Short-circuiting negative feedback loops. In the inverse example, imagine we have someone who feels disrespected in their role. They become prickly and defensive, are difficult to deal with, people interact with them less, they are left out of discussions and receive information more slowly, their job gets harder, the quality of work that depends on their input reduces, outcomes deteriorate, they feel more disrespected, become pricklier, this ripples across the org and makes everyone else’s job harder → ∞ ad infinitum. The more the loop spins, the worse the company gets.

All of the things that people think managers do - making decisions, communicating, setting goals, managing performance, maintaining system/cultural integrity, budgets, hiring, quality control etc, are tools that fit into the above buckets. It is a bit like gardening; the tree must grow healthy and strong, but whether you should water it or spray for insects is a different question.

Having defined management, we can take it down a level into specific techniques people use to actually manage. Some examples:

• Meetings: A crisp meeting gets everyone on the same page, and makes sure we are all rowing in the same direction and not pulling against each other, i.e. we are Applying efforts to problems.

• Communicating: Regular updates share useful information, such as goals, changes to policy or circumstances. This allows us to focus our efforts and minimise the amount of rejection & rework, i.e. we are adding Leverage and Applying effort.

• Goals / Targets: These make it clear to everybody what good performance looks like. They help us Apply effort, stretch, and add Leverage.

• Budgets / Resource allocation: Understand how much money we have available, how much we are spending, and on what (i.e. a tool for Applying Efforts).

• Capital Allocation: Literally where do we Apply our efforts, what kind of return (Leverage) do we get on these, and can we increase this? Management is not capital allocation. Capital allocation is a tool a manager can use to manage.

Viewed like this it becomes clear that all the “things” you do as a manager are tools that either Apply Effort or Add Leverage, and either maintain/reinforce positive loops or short-circuit negative ones.

Yeah, but how do I actually manage?

I am going to give you another non-answer here. If you really want to know the mechanics of how to run a team on a day-to-day basis with an objectively right answer, then just go do a Scrum course or similar.

The true answer, in my view, is that a manager’s belief system determines how they manage. This is one of the least explicit parts of management that in my view causes the most conflict.

Here’s a simple example:

• leaders eat first; bosses are special, can work less hard and get special perks tied to their position (e.g. dedicated car space).

• leaders eat last; bosses are not special, should work as hard as their team, and not receive special perks tied to their position (use the carpark with everyone else).

Very few organisations will ever tell you “we bosses are way more important than you worker drones” but many organisations believe this, and this obviously influences the way that companies manage and their results - especially when they message the opposite.

Let’s look at another example:

• People are replaceable; people are cogs in a machine, we do not need to treat them with any special care, and if they leave, we can simply find another one to work for us.

• People are not replaceable; people are not cogs in a machine, they are unique and an untapped well of potential and we must do our part to help grow that potential for both our benefits.

What’s interesting with this example is that both are obviously true - people are replaceable cogs in a machine, AND people are a unique well of potential. However, most managers lean one way or the other in their beliefs, and this flows through and informs how they act as managers, how their team performs, and the types of people issues they have.

Managerial belief systems

Phrased differently, the way a manager manages - how and when they apply their tools, the types of problems they run into - is mostly determined by their belief system.

If you believe that people cannot think for themselves and must be told what to do, largely you will be proven correct! Consequently, the types of problems you will run into are being too busy/ having to control everything, and staff turnover/ finding low-initiative people who have the patience for micromanagement. You will run fewer meetings and issue many more instructions.

If you believe that people can think for themselves and can be trusted with information, autonomy, and decisions, generally you will also be proven correct! The problems you will deal with are coordinating & aligning activity, keeping people informed, and your absence of direct control over the system. You will hold many more meetings and issue fewer instructions.

A manager’s belief system determines how they manage and what types of problems they will encounter as managers.

While I’ve given binary examples here because they flow through easily into behaviours, I want to stay value-agnostic for the moment. This is not about choosing the “best” way to manage or telling you what not to do. Management is a choose-your-own-adventure book and there are few universally correct answers. The secret is that you literally get to choose the types of problems that you/your organisation will have.

Overall, what is most important is that the belief system is tailored to the context and that its owner can live with it. Every management book ever will tell you that people thrive with autonomy and not being micromanaged, but if I am an emergency room surgeon working on a patient who is about to die with some nurses I haven’t worked with before, probably I should be micromanaging! I need the team to do exactly what is required and when.

Good management comes from having a solid belief system for the context of the organisation you run.

Good management / bad management

Let me take you through a simplified belief system - mine - and then look at what good management looks like in this context. My experience is equity markets/communications & software product. While there are occasional catastrophes - we once had 50% of our revenue turned off overnight - it’s not an emergency room or a nuclear submarine.

If you work in a different field several of your beliefs will be different to mine:

• Business is a team sport. We are working together to create disproportionately more value than the sum of our individual efforts.

• It is possible to produce an average day’s work in much less than a day. Optimise for productivity in terms of impact per unit of output and reducing the barriers to creating output.

• To the extent possible, work should never just “be done” and shipped off to Narnia. Feedback loops are essential especially for internal outputs like decisions, communications, meetings, analysis, training, etc that do not receive market feedback.

• High trust is the backbone of an organisation. Actions increase or decrease trust, and this is a feedback loop like anything else.

• It is not about you; it is about the team and the organisation.

• You cannot control people; you must help them find what they need to succeed and trust them to do their best in the organisation’s best interests.

• Every person has potential and value. People live up or down to expectations and it is shockingly cruel to limit somebody else’s potential. Explicitly choose to believe that every person is capable of more and allow people to opt in or out.

• All people are flawed. We don’t have the right to expect perfection; we must expect best efforts and a commitment to improving. Feedback must be given quickly and ideally in a way that can be immediately applied.

• People go through phases. The organisation must be realistic about its place in the pantheon of individual needs & desires & integrate with these to the extent possible.

• As manager, you broadcast to a group of people. You must cultivate personal adequacy and humility because all your flaws and insecurities broadcast too.

• Management and leadership are intensely moral disciplines. To cast the aura, you must start from moral high ground, a position of merit, fairness, accountability, respect. You must care, be interested, and be motivated about the work and the people.

• Managers have disproportionate ability to introduce decay, waste, injustice, and unhappiness into a system, and consequently must be held to a significantly higher standard of performance and behaviour than ICs. Leaders eat last.

Having defined it, looked at the most common tools, and how they fit into a belief system, we can now start to draw a line between good and bad management for my context.

Let’s imagine a different belief. Say I run a really idiosyncratic, highly independent organisation; maybe something like a stable of newsletter writers. I believe that everyone is responsible for their own work, because it’s not possible to stay across each of their niches & because the market feedback loop is much faster & direct. In this situation, the behaviours might look much more like:

• Good management: Manager checks that each creator has a discipline of collecting and measuring feedback, facilitates the sharing of learnings across creators, and checks the integrity of the systems (E.g. that there is a correlation between positive feedback and commercial results).

• Bad management: Manager leaves creators to their own devices, ignores/diminishes the importance of learning rate, or checks feedback but is unsystematic/unrigorous, doesn’t facilitate sharing of learnings across the team

No management book will ever tell you “rarely give feedback” or “everyone is responsible for their own development and we do not participate” but those might actually be useful beliefs to have here.

The #1 implication of this is that to manage effectively, an organisation & its managers must settle on a belief system. It must then train, broadcast, and reinforce this belief system to its people and make this an explicit part of its culture.

Once a belief system has been instilled, the types of problems your managers run into will be more uniform and you can start to be effective with training. Your organisation moves beyond a cottage industry with everyone figuring it out for themselves.

Using the writer example above, if you believe that people must be responsible for their own development, what your managers need to excel at is checking system integrity and facilitating the sharing of learnings. Once you have a shared belief system, you can train for that, gaining scale and reducing the time to get up to speed. Sharing best practices becomes easier using a common language.

It also becomes easy to identify “fit” issues where you have (for example) a manager who believes the opposite, and this person is “poisoning the well” / running counter to the culture.

Wrapping up

If you made it this far, thanks for sticking with me. A recap:

• Management is the craft of Applying Effort, Adding Leverage, and Solving Problems.

  • It is a force multiplier on your output, not an output

• Your belief system determines how you manage and the types of management problems you will run into

• Agreeing on and installing a belief system in your organisation allows you to unify & standardise your management approach, vastly improving quality and making it much easier to train

Thanks for reading.

Do not worry. This is the most common feeling new managers run into and there are specific, actionable things you can do to make it go away.

But first, let’s ask ChatGPT

I once saw someone on the internet describe the chatbot as “like having infinite inexperienced laypersons working for you” and I like to ask it what it thinks about life.

ChatGPT thinks that you should acknowledge and normalise your feelings, use positive affirmations, and practice self-care. Thanks, ChatGPT!

Look, this advice is “generally right but specifically wrong”, but we’ll get into that in a minute.

If you have deep-seated feelings of inadequacy or feel like a phony for much of your life & in a wide range of areas outside of work, ChatGPT’s advice is good and honestly you should talk to a professional - this article is not for you.

However, if you have feelings of being an impostor that are specifically related to your recent promotion into management, I have better advice.

Step 1: Let it go

Like most bothersome things in life you should acknowledge the feeling, take a breath, let it go and get on with it. However, you need to do this really quickly - within a couple of days max. If you’re finding this difficult - and if you’ve read this far, I’ll take that as a sign - more drastic action is required.

As a new boss, you only have a short honeymoon period (and you might actually have a negative honeymoon if you’ve been promoted to lead coworkers) so you can’t afford to waste time here.

Step 2: Get over it

Management is a team sport, and the focus should be 100% on the team. Impostor syndrome, however, is inherently selfish. “I feel like…”.

You are focusing on the wrong things. It is not fair, but nobody cares. Your team especially will not care when their self-centred boss spends more time worrying about their own inadequacies instead of creating a positive environment and removing roadblocks so that people can do their job and be successful.

Step 3: Take positive action

As a new leader at any level, there are so many things to learn and understand about your team. Done right, you won’t have any space in your mind for feeling like an impostor.

If you are worried about feeling like an impostor, here is a non-exhaustive list of questions you should try focusing on instead:

• Where is the team at? (Is it effective or ineffective? Is it a helpful and collaborative or is it siloed and isolated? Does the team take joint ownership of its goals or do you feel like the sole owner & everyone else is disconnected from them? Do people focus on the success of the team or only on their narrow individual goals? Is there a clear definition of team “success”? Does the team have clarity of purpose - if you ask people on the team what the goal is, could they answer you? Is there a discipline of training & learning? Do people make friends at work? Is it a hierarchical environment where only the boss speaks during meetings, or do all teammates contribute? If some people don’t contribute, why is that? What are everyone’s skills & unique strengths or interests? What is your boss’s perception of your team & why? What are other teams’ perceptions of your team? How does your team interact with other teams - do they go direct, or do they expect you to manage communications? How do other teams interact with each other? Is this ideal or not?)

• Where does the team need to get to? (Considering all of the above, what does the team & yourself need to focus on to get better? Is the team aligned with the business’s goals? If the business reaches its goals over the next year or two, how will the team need to change to support this? Have you got a plan for this? Does the team know about the plan & have they had input on it, or are you imposing your plans on them? If you’ve identified issues e.g. with collaboration/communication/alignment/etc how will you fix these? What do people on the team think needs to change, & is this the same as what you think needs to change? What sucks about working here? What are the big obvious opportunities we should be pursuing but aren’t?)

• How does the team work? (What is everyone working on, what blockers are they facing right now & what’s likely to block them in 1/2/4 weeks time? Would someone tell you if they were blocked? Have you built enough trust for them to do that? If not, how would you know? Does the team have the right habits in place, e.g. how does it prioritise its time? What type of input do they expect from the manager - is it technical leadership as well as context & prioritisation? How does the team measure progress & results? What would happen if something went wrong - how would the team address this & course correct? What series of meetings - formal and informal - are in place to ensure information is shared effectively?)

There are literally hundreds of things a new leader will need to learn about the team, its people, & its place in the world, but the above is a good starting point. Shift the focus from “me” to “we” and you will find you have much less mental energy to spend on feeling like an impostor.

Can you be more specific?

1. When you start work tomorrow, immediately start work on fixing on a blocker for one of your team. If you don’t know of anything blocking them, ask around and find one.

   1. I guarantee you somebody will have something, even if it’s just “the tea in the tearoom sucks” example from Radical Candor.

2. Ask someone else “what is the worst thing about working here?” about your organisation or team. Take notes, their answer is a future blocker for you to put in your mental backlog.

3. Every day after this, try to answer one of the questions I highlighted under Step 3.

The bottom line

If you follow the above advice, you will be much too busy to feel like an impostor. If you then act upon the things you learn, in a short amount of time, you will have made so much progress & have so much to show for it, that you will have the evidence required to dispel those feelings for good.

Remember: The best way to stop feeling like an impostor is to simply not be an impostor.

Good luck on your journey!

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Define:

Gardener: Patient, happy to do same thing every day (water, weed etc), progress is measured by health of the tree. Happy when tree is healthy and growing, unhappy when it withers.

Builder: Impatient, desires to shape a space to fit their will. Clear the ground, place foundations, lay bricks. Happy when progress is tangible, unhappy when it slows or stalls.

People move in and out of these phases as their life changes, and you can find a lot of success with either.

Steve Jobs is the classic builder archetype. Jamie Dimon is the classic gardener. Early Warren Buffett was a builder, taking active positions in securities and convincing management to sell assets and so on. Now he focuses on the health of the garden he has built.

Banking is a gardening industry. Software tends to be a builder industry but not always - as it tends towards maturity the focus becomes gardening. Companies like Bloomberg are gardeners more than builders these days. Early-stage software start-ups are builders and have no space for gardeners, but they will not find sustained success without gardeners. Mature companies tend to lose most of their builders over time, and consequently find it hard to drive the changes they need.

So what?

At the end of the day this is the simplest check anyone can do to evaluate cultural fit. Am I personally in builder mode or gardener mode in my life right now, and is the company I work for in builder or gardener mode right now?

This is also one of the simplest ways for understanding at the leadership level the types of change, and the types of people, you need in your organisation as it evolves across time.

I’ve seen a lot of builders leave gardening firms because progress is too slow, and gardeners leave builder firms because they are stressful and high-pressure.

Be intentful about the choices you make and the result is less friction and more success.

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So, a word of advice:

• Intentional is being aware that we’re making a choice.

• Intentful is taking a particular choice, from a range of options, with the aim of achieving a specific outcome/state of affairs. I.e., “we are doing [X thing] because of [specific reasons] with the intent of achieving [very specific Y] as a result.”

Be intentful with your decisions. Start with the end in mind.

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Never underestimate how much other managers need to talk about their work. Managing can be a lonely business, and leadership is worse.

When you get the chance, ask a manager for their thoughts on how to solve a problem you have. Having the humility to consistently ask others for advice will also carry you a very long way in this most human of pursuits.

For this update, I’d like to share with you a conversation I had recently.

The Conversation:

A few weeks ago, two separate people from different companies asked me for advice on the same problem. One is the founder-CEO of a fast-growing internet business, and the other is a former protégé of mine who now has my old job.  Both had a similar concern regarding how much time they were spending quality-checking the work their teams produced.

The answer to that question is contextual, but first we need to define the problem.

In this case, the problem is not “I am spending too much time on X”. The problem is something more like “I believe that we are not able to arrive at an acceptable level of quality without my direct oversight and frequent input, which takes up too much of my time that could be spent on higher impact projects.”

Ordinarily, I would advise unpacking that statement. Is your belief correct? Maybe customers won’t notice the quality difference. Is the quality bar set at the right level? Maybe it is too high or you are not measuring it the right way. Are you sure the other projects you could be working on are more valuable? And so on and so on.

Here though, we need to start at an even higher level. Is this a work we do problem, or is it the way we do it?

The work we do vs The way we do it:

My answer to both individuals was:

“There are two levels that companies operate on.  There is ‘the work that we do’ and ‘the way that we do the work.’”

Let me explain.

The work that we do:

Let’s say that I am a Bricklayer Manager.  I lead a team of five Bricklayers.  They unload the bricks, mix the grout, build the walls, make sure the walls are level, and so on. 

I do quality control – check measurements, record breakage, spot check & ensure mistakes are rectified, make sure supplies arrive on time and that we are meeting our scheduling & constructing in line with the plan. I adjust the schedule for absences and weather.  This is the work that we do.  We are specialists doing our jobs.

Now, consider:

The way that we do the work:

Every Friday morning, the Manager takes an hour to look at the schedule for next week and make sure that our orders for bricks and grout have gone in. Every Friday afternoon the team downs tools an hour early to review how the week went and we have a chat and socialise – this is how we reinforce our norms and measure ourselves against our plan from the start of the week. 

Daily every morning at 7am we have a 15 minute meeting to talk through the schedule for the day, when supplies are arriving, how we coordinate with other specialists like plumbers and concreters and so on.  At smoko at 11am there may be an ad-hoc update, for example if supplies are delayed or rain is expected tomorrow – this is how we realign changes to our schedules and expectations.  

Quarterly, we review profitability and performance and identify areas for improvement. We also look at the plan for the quarter ahead and priorities and scheduling.

In lieu of equity, we pay a significant percentage of profit each year as bonuses to reward staff for loyalty & helping us meet our goals. We don’t ever employ contractors except for specialists that are not required for the life of a project (e.g. architects, electricians), because we believe in loyalty to people. This is the way we reward people for excellence, keep the right people, and align activity with our financial goals.

This is the way that we do the work, i.e. it is the “meta structure” that we have put in place to direct & redirect our efforts in a relatively frictionless way.

At its broadest, the way that we do the work can be culture, it can be norms, it can be a remote or in-office working policy – whatever.  At its narrowest, it may be as simple as a question like – are the managers responsible for teaching team-mates their work, or is that function served by specialist non-managers within the teams?

The problem:

Let’s say that, as Bricklayer Manager*, I have a problem. Too much of our time is spent straightening walls where we’ve laid bricks. Regularly I’ll hold a spirit level against a wall and find it’s a few degrees out of true. If this is not addressed, it damages the structural integrity of the building and virtually guarantees we will be hit with large repair bills a few years down the line.

Now, we need to understand why these problems happen and how we address them. Is this a “the work we do” or “the way we do the work” problem? Some hypotheses:

• The work we do

  • Maybe my spirit level is damaged or I am not measuring correctly (i.e. do I have the skills or tools to do my job properly?)

  • Maybe we are mixing too much water in the grout which causes the grout to not set properly, leading to a bent wall (we have a skills gap in our team)

  • We have been under time pressure and we worked during a semi-rainy day which caused the grout to get wet, leading to quality issues (i.e. this is a situational issue caused by the environment)

• The way we do the work

  • We use the young apprentices to lay bricks while the old bricklayers supervise (i.e. the people best experienced at laying bricks are not doing the work, leading to more mistakes)

  • Only the supervisor has a spirit level, meaning that:

    • a) the team does not have the tools to make sure that the wall is properly vertical

    • b) Any mistakes are discovered too late because teams are dependent on the manager coming around to quality check

  • We are not doing quality checks soon enough to communicate to the team any issues

    • When we do quality checks, we are communicating the problem but not teaching the solution - which perpetuates the problem.

    • Alternatively, we might find that earlier quality checks don’t help. For example, maybe you can’t tell if a wall is out of true until it is >4 bricks high. If true, there will always be a significant chunk of time expended before issues are identified.

      • In this situation, we need to find alternative solutions for spotting potential risks/errors earlier.

If I looked at this problem cold, with zero context, my money would be on the lack of tools or lack of skills hypotheses being the answer. Nobody gets up in the morning with the goal of doing a bad job at work - it’s inconceivable. Rather, people do the best they can within their understanding of the constraints that are placed upon them. (Note: This feeds into the “average vs star performer” debate, but that’s a story for another time)

Do you see what I mean? It’s really hard to hire a bricklayer that doesn’t know how to lay bricks. Yet - hiring the right person doesn’t mean that the business has the right structure in place to let them do a great job.

Note: Never underestimate the value of small but simple changes IF those changes contribute to business goals. A good friend of mine runs a cleaning business in Canada. He’s grown revenue 18% and 15% respectively in the last two years - in a mature business, with no new hires, no marketing, and no change in pricing - after purchasing tool belts for his team. Tool belts greatly increased capacity because people don’t need to go back to the van anymore for supplies. Additionally; he pays people for a full day even if they finish early. In fact he specifically says - this is the plan for the day, get stuck in, do it right, and we’ll go home as soon as we’re done. The investment in tools and use of incentives lets the team do more work easier and rewards performance, leading to a significant increase in productivity. It goes to show what can be achieved with investments in “the way we do the work”.

Applying this in practice

In business, many changes you make will be in the form of changing “the way we do the work”. With the quality control example above,  what is the actual root problem?

·         Are people being taught the correct way of doing the work?

·         Is there a gap in expectations, for example people expect the manager to teach but the manager expects the senior team members to teach?

·         How are the QA issues being measured?  Are the measurements being communicated to the team in a timely way so that they can self-correct?

·         Is there a QA process in place or is the QA dependent on management’s judgement? I.e. is it standardised & transferable or idiosyncratic & unique to one individual?

·         Have we hired the right people with the right skills? Are our team members capable of doing the work at the level we need?

This is an interesting issue because the work that we do clearly needs to change. We know that there are quality issues and we are spending too much time fixing them.

Yet – if the problem & solution were clear to everyone involved, it would have fixed itself already. There must be a problem with the way we do the work.

Closing thoughts

One of the leaders I spoke with was able to formulate a solution by improving “the way we do the work”. That is being implemented at the moment, and I’ll have a case study on that in the near future. (Update: I have now published the case study)

For now, remember:

• The work we do

  • These are the tasks that we/ our teams do day to day in our jobs as specialists

• The way we do the work

  • These are the structures that we put in place to facilitate optimal outcomes for the business & its stakeholders

• As a manager, often your issues will be with “the way we do the work”

  • People will generally do a good job if placed into an environment where they can succeed.

  • Often (but not always!) problems with alignment, communication, education, context, goals + direction, are bigger opportunities for improvement than weaknesses in the work of an individual

Have you come across this issue in your own experience? If you have seen this before, I’d love to hear your story. Let us know in the comments.

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Until next time,

Minion

*Full disclosure - I know nothing about bricklaying. Sorry.