Author: Fabrizio

If, when, and how

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In life, as in business, it is often not a matter of if.

Things will happen that will mess with your plans, disturb your tranquillity, challenge your assumptions, force you to review your ideas.

On the other end, it is pointless to make it a matter of when.

You can’t control change, and timing might turn into an excuse to not do things. Tomorrow, when the right situation will present itself, after we have completed this, just one more time, and so on.

It turns out it is almost always a matter of how.

You are stronger if you have a practice, if you have a strategy, if you have a purpose, if you have a culture. Not because things will not happen right when you are not expecting them, but because you have something to step onto for the following leap.

It is always the right time for doing.

One on one

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Following up on a post I wrote a while back about meetings, some top-of-mind rules to make the most out of 1-1s.

Short and frequent beats long and sporadic – 30-45 minutes every week is optimal; 45-60 minutes every two weeks is doable; 90 minutes and more every month is ineffective.

Commit to being there – If one gets cancelled, reschedule for the next day. Be present for the duration of the 1-1. Never say “I have nothing for you today”, and for sure never ever make a habit of this. What you have to do after the 1-1 is not more important.

Set a broad agenda and be flexible with it – Write down 1 or 2 points you want to discuss, but keep the agenda open in order to allow stuff to emerge. Be ready to forgo the agenda completely if the situation demands it. Always start with some informal chat about the weather, kids, weekend plans, food, and other things that might make a connection.

Listen and ask – If you are the team lead, be ready to shut up. 1-1s are for the other person to express ideas, plans, concerns, issues. They are not for you to get updates or answers, nor they are to display how much you know and how thoughtful you are. When the other person struggles to open up, probe them with open questions: “what’s on your mind?”; “what have you learned the past week?”; “how would you go about it differently next time?”; and when they are done talking, “what else?” to unlock deeper layers.

Think outside the box – If at all possible (it usually is), get out of the office. Consider having 10 minutes 1-1s every day in front of the coffee machine. Pick up the phone and call the other person, instead of meeting on Zoom or Teams. Use 5 to 10 minutes to play a game together, or discuss a book you both read. The less you make it about work, the more the other person will be willing to let go of their and your role and connect in a meaningful way.

Absolute

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If we want to grow, we need feedback. And if we want to learn from feedback, we need to stop taking it as absolute.

It is human to want to protect one’s work, reputation, identity. But that often leads us to see feedback as totally negative (or totally positive). We need to be able to identify the pieces of feedback we can use to improve and grow, while at the same time leaving out the pieces of feedback that are irrelevant or that we do not believe in (yet?).

Start thinking about who is giving the feedback and how much of what they are saying you do agree with. Receiving feedback is a muscle that can be trained.

Culture

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I made a list of the happiest periods in my life, and I realized that none of them involved money.

We believe that it’s really important to come up with core values that you can commit to. And by commit, we mean that you’re willing to hire and fire based on them.

The ultimate definition of success is, you could lose everything you have and truly be OK with it.

People may not remember exactly what you did or what you said but they always remember how you made them feel, that’s what matters the most.

Our philosophy has been that most of the money we might ordinarily have spent on advertising should be invested in customer service, so that our customers will do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

Our belief is that a company’s culture and a company’s brand are just two sides of the same coin. The brand is just a lagging indicator of the culture.

Tony Hsieh

Productivity score

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There is no evidence correlating longer hours with increased productivity. If anything, there is evidence that after a certain threshold (that might depend on the type of job), your productivity goes down (some evidence here and here). Sure, you still get something done on your 60th, 70th or 80th weekly hour of work. It is just not worth it.

And so, it is strange to see Microsoft launch a service for companies called Productivity Score. A service that tells employers how staff uses Microsoft apps, essentially measuring for how long certain apps are used, or how many interactions there are with a certain shared document.

There is a huge discussion about whether or not Productivity Score is a violation of employees privacy. But from a marketer perspective, I would argue that the biggest mistake Microsoft did was naming the service as it did.

In the article linked above, Jared Spataro (Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365) says that Productivity Score is “about discovering new ways of working, providing your people with great collaboration and technology experiences”. Elsewhere, Microsoft argues that employers can use Productivity Score to ensure their investment in technology goes to fruition: for example, by signaling that certain areas of the business (or certain employees) spend less time on emails or Teams, the company might want to organize specific training to increase adoption.

That is all great, but that is not productivity.

Productivity Score is a wrong name, a misleading name, a lazy name. It suggests a link between usage (mainly in terms of hours) of Microsoft apps and productivity that is non existent. Microsoft itself cannot make that link, and in fact here is the closer they get to it in one their blog post introducing the service:

Indeed, in a survey of more than 2,000 customers globally, those with the most complete adoption and use of Microsoft 365 had 66 percent higher confidence in their organization’s ability to adapt and thrive amidst uncertainty than those less far along.

Again, that is not productivity.

Names are sticky. They are the first chapter in the story of a product, a service, a feature. They create expectations and often guide the way users will use (or not use) what you offer.

Names need to be picked carefully.

What you must look for is a name that begins the positioning process, a name that tells the prospect what the product’s major benefit is.

Al Ries, Jack Trout in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind