Links of the day - 22nd March 2018
The "Make Everything Better" Button - Terence Eden
But every time I get a perky email from my smoke-alarm telling me how wonderful it is, I want to rip it from my wall. Do your job and leave me alone.
So, dear app designers, refrain from sending constant, pleading emails in the vain hope that your click-through-rate will inch ever-closer to perfection.
No. Refine your service so that it can work silently. Let the absence of interaction be a selling point
There are very clear, obvious, and immediate situations where you let a human go. If they are stealing from you, you let them go. There are others, but the vast majority of the situations surrounding performance are fixable. The work is complex, uncomfortable, time-consuming, and often hard to measure, but it is during these hard conversations that you become a better communicator, you learn the value of different perspective, you build empathy, you become a better coach, and you become a better leader
As someone who's been through the process of hard discussions that I felt I didn't hear of early enough (conversations that were very well resolved eventually), this is a must read post for anyone considering the management path. In fact, I was glad to go through that experience where I feared being fired. It made me realise that if I ever go back into management, I'll do everything in my power to make people feel safe. If they aren't working correctly, then the first stop in responsibility will fall upon me to ask:
- "Are my expectations of this individual's work even fair?" and if so...
- "hey, what am I not doing right that makes this person want to work in a way that matches my expectations"
Not a real read. Just a fascinating little webcomic drawn only with free and open source software. And the comic is quite lovely.
Posted on March 23 2018 by Adnan Issadeen