Sanity in the Workplace

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work book cover

A lot has changed about our work spaces since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020. Before this, very few companies considered allowing any portion of their employees to work from home. Then we were all forced to figure out how to do so if it was at all possible. Now, as the pandemic starts to wane, businesses are trying to figure out how to manage with the new expectation of working from home.

Just as the pandemic has challenged employers to revisit their attitudes toward their employees working from home, so have the authors of It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work challenged traditional views of how companies should be run. Their company (Basecamp) is 100% remote and has been since it started. And in this book the authors outline many other aspects of how they run their successful company (it has been profitable from day one).

In short essays, they talk about how they run their business. Here is a sample of some of the subjects covered.

Paying for their employees’ vacations
Limiting work to only 40 hours a week (32 hours in the summer months)
Paying everyone in the same job the same salary
Doing less but doing it better

The writing in the book is straightforward, funny, and approachable. But perhaps my favorite aspect of the book is that they state right up front that they developed these ideas as they went. That some things that worked when they were a small company of only three people didn’t work when they were a company of fifty people. I find it refreshing—that kind of perspective and willingness to change policy and procedure.

So while not all of the ideas in this book may appeal to you or your company, the thinking behind these ideas is worth you time to contemplate and consider.

A Guide for Going Agile

My company is in the midst of an agile transformation. We’ve pretty much got it working at the tactical level, but we are struggling a bit at the strategic level. We are getting there, but progress is slow. So I went looking for a book to educate myself with the goal of being more of an asset during this transition. What I found was Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos by Darrell Rigby, Sarah Elk, and Steve Berez—and it was a good find.

I love that it starts out by showing how agile really works and how agile is scaled across a large enterprise before moving on to the details of agile transformations. Along the way the authors ask questions, never making any assumptions. For instance, they ask, “How agile do you want to be?”, pointing out that agile is definitely not the solution to every business problem.

My favorite chapters were chapters four and five about leadership and planning respectively. Leadership must buy in and, more importantly, model agile principles. Furthermore, they must be practiced in the finance process – planning and budgeting. Every chapter ends with a summary of five key takeaways.

Perhaps most importantly, the foundation for the book is the case studies throughout it that are the basis for the thoughts and conclusions expressed. I took a lot of notes reading this book, and I am looking forward to putting the principles I learned into practice.

Conscious Culture

The Culture Code by Danile Coyle uses practical examples and research to show how culture can be consciously developed. This comes from the cultivation of three skills in particular: building safety, sharing vulnerability, and establishing purpose.

Building Safety

The buzzword often heard around this concept is psychological safety. This is the simple but profound idea that we are safe and connected. This builds a strong sense of belonging and needs continual, purposeful cultivation. This skill is the foundation of building successful culture.

Sharing Vulnerability

This skill is perhaps best summarized by the phrase, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll help you.” It doesn’t presume to know what is best and puts itself out there in service to the team. And by doing this, it invites others to do the same. So while vulnerability can feel scary and perhaps weak, it is in reality a strength that invites others into the process of solving the problems of the team.

Establishing Purpose

Every team has to have a shared list of priorities. And these need to be share over and over, *ad nauseam*. Many organizations have a credo or mission statement that is delivered from on high. Instead, the team needs to be involved in creating such statements or at least revisiting them and consciously buying into them. Then everyone has to be invested in sharing them regularly and living according to them. Interestingly, there is a difference in how to lead teams for proficiency (when the tasks are well-known and repetitive and how to lead teams for creativity (when the tasks are creative and determined by those doing them).

Ideas for Action

At the end of each section covering these skills are robust action lists derived from the activities of successful cultures. These can be used as take away crib notes to remind the reader of how to continually work at building results in your organization or team.

Goals vs. Strategy

Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard P. Rumelt is a primer on corporate strategy, why good strategy is so hard and why we have so much bad strategy. Here are some highlights.

Bad strategy has many causes. One of the most common is confusing goals for strategy. And one reason we have so much bad strategy is an inability or refusal to choose. When given a choice, leadership says “I want it all”. That isn’t strategy.

Good strategy requires making hard choices and comes in three parts — the diagnosis, the guiding policy, and coherent action. These are all covered in depth.

The book is filled with illustrating examples of both good and bad strategy. These go beyond the standard “case study” and include the thinking processes of the executives and/or the instructor. I found that small addition increased their value immeasurably.

In addition to outlining what good strategy is and isn’t, the second part of the book outlines methods for how to build a good strategy. I expect to be using the ideas, principles, and illustrations in my career for years to come.

Success Through Failure

Throughout my life I have been told that mistakes are okay and to learn from them. However much of my experience has taught me very differently. In school, mistakes were bad and led to low grades and poor performance. At work, mistakes can lead to reprimands, demotions, or the loss of a job. So contrary to much of what I was taught, mistakes felt like something that should be avoided at all costs and certainly should not be accepted as a normal part of life. In his book Adapt, Tim Harford turns this on its head, showing not only how to learn from mistakes but arguing that, as it says in the subtitle, success always starts with failure.

The key takeaway is what Hardford calls the Palchinsky Principles after a Soviet scientist who was sent to Siberia and later executed by Stalin for daring to point out adaptations that would not work. These principles are variation, survivability, and selection. Adaptation starts with trying lots of things that might work, but which are unlikely to cause a catastrophic failure. After seeing what fails (most attempts) and what works, select the change that best meets the need.

A key to this process is to make sure that you know when you have failed. That may seem obvious, but we humans have a way of talking ourselves out of our mistakes. We deny they were mistakes at all by telling ourselves a story that somehow turns them into successes. Sometimes when we fail to admit our mistakes we continue on a failed course, wasting time that could be spent pursuing a more successful solution. And sometimes we just convince ourselves that it really wasn’t that bad even when we know better.

Throughout the book, the author uses examples to illustrate learning organizations (the US Army in Iraq), creating ideas that matter (solving the problem of locating a ship at sea), finding what works for the poor (building wells in Africa), and many others. By using such case studies, Harford explores in a practical way how to successfully change and adapt. In a world where it sometimes seems that innovation and change are happening for their own sake with no consideration of unintended consequences, this is a book with a method that could help create change that better solves the problems we collectively face.

How to Create Leaders

Turn the Ship Around! by L. David Marquet is a leadership memoir that tells of the author’s experience as the commander of a submarine in the United States Navy. He tells of his process moving from a leader-follower model of leadership to one of leader-leader – a process which builds mindful leaders rather than thoughtless followers.

I learned of this book as I read Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. In that book Sinek tells of Marquet’s year-long preparation to command a well-run submarine. At the last minute he learned that he would instead be taking command of an underperforming submarine of an entirely different class. Lacking the time to study this new sub type and her crew, he racked his brain to figure out how he could successfully command this new vessel. He decided to give as few orders and possible, to empower his knowledgeable and capable crew

The example that Sinek gave is what led me to read this book. Traditionally in the US Navy, one asks the commander for permission – “Request permission to submerge the ship!” Marquet changed this from a request to a statement of intent – “I intend to submerge the ship!” – thus giving agency to his crew. And the book details how he worked with the leaders on his ship to develop a process for turning a crew with one leader and 134 followers who mindlessly take direction into one with 135 leaders actively thinking about what they can proactively do to achieve the ship’s mission.

To dig further into the ideas of intent-based leadership, Marquet published another book in 2020 titled Leadership is Language. He also has a website with a video of him giving a talk on the ideas in Turn the Ship Around!

For anyone searching for how to move from simply managing what happens to being a leader and developing leaders, you can’t go wrong reading Turn the Ship Around!

Communicating with Numbers

I recently finished a new book about how to communicate with numbers–Making Numbers Count by Chip Heath and Karla Starr. It is both a workbook and a reference tool. The author’s goal is to help overcome the fact that humans are not biologically built to easily manage numbers over five. Yet today we regularly need to communicate through numbers. What to do?

The authors provide excellent guidance and examples for how to effectively communicate what numbers have to say so that audiences will understand the message the numbers have to deliver. I highly recommend it to all managers and leaders.

You Can’t Be Efficient with People

In Celeste Headlee’s new book Do Nothing, chapter 4, Time Becomes Money she writes:

In the end, it all comes down to time: our relationship with it, our understanding of it, the value we put on it. Before the industrial age, time was measured in days or seasons. However, when workers began punching in and out of work, our understanding of time changed, as did our enjoyment of our time off.
Chapter 4, Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

As time has become viewed as a commodity to use efficiently, we’ve become more and more impatient and busier and busier. Why should I just sit here? I could be earning more money. But that begs the questions, To what end? Yes, more money is needed when we are struggling to provide for the necessities of life. But once we are comfortable and can provide for ourselves and our loved ones, why do we keep trading our time for more money? The truth is that we aren’t, working more hours, that is.

Because we value time more, we tend to think if it as scarce even when it is not. Most workers are clocking fewer hours than they did ten to twenty years ago. But we feel like we are working more because of the increased value on time. And the challenging part of all this is that despite not working more hours, the stress we feel as a result is very real and affecting our health. “Regardless of how much people are actually working, the stress these people feel is very real and should be taken seriously.”

Because of the stress and the blurring of lines between work and personal life, we have begun to experience “polluted time”. “This is a phenomenon caused by having to handle work duties during off-hours, being on call, or even having to think carefully about work issues or problem-solving while technically not on the job.”

This is in part due to the rise of flex work, where workers often don’t know what their schedule will be for the week until just before it begins. And sometimes their work hours are cut short and they are sent home because of slow business. And other workers are expected to be essentially “on call” ready to respond at a moment to emails and texts from their boss. This pollutes their time, and they never have any real time “off”. “With work intruding on our home life and home life encroaching on work hours, many people now never have a sense of being completely separate from their jobs.”

Despite the growing prevalence of unlimited vacation time, most Americans don’t even take two weeks of vacation in a year. They feel like they can’t or they will fall behind, becoming less productive.

Here’s the irony: Staying on the job may well be impeding your career advancement. It accomplishes the opposite of what’s intended. Even though Americans say they’re afraid to take time off because they may be punished, research shows that people who take at least eleven days of vacation are more likely to get a raise than people who take ten days or less.
Chapter 4, Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

Another big reason for not taking a break is the American myth that “hard work, on its own, is the key to success.” Also contributing to this blurring of the lines between work and the personal is the furnishings of our offices. We make them feel like living spaces with fully appointed kitchens and lounges. “While it’s important to create an environment that’s safe, comfortable, and supportive of creative thinking, it’s also crucial that there be a clear distinction between being on the clock and off.”

Chapter 5, Work Comes Home, starts with a discussion of “quality time” and the phenomenon of “latchkey kids” in the 1980s. Due to both parents working and the kids being home alone, it was thought at the time that this could be overcome by spending “quality time” with the children. While nothing beats quantity when it comes to time with children, quality time was an especially challenging concept because we ended up treating it like we did work. Turns out children don’t respond particularly well to being managed in a time efficient way. Go figure.

She then goes on to show that even when we try to apply efficiency in what seems a logical way, it doesn’t all work out the way it was intended. One example of this is the rise of students taking notes on their laptops. Sure, this means that students can essentially take down every word the teacher says. But are they learning? Studies show that taking notes by hand, where the student must summarize points, leads to better retention. “We strive to achieve peak productivity but forget that it’s taking us further from our ultimate goal—learning.”

And we are beating this “time efficiency” into our children at younger and younger ages. Many parents cram their schedule so full of activities for their children that the children sometimes ask to just stay home. This doesn’t always go over so well with the parents. Many children today have never played a pick up basketball game or played an unorganized (by adults) game of baseball with their friends. And the parents don’t fare much better. They have less time for hobbies. Or worse, these activities are seen as a waste of time.

Speed and efficiency are, by their nature, antithetical to introspection and intimacy.
Chapter 5, Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

One of the most valued skills today seems to multitasking. This is despite the fact that there is no such thing, at least for human beings. It can more accurately be called task-switching, and it has a high cost.

Neuroscience has taught us that not only is multitasking not efficient, it is bad for us. The more we try to do it, the poorer at it we actually get.

And here’s the worst news of all: “Heavy multitaskers” have the same trouble sorting through information and organizing their thoughts even when they aren’t multitasking.
Chapter 6, Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

Headlee points out that we often think women are good multitaskers, but they aren’t. They’re just better at it than men, but only at cognitively simple tasks. For complex tasks, it just doesn’t work.

… when it comes to more complex tasks, including most of the things we do while on the job, there’s no evidence that women are better at multitasking, and there’s plenty of evidence that trying to do it is really terrible for your brain.
Chapter 6, Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

Multitasking causes stress because it is bad for us. And women tend to do more of than men, and not just because they are “better” at it. They have more to manage. Despite the many changes in men and women sharing work at home, women still do the majority of the work around the house. “Research shows that when men watch their children, they often end up doing the more enjoyable activities, like taking kids to soccer games, while mothers tend to do more of the cleaning, cooking, and logistical management.”

Another byproduct of bringing efficiency to child raising was the greater involvement of parents, sometimes called helicopter parenting. Spending more time with your kids is better if you want to make sure they become healthy and successful adults, right? It turns out that when you do too much for your kids, they never learn to do it for themselves. This may be what has led to unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression among to today’s youth. “Overparenting may feel like a good use of time, but it does not ensure success for your child. Most of the time, it does the opposite.”

And the situation gets worse for mothers. Mothers are less likely to get hired than fathers or childless women. They also make less money. The real kick in the teeth is that fathers are seen as more competent than mothers. So mothers are doing more work and being paid less and being seen as less capable while the exact opposite may be true.

One reaction to all the busyness is to avoid the self-care we all need. After all, we simply don’t have time for it. So instead of socializing, we tend to scroll through social media for a quick break. Turns out this is not refreshing. “Going to the coffee shop and chatting with friends for a couple hours will leave you feeling refreshed and upbeat; the time you spend surfing the web will exhaust your brain and deplete your resources.” Paradoxically, we need to take time out to refresh in order to be our most productive.

Uncovering the Cult of Busy

The longer I’ve worked, the more I have noticed that my greatest productivity comes from the spaces between my busy times. Those times when my mind is free to consider other ideas or none at all. Sometimes inspiration on a problem hits when I least expect it, and so now I have come to expect it. The best of example of this in my experience comes from when I was programming for a living.

During those years, it was not unusual for me to find myself stuck on how to accomplish a particular task when I was programming. I would try different ways to tackle it. I researched on the internet to see what others in similar situation had done. Still, sometimes I stayed stuck. But I would not give up. I stuck with it, missing dinner with my family before reluctantly giving up and going to bed.

The next morning while I was showering or shaving, I almost always had some sort of inspiration, something to try or a new direction. Slowly, I started to recognize this and stopped spending so long down those blind alleys. I’d move along to some other task, leaving that stuck one unresolved, confident that a new idea would present itself. And it always has.

Ever since then, I’ve been interested in this idea. I look for it in articles and books. One book I started reading recently goes in depth into this idea. It is called Doing Nothing by Celeste Headlee. This is a well-researched book about the benefits of leisure and idleness as well as the history of how we got to the current cult of busyness.

In the Introduction she explains a bit about how she thinks about leisure and idleness and their effects.

I’d like to inspire a new consideration of leisure and a new appreciation for idleness. Idleness in this sense does not mean inactivity, but instead nonproductive activity. “Leisureliness,” says Daniel Dustin of the University of Utah, “refers to a pace of life that is not governed by the clock. It tends to run counter to the notions of economic efficiency, economies of scale, mass production, etc. Yet leisureliness to me suggests slowing down and milking life for all it is worth.” That’s the kind of leisure I hope we can all make time for. It’s what humans were meant to enjoy and what we need in order to function at our highest levels.
Introduction, Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

In the first chapter, Mind the Gap, the author describes a train ride she took around the country. It was a disconnected, slow journey, one she found difficult and challenging at first. But by the end, she came to appreciate the benefits she experienced. “The idea is not that everything should be slower, but that not everything needs to be fast.”

The sense that something could go wrong at any time, or that something urgent would arise that might require my immediate attention, was gone. I was no longer in fight-or-flight mode. Breaking away from the relentless pace of connected life felt uncomfortable at first, but as I ended my trip, I dreaded joining that joyless parade again.
Chapter 1, Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

Interestingly, until about 250 years ago, we didn’t have this hurried sense and need to be always on and always doing. In the author’s words, “Everything we think we know about work and efficiency and leisure is relatively recent and very possibly wrong.”

In chapter two, It Starts with a Steam Engine, the author shows that prior to the Industrial Revolution humans just didn’t work that many hours. Without electricity, the day only lasted as long as the sun was up. Most workers owned their tools and were paid by the project. They worked as much as you could physically and enough to support your needs. Beyond this, there wasn’t much point. “Before the nineteenth century, people worked an average of six to eight hours a day and enjoyed dozens of days off throughout the year.”

But with the rise of factories, people began to move to cities where they were no longer in control of their tools. These were provided by the employer, and one employee could replace nearly any other. Work became priced by the hour and the world of busyness began. “Quite suddenly, people were expected to work punishing hours with no time off.”

Interestingly, all these extra hours turn out not to be all that productive.

Yet we’ve known for more than a hundred years that long hours of toil don’t actually increase productivity. We have data on this going back to the 1800s—at the time when unions forced employers to cut hours, factory owners were surprised to find that productivity increased while accidents decreased. Overwork was counterproductive in the days of the sweatshop, and research shows it still is, even in the age of the knowledge worker.
Chapter 2, Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

In chapter three, Work Ethic, the author shows that the work ethic we have today is due to both a religious and an economic myth.

This belief in hard work as a virtue and a life philosophy started on the door of a church in Germany. Over the course of a couple hundred years, the religious notion that working long and hard makes you deserving while taking time off makes you lazy was adopted as an economic policy, a way to motivate employees and get the most out of them.
In the end, this story is about how the industrialist desire to have fewer workers doing more hours of work merged with the religious belief that work is good and idleness is bad, along with a capitalist faith in constant growth.
Chapter 3, Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

We stopped taking the time to enjoy pastimes and hobbies. These were a waste of time. We no longer pass time, we spend it. And we need to be careful how we spend it lest we be seen as lazy.

In the 1930s, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030 people would only work fifteen hours a week. That would be enough to support all. We would have unprecedented time for leisure. The problem would be what to do with all that extra time. But that hasn’t happened. Why?

CEO pay has grown out of all relation to that of workers, showing that the benefits of the increased efficiency that Keynes rightly predicted have not been evenly distributed. “The profits that Keynes thought would fund a more leisurely lifestyle for all have mostly gone to a tiny percentage of the population.”

We marvel at the luxury enjoyed by English dukes and German barons of bygone eras, but the top earners now live more lavishly than the Crawley family in Downton Abbey. The only difference is the income gap is wider today between CEOs and their workers than it was between the fictional Earl of Grantham and his valet.
Chapter 3, Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee

I’ll continue my review in my next post.

It’s All Personal

Don Corleone from The Godfather saying, "It's not personal. It's just business."

“It’s not personal. It’s just business.” In my experience this is a common phrase used when a business person needs to do something that might be perceived as harsh or unkind. Personally, I have never subscribed to the message behind this statement. It suggests that our work and personal lives are separate and that we can make decisions in one area of our lives separate from the other. In short, it implies that we are two people – one at work and another at home. I don’t buy it. To me, it’s all personal.

As an employee, when someone makes a decision that adversely affects me, that’s personal. It affects my life in a profound way. Brushing it off by saying, “It’s just business” is disingenuous at best and self-delusional at worst. Every decision a boss or manager makes affects others personally. To pretend otherwise is simply bad business.

Nonetheless, business people have to make difficult decisions every day. And many, if not most, of these will make a direct and substantial difference in the lives of their employees and clients. How can those involved do this while maintaining their own humanity and respecting that of their employees and clients? I think the answer is simple, yet challenging. Treat them the way you would want to be treated if you were on the receiving end of the bad news you are delivering. Here is an example.

Times are tough. Your company just lost its biggest client. You have reduced all other expenses as much as you can. Now you have to start letting some of your employees go. This is hard for you. You have built a cohesive team that feels closer to family than employees. How can you let some of them go? “It’s not personal. It’s just business.” is simply not an option. Be frank with the employees you need to let go. Explain as much of the situation as you can. Offer to provide excellent references. Provide or pay for assistance to them in finding another job, if you are able. This not only makes it easier for them to come back should things turn around, it also means that they leave with a more positive feeling about you and your company. This is leaves doors open rather than dismissively (and perhaps unintentionally) shutting them in their face. In short, it is good business.

Admittedly, this is a simple example. There can be, and often are, many other factors that make such decisions hard to carry out. No matter the situation, the best business decision is to always acknowledge and respect the humanity in others. Business is nothing more than people dealing with each other in a market of some kind. There really is no separation between business and the personal. Bringing your humanity to work is good business, because it’s all personal.