Management

When I was working on ads one of the values we developed for our leadership team was to Be Plainspoken. That means communicating in an unadorned manner. It means having the conviction to be honest with one another so we can all improve. It means being direct not out of cruelty but out of an abundance of kindness.

Give good feedback (and ask for it, explicitly). A lot has been said elsewhere so I’ll go with: do it frequently and immediately, from a place of care, as a set of things you have observed, explaining the impact.

When something isn’t getting done, it’s because the person a) doesn’t have the time b) doesn’t have the skill or c) has some sort of psychological block. The third case is surprisingly common. After a few slips with someone I trusted, I’d just ask directly. “I noticed this work isn’t being pushed forward at the rate I expected or at the quality you

What you don’t want to happen is unsustainable stress, or for people to not share failure or tell you when you’re wrong. So you need to actively fight this as the leader by: a) asking for dissent (“does everyone agree this is the right path? Does anyone disagree”? and letting a silence hang until someone speaks) b) reward debate. If someone dissent

The biggest thing about writing down strategic choices is that they serve to build a corporate history (over a year or two, not really thinking about decades). Why decisions are made is rather important because companies, like people, can make the same mistakes over time without history.