Resources

Last updated: March 22, 2024

References I revisit regularly. If you’re a Strategy & Operations Lead, a Chief of Staff, or interested in management as a discipline, you’ll find useful material here.

Key Principles for Leadership Teams

• First-team Mindset.
  • Patrick Lencioni: “When every member of the leadership team is prioritizing the team they lead over the leadership team, the executive team becomes like the United Nations or Congress, where everybody is getting together to lobby for their constituents, rather than to come together to make decisions that are for the good of the whole organization.”
  • Jason Wong: “A First Team mindset is the idea that leaders prioritize supporting their fellow leaders over supporting their direct reports—that they are responsible to their peers more than they are to their individual teams.”
• Mutual Knowledge. Andrew Bosworth: “Mutual knowledge means everyone now knows that everyone else knows the same thing that they do. In a state of mutual knowledge, people can speak frankly to advance the state of that knowledge. It serves as a platform to build upon. They can also act with greater independence, trusting that they know where their team stands on an issue. We cannot hope to agree if we don’t understand the mental model of those we wish to align with. The larger the organization, the more intentional we must be to ensure we will arrive at a state of mutual knowledge.”

Team Culture

• Greatness: Lead by Giving Intent, not Orders (9-min video) based on David Marquet’s talk that draws from his book, Turn the Ship Around. “If you want your people to think, don’t give instructions; give intent.”
• Does your company lurch from crisis to crisis? Hero culture could be to blame by Ron Carucci [Summary]. Many organizations are perpetually in crisis and rely on company “heroes” to put out the fires. It’s a management failure when you have a team that requires heroes to succeed—you haven’t scaled your team to withstand the unexpected, and individuals bear the brunt.
• Culture is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves by Don Phin [Summary]. The fastest way to transform your team’s culture is to consciously design the stories you tell each other about your team. Ten types of stories collectively reflect a company’s culture; consider adding carefully selected examples of these story types to your onboarding process. Before sharing a story, ask yourself if it will contribute to the culture you want for your team.

Developing Leaders

• How Managers Become Leaders by Michael Watkins [Summary]. To transition into leadership, executives must navigate a tricky set of changes in their leadership focus and skills for seven distinct areas.
• Working High-Low: the #1 Skill Every Executive Should Have from Personal Math. “Working high-low means you think and produce across multiple time horizons. Most near-VPs envision a role where they can just work “high” (think big, set strategy, tell others what to do, etc.). It doesn’t work like that. Without going high, you’ll never get to the leadership team – but without staying low, you’ll be the first laid off because you cost too much.”

Developing Managers

• Saving your rookie managers from themselves by Carol Walker [Summary]. Most organizations promote employees to managerial positions based on their technical competence, but that kind of competence does not automatically translate into good managerial performance. Here are five things you can do to address their coaching needs proactively.
• The book I always recommend to first-time managers [Blog post]. The best managers build a work environment where the employees can answer ‘Yes’ to 12 questions. First-time managers are encouraged to use every interaction with team members to make one or more of these statements a ‘Yes’ for their team.
• Management is not a promotion; it’s a change of profession by Charity Majors [Summary]. Before you offer a management role to an individual contributor (IC), be sure they understand that it’s a change of profession. “Management is highly interruptive, and great [individual contributor] work—where you’re learning things—require blocking out interruptions. You can’t do these two opposite things at once. As a manager, it is your job to be available for your team—to be interrupted. It is your job to choose to hand off the challenging assignments so that your [ICs] can get better at [IC work].”

Chiefs of Staff

• Ways the Chief of Staff can improve executive effectiveness. Prime Chief of Staff: The high-functioning CoS improves executive effectiveness across six different practices: (1) Know where the time goes and redirect/reprioritize as needed; (2) Focus on outcomes, not outputs; (3) Communicate to maintain mutual knowledge; (4) Identify and build on team and executive strengths; (5) Concentrate on top priorities through the strategic planning process and implement the strategic framework for accountability and alignment; and (6) Help the executive make strong decisions.
• Making Time Management the Organization’s Priority. McKinsey: Leaders who are serious about addressing the ‘lack of time’ challenge must stop thinking about time management as primarily an individual problem and start addressing it institutionally. Time management isn’t just a personal-productivity issue over which companies have no control; it has increasingly become an organizational issue whose root causes are deeply embedded in corporate structures and cultures.

Developing a Strategy

• Von Clausewitz on War: Six Lessons for the Modern Strategist. William Petersen: Strategy is the necessary response to the reality of limited resources. Setting strategy is about making choices on how we will concentrate our limited resources to achieve competitive advantage.

Organizational Design

• The Decision-Driven Organization by Marcia Blenko, Michael Mankins, and Paul Rogers. “When reviewing an organization’s structure, focus on finding the right owner and home for the key decisions the company must make, with a bias toward providing clarity and simplicity. Determine what authority decision-makers need if they are to make good decisions and execute them effectively. Then help managers develop the skills they need to make decisions quickly and translate them into action consistently.”
• Recognize and reward valuable, non-technical skills that are essential to your team’s success. Tanya Reilly on Being Glue: Glue work is technical leadership, but sometimes that work is done by someone who isn’t senior and they aren’t always rewarded for doing it.

Delegating

• Completed Staff Work by Jade Rubick. Completed Staff Work is the idea that subordinates are responsible for submitting written recommendations to superiors so that the superior has to do nothing further in the process than review the submitted document and indicate approval or disapproval. The subordinate is responsible for identifying the problem or issue requiring a decision by some higher authority. In written form, such as a memorandum, the subordinate documents the research done, the facts gathered, and the analysis made of alternative courses of action. The memo concludes with a specific recommendation for action by the superior.

Women Leaders

• Can ‘No’ be a Complete Sentence for Women Leaders? Alizah Salario: “The initial discomfort of a ‘no’ is better than the regret of a ‘yes’ you didn’t stand behind. Susan Murray, who says she has to say “no” to stakeholders or team members every day, usually anchors her response in predetermined goals. “I’ll typically respond with, ‘Here are our team’s three to five priorities. Do you see it differently? Is there something I’m missing?’ This may sound highly technical, but it opens up a conversation.” Kristen Golden: Coupling a “no” with her reasoning and a solution is essential to collaborative leadership. The colleagues she’s most enjoyed working with have taken the time to help her understand their thought processes. Without dialogue, hierarchical relationships develop, “and then people can’t function without you.”