Management – Terry's Blog!

Brief Reflections on Happiness in the Workplace

Everyone does it. There’s that friend that works in the same industry/workplace/job. It’s Saturday/Sunday brunch/lunch/meal time. “How was your week?”

An unobserved amount of time later your forgotten meal arrives. Hopefully a cool sip of a watered down beverage can tame your adrenaline. “Yeah, but when we run the world it’ll be totally different.” Wry chuckles and sad smiles briefly mask the desperate search for any topic besides the mutually-assured conversational destruction of workplace catharsis. There is no position that runs the world anyways.

It doesn’t take long in an office to realize a steady paycheck does not equal happiness. It certainly helps. For what comes after direct deposit forms, enter Dan Pink*, specifically this talk. To sum up, for work that requires minimal creativity intrinsic motivators work better than carrots and sticks. Dan stews his thinking down into these three, paraphrased bites an organization should feed its workforce: autonomy, or the a sense of independence when producing results, mastery, or the ability to grow a skill on the job, and purpose, or the belief you’re contributing to something meaningful the world will benefit from.

After numerous, early 20s therapy brunches with other young professionals I was finally in the position to hire a team and manifest its culture. Hiring sucks for everyone involved. It’s expensive mentally, financially, and temporally. Keeping effective coworkers sincerely happy is a defensive measure. With that ice bath of an unfeeling, business school-esque observation of hiring out of the way, it’s just nicer to smile and laugh with office mates than languish in untreated depression together.

At the first meeting the new hire and their “manager to be” have already come so far. After a palette-cleansing dose of direct report expectation setting, Dan’s happiness appetizers are served. The case to deliver was that I, as the manager, am invested in their happiness. I will do that by providing you autonomy in providing your results, challenge you with tasks you will grow from, and sous vide you with why what you’re doing matters. I will do this every day, and we will meet every other month to assess my performance.

When serving any management dogma, eventually the common compromises bubble to the surface. Core hours are from 9am to 3pm, and you’ll spend eight hours of your day doing work. No, you can’t do all your work from 8pm to 4am because, occasionally, we’ll need to talk to each other. If you’re salaried, sometimes duty calls outside core hours. That usually means we put too much on our plate, and the office gluttony will subside after delivery. Bland, bean-counting chores will have to be done, but most tasks will feature a peppering of fresh challenges. Regardless, everything we do will have a macro-purpose. It can be a hard sell at times, but the manager committed to always having a pitch from the start. “Why does this need to be done?” always has a big picture answer.

It was happy hour on some Thursday/Friday. The pre-covid cacophony of conversation and clinking glasses enveloped us at the table. Looser neckties and employed hair ties sacrificed an sliver of post-work personality on a beautiful Spring day. Weekend plans were getting from a tweet to a novel’s worth of service. Inescapably, the chatter references work. A direct report began recounting a Saturday brunch. (To paraphrase…) “My friends were going around the table complaining about their work. It took most of the meal. When it finally got around to me I…” — shrugs shoulders — …”…didn’t have much to say. Like, I’m good.” Chuckling, he says, “I’m happy.”

This was one of the best stories and one of the best moments of my career thus far. Dan’s recipe for happiness was working, and the only thing bitter about this team was our cold beers.

*In writing this I’m realizing Daniel Pink now goes by Dan, and he’s been busy the past decade. I haven’t read his book related to the talk’s content, but probably should now.

Brief Reflections on Applying Trustworthiness to Management

As we were waiting for our plane cross-country to begin boarding I was flipping through the pages of my soon-to-be in-flight read. Patrick Lencioni expresses his research as a modern-day business fable in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. The base element to producing a successful team, according to Patrick, is trust. Teams that suffer from an “absence of trust” incapacitate their delivery. Fittingly, I was about to fly with a new team of volunteers for an undergraduate, experiential learning trip to Northern Mexico. I noticed we already trusted each other, so I sipped my coffee, double-checked my boarding pass, and prepared to see what other observations hid in Patrick’s book.

Over the next few years the research from “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” proved itself to me. It’s a blessing contract funding was cut from four teams over two years in my first job after college. With each introduction to a new team the turbulence of the change became less jarring and more natural. My first observational assessment became the magnitude of trust the current group of IT Consultants had for each other. I did my best to cultivate team trust as soon as I had my mental bearings on the new role, but how? Enter Onora O’Neill.

In Onora’s talk she deduces trust is something given from one person to another. Individually, it’s not trust to cultivate, but trustworthiness. Consistently being honest, reliable, and competent will beget the gift of another’s trust for you to care for. If you’re trustworthy, you’ll be trusted.

Combining Onora’s and Patrick’s findings makes being honest, reliable, and competent a workplace imperative for all professionals. A few years after watching Onora’s talk I had the opportunity to build a team and manage direct reports with my boss and another technical lead. With every new hire setting expectations was simple — We will judge each other on our ability to be honest, reliable, and competent in every aspect of our work with one another.

I’m incredibly grateful this management philosophy coalesced. In practice, when there was an issue it was rarely hidden. If someone was unsure of something they said so. When we set deadlines, we nearly always hit them. On the seldom occurrence we realized we couldn’t, it was not kept secret. We worked together to come up with a solution, and tactfully adjusted. Over time our technical competence and professional acumen grew together. When the inevitable outage happened, including in times of operator error, it was raised, we learned from it, and it didn’t happen again. In the unfortunate circumstance a team member was not meeting our mutual expectations, the criteria of trustworthiness catalyzed a swift, binary conclusion on whether or not to show them the door. Determining promotions and awards exhibited the same pattern.

There were some complexities. Bad news delivered honestly couldn’t be punished. Actions without adequate competence that resulted in undesirable outcomes had to be followed up with learning opportunities and some kind of assessment. 360 reviews were imperative as it was just as important for each individual to hold the other accountable. A virtuous environment that is mandated necessitates whomever required it to perpetually showcase the standard. Otherwise the trustworthiness of the practice itself erodes and Patrick’s dysfunctions leak in.

It’s safe to say it would’ve taken much longer to lay concrete at the school in Mexicali if I had volunteered solo. An individual can only accomplish so much by themselves. Teams naturally arise with our ambition for more. Learning to proficiently lay the foundation for a team has been an empowering skill. Maintaining a baseline of trustworthiness has proven to be the cement for our professional relationships to build on. It’s the air under a team’s wings. Once we have that, there’s no telling how far a team can go.