Team

A 14-post collection

Gratitude for normality — Weekly Review

My partner had an operation on her foot this week and it means she can’t walk on it for a few weeks. She’s on crutches and resting up, and otherwise doing well.

It’s incredibly easy to take one’s regular routine, limbs, and life for granted.

I’m often curious and hungry for the next thing, to do more, explore more, achieve more. But this week has been a good reminder to reflect on what I have, and what bliss normality looks like.

It’s easy to forget how helpful two working legs and feet are until you see a loved one suddenly having to operate normal life without them.

My partner and I, to a lesser extent, have experienced a change to our routines. Because my partner has been less mobile, her parents visited for the week to help us both out.

Having in-laws stay has been helpful for many reasons, but it has also been a good reminder of how much I appreciate my own space. It’s also been an insight into how different people have different habits, lifestyles, schedules, and more.

There’s an old joke that I was reminded of: What’s the difference between in-laws and outlaws? Outlaws are wanted!

But, joking aside, I have been feeling very fortunate this week to be surrounded by such a wonderful group of people in my life — family, friends, and colleagues.

Here's to normality resuming soon.

A few other notes

  • We got the team together on a boat in London for our summer social. It was so much fun, even if it was windy and not-at-all like summer.
  • Fred Again at Reading — really cool, fun DJ set with a huge crowd having a great time.
  • How did Roman aqueducts work? I stumbled upon this explainer and it's incredible how precise the engineering was.
  • I bought an alarm clock to discourage me from bringing my phone to bed with me. Let’s see how I fair with my evening and morning routine now…

Quote

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” — Pablo Picasso

Episode 15 of Lost and Founder — What we've learned from 16 years of GoSquared

On 3rd February GoSquared turned the grand age of sixteen.

In the latest episode of Lost and Founder, I talk about eight of the 16 lessons from those 16 years — on building, ideas, and on customer relationships.

Recently when GoSquared turned 16 years old (or young?) we shared a blog post with 16 lessons from those 16 years.

We received a ton of great feedback on the post, so I thought it’d be good to share some of those lessons on the show and speak about them a little more.

Here are the first 8 of the 16 lessons we’ve learned along the way so far...

On ideas and building:

  1. Build something people want.
  2. Share early, share often.
  3. Constraints breed creativity — embrace them
  4. The details are not the details, they make the product

On customers:

  1. Use your own product. Be your own customer
  2. Charge the trust battery
  3. Your customers are smart — treat them accordingly
  4. Treat each customer as unique, but scale your process

Thanks, and see you next time!

Music: Jakarta by Bonsaye. Podcast hosting: Transistor.

Episode 13 of Lost and Founder — The Great Resignation

It's been a fair few weeks since the last episode of Lost and Founder, but I'm pleased to return with a topic I've been doing a lot of thinking on lately: the Great Resignation.

I hope you find this episode helpful, and as always, if you want to talk about anything in the show, please reach out.

After a year and a half, it seems that more people than ever are looking for a change in their lives.

In what some have dubbed "The Great Resignation", in this episode I look at how to handle team changes in the wider context of managing a team through a period of significant change.

This year, the term "the Great Resignation" has been increasingly used to describe the explosion in people wanting to change their careers.

As a planet, we're in unprecedented times – and it's no wonder that many teams are going through a tumultuous time with changes never seen before.

If you're anything like me, handling team changes is one of the most challenging aspects of being a manager and leader. I find it hard to even know where to begin on this topic, but I thought I'd share my latest thinking in this episode with the hope it will be valuable to others out there going through similar challenges.

Actions / take aways

  • Every change is an opportunity to look at the business – what is going well, what isn't?
  • Understand people’s goals and desires and ensure they’re on the right path.
  • When someone leaves there can be tremendous opportunity for others on the team to grow into new roles.
  • Be clear with yourself on the goals and needs of the company.
  • Remember: everyone is on their own journey. You can’t control that! Focus on what you can control – organisation design, encouraging the culture and performance you want to see, leading by example, and making people the hero on their own journey.
  • You’re not alone. This stuff is hard. Talk to others and you’ll realise that many others are in the same boat and going through similar challenges.

Links and further reading

Thanks, and see you on the next show!

Music: Jakarta by Bonsaye. Podcast hosting: Transistor.

Episode 8 of Lost and Founder — How soon should you launch?

Lead Forms by GoSquared

This week we just launched a new product at GoSquared: Lead Forms.

Launches are always exciting, and every time we do a launch we learn from it, so I decided to focus this episode of Lost and Founder on the topic of launching.

As I’ve written in the past, I feel launching is a bit like inviting your friends or relatives over to your house. Inviting someone over forces you to get your house in order — to tidy, to prepare for a deadline, and to prioritise unfinished tasks.

When launching a product or a feature, or even launching a whole new business, it’s often difficult to know when to do it. You’re pretty much always going to launch too early or too late — from my experience, it’s almost impossible to launch “perfectly on time”.

If you’re getting ready to launch something, I hope this episode is helpful for you.

Actions / take aways

I’ve outlined some key actions and take-aways for those too busy to listen to the full thing:

  • Set a deadline for your launch — every time you do this you learn how to get better at setting deadlines.
  • Assign an owner if you're in a team — if more than one person “owns” a project, then no one actually owns it.
  • Be clear on your priorities — ensure everyone is aware of what is most important to the launch and the company.
  • If in doubt, optimise for speed — moving faster tends to solve more problems than it creates. Speed means you learn faster.

Subscribe for future episodes

If you haven't already, it'd mean the world to me if you subscribe to Lost and Founder wherever you get your podcasts — find all the links to subscribe here.

Thanks and see you next time!

The 2x Preparation Rule: How to turn Good Meetings into Great Meetings

A general rule of meetings I’ve found to hold true through the years: however long your proposed meeting is, you need to prepare for at least twice that amount of time in order for the meeting to run optimally.

That may sound like overkill, but I hope you can hear me out...

As with any rule, there are always exceptions. I have always found if I prepare for twice the duration time of the meeting then the outcome of the meeting itself is dramatically better. For example, if I have a 30 minute meeting to discuss a topic with three other team members, with the goal of getting to an outcome, I know that I should ideally prepare for at least an hour for it.

The seemingly excessive time I spend is recouped by saving even more from the attendees of the meeting.

This likely doesn’t need to apply for every one-on-one or regular meetings you’ve really got into a groove with, but for new meetings, and especially for meetings with 5+ people, the time one person spends preparing is often recouped several times over by being more efficient with the time of the attendees.

A while ago I wrote about how we do silent meetings – these are a great example of how the preparation beforehand is so critical, and can lead to a far better outcome for a meeting.

The expense and value of meetings

Meetings are expensive – the more people and the more time given, the more expensive they become. But they're also valuable moments where team members get to collaborate, bond, and integrate with each other.

Through lockdown and working remotely, I sense that many people enjoy a meeting to get together with their colleagues. It’s not surprising we all crave social contact and want to hear how each other is doing.

Trying to find the balance between social and “work” focus in a meeting will vary by team and culture, but it’s possible to find a sweet spot, and preparation before a meeting will help get clearer on what is needed from a meeting, and help you ascertain just how much time to spend on catching up on your weekend plans at the start of a Zoom call!

Try this out and let me know how it goes

For the next meeting you’re in charge of, book out twice the time of the meeting beforehand to prepare for it. And then assess:

  • Did the meeting run better?
  • Did you get better or clearer outcomes?
  • Did the attendees feel more energised at the end of the meeting?
  • Was the meeting shorter thanks to the preparation?
  • Did the meeting even need to happen once you did the prep?

Good luck!

How to run a remote meeting

Do you and your team enjoy remote meetings?

tumbleweed...

If you're anything like us at GoSquared, during lockdown you've been having too many meetings, most of them have been ending without a clear conclusion, and often waste a lot of attendee's time.

Don't worry, you're not alone.

Having run hundreds of meetings over the years, many of them during lockdown and fully remote, we've picked up a bunch of key techniques and simple methods for ensuring meetings run well every time.

I just shared a new video on YouTube (it's part of my goal for this year to get better at video as a medium!) – it's all about how to run a remote meeting.

My goal with this video is to give you the best chance of upping your game with remote meetings and a framework for running meetings on time, with a clear agenda, and with solid outcomes.

In this video you'll (hopefully) learn:

  • How to prepare ahead of time to set your team up for success.
  • What makes a good meeting agenda.
  • Why you need a meeting owner.
  • How to follow up after a meeting to ensure everyone's on the same page.

I truly hope this helps you out, and if you have other suggestions for running good remote meetings, I want to hear them!

If you find this post and video helpful, you might also want to read about how we do silent meetings – they're not for everyone, but I highly recommend giving them a go as an experiment!

Creating OKRs in Notion

Set up OKRs in 5 mins with Notion

It’s the end of 2020 (finally), and I wanted to post one last time before we head into a hopefully bright new year.

My most recent YouTube video covers the basics of creating an OKR (Objective and Key Result) system in Notion.

Hopefully you find this helpful as we head into the new year.

You can find more about how we use Notion at GoSquared, along with a bunch of free templates you can use in your own Notion setup – these are the templates we use every day to help the company run smoothly.

In this video, we’ll cover:

  • What are OKRs?
  • Why do OKRs help?
  • Why use Notion for OKRs?
  • How do you set up OKRs in Notion?

Hope this helps you kick off 2021 with your team in a neat and organised way. Heck, you can even use this system for your personal goals too.

If you give it a try, let me know how you get on – I’d love to follow up with answers to any questions.

See you on the other side!

Move fast

“A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.” – Charles Darwin

I shared the above quote in my last piece on Silent Meetings, but it continues to be at the forefront of my mind.

I’m in the last year of my twenties, and I’ve been thinking a lot about time – it’s a rather limited resource.

The longer I’m on this planet, the more I realise that the time it takes to achieve things is very often an attitude or a viewpoint, rather than an immovable fact.

Somewhat proving this point is this list of “examples of people quickly accomplishing ambitious things together” from Patrick Collison of Stripe.

Patrick’s list includes the first version of Amazon Prime (six weeks), the first iPod (approximately 290 days), and Disneyland (366 days).

This weekend I also read a profile on Elon Musk in Rolling Stone – this quote stood out to me (emphasis mine):

Beyond all this, most maddening or exciting for Musk’s employees, depending on which one you ask, is the time scale on which he often expects work to be done.
For example, one Friday when I was visiting, a few SpaceX staff members were frantically rushing back and forth from the office to the parking lot across the street. It turns out that during a meeting, he asked them how long it would take to remove staff cars from the lot and start digging the first hole for the Boring Company tunnel. The answer: two weeks.
Musk asked why, and when he gathered the necessary information, he concluded: “Let’s get started today and see what’s the biggest hole we can dig between now and Sunday afternoon, running 24 hours a day.”
Within three hours, the cars were gone and there was a hole in the ground.

Not everyone is comfortable moving fast, but I don’t think there’s any option when running an internet business: you have to move fast or you die.

When someone says something will take two weeks, you can either take them at their word, or you can challenge them to think: what would it take to achieve this in two days? What needs to change?

The folks at Basecamp made this point better than I ever could in this short chapter of their original book Getting Real – keep time and budget fixed, be flexible on scope.

How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time. —Fred Brooks, software engineer and computer scientist

Speed isn’t the only thing that matters when running a business, but it’s often treated as optional, and it’s easily lost one hour at a time.

Hours add up to days. Days cause weeks to slip. Weeks drag out into quarters. Quarters impact entire years. And we don’t have many years to waste.

Featured on BBC News

GoSquared on BBC News

It's not every day we're featured on BBC News, but after a quick back-and-forth with Katie Prescott, the GoSquared team made an appearance in article about the unexpected shenanigans of conference calls today.

The screenshot was taken on my birthday when the team sang happy birthday to me via Zoom.

See the article on the BBC

Give praise

It’s so easy to take the hard work of others in your team for granted – to just expect people to do great work day in day out.

It’s also so easy for good deeds to go unnoticed, and to simply say “thanks” and move on with your day.

But think about the last time someone specifically spoke to you to tell you how much they appreciated something you did. It felt good, didn't it?

Being aware of what you think and what you actually express to others will likely cause you to realise that others around you aren’t aware of how much you appreciate them.

At GoSquared, for a long time we’ve put specific time aside each week to share thanks and praise within the team.

Every Friday it’s the best way to start the weekend – knowing others on the team appreciated something you did.

Next time you’re wondering whether or not to call someone out to thank them in front of the team, don’t wait, don’t hesitate, just do it.

Over-communication

Within a team – whether you’re five people or 500 – bad communication is often the top reason for things to fall apart.

If you can communicate better you can operate better.

But it’s extremely easy to under-communicate. To assume that everyone knows the plan, everyone knows the reason we exist, everyone knows the pricing, everyone knows the roadmap, everyone knows the mistakes you’ve made and the lessons you’ve learnt from them.

But in reality, most people on the team don’t know the same information. They probably have far fewer things clear in their heads.

If you’re in a position of leadership then you’re probably in a position of immense power to communicate more, and to communicate better, with your team.

I’ve made this mistake too many times – to assume everyone “gets it”. To not repeat what you feel is already obvious.

But what you think is obvious as a leader may be clear as mud to some on your team – especially if they’ve just joined your company.

Communicate the big and important stuff clearly. Communicate frequently. Then make it clearer. And then communicate it again some more.

Communicate the same thing over and over and over until it’s painful to repeat it again.

It’s extremely hard to over-communicate as a leader. And the risks of under-communicating far outweighs the risks of over-communicating.

Giving and receiving feedback

When was the last time you gave someone you work with feedback that was more than just “nice one!” or “great!”?

If you don’t give direct, constructive, helpful feedback you’re doing your team a disservice.

It’s so much easier to keep your thoughts to yourself – to hold it in and move on with your day, or to try to do the task yourself next time. But neither of these options help you build a great team, and neither of these options help the individual who needs the feedback most.

Two sides of feedback

There are two sides to feedback – the giving and the receiving.

Something we are always working to infuse within the team at GoSquared is a shared understanding of why feedback is so important – it enables each of us to improve and be the best we can be.

The following talk from Kim Scott on Radical Candor is a helpful step in the right direction for understanding why feedback is important and how you can encourage everyone on your team to get better at giving and receiving it.

https://youtu.be/MIh_992Nfes

For the record

Meetings changed recently at GoSquared.

They got quicker.

They got clearer.

They started more promptly.

The need to be in every meeting reduced.

And the amount of “he said she said” reduced to zero.

What happened?


We started recording meetings.

At first, it was an alarming change – it felt weird.

Was it a step towards overbearing surveillance? Could this be used against me in the future? We all had concerns when starting out.

But a few months in, and the results have been undeniable.

The inspiration came from learning of Ray Dalio’s approach to running Bridgewater Associates. At Bridgewater every meeting is recorded, and direct, clear, honest feedback is strongly encouraged.

As with Bridgewater, recording meetings is part of a wider understanding across the team that we want to grow as individuals and as a team, and if we don’t hold each other to a high standard then we’re letting everyone down.

Now every individual in a meeting is aware that anyone else in the business has the opportunity to listen at a later date. It encourages everyone to bring their best to every meeting.

Why do we do it?

The key reasons we started to record meetings:

  • If someone can’t be present and wants extra detail on why a decision was made or how an idea came to be, there’s a place to understand that.
  • So anyone in the meeting can reflect on their own performance – just as a sports team reviews their performance after a game, it gives us a chance to review our own performance.

How do we record meetings?

There’s nothing complex:

  1. Start the meeting.
  2. Remind everyone the meeting is about to be recorded. If someone isn’t OK with it they can veto the recording any time. Consent is required.
  3. Open the Voice Memos app on your phone.
  4. Hit Record.
  5. Remember to hit Stop at the end of the meeting.

To be clear, we don’t record absolutely every internal meeting – private one-to-one catchup conversations with the team and similar situations where discretion is critical are not recorded.

Customer conversations are a different ballgame entirely. There's a huge benefit to recording conversations with customers and potential customers. The emphasis on consent is even greater here, and is a topic for another day.

It’s worth noting that we’ve evolved how meetings are run at GoSquared a heck of a lot over the years. Those learnings are also for another post – stay tuned.

I hope this is helpful, and reach out to me on Twitter if you have questions about our approach.

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The 5 dysfunctions of a team

The dysfunctional team pyramid - 5 dysfunctions of a team

We recently grabbed lunch with another London based startup, and during conversation with the founder, he recommended a book I hadn't come across before – The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.

As anyone who has managed people before will know, building a team is really hard. You work your socks off to hire the best people you possibly can, but getting those people to work together as a single unit doesn't happen by magic.

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team applies a relatively simple set of guidelines to spot and resolve problems within your team and encourage everyone to collaborate effectively.

Absence of trust

If people are unwilling to be vulnerable within the group, it can be hard to build trust within the team.

Fear of conflict

If the team seeks "artificial" harmony, it can harm your ability to have a constructive and passionate debate.

Lack of commitment

A lack of buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the team resulting in outcomes that no one sticks to.

Avoidance of accountability

Members of the team avoid the responsibility to call out peers on counterproductive behaviour, resulting in low standards being accepted across the group.

Inattention to results

Individuals focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success causes the team to suffer.

Overall, each of these attributes is no surprise, but having a framework to align your team is incredibly helpful.

Is your team performing well in all five of these areas? What can you do to address any "dysfunction" within your team today?