At an early job, I worked with a coworker whose philosophy was “If you don’t ask for it, you’ll never get it”, which culminated in continuous escalations to management for exceptional treatment. This approach was pretty far from my intuition of how a well run organization should work, and it grated on my belief that consistency is a precondition of fairness.
Fairness is what the powerful ‘can get away with’ study shows
The willingness of those in power to act fairly depends on how easily others can collectively push back against unfair treatment
Leadership requires taking some risk.
At a recent offsite with Carta’s Navigators, we landed on an interesting topic: leadership roles sometimes mean that making progress on a professional initiative requires taking some personal risk. This lesson was hammered into me a decade ago during my time at Uber, where I kicked off the Uber SRE group and architectured Uber’s self-service service provisioning strategy that defined Uber’s approach to software development (which spawned a thousand thought pieces, not all complimentary). I did both without top-down approval, and made damn sure they worked out. It wasn’t that I was an anarchist, or that I hated all authority, rather that I could have never gotten explicit approval for either approach. It was the sort of culture where occasionally you were told not to do something, but you were only rarely given explicit permission to do anything. My choice was to either point fingers about why I was stuck, or take on some personal risk to make forward progress.
Refusing to Be the Victim – How to Adopt a “Player” Mindset at Work
You can’t expect others to fix your problems. When you take responsibility for making the best of any situation, you have the power to make things better.
Mechanism Experiments and Policy Evaluations
Randomized controlled trials are increasingly used to evaluate policies. How can we make these experiments as useful as possible for policy purposes? We argue greater use should be made of experiments that identify the behavioral mechanisms that are central to clearly specified policy questions, what we call "mechanism experiments." These types of experiments can be of great policy value even if the intervention that is tested (or its setting) does not correspond exactly to any realistic policy option.
Accountability sinks
In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held dire...
Is Your Team Caught in the Solution Fixation Trap?
In the face of escalating complexities, organizations are increasingly relying on teams to tackle these intricate issues and drive pivotal organizational decisions. To extract maximum value from team dynamics, leaders must remain mindful of potential biases that may impact team dynamics and to actively steer and fine-tune team processes. Specifically, the authors urge leaders to address a decision-making bias they call the solution fixation trap, which emerges when a team rushes into discussing possible solutions before fully understanding the problem at hand. The authors discuss the study that helped them uncover this bias, explain what the solution fixation trap looks like, and discuss what leaders can do to protect their teams from it.
Paging Charity? How do I get my leaders to stop running teams Into the ground? - Stack Overflow
I'm a senior staff engineer, and I’m wondering what advice you might have for a person in my role in a large company to affect priorities and the speed at which work is "expected" to be executed.
Why Diversity Programs Fail
After Wall Street firms repeatedly had to shell out millions to settle discrimination lawsuits, businesses started to get serious about their efforts to increase diversity. But unfortunately, they don’t seem to be getting results: Women and minorities have not gained much ground in management over the past 20 years. The problem is, organizations are trying to reduce bias with the same kinds of programs they’ve been using since the 1960s. And the usual tools—diversity training, hiring tests, performance ratings, grievance systems—tend to make things worse, not better. The authors’ analysis of data from 829 firms over three decades shows that these tools actually decrease the proportion of women and minorities in management. They’re designed to preempt lawsuits by policing managers’ decisions and actions. But as lab studies show, this kind of force-feeding can activate bias and encourage rebellion. However, in their analysis the authors uncovered numerous diversity tactics that do move the needle, such as recruiting initiatives, mentoring programs, and diversity task forces. They engage managers in solving the problem, increase contact with women and minority workers, and promote social accountability. In this article, the authors dig into the data, executive interviews, and several examples to shed light on what doesn’t work and what does.
Self-Enforcing Protocols - Schneier on Security
There are several ways two people can divide a piece of cake in half. One way is to find someone impartial to do it for them. This works, but it requires another person. Another way is for one person to divide the piece, and the other person to complain (to the police, a judge, or his parents) if he doesn’t think it’s fair. This also works, but still requires another person—at least to resolve disputes. A third way is for one person to do the dividing, and for the other person to choose the half he wants. That third way, known by kids, pot smokers, and everyone else who needs to divide something up quickly and fairly, is called cut-and-choose. People use it because it’s a self-enforcing protocol: a protocol designed so that neither party can cheat...
Manage your priorities and energy.
Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third. This “company, team, self” framework proved a helpful decision-making tool, and at the time I felt it almost always led to the correct decision. It also helped me articulate why I disagreed with some of my peers’ decisions, which violated this hierarchy by placing individual or team preferences over the company’s priorities.
Autonomy and Clarity in Leadership Styles
There’s no one right style of leadership. Use the right style of at the right time.
Don't soften feedback.
When I talk about balancing being directive and empowering as a leader, the distinction between being kind and being nice often comes up.
The Nightmare of Valve’s self-organizing “utopia”
How Valve’s perfect work culture turned into a toxic bully’s yard and what it tells us about “flat hierarchy” workplaces.
Why Good Leaders Fail
The risk of sudden leadership failure can be headed off by early detection of challenges and better supports.
