My long-time friend, Matt Schlegel, interviewed me on my experiences learning about myself and leadership and management through the enneagram. Matt has a series of discussions with leaders of different types and mindsets, so they are an interesting way to understand the different ways people work and think. I alto thought it was a fun conversation. You can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI39zl5sV7s
I’m working with the Outreach College at the University of Hawaii at Manoa to offer a unique combination of my class content in a remote, zoom-like, environment. You can read more about it and sign up at their page here. I’ll be including most of my Email Management, Task Management, and Prioritization (Getting the Right Things Done) courses along with some of my newer Doing Less content. I’m looking forward to it and hopefully the first focus on productivity doesn’t dilute the ending message to slow down and take a step back from time to time too much. 🙂
I’m also experimenting with ways to get some of these courses out to a broader audience, so I’ve started a YouTube channel. I’m starting it with my Email Management course content and some random other thoughts. Stop on by and let me know if you’ve found it useful. I need 100 initial subscribers to get a better URL and make my content easier to find, so if you feel like subscribing, it would be a big help if you could. I’m not going to beg for likes and subscribes in the videos themselves, but I would like them to be accessible to people looking for such content.
Want to find that secret manual that tells you how to behave in all situations, overcome life’s challenges, reach your potential, and connect with those around you? I spent years looking for such a manual, one that I was convinced everyone else had access to, but I didn’t. My answer now: read a book! Well, a novel, really. Or some poetry. A biography, if you must, but preferably not. Find a fiction best seller list and start reading. Why? Well first let me give you some background.
Some years ago, probably around the time I started reading management books, but likely even before that, when I read technical books, history, or scientist biographies, I not only stopped reading novels, but I sort of proudly declared myself devoid of time to read fiction. Who could be bothered with fiction when there’s so much to learn from non-fiction? Well, me, for one. Or, at least I should have been.
Another useful bit of useful background is the impostor syndrome. I could do a whole post about the impostor syndrome (and frankly, I’m kind of surprised I haven’t by now), but I think it’s a concept that is becoming pretty well known these days, so let me just summarize it as that common feeling we get that we are not really qualified to do what we are doing and that some day, someone will discover that we’ve just been faking it and the gig will be up. The origin of the impostor syndrome is easy to understand: we all know our own self doubts or struggles and yet, we don’t talk about them and more specifically, those we work and interact with don’t talk to us about their doubts and struggles – they only tell us all the great things they can do. Modern, curated social media tends to make that sense even worse. We end up with the misguided impression that everyone else knows what they’re doing and we know we don’t, so we feel like an impostor.
One of the ways out of the syndrome is recognizing that everyone has feelings like this and everyone has their own doubts that they just don’t talk about. If you are an impostor, so is everyone else around you, so who cares any more?
I admit I still find myself feeling like a professional impostor at times, but then I remember what I just said above and I remind myself that while there is always someone who knows more about a specific topic than I do, or more about more different things than I do, I also know more than others. I tend to go deeper than most people who are as broad and broader than most people who are as deep. That’s my trick and it’s been my strength and niche and it sort of keeps the professional impostor at bay.
But what I only recently realized is that while the professional impostor was reasonably dealt with, the personal one has been front and center in my life for a long time, without me even being aware of it. I truly believed that everyone else in nearly every life context had the secret manual that I somehow never got a hold of. They all knew how to act, behave, and overcome life’s obstacles in ways that I simply didn’t. Why was I so messed up and struggling in things everyone else just got?
Scot’s missing secret manual. Image made at canva.com.
You’d think a look around my own extended family (and I don’t think we’re very different from most other families) would have assured me that wasn’t the case: plenty of failed relationships and divorces, various struggles with addictions, family members cutting each other off or not talking to each other…. Those aren’t the outcomes of people that have the secret manual. My family provided plenty of evidence that it wasn’t just me, but I didn’t really see it.
So why didn’t I get the lesson that everyone struggles with life and it’s not just me when I had ample evidence within my own family? Well for one, although these struggles existed, we still never talked about them. We didn’t talk about the mistakes we were making or the doubts and uncertainties we had. So, although I saw the results of normal people struggling with life’s challenges, I could still safely ascribe the troubles to circumstances or one-off issues, not universal cluelessness as we all struggle with finding our path through life.
Even my history and biography reading could have conveyed this message to me, but I didn’t hear it there either. Partially, because their purpose is usually not the struggle itself, but the resolution, thereby tending to actually increase the impostor feeling in the reader. And partially because, as with my family, I applied the inverse fundamental attribution error1 – I attributed good intentions and bad circumstances to others’ misfortunes and incompetency and failure to my own.
My personal impostor was so strong that I saw others’ struggles and undesired outcomes, I vowed not to replicate them, and yet I continued to believe everyone else knew what to do and only I struggled to get through life and find happiness, connection, and fulfillment within it. Universal incompetence at solving life was right in front of me, but I was blind to it and believed I was the only incompetent one.
Years ago, I started to include fiction back in my reading list, and meeting a poet at a friend’s gathering once, I began to read (and later write) some modern verse. I was listening to a lot singer songwriters (having already gone down the Blues rabbit hole years before). Who writes more songs of struggle and pain than singer/songwriter-types and Blues musicians? Every book, every verse, every lyric, every movie even – all were further evidence that to struggle, to mess up, to be lost, are all part of the human condition. And yet, still, I remained blind, and thought it was only me – that I was the only one without thesecret manual.
I’m not sure what eventually opened my eyes, but they did open and I began to share some of my doubts and struggles with others and I got back not just sympathy and empathy, but an understanding of others’ life struggles as well. We began to talk about what we never talk about and I became more open to the idea that maybe it wasn’t just me. Maybe it’s all of us. I now see this in every book I read, movie I watch, song I hear. This message is everywhere, yet, apparently, it’s also surprisingly easy to ignore.
I now wonder if this isn’t the primary purpose of literature, stories, movies, poetry, music, theatre (has to be spelled in the British style in this context): to talk about what we don’t talk about to help people realize we are not alone, we all struggle, and no one has all the answers. It was there in front of me, in front of all of us, all this time. We just have to see it and we have to be willing to talk about it and share our doubts and struggles with each other. It is through this work that we will overcome our obstacles and connect with humanity around us in ways impossible in curated social media.
The secret manual? I’m beginning to think this is it. We all struggle. We are all impostors. There is no secret manual. This is the secret manual. It’s not a secret. Talk about it. Share it with someone. That’s how we get through this. Together.
1 The fundamental attribution error – our tendency to apply malice or ill intent to other people’s behaviors and environmental circumstances and good intentions to our own. The person that cuts us off on the road is a jerk and a lousy driver; when we cut someone off it’s because we were distracted and inadvertently made a mistake. It’s interesting that I’ve never thought before about how the impostor syndrome actually reverses this logic. Either way, though, the assumption generally remains an error.
I was just relating to a colleague the other day how I find this whole pandemic working from home thing beneficial in certain ways. True, I have more meetings. tiring zoom meetings, than I ever had, but generally outside of my meetings, my time stays mine. People tend to hold things for our meetings, or they deal with things themselves that they might previously have come through my open office door with. There also seems to be a more general awareness that our non-work life is going to intersect with our work life, so there’s less expectation, generally, of immediate email response as well. I’m finding it easier to put my email aside for longer periods of time while I concentrate on a specific task or project without drawing people’s ire.
Open door policies have good intentions and several benefits, but they also have some significant drawbacks. For one, they essentially say that your interruption is more important than my otherwise planned work. All the time – without exception. Yes, you can close your doors at times, or respond to an interruption with a statement that this isn’t a good time, but the general expectation at the office was anyone can go see anyone at any time and get a response right then and there. Not only does that devalue the work of the one interrupted, it can also be disservice to the interrupters who don’t derive the benefits from spending a bit more time on their problems and discovering the solutions themselves. Even in the pre-pandemic world, when someone you wanted help from wasn’t in the office when you needed, you usually went back to your own office, googled for a bit, sketched out some ideas, and generally found the solution you were looking for on your own. Would have it been easier or faster to get the answer from your absent colleague? Yes, perhaps, and in some cases that is indeed the right thing to do. But in other cases, it’s just not.
From 3 Easy Steps to Establishing an Open Door Policy That Really Works with some good suggestions, but mostly missing the point about the value of the interrupted person’s time. https://www.insperity.com/blog/3-easy-steps-establishing-open-door-policy-really-works/
I think the norms that have arisen around remote work have been good for abating the rise of an unhealthy interruption culture. People don’t interrupt unless they really feel they need to, tending normally to figure out the issue on their own or store it for the next scheduled zoom meeting. This, I think is the intent of the open office policy – I’m here to help when you really need it, but it’s that when you really need it that tended to get lost and people sought others’ help whenever it was convenient, not whenever it was really necessary. I want to hear from you and an open door helps make that possible. I also want you to spend some time with your problems and own your solutions and I have my own work I’d like to complete as well. Open doors don’t help very much with the latter two objectives.
So now, even though I have fewer free hours in a day, I can generally use those hours more effectively than I could in the office. I have time to think; time to do the important, but not urgent; time to get into a state of flow and stay there for a while. None of these things are possible with the usual daily interruptions of an open door in the office.
There are lessons here for the eventual return to office. I’m leaning more towards the concept of office hours rather than open door. I’ve considered that before, but this pandemic experience has really demonstrated the value of that approach. Stop looking for the quick answer that disrupts someone else. Work through the problem on your own, seek help when you really need it, and let others enjoy the same quality time for their work that you have for yours. Supplement this with scheduled time to talk to your colleagues and then really listen. Combined, I think these efforts could bring some of this work from home productivity back to the office.
Working from home, of course, has its own set of distractions and interruptions that don’t apply to the office, but having more occasions for uninterrupted time, even for an hour, is a big enough benefit that Scot would like to find a way to continue this once back in the office.
Over the years, I’ve developed a number of short courses on a variety of topics concerning workplace efficiency, effective management, and leadership. Lately, I have expanded the content and realized there may be a larger audience for all of this than what I am currently reaching. So, I’m also thinking of new ways I can present the material and am considering whether I can make them into a set of self-serve videos that people could pick and choose from. The classes usually include a lot of interactive discussion and some exercises, so I’m trying to develop some way to translate all that into the different format. I’d be happy to hear your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.
I also need a place to record a summary of the offerings, so for now at least, this is that place.
The Productivity Series
Your email inbox includes hundreds of emails that demand your attention or some action to close out. You are continually barraged with new work requests that make it difficult to both keep track of everything on your plate and stay focused on the task at hand. You find yourself constantly working to do the urgent tasks on your list and seldom find the time to work on those long-term important projects that don’t have specific deadlines. You would love to delegate some of your work, but the process is usually painful enough that it seems easier to just do things yourself. You sometimes wonder if it’s all worth it. If any or all these situations sound familiar, and they are too much so for many of us, these four classes can help you regain control or refine your existing processes for more thoughtful productivity:
1. Email. Learn how to reduce the amount of time you spend processing your email and make your own emails more effective.
2. Task Management. Learn how to organize your tasks so you don’t lose track of what you have to do or where you are on a given task. Reduce the amount of time you spend switching tasks and prepare yourself to better respond to new task requests.
3. Prioritization. Learn to make time for the important as well as the urgent. Understand basic human tendencies that sometimes inhibit us from making the best decisions on what task to spend our time on. Learn when and how to slow down and say no.
4. Delegation. Learn effective ways to offload tasks to others and still get results.
Individual Components
Email Management Finally, a meeting where you’re not only allowed, but instructed to read your emails. Leave this class in control of your email. We’ll discuss the zero inbox method of email management, including ways to send more effective emails, receive fewer emails, and derive better processes to organize the emails you receive.
Task Management Once you’ve learned to manage your email, attend this session and learn to manage your tasks. How do you keep track of what needs doing? How do you make sure important tasks don’t slip through the cracks? How do you stop your mind from reminding you at all the wrong times about all the things you need to do? We’ll focus primarily on a simplified Getting things Done (GTD) type task management approach and discuss several practical ways to implement it.
Getting the Right Things Done Go beyond task management and learn how to identify what the right things to be doing are and explore why we don’t always seem to do the right things, even when we know what they are. Mastering this content should help attendees remove low return tasks from their plates, focus on getting the most important tasks done, and partner better with their colleagues.
Doing Less or There’s more to Life than Efficiency Focusing on productivity and efficiency are good things, but as with most things, too much of a good thing can still be too much. In Doing Less we talk about the value of slowing down, allowing time for context and creativity, and choosing a path simply because it is unknown. Together with Getting the Right Things Done, we address the other half of task management beyond organizing and controlling your tasks to prioritizing, doing, and sometimes purposefully not doing.
Successful Delegation An important part of controlling your own task list is delegation. A critical and necessary part of delegation is tracking and ensuring your delegated tasks get done. Here, we discuss techniques to make proper requests of others, set deadlines, and follow up without coming across as a nag or an untrusting colleague.
Effective Meetings You’ve mastered your inbox, taken control of your task list and become a master of delegation. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to attend, or perhaps even hold, a meeting to discuss your projects. This course offers a framework for meetings that helps ensure you walk away from each meeting with the results you need and with appropriate participation from the attendees. Would you rather watch a good move, or go to a meeting? If you chose a movie, come learn why and how you should attend a meeting instead.
Leadership and Teamwork Can anyone be a leader? Do I need a title to be a leader? How do I learn my leadership style? Leadership is about character and skills and both can be learned. In this course we differentiate management from leadership, discuss the different ways one can lead, find a common thread running through most leadership models and the best leaders, and learn to lead by first understanding yourself, then others. We build a set of skills and a problem solving framework to help leaders and teams focus on the right problem solving steps while avoiding common pitfalls.
Still occasionally suffering from an email inbox that doesn’t get emptied, tasks that don’t get done, meetings that aren’t efficient, and other signs that he has still not fully mastered this material, Scot enjoys presenting these courses and learns something new every time. As a result, his processes continually evolve and improve and hopefully others also gain control and purpose in their work life. It is all a work in progress and a journey he hopes to share with others for mutual benefit.
In preparation for a new delivery system, Scot has started a new Astromanager youtube channel with as of yet, no content. If you want to check it out you can find it at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2lJ7RdBBowLLON762LQ6Qg. You can subscribe now for that first video notification and a valuable early subscriber number.
I frequently hear the phrase “the science has to come first” that generally means all we have to do is select whichever course of action produces the most science (as if that were easy to determine, but that’s another topic) when faced with any decision. While I agree the business of observatories is to produce science, I often wonder if saying the science comes first is a bit like saying profit comes first. Isdoing whatever produces the most science equivalent to doing whatever produces the most profit? These days, the latter sounds antiquated and uninspiring. Many modern companies put their mission, their customers, and even their employees over profits (see Vineet Nayar’s book, Employees First, Customers Second, Ricardo Semler’s Maverick, and many others, for example). The thought is that if you put your employees or your mission first, the profits will follow (see also Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, for example). Looking into these sources, you can convince yourself (as I have) that this is not all just a bunch of feel good new age talk, but a real recipe for both doing general good and being rewarded for it with enhanced profit (or in our case, science).
When I was working on my MBA, I often had to build a translation table to map for-profit strategies to their equivalents in the nonprofit world. More often than not, the mapping was as simple as changing dollars profit to science output (measured in published papers, if you must). There isn’t a whole lot in what I often refer to as “the real world” that doesn’t apply to the academic world if you make that mapping.
It therefore seems no stretch at all to believe that if we build good scientific organizations that put employees’ needs first, the good science will follow. Imagine a corporation that makes every decision based on maximizing profit. Is that a place you would want to work? Is that organization going to attract and retain the best people that will bring the best ideas that generate more profit? I think not. Putting profit first may appear the more. ahem, profitable approach, but it is a short-sighted one that leaves a lot of additional unseen opportunity on the table. An employee-centered organization, on the other hand, taps into one of humans’ best profit(/science)-generating fountains: self motivation and a general desire to contribute to a larger goal.
Simon Sinek talks about “people don’t buy what you do they buy why you do it.” Is science output our profit, or our mission – our why, in this context? Clearly, we have a why people can buy into – we are exploring the Universe around us and sharing our knowledge. Yet science output is also our currency. In making science the bottom line, are we being a greedy company focused only on profit, or a noble organization focused on a larger mission of exploration and the transfer of knowledge? (Hint: science output is both our why and our profit and for both, we need the best from our people.) Too often we fool ourselves into believing that putting science first enhances our mission, when in reality, it can end up demotivating our staff and making us an undesirable place to work.
Science is our mission, and it is a grand and noble one, yet we need our best people fully engaged to produce the most of it. People first – in order to produce more science – is the key that will help us fulfill that mission.
Our focus on our scientific and educational mission is what allows us to have such a dedicated staff of people that want the organization to succeed. It is why we often get professional managers, engineers and technicians that could be making more money in the “real world”, but come to us to be part of the mission of discovery and sharing. Science provides a compelling answer to Simon Sinek’s why? Focusing on science outcomes is good.
And yet, it is not enough. Focusing on our output only, whether it be science productivity or dollars, sets the focus away from the people we are serving and more importantly the people who are doing the work. It says the ends are more important than the means and I don’t believe they are.
To produce the most science, we need to focus on the means as well as the ends. We need to allow our people to innovate and deliver more and better science because we have made it easy for them to do so. We need to create an environment where our people can create and enable the most science by setting things up, then getting out of their way. By focusing on our staff, we allow them to focus on enabling and producing science, just as many companies have found focusing on their staff allows them to produce more profits. For any given decision, one choice might appear to produce the most immediate amount of science, but if it hinders a staff member, limits their ability or motivation to produce and innovate, lower output will result. Businesses cannot afford to focus on profit over their people; and neither can we. If we want the most and best science, we have to focus on enabling our employees to go out and produce it for us.
As an astromanger himself, Scot wants his work to deliver the most possible science, and before he became a manager, he contributed to that mission by producing science, individually and in collaboration with others. At that time in his career, he could indeed focus on what action would produce the most science. As an astronomanger, however, his primary mission is no longer to produce compelling science himself, but to enable those in his care to do so for the good of the overall organization. Making that happen meant changing his focus from what he was trained in, the objective, relentless, scientific process, to what he had to learn, how to enable the people in his care to live and work to their greatest potential. That is the true role of the astromanager, and one he strives to be worthy of, despite its subjective, squishy, nature.
Although I normally think and write about what the commercial business (aka the real) world can bring to astronomy management, I thought I would take a new look at the subject and consider what science can bring the (real) world of business management. Are there aspects of science and astronomy that can be applied to the business world? In short, yes.
A few years ago, I was fortunate enough to visit the Vietnamese company, Viettel. Viettel is one of the fastest growing telecommunications companies in the world and I was very impressed with their leadership and their company’s vision and culture.  The company has 8 very visible values that seem to directly reflect the marriage of the scientific approach within the commercial world framework.  The translations I found differ, but their 8 basic values can be summarized as:
The data decide the right answer.
Learn through success and failure.
Change is the norm; adapt quickly.
Innovation is life.
Think about the system, not just the parts.
Combine the East and the West – look at things from different perspectives.
Exploit the military tradition and manner: discipline, unity, perseverance, decisiveness, thoroughness.
Viettel is a family.
I really can’t think of a better way to put it. These principles capture the data-based, experimental, innovation driven approach from science with a systems engineering, multiple-perspective, disciplined outlook in an organization that treats its employees as family. That sounds a lot like the marriage of science and business, fairly consistent with my own management and leadership goals as mentioned in a previous post.  Some benefits of the scientific approach, which Viettel seems to understand, include the objective competing of different ideas and different solutions in order to find the best solution.  The search for the truth is more important than any one person being right.  In working together to explore multiple ways of solving a problem, we create alignment in purpose and a focus on providing the best results for the organization. We do not make decisions based on opinions, but on facts and data.
Viettel also acknowledges that learning comes from failures as well as successes. Combined with their focus on objective data, I imagine they explore why their successes worked as well as why their failures failed, and learn from each. My personality type, I’ve read, typically views failures as incomplete successes. That characterization may have been meant a bit facetiously, but the Viettel principles show the value of such a world view. If we use the data at hand, make an objective decision that ultimately proves wrong, we have learned something valuable – perhaps as valuable or more than we would have learned had we got it right instead. We try, we fail, we learn, we improve, we move on. (The downside to that approach of course arises if you fail to learn from the failure, and simply reclassify it as a success. That is not what I am advocating.)
I think this ties into a concept I have been hearing more and more about lately of radical transparency, but more on that in a future post.
At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. Managers are there to support people and to remove barriers to getting things done. Managers focus on building a great team, creating a vision for how that team will execute its goals, and helping the people on that team develop in their careers. They are put in those positions because of their strong people skills. They aren’t there to tell teams what to do. This viewpoint has become so effective that some managers at our company have even gone so far as to stop saying things like “my team,” instead opting for things like “the team I support.”
I really like this idea and it supports this general notion I have that concentrating power at the top with direction flowing down is the wrong way to run an organization. At my organization, managers used to propose projects, evaluate which we could and should do, and then worked to form teams that carried them out. We’ve grown a bit since then in that we accept project proposals from all staff, but we still let a small group of executive managers decide which we should do. There’s a tacit understanding that executive management has to set the strategies, and therefore the tactical plans, for the organization.
Our next growth step, I hope, is to allow staff themselves to select which projects we execute. Managers, then, would have the job, as at Facebook, of creating environments where people can work effectively, and where staff understand the observatory’s strategies and operating constraints well enough to make the right decisions. As Ricardo Semler explained in his book, Maverick, this means management has to make the organization’s finances, regulations, governance and other constraints accessible to the staff. Educate them in the nature of the business so they can use their experience on the lines to develop new solutions and projects that propel the organization forward. (Ricardo even went so far as to hold accounting classes that taught employees how to read and understand the company’s income statements and balance sheets.)
The next step would be to consider who owns and develops the organization’s strategies. Is it executive management or the staff? Do executives make the strategy, then educate staff so they can figure out the best way to implement it, or do executives explain to organization’s environment so that staff can both develop and implement the appropriate strategy? What is the role of the visionary leader executive if not to develop clever strategies that when efficiently executed by employees lead to industry success?
My answer to those questions involve removing the word “executive” from my last question. Why does the visionary leader have to be an executive? Furthermore, why does the visionary leader have to be a single person? Don’t we get more opportunities to develop clever strategies if we reach out to all our staff and give them the ability and access to chart the organization’s future? Isn’t that the role of management – to maximize the value each employee adds to the organization? If a line employee has a compelling vision, there is no reason to stifle it just because the originator is not in executive management!
That’s the organization I’d like to see. Management that creates environments in which employees can work effectively and that educates staff on the organization’s business so that good ideas, tactical or strategic, can come from anywhere within the organization, producing staff that all have the ability and knowledge to identify and carry our their best ideas.
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