The Overlap is a newsletter somewhere between product development and organizational development. It’s in your inbox every other Thursday morning (although this one came out a little later!).
First, edition 50! Wow. We’re at 1072 subscribers as of this writing. I know I’m picky with the newsletters I read — there’s so damn many. If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, I appreciate that you take a moment in your day to read this. It means a lot.
Second, you can get a 15% discount (with the code OVERLAP) to Doing Better Work Together. It’s a gathering with folks who work on new ways of organizing. Hosted by the good people at Enspiral.
Can you review this deck? Can you give feedback on my doc?
We spend a lot of time preparing work for others to review.
We often have the best intentions. We want our work to be great.
People reviewing our work also have the best intentions. They want to help you meet your timeline. They want to improve the quality of your work so that you’re capable of reaching that level of quality in the future.
However, I’ve observed people (myself included) spend an inordinate amount of time, attention, and energy preparing work for others to review.
“What if Jill gets upset? Is this too bold of an idea? We know Antonio will get annoyed if we say this, so how do we say this in a way that lands with them?”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big believer in reviewing work. I love good design reviews. I edit essays when friends or colleagues ask. I ask my climbing partners to give me feedback on my climbing. Having my work reviewed by others improves my work!
I just think we lose sight of the purpose of reviewing work — improving the work itself, solving the right business problem, prioritizing the right work — when we spend way too much energy making sure it doesn’t upset people.
I don’t mean to dampen the importance of communication. Communication is important. It’s our job to listen and understand.
It’s just… we try not to upset people at the cost of not having the important conversation. There are Departments in Big Companies where their entire goal is to make sure one person highest up the hierarchy is happy with The Idea and The Plan. The Department feels like The Idea and The Plan have to be bulletproof to The Executive. They feel like they have to get The Executive’s approval — this is the way projects in Big Co usually get funded. I can’t help but wonder if we can innovate beyond a single person’s approval. And if past employees at Big Co have tried to push the org beyond approvals, failed to do so, and felt jaded/cynical because they tried and failed.
Getting our work approved gives us the confidence to move the work forward. It just… perpetuates the idea that we need permission to do things. And feel confident. Can we reimagine our organizations so that approval isn’t necessary, yet our work quality is top-notch? What would that look like?
We waste time and energy on our Second Job
We all know what it’s like to manage other people’s impressions, play politics, catch up on gossip, and read between the lines. While this exists in every organization, I have to admit. I feel exhausted by it.
In An Everyone Culture, Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan talks about how this is our second job:
In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for. In businesses large and small; in government agencies, schools, and hospitals; in for-profits and nonprofits, and in any country in the world, most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations. Hiding. We regard this as the single biggest loss of resources that organizations suffer every day. Is anything more valuable to a company than the way its people spend their energies? The total cost of this waste is simple to state and staggering to contemplate: it prevents organizations, and the people who work in them, from reaching their full potential.
I don’t want work to be a space where we spend 80% of our time and energy managing expectations, hiding flaws, and holding back ideas that could change the game. I want to share my ideas, unfiltered, and feel safe in doing so. I want that for my teammates, too.
I know that’s a lot of me to ask for, from work. I know people get Zoom fatigue, reject the forty-hour workweek, and criticize the assumption that work is the sole thing that brings us meaning. I mean, Severance was a hit.
However, I’m critical rather than cynical (to use Maria Popova’s words!). I choose to hope for a better future of work. At times, I don’t know why I do. Capitalism is hard to change. I guess I believe that the people who believe in a better future actually make the future better.
I also believe:
People are self-motivated.
People relish doing difficult things.
People enjoy working with others (when there is a clear strategy and when they know everyone’s roles & responsibilities).
People want to invest their energy and time towards things that make an impact.
And I know some people just want to do their job and clock out, in a frictionless way. Kids, family, new experiences, great conversations, creative pursuits — that’s what brings their life meaning.
What if we didn’t have a second job? What if our job was our actual job?
Ways to keep it focused on the work
While we can’t get rid of bureaucracy, the second job, and capitalism overnight, we can do some small things. Small things that prevent unnecessary approvals and keep it focused on the work (while also improving our ability to deliver better work in the future).
Individual contributors, freelancers, and literally anyone asks for feedback on their work often — here’s how we can improve our own work quality while not play the second job:
Ask for specific feedback. Avoid “thoughts????” (unless you truly want to hear everyone’s general thoughts). Practice asking for what you need. Write down 1-3 questions that you want reviewers to respond to. Start your presentation with those 1-3 questions. End your presentation with those 1-3 questions. Follow up asynchronously with those 1-3 questions. You aren’t annoying if you do this. You’re helping others help you!
Set a deadline for when you need feedback. “We need this feedback by Friday.” People appreciate the constraint.
Make it clear what option you’ll move forward with if you don’t hear any feedback. “We’ll be taking feedback from now until the end of Thursday. If we don’t hear any feedback before then, we’ll move forward with Option 2, to make our deadline.”
If possible, put yourself in a situation where you don’t need feedback. Maybe you won’t get feedback by the time you hope. Consider that a possibility. Think about what you can move forward on without approval or permission.
Don’t always expect actionable feedback. People give feedback in very different ways. “Take what’s useful, reject what isn’t, and add what is essentially your own” as Bruce Lee says.
Founders, leaders, and DAO workers, set the tone:
Do not schedule pre-meetings before the meetings. Have the conversation in the room. If you don’t, you’re setting an example that others should avoid conversations too.
Discuss proposals/ideas live, with the most necessary individuals. Don’t ask for the link/PDF to discuss with another stakeholder in a separate call. Bring that stakeholder into the team’s work reviews. Even (and especially) if you think “they’re busy.”
Ask clarifying questions before offering feedback. This models curiosity before critique. Avoid trying to sound smart for its own sake. Consider the possibility that the team presenting you work has thought about your feedback and addressed it. “What have you tried in the past?” “I have my own hunch, but which of those three options are you leaning towards and why?”
Invite the right expertise. If you don’t have the right expertise for what’s being asked of you, bring in the person with the right expertise. Maybe you’re the Product Director, but being asked by a design team which of their three design explorations is the most user-friendly. While you can weigh in on which exploration is best for the business, ask a seasoned designer to respond to their prompt.
Encourage your team to seek feedback from other teammates on their work. Sometimes people need to hear that they can pull aside individuals with the right skills/perspective to give feedback on their work. Encourage pairing. Offer your own time to jam on another colleague’s work.
Why is it on me to improve the way we review work?
“The organization is broken. I just want to do my job. Why is it on me to change how we do approvals?” You may be thinking that.
It doesn’t have to be on you! You can submit to the bureaucracy, wait 3 weeks for your work to get approved and move on. That’s totally okay.
I think some (most?) of you want to improve the way work works. While there are larger, more systemic, and more economic reasons for why companies and jobs are the way they are, some of you want to do what you can to better your organization. That’s why you read this newsletter, right?
If you want to better your organization, why not take the first step?
What I’m Reading
See you in two weeks,
–tim
One of the many things I started noticing only when I started working as a consultant, seeing companies from the outside, it' just what you described: the insane amount of time people spend in polishing work for others.
A recurring jokes from client is about me not wanting anything to do with slide decks.
That's because when I started coaching my focus shifted into having good conversation, and away from producing deliverables.
I think that this obsession with polishing deliverables hides an unwillingness or incapability of having good conversations.
A few weeks ago a client was worried about not communicating well enough about their re-org, and the solution was to prepare a "better slide deck" as a sort of weekly newsletter about the transformation.
Them: "People don't know what we are doing!"
Me: "Why should they care?"
(oh, even the hint that people might just not care made them furious!)
In the moment, I thought we were discussing about having a meeting with the potential recipients of those slides, but no: they just sent the slides (after obsessing over them for weeks), without any conversation, hoping that having better looking slides with more information would be enough (spoiler: it won't).
Spending a lot of time on these deliverables and having them (mostly) ignored also keeps alive one of the most fundamental communication asymmetry that we have out there: it's always gonna be you (the good one, having spent lots of time on the deliverable) against them (the bad ones, ignoring or demeaning your work), further enlarging the communication gap.