Who do you associate with?  Who are your peers?

Our tendency to create hierarchies has practical wisdom in group dynamics, from families to organizations to kingdoms.  Every effort to create leaderless communes failed.  We hold this in tension with the simultaneous reality: You’re not ‘above’ anyone.

At one level, every human is your peer.  We should be respectful to all. The apostle Paul gave important commands to the churches in Rome:  Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. (Romans 12:16)  These are commands because they aren’t our default behaviors!  Tim Keller gave this insight about the intrinsic value of every person, including yourself: “The only person in the universe whose opinion counts looks at me and He finds me more valuable than all the jewels in creation.”

Deep-in-our-bones conviction of intrinsic human value keeps us from great evil. 

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Not everyone is our peer in another way.  We should have selective peer thinking because of the power of association to shape us.  I’m not recommending elitism, but wisdom. 

The apostle Paul does not contradict himself when he counseled the Corinthian church to not associate with immoral, unrepentant people (see 1 Corinthians 5).  There are several Proverbs about not associating with thieves and those who would draw you into adultery.  Wisdom requires guarding your heart from temptations and company that would shape your heart and mind in bad ways.

Most of us have failed at the “love the sinner but hate the sin” strategy. 

I find an important clue in John 2:24  : But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them. Jesus loved these people, served them, helped them, but did not put his full trust in them, because he knew what they were.

Think of peers and associates as someone to whom you are willing to entrust yourself.  You can recognize the intrinsic value of every person, love and serve them as you are called, but focus your listening and learning by associating with people who bring forward your best. 

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Who are your peers in this way? With whom do you associate? Not everyone. 

We’re constantly living on the cusp of extraordinary tech (and social) changes.  We’re frequently in transition states – children, parents, jobs, locations, pastimes, leadership, business models, community structures.  Seek out people who have navigated big changes.  Seek people who are a little ahead of you on life stages.

Much of what we depend upon is unstable.  My grandfather would tell me, “Glenn, if something can’t go on forever, it will stop.” The wildcards in global and local economics, debt, geopolitics, competing government models, religious and philosophical worldviews, education, and climate make it impossible to forecast the future.  The uncertainty is palpable. We sense there is something we can’t predict coming, maybe fast. Therefore, seek out people who can help you “anticipate the un-anticipatable,” a phrase I borrow from Perry Marshall.

Some people have a healthy mindset. They go about their craft without anxiety about the latest news alert (of 23 you can hear daily).  They stay focused on what they can control.  They care deeply about good foundations and solid ‘construction’ or organizations and still care about individuals.  They think about today and about 50 years from now. Associate with deep people like this.

There are very few truly new questions.  Not long ago a younger person told me they couldn’t believe in an omnipotent loving God because there is suffering in the world.  They clearly believed that they were the first person to question suffering.  I steered them to books which are hundreds and thousands of years old.  Books are incredibly cheap for the lifetimes of wisdom and insights they offer you. Associate with the great thinkers and writers of the past. 

Your peers must include people who excel in your domain.  If you own a growing business, you can’t talk about your $250,000 tax bill with just anyone at the church picnic.  If you’re a pastor, only a few non-pastors can be trusted to help you wrestle with thorny challenges.  I’ve interviewed military men and fully understand why they don’t share all their combat stories with me, because I’m not their peer.  Leaders in large organizations need peers with experience that uniquely emerges with groups of more than 200-400 people.  This applies to all domains of expertise and experience.  Find peers in your domain.

A useful litmus test is whether they will encourage you. There are plenty of people who will push you but don’t love you or your dreams.  Associate only with people who will encourage you and push you because they care for you.  I like this definition of a friend: Someone who won’t think less of you when you call them at 3am desperate for help. 

You’ll encounter people who meet these criteria but… you don’t resonate with them.  You don’t like spending time around them.  It’s hard to articulate but it’s real.  Don’t feel forced into associating with them.  Have confidence that a better match is coming into your life soon.

Embrace the reality that peers and associates will shift over time.  You grow, you need new things, people around you change.  Everything life-giving is dynamic; only dying and dead things are stuck in place.  The old wisdom that “when the student is ready the teacher appears” is certainly true.  Our cup must have some room for new insights.  We cannot be too full to receive more. 

You’ll need to pay for some peers and associates.  It could cost you much more to NOT have people like these available to you.  Buy books.  Get paid coaches, teachers, advisors, and mentors.  And cultivate plenty of associates who you can go to and simply ask a favor.

Dopamine is the “feel good” neurotransmitter in your brain.  

The phrase “cheap dopamine” alludes to the things we eat and consume which stimulate dopamine but don’t generate positive trend results.  This includes things like:

Sugary and salty snacks

Alcohol

Porn

Scrolling social media 

Binging videos

Constant task switching

Daydreaming and fantasizing

Leaders have additional forms of cheap dopamine:

Getting to inbox zero every day

Meetings even if you don’t have an agenda

Interrupting people with your stuff because it makes you feel important

Frivilous emails and instant messages

Gossiping about speculations

Set these aside.  Real productivity from your leadership work requires focus on the important things, which generally won’t spike your dopamine in the next 4 minutes.  

(Not your promotion, this is about promoting people in your team.)

You’ve got an opportunity to advocate for promoting a few people in your team.  How do you think about what promotions are appropriate?  How do you persuade approvers to make them happen?  What do you tell your team?

A few principles learned the hard way:

• Promotions only happen when you do your job as a manager.
• A promotion means a person will have a different job, not merely an extension of their current job.  You must be absolutely clear about the expectations for a different job.
  • Decision point:  If it’s a different job, should it be posted as a new position?  Maybe your current team member isn’t the best person available?  If they are an excellent prospect, perhaps the work of posting and interviewing has low ROI.  At a minimum, the exercise helps you define the role and performance expectations!
• Does their previous job need to be done?  If so, who is going to do that work after you’ve promoted someone?
• It’s difficult to promote someone if the approvers don’t know the person or their contribution level or have some sense of their capacity to grow.  Therefore, you need to know these things and consistently communicate this – beginning long before you recommend a promotion.
• All organizations need people performing at different job levels.  No organization is 100% generals or presidents. 
• Think first of promotions as a design element in your organization structuer in an abstract way, independent of the specifics about individuals.
• The primary constraints on how many promotions are available is usually budget.  Therefore, you should forecast how the team salary and benefits costs will change with any promotion.
• Never promise someone a promotion.  There are factors outside your ability to deliver that promise.  You can only commit to advocating for them.

Additional recommendations:

• The opportunity to submit promotion requests often comes up quickly.  A sharp manager sets aside an hour or two each year to pre-plan promotion candidates and think about how to exploit opportunities.
• All promotions are development opportunities. Be slow to promote someone unless you’re confident that they can do at least 50% of the new job now, and will be able to grow into the role in a year.  Sometimes this is called the “150% rule.”
• When someone points out they’re now doing much more than they used to in the same job, remind them (gently) that it’s a normal expectation that job requirements evolve and professionals expand the significance of their roles.  Bonuses, salary increases, and access to extra opportunities are your manager tools in these situations.
• When someone leaves a position, step back and consider whether the position should be refilled at the same level, or higher or lower.  (Frankly – maybe not at all.)
• Resist the impulse to give someone a promotion if they threaten to leave without one.  Promotions must make organizational sense first. 

I’ve made so many mistakes interpreting body language in meetings and discussion.  A sampling: 

A petite colleague sat in all my meetings with her legs and arms crossed.  I assumed she was angry, distrustful, in disagreement.  She was really cold in the air-conditioning. 

An extremely intelligent man was quiet, well off to the side of the main discussion.  I assumed he did not understand our plans.  In reality, he was bored with our pedantic ideas.  

A junior member of my team was fidgeting in our 1:1 while I was delegating a small-to-me-but-big-to-him project.  I assumed he was nervous about failing.  He had learned an hour earlier that his wife had breast cancer, and his mind was racing about how to share this news with their kids.   

We hired a talented young guy for a technical role who had talked incessantly during his interviews.  I counseled him on his first day that he needed to focus more on listening.  The interview day was an outlier for this introverted shy man.  I had to drag words out of him most of the time.   

Be cautious about interpreting behaviors and body language signals.  Our interpretation engine has a high error rate.  

You can’t think your way out of a problem you behaved yourself into.

I’m a big believer in the power of data.  One of my bosses used to say “Data beats no-data every time.”

Fans of Data Science tend to be over-confident that data alone is sufficient and obvious and of course it leads to the right outcome.  Here’s good wisdom in a pithy sentence: “If all we needed was information we’d all be multimillionaires with six-pack abs.” 

It’s about proper data for decisions AND behaviors to follow-through.

Sharp leaders do pay attention to data as a guide to making decisions.  Execution and change are all about behaviors.

Email remains an important tool for many of us. Here are my recommendations to effectively manage your email account.

Search is more powerful than proliferation of folders.  Consistent studies show that we only go back to 4-6% of email messages after 20 days, and less than 1% after 60 days.  It’s a waste of energy to have an elaborate file folder or tagging structure.  A few fat folders are superior to many slim folders.  

You have Inbox, Drafts, Deleted, and Sent as defaults.

Create a folder named @Action to store emails which require some action on your part.  The @ sign keeps that folder up high in your alphabetic list.

Create a folder for your primary role work.  This is where you’ll store most messages which you want to keep for relevance but don’t need to act upon.  I know you have multiple roles, but there is little value in managing multiple folders.  Name this folder something like @MainWork if you can’t be creative.

      Special case:  If you’re moving into a new position, create a new main work folder for that position.  

Optional folders:  

      @WaitingFor  For messages where you are waiting on someone else.  You need a rhythm of checking that folder to follow-through when someone didn’t respond.  I’ve given up on this approach after several tries.  I just cc: myself on messages where I’m waiting for a response, and manage them in my @Action folder.   

      @Collecting   For emails that you probably don’t need but feel like you should wait before deleting them.  

Do NOT leave everything in your Inbox.  Scrolling up and down to decide what to work on is inefficient and depressing.  Your email program will open much faster if you don’t keep 42,000 messages in the Inbox. 

You should process emails in your Inbox several times a day:

      File or delete messages that you don’t need to act upon once you’ve read them

      Use the 2-min rule to quickly respond to messages which take 2 min or less.

      Move messages to your @Action folder if they require more than 2 min

Live out of your @Action folder, not your Inbox.  

Many people are successful at scheduling 3 times a day to process and respond to emails (e.g., morning, mid-day, end of day).  It’s ok if you aren’t that strictly disciplined.  

Delete the messages in your Deleted folder periodically, at least monthly.  Delete old emails in your @Collecting folder periodically, too.  

I heard this many years ago, can’t remember where or from whom, but it continues to ring true:  “Choose your enemies carefully, for they will define you.”

A powerful tool is the ability to choose who/what your team or organization is competing against.

Steve Jobs famously said that Apple needed to compete against IBM and Microsoft.  Sports teams get especially psyched up against their biggest rivals.  We have a long history of painting our political and military enemies with scathing portrayals.

The ‘enemy’ can also be a situation you don’t want to be in – bankruptcy, #3 in the market, reduced optionality, limited freedom to operate because your competitors have strategic patents, too much (or too little) inventory to sell, and so on.  Paint a vivid picture of that situation to energize people into actions to avoid it. 

We like to tell children (and ourselves) that they can be anything they want to be.  Untrue.

You can become good at about anything, if you’re willing to work hard enough for long enough.  But choose a domain where your genetics works in your favor if you want to excel in something.

Your ability to excel in a particular domain probably breaks down something like this:

50% genetics – your biologically innate capabilities.

25% how hard you work, consistently, to achieve levels of mastery.

25% enabling factors such as environment, teachers and mentors, and people giving you opportunities you couldn’t have engineered yourself.

Genetic distribution means that not everyone can excel in a particular sport or role that requires extraordinary coordination, strength, or endurance.  Not everyone has the intellect to be a doctor or experimental physicist.  Not everyone is wired to be an entrepreneur.  Not everyone has a mind designed to find joy in spreadsheets or crafting poetry.  Not everyone has mechanical aptitude.  Not everyone can be an effective leader of complex organizations. We should be thankful for this!

History is replete with innate talent never used or fully developed.  Significant and sustained work is required.

We like to think we did it all ourselves, but none of excel without enabling help from others.  Excellence requires support, in all kinds of ways.  Excellence is an outcome from association. Think carefully about your peers and associates.  These people matter immensely on the journey to becoming a deeper person.

You might have heard the Red Green line, “If the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.” If you can’t be successful, you can still be a cynical organization.  Cynics are made by leaders who consistently disappoint and frustrate people’s reasonable expectations.  The basic formula is big promises, tiny rewards, and shunning complainers as unworthy of working for you.  

Organization leaders can follow these time-tested proven strategies: 

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Make gigantic promises about the future.  It’s not “Shoot for the moon,” it’s “Shoot for Pluto.”  Never articulate intermediate goals, and certainly never promise any rewards for hitting intermediate goals. Respond with “Soon” or “Next Quarter” if anyone asks “When?”  Delegate any requests for a Gannt chart to a junior person far from headquarters.  

Never acknowledge a mistake.  Blame-shifting, ignoring the topic, introducing a crisis as a distraction, and revisionist history are your friends.  This only applies to you and the people you favor – every other employee gets no mercy.  

Emphasize appearances and posturing over measurable results and deliverables.  Insist that everyone be ‘strategic’ but don’t demand competence.  Favor good talkers over good doers.   Praise people who ask “smart-sounding” questions that don’t lead to decisions or change.

Create change initiatives to address symptoms.  Keep anyone talented away from addressing root causes by putting them on ‘special projects.’  

Reorganize frequently.  Reorganize in lieu of solving real problems.  Describe reorganizations as a “solution” to give problem-solving energy time to evaporate.  

Spend large amounts of money and time on issues which have zero relationship to the products and services provided by your company.  This will make a few employees happy and quadruple the cynicism of the rest, a big win!   

Hire reliable sycophants. Only promote people who will always agree with you and never outshine you. 

Aim to bring up everyone’s performance by no more than 1% and expect all your employees to do this on their time off.  If someone asks for training, adopt a puzzled expression, and ask “Why?” It will probably be necessary to hold back your top performers to keep lousy performers on the payroll, and especially to keep them in positions of authority.  Find plausible reasons to retain everyone in the spirit of “compassion.”   

Never allow one group to celebrate their accomplishments unless every group has delivered remarkable results in the same month.  Repeat this mantra: “We’re one team and unless everyone wins big, nobody gets a win.”   

Pay new hires significantly more than your long-time employees.  Give all the interesting and new projects to new hires. There is plenty of routine and maintenance work for your old employees because they have more experience.   

Distribute 95% of a tiny fraction of your profits for friendly executives and 5% for everyone else.  Pay bonuses many months after a fiscal year closing; you might need that money for something else that could come up in the meantime.  

Choose the best time to change IT, Finance, Regulatory, and HR systems:  Three months before the current system might start delivering its value proposition.   

Consider all status reporting and standing meetings a perpetual requirement.  It was important once so it must still be important.  Insist reports be compiled and sent to you. Delete them without reading them.  

Schedule update meetings, promising new information, then cancel with a cryptic comment like “To be rescheduled another time.”   

Assume that the right answer to any major problem must be found in an external consulting firm or outside supplier.  Heavily discount internal expertise as “outdated” and “not how the best organizations do things these days.”  When your internal people complain that they’re doing most of the heavy lifting for the consulting firm, respond with “Give them whatever they need because they’re the experts.”  

Use inefficient and drawn-out processes for all budget work, especially requests for increases. Give everyone ambiguous hope for big increases and then trim back to nearly nothing at the last hour.  Follow the same practices for promotions and raises.  

Fuel speculation and uncertainty by withholding detailed information.  You’ll find opportunities to do this every week with only a little effort.  Give ambiguous teasers about mergers, acquisitions, and layoffs to people incapable of keeping secrets.  You can be confident that 14 variations of your comments will be spread within two days.  Then follow-through with wordy memos that begin with “You might have heard that… but it isn’t true.  Not now, anyway.” 

Your weakest leaders, with the smallest track-record, need the most development.  Therefore, give them new strategic assignments every two years and position a few competent people to make them look better.   

When a big decision is needed, invite some of your leaders to review the options and make a recommendation based on an elaborate scoring system.  Ignore their recommendation.

Abandon the past convention that we don’t talk about religion, politics, and sex in the workplace.  Foster religious fervor about social issues, political alignment, and sex.  Shame or expel employees who say things like “can’t we just do our work” in the name of diversity and inclusion.  Encourage everyone to be “authentic” even if they’re disrespectful jerks and nincompoops. Bonus points when you celebrate victimhood instead of people overcoming challenges! 

Ask for suggestions and aim to ignore them.  You already know what’s best.  If a suggestion comes up from one of your sycophants, delay acting on it because of “budget concerns.” 

Repeatedly mention your “core values” but ignore violations unless it’s a convenient excuse to get rid of someone.   

Say “Employees are our most important asset” in the weeks leading up to Board of Director meetings, hiring a new HR VP, and deciding on promotions and raises.   

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You might be feeling overwhelmed with such a long list of strategies but take heart!  Nearly all these can be done passively without conscious effort.  Just follow the path of least resistance and what feels less confrontational. Don’t even bother to survey employees to quantify their cynicism.  That’s unnecessary work! 

o-o-o-o-o 

Written in the spirit of The Screwtape Letters and The 13 Step Plan to Run a World-Class Bad Meeting.  

The 13-Step Plan to Run a World-Class Bad Meeting – Glenn Brooke

HT to M.W. for suggesting this.  

Trust has a curious relationship with privacy.  We need circles of trust or we won’t share;  when something we thought was private becomes shared without permission it shatters trust.

I’m a bit double-minded about privacy.

I can see the dangers of governments and corporations exploiting their access to your information for power, control, and profit.  This is an institutional extension of our flawed human nature.  There are good reasons to make voting a private process, for example.

People conflate privacy and anonymity.  Anonymity is hazardous – people say and do more terrible and hurtful things when they think no one knows who they are, or they will not be held accountable.  We’re individually and collectively better when everyone must stand by their word and be accountable for our actions. 

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Trust is priceless in the moment of testing. A wise man I know says that cynicism is a giant scab that protects you from disappointment. Many among us have been swimming in a sea of distrust so long that dark humor becomes normal.

Many have lost trust in institutions. Banks failed or didn’t keep their promises to customers. Companies prioritized some shareholders and abused their own employees. Public agencies lied to us then doubled down in cover-ups.  Schools mismanaged a crisis or conflict.  Churches tolerated and hid the abuse of the vulnerable.

Cynicism is understandable as a defense mechanism. It’s a powerful shield against almost everything.

But you can’t be cynical and hopeful at the same time. Hope can live beneath cynicism, quietly waiting. Hope is in precious short supply in most hearts.

Good leaders can tap into that hope underneath the scab. Never abuse that hope; always handle hope with gentleness. Anyone who shares their hope is entrusting you, saying “Don’t ruin this.” 

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Rebuilding trust in institutions begins by acknowledging mistakes, errors, lies, and manipulations. Hold some leaders accountable, and people who were their accessories. I speak of confession, not admission. (Admitting something is enough to get on talk shows; confession is meaningful.) The way up first requires going humbly down.

The next step is forgiveness.  Relationships re-made on the far side of confession and forgiveness can be stronger and better.  There are many examples of companies who disappointed customers, acknowledged this and made it right, creating long and loyal customers for the future.  The same can happen with other institutions. 

Take note of the history of cults, dictatorships, and collectivist ideologies – they have been incapable of openly acknowledging failures or fostering forgiveness. 

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Trust is an epiphenomenon of relationships. Institutions are a larger fractal state of interpersonal interactions.  

Corporations where invented as a legal construct – a ‘corpus’ (body) without a soul, that could interact much the way individuals do, but shielding individuals in the corpus (especially owners).  Abstraction and anonymity are simultaneously the power and the problem.

Institutions aren’t uniformly “one person” in the same way that individuals have fragmented perspectives and motivations.  There are subsets and sub-tribes holding different narratives.  The lack of clarity about who you are interacting with complicates restoring trust in an institution. 

Rebuilding trust in institutions is complex and requires faith in larger possibilities.  It requires letting go of preferred grudges and hurts. Rebuilding trust in institutions is the work of deep men and women. 

Perhaps this is your calling?