May 2024 - forget goals, essential interview questions, being a follower, and you can't always optimize
this is issue #64
Welcome to what “crossed my desk” in this month of full moons, Mothers, and Memorials.
A different take on having goals and a vision. From Steve Albini:
I’ve lived my whole life without having goals, and I think that’s very valuable, because then I never am in a state of anxiety or dissatisfaction. I never feel I haven’t achieved something. I never feel there is something yet to be accomplished. I feel like goals are quite counterproductive. They give you a target, and until the moment you reach that target, you are stressed and unsatisfied, and at the moment you reach that specific target you are aimless and have lost the lodestar of your existence. I’ve always tried to see everything as a process. I want to do things in a certain way that I can be proud of that is sustainable and is fair and equitable to everybody that I interact with. If I can do that, then that’s a success, and success means that I get to do it again tomorrow.
Bartleby in The Economist with an obvious worth re-stating:
If there is one thing anyone with a job and a pulse needs to learn, it is how to lead. That, at least, is the message from the tsunami of books, courses, videos and podcasts on the topic. Business schools offer all kinds of leadership training. Authors pump out books instructing you to eat last, be daring and take leaps—which risks stomach ache if nothing else. Gurus tell you how to lead without actually being a leader; you might be on the reception desk, but you’re really in charge.
Missing in all this is an inconvenient fact. Most people in the workforce are not leaders and pretty much everyone reports to someone else. The most useful skill to have in your current job may well be how to be a good follower.
Adam Bryant interviewed over a thousand CEOs for the “Corner Office” series in The New York Times and now with the ExCo Group. He has “amassed a large data set of questions that leaders use as a work-around to avoid the pat and predictable answers that job candidates recycle in response to standard hiring questions.” Here are his top 8 essential questions:
Do You Really Want to Work Here?
You want to know that the candidate has done their research and has authentic and meaningful reasons for wanting to work at your company rather than just wanting to land a job.
What Makes You Tick?
Given the level of disruption in the world, and the fact that every company is in some phase of transforming itself, any job that someone is hired for is likely to change. So employers want to understand a candidate’s strengths, their work ethic, and the source of their drive.
Do You Have a High Level of Personal Accountability and Determination?
It is a crucial moment in any relationship between an employer and employee: You have a difficult assignment with no obvious solution, many gray areas, and plenty of challenges. Do they push back, coming up with reasons why it can’t be done? Or does the employee ask for more clarity and say, in so many words, “I’ve got this and I’ll figure it out”? Whatever you call it — grit, perseverance, resilience, or comfort with ambiguity — all employers want this resourceful quality in their new hires.
Are You Hungry to Learn and Build New Skills?
Companies are looking for employees with an innate hunger to learn more and raise their game rather than rest on past successes.
Are You a Team Player?
Employers want to steer clear of those job candidates who sees everything as zero-sum game, regardless of how talented they are, and instead find people who are wired to help their colleagues and understand the power of teams.
Are You Self-Aware?
There are always gaps between how we think we are showing up in the world and how people perceive us. But there is no such thing as misperception in terms of how you are viewed by colleagues. If they think you are a bad listener or disengaged or quick to point fingers and blame others, that is all that matters. To be an effective team player and leader, you must be self-aware so that you not only understand your strengths and weaknesses but also how others see you.
Will You Thrive in Our Culture?
Many companies look for “cultural fit” in their new hires. Given that a focus on fit can undermine efforts to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, that thinking has shifted to hiring people who will be cultural enhancers. Employers want people who know how to read the room and understand the nuances of the existing culture before trying to help strengthen it.
Are You an Effective Leader?
Does the person understand the complexities and balancing acts that make leadership roles so challenging? Do they have both hard skills for driving results and soft skills for coaching people on their team and building followership? Can they develop other leaders?
Some people perform better when they are more closely managed
In other words, working from home all the time is not what is best for them. Researchers interviewed 30 managers to have a better sense of this autonomy paradox. Their finding:
[T]he real issue isn’t whether to return to physical offices or not.
Instead, we should concentrate on creating work environments tailored to each individual’s capability to navigate the complex challenges of hybrid work and their readiness to embrace these challenges. (…)
Managers need to assess and enhance their team members’ paradox mindset and ability to deal with digital technologies. This implies not only providing the necessary tools and technologies but also ensuring that employees are prepared and supported to handle the complexities and contradictions these tools might bring up.
Research: Want to boost creative ideation in real time? Go for a walk.
Norway is often in the 10 happiest countries in the world and is also in the top 3 most productive. “I work in Norway, one of the most productive countries in the world. Here's why – and how our work differs from the US.” is a first-person account of specific ways in which work does not have to invade the rest of your life.
HBS professor Lynn Payne looks back at her research and finds time confirms another obvious worth repeating: misconduct often results from managers who set unrealistic expectations, leading decent people to take unethical shortcuts.
[C]orporate malfeasance cannot be written off to rogue actors or bad people. It is an organisational phenomenon whose roots lie in the decisions that managers make in the ordinary course of managing.
How managers make decisions and what they decide – what opportunities to pursue, what goals to set, how to measure performance, how to pay people, how much to invest in risk management, technology, training and so on – together have a profound influence on how individuals do their jobs and whether the company as a whole acts responsibly.
While I believe this connection is more widely understood today than it was in 1994, the steady stream of cases involving large-scale corporate malfeasance over the last three decades suggests that it is worth repeating.
A sobering piece by Guillaume Desjardins on the impact of AI on management in light of human and organizational realities: “AI will not revolutionize business management but it could make it worse.”
A conversation with a friend veered towards the English language having become the lingua franca for business the world over. About which, two things:
What is spoken the world over in business is not the English language but rather a tiny subset thereof called Globish: a version of basic or so-called Easy English with a vocabulary of a few thousand words; and
It wasn’t always this way. Ironically, “every poet writing in English in the 14th century thought across and between languages, using words that had purchase in multiple tongues, aware of the blurred boundaries between one language and another. (…) Medieval writers had an acute awareness of their disenfranchisement, their lack of ownership of the languages in which they wrote – a much less chauvinistic and more curious attitude than now prevails.”
Although the title of the article says “against” this is actually a realistic —not contrarian— take by Mandy Brown on optimization:
There’s an always-on assumption that there are still yet more efficiencies to be found, if we go looking for them, still yet more ways to hone the team’s focus, to turn laser-eyed onto whatever it is the executive team has deemed most necessary and then light that thing up.
But what happens when those optimization efforts collide with an unpredictable environment?
Context: one aspect of the American Dream is withering
The Guardian reporting on a Harris poll:
Buying a home in the US is starting to look like a Catch-22: Owning a home can help a family build their wealth, but in order to afford a home, a family needs to have some degree of wealth in the first place. In the new Harris poll, 72% of renters said they would need to be gifted or inherit money in order to own a home any time soon.
Context: Insufficient retirement savings
From the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago:
Based on their current account balances, income, saving, and investment behavior, three in four workers in our sample are not saving enough for retirement.
And now for something completely different:
Do you consider yourself more of a music person or a lyrics person, and why?