Here’s The Rub: We Don’t Believe You – Rands in Repose Skip to content<br>Welcome, new leader. We’re glad that you are here. Your arrival fills a critical vacancy in our team, and we can’t wait to see what you can do at this company. We’re going to say that we’re not in a hurry and you should take your time, but we’re in a hurry.<br>Before you arrive, we’re going to tell you what we think needs to be fixed. You should listen to us, but the issue is that we probably don’t know what is broken. Either we’re too busy to notice, or we’re too close to the source material. We wrote the current script, so we’re required to believe it is good. It’s not. It’s a disaster, and it’s breaking, and we need you to investigate, and then to tell us what’s wrong.<br>Here’s the rub. We’re not going to believe you when you tell us. If that all feels like a trap, it’s not — it’s just senior leadership.<br>Hi, Rands here. I’m not typically this prescriptive, as every individual, team, and company has different values and culture. Thing is: everything I include in the checklist is a tactic I’ve used at wildly different companies for the past twenty years. This might say more about me than the teams and companies, but they also work.

Recurring 1:1s with Inner Circle<br>No surprise here. I’ve been preaching 1:1s for years. Within a few weeks, you should have 1:1s with all of your direct reports and your boss. You should also have a sense of what type of 1:1 works for each of them. There are humans who prefer a wandering, casual conversation, and those who want to know precisely what topics will be discussed beforehand.<br>The goal for this meeting is to establish a consistent weekly meeting that is a safe place to discuss topics of note. These are issues, questions, or discussions where the two of you can seek understanding. These topics can show up as part of casual conversation, but I like to get in the habit of sharing these beforehand with a bit of context as to the intent. I use a 1:1 Slack channel for this, but any medium works; the content is less important than everyone involved knowing this meeting happens every week, no matter what.<br>Here’s the rub. Your 1:1 list as a senior leader is bigger than direct reports and immediate leadership; your 1:1 list includes the entire ecosystem of humans who support your team in getting the job done.<br>Who?<br>Sorry, the list varies wildly depending on company, culture, and that moment in time, but there is an essential and non-obvious set of other humans who require as much investment as your team and your boss. Most of these humans will be names that you just keep hearing. Sarah this. Sarah that. No one is saying, "You should spend time with Sarah," but Sarah is clearly in the team’s bloodstream, and it’s your job to figure out why.<br>My default move in the first three months — and it’s an expensive one — is, "Always schedule 1:1 time." Possible learnings from this meeting include:<br>This is a human with some juicy signal about the state of our teams — keep meeting .<br>This is a human who has a signal that I have already heard — don’t meet again .<br>This is a human whom I sure like, but who doesn’t really have signal — don’t meet again, have lunch occasionally. You never know .<br>You’ll know it’s working when you find a mystery. I found one on the second weekend at my third start-up. Ryan wasn’t the first engineering leader to raise the topic, but he did ask the question, "How are we promoting engineers fairly?" We weren’t was the unfortunate eventual answer. Promotion was left up to the engineering manager’s discretion, with a meaningless gut check by senior leadership. They still acted like it was twelve people in temporary space, but there were over one hundred engineers, and we were on track to double in the next year.<br>Extended Staff Meeting<br>Of course, you’re doing a Staff meeting. Getting all your directs together for the weekly breaking of the professional bread? A quick metrics review followed by a set of team-supplied discussions with a compelling chase of Gossip, Rumors, and Lies. Unlike 1:1s, I’m not going to regurgitate my thoughts on the necessity of Staff meetings.<br>Here’s the rub: you need another meeting, the Extended Staff Meeting, which you need to have in place by your second month. Required attendees for your Staff meeting are obvious: your direct reports. Maybe you’ll have special guests who are critical support from across the team, and maybe those folks will be regulars. Go for it. No more than ten 1<br>Required attendees for your Extended Staff are:<br>Everyone we just defined for Staff.<br>Every manager in your organization. (Yes, every single one)<br>Every leader in your organization — keep reading.<br>That last bullet is a slippery one, but before I explain how to select these folks, let me explain what is happening in this meeting. Yes, a lot more people than your Staff meeting. Yes, you’ll need to present more than discuss, but this is not your All Hands; this is still a meeting, and discussion is...