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I often find most people are really bad at taking a step back and thinking freely about the problem at hand — especially if they are stressed out. And they (we)
by atoav 4y ago
I often find most people are really bad at taking a step back and thinking freely about the problem at hand — especially if they are stressed out. And they (we) are stressed out all the time, because apparently it is considered good managment to not consider what happens when you put pressure on people.
I tend to say: "You cannot afford to go fast if you are in a hurry, because this is where stuff goes wrong. And if you are in a hurry you cannot afford stuff going wrong."
If you are a manager and you want your people to deliver the most innovative, creative, best solution you have to lift stress of them and that also means freeing them of their daily duties and giving them the space to think openly about solutions. If your shop will collapse when you relive the best people of their daily duties for a week that means you shop is badly managed.
- whiplash451 4y agoSlow is smooth, smooth is fast.
- rco8786 4y agoSomebody drives race cars
- bdunks 4y agoThis phrase is also a mantra of the US Navy SEALs.
- weatherlight 4y agoReally any US military outfit. I was airborne infantry in the US ARMY and this was our mantra when learning anything new.
- xtiansimon 4y ago“I would have written a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time.”
- scns 4y agoTake your time, i'm in a hurry. - The emperor of china to the guy who helped him dress
- maroonblazer 4y ago"Don't confuse starting fast with finishing fast."
- yamazakiwi 4y agoWhat if your greatest strength is moving fast while making less mistakes than others, how do you identify when slowing down is valuable? Isn't the point of moving slow just to train yourself to go fast?
- mejutoco 4y agoYou might like a Spanish saying: "Vísteme despacio, que tengo prisa". (dress me slowly, because I am in a hurry)
- yanis_t 4y agoWhile this sounds legit in isolation, it's worth noting that it's not always managers who put pressure, but rather the circumstances. We live in a competitive world, and success depends on how fast we can deliver a product to the market. It's easy to put all the responsibility on managers, but this is only part of the picture. I mean, you can create a better product by taking more time, and the whole company still dies because you're too late. This is where the stress comes from; managers only translate it.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoThat's a manager talking. The company dies anyway, so that argument is moot. The solution lies somewhere else. For instance, actually taking the pressure off with resources - e.g. the manager can get their status reports by actually understanding the project by short one-on-one interviews and attending design meetings. Instead of asking everyone to come to a staff meeting, or send their status reports and jamming them into one aggregated email and forwarding that as their own work and pretending they did something.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoAgreed. One powerful idea for software development is "integration and promotion" - integrating code from different commits / workers and putting them into one package and testing it and only then moving it forward. you can take this principle into everything - got a marketing launch? Set up in the room downstairs and run your timings, Basically "plans" that do not involve early surfacing and use of the product (and just hoping you are a good enough manager to tell everyone what to do) is doomed. we only do well things we do often
- actionfromafar 4y agoNot only, but yes. The skill is to know when to take your time and when not to.
- monkeydust 4y ago100%. People forget managers are humans too. They were likely an IC at some point and now have to answer to higher up power who are under more acute PnL stress hence the pressure flows down to them. The trick with manager is to release some of that pressure as it goes down to their directs, this might mean taking it head on directly and shielding directs from it or just re-directing it back up the chain.
- flappyeagle 4y agoHow are you so sure about this? Some of the greatest practical innovation comes from times of greatest stress, like war.
- atoav 4y agoYou are not going to innovate while you are being shot at. There is a productive amount of stress and there is a destructive amount of stress. I argued against the latter.
- flappyeagle 4y agoGood thing no one is being shot at
- SuoDuanDao 4y agocounterpoint: As a new-ish manager - who despite its impact on my pay would like to live in a world without middle managers - it's been my unfortunate experience that a lot of people don't work as well when there's zero pressure. The right kind of incentives would likely provide a sense of motivation without urgency, but those aren't in the power of most managers to create.
- allknowingfrog 4y agoI don't personally need a lot of pressure to keep me focused on delivering business value...but I think that's how I ended up managing people who do. Finding that "motivation without urgency" balance is both difficult and necessary.
- kqr 4y agoI believe there are two things to disentangle here: 1. What problem are you using pressure to sweep under the rug? I.e. why are your colleagues disengaged by default? Most people happily do things they find important. Have you hired the wrong people who don't share your values or are you asking unimportant things of them? 2. When you say people work well under a little pressure, do you mean they produce more... things during a given time interval, or that the long-term quality of their work actually improves?
- aprdm 4y agoNot disengaged, people start chasing butterflies, developers start getting lost in irrelevant technical details and adding complexity instead of solving the problems at hand — since it’s more fun to play with tech than it is to solve business problems
- kqr 4y agoIs this how the developers would describe what they are going? "Chasing butterflies and adding complexity because it's more fun"? If so, they seem to live in a bubble and are not integrated enough into the rest of the business. Developers need to understand and be involved in financial, customer, and product concerns. More likely in my experience they are very busy working off technical debt that would be under-prioritised by the manager creating pressure. Some of them may even be innovating new solutions that will open up entire new markets. Sure, not all innovations are successful, but it's enough if a small fraction is. R&D ("chasing butterflies") is a comparatively very cheap way to acquire knowledge, and what puts you ahead of your competition is the knowledge you have acquired and they have not (yet).
- livelielife 4y ago> You cannot afford to go fast if you are in a hurry, because this is where stuff goes wrong. And if you are in a hurry you cannot afford stuff going wrong." if in a hurry, move slowly
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hyperthesis 4y ago"less haste more speed"
- mxkopy 4y agoThe army says "slow is smooth, smooth is fast"
- l33t233372 4y agoI want to agree with sentiments like this because they serve my interests, and maybe I’m just lazy, but with loose deadlines and minimal pressure I’m just going to be messing around and not “thinking openly about solutions”
- peterlk 4y agoThe answer can be both. There are times when deadlines are fixed, the path is known, and everyone just needs to march in the same direction. There are other times when a company faces an existential threat from a new technology. This is when having your best minds “messing around” can be hugely beneficial. For example, pivoting your photograph company to a makeup company is not intuitive to me, and is an idea that could have come from someone screwing around in a lab. It is also a tome of huge pressure, and managing that dichotomy is what good managers do
- atoav 4y agoI think you are taking my point to the extreme here. I did not say loose deadlines and minimal pressure. I argued against spreading your employees too thin. That doesn't imply automatically that I advocate for a complete laissez-faire approach to managing your employees (although with the right people, in the right situation this can work very well). What I argue for is that during normal, daily, non-emergency work hours your employees should not run at or over capacity but with a headroom. And if you want them to solve a long-standing, complex problem and you want them to solve it well, you have to give them the resources (e.g. time, mindspace) to do just that. Sometimes this just means: "Steve, on Fridays you don't have to answer any emails and phone calls, or do any other thing, just focus on finding a good solution to $PROBLEM"). In my experience that yields better solutions and doesn't take much longer (quite often the opposite).