8 Comments

One of the greatest tokens of responsibility granted is the trust to get your work done on your own time. One of my favorite mentors told me early on, "I don't care when you work, as long as the work gets done."

The work always got done under that kind of leadership.

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For me, it's the right approach. I don't even care HOW you solve a problem as long as the problem is solved, let alone WHEN you solve it!

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I have adopted this approach since my first team back in 2003. One of the other managers called me out on it, thinking my team wasn't "pulling its weight" so I called up the stats and sure enough, my team had been c30% up on their team in every month of the previous six.

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I still don't understand how people don't get it tbh

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This was always true, even in offices before Covid and the acceptance of remote work.

Effective employees built trust through their performance and relationships by being accountable to their results. Managers that forged trust by relationships became catalysts through delegation and coaching.

Part of this was control over your own time, which high performing teams have always had under good management. Remote work presents the manager with new challenges of course, but is not the catalyst for responsibly using your time in and out of work to be effective.

Hire fast is a trade off sacrificing effectiveness for efficiency. If onboarding and firing is easy for you and your organization then this is a sound tactic. However, I’ve seen that the constant battering relationships get from this mounts quickly and causes individuals to isolate behind their tasks, made easier in a remote environment.

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Thanks for this thoughtful comment. I agree with your messages.

On your last point, how the "hire fast fire fast" approach gets people to isolate behind their tasks? I might have misinterpreted what you wrote...

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Thank you, I’ll elaborate.

The cost of fast hire is also increased attrition, you noted this in the original text.

Attrition breeds attrition and strains the remaining team as relationships established breakdown and have to be reformed.

Each person onboarded, and then discarded as unfit, bears a relationship cost (besides all of its other obvious and hidden costs). This is strain on the remaining people.

You see this in conscript military organizations where turnover is high, in medical programs where interns have relatively short tenures.

The veterans barricade themselves to avoid the emotional strain of disconnected relationships. These barricades become ingrained in process, and tradition, until people silo themselves into their own domains to get stability.

In other words: people bury themselves in their work rather than go through the pain of getting to know the latest batch of juniors and then facing the pain of seeing them disappear in a process they have no control over.

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Thanks for this interesting perspective. I learn so much from these interactions in the comment section!!

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