When complaining is candor, and when candor is compelling
Leaders often hear complaining when what they’re actually getting is feedback, “candor” even. Or maybe it just is complaining. How can you figure out the difference?
I get antsy when I hear complaining because I feel like either I’m being asked to fix it, and/or, that we’ll now spend too much time on things we can’t control, running out of time to do anything.
However, I know that complaining/feedback is incredibly important, even if it’s just “being heard.” How can you detect when something is good complaining versus not-useful comparing?
🤖 Knowing When to Talk
I remember hearing an interview between two writers who had been married fifty years or more. When asked the secret to staying together one of them said, "candor is overrated." In a psychologically safe organization, how can you figure out when it's good to not talk? (I asked it to rework an original list of 4 things to spell out TIRED.)
In a psychologically safe organization, knowing when to hold back requires emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and an understanding of the context. Consider these factors:
Timing: Assess if the current moment is appropriate for sharing a concern or idea.
Impact: Reflect on the potential consequences of sharing your thoughts.
Relevance: Ensure that the topic is pertinent to the current discussion or the team's objectives.
Emotional intelligence: Recognize and manage your own emotions and those of others when sharing information.
Delivery: Choose the right tone, language, and method to communicate effectively without causing unnecessary conflict.
Striking a balance between candor and discretion is key to maintaining a healthy work environment that values psychological safety.
I also asked it when psychological safety didn’t work, and it said:
Employee turnover is extremely high, making it difficult to establish trust and rapport.
The organization operates under severe time constraints or in crisis mode, requiring rapid decision-making and leaving little room for open discussion.
Those are interesting because it’s about the lack of tools/ability/time to do it, not because it’s a bad idea.
Cloud Costs
I found three short videos that I did for a tech news site but never used on my own. Here’s the first of them:
When it comes to cloud cost management, visibility is the name of the game. I mean, you can't manage what you can't see, right? To stay on top of your costs, you'll want to examine your cloud environments, application architectures, and data usage patterns. And trust me, cloud usage goes way beyond just applications; it can span your entire
IT estate, from collaboration tools to remote working. The trick is to understand how application development affects resource usage and costs. By gaining insight into your usage patterns and predicting how new workloads and architectures will hit your wallet, you'll be a budgeting rock star in no time.
Wastebook
“a mercenary truth brigade” Here.
Culture runtime
Salt Minions
Mountweazel: a bogus entry deliberately inserted in a reference work, usually as a safeguard against copyright infringement. The source of the term is the fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a bogus entry in the fourth edition of The New Columbia Encyclopedia [NCE] (1975).
“Small capital letters.”
5 Ways to Cure Your Tech Debt Crisis
My colleague Bryan Ross has been writing up each of my 14 hurdles to digital transformation videos. They’re great reads: here’s the first one, and the second one. His third one goes over tech debt and legacy software. He talks about tools and actual tech stuff, but you’ll see that his list of five also has practices change. You always need both tech and culture to get sustainable change going. Check it out!
Relevant to your interests
Why did you pull out an umbrella? - by Alistair Croll - A set of tactics to do more “active listening.”
🤖 Gartner Highlights Four Steps CIOs Can Take to Mitigate IT Employee Fatigue - CIOs can mitigate IT employee fatigue by creating a culture of trust and flexibility, optimizing the work environment, and using automation to reduce manual workloads.
🤖 Don’t Learn the Wrong Lessons from Failure - To learn the right lessons from failure, organizations should create a culture of psychological safety and take a proactive approach to learning.
🤖 How Spotify Measures Backstage ROI - Spotify measures Backstage ROI by tracking adoption, impact, and business value.
🤖 Docker and Kubernetes Founders Talk About Future Cloud - Containerization and orchestration will continue to play a critical role in the future of the cloud, and multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments are becoming increasingly important.
🤖 The Hurdles Women-Founded Startups Face in Venture Capital and Advice to Overcome Them - Women-founded startups can overcome challenges in securing venture capital by building a strong network and focusing on metrics and milestones.
🤖 Why Successful Platform Engineering Teams Need a Product Manager - Product management is important in platform engineering teams, including prioritizing features and projects based on impact, and communicating value proposition to other teams.
🤖 The Improv Instinct - Principles of improvisational theater can be applied to business and entrepreneurship, including embracing failure and taking risks.
🤖 The Rise of Nonalcoholic Beers - Nonalcoholic beer is becoming more popular as people seek alternatives to traditional alcoholic beverages.
🤖 Cloud Culture and the IT Shift from Control to Collaboration - The shift from a control-based IT culture to a more collaborative one includes building trust, fostering innovation, and empowering employees.
Logoff
The robot means ChatGPT did it. I’ve had some work “day”-long meetings these past two nights where I call into California from Amsterdam. I can see why people don’t like working like this.