I chromecasted the kitchen laptop to our family room TV yesterday morning and watched the entire Sarah Lacy interview with Dick Costolo. Yes, I had posted it as the video of the week without watching it in its entirety. But I knew it would be good. And it was. All two plus hours of it.
Dick has this management framework that I've heard him talk about before. He and Sarah talked about it in the Pando talk. It goes something like this:
If you think about what you are trying to accomplish in a meeting with someone you are managing and you plot the following:
one the x axis – whether you clearly communicated the issue to the person
on the y axis – whether they walk out of the meeting happy or mad at you
Dick's point is you want to optimize for the x axis, clear and crisp communication, and not worry too much about the y axis.
In his talk with Sarah, they talked about meetings that "move up the y axis". Dick put it this way.
In delivering difficult news to the person, you start trying to make them feel better. The next thing you know "you are taking to dos and moving up the y axis and you are going to spend all afternoon on those to dos you took".
Dick's meta point here is your job as a manager is to give people direction not to make them feel good. And if you, in an effort to make them happier, take on a bunch of work that you shouldn't, you will be less effective too.
As Sarah put it, "don't move up the y axis". It's good management advice and I thought I would share it with everyone who did not watch the whole video on this MBA Monday.
