What happens when you frame the work

One of the hardest parts of making the jump to being a manager, leader, or starting a company/org is learning to frame your work. 

This is a brutal truth: most people don’t know how to frame the work they are doing. 

It shows up all the time… 

  • Two people schedule a meeting and spend the first 20 minutes telling a third person about a conversation they already had. 

  • Someone with writing as a core part of their job delivers two projects. One is amazing and on-point, the other is ok but written for the wrong audience. 

  • A partnership opportunity appears out of thin air but the company/org can’t move fast enough to leverage it. 

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Do 85% twice

Every now and then, someone “explains” to the internet what 10x looks like.

Sometimes they do it with a good deal of expertise, like Ken Norton’s 10x Not 10% post from a few years ago breaking down how to think much bigger. Often it’s done with less finesse, like this recent thread of tweets about the mystical 10x engineer from Shekhar Kirani of Accel Ventures.

In those cases, writers choose to weigh the obvious (that some people have extraordinary talent) over the also obvious (glorifying + excusing behavior of high performers actually destroys teams).

There may be some value to aiming very high and never accepting the possibility of failure, but another way to look at it is that the best people on a team never aim for 10x. They get to 85% of what they can see should exist, make sure it works + everyone is involved/understands it, and then once they're done they go back and do 85% again with a result far better.

Simply put, they just move faster than everyone else, they’re more iterative, and they are willing to consider outcomes other people don’t. That doesn’t require any inherent genius (though in some cases it helps), and it doesn’t have to destroy the people around them either.

Long story short: if you do 85% x 2, you’ll almost always learn more and get closer to the moon pie in the sky idea you had anyway.

A metric for investing in your team

Here is a thing not many people will say out loud: investing in your team is hard.

Often, it is an expected part of a founder, executive, or leader's job but not valued in the same way that revenue, customers, product use etc. are even though investing in your team is what helps you hit those goals.

Coaching / leading a team is also the defining factor in whether or not you are creating sustainable and responsible growth with purpose, with equity...or just floating some line about diversity or meritocracy.

How you design your internal choices (or not) and enable your team to keep iterating, changing, updating, seeing opportunity individually + together, that's the whole battle.

You'll never hear this at a board meeting or on a quarterly earnings call, but it matters.

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When things go wrong

Things can go sideways in any company or organization, regardless of size or industry.

You don’t have to be evil or stupid for this to happen. Markets change constantly, and timing and luck have a lot to do with whether your product is successful over time.

Often, there are opportunities to course correct before the problem(s) become major. But seeing those opportunities (and acting on them) depends heavily on building good culture.

At a team level, if you are a manager, director, or executive cutting headcount or delivering a performance improvement plan (corporate lingo for “you’re not doing well and need to get it together”), it’s already too late.

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