Fifteen Tics

Remember Manager Readmes? The idea was that a manager would take the time to write up their leadership style, what they valued, and their principles. A fad that started in 2017, hit its peak in 2018, and then faded.¹

I wrote one in March 2018 and enjoyed the process, but while I published mine, I didn’t think the point was to share; the point was to write it.

• If I am in the Zone and you interrupt that state, I am instantly and irrationally mad.
• If you tell me what to do, the hair on the back of my neck stands up. If you ask me for help for the same task, no problem.
• If you are a leader and you are late to my meeting again, I am no longer thinking about the meeting. I am narrating an increasingly snarky internal story about what your lateness says about you.
• If you’re sitting next to me tap-tap-tapping your leg, I’m annoyed. I am a lifelong fidgeter. I know.

I was at Slack when the Manager Readme craze hit. Managers on my team followed my lead and wrote their own and then proceeded to send their Readmes to their team. I don’t know how they framed this document when they sent it, but I know how it was received: “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”

For my (now dated) Readme, the task was: reflect on what’s important to me as a leader. The task of getting that out of my head and onto the page had the same result as all writing for me; it forced me to think through the subject.

• If I am explaining something to you and it’s not clear that either you are getting it and/or you appear to not be listening, I focus on your lack of attention versus what I am trying to say. Weird, right?
• If I hand you a task, I have already — instantly, involuntarily — re-graded you on every prior task I’ve ever handed you, and that grade silently decides how much I hover.
• If I didn’t build it with my own hands, I quietly and unfairly believe you’re going to screw it up.
• If the team drifts off the plan in my head — the unspoken plan I never actually told anyone — I start making lists with boxes, and THE BOXES MUST BE CHECKED.

The employees who received the Readmes from their manager were rightly furious. The document can read like a manifesto. Good leaders don’t lead by mandate; they lead by example. You see — with your eyeballs — how your leaders act, and you decide — with your brain — does this work for me? Or not? And why?

I spent random parts of the month cleaning up the perspective that a Manager Readme wasn’t a cheat sheet for your manager; it was their reflection on what was important to them, as a manager.

• If you give me critical feedback, I rage first (“Jerks”), rationalize second (“They don’t understand me”), and only then — after years of practice — think. The order never changes.
• If my brain senses a hard conversation approaching, before a single word is said, it is preparing for hand-to-hand combat.
• If a problem is unresolved at bedtime, my eyes pop open at 3:13am with my brain already mid-compile. Nobody asked it to do this.

Habits are a part of those Readmes. Ways that I’ve learned to act. Values are there, too, but there is a final section that I called Nuance and Errata. For all the buzz generated by Readmes, this section was the only one where I received substantive feedback. Shortly after publication, a General Counsel from a prior company mailed me and quoted the piece:

I’m an introvert; more than eight people and I go strangely quiet. Don’t confuse quiet with lack of engagement.

He added, “Now I understand you.”

I have tics. Many of them are irrational and deeply unfair to those around me.

I have many tics. You’ve been reading them throughout this piece. If you click on the links, you’ll realize you’ve been reading about them for years.

• If a small thing breaks — a keyboard key, say — the rage is instant and wildly out of proportion to the thing. The actual root cause of the fury is buried somewhere deeper, and I mostly don’t want to look.
• If I lose data, I will not cease my irrational swearing until the tool responsible is eradicated from my system. Even when — especially when — the loss was entirely my fault.
• If I’m standing in an unreasonable line, I’m telling myself the story that a specific human somewhere made a specific poor design decision whose consequence is me, standing in this line. Rage.
• If I don’t know precisely where my stuff is, I’m twitchy and, frankly, a jerk. This is why I fully unpack in every hotel room immediately, no matter the jet lag.

Like I said, irrational and unfair. Embarrassing. Mostly not your problem.

Pick the human you worked with, or for whom you admired the most. For each of the attributes that you admire, there is an equal amount of strange to bizarre to broken behavior, habits, and tics that you may never have seen, but are certainly there. 

The competent leaders are aware of these behaviors, their consequences, and the carefully constructed compensation techniques that lessen their impact on themselves and the humans.

Thinking takes practice.

1. Speaking of fading. Holacracy! Remember that? Started in 2007, but kicked into high gear in 2012 with Medium and then in 2015 for Zappos. Three years later, gone. Turns out you need some form of leadership in your team. Dictators and RIP middle management is the craze right now, but just wait three years. You’ll see. ↩︎