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Archives for July 2020

Introducing the Align Remotely podcast

July 31, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer 2 Comments

I’m excited to share that I’m finally launching a podcast, after a few almost successful attempts in the past.

Filed Under: alignment, metrics

Just how expensive are all these online meetings?

July 23, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer 2 Comments

If you want a high-leverage way to improve your company’s culture, one of the highest leverage (even financially) ways to do so, is to take a close look at your meetings. This includes your regularly re-occurring ones, as well as big long ones when kicking off or closing an initiative.

Filed Under: assumptions, metrics

Win the fight for attention by communicating with relevance

July 16, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

The biggest challenge when introducing a new product is establishing a connection with your audience. Often, this is because you can’t do anything else until this is in place. This detail really hit home for me, when I went to an accelerator event in Mexico.

In this 2006 photograph, a man was receiving an intramuscular injection in his left shoulder muscle from a trained, registered nurse (RN), while his family was observing from over the nurse's shoulder.
Photographer: CDC | Source: Unsplash

One of the speakers was an immunobiologist client of mine, who’d developed a unique salmonella vaccine that could be combined with other vaccines. And it looks as though his vaccine is the only salmonella one which can do that.

I’d worked with him briefly as an innovation expert, and had a discussion about commercialization options as well as some pitch training. At the time he was struggling to see entrepreneurship as a viable route to greater impact. He felt comfortable as an inventor, and wanted to do more of that, not become a businessman.

It turned out I had unleashed a force of nature. Also drilling him in giving pithy explanations helped him hone down his message to something much more concrete for anyone who wasn’t already a fellow immunobiologist, or even a scientist. This one insight allowed him to communicate the relevance of his work to the wider public.

But more importantly, he started to believe that entrepreneurship was a viable route to greater impact. As it would force him to confront institutions that held him and other scientists back domestically.

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

As a result of both, he’s pretty much gone from a booksy academic researcher to a serious contender in getting funding to help spread the use of his product vaccine. This is the power of relevance and empathy in an age of dwindling attention.

One of the best ways to get (and stay) relevant is to focus all of your marketing and product efforts around a client profile. In theory there are millions of ways to reach an audience; in practice, you only need to reach a specific group of people. So figure out who they are, and then just focus on them. The best way to do this is the Hero Canvas tool. Grab a copy and get a quick intro for free with my Hero Canvas course.

<< Help Yo' Friends

Filed Under: assumptions, case study, find people, innovation, startup, stories Tagged With: attention, relevance

Why the silo megaphone effect undercuts your ability to align

July 10, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

The biggest challenge I’ve had with building alignment as a team leader was the “silo megaphone effect”. In the past, I’ve attended a number of surreal stakeholder meetings attended by:

  • head of product
  • head of delivery
  • a technical person
  • a head of QA
  • or possibly other managers.

Each participant makes statements that–on their own–made absolute sense. For example, the QA person argued for keeping a certain standard in terms of quality. The delivery person wanted to bring in the date as much as possible. The product person wanted to throw in as much scope as possible to make it easier to sell the product. I understood what they were saying. I could fully understand why they were saying what they were. They genuinely believed they were arguing for the overall benefit of the company, as a whole.

Nevertheless, if you juxtaposed what one manager was saying against the other, it was less than clear what the overall priority was. And this is exactly what I call the silo megaphone effect.

Filed Under: alignment Tagged With: silo, silo megaphone effect

Why addressing errors effectively lies at the heart of team performance

July 2, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

No one wakes up in the morning excited to go to work and look ignorant, incompetent, or disruptive. While it’s not true of everyone, I think it’s fair to say that anyone who gets a job wants to be there and usually wants to do well–for the purpose of self-respect. Look at how elated most people are when they accept a job after getting an offer. It’s when they enter into the “systems” at a particular company, that everything usually takes a left turn.

Modern Times (1936) trailer: capturing the essence of managing

In established companies, it’s sadly common for employees to be habituated in a context of fear of failure. Especially if there is a lot of pressure from management to perform at a high level. There are ambitious goals, often coupled with a lack of clarity on how they will be achieved. In practice, employees focus on looking busy (however that is defined). They end up fearing failure, of not living up to expectations.

As a manager, there is a fine line to draw here. You don’t want to set the bar too low and cause everyone to just slack off. The starting point here is one of psychological safety; according to the research, this is one of the main factors driving high performance in teams. In particular, how you handle errors, failures, or surprises in a way that keeps the team accountable while enabling them to believe that they will be listened to–if they speak up.

Common error types

According to Amy Edmondson in The Fearless Organization, there are 3 different types of errors which happen professionally, and their meaning is largely driven by context:

  1. mechanical errors in a highly repeated process that just need to be minimized in frequency: this is what Modern Times parodied
  2. interaction errors which result from highly complicated relationships, especially in a larger company
  3. thwarted expectations around a goal in the context of experimentation, often a surprising result of an experiment

A large part of the challenge of large companies is that they treat all errors as if they were all #1 by default. This approach may be tied to political gamesmanship. But not everything is just a deviation from a standard (regardless of who actually decides and imposes that standard). Especially in knowledge work like software, where completing something requires you to learn something you don’t know up front. Edmondson quips, “For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge!”

Your riskiest assumptions are probably related to your prospects and customers. Establish empathy quickly with your target prospect, figure out what's valuable, and get your innovation into the market.

I don’t know who dropped this in Leeds city centre but I feel their disappointment.

Filed Under: alignment, assumptions, metrics Tagged With: digital taylorism, output, principles, process risk, throughput

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  • About Luke

    Luke Szyrmer is an innovation and remote work expert. He’s the bestselling author of #1 bestseller Launch Tomorrow. He mentors early stage tech founders and innovators in established companies. Read More…

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