Lessons and Quotes

I see people spending time turning their thoughts into quotes complete with photos of themselves looking pensively into the distance and I sometimes cringe on their behalf. A step above liking and retweeting your own tweet, while we all can teach others many things, isn’t it awfully presumptuous to believe you have just the thing that deserves daily quote-making? Don’t get me wrong, a lot of pearls of wisdom in those quote cards and some of those messages are invaluable indeed, I’m only objecting to the delivery method.

By contrast, I recently took stock of how many things I wrote and how many things I learned and decided to see you a quote and raise you a totally unordered list of miscellaneous learnings and findings. The only criteria? I wouldn’t have believed my future self that these lessons are a thing if I met myself 3 or 4 years ago when I was still starry-eyed and misguided about the “fixing people’s lives at work” size of the job.

Everyone in every enterprise that has HumanDebt™ feels it intensely. No one is oblivious to the notion of Human Debt in general but more importantly, they closely relate to it from a personal standpoint and shake their heads and sigh in recognition of every type of anti-pattern discussed or of examples of toxic culture that result from it.

The notion of “team” is super unclear to most shops. Very few places have a firm definition of teams in particular when they are cross-functional or distributed across geographies and so on. It’s usually a sign of low “Structure and Clarity” which is yet another of the sine qua non conditions mentioned by Google’s Project Aristotle.

Measurements and data have a bad rap with employees who see them as a risk factor not a way to show their hard work. Most companies of the thousands we met are still operating unquestioned annual surveys alongside antiquated and frightening performance appraisals and have never stopped to question either.