Nine lies about work

1. Nine Lies About Work
Diego Pacheco

2. @diego_pacheco
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diegopacheco
http://diego-pacheco.blogspot.com.br/
About me...
https://diegopacheco.github.io/

3. #lie 1 = People care about the company they work for.
❏ The truth is people care which team they are on.
❏ 3 truths from Yuval: Objective Reality(Believe or not will happen i.e gravity
vs Subjective Reality i.e depends on your feelings)
❏ There is a 3rd kind (there is something that's real just because we all
agree is real i.e money, nations).
❏ Signifiers == plumage == propaganda (20% time to focus on personal
project) == just to attract you == will fade.
❏ People care about their teams.

4. #lie 2 = Best Plan wins
❏ Plans constraint people and could be completely out of reality.
❏ Plans scope the problem - not the solution
❏ Plans are static and the reality is dynamic.
❏ Makes sure your team is swimming in real-time data all the time.
❏ Best Practice is Checkin == 101 weekly

5. #lie 3: The Best Companies Cascade Goals
❏ Cascade goals limit performance, they slow you down.
❏ If rains in NYC you might have more demand but you don't get more taxies.
❏ The goal is binary, either you are done or not done.
❏ Real-world there is work, the fantasy world there are goals.

6. #lie 4: The Best People Are Well-Rounded
❏ The proof that acquires a list of competencies you are lacking will improve your performance.
❏ Excellence is idiosyncratic.
❏ If you would develop a top-performance attacker - it's very unlikely you would build a new Lionel Messi.
❏ In real-world top managers, top performers don't have many traits in common but high score performance.
❏ So this all shows the issues with competency models (360 reviews and people evaluation)
❏ Each of us is unique.
❏ This is just a form of control
❏ flawed assumptions(ideas behind competency models) = improvement come from repair defect, failure is essential to the growth
❏ Strengths are something we should be afraid of.
❏ Embrace failure
❏ Focus first on our strengths and performance and second in well-round it
❏ Turn people bugs into features === as soon as we realize that the outcome is what matters.
❏ We are all weird == we are all different == Diversity is not an impediment to a great team is the other way around.

7. #lie 5: People Need Feedback
❏ Ray Dalio and extreme culture of bridgewater
❏ We have this wrong vision that Feedback means == Who you are (that's no true)
❏ As humans, we have poor theories about others
❏ How do we know feedback is helpful? and really needed?
❏ What we want from social media is attention, not feedback (we live in an attention
economy).
❏ Positive attention is 30x more powerful than negative attention to creating high
performance(studies proof).
❏ Stay away from negative feedback.

8. #lie 6: People Can Reliably Rate Other People
❏ 9 boxes to rate people + meeting about consensus or calibration
❏ Fixed numbers of (4s) so few people get promotions every year
❏ Force curves == Managers give as top performance to avoid explanations
❏ In real-world none of them works because they are based on the idea that people can reliably
rate people
❏ Rating patterns reveal much more about raters than about team members since rate patterns
dont change across different people (studies show)
❏ Rating exercises is not a window but a mirror.
❏ 360 reviews try to fix this problem bay saying of 2-3 raters are wrong but if 10 people say it
must be right
❏ 360 does not work because - has 2 fallacies:

9. #lie 6: People Can Reliably Rate Other People
❏ 1 - the wisdom of crowds - if the crowd is well informed on avg in will work but if they are not will be a disaster.
❏ 2 - errors are not avg out (only when they are random) never when they are systemized == 6 people talking bad about you.
(not how data works).
❏ Good Data(verification) = Could you show this was used to predict something else? to measure something else? Do we see a
variation or range? If all fall into one category, consensus contaminates the data.
❏ Good Data = careful step after step, reliable, valid, diversity.
❏ In the age of big data - no org can say what drives performance. (local, remote, diversity or not) no reliable way to measure
performance.
❏ What can we do?
❏ Ask to see a survey, ask to see where the data come from? Ask if the survey took into account the idiocracy rater effect;
❏ If you ask to rate someone in your team about growth potential your rate is not reliable, but if you ask if you would promote
that person today it would be much more reliable. When we report our experiences we are much more reliable.
❏ Reliable != accurate

10. #lie 7: People Have Potential
❏ You are not familiar with another team - how can you know the person will
excel someplace else?
❏ Missing possibilities - when we think some people have potential and other
don't.

11. #lie 8: Work-Life Balance Matters Most
❏ The author talks about a doctor who loves the stress and adrenaline of
dealing with complex responsibilities and even stress
❏ Red Threads = Activities you love (20% is enough - more does not prove
better performance).
❏ Balance is wrong - we got the categories wrong(not about life and work).
❏ It's not about being easy = it's about being unique and good for you.
❏ Burn out is not the absence of balance but the absence of love.

12. #lie 9: Leadership Is a Thing
❏ We trust in a leader when we get something in return == confidence
❏ We follow people that are really good at something very important to us.
❏ We mute our curiosity - we replace it with dogma.
❏ The truth is no leader is perfect.
❏ Truth is that leaders are frustrating.

13. Truths
❏ 1. People care about what teams they are on - because that's where real work happens.
❏ 2. The Best intelligence wins because the world moves too fast for plans.
❏ 3. The best companies cascade meaning - because people want to know what they all share.
❏ 4. The best people are spike because uniqueness is a feature, not a bug
❏ 5. People need attention - because we all want to see what we are best
❏ 6. People can reliably rate their own experience because thats all we have
❏ 7. People have momentum because we all move to the world differently
❏ 8. Love in work matters most because that's what work is really for
❏ 9. We follow spikes because spikes bring us certainty

14. Nine Lies About Work
Diego Pacheco