Podcast appearances and mentions of claire lew

What makes a great manager and what are the most important factors in making the leap to leading a team? In this weeks' podcast episode, Lily and Randy were joined by the amazing Melike Hope, Product Director at Twitter, to talk all about managing product managers and scaling up your career ladder.  Featured Links: Follow Melika on LinkedIn and Twitter | Melika's IC to Manager video | 'How to be a great manager' - Claire Lew on The Product Experience

You are sitting there and scratching your head. You just got an email from your client that they will be churning. How could this be? You spoke to them last week and have had regular meetings and they never mentioned the possibility of leaving. Unfortunately, if you are in customer success, this can happen from time to time. The relationships that you think you have with your clients aren't as strong as you think they are. Sorry to burst that bubble.Here are two questions that I've borrowed from Claire Lew that I recommend you ask yourself regularly for each client to ensure you know where you stand with your customers.Reality CheckYou first need to do a reality check. Ask yourself: “To what degree are you seeing the current reality for what it is?” You need to get real here. Consider these items: Is the client actually achieving value from your solution? Do you know if they would renew tomorrow if they had to? If you can't confidently answer these questions, you need to dive deeper. As Bob London recommends, ask your clients disruptive questions such as: “If a competitor reached out to you, would you respond?”. Keep probing until you are satisfied with the response.Just because a customer tells you everything is ok, doesn't mean that it is. At times, it's easier for them to gloss over their larger issues as they may be busy. In addition, they may be fed up as they are tired rehashing ongoing issues. It also may be easier for you to shake off signs that there are problems such as a customer canceling a call or ignoring your email. Seek out the truth - even if it hurts. Environmentally FriendlyThe second item to consider is the environment you've created for your customer. Ask yourself: “To what degree are you creating an environment for your client to be successful?”. Consider these items:Have I provided the client with everything they need to succeed?Do I need to do the work for the client or are they able to do it by themselves?Where are they struggling? Why are they struggling?If you can't confidently answer these questions, start by reviewing their conversations with your support team, any other voice of customer feedback such as surveys as well as their usage of your product. Look for potential issues within these areas and any past correspondence you've had. Then ask them the challenging questions “how can we make things easier for you?” or “If our product went away tomorrow, how much pain would this cause you?”. Ask follow up questions to ensure that they are getting the support they need to be successful. Determine what are some of the immediate and longer-term steps that can be taken to improve their situation. Figure out how to create a better environment for your customer and this will create an overall better customer experience.Don't get burned by unexpected churn. Challenge yourself with these two questions and challenge your clients. PS. Here is a movie from 90's that I highly recommend: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chadhorenfeldt.substack.com

If a coworker had feedback for you, would you rather they say it to your face, or do you prefer to receive it anonymously? Today's debate challenges you to think again about the best way to critique your colleagues.  Debater Rani Shah defends direct feedback, with support from Know Your Team's CEO Claire Lew, who unpacks the cultural consequences of anonymous feedback. And Marshall Walker Lee argues in favor of anonymous feedback, with help from HR pro Osasu Arigbe, who shares a story of direct feedback gone very wrong. 

Be it Fear or futility, Those pesky employees aren't telling you everything. Claire Lew looks at why and gives you actionable advice on how to build a better work culture. For more talks, check out businessofsoftware.org --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/business-of-software/message

In this week's episode of Talking Through It, Neal Sáles-Griffin talks with Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Team. Today's Topics:Hitting a pandemic wallRobinhoodClubhouseAddressing toxicityPositive workplacesThis Week's Startups To Watch:FrankRosecrans VenturesTechstars personnel and/or guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, and not the opinion of either Techstars or any company discussed in this podcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities are for illustrative and/or informational purposes only and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investor or prospective investor, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by Techstars. Certain of Techstars funds own (or may own in the future) securities in some of the companies discussed in this podcast. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A dynamic conversation between 4 current and past VPs of Engineering who cover tons of patterns and anti-patterns about being a VPE! You'll hear how leadership is different in large vs. small companies, mental models to determine your greatest leverage, why you DON’T need to act like an owner, how to put trust into practice when you’re transitioning into a new role, and about the imperfect path to become a VPE. SPEAKERS: CATHY POLINKSY CTO @ Stitch Fix JERRY KRIKHELI VP of Engineering @ Houzz RICHARD WONG SVP of Engineering @ Coursera ERICA LOCKHEIMER VP of Engineering @ Linkedin Learning And CLAIRE LEW CEO @ Know Your Team SHOWNOTES What Cathy means by “the best leaders spot patterns, understand problems, then build systems to solve them” (3:55) Jerry’s view on how the practice of leadership is different at large companies vs. small companies (7:30) Erica’s perspective on how the transition to VPE is different than other eng leadership roles and how to put trust into practice (12:27) Why Richard resonates with “act like an owner” and what it actually looks like in practice as VPE (16:40) Cathy’s top 3 priorities as VPE that determine how she spends her time and how to refocus your team (23:50) Richard's mental model to determine where he has the most leverage for impact and why being technical isn't always about writing code (26:16) Jerry's 3 key hiring traits and how to create an environment where you're the first to know when something's wrong (30:10) The imperfect path to become a VPE and Erica’s advice for engineering leaders with an “unconventional” background (34:01) The common struggle to balance being a problem solver and being the bottleneck as a VPE (39:11) How they cope with and manage stress (42:55) Takeaways (45:00) ELC SUMMIT 2020 Accelerate your growth as an engineering leader at the ELC Summit! Learn from 100+ incredible speakers. Talks cover tons of well-rounded curated topics. There will be opportunities for hands-on practice through workshops (+ other programs), and speed networking with other eng leaders through our own custom-built platform! More details and tickets @ http://elcsummit.com Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message

MicroConf 2016 Claire Lew has run an unconventional business – this is the story of how she created a profitable, bootstrapped software company that has over 10,000+ people using our product, on a their-time pricing model, with just a two-person team. How do we they it? She’ll share our unconventional approach, why they chose it, and the greatest lessons they've learned along the way. MicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe Basecamp https://basecamp.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Basecamp

MicroConf 2016 Claire Lew has run an unconventional business – this is the story of how she created a profitable, bootstrapped software company that has over 10,000+ people using our product, on a their-time pricing model, with just a two-person team. How do we they it? She’ll share our unconventional approach, why they chose it, and the greatest lessons they've learned along the way. MicroConf Connect ➡️ http://microconfconnect.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/MicroConf E-mail ➡️ support@microconf.com MicroConf 2020 Headline Partners Stripe https://stripe.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Stripe Basecamp https://basecamp.com Twitter ➡️ https://twitter.com/Basecamp

For the past 10 years, Claire Lew has been shaping businesses in the background. She founded Know Your Team to help leaders become better at leadership by focusing on topics that most of us overlook: how to give honest feedback, how to nurture your talent and how to run a team effectively. In this conversation, we go deep on what prevents us from becoming great leaders and what we should do about it. BONUS: Claire shares her framework on how to give feedback that inspires action.

Managing a remote work doesn't have to be scary, but it is harder than you think. Claire Lew has everything you need to know to get off to a good start. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We spoke to Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Team. Know Your Team is a software tool that helps more than 15,000 people in 25 countries become better leaders and work with their teams better. Claire's writing has been published on Harvard Business Review, CNBC, Business Insider, Inc, Fortune and more. Full transcript: http://ex.pn/levelup 

Storytime With Managers is a collection of twenty minute conversations where Jennifer Tu finds answers to questions of interest to both established and budding leaders in technology fields. How do you communicate high-level or complex ideas to your team? How do you know if your ideas are getting across? When is repeating yourself too repetitive? In Episode 25, Sergio Rabiela (@spacechurro on Twitter) shares advice on communicating high-level ideas to your team. Show references: Marco Rogers on 1-1s Claire Lew on how ICs can prepare for a 1-1 with their manager Tell us what you think of our podcast! We're on Twitter as @wecohere. ---- Our theme music is by Kevin MacLeod (CC-BY): www.orangefreesounds.com/electronic-ambient-easy-listening-music/ We are edited by Mandy Moore and the Dev Reps team (http://www.devreps.com/). Tell us what you think of Storytime With Managers! Twitter: @wecohere

In these changing days with all of us in education working remotely, it is so important for leaders to stay connected to their teams. Chris and Tim discuss an article written by Claire Lew on knowyourteam.org that describes 4 important questions for leaders to ask their remote employees on a regular basis. In this podcast, we discuss the following four questions in more detail.  How would you describe your energy level?  What fears or trepidation do you hold regarding the team or company? Do you feel equipped to do your job well? What can I do to create an environment for you to do your best work, while remote?

Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Team (one of our favorite products) discusses how they aim to educate, inspire and empower managers to become better leaders.

This week on the BoS Podcast we have Claire Lew - professor of entrepreneurship at Northwestern University and CEO of Know Your Team (a software tool that helps managers become better leaders) - talking about how no one sets out to be a bad boss, but it's easy to become one. After years of research from 15,000+ people and 25 countries, Claire, shares the biggest, most counter-intuitive mistakes that leaders unintentionally make – and what to do about them. Recorded at Business of Software Europe 2019 in Cambridge, UK. To listen to more talks go to https://businessofsoftware.org/videos --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/business-of-software/message

Dimitar Karaivanov on Agile Atelier, Claire Lew on The Product Experience, Eric Willeke on Agile Amped, Mike Bugembe on The Product Experience, Colleen Esposito on Hired Thought I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button, and if you like the show, please tell a friend or co-worker who might be interested. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting February 17, 2020. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. DIMITAR KARAIVANOV ON AGILE ATELIER The Agile Atelier podcast featured Dimitar Karaivanov with host Rahul Bhattacharya. Dimitar is an expert on scaling Kanban. Dimitar thinks of Agile as a company sport rather than a team sport. At the team level, scaling is horizontal. The more interesting kind of scaling to Dimitar is vertical scaling. If you have a hundred or a thousand teams, the real challenge is the coordination piece on top of those teams and the strategic piece on top of that. If you don’t have an optimized coordination layer that reduces the number of things the organization is working on, your organization is spread too thin. He explained the importance of teamwork and coordination using the metaphor of a band of musicians. Scaling Kanban starts with a single team. What Dimitar likes about Kanban is that if you follow the basic rules, it always results in some kind of improvement. Next, we want to connect the teams to a management layer that performs the coordination activities. People often perceive Kanban as a visual board with some sticky notes on it. Actually, if you go horizontally, then vertically, it is more of an instrumentation facility for your organization. Like a performance profiling tool, you connect Kanban to your organization and it provides entry points with time stamps and starts collecting data. With this profiler, you can dig in and find out what the slowest part of your organization is. Rahul asked about roles in scaled Kanban. Dimitar says there are only two specialized roles called out in Kanban: the service delivery manager and the service request manager. Because one of the principles of Kanban is to start where you are, you do not have to change a lot about roles when you start using Kanban. The service request manager role just means having someone who is responsible for requesting work, such as product manager. The service delivery manager just needs to be someone who is responsible for ensuring the work gets done. This could be a Scrum Master or maybe just a team lead. If the organization is adopting Kanban as a whole, you will need someone on the strategic level that is connected to the Kanban system and has a say in what gets done and when. Rahul asked about failures Dimitar has seen. Dimitar has seen problems in which training just the teams and expecting this to lead to business agility failed. Another route to failure was relying on tools to do all of the work of creating agility. He says you need people with personal agility. You need to find these people or stimulate your existing people to grow themselves so that they become agile in their mindset. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-19-scaling-kanban-with-dimitar-karaivanov/id1459098259?i=1000464007645 Website link: https://rahul-bhattacharya.com/2020/01/29/episode-19-scaling-kanban-with-dimitar-karaivanov/ CLAIRE LEW ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience featured Claire Lew with hosts Randy Silver and Lily Smith. Randy started by asking Claire if she’s ever accidentally been anybody’s worst boss. This was the question that Claire herself had asked at the Business of Software conference in her talk, “The Accidental Bad Manager.” She says that, based on her data, the answer is “probably.” She says that 85% of the time companies are choosing the wrong manager or promoting the wrong people into the role. They’re choosing for a manager those individuals who were showing excellent skills and outcomes as an individual contributor, but those skills don’t transfer over when they become a manager. Claire cited a Gallup study that found that there are five to seven traits that characterize the best managers and, yet, only one in ten managers possesses these traits inherently. Claire created Know Your Team because she herself had a really bad boss and he had no idea. The first thing that made this boss so bad was that he didn’t follow through on his commitments. Looking back, she sees this as a classic case of failing to build trust because he made promises and didn’t deliver. When leaders think about trust, oftentimes their minds go to likability, team-building, and images of trust falls and happy hours. None of those things have to do with real trust, which is the ability to show people that you will do what you say. A second thing that made this boss so bad was that he lacked an ability to communicate and share vision. This is a common problem because most of us get the definition of vision wrong. Claire says that vision is not what you do and it’s not how you do it; it is where you’re going. Vision is the strongest motivating force in a team and the most clarifying force for decision-making. Neither motivation nor decision-making were tenable under her bad boss because the vision wasn’t clear. Lily asked how Claire designed Know Your Team. Claire says that the number of conceptions of leadership is as large as the number of people who have attempted to define the term. She believes the reason there are so many definitions of leadership and the reason that there is no agreed upon best approach to leadership is because, most of the time, the right thing to do is highly dependent on many factors: your own disposition, the team’s disposition, team dynamics, the market, the task at hand, etc. So the best thing to do is to compile as much data as possible and determine the two or three best things to focus on. The best managers, she says, tend to focus on three things. First is trust. Second is honesty. Third is being able to create context in a team, that is, being able to understand and share where you are trying to go and what progress is being made along the way. Lily asked how these areas of focus compare with the traits in the Gallup study Claire mentioned earlier. Claire says that the Gallup study identified temperamental characteristics like positive thinking, good judgment, and empathy, and Claire’s areas of focus represent the skills you can build and the things that you can do to make your team run better. But there are connections between the Gallup characteristics and Claire’s areas of focus: you need empathy to build trust, and you need good judgement to create context. Randy asks why managers are the last to know that they are bad at this. Claire says the psychological reason is that we create a narrative for ourselves that fits with a coherent positive self-image. More practically, we are complicit in being the last to know for several reasons, including the fact that we don’t create an environment for people to tell us. As a result, people don’t speak up in the workplace and this is because of fear and a sense of futility; they believe that nothing would change. To resolve this, we need to be able to ask for feedback in the right way and we have to act on that feedback. To ask for feedback in the right way, we need to be vulnerable. Tell people you are struggling. When you go first and you come from a place of vulnerability, you give the other person permission to be vulnerable themselves and you defuse the element of fear. You also need to be specific. You can’t ask, “How’s it going?” Instead, ask something like, “What is one thing that we could have done better in the past quarter?” or “When is the last time you felt frustrated with your work?” or “Have you observed any micro-managing tendencies from me in the past few months?” or “Have we been all talk and no action on anything lately?” Next, you need to act on the feedback. If asking questions is all about defusing fear, acting on the feedback is all about defusing futility. When you show people that their feedback is not in vain, that helps people to speak up. Some people think this means having to implement every single piece of feedback. Not at all. Acting on feedback can be as simple as thanking someone for their feedback or explaining why you are not doing something. As leaders, we often explain why we are doing something but we forget to share why we are not doing something. The best way to modulate and calibrate the other person’s expectations so that they don’t think speaking up is futile is to say, “You’re not likely to see a ton of progress on this in the beginning but I will give you regular updates on the progress.” And then make sure you give those updates. Another best practice for creating an environment where you are not the last to know is to ask people what their preferences are around feedback. They may want an email, a slack message, or a phone call. Another preference we often forget to ask about is how quickly to give feedback. They may want it right away, or scheduled for the next day or the next week. A third preference is their orientation toward conflict. Do they believe that conflict is healthy and necessary to be productive in a team or do they much prefer a low-conflict environment? A manager should not just be looking to be a great manager or leader but to be the best manager or leader for each particular person and to know that this is going to require customizing your approach to every individual. Randy asked what lessons people can learn about leadership if they don’t have direct reports but need to be able to influence without power. Claire says leadership is not about your title or the number of direct reports you have. At its most core form, leadership is about modeling the behavior that you want to be true of your team. Say you are so annoyed that your entire team is always late for meetings and late on deadlines. Instead of thinking you need to speak to someone or to manage up, one effective way of exhibiting leadership is to turn to yourself and ask, “To what degree can I model the behavior I would like to be true of the team?” A second way to exhibit leadership is to consider how you, as a teammate, can create an environment for those around you to do their best work. Apple Podcasts link:  Website link:  ERIC WILLEKE ON AGILE AMPED The Agile Amped podcast featured Eric Willeke with host Leslie Morse. The first and most critical thing Eric learned about WIP, or work in process, is to pay attention to how WIP cascades and multiplies in an organization. A single piece of strategic WIP equals hundreds to thousands of pieces of individual WIP. A lot of good work comes from corporate strategies, but there is too much of it. Eric gave an example of a VP of product management whose work he helped visualize. They discovered that he had 38 initiatives that he had to report on for his eight teams. When you look at that kind of flood, there is little wonder that we are creating an inability to focus and limit work in process. Eric no longer looks at the executive ranks and says they are to blame. He owns up to it and says that we are all to blame. He now feels empathy for the powerlessness that senior leaders feel in spite of their titles and maybe even because of their titles since those titles carry with them a kind of trap. Eric has three strategies that he uses at organizations to reduce their WIP problems: 1) Start with alignment. Make sure people understand intent and purpose. Eliminate the excess WIP that comes from the “Am I in the right direction?” question. 2) Practice reduction in depth. According to Michael Porter, the essence of a good strategy is what you’re not doing. Help people learn what is not part of the strategy and generate focus. You may have to repeat yourself because, as Patrick Lencioni says, “You only get one message per quarter and you need to say that message hundreds of times.” 3) Create permission and safety as part of how you decentralize. When you decentralize, people need to have all the permission to take responsibility and the safety to try things, learn, and experience the associated failures that come with learning. The conversation with leaders to get them to limit WIP is difficult. The leader starts with the best of intentions. If you come in too strongly with a message that they are doing it wrong, you are saying, “You were trying really hard in the best way you know how and you failed.” They didn’t. They were not responsible, necessarily, for all of the different pieces of WIP or how it cascaded, yet they have to take responsibility for helping people set things down. One leader Eric is working with understands this and uses a quarterly message that says, “You may put things down, but you need to put them down gently.” A lot of people look at WIP and say, “We just need to throw away half the items in process.” But that hurts people, hurts initiatives, and hurts business leaders. So we need to know how to carefully set down the things we’re not going to do yet and bring everybody else along. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/too-much-wip-destroy-your-backlog/id992128516?i=1000463449566 Website link: https://solutionsiq.podbean.com/e/too-much-wip-destroy-your-backlog/ MIKE BUGEMBE ON THE PRODUCT EXPERIENCE The Product Experience podcast featured Mike Bugembe with hosts Randy Silver and Lily Smith. Mike is the former Chief Analytics Officer for justgiving.com, which uses machine learning to try to increase generosity in the UK. When Mike joined, the company had in excess of ten years of data on people raising and giving money for causes they cared about. They used their technology to get a signal about what people were passionate about and used this to match people to causes. They started by using a collaborative filter approach like Amazon’s “people who purchased your item also tend to purchase these items”, but charitable giving is so personal that collaborative filtering doesn’t work. Instead, using Nicholas Christakis’ research, they could see that connections between individuals could help them understand the flow of generosity and the flow of the things that are important to people. Mike says that a lot of large companies talk about the fancy things they do with machine learning and data science like Facebook’s EdgeRank or Amazon’s and Netflix’s recommendation engines, but sometimes there are use cases that are unsexy but deliver a huge amount of value. For example, when people put a fundraising page on JustGiving, they have the option to specify a target. Only 30% of fundraisers were specifying such a target, but Mike found that this behavior led to much more money raised. So Mike created a machine learning system that predicted how much a fundraiser was likely to raise and pre-populated the target field. This was a lot of work to deliver one number on a screen, but this feature delivered an additional 7% on a 400 million pound business.  His approach to understanding where AI can deliver business value is to look at every business as a system of people making decisions, whether it’s marketers, product teams, or users. When you look at a product this way, the machine learning use cases float to the surface. You see where machine learning can make a decision more efficient, more automated, or more predictable. You then add a metric to each decision and see how decisions relate to each other or how they relate to key metrics you are trying to move. Your data is quite unique to your business and your product. It acts like a fingerprint. One of the risks of data science is that it is an experiment every time you do it. Even if somebody else has done it before, you have no guarantee that when you do it you will get a successful result. Product management teams that work with data science teams need to be aware that data science is not the same as delivering a feature with a software development team. It is an experiment. You have a question in mind and you have no idea whether or not the research will produce the result you’re expecting. Lily asked Mike how he recommends people hire a data scientist. Mike says he is very much against the idea of hiring a data scientist just because they have a PhD. That’s a massive risk. You could get a PhD-holding job candidate who only understands regression and is not numerate enough to try a lot of the different algorithms that data scientists use. Mike himself looks for data scientists who have real life experience. This doesn’t mean they’ve worked in a lot of companies before. It means they’ve got things that they’ve produced. You can read and study, he says, but if you’ve never done it, you won’t know the gotchas and foibles that come with working with data. Randy asked if there any guidelines or cheat sheets for people to educate themselves about bias in data collection, in algorithms, in assumptions, and in interpretation. Mike created a non-technical course for executives, product managers, and founders because they know their business better than the data scientists, in most cases. They add a layer of domain knowledge that helps reduce risk due to bias. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/cracking-data-code-mike-bugembe-on-product-experience/id1447100407?i=1000463981779 Website link: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/cracking-the-data-code-mike-bugembe-on-the-product-experience/ COLLEEN ESPOSITO ON HIRED THOUGHT The Hired Thought podcast featured Colleen Esposito with host Ben Mosior. Colleen loves helping teams get started, helping them understand that Agile is about uncovering better ways of developing software, and helping them identify what Agile means for them. She also loves helping the managers, directors, and VPs to interact better with the teams so that the teams become empowered. Colleen is a fan of invitation-based coaching and making sure the people understand the whys behind the change, what it looks like in the anticipated end state, and what steps the team may take to move towards that vision they’ve identified. Colleen says that the first thing she does when she comes into a brand new organization is she tries to understand the whys behind their decisions. “Why did you choose to use Agile?” If what she hears is, “Twice the work in half the time,” then she knows that she might have to reset expectations. Before starting an Agile adoption, Colleen gets everyone to think about the answers to some common questions like, “Why are we doing this? What’s in our way? What’s in our favor?” She says that if the leadership makes changes without involvement of the people, they are going to miss out on a valuable perspective. Colleen says that the people who hire her often think that she is going to come into their organization and make huge, sweeping changes. Instead, in the very beginning, it is often small changes like connecting what a development team is doing with what an operations team is doing. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/5-building-bridges/id1479303584?i=1000464455334 Website link: https://hiredthought.com/2020/02/03/5-building-bridges/ LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

We’ve all had that one manager that we’ll do anything to avoid for the rest of our careers – but have you ever stopped to think if you’re that person for someone else? That’s the question that prompted Claire Lew to start Know Your Team and here she joins us on the podcast to give [...] Read more » The post How To Be A Great Manager – Claire Lew on The Product Experience appeared first on Mind the Product.

Reality Check: Success isn’t about driving Ferraris and sipping champagne from a private jet… It’s about how you handle problems. No matter how many customers you get, how much profit you make… you will always have problems. Money might buy you a bigger team and more talented employees, but then you’ve got the problem of actually knowing your team!  How do you keep your finger on the pulse in your own company?  That is one of the biggest problems that SaaS founders encounter when they start to scale. Growing pains.  Losing touch. Well, in this week’s episode of Escape Velocity, I sat down to interview someone who has solved this exact problem for lots of businesses: Claire Lew. Claire is the CEO of Know Your Team. They build software that saves a manager from becoming a bad boss. One minor improvement in team communication can have an exponential effect on productivity, output and growth business-wide. It’s such a significant problem that Claire now works with managers from DropBox, Mailchimp, AirBnb, and more…  …working with over 15,000 people in 25 countries …and yet her own business is just 4 people! Claire is infinitely intelligent, full of great stories, and in this episode you’ll learn: - Why her boss made her quit - How she started with one-on-one consulting - Her first customer (Jason from Basecamp!) - Becoming a CEO at 24 years old - Being profitable from month one - The 3 biggest things most CEOs don’t know about their team - Nailing the right pricing - Rebuilding your own product I love Claire’s story because it maps out the time-tested steps to growth. She had a problem (she hated her boss), she wanted to solve this problem (developed a way to provide feedback), she began helping people 1-on-1 (idea validation), then she scaled into a SaaS. Starting a great business is not rocket science.  Sometimes simplicity is the key. Get your headphones in, queue up the episode right here, and don’t forget to leave a comment. I love getting the conversation going! -- Dan Martell has advised more startups than his hometown has people and teaches startup founders like you how to scale. He previously created, raised venture funding for and successfully exited two tech startups: Flowtown and Clarity.fm. You should follow him on twitter @danmartell for tweets that are actually awesome. + Instagram (behind the scenes): http://instagram.com/danmartell + Facebook (live trainings + Q&A): http://FB.com/DanMartell + Twitter (what I'm reading): http://twitter.com/danmartell

Claire Lew is the founder of KnowYourTeam, software that helps managers become better leaders. She's also an expert on leadership and how to motivate employees to do their best work.Jonathan sat down with Clare to discuss what it really takes to become an exceptional leader as a first-time founder, as well as how employees really like to be led and managed.This is the sixth interview in our new "Keys To Scale" series, where we talk to successful founders and entrepreneurs about what it really took to scale their businesses.

We find that conviction often leads to great product stories, and today’s is no different. Christian came across our guest on Twitter, and the more digging he did, the more interested in her story he became. Claire Lew is the CEO of Know Your Team, a software that helps you become a better manager. Claire is passionately focused on helping leaders become better at leading, and her story to success is driven by a philosophical approach. In fact, that approach led to some unexpected turns that have transformed the possibilities for what Know Your Team could actually become. As the company changed - and as you’ll hear, quite literally everything changed - the pricing model transitioned right along with the philosophy of the company. But How? Why? These are the questions we ask Claire Lew on the latest episode of Better Product. Connect with Claire  Learn more about Know Your Team Connect with Christian Connect with Anna Learn more about Innovatemap

Eliminate blindspots and build engagement by getting to know your company better - Interview with Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Company, a software tool that helps business owners get to know their employees better and overcome company growing pains.

Rick en Reinier bespreken het artikel The 9 leadership mistakes you don't know you're making as a new manager (https://knowyourteam.com/blog/2019/02/28/the-9-leadership-mistakes-you-dont-know-youre-making-as-a-new-manager/) van Claire Lew. Verder nog in deze aflevering: The Peter Principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) GitLab’s Director of Risk and Global Compliance resigns (https://www.reddit.com/r/gitlab/comments/dtfccm/gitlabs_director_of_risk_and_global_compliance/)

This week, Jason Fried, CEO and Co-Founder of Basecamp and I, your host, Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Team, interview each other for this special milestone episode #50 of The Heartbeat. We talk about learning how to be like yourself earlier, thinking about long-term views as leaders, how leadership roles change over time, and… Read the full article

Claire Lew is the CEO of Know Your Team, a software company that helps you be a better manager. In addition to running her company, Claire writes extraordinarily insightful leadership articles on the Know Your Team blog, and she has been published in Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, CNBC, Inc, and Fortune. She also speaks internationally on how to create more open, and honest work environments. You can connect with Claire on Twitter (@ClaireJLew) or by visiting www.knowyourteam.com Where Others Won't is recorded in Toronto, Canada, and was created by Cody Royle and Adam Esker. You can book Cody to speak, or learn more about his background by visiting: www.codyroyle.com

How to create a safe space for conflict and feedback with Claire Lew Guest Claire Lew (https://twitter.com/clairejlew): CEO of Know Your Team (https://knowyourteam.com/). Inclusion Card: The Whole Deck Summary In this final episode of Meetings Done Right, Noel and Ashley talk to Claire Lew of Know Your Team about creating a safe space for conflict and feedback within your company. Claire talks about how not to be a bad boss, and offers some specific tips on what it takes to be a good meeting facilitator, and suggests how much a good facilitator should speak. Claire also shares her worst and best meeting stories. Notes 01:08 - The Reason for Creating Know Your Team - Basecamp (https://basecamp.com/) 04:37 - Bad Bosses: Are We Someone Else’s Worst Boss?! * The Accidental Bad Manager (https://www.slideshare.net/marklittlewood/claire-lew-ceo-know-your-team-the-accidental-bad-manager) * Gallup Q12 Employee Engagement Survey (https://q12.gallup.com/public/en-us/Features) 09:08 - Being a Good Meeting Facilitator * Going First * Ask Good Questions * Communicating Opinion as Not to Sway Others 17:56 - Remote vs In-Person Meetings 20:32 - Worst Meeting: Letting Someone Go 22:01 - Best Meeting: When Things Get Done 23:20 - Meeting Tip: Defining a Purpose + Ask For Advice Rather Than Asking for Feedback Special Guest: Claire Lew.

There's a point in life, somewhere around the halfway mark, where the reality check hits -- you're going to die. There's a future without you in it. There's a new generation of children growing up, learning their way through the world, and humanity will keep moving forward without you. On one hand, this is depressing. Everyday, we go through the motions. Everyday, we play the game. And suddenly, it all seems so meaningless. The characteristic period of "mid-life crisis" starts with falling into a pit of nihilistic despair, and a quest to answer the most basic existential questions. Does anything really matter? Who am I? What do I live for? On the other side of these questions, something magical happens. The finiteness of Life is also what gives it meaning. Every breath is something to cherish. Every joyful memory is a gift. And right now, in this moment, we have the opportunity to live and be, whoever it is we want to be. Who are your heroes? Who do you admire? What character do you want to play? How can you use your special gifts to lift the people around you? Like a cacoon-shattering phase change, a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, we become an Elder, a steward, and a leader that works on behalf of the children of our future. This audio clip is a conversation between Claire Lew (https://twitter.com/clairejlew), CEO of Know Your Team (https://knowyourteam.com/) & Arty Starr (https://twitter.com/janellekz) about the journey of becoming an Elder, and why Arty decided to change her name. If you want a bit more backstory, you can also check out this thread: this is great stuff! Artemis is a badass.— Miko Matsumura ㋡ (@mikojava) October 13, 2019

Today we have Claire Lew on the show! Claire is the founder and CEO of Know Your Team, software that helps you become a better leader for your company. We talked about building trust and social connections in a remote team, how you can be a better facilitator as a leader, and the role of empathy in a distributed team.

Will Larson on Greater Than Code, Marcus Blankenship on Software Engineering Radio, Sonal Chokshi on Software Engineering Daily, Roman Pichler on Being Human, and Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt on Hanselminutes. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. And, if you haven’t done it already, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting September 2, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. WILL LARSON ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Will Larson with hosts Jessica Kerr, Arty Starr, and Rein Henrichs. Will talked about systems thinking, specifically referencing Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems: A Primer. As a sixteen-year-old, he was exposed to systems thinking by his economics professor father. They talked about how to bring about change in complex systems and Rein brought up Virginia Satir’s change model.  They talked about various forms of dysfunction, with an example being tasks that are marked as completed by developers without first doing the work of validation. Will’s own example is that executives never miss their goals; they just redefine the goals so that they hit them. There is a certain level of seniority where you can never be held accountable because you are the accountability function. Getting back into the topic of how to change complex systems, Will referenced the book, The First 90 Days as a great explanation of the need to go slow and observe before you try to change things. He says that the “great man theory” has been out of style for decades in the study of history, but is still in style in tech as the most causal way to understand how change works and also the most comforting. Rein talked about how the heroic individual myth is the other side of the coin to the scapegoat. Just as you pile all the blame onto the scapegoat, you pile all the credit onto the hero. He says that cultures that engage in hero myth-building are also likely to engage in scapegoating. Will says he himself has not seen much scapegoating at the companies he works at, likely because those cultures were unwilling to hold folks accountable for their work, but he has seen the hero myth at every company he has worked. Will then spoke about the 10x engineer myth. Will says he meets people who have been in tech for six or seven years who have the idea that they are almost done with their career. It may be due to the “senior engineer after two years” phenomenon where the career path is not well-defined and a lot of companies don’t know how to take advantage of the skills of people with 15 to 20 years of experience. A second reason is that the industry is an overwhelming and draining environment and people choose to opt out of it. As a result, we have very few engineers who have been around long enough to witness the long-term consequences of their brilliant ideas. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/142-modeling-constraints-in-human-systems-with-will-larson/id1163023878?i=1000446345964 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/modeling-constraints-in-human-systems MARCUS BLANKENSHIP ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING RADIO The Software Engineering Radio podcast featured Marcus Blankenship with host Travis Kimmel. They talked about motivation, specifically motivation of engineering teams. Marcus says that motivation is the desire to get things done and every engineer coming out of school is motivated from day one. If you get one of these people hired onto your team and, two years later, they are demotivated, suffering from PTSD, scared to offer ideas, and figuring they are just a cog in a machine, your problem is your company or your team, not the engineer you hired. Marcus says he is doing secret research on motivation as he is now interviewing candidates for a job and asking them why they are looking to leave their current job. Nobody says, “Pay.” Often the answer is a lack of alignment with their boss or their company, resulting in the engineer losing the desire to contribute because of a relationship problem. These engineers are not stick-in-the-muds that are angry they don’t get to use COBOL anymore. Something happened where instead of having their ideas valued and heard and being part of the discussion, they somehow got disconnected from their boss. In the seventies, Marcus says, researchers discovered a strong correlation between positive employer-employee relationships and the amount of job satisfaction, quality of work, turnover intentions, and amount of promotions. We are thirty-five years into a few thousand scientific studies that continue to prove that the relationship one has with one’s supervisor matters more than any other factor when it comes to job performance and job satisfaction. Marcus says that a supervisor’s one true job is to create a trusting relationship with the people that report to you. Travis shared his own experience in having one-on-ones with his supervisors that felt to him like they were trying to artificial manufacturing a relationship because there was no indication of what the goal of the meeting was.  Marcus says that good one-on-ones are bi-directional. One-on-ones in which the boss just gets status updates from the subordinate and gives new marching orders are often dissatisfying for both parties. Another flawed kind of one-on-one is where it is all about the employee. Such one-on-ones are not effective and neither party likes these either. Marcus suggests that we apply to our one-on-ones the same Agile thinking that we apply to our work. Every month, at one of your one-on-ones, do a retro on the one-on-one. Talk about why you are doing them, what value you’re getting from them, and how to make them better. They talked about psychological safety. Marcus says a lot of managers don’t realize that they are not in a good position to measure psychological safety based on their own gut. He says tools like Claire Lew’s knowyourteam.com, officevibe.com, and other anonymous survey tools can help. When we become a manager or team lead that has you supervising or leading, we forget that we are in a position of power. Travis added that leaders need to be careful about what they say casually so that it doesn’t get taken as a mandate. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/episode-374-marcus-blankenship-on-motivating-programmers/id120906714?i=1000445260176 Website link: https://www.se-radio.net/2019/07/episode-374-marcus-blankenship-on-motivating-programmers/ SONAL CHOKSHI ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured a16z podcast host Sonal Chokshi with host Jeff Meyerson. Jeff started out by asking why a VC firm decided to start a podcast. Sonal says that a16z has always had a culture of writing, blogging, and sharing ideas. This led them to develop an editorial operation from which the podcast naturally followed. Jeff asked what lessons from blogging apply to podcasting. Sonal sees podcasting as the next evolution of blogging because of its similar intimacy and a similar feeling of authenticity. The difference, she says, is that podcasting is a community and a movement.  Sonal talked about her favorite a16z episodes, including an episode on emojis. She loved it because everybody understands how to use emojis but there is a lot of deep tech and governance involved in making emojis possible. That episode, she said, encapsulates the whole a16z podcast: the intersection of technology, people, politics, context, culture, and humanity.  Jeff brought up a16z’s connection to Mike Ovitz’s Creative Artists Agency. Having read Ovitz’s book and noticed how it portrays Ovitz as a workaholic, Jeff asked Sonal how she finds balance while drinking from the addicting technological firehose. Sonal says there is a lack of nuance in the debates about screen time and work/life balance. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/a16z-podcasting-with-sonal-chokshi/id1019576853?i=1000446547922 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/08/09/a16z-podcasting-with-sonal-chokshi/ ROMAN PICHLER ON BEING HUMAN The Being Human podcast featured Roman Pichler with host Richard Atherton. Richard asked Roman what a product manager is. Roman says a product manager is someone who takes an idea and helps bring it to life, launch it, make it successful, and keep it successful. Richard asked about the distinction between a product manager and Scrum’s notion of product owner. Roman sees the product owner as a product management role, but methodologies like SAFe have redefined the product owner to be a tactical role, misunderstanding the intention behind the role and the practicalities such as answering questions from the dev team, refining backlog items, and answering support and sales questions. He says there is too much focus on the details and this risks losing sight of the big picture. To do a good job for users and for the business, Roman says it is helpful to have people looking after digital assets with the right qualifications, skills, organizational support, authority, and autonomy. He says the term “mini-CEO” appeals to some product people because it indicates that product people need a certain level of authority, but a CEO would have marketing and sales functions under their control and product people do not. Richard asked what talents Roman had to develop to be a great product person. Roman started out as a programmer and began to help business groups come up with new products. What helped him most was to boost his own understanding of how business works and the second most important element was letting go of being interested in how digital products work and focusing instead on who benefits from them. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/72-to-manage-products-is-to-care-with-roman-pichler/id1369745673?i=1000446514943 Website link: http://media.cdn.shoutengine.com/podcasts/4081235a-554f-4a8f-90c2-77dc3b58051f/audio/9b2501e7-e618-46f6-8f41-abd69c871211.mp3 DAVE THOMAS AND ANDY HUNT ON HANSELMINUTES The Hanselminutes podcast featured Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt with host Scott Hanselman. Scott started by asking whether Dave and Andy knew at the time they wrote the Pragmatic Programmer 20 years ago that they were writing what would become a seminal work. Dave said that both of them were stunned by its success. The book was intended as a way to clarify their own thoughts based on their experiences as consultants in which their clients all had the same kinds of problems: inconsistent builds, the shipping of untested code, and impossible-to-change designs. Scott asked about the importance of the name of the book. Andy said that there was a strain of thought at the time the book was written that was dogmatic and they deliberately pushed against such approaches. Dave pointed out that this was harder on their readers because it forced them to figure out for themselves what works for them. They got into a discussion of what kind of educational background one needs to be a successful programmer. Dave revealed that he is currently teaching classes at SMU to, he says, corrupt the youth by teaching them things like functional programming, and because traditional computer science education is poorly serving the industry and the student. People are coming out of university with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and, in terms of their value in the industry, they are not much different from people who are coming out of eight-week bootcamps. He teaches third or fourth year undergraduates and graduate students and he has found that none have been shown any form of testing. He would much rather hire someone who had the right attitude, was smart, and who could talk to people and he could show such a person how to code while on the job. Andy added that he gets the feeling that most computer science programs are there to teach you to become a professor of computer science rather than a problem-solver. What Andy says people need to learn, and what university education is not providing, are problem-solving skills. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/pragmatic-programmer-celebrates-20-years-dave-thomas/id117488860?i=1000446461596 Website link: https://hanselminutes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-pragmatic-programmer-celebrates-20-years-with-dave-thomas-and-andy-hunt-VBmLw9lP LINKS Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheKGuy Website:

The Feedback loop – it’s not just about giving, but also about asking, receiving as well as acting on the feedback you’ve been given. Claire Lew joins us to share how we can be great a culture of feedback.  One of the main benefits of receiving feedback is that it fills in the blindspots. But... The post #218 Feedback with Claire Lew appeared first on UX Podcast.

Jocelyn Goldfein on Software Engineering Daily, Michael Bolton on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, Dave Snowden on Engineering Culture by InfoQ, Ben Orenstein on Software Developer’s Journey, and Claire Lew on Greater Than Code. I’d love for you to email me with any comments about the show or any suggestions for podcasts I might want to feature. Email podcast@thekguy.com. This episode covers the five podcast episodes I found most interesting and wanted to share links to during the two week period starting June 10, 2019. These podcast episodes may have been released much earlier, but this was the fortnight when I started sharing links to them to my social network followers. JOCELYN GOLDFEIN ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING DAILY The Software Engineering Daily podcast featured Jocelyn Goldfein with host Jeff Meyerson. Jocelyn talked about joining Facebook after having spent years at VMWare delivering shrink-wrap software that had a release cycle on the order of years. Witnessing the cadence at which Facebook delivered new releases firsthand, it appeared to her like Facebook was defying the laws of physics. The cost of a release had shrunk to nearly zero. She says that companies that start life developing for native, that is, developing shrink-wrap software like that of VMWare, never really shake off the culture of developing for native. These cultures define a good engineer as someone who can estimate precisely and deliver predictably and it is all because the cost of a release in that native software world is so high. She talked about the often unacknowledged tradeoff between productivity and predictability. She also talked about the flexibility the engineers obtained by shipping more frequently. Not having to hit infrequent, high-risk release windows meant that engineers could stay “on the balls of their feet” and, say, have the news feed team help the photos team because they were not going to miss some “huge release date in the sky” by shuffling tasks and reprioritizing. By the way, I love Jocelyn’s colorful metaphors. She said that being able to move people around fungibly to unblock each other ends up being a “turbo button for the entire organization.” She says that the combination of removing deadline pressure and continuously integrating new features behind feature flags into the single branch that all of Facebook ran on allowed the engineers to be agile and to “reserve the right to wake up smarter and make a better decision tomorrow” based on actual usage. This is in contrast to many software teams that spend so much time making a perfect product before they finally get feedback that they become both psychologically committed to their design and physically committed to it (through a hard-to-change code base). At Facebook, the “concrete was still wet” until incredibly “late in the game.” The architecture and the release process at Facebook let them “jettison some sacred cows,” specifically, the notion of deadlines and the idea that you only get feedback at the end. She says that Mark Zuckerberg has many gifts but one of his superpowers is to be able to admit when he was wrong. She says she doesn’t think people can reliably distinguish good innovative ideas from bad ideas without trying them out first and she believes Facebook has been innovative because their architecture, release process, and values system allowed them to take risks. She says, “Facebook’s genius is not that it is right any more than anybody else. It is that it tries experiments at a higher velocity than anybody else and it purges the ones that don’t work faster than anybody else. It is no surprise that, in the end, the deep-seated challenges for the company have been problems that don’t show up immediately — problems where the downsides were incredibly lagging indicators.” Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/facebook-management-with-jocelyn-goldfein/id1019576853?i=1000438147913 Website link: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2019/05/15/facebook-management-with-jocelyn-goldfein/ MICHAEL BOLTON ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Michael Bolton with host Shane Hastie. Shane started by asking Michael whether testing is blasé today. Michael said that you can choose to look at it that way but nothing is more fascinating to him than testing, which he defines as evaluating products by learning about them through exploration and experimentation. He also says that testing is focused on a question that nobody else is interested in asking or answering, which is: Are there problems that threaten the on-time successful completion of the project or that threaten the value of the product? Michael sees his job as helping people get comfortable with the process of looking for problems that threaten value so that managers can find out whether the product they have is the product they wanted. In response to a question from Shane, Michael brought up a conversation in which someone said that you often look at a piece of software and think to yourself that it couldn’t have an effect on human life or health or safety. But you don’t know how people are going to use your product. A developer of Microsoft Excel might think, “Nobody’s going to die if there is a bug in Excel.” Somebody could easily lose a mortgage due to a bug in Excel and when a product is used as ubiquitously as Excel, you are not going to see the knock-on effects of the risk. He talked about the problem of needing to maintain a critical distance to spot the problems that arise from complexity. He said that unit tests may demonstrate that the individual units of a program can all be individually reliable, but they would not demonstrate that the overall product is safe. He gave an example from Nancy Leveson’s Engineering a Safer World of a chemical reactor in which the software that controlled the flow of water and catalysts into the reactor was designed to leave all control variables as-is and sound an alarm in response to a fault. This sounds reasonable, but a situation occurred in which a fault was triggered just after the catalyst was added to the reactor. The cooling water flow had not yet ramped up and fault policy meant that it stayed at this low level as the system got hotter and hotter. The reactor overheated, the release valve lifted, and the contents of the reactor were discharged into the atmosphere. This illustrated how putting simple things together into a complex thing creates complex problems we are not great at anticipating. The solution he says is to experiment with the system in the same way Hook, Boyle and their contemporaries in the 1600s were doing: putting the system into conditions that are not normal so as to reveal surprises. It is the tester’s job, Michael says, to be professional skeptics. The problem, he says, is that the critical distance of a good tester is bound together with social distance. Nobody wants to receive bad news and testers are often the people delivering the bad news, creating social distance from the rest of the team. The social challenge for testers is to help people appreciate getting the bad news. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/michael-bolton-on-the-testing-mindset/id1161431874?i=1000438906048 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/interview-michael-bolton DAVE SNOWDEN ON ENGINEERING CULTURE BY INFOQ The Engineering Culture by InfoQ podcast featured Dave Snowden with host Shane Hastie. After asking Dave to introduce himself, Shane asked about the liminal aspects of the Cynefin “model” and Dave made the correction that Cynefin is actually a framework rather than a model because it doesn’t seek to represent the world but to give a perspective on the world. Dave explained that regarding liminality, Cynefin started with five domains and a set of dynamics for moving between domains but this confused people, so they introduced liminal zones to represent this state of transition. He pointed out that the Scrum framework holds things in the liminal state between complicated and complex long enough to get them right and this is a strength of Scrum. They talked about the need to run parallel safe-to-fail experiments when in the complex domain and Dave gave three examples. The first was to break people up into trios and spin off 30 or 40 trios to look at a problem in their spare time over a week. The second example was to create a prototyping team and put them with users for a day to build a prototype and then pass the prototype on to another team charged with improving it without the original user input. The third example was to do continuous mapping of unarticulated needs and, when they get statistically significant clusters, put small prototyping teams on each cluster. Dave told a story about creating a fake infographic about a cybersecurity breach in one industry, giving it to employees in a different industry, and asking them to tell a story about why it couldn’t happen to their company and a story about what they would do if it did. He then analyzed these stories to look for complacency. More generally, he would use this technique and look for outliers because, when you want to create significant change, you need to look to the outlier groups rather than the dominant groups. Shane pointed out the contrast between this technique and common requirements-gathering techniques and Dave responded that requirements-gathering allows bias to creep in after the first few interviews. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/dave-snowden-on-liminality-in-cynefin-moving-beyond/id1161431874?i=1000438021618 Website link: https://soundcloud.com/infoq-engineering-culture/dave-snowden-on-liminality-in-cynefin-and-moving-beyond-agile-to-agility BEN ORENSTEIN ON SOFTWARE DEVELOPER’S JOURNEY The Software Developer’s Journey podcast featured Ben Orenstein with host Timothée Bourguignon. They talked about Ben’s academic challenges, his initial lack of maturity, his discovery of Ruby and then Rails, and his growth as a software developer under the tutelage of his former boss and mentor. Tim asked Ben what he would be looking for in a junior developer to have as a mentee and Ben answered that he would look for something like grit (the ability to push forward and not get too discouraged) because the kinds of problems we face as software developers require grit to get through and this never really goes away as you become more senior and experienced. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/51-ben-orenstein-advises-us-not-to-worry-too-much/id1079113167?i=1000439883363 Website link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/190346/1195571 CLAIRE LEW ON GREATER THAN CODE The Greater Than Code podcast featured Claire Lew with hosts Janelle Klein and Sam Livingston-Gray. The panelists asked Claire the standard “What is your superpower?” question and, after answering, she turned the question around to them. They then entered the topic of bad bosses in which Claire told her own story and then got Janelle and Sam to tell their own bad boss stories. Sam told the story of his experience with a command-and-control CEO and this led to a discussion about when motivating through fear is and isn’t effective. Sam related this to a book by Courtenay Hameister called Okay Fine Whatever that describes the negative effects of stress on one’s ability to be creative. This reminded me of the section of the book Switch by the Heath brothers about the burning platform concept and how negative emotions stifle creativity. Claire pointed out another problem with command-and-control leadership is that it disregards the belief that people are ever intrinsically motivated. She says that while there has been a shift to leaders being told they need to inspire people rather than command and control them, there is still an implicit reference to control. People say things like you need to “empower” people. She hates that word. She says people are already empowered. Leaders need to create an environment that lets their people do their best work and then just get out of their way. Apple Podcasts link: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/132-distilling-the-hailstorm-with-claire-lew/id1163023878?i=1000440034174 Website link: https://www.greaterthancode.com/distilling-the-hailstorm FEEDBACK Ask questions, make comments, and let your voice be heard by emailing podcast@thekguy.com. Twitter: https://twitter.com/thekguy LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keithmmcdonald/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thekguypage Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_k_guy/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/thekguy Website:

Only 1 in 10 people have the natural ability to be a manager. Well, maybe that's obvious, but what can you do if you know that you are in the majority? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

02:06 - Claire’s Superpower: The Ability to Distill Things and Catching Pellets 05:21 - Janelle’s Superpower: Seeing the Gifts of Others and Bringing Them to Surface 08:19 - Sam’s Superpower: Being Able to Make Connections Between the Shapes of Things Even if They Don’t Look the Same on the Surface 09:13 - Bad Bosses Panelist Experiences, Symptoms of Poor Leadership and Management Are We Bad Bosses?! Okay Fine Whatever: The Year I Went from Being Afraid of Everything to Only Being Afraid of Most Things by Courtenay Hameister (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316395706/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0316395706&linkId=2ea38ee8c980c0bc28c894b768c5b572) Command and Control Leadership (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_control) 26:18 - Talent vs Skill Questions to ask yourself if you’re an aspiring manager: How much do you enjoy being in Flow (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology))? How much do you enjoy repeating yourself? Do you like to play detective about people? Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being by Brian R Little (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1610396383/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=therubyrep-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=1610396383&linkId=a4d39d490502f94089460a5a28cb97f1) Reflections: Sam: “Do we ever think about ourselves, that we me be someone else’s worst boss?” Arty: Claire asking the panelists questions was different! (In a lovely way!) Claire: The different forms and threads that real leadership can take. This episode was brought to you by @therubyrep (https://twitter.com/therubyrep) of DevReps, LLC (http://www.devreps.com/). To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit patreon.com/greaterthancode (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode) To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content and transcripts like this, please do so at paypal.me/devreps (https://www.paypal.me/devreps). You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well. Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks! Special Guest: Claire Lew.

In our last episode, we talked to Claire Lew, the CEO of Know Your Team. She has her own show called The Heartbeat Podcast, where she talks to founders and leaders about management. This is her interview with Basecamp co-founder and CTO David Heinemeier Hansson.

This week we're excited to share our conversation with Claire Lew, the CEO of Know Your Team. We learned an incredible amount from Claire about management, remote work, entrepreneurship and much more. Claire is one of the leading voices on how to improve your management skills and become happier at work. You're going to want to take some notes for this one! We certainly did. Equally as interesting as the software itself, Claire's journey to where she is today is an inspiring one. From her early success to finding and developing a product that helps people, Claire has extensive experience yet remains incredibly humble. We think this is one of our better conversations, and we hope you do to. Know Your Team is a management software tool that offers best practices, guidance and a community of peers to help you become a more effective manager. It is particularly popular in remote teams, and we highly recommend that you check it out if you'd like to improve as a manager! Visit: https://knowyourteam.com/ and sign up for a free trial! Please check out Claire's blog, found here: https://knowyourteam.com/blog/ And follow her on Twitter: @clairejlew

Claire Lew is the CEO of Know Your Team, a company dedicated to solving the problem of bad bosses. The company has its origins as a product developed within Basecamp and today is not just a software tool, but a deep vein of resources for managers of all experience levels. In this episode, Claire shares her unconventional path to becoming a CEO, how she completely revamped her company's focus and business model, and why so much "thought leadership" around management gets it wrong.

This week I talk with Claire Lew, Founder of Know Your Team, where they build software and and produce resources to help you become a better manager! In this episode we talk about culture shock of moving a lot as a kid, how painting and art play a part in being a better leader, how an intervention at her first company led to what she's doing today, how a random meeting with the guys at Basecamp led to her becoming the CEO of Know Your Team and a whole lot more! - [http://founderchats.com](http://founderchats.com/) - [https://knowyourteam.com](https://knowyourteam.com/) - [https://baremetrics.com](https://baremetrics.com/)

CEO and Leadership expert Claire Lew from https://knowyourteam.com/ talks about the recent pivot her company made in order to focus on helping managers instead of just CEOs, the 3 things leaders needed to be more effective, how teaching makes her run her business better, and much more Intro music is "I'm Going for a Coffee" (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/Music_For_Podcasts_3/02_Im_Going_for_a_Coffee) by Lee Rosevere, which is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Special Guest: Claire Lew.

Becoming a Senior Engineer with Jamey Hampton TableXI offers training for developers and product teams! For more info, visit http://tablexi.com/workshops or email us at workshops@tablexi.com. Guest Jamey Hampton (https://twitter.com/jameybash): Senior Software Dev at Agrilyst (https://www.agrilyst.com/) and panelist on Greater Than Code (https://greaterthancode.com). Blogs at jameybash.com (http://www.jameybash.com/). Summary On this episode, we're talking about becoming a senior engineer. When you first become a senior engineer, you suddenly have new job responsibilities that aren't coding and they aren't management. It's not clear how to balance your time or evaluate your success. Our guest this week is Jamey Hampton, a panelist on the Greater Than Code podcast and a Senior Engineer at Agrilyst. We talk about how to handle the changing responsibilities and perspective that comes from being promoted even when you're still the same person that you were the previous week. We also talk specifically about hiring as a non-coding responsibility. Notes 02:00 - Taking on New Responsibilities as a Senior Developer 07:20 - Evaluating Productivity 11:05 - Seeing Victory on an Abstract Level 17:26 - Client Meetings and Talking to Non-Technical Clients 23:21 - Hiring and Conducting Interviews 33:10 - Keeping Up With Coding and Other Skills - Kerri Miller: Crescent Wrenches and Debuggers: Building Your Own Toolkit For Rational Inquiry (http://confreaks.tv/videos/codedaze2016-crescent-wrenches-and-debuggers-building-your-own-toolkit-for-rational-inquiry) Related Episodes Empowering Entry-Level Developers with Mercedes Bernard (https://www.techdoneright.io/47) Managing For Career Development with Claire Lew and Dan Hodos (https://www.techdoneright.io/12) Career Development With Brandon Hays and Pete Brooks (https://www.techdoneright.io/002-career-development-with-brandon-hays) Special Guest: Jamey Hampton.

One-on-one meetings should not be used for a status update, rather to uncover problems. CEO of Know Your Company, Claire Lew, talks candidly with Happy Melly about what it takes to be a better manager and a more honest, open and communicative leader. She also explains why buying a book about what to do with her life at the age of 13 helped her get to where she is today. For more happiness, visit www.management30.com.  

Empowering Entry-Level Developers with Mercedes Bernard TableXI is offering training for developers and product teams! For more info, email go to http://tablexi.com/workshops. Guest Mercedes Bernard (https://twitter.com/mercedescodes): Senior Software Engineer at DevMynd (https://www.devmynd.com/). mercedesbernard.com (http://mercedesbernard.com/). Summary How can your company empower your entry-level developers to grow their skills and advance their careers? If you are an entry-level developer, what are skills that are important for growth. Mercedes Bernard, a Senior Software Engineer at DevMynd, joins Tech Done Right to talk about empowering entry-level developers. We talk about giving people scaffolding to support them in owning larger and larger parts of a software process, and how to align your entire company to support growth. Notes 02:15 - Misconceptions About What it Takes to Level Up and The Best Ways to Start Making That Journey 04:17 - On Being a “Domain Expert” or a “Sponsor” 07:52 - Job Switching, Career Advancement, and Promotion 13:48 - Determining Levels and Providing Support - Brandon Hays (https://frontside.io/blog/2016/07/07/the-conjoined-triangles-of-senior-level-development.html) 20:17 - Scaffolding 21:59 - Entry-Level Struggles: Confidence and Time Management 27:55 - Mentorship 31:01 - Giving Support to Entry Level Teammates: Feedback 33:44 - Signs People Need Support 35:06 - The Importance of Hiring Junior Developers Related Episodes Apprenticeship with Megan Tiu, Kara Carrell, and Alyssa Ramsey (https://www.techdoneright.io/41) Your First 100 Days Onboarding A New Employee With Shay Howe and John Gore (https://www.techdoneright.io/37) Managing For Career Development with Claire Lew and Dan Hodos (https://www.techdoneright.io/12) Career Development With Brandon Hays and Pete Brooks (https://www.techdoneright.io/002-career-development-with-brandon-hays) Special Guest: Mercedes Bernard.

Apprenticeship with Megan Tiu, Kara Carrell, and Alyssa Ramsey TableXI is offering training for developers and products teams! For more info, email workshops@tablexi.com. Get your FREE career growth strategy information and techniques! (https://stickynote.game) Summary What is an apprenticeship program, how is it different from an internship, and how can your company benefit from having one? In this episode, we’re talking about technical apprenticeships with Megan Tiu of Women Who Code. Megan and I have both run apprenticeships at various companies. We’re also joined by Table XI’s current apprentice cohort, Kara Carrell and Alyssa Ramsey. Guests Megan Tiu (http://twitter.com/megantiu): Engineering Manager with Women Who Code (https://www.womenwhocode.com). megantiu.com (http://www.megantiu.com/). Alyssa Ramsey: Developer Apprentice at TableXI (https://www.tablexi.com/). Kara Carrell: Developer Apprentice at TableXI (https://www.tablexi.com/). Notes 02:18 - Apprenticeship: Defined 04:38 - Finding and Hiring People for Apprenticeships 05:21 - Interviewing For Apprenticeships 08:35 - Organizing Apprenticeships 14:13 - Making Use of Unstructured Time and Other Opportunities for Apprentices 17:39 - Career-Growth Support - Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596518387.do) 20:40 - Having a Sponsor and Getting Support - Sticky Note Game (http://stickynote.game) 24:20 - Evaluating Apprentices 27:59 - Benefits For Companies That Have Apprenticeship Programs - How to be a Better Junior Developer, by Katherine Wu (https://confreaks.tv/videos/railsconf2014-how-to-be-a-better-junior-developer) Related Episodes Your First 100 Days Onboarding A New Employee With Shay Howe and John Gore (http://www.techdoneright.io/37) Developer Bootcamps and Computing Education with Jeff Casimir and Mark Guzdial (http://www.techdoneright.io/20) Managing For Career Development with Claire Lew and Dan Hodos (http://www.techdoneright.io/12) Career Development With Brandon Hays and Pete Brooks (http://www.techdoneright.io/002-career-development-with-brandon-hays) Special Guests: Alyssa Ramsey, Kara Carrell, and Megan Tiu.

Diversity and Inclusion at Small Companies with Meara Charnetzki, Michael Donnelly, and Elena Valentine TableXI is now offering training for developers and products teams! For more info, email workshops@tablexi.com. Get your FREE career growth strategy information and techniques! (https://stickynote.game) Summary What can a small company do to improve its diversity and inclusion practices when your company just isn't changing personnel quickly enough to improve via hiring? Here to discuss this are Meara Charnetzki from Table XI, Michael Donnelly from the FWD Collective and Elena Valentine from Skill Scout. We'll all about company values, supporting a wider community, using internal feedback, and what to do to encourage improvement at your company. Guests Meara Charnetzki (https://twitter.com/m34ra) of Table XI (https://www.tablexi.com/) Michael Donnelly (https://twitter.com/realmdonnelly) of The FWD Collective (https://fwdcollective.io/) Elena Valentine (https://twitter.com/Elena_Valentine) of Skill Scout (https://www.skillscout.com/) Notes 02:56 - Advice For Small Companies Interested in Being More Diverse 09:08 - Vetting Companies for Diversity & Inclusion Values 13:59 - Having a Healthy Company Feedback System - Know Your Company (https://knowyourcompany.com/) - Managing for Career Development with Claire Lew (http://www.techdoneright.io/12) 17:02 - Building Relationships as a Company Leader 20:09 - Diversity and Inclusion Benefits Everyone 23:31 - Encouraging Companies to Start D&I Initiatives as an Employee 30:45 - Company Exit Interviews 32:26 - Salary Transparency 35:51 - Flexible Working Structures Related Episodes Diverse Agile Teams with Marlena Compton, Betsy Haibel, and Jennifer Tu (http://www.techdoneright.io/38) Your First 100 Days at a New Company with Katie Gore and Elizabeth Trepkowski Hodos (http://www.techdoneright.io/36) Managing for Career Development with Claire Lew (http://www.techdoneright.io/12) Special Guests: Elena Valentine, Meara Charnetzki, and Michael Donnelly.

From the very beginning, nothing has been ordinary about Claire Lew's (@cjlew23) company, its business model, or the way she came to lead it. Learn how Know Your Company has generated millions in revenue with a tiny team, how Claire has met with over 500 CEOs and business leaders, and what she's learned about creating a successful company.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/055-claire-lew-of-know-your-company

In this interview, Claire Lew talks about leadership, how to keep your team motivated and the things leaders should avoid. We also talk about the importance of building relationships with your customers and the real reasons why people buy from you.

Rob Walling is the Founder of Drip, an email automation platform. A serial entrepreneur who has published books, runs MicroConf, and hosts a podcast, Rob shares the importance of deliberate hiring, and focusing on trust instead of loyalty in teams. Claire: Hey everyone, I'm Claire Lew, and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company, and today I have a really special guest. I… Read the full article

David Cancel is the CEO of Drift, a conversational sales platform that has over 100,000 customers. Having started five companies previously, David shares lessons learned as a leader – including the importance of people, one-on-ones, and “no consensus” in teams. Claire: Hi, everyone. I'm Claire Lew and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company. Today we have a super special guest… Read the full article

An acclaimed nonprofit leader featured on the TODAY show, Steve shares his biggest lessons learned around empathy, self-care, and self-awareness as a leader. Claire: Hi everyone. I'm Claire Lew, and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company. I am here in Chicago with honestly one of my favorite people in this city. We have Steve Larosiliere, whose… Read the full article

With a focus on diversity and inclusion, the CEO of a Chicago-based media company focused keeps it real about the myths and struggles of leadership. Claire: Hi everyone, I'm Claire Lew and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company and it is my honor today to introduce a very good friend of mine who is on the heartbeat, the… Read the full article

Daniel Houghton is the CEO of Lonely Planet, the largest travel guide book publisher in the world. As a 29-year-old CEO with almost 400 employees across five different continents, Daniel shares how it is personal skills, more than anything, that has helped him survive and thrive as a leader. Claire: Hi everyone! I'm Claire Lew, and I'm… Read the full article

Negative feedback may be the most important feedback you ever receive as a leader so long as there is a proposed solution. In this episode, we discuss This is Why Your Boss Deserves Your Negative Feedback by Jane Claire Hervey. The article is shared below. This Is Why Your Boss Deserves Your Negative Feedback Jane Claire Hervey, WOMEN@FORBES I romanticize my work. I love to solve problems. I want to be the change I wish to see in the world. (I'm also a millennial—what can I say?) So, when I started my first full-time job at a digital marketing firm, I had high expectations. I was ready to learn, maximize my role and help the company drive revenue. When I noticed a problem within our operations, I pointed it out. If I thought there were areas in which we could improve, I spoke up. If I had a good idea, I gave it. But, more often than not, this feedback was met with silence and inaction, and over time I began to contribute less and less. When I left the company after three years, the CEO was surprised. "I didn't see this coming," he said. That stumped me. I had been vocal about my needs, pointed out gaps in our infrastructure and nothing had ever changed. Wouldn't my exit be expected? It turns out I'm not the only one with this experience. According to Claire Lew, the CEO of Know Your Company, this phenomenon is common—and it's the reason she's got a job today. Before Lew started Know Your Company, a software tool that helps business owners collect and utilize feedback, Lew also hated her job. She couldn’t give feedback to her boss, and the problem frustrated her so much that she quit to find a fix. She launched a consulting agency to help CEOs build better work cultures, and surprisingly one of her first clients, Basecamp, happened to be working on a software prototype for feedback. Together, they launched Know Your Company as a product in 2013, and Lew became the project's CEO in 2014. Since, Know Your Company has served more than 15,000 people in 25 countries. A couple of weeks ago, I caught Lew's talk on building feedback loops at the Culturati Summit in Austin, Texas and I immediately had a million questions: How do we build work cultures within our economy that better prioritize women and healthy lifestyles? How can we empower employees to give negative feedback? What can we do better—as bosses, as leaders, as employees—to turn problems into solutions? In this interview, Lew and I thankfully get to some potential answers. Jane Claire Hervey: Who are you and what do you do? Claire Lew: I’m the CEO of Know Your Company, a software tool that helps leaders create more open, honest environments by getting ongoing employee feedback. We also founded an online leadership community called The Watercooler, with 500+ managers and executives from all over the world. Hervey: There’s a lot of pressure on women and people of color to advocate for themselves and negotiate harder to claim their seat at the table. The mindset behind Know Your Company implies that dismantling the power dynamic that may hold certain employees back is on the CEO/leadership team. What do you have to say to the former? What may be misleading about that way of thinking? Lew: Asking women and minorities to advocate and negotiate for their seat at the table is like saying that people who get mugged on the street should take self-defense classes or carry a gun on them. It’s placing the burden of the problem on the victim, instead of addressing the underlying root cause of the problem. The problem is the work environment and culture—not the lack of action on the part of women and minorities. On top of that, the fact is that negotiating compensation is empirically disadvantageous to women and minorities. So negotiating for equal pay, let alone a seat at the table, has a ton of deeply entrenched hurdles around it. Hervey: How can start-ups, small businesses and lean creative companies better prioritize and utilize their team’s expertise? Aside from language, how can we actively create cultures that are diverse, inclusive and, most importantly, thriving? Lew: To actively foster thriving cultures that are diverse and inclusive, I recommend looking at four buckets of things you can do different. No. 1: Attract your applicants differently. You can edit your job description to be more inclusive. The language used in job descriptions can heavily bias who applies. [For example,] Buffer experienced this firsthand, and you can also learn the exact words that often discourage female applicants. No. 2: Elect your candidates differently. Clearly articulate attributes for each role and “culture fit” in advance. When you set the criteria ahead of time and define culture fit per your company’s core values, you can avoid unconscious bias. [Here's how companies like Facebook tackle that.] You can also consider having a rubric to evaluate candidates to make sure unconscious bias doesn’t creep in. No. 3: Develop your new employees differently. This includes having a clear policy on negotiation. Negotiating compensation is empirically disadvantageous to women and minorities. Perhaps consider getting rid of negotiation in the offer process entirely, as Reddit has done. You’ll also want to monitor for bias in performance and promotion processes. Research shows women tend to get promoted based on performance, while men are promoted based on potential. No. 4: Retain your employees differently. Survey your employees. Giving your employees a safe place to speak up about how they feel about their environment is key. This way you’ll learn what’s working and what’s not, be it hiring practices, mentorship programs, employee benefits, etc. Also, consider drafting a code of conduct to establish what you view as acceptable behaviors. Even consider how environmental cues like naming all the conference rooms after men can influence the tone of your environment. You can also offer benefits that are attractive to all employees. Support underrepresented employees’ needs and actively ask your employees for input on this. For example, Google started offering transgender benefits starting in 2011, after creating a workgroup to access the company’s benefits. Hervey: At Know Your Company, you encourage leadership to be vulnerable about their struggles, which is somewhat emotional. In small company settings, how can you proceed with this vulnerability about the company’s obstacles without scaring employees or threatening their trust in the company’s growth? Lew: Great question. When choosing to be vulnerable about serious company obstacles, you’ll want to first provide as much context as possible. For example, if your firm just lost its biggest client, provide context as to what percentage of the business this was and how the other accounts you have will cover for it, etc. Without this context, it’s easy for employees’ imaginations to (naturally) run wild. The other thing you’ll want to do when being vulnerable about a dramatic company challenge is to share a path forward. For example, if your company sales underperformed this quarter, be clear about a plan of action ahead to improve business development going forward. This maintains your employees’ trust that you’re doing everything you can to have their backs in a tough situation. Hervey: With limited resources as an entrepreneur or small business, how can you reasonably manage expectations when gathering company feedback? Could you specifically expand upon your concept of “closing the loop” from this perspective? Lew: When gathering company feedback, there’s definitely going to be a time–or many times–when you can’t implement a piece of feedback. Or, when you simply don’t want to. Someone made a ridiculous suggestion about a company benefit. Or, someone has a great idea but one that financially isn’t feasible right now. What do you do? If you receive a piece of feedback that isn’t practical or doesn’t align with the company’s direction, tell your employees that. Explain why you’re not doing something. Expose your decision-making process. Explaining why you’re not doing something—or what I like to call “closing the loop”—is one of the most effective ways to cultivate an open, honest work environment. If you don’t, employees will wonder, “What ever happened to that idea I suggested?” They’ll assume that you’re not open to receiving new ideas, and they’ll hesitate to bring up feedback the next time around. Hervey: Any advice for companies building their operations? Where might they actionably start in incorporating feedback loops? Lew: As a company that aspires to foster a culture of feedback, it’s more than just doing one-on-ones and employee surveys and calling it a day. To have your team truly embrace feedback in their day-to-day operations, you’ll want to consider these three things: personal accountability, consistency and richness. Personal accountability: When it comes to feedback (and leadership in general), you’ve got to walk the walk. You can’t ask others to be open to feedback if you’re not open to feedback yourself. Model the behavior you want your employees to exhibit. If you want employees to admit their weaknesses and be forthcoming about their mistakes, you have to start with doing so yourself, first. Consistency: Holding all-company meetings and/or one-on-one meetings are great to initiate the feedback loop. But the power of them lies in how consistent they are. Do you hold those all-company meetings or one-on-ones regularly? Or just here and there, whenever you remember them? If it’s the latter, you’re sending the message: “Your feedback is not important.” Consistency of your feedback loops is what determines whether or not you’re building a culture of feedback–or if it’s a facade. Richness: You can’t assume that one channel of feedback is going to work for everyone. So the more avenues to provide for people to give feedback and weigh in, the better. Some people might prefer town hall meetings, while others prefer electronic employee surveys. The richness of how you communicate–the varying formats and mediums–allows you to reach everyone. One way is not the only way to foster honesty and transparency within your company. Hervey: When balancing the personal and professional in the workplace, especially in small companies, do you have any tips for founders that need to give really honest feedback on performance? Lew: If you need to give honest feedback on performance, and you’re worried about negatively affecting someone’s morale, there are four things to keep in mind. No. 1: Come from a place of care. You’re giving feedback because you care. You deeply care about this person’s personal and career growth. You deeply care about the project’s success. Communicate these things. For example, you could say something like: “I’m saying this because I believe in you and I want you to succeed…” No. 2: Come from a place of observation. Focus on the actions and the situation of what happened—what you observed—and not the personal attributes or characteristics of the person. For example, if you think a coworker wrote a sloppy email to the client, instead of saying: “I think you’re careless”… you could say, “I noticed that in the email you wrote, there were a few mistakes that were made.” No. 3: Come from a place of fallibility. Your feedback is not infallible. Don’t forget that your feedback is only an interpretation of what you observed, and your own perspective of how things can improve going forward. Be willing to admit this. For example, you could say, ““Is there any information that you think I might be missing?” No. 4: Come from a place of curiosity. When you give feedback, it should feel like a conversation. No one likes being talked at. To do this, simply ask after sharing your feedback: “What do you think?” Hervey: Can you describe a favorite feedback moment with your own team at Know Your Company? Lew: They happen all the time! Just the other day, I had an idea for marketing that our CTO gave me feedback on. Even though marketing is technically “my domain,” our CTO had some excellent thoughts on my idea. I easily could’ve been defensive toward him or dismissed his feedback–but I listened, and we ended up going with what he suggested. Acknowledging that I might have a bias toward my own idea helped me listen to feedback and make a more informed decision. Hervey: What’s your ideal working environment—both mentally and physically? Lew: Peaceful. Anywhere with little to no sound, and an uninterrupted period of time. Hervey: Any professional self-care routines that you could recommend? Lew: Giving yourself uninterrupted periods of time to get stuff done is my biggest saving grace. Also, sleep. You can’t do your best work without a good night’s sleep. Hervey: What do you wish for the future of work culture? Lew: I hope our future of work culture can be more open and honest–that employees and leaders alike don’t fear talking to each other, speaking the truth and what’s on their mind. I believe when we can all go to work in an environment where you feel free to be open and honest, we’re all happier. Interested in Hervey's work? Follow along on Instagram or check out her Texas-based nonprofit, #bossbabesatx. Check out more of Jane's work Women@forbes Be Bold Dave

As a creative leader who's worked with everyone from Apple to ESPN, Dan shares his biggest leadership lessons on servant leadership and how to ensure teams work well together. Claire: Hi everyone. I'm Claire Lew and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company. Today, I've got a good friend of mine with me that I'm so excited to… Read the full article

Developers from the Perspective of Product Owners Follow us on Twitter! @techdoneright (https://twitter.com/tech_done_right) Also, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-done-right/id1195695341?mt=2)! The newsletter is back! For more information on upcoming episodes, sign up at http://techdoneright.io/newsletter (http://techdoneright.io/newsletter) Guests Cat de Merode (https://www.linkedin.com/in/cat-de-merode/): VP of Product at PeaPod (https://www.peapod.com/) Matt McNamara (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewbmcnamara/): Product Manager Summary Have you ever wondered what it's like to work with a software team? Perhaps you are a developer wondering what you seem like from the outside? Or maybe you are starting to work with a software team and you want to know what to expect? Cat de Merode and Matt McNamara join the show to talk about their experiences as product owners interacting with developer teams. We'll talk about what developers can do to build trust, how to work with product owners on estimates and to talk about technical topics. And they'll say what the most important things developers should know about working with their product owners. Notes 02:43 - Dealing with Developer Teams 04:00 - In-house vs External Developers 05:33 - Helping Developers Understand Product Owner Motivation and Goals and Getting on the Same Page 11:18 - How can developers build trust? 12:29 - Explaining Architectural Decisions to Product Owners 14:29 - Does team size make a difference? 16:30 - Good Company Culture Behavior 18:44 - Estimation and Complexity - More on velocity: Agile Teams and Escaping Velocity with Doc Norton and Claire Podulka (http://www.techdoneright.io/15) 28:40 - Curation of Features 34:15 - What should developers know about working with product owners? Related Episodes Agile Teams and Escaping Velocity with Doc Norton and Claire Podulka (http://www.techdoneright.io/15) From Idea To Company With Maci Peterson and Alicia Drucker (http://www.techdoneright.io/14) Managing For Career Development with Claire Lew and Dan Hodos (http://www.techdoneright.io/12) Special Guests: Cat de Merode and Matt McNamara.

Laura Roeder is the founder and CEO of MeetEdgar, a social media scheduling platform tool with over 7,000 customers. As a founder who bootstrapped her company to $4MM in annual recurring revenue in 2.5 years, Laura shares her biggest leadership lessons around letting go as a manager. Claire Lew: Hi everyone, my name is Claire Lew and I'm… Read the full article

As a prominent expert who wrote the book on workplace conflict (literally), Amy shares her biggest leadership lessons learned on healthy work relationships and working with conflict. Amy Gallo is a Contributing Editor at Harvard Business Review, and the author of the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict. Claire Lew: Hi, everyone. My name is Claire Lew, and I'm… Read the full article

Running Olark, a company with 12,000+ customers, Ben shares the biggest leadership lesson he wishes he learned: The importance of self-awareness and emotional intelligence as a leader. Claire: Hi everyone, I'm Claire Lew and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company, and today I've got a really special guest. We have here Ben Congleton who is the… Read the full article

As the VP Engineering of Slack and prolific author on technical leadership, Michael discusses why being busy is a bad thing as a leader and how to delegate well. Claire: Hi everyone. I'm Claire Lew, and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company, and today I've got a very special guest. I have with me Michael Lopp, who might… Read the full article

As the founder + CEO of a 100+ person remote company, Sara reveals the importance of gut instinct in leadership, and how she learned that the hard way when starting her first company at 21 years old. Claire: Hi, everyone. My name is Claire Lew, and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company and today I have a really special… Read the full article

As the CEO of Jellyvision, a 400-person software company, Amanda Lannert has won just about every “best CEO” award in Chicago, and is someone I've admired for years. In this 12 minute interview, Amanda admits the one lesson she wishes she learned earlier as a leader. Watch or listen to the full interview… Claire: Hi, everyone! I'm Claire Lew,… Read the full article

As the Creator of Ruby on Rails and Founder & CTO of Basecamp, David Heinemeier Hansson shares with me what he wishes he learned earlier as a leader. We chat about empathy, illusions of disagreement, and why best intentions are bullshit. Listen or watch the full interview… Claire: Hi, everyone. I'm Claire Lew, and I'm the CEO… Read the full article

As an acclaimed nonprofit leader and public speaker, Halleemah Nash reveals what “authentic leadership” really means… Claire Lew: Hi everyone! I'm Claire Lew, and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company. Today, I am incredibly excited because I have a very special guest and dear friend with me today. I have Halleemah Nash, who is the Executive Director… Read the full article

As the founder of a 300+ software company, Des talks about the silence cost to being nice, the pitfalls of transparency as a leader, and the power of consistency. Claire Lew: Hi everyone, I'm Claire and I'm the CEO of Know Your Company. I'm really excited today to have a special guest with me, Des Traynor, the founder of Intercom. Des… Read the full article

All of us know people who are good at opening the door for others to succeed. They are the people who everyone wants to know and be around. Neal Sales-Griffin is one of those people. As an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, he's had a tremendous impact on many students and has put his philosophies about helping others to the test by creating a nonprofit aimed at helping High School students learn how to solve problems through coding. There are a handful of people here at Launchpad Lab who take every opportunity to be around Neal, and after you hear this interview you'll understand why. The drive to be happy motivates all kinds of action. What is it driving in you? One of the reasons Neal Sales-Griffin wanted to succeed in college was because of the desire to have money. Since he grew up with very little money that motivation makes perfect sense. But in retrospect he realizes that it wasn't really the money he was after, it was happiness. Once he was able to discover what truly makes him happy (and it's not the money) he has oriented his life in a direction that fulfills that desire. What makes him happy? Opening the door for others to find their own happiness and success. You can hear how Neal does it and how that philosophy permeates his life, on this episode of The Critical Shift. Sometimes people who have ambition just need a nudge from you. An earlier episode of The Critical Shift featured Claire Lew, CEO of Know Your Company. In that conversation, Claire mentioned the powerful impact today's guest had on her. Neal Sales-Griffin is a man who's made it his mission in life to lift up others, to do what he can to value them so they are encouraged to accomplish all they were designed to accomplish. Claire is one example of the many people Neal has touched and inspired. His perspective is simple: people around you many times just need a nudge in the right direction. That's worth the effort, isn't it? Hear Neal's story and how he explains his motivation to help others, on this episode. You can be the one to open the door for others… and the impact can be incredible. There are people you meet every day who are struggling with their own sense of worth, struggling with the self-doubt and lack of confidence that they really can make a difference in the world. But you wouldn't know it because we all strive to put on our best face and keep moving. But since you know it's true, why not do what you can to help those people bust the doubts and move forward? Your simple words, questions, and encouragement can do it. Neal Sales-Griffin talks about the way he's been able to encourage others and help them move forward in what they are passionate about doing, on this episode of The Critical Shift. Why the focus of Neal's life is to become irrelevant. Toward the end of this conversation, Neal was kind enough to summarize the way he looks at the calling that is on his life. In his own words, the focus of his life is to become irrelevant. He wants those he teaches, encourages, and equips to outpace him in every area so that his place in their lives is no longer needed. Isn't that a refreshing perspective in this world of personal branding and promotion? You can hear Neal's story and why he believes that building up others is the best use of his life, on this episode. Outline of This Episode [2:06] Who is Neal Sales-Griffin? [4:45] Neal's journey to Northwestern, the first in his family to complete college. [16:20] Experiencing the benefits of leadership gifts and clear direction. [20:57] The passion that drove Neal in college and how it developed over time. [28:09] Why Neal takes the initiative to lead people. Resources & People Mentioned The Starter League - learn to code in 3 months Code Now Northwestern University Outcome Health Full Stack Academy ISBE at Northwestern Know Your Company Wildfire - Northwestern's startup incubator BaseCamp ClarityBox Connect With Tom and Launchpad Lab https://launchpadlab.com/ On Instagram On Twitter On Facebook On LinkedIn

It's really a hard thing to know what you want. It takes a lot of soul-searching and more than most of us want to admit, it also requires a lot of experience with things you don't want. Claire Lew is one of those people who has traveled that journey of discovery. Her story is almost enchanting because as she tells it, you see the pieces that led toward her own sense of desire and purpose falling into place perfectly. On this episode of The Critical Shift, you'll hear Claire tell about her journey in her own words and find out how she came to the point that she had no doubt about what she was meant to add to the world. What happens when a child grows up with confidence that they are fully loved and supported? Most of us have a pretty clear picture of what happens when a child is run down or berated as they grow up. But have you ever known somebody who grew up in exactly the opposite environment? Claire Lew is one of those people. She's blessed to have had parents who told her that anything was possible and no matter how hair-brained or disjointed her plans may have seemed to them as she discovered her own sense of purpose, they were always there with encouragement, telling her that she could do anything she wanted to do. That's what fuels her even today as she pursues her passion of making companies and employees true partners in purpose and direction. Problem-solving is the purest form of entrepreneurship. Claire Lew was a Sophomore in college when she realized that her path forward would be that of an entrepreneur. She loved solving problems - for friends, in class, for the student body - anywhere she could. When she enrolled in a course about entrepreneurship and saw that the basic job description of every entrepreneur is to solve problems - she was all in. Today as she leads “Know Your Company” she's in her sweet spot, routinely working alongside companies to solve a problem that she's experienced personally and is passionate to fix. You'll enjoy her story as she shares it on this episode of The Critical Shift. Knowing what you really want is paramount to fulfillment and impact. It's a lot of work to figure out what you really want. But when it happens, when you get clarity on what you want, all kinds of things open up to you. You begin to see opportunities that you didn't notice before. You take steps of faith (risks) that you would never have taken before. You begin to learn from people and experiences like never before. Claire Law's story demonstrates all of those things and you'll be encouraged and challenged by it if you listen - so please do. Do you know what you want? If you're going to figure out what you really want to do in the world it's going to take a lot of work. You'll have to make some hard choices, you'll have to say “no” to many, many things, and you'll have to take steps that seem like leaps of faith. But through it all you'll discover things about yourself and what's truly on your heart that you can't know any other way. Listen to Claire Lew tell how she took that journey and the amazing results that have come from it, on this episode of The Critical Shift. Outline of This Episode [0:22] Meet Claire Lew, CEO of “Know Your Company” and why she's a guest on the show. [3:40] Why Claire was asked to take over a company the Basecamp team had created. [7:00] Constant moving because of her Dad's job, constantly being the new kid. [9:52] Wanting to understand how to be happy at work, even as a kid. [16:40] True success: Living life on your own terms. [29:50] Leaving her first successful startup because of burnout. [36:20] The response of her parents when she quit her job to pursue her own business. [41:15] Building out her philosophy through case studies and connecting with the Basecamp team. Resources & People Mentioned Know Your Company Jason Fried BaseCamp BOOK: What Should I Do With My Life? 37 Signals BOOK: Rework BOOK: Getting Real Groupon The Starter League BOOK: The Alchemist   Connect With Tom and Launchpad Lab https://launchpadlab.com/ On Instagram On Twitter On Facebook On LinkedIn

Managing For Career Development with Claire Lew and Dan Hodos Follow us on Twitter @techdoneright (http://www.twitter.com/tech_done_right), leave us a review on iTunes, and please sign up for our newsletter (http://techdoneright.io/newsletter)! Guests Claire Lew (https://twitter.com/cjlew23): CEO of Know Your Company (https://knowyourcompany.com/) Dan Hodos: Table XI’s (http://www.tablexi.com/) Director of Operations Summary How can you get honest feedback from co-workers, even when you are their manager? How can you support your team's career growth and support them as they improve their skills? Claire Lew, the CEO of Know your Company, and Dan Hodos, Table XI's Director of Operations, join Noel to discuss why listening is the most important thing you can do when getting feedback, how specific questions can break the "fine" reflex, how sticky notes can help with career growth, and the one thing you should never do in a one-on-one meeting. Notes 01:33 - Why One-on-One Meetings Are Important 03:16 - Creating a Safe Space for Employees: Make Empathy Your Mission 05:03 - Active Listening and Asking Questions 07:15 - How often should these meetings occur? 08:58 - Sponsorship and Career Mentoring 10:19 - Table XI’s “Sticky Note Game” 12:56 - What are the things you shouldn’t do during a one-on-one? 15:18 - Receiving Feedback - Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High (https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-Second/dp/1469266822) - Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses "No, But" Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration (https://www.amazon.com/Yes-Improvisation-Reverses-Creativity-Collaboration-Lessons/dp/0062248545/) 19:41 - Favorite Questions 21:03 - Balancing Natural Conversation with Asking Tough Questions 24:12 - Conducting Remote One-on-Ones 25:29 - Investing in Your Mentees 29:17 - Surprising Revelations Learned While Building Know Your Company - Our Biggest Blindspots (https://knowyourcompany.com/learn/guides/1-blindspots/1-our-biggest-blindspots-as-CEOs/) 32:24 - Creating Environments for Employees to Flourish Resources: Claire: * Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High (https://www.amazon.com/Crucial-Conversations-Talking-Stakes-Second/dp/1469266822) * The Know Your Company Blog (https://blog.knowyourcompany.com/@cjlew23) * The Know Your Company Knowledge Center (https://knowyourcompany.com/learn/) Dan: * Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses "No, But" Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration (https://www.amazon.com/Yes-Improvisation-Reverses-Creativity-Collaboration-Lessons/dp/0062248545/) * Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/1594484805) * taking an improv class. Noel: * RSA Animate — Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (https://vimeo.com/15488784) * Bossypants by Tina Fey (https://www.amazon.com/Bossypants-Tina-Fey/dp/0316056898/) Special Guests: Claire Lew and Dan Hodos.

Claire Lew, the CEO of KnowYourCompany discusses the importance of gathering and using employee feedback.

You are the type of person who never wanted to just say "work is fine." You wanted to be passionate about your work and solve problems that interest you. When someone asks you how work is you want to say "AMAZING" and go off on a tangent about your latest project or entrepreneurial feat. You aren't a typical 9-5 corporate culprit. You are a boss entrepreneur who overcomes a lot of different pains but doubles that pain with growth. Todays guest, Claire Lew, is the CEO of Know Your Company. She has overcome her own growing pains as an entrepreneur and helped create the tools for companies to overcome their unique pains as well. In this episode you will... Know how a bootstrap company works & its benefits Hear how Claire's dad's work influenced her Value why you can't let your "inspiration expire" Strengthen your ability to trust yourself Uncover how Claire has grown as a leader & CEO Learn about Claire's relationship with Basecamp RESOURCES: She Did It Her Way Podcast She Did It Her Way Twitter She Did It Her Way Facebook Claire's Twitter Know Your Company Twitter Claire's Website Know Your Company Website Claire's Instagram "What Should I Do with My Life" by Po Bronson "Rework" by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson Starter League Software The Lively Show Podcast Ben Horowitz article Basecamp 1 Password Draft INSIGHT: “Being a bootstrap company, the fact that you are deliberately choosing not to take on outside funding, what that means is that cash flow is everything.”- Claire Lew “I just don’t want to say that work is ‘fine’ because clearly it’s not when you’re saying something is fine.”- Claire Lew “We’ve grown up in a society that gives us a lot of signals,clues, paths, and symbols for what success is and it’s very easy to listen to those things.”-Claire Lew “The greatest source of motivation, the greatest source of you being able to accomplish what you want to do, has to come from within yourself."-Claire Lew “My greatest source of happiness comes from helping other people and I think the best way that I could possibly do that was to start a company.”-Claire Lew “How you feel about your work affects how well you actually do your work.”-Claire Lew “If there’s something that really pisses you off ride that momentum and just take advantage of that feeling in the moment and ride it out.”-Claire Lew “Well, this inspiration has an expiration date. It’s fleeting and if you don’t just kind of jump on it right then in the moment it will really pass.”-Claire Lew “In terms of thinking ‘how did I know that this was the right thing to do or go after’ or ‘how did I know this was the right problem to solve,’ I didn’t. I just decided and took advantage of the inspiration when I felt it.” -Claire Lew “I am my own worst critic and I know that I can be very hard on myself, so being able to brush things off, being able to tell myself that it’s ok and everything is not in my control because that is impossible, learning to be patient with myself, learning to take vacations, learning to take more reasonable hours, that is a learning process.”-Claire Lew

Invigorating thoughts on creative expression, eking out a living and a grander purpose, creating real value, and trusting oneself.

Know Your Company is a two-person company that is experiencing steady revenue and customer growth in more than 15 countries. With Kickstarter, Medium and Airbnb on their client list, I had to find out more. Know Your Company is a software tool that helps you uncover insights into your company that you didn't know before.  Every week, you’ll learn three different things... You'll learn how your employees feel about your business, the work, the culture, etc. You'll uncover blindspots in your company. You'll be able to address issues before they turn into bigger problems. You'll learn what everyone in the company is working on.Everyone will be on the same page. No one in the company will feel in the dark about what's going on. You'll learn more about everyone in the company as people.This could be a favorite recipe or movie. The small connections will bring everyone a little closer together. I invited CEO Claire Lew onto the show to learn more. Guest Info https://knowyourcompany.com/ @cjlew23

Claire Lew is the CEO of Know Your Company, where she has helped over 10,000 people at companies like Airbnb and Kickstarter. Her mission in life is to help people become happier at work, and her software revolves around exactly that by asking the right questions to identify blind spots.

Claire is the CEO of Know Your Company, a software tool that helps business owners with 25 to 75 employees overcome company growing pains. The software was originally built by Basecamp (formerly 37signals). Since then, Know Your Company has helped over 7,000 people at companies like Airbnb and Kickstarter.

Claire is the CEO of Know Your Company, a software tool that helps business owners with 25 to 75 employees overcome company growing pains. The software was originally built by Basecamp (formerly 37signals). Since then, Know Your Company has helped over 7,000 people at companies like Airbnb and Kickstarter.