Just Thoughts #36: Feedback and Team Performance Frameworks - Part 2/2.
Welcome reader! Just Thoughts is for modern-day leaders who want to think better about business, leadership, and entrepreneurship. This article's Content is “handwritten” (highlighted when not) and co-piloted with Grammarly’s spell-checking and rephrasing for tone of voice.
The first rule of reading these thoughts is to ask yourself:
Why should I think this way?
This edition of Just Thoughts continues Just Thoughts #35: Feedback and Team Performance Frameworks - Part 1.
Headlines This Week:
Quick Recap
Feedback Framework
Giving Feedback
Receiving Feedback
negative ways
positive ways
Application
Tools to solve the performance issue
Building tools that win
Team Development Frameworks:
The five dysfunctions of a team
Tribal Leadership
Applying Feedback: Slush 2024 Reviewed.
Quick Recap
The last edition introduced the concept of feedback frameworks and explained the premise for how the framework came to be.
From Just Thoughts #35: Feedback and Performance Frameworks - Part 1.
“The level of trust in your organization outweighs communication styles.” Trust is always the cornerstone of beyond-average performance; sometimes, that trust manifests in teams with dysfunctional communication patterns for various reasons. However, regardless of their performance levels, these aren’t very healthy environments.
Teams with high psychological safety and inclusive communication styles still need accountability—something we’ll discuss in more detail in this post.
Any Feedback framework should consist of the following three elements:
Asking for feedback
Giving Feedback
Receiving Feedback
If you’re building your framework, you should know the following aspects.
Any feedback framework aims to create a better feedback culture in your team or organization.
All frameworks are flawed, but they give people a vocabulary for what “bad” and “good” feedback are within your context, so you don’t get lost in translation.
Please beware of the Feedback Fallacy; feedback can fail regardless of how well it’s executed.
We all crave attention, and that’s why “negative feedback” or nagging seems to work: We still get attention, and that’s better than no feedback.
The complex business world requires an operating model involving trust, transparency, and feedback loops at all organizational levels. Such a system is demanding for leaders, and the type of leaders who don’t survive it are
Manipulative individuals who genuinely do not care about people
Those who take challenges personally (when they are not meant to), and can’t receive feedback constructively.
Leaders who don’t put any thought into what their values or principles are and lack a sense of integrity
Those who always need to be the ones who speak first and listen later.
Deploying feedback frameworks and training in a system that harbors these types of leaders will be a waste of time, and you should use other tools to address the systemic issues.
When building a better feedback culture, start by creating the habit of asking for feedback and be mindful of who, when, and what you ask.
Feedback Framework
We ended the last post by asking for feedback and picked it up from there, which is below.
Giving Feedback
The following framework is a combination of Radical Candor and non-violent communication.
Radical Candor is a framework that helps you categorize feedback, distinguishing good from bad, and gives a language to describe what’s lacking.
Here’s an excellent summary of Kim’s work by Lucio Buffalmano;
You want to be able to challenge directly while emphatically caring. However, the challenge with Radically candid feedback is that it doesn’t provide a clear-cut way to formulate developmental feedback radically candidly. While insightful to some feedback cases, it doesn’t help that many summaries of Kim’s work feature something like “you’re fly is down” as a feedback example and fewer examples of actual career-forwarding advice.
Hence, the non-violent communication framework. Here’s a nice visual by management30.com describing the framework.
The nonviolent communication framework is mastered by peacekeepers, among other practitioners. Its power lies in its non-triggering aim. People usually have a negative, triggering reaction to feedback. Using the “I” in this framework is the key, as you make the whole thing about how you feel as the feedback giver about an objective observation; you make it about yourself, not the receiver.
Using the “I” in this framework is the key.
I like this format as at Slush, when I ran the org, I told people complaining about someone else’s behavior to go into a discussion explaining 1) how they feel, 2) what they need, and 3) asking the other what they need.
I’ve often used this framework to start formulating something I want but don’t know how to say effectively or when I’m at a loss for how to get started, not only in constructive feedback but also in appreciation. When I want to say something more than “Good job” or “Thank you,” I use this framework.
"When you say hi whenever you come to work, I feel joy because it makes me feel seen”.
It gives much more valuable feedback than “Thank you for saying hi.” When I’ve done training (and I’ve done these a lot), I’ve sometimes had people write a piece of praise or gratitude like this and give it to their colleagues, having the recipient get tears of joy. It can sometimes be that powerful.
Go into a discussion and explain 1) how you feel, 2) what you need, and 3) asking your recipient what they need.
In essence, the two frameworks complement each other nicely, as
a) Not all types of feedback need to be as intensely formulated as non-violent structures. For example, whispering, “Your fly is open,” is enough to end up radically candid. You do not need to say, “When you’re not noticing when your fly is open yourself, I hope you close it because I feel embarrassed for you.” It may just make things worse when making a thing out of saying something so intense with so little effort.
b) When you aim for nonviolently communicated feedback and are off, no language or frame describes why it doesn’t feel right (in non-violent communication). It may be that over-engineering the input doesn’t feel radically candid to the receiver.
To summarize, Nonviolent communication changes your feedback to be more sincere when you remember to use the “I” and tell others your reaction to the observation you are making. The observation, being as descriptive as possible, creates more “challenge,” as described by Radical Candor.
We’ve covered how to ask for and give feedback and what good and bad feedback could look like according to a framework. Before moving on to the last part, receiving feedback, I’d like to remind you that giving feedback may not always be the most effective way to get higher or better performance, as the Feedback Fallacy describes. Additionally, you should reflect on implementing these practices in your 1-on-1, which we discussed in Just Thoughts #33 - The 1-on-1:n framework for better discussions.
Receiving Feedback
In short, there are good ways of receiving feedback that invite more feedback to be given in the future and destructive ways that reduce the amount of feedback. By becoming an excellent feedback receiver, in both praise and criticism, you’ll create an environment that invites more of it in the future. That is the goal of receiving feedback well: to generate more feedback.
The goal of excellent feedback reception is to create more of it.
Just Thoughts #35, we mentioned that Katri Junna, now Netlight's CEO, developed the initial feedback framework that we iterated. Before this, Smartly.io did not have a concept or guidance on receiving constructive feedback other than Kristo Ovaskas ’s (Former CEO and co-founder of Smartly.io) very exploratory behavior of always thanking for the feedback.
Katri Introduced the “ladder” for receiving feedback, which we turned into the “planetary" framework for receiving feedback. Regardless of how it’s visualized or talked about, it consists of two parts: the negative and positive ways of receiving feedback.
The Negative ways:
Destroy— Destroying Feedback is attacking the person giving it, belittling, gaslighting, bullying, or otherwise dismissing the nature of the feedback or its content, regardless of how accurate or inaccurate it may be.
“You’re in no position to give me that feedback!”
Deny— Denying Feedback is simply neglecting it to be accurate, regardless of whether it isn’t.
“What you’re stating is incorrect. I didn’t do that”
Defend— Defending means you start explaining yourself away. Coming up with excuses for your behavior is warranted, whether you are in a position to do so or not.
“I had the right to act that way.”
Dismiss— Dismissing refers to ignoring the person giving the feedback and not wanting to discuss it.
“Thank you for the feedback…. [silence]”
Notice how these different versions account for whether the feedback is warranted. This implies that even when the input is poorly given or holds no ground for validity, none of the ways above make for constructive ways to receive feedback and breed more input in the future.
If the input is poorly formulated and holds no ground, you can always enter a discussion about it by giving feedback on how the input was provided. However, that should happen after you’ve received it well. Before we move on to how to receive feedback well, here’s probably the most iconic feedback reception on the internet.
We can argue about the quality of the response once you’ve read through the last bit, but notice how Steve does two things. a) He doesn’t attack the person, and b) he sits down to reflect before answering, not letting his emotions get the best of him.
This shows that you are aware of your emotional state before answering, and Steve knew he would be criticized based on how he presented the question. This means we should be mindful of our good and bad biases, as who is giving the feedback may affect how we react.
Unfortunately for Steve, he didn’t have the luxury to dodge the question, but in different circumstances, it’s perfectly ok to say if you can get back to the person with your reaction at a better time if you clearly state when you will do it. Stating that you’ll do so because you feel triggered and would take the time to reflect instead of reacting immediately. Brene Brown would call having the courage to express the emotion in the situation an act of “Daring Greatly”.
Nonetheless, with enough practice, you can go about reacting to feedback constructively the following way.
The Positive ways:
Reflect, Listen— You may sit and think first (like Jobs) or maybe say, “Thank you for the feedback before doing so,” but you show that you’re paying attention. The best way to “reflect” is “thinking out aloud” the way Jobs does in the video above.
Reflect, Ask— Reflecting here refers to the same as above; asking refers to discussing the input, regardless of whether it’s true or false. Acknowledging the person and their tone of voice ensures the giver is being seen; better yet, they feel heard.
“I hear you tell me my behavior annoys you; what makes you give me this feedback now?”
Reinforce, Remain/Revise— Assuming the feedback is valid, the best way to react is to re-state what you heard and let the giver know what you’ll do differently, breeding a sense of accountability. If it’s not valid, the best way is to reflect, ask, and ask if you can give feedback on how the original feedback was provided.
In praise, a reinforce and remain reaction I like to use is to say;
“Thank you for saying that. It means a lot coming from you because [insert a reason]. I’ll continue doing [insert the reason for the praise].”
A common mistake many make when receiving praise is dismissing like “No, it was nothing big” when it was, and you put a lot of effort into making something happen.
When receiving valid criticism, reinforcing and revising means repeating what you heard and stating what you’ll do in the future, either according to request or based on your reflective judgment. The point is that regardless of whether you agree on the future action, you allow for further discussion or accountability. The giver can hold you accountable for acting accordingly when you state what you'll do after receiving feedback. Notably, if you think of some other future action than what is suggested, you may ask yourself if it would be alright if you’d act differently and explain why so a constructive discussion can be held.
“I hear you saying me interrupting you during meetings feels disrespectful. However, instead of raising my hand, could I state, “may I interrupt” before doing so?”
I’ve witnessed multiple times when someone receiving feedback for misconduct says thank you for the input but does not state if they will do something differently. Be wary when people don’t give you answers about how they’ll behave differently in the future. Those situations tend never to end well.
We’ve now covered how to receive feedback, and here’s the above visualization, initially created by Katri Junna.
We turned this into two different planets, such as Smartly.io, to fit with our strategy visualization at the time, saying, “Be on the positive planet,” not “the negative planet.” Instead of the ladder, we had orbits, with “reinforce & remain/revise” being closest to the ground on the “positive planet” and the “destroy” being closest to the ground on the “negative planet.”
With all of this shared, we may now ask ourselves how we apply this framework and how we breed a better feedback culture in our organization. To embark on the “application” journey, I’ll refer to an event I participated in during Slush last week. Namely, the Slush Side Event: Performance Management in The Era of AI - Lunch with Taito.ai, Accel, and OpenAI, the primary host being Kristo Ovaska and his team at Taito.ai, his new startup trying to build a product to support leaders and organizations with their performance management challenges with the help of AI.
Application
When it came to the culture at large and the culture at Smartly.io back in the day, I had to decode and recode the culture. Feedback and training for feedback are just one piece of a massive puzzle. We won’t go into decoding culture at large. For that, I suggest familiarizing yourself with
“Culture Canvas.”, and my previous writing.Nonetheless, it’s worth discussing feedback with performance, especially performance reviews, both traditionally and today. This topic was covered in the Slush Side event’s first topic with panelists Cal Henderson (CTO & Co-FOunder of Slack) and Nathalie Parent (CPO at Shift Technologies) interviewed by Kristo.
Nathalie makes the open remarks, saying, “Anything driven by HR is questionable; you need the business leader to drive the effort” and that the most common thing people do wrong when designing performance management systems for their organizations is that they create them for the worst managers, not the best.
What to do wrong in performance management systems; designing process for the worst managers
She also later remarks that few people are very good at giving feedback and that most processes involve looking back rather than looking forward.
Reflecting on these statements, I recall Will Larson (author of An Elegant Puzzle) saying that annual or quarterly reviews are best viewed as a “backstop” hedging the company against potentially poor performance management made by individual managers. Making them a “necessary evil” and posing whether there is a way to inspire and give all managers the tools to handle performance continuously.
Nathalie's remark about “looking forward” reminded me of another feedback framework I used in an induction exercise during the first day for new employees at Smartly.io, namely, “feed-forward,” developed by Marchall Goldsmith. It has all three elements of an excellent feedback framework, starting with 1. asking, 2. giving feedback, and 3. receiving feedback, but it differs from the one described above by a) what you ask about and b) what you're giving feedback on.
In our induction exercise at Smartly.io, we emphasized the feedback culture and got people into the habit of asking for feedback. Everyone picked one thing they wanted to learn during their onboarding process and asked their peers in 2-minute speed dating for suggestions on how to go about their learning goal.
Coming back to the panel discussion, Cal at first seemed like he wanted to disagree with Nathalie but eased into her opinions and supported some general best practices such as;
Expectations should be set before they are reviewed. Any performance review process should include what HR professionals call a “leveling framework” that codifies what is expected of people at different seniority levels, a.k.a. “job families” in HR lingo.
The HRBP should have a “seat at the table” regardless of whether you talk about leadership team level or VPs holding director-level business meetings. Cal emphasizes the point by saying his HRBPs are at most of his meetings with him and that the HRBP is the person he spends the most time with out of all his colleagues.
Another issue Cal highlights is that 100% of the feedback is sent by only 10% of the workforce and is mainly only positive. However, I would argue this is likely not a “feedback issue”, but I trust a “psychological safety” issue. Hence, trying to solve this issue with better tools or feedback training won’t do the trick; instead, starting with vetting the organizational operating model first and reviewing the performance of those in managerial positions across the company as described in Just Thoughts #35.
Cal seemingly contradicts Will Larson by stating, “Feedback only once a year is like doing code reviews once a year.” This can be interpreted as performance reviews being a waste of time, but he meant feedback should be given constantly throughout the year, not just when the company demands it.
Here is where Cal highlights other essential practices, such as goal setting, and how you’re highlighting “what great work looks like” across the organization. This is where technology can help.
It can help calibrate and set expectations across the organization and gather feedback.
Codify and make it easy for people to give and receive feedback. Store it over time so you don’t have to remember everything at the time of an official review.
Technology can also help distribute highlights. A common practice in many organizations is to create a “kudos” or “praise” channel in Slack to highlight great work.
Not shared by Nathalie or Cal, but summarizing some implications of their points with my personal experiences. The pitfalls you may have and issues you should address before bringing in technology to amplify your performance management system are as follows,
It would be best if you had a philosophy about goal setting in general. What do you want it to achieve, and how does it fit into your company narrative? Check Just Thoughts #2 for inspiration.
It would be best if you had a joint understanding of the leadership level, what great work looks like, and why. Usually, the struggle becomes balancing business results vs. culturally desirable behavior.
You may have individuals or practices that deteriorate the level of trust in your organization, and any efforts to employ better performance management systems or goal-setting practices will collapse because of them.
To conclude this headline, completely neglecting performance review cycles is likely not the best approach, but striving to embed feedback into your 1-on-1 practices and daily routine when interacting with others is something to strive for. Training and a shared feedback framework in the organization will help you determine the quality of your interactions.
Tools to help solve the performance issue
The second part of the stage program included a panel discussion with Niilo Särmänen (CTO of Wolt), Ewa Priestly (VP of Talent at Miro), and Laura Modiano (Head of startups at OpenAI), moderated by Juho Eräste Co-Founder and CTO at Taito.ai.
Niilo opens the discussion with a bold dose of honesty: we don’t know how to get this right. Please help us; most performance management systems are designed for the bottom 60% of team leads in large organizations who are either new or poor managers. The consequence is an over-engineered system where your most recent performance review is usually the only label you hold regarding performance. With his answers, he states, “I’m the customer here, and these are my problems,” which becomes even more apparent later in the discussion.
Ewa, on the other hand, had a clear pre-thought message she wanted to come across with;
Performance management frameworks are never static; they are fluid. Hence, it would help if you constantly iterated.
“Philosophy over process” is a way to approach performance management regardless of the system. Cal had a similar thought about goal setting: Start with philosophy, then define the process.
At Miro, they have something called “Miro Performance & Mindset.” To me, this translates to a strong enough culture where values are defined and lived, as well as having their language to describe performance. In the Tribal Leadership model discussed later in this blog post, they have an organization operating at “Level Four.”
Ewa also describes Miro as operating in a “chaotic environment” without going into further detail. That reminds me of the cynefin framework developed by IBM in the early millennia, aiming to help managers categorize problems. “Chaotic” issues are one of five categories. When your problems are chaotic, the only thing you can do wrong is do nothing because doing nothing will usually lead to chaos. Hence, it would help if you had a strong bias for action in chaotic environments.
At Slush, we trained the volunteers to be emotionally prepared to take action, as events are uncontrollable or chaotic by definition. How do you do that? Taking them through a series of stories and customer service situations they may encounter during the event made it abundantly clear that the people closest to any given problem are the best people to solve the issue while trusting their capabilities.
At Miro, they also seem to have an internal performance review tool. Much like Revolut, whose founder, Nik Stronsky, was on the Slush Founder Stage talking about their journey and their internal performance management system, which they’ve produced and started selling as a product to other companies called “Revolut people”. I was looking forward to this discussion regarding the main event the most, but I was disappointed as they only talked a little bit about the performance part of things at Revolut.
The main takeaway was that Nik stated he strongly needs “control,” which seeps through the Revolut people's product and philosophy for performance management. Nonetheless, Martin Mignot from Index Ventures, who interviewed Nik, pointed to his LinkedIn post about the subject, referring to Quantum Lights' performance management playbook at the core of Revolut people as an excellent asset for anyone interested.
Coming back to the discussion at Taito.ai’s event, Niilo speaks more about the problems with performance management systems, such as some feedback only comes once a year, and it’s usually shit because of it. Feedback should be immediate, but few tools facilitate this well, with the problem of feedback being seen at worst as a separate process from “business as usual.” In poor feedback cultures, performance reviews are seen as “business blockers,” something that is not top of mind and a +1 to everything else you need to do.
However, as mentioned in Just Thoughts #33 - The 1-on-1 framework for better discussions, when personal development is seen as interdependent with the bottom line, any performance system becomes embedded in “business as usual,” with better discussions in meetings, in private and constantly through every interaction in your organization. When you have a mindset like this, technology will amplify it instead of being seen as a wasteful resource. We need to remember the best managers will need little to no technology to breed better performance, and the Roman Empire was built without a single bit, turning from one to zero.
The world is no longer the same; technology is seeping through business at unprecedented speeds. OpenAI provides solutions that create the basis of operating systems in which AI can rapidly be deployed to assist in the myriad business challenges organizations may face. Hence, Laura was on stage, giving examples of how technology and AI can be leveraged in performance management. She mentions
Using AI to provide feedback faster to leadership
Using data in an unbiased way, where a person analyzes it in between, might lead to faulty conclusions.
Using AI to deliver feedback in a human-like way without manager bias
Ewa continues by mentioning a few other use cases, such as Siemens using something called “Amber.ai” to train their managers for different situations using AI avatars as coaches.
This brings us to the ultimate question: will OpenAI eat Taito.ai the way they’ve obliterated entire domains, and what do you need Taito.ai for when “the best companies” are building their systems like Revolut with their proprietary product Revolut People product?
To shed light on the answer to this question, I asked Laura after the event what tool they were using for their internal performance reviews at OpenAI, and I can tell you it wasn’t Taito.ai, but that’s likely not surprising to anyone at this point. However, what blew me away when it came to using the latest technology and AI to drive organizational performance was the Finnish company In Parallel, which organized its launch party later that same day.
Operating for 20 months in stealth, with a 2M€+ seed round raised last spring, 20+ people on the payroll, and their panelists at their launch event featuring their alpha customers representing Fortune 500 companies, they’re definitely on to something. What they were doing didn’t dawn on me until I discussed the details with the founders and their team members at the launch event. Their launch video and slogan, “Hyper-align execution with your strategy. Every time. In real time.” sounds like a lot of nice words but don’t do justice to the ingenuity of their product.
If Taito AI is trying to serve organizations with 250-1500 people, In Parallel is an enterprise solution. Instead of addressing individual performance, it addresses strategy alignment for organizations with 10,000+ people. When Cal said you need a “philosophy for goal setting” before you create any performance management system, In Parallel comes with that as the launch event featured the book “The One-Hour Strategy” - By Jeroen Kraaijenbrink.
What makes In Parallel so attractive to buyers is that it provides visibility on the return on investment for even the CFO, where few tools previously quantified organizational data meaningfully or made the data gathering as easy as it was with their tool. For someone like me who has been geeking out on organizational data transparency forever, this tool makes total sense on an enterprise level.
Building Tools that win
To win in people ops space, you must do the following four things:
Generate enough proprietary data for additional machine learning algorithms to make sense. For example, people are inputting- or the machine is gathering data that hasn’t been digitized before, and others are reviewing or ranking the quality of that data.
Create a UX/UI experience that meets people where they are already working e.g., questions answered in Slack or having an AI avatar call you for input (blue-collar workers may not use digital products for input alignment)
Combine it with some baseline, must-have data, such as HRIS data or, arguably, people engagement data.
Create a brand with an outsized value in domain expertise, network, and community so no company will want to build this internally but rather leverage that expertise and community. You want to make a case for Revolut People to appear as an outlier, not the norm, or have people think they can build everything themselves.
The foundation model will blow you out of business if you’re not generating enough unique data or you aren’t providing a user experience that is so unique but still valuable that it doesn’t make sense for a foundation model to cater to it well. For example, I’ve built engagement survey forms and leader performance review forms from scratch with Google Forms and ran the input data through ChatGPT with a prompt to produce an action plan based on the data, which I’ve then copy-pasted onto a Google spreadsheet in time for the review. Automating this is already a use case, but building a moat around it with anything but a brand is challenging.
Secondly, you must understand what tools organizations will buy and in what order. In addition, it’s tough to build a system that caters to all the needs of enterprise-level people teams. It’s so fragmented that creating a platform that maintains the APIs is a 10M+ AAR opportunity, as proven by Kombo.dev. Also mentioned, the few solutions that try to integrate everything, like Workday, don’t provide an enjoyable user experience, as many people at Taito.ai’s event mentioned Workday is not fun to use. One needs to understand that in the heart of it all lies the HR data, combined with seamless usability, something Rippling is placing their winning bet on when taking on Workday.
Taito’s most significant challenge lies in competing against all the modern HRIS platforms that deploy similar performance management systems as features on the side of the core product (like HiBob or Deel). Organizations will have to buy the HRIS before buying a performance management tool. In Parallel sees the most significant opportunity starting from goal and strategy alignment, which becomes a huge issue when the organization amounts to tens of thousands.
If you're not building an HRIS or ATS (recruitment tool), the current path to producing hard-to-replace value in the “people domain” for any organization is creating an engagement tool like Teamspective and adding the performance management feature to work alongside the people engagement part.
To summarize these thoughts:
Taito will have to focus heavily on goal-setting or engagement metrics while doubling down on UX/UI to carve a moat for themselves. They could also focus on training, which would involve using AI avatars to prep people with calls or videos, listening in on performance reviews and one-on-ones, and giving pointers on improving.
In Parallel is already clearly addressing a sore pain point but will likely be highly sticky if it acts as the pivoting tool for the rest of the internal tech stack managed by the CFO / CPO. When you migrate between HRIS, ATS, Engagement survey tools, and the like, the most challenging part is creating seamless data transfers and educating people about using a new tool. However, the latter won’t be a company-wide issue if everything is behind the In Parallel interface.
Future opportunities in space may include organizational network data and tools that easily maintain a talent community outside the organization, such as alumni, or tools that allow individuals to retain their learnings and reviews across organizations, which would rival LinkedIn by having richer data. However, that may be a subject for a future edition of Just Products.
When covering all this ground, as Nathalie and Cal mention, we must not forget that tools will never substitute for outstanding leadership, and business performance rarely happens in isolation. Hence, anyone leading a team reading this should create a philosophy about how they view individual and team performance.
Nik and his teams at Quantum Light and Revolut base their system on the fact that anything can be chopped into small enough pieces and optimized for the sake of control. On the other hand, I grew up professionally and had to build organizations in a wholly uncontrollable business domain. At the same time, I was working with volunteers, whom you can’t reward directly with monetary incentives, and the impact of the business itself wasn’t measured in turnover or valuation.
Here are a few frameworks, along with the DDOs mentioned in Just Thoughts #33, that I’ve found helpful over the years. The feedback frameworks become extremely useful when combined with these, as you will understand what’s worth giving feedback on and what will move the needle regarding behavior.
Team Development Frameworks
My training features the following frameworks for teams trying to figure out their leadership practices and feedback culture, with the intent of improving team performance.
I will not go into detail about the frameworks I have not developed myself, as there are entire books about the subjects for you to dive into, and I’ve previously written about my frameworks. I will merely provide reflections on how I see them and use these frameworks to make sense of what’s happening in any particular team or organization.
To underpin how I value and relate to organizational and team development frameworks, I asses them against the three pillars of self-organization.
Trust - Trust that individuals can make the best possible decision with given information
Transparency - Providing teams with any information the organization has by practicing “opt-in” transparency
Feedback Loops - “self-reflection” and giving feedback is actively practiced on all levels of the organization
It’s worth noting that I created my leadership and goal-setting frameworks in the self-organized context in Just Thoughts #2—An Operating Model, Just Thoughts #23, which introduces the leadership development model derived from the self-organized context, Just Thoughts #24, which includes the leadership framework part 2, and the leadership framework part 3 described in Just Thoughts #26.
In short, within this framework and operating philosophy, Leadership is a subset of actions that help you get the right amount of the right people, and management is a subset of actions that help you get the right amount of the right people to do the right thing at the right time. The former is a function of people and their emotions; the latter is a function of things you can automate. Ultimately, all tasks associated with leadership and management can be distributed to a crowd. They are mutually exclusive but complimentary.
There lies the art of being a modern-day leader: designing a system where the right people lead at the right time to do the right thing.
The five dysfunctions of a team
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is one of Patrick Lenciones ’s many books, and all are written in a very particular style: first, a fable, then the beef in a few pages at the end of the book. This framework highlights the importance of trust to the other things highly functional things need.
To me, this has always felt more like a stack of balls on top of each other than a pyramid with a solid foundation because you can genuinely only “hold on to one thing” at any given time, so you might as well hold on to the “Trust ball”
As mentioned in Just Thoughts, #35 “The level of trust in your team outweighs the communication styles”. Hence, if there is one thing you “can hold on to,” then hold trust and nothing else, as trust is the hardest thing to rebuild.
As Cal highlighted in the earlier sections, 10% of the people tend to give 100% of the feedback, and it’s all positive. This sounds like the organization has a “fear of conflict. " The issue likely is that people aren’t asking enough feedback, while others are not giving it in fear of it not being received well.
The five dysfunctions also highlight how receiving feedback well and stating what you’ll be doing in the future allows for accountability to be employed in your team. On the other hand, commitment is hard to make unless you constructively argue a plan of action or have transparency across the organization regarding how you are doing the way In Parallel provides it.
I highly recommend all Lenciones books. Some are more useful than others, but I keep referring to Death by Meeting as one of them due to very high alignment with how to deal with issues in the “Beat” in the “Heart, Beat, Hustle” operational model I’ve developed. Furthermore, if you want something to contrast Nik’s leadership style, read The Five Temptations of a CEO. Even if the framework describes what Nik’s philosophy aims for, the fable describes a CEO who doesn’t need a performance system that cuts the bottom 20% of your people. Instead, they self-select themselves and leave without conflict.
Tribal Leadership
Tribal Leadership has already been introduced in Just Thoughts #27; it describes different maturity levels for organizations, ranging from one to five, and actions to help you move from one level to the other. The crux is that you can’t skip levels on a journey to get from one to five. Different individuals and teams may be at lower levels than the overall organization, but I rarely see teams operating above the organization's average level.
To contribute perspective to the content of this post, Tribal leadership explains why performance management systems and the supporting tools help organizations that struggle to get people from level two to level three but have a hard time getting them to level four.
The reason is that to operate at level four, you need shared values and philosophies, which are even more challenging to construct with the help of digital tools. It would help if you had actual real-life model behavior to get there. That’s, however, when a great feedback culture built on trust becomes invaluable.
I highly recommend Nine Lies About Work—A Free Thinker Guide to the Real World for additional frameworks and perspectives on performance and leadership. It highlights a crucial aspect of those who are the best in the world at what they do: why they are that and how they’ve achieved it are rarely if not impossible to replicate in the real world.
What makes one person great will not be the same things that make someone else great. Hence, having leveling frameworks that put people in boxes is not an accurate representation of the natural world, even if it’s a handy tool to distribute the finite resources of a company.
Applying Feedback: Slush 2024 Reviewed
Writing all the content in this blog post has taken me over three days, and this learning has primarily resided in my head. Forcing myself to write it and putting it into a timely context is my way of demonstrating mastery in what otherwise seems like an abysmal performance in implementing these learnings over the past few years.
In my own experience, the reason for poor performance is that I’ve found myself in the absolute worst environments, which I emphasize so heavily on the fact some systems require brute forcing individuals out of the system instead of expecting them to change.
Combined with personal hardship, I haven’t had the energy or even thought some fights were worth fighting. Nonetheless, I believe in what I have learned and have positively contributed to an organization with its 9th generation of leadership in 16 years; Slush still holds its title as one of the best events in its category and still stays true to its mission. Everyone in the current organization should be proud of not losing that after yet another year, and I applaud you for the effort because it’s not given that you get to be a part of something that still means something to someone, somewhere.
The event has also clearly perfected its core offering and can deliver its value proposition while operating with healthier margins. Back in the day, it was a 10M€ operation with a 0,01% margin of error. During the Corona years, Miika Huttunen and the team had to deal with an impossible market while even bending government laws in Slush’s favor to de-risk bankruptcy in case of another lockdown.
Now you have an impeccable speaker line-up, and people are still returning after multiple years, saying it’s their favorite event. The relevancy of individuals you meet by serendipity has also increased. At the same time, the quality of the pitching competition is still world-class, featuring startups that could easily be in any accelerator's top 10%.
What Slush currently lacks are those crazy ideas and pushing for something new—the planes and skydiving competitions, as described in Just Thoughts #28. After so many years of fighting for simple survival, it’s time to get them back before they’re forgotten as part of the organization's DNA. The complacency shows not only in how the event is produced but also in the originality of the output.
For example, the entrance featured a resting area with only one little stream of water, which I doubt anyone noticed. Back in 2018, it was a massive area with walls of flowing water, and the opening show this year made people automatically say some other year was better just because the show was better.
You’re also competing in a world where podcast popularity is drastically increasing, and AI is making the listening experience superior to many amateur producers. This results in high expectations for the quality of the stage program, not just who’s presenting. Slush has one of the most unique media libraries; it is just sitting there on YouTube without being effectively utilized. You could run a
“Lennisbot” exercise on that content or create a directory following ’s guide on building directories, to drive SEO engagement.Another trend is the massive increase in side events and their quality. At least the ones I visited were highly relevant. Still, the offering, in combination with a stable amount of primary event attendees, I’d recommend future organizers to make an effort to invite a lot of people outside of the core attendee group, coming up with events that sit at the intersection of Slush core crowd and their community or core audience.
Finally, I acknowledge that I haven’t been able to see or test the all-year-round match-making tool, matchmaking sprints, or online events. Still, based on this year’s event experience, I doubt it will cannibalize the actual event experience; instead, it would make the Slush Community more accessible and more topical every time of the year. Not just for cold November.
My favorite part of Slush is always meeting old friends and new ones while having meaningful discussions about leadership, entrepreneurship, products, culture, and life in general. For example, I ran into my old friend, Rony Vartio, a.k.a. Rony Rex, with whom I started my entrepreneurial journey. Seeing him made me scream in excitement.
Upcoming releases from The Just Home include an interview with Rony, featuring his signing with Live Nation in the first edition of the Just Culture Podcasts. We will also publish a research paper on what makes people out of the student-led startup ecosystem great founders.
A post in Just Products with a visualization of the different tools in the people space would likely help put some of the content into perspective for those less knowledgeable about the space. What do you think?
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