New month, new practical advice to grow in your leadership journey!
Hey fellow managers and leaders 👋
In today’s issue of the Supermanagers TLDR, we’re covering:
- How the CTO of Zoom makes decisions
- Upwork’s framework to increase diversity across all levels
- Why great leaders follow the five-to-one feedback ratio
- Positive feedback examples
- and more…
Let’s get into it ⬇
💡 How the CTO of Zoom makes decisions
TLDR: Brendan Ittelson was promoted to the CTO role right when Zoom started to experience hypergrowth 🚀. One of the questions that we asked him on this episode of Supermanagers was: “How do you solve problems that most people think are impossible?”
Brendan gave us a framework for exactly that:
- Get to the root of the problem at hand.
- Understand deeply why most have considered it impossible.
- Make sure everyone is clear on the why
- Brainstorm without constraints (playbook in the episode!)
“One of the big things for me and part of our organizational culture is looking at problem and root cause before you get to solution. Folks often start talking about a solution. But when you dive in, if you don’t go through the diligence of problem and root cause, the solution might not actually fit.”
– Brendan Ittelson, CTO at Zoom
✅ Upwork’s framework to increase diversity
TLDR: Dozens of studies and decades of research have shown that diverse teams outperform homogenous ones in decision-making and performance. With these benefits in mind, most companies focus on increasing diversity in their candidate pipeline. However… in this episode of the Supermanagers podcast, Erin Thomas (VP, Head of Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging at Upwork) explains how the company started focusing on increasing retention before doing anything else… and it worked!
“We wanted to focus on making sure our ‘house’ was in order before we invited more folks over. We needed to make sure that our environment was supportive and inspiring for folks from all backgrounds, and in particular, black folks. So there were a lot of efforts there around conversations with the managers and leaders of our black employees.”
– Erin Thomas, VP, Head of Diversity, Inclusion, & Belonging at Upwork
⚖ The five-to-one feedback ratio
I just finished reading an excellent management book titled “When They Win, You Win” 📔 (Fun fact: this week’s episode of Supermanagers will feature Russ Laraway – the author – so make sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify so you don’t miss the interview!).
Back to the book. In chapter 9, Russ describes that great leaders highlight the things that their teammates are doing right to give them the best chance of repeating those things. In fact, research shows that the best leaders have a five-to-one praise-to-criticism ratio.
“It’s not five to zero, it’s five to one,” says Russ Laraway… emphasizing that sharing constructive feedback about what can be improved is also critical to developing your team.
Inspired by this chapter in Russ’s new book, we’re sharing 10 scenarios in which you can offer positive feedback in the link below 👇
👍 Positive feedback from manager to employee: 10 examples
… and that’s a wrap! We hope that the content we curated inspires you to continue growing as a leader.
If you enjoyed this issue, please share the newsletter with a colleague or friend –they can subscribe here!
Thanks for being part of our community,
Manuela & the Fellow.app team