Every week or so, we send you our most recent blog posts on leadership, a new Heartbeat podcast episode, and recommended readings on management.
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From The Heartbeat Podcast: A chat with Wade Foster
Wade Foster is the CEO and Co-Founder of Zapier, an integrations platform with over 2 million users that generates $35MM+ every year. In our chat, Wade and I discussed the importance of intellectual honesty as a leader, what to consider when running a remote company, why the message of your feedback matters, and more.
Listen to the podcast and read the transcript of the interview here.
What I’ve been writing lately
How transparent should you be as a leader?
“As a concept, transparency makes sense: If you want your team to behave the way that you would behave, they need access to the same information that you have.”
Is a CEO is worth working for? 4 questions to ask a prospective boss
“Plenty of CEOs sound like they’d be a good CEO. They’re charismatic, they’re articulate — but does sounding like a good CEO really make it true?
What I’ve been reading lately
The Feedback Fallacy
I highly recommend this article – wonderfully nuanced view of feedback: “Underpinning the current conviction that feedback is an unalloyed good are three theories that we in the business world commonly accept as truths.” Written by Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
Can We Really Test People for Potential?
Excellent piece on how to consider predicting job performance: “The most recent review of a century’s worth of research on selection methods, for example, found that tests of general mental ability (intelligence) are the best available predictors of job performance, especially when paired with an integrity test.” Written by Reb Rebele, MIT Sloan Review
Good Work
“PwC’s study “Preparing for Tomorrow’s Workforce, Today” shows that two-thirds of companies are failing to make workloads manageable, and 80 percent don’t prioritize programs to help workers’ well-being or mental health, even though they realize these issues are important.” Written by Bhushan Sethi and Carol Stubbings, strategy+business
Competitive advantage with a human dimension: From lifelong learning to lifelong employability
“Rather than focusing on retraining and reskilling as ends to themselves, we must reframe these topics as a means to the specific end of remaining employable for as long as one desires to be a part of the workforce.” Written by Beth Davies, Connor Diemand-Yauman, and Nick van Dam, McKinsey Quarterly
A handy leadership tip
From our online leadership community of almost 1,000 managers, in Know Your Team…
What are your best interview questions?
- If you had an entire work day with no meetings, obligations, or interruptions – what would you do?
- What is the project that you are most proud of?
- Where do you see your career in a year, and how does this role help you get there?
- Can you describe a company you would love to work in? What do you think the company must have? What should it not have?
- What kind of people do you want to work with? What is important?
- Tell me about a time when you experienced frustration, and how you handled it.
- What are the qualities you like least and most in your parents?
- What three events in your life would you say have had the biggest impact on your and why?
- Let’s say you were to be in this role – what would your biggest learning curve be?
- Tell me about the last time you handled some work that was explicit with a solution. How did you handle that? How did you orient? Clarify value?
- Tell me about the last you handled some work with an open ended solution like a metric target? How did you handle that? How did you orient? Clarify value?
Just for fun
James Turrell’s New Masterpiece in the Desert
Turrell is one of my favorite living artists. This piece on his new
master installation is mind-boggling. “There is this strange truth in
light, and I’ve been very interested in that.”
