Now, for every post I will give a book recommendation. Today, The Book of Joy. Reading these two spiritual guides chatting about how to keep a joyful state of mind in a troublesome world is really inspiring. Lots of wisdom packed in a book.
This post came about a week later than expected. Pandemics hit really hard on my psyche - again - and I really had to slow down in the past few weeks. Brazil is still far from reopening and death numbers are terrifying. In more than a year I had ups and downs with this home-office-with-two-kids situation, recently it was a down. Then I decided to write about a topic that is related to this moment: energy management.
This newsletter is about build tech products. Why is energy management important for building great products? Because often what separates a bad, good or great team is only how they manage their energy in time.
Most products are built over consistency. Improving a bit every week for a long time often surpasses once-in-a-while peak improvements. Moreover, consistency is repeatable. But you cannot do that pushing the team to 100% all the time. The key ingredient to keep consistent improvement is to manage the energy of the team in time.
As John Cutler once said:
Product development is about managing energy more than managing time
In fact he has a whole systemic view on managing a team's energy that you can find here.
Here I made a simple map of how I think about the problem to illustrate how I like to manage my energy and that of a product team.
Energy drives outcomes. It is a non-linear as results are not fully predictable, but in general high energy / motivated people have better outcomes. And people cannot perform at their best when they are not feeling well.
Then outcomes are compared with expectations. If expectations are met, confidence is built. It leads to a positive energy feedback. If expectations are not met the team are pressured - by themselves and external stakeholders - and energy gets lower.
Some people argue that pressure does help people deliver more. I highly disagree for two reasons. First, most people already put a lot of pressure on themselves. Second, there is a lot of underlying pressure when setting high expectations - which the team will be pumped to match. I think hard but achievable expectations are good energy drives if the team is not already pressured.
Recognize that nobody can work at 100% all the time
The first thing to trigger positive or negative emotional feedback loops is related to how you set expectations. If expectations are unachievable, a loop of negative pressure will lead. If they are easily done then you might impact the morale negatively as people are motivated by challenges.
It is difficult to find the right balance. Setting the right expectations is one of the signals of a healthy and mature team. Google has done a famous research that showed how teams that have clear impact, structure and whose members are emotionally safe are more effective.
It all begins with managing the energy of the team. When energy is high the team naturally tend to push expectations further. But that leads to frustration once those expectations are not met. Because energy oscillates. Nobody can work at their best for a long time. Susan David pointed this out in her TED talk:
Normal, natural emotions are now seen as good or bad. And being positive has become a new form of moral correctness. (…) It's a tyranny of positivity. And it's cruel. Unkind. And ineffective.
(…) Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure. Tough emotions are part of our contract with life. You don't get to have a meaningful career or raise a family or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
Everyone needs to recognize this fact, for themselves and for those in the team. Considering that you will not be always at your best will allow for some slack which is necessary to actually be consistent.
Create a system that makes slack time a super-power
Slack is the super-power towards effectiveness. It not only helps us to deal with energy oscillation in time. It gives room to breath and to handle failure with less pressure.
From Farnam Street:
Having a little bit of wiggle room allows us to respond to changing circumstances, to experiment, and to do things that might not work.
Slack consists of excess resources. It might be time, money, people on a job, or even expectations. Slack is vital because it prevents us from getting locked into our current state, unable to respond or adapt because we just don’t have the capacity.
Not having slack is taxing. Scarcity weighs on our minds and uses up energy that could go toward doing the task at hand better. It amplifies the impact of failures and unintended consequences.
Too much slack is bad because resources get wasted and people get bored. But, on the whole, an absence of slack is a problem far more often than an excess of it.
When you push expectations too high you are in fact removing slack. When you pressure people to work at 100% all the time, you remove slack. Watch out for efficiency as it may be the enemy of efficacy.
If the pressure is high, release it
Sometimes there's a lot of pressure from inside or outside the team. Maybe that came from bad outcomes that made stakeholders distrust the team. Maybe that comes from a market condition that is stressing out the company. Whatever the reason, the team feels it and energy is negatively affected.
At this situation you need extra care to set expectations. Underpromise and overdeliver is a really important motto to release the pressure. Make the necessary tradeoffs. The idea is to release the pressure delivering something important and using that as a drive to calm things down.
Moreover, shielding the team from external influences may be important. Most of the time to get the energy back you need to create a narrative to engage everyone under a deliverable. A lot of pressure often comes from a lack of clarity. If people without proper context start questioning the team's premises, that may add up to the pressure.
When energy is low, deliver something small
If the energy is low - due to pandemics, lack of confidence or personal issues -, any outcome may get it back. Lower the expectation to almost zero, give people and yourself time to breath. Help them deliver something. Start small and increment it in time as energy is recovered.
Slack is extra important when energy is low. Sometimes the best is doing almost nothing. It sounds counterintuitive, but delivering something small really fast gives an initial push to rebuild the inertia. This is way better than lingering on a big deliverable with low energy.
Make it a practice
Managing energy is a daily practice. You need to talk about emotions using the right words. When the team starts talking about it then it becomes a practice.
There are some great tools to do it, like Spotify's health check. But remember that the best is to incentivize people to talk about emotions often. That's why the retro is the most important team meeting for me.
Thanks for reading.
Always be curious.