Subtlety

I’ve just delivered a painful performance review to an employee and he doesn’t get it. Two weeks I spent writing this thing, gathering different perspectives from peer feedback, rereading relevant e-mails from the past year, and rewriting, rewriting, and rewriting. Worst performance review ever. And he’s sitting there like everything’s dandy.

I’m not about to fire this guy, but given his current trajectory, he’s two years from becoming irrelevant. I want to nip this in the bud, but all I’m getting is radio silence.

“Any questions on your review?”

“Nope.”

“Are you clear about the areas I want to work with you on?”

“Yup.”

Now, the point of a performance review is not the review itself but the conversation that stems from it. It’s about constructively conveying information about the performance of the coworker and then chewing on it a bit. You want to see the person processing the information you just presented; you want to see them asking questions.

This guy gave me nothing.

OK, so maybe the performance review wasn’t the right place to course correct. Maybe I needed to use a subtler approach. A week later, we were in our one-on-one and I had a list. It had each and every discussion point I had for this gentleman rewritten to support the areas of improvement I called out in the performance review.

The employee in question wasn’t comfortable with the strategic broad strokes I’d painted in the review, but when I carefully mapped the review into our tactical day-to-day work, he was listening. By the end of the one-on-one, I’d piled his to-do list so high we were actually back to talking about the performance review because it was that advice that was going to help him get the work done.

Subtlety starts with humility. Exhibiting your power and knowledge as a manager isn’t always the best method of communicating. Sometimes your approach needs to start small, humble, and in a place in which you admit that you don’t have all the answers. I know it feels great to make that snap decision and show the team you’re the guy in charge, but was it the right decision or was it ego?

Subtlety finishes with elegance. It’s not just successfully solving whatever hard problem you’re staring at, it’s that you solve it in an ingenious, novel way that builds and refines your management aptitude.

Subterfuge

Say it with me: “sub-ter-fyooooooooj.” We should make shirts; it’s that fun to say. But what does it mean? Subterfuge means “intrigue, deviousness, deceit, deception, dishonesty, cheating, duplicity, guile, cunning, craftiness, chicanery, pretense, fraud, fraudulence.” Those synonyms cover a lot of territory, so let’s refine it for the sake of this piece.

Relative to management, subterfuge does not mean “deceit, dishonesty, cheating, fraud, or fraudulence.” It’s everything else. I’ll explain.

We were at a crossroads at the startup. Too much to do, two vastly different directions in which the team wanted to head. There were the infrastructure folks who wanted to spend three months replacing the application server, and then there were the interaction folks who wanted to improve the usability of the application. The VP listened to both sides and then he decided, “Infrastructure! Long-term scalability!”

The interaction folks were pissed. Their response: “Who cares about long-term scalability if no one wants to use the product?” Oh yeah—I was also the manager of the interaction folks and I agreed with them, but I had to throw my engineers on the infrastructure work because we didn’t have the capacity. I was talking with existing customers and they weren’t pulling their hair out because the application was sluggish, but rather because it was an interaction nightmare. They were spending most of their time trying to figure the damned thing out.

Grrrrrrrrr.

The lead interaction designer, an engineer, and I sat in a conference room fuming in silence when it popped into my head: “Hey, people are visual creatures. How long would it take to throw together a prototype that shows off what we were thinking?”

My engineer: “A week!” Good time to point out how enthusiasm reduces all engineering estimates by a third. My engineer continued, “But I’ll need Frank.”

Hmmmmm.

“Here’s what we’re going to do. I want you and Frank to work on this after 5 p.m., after we’re done with our infrastructure work, and I want you to keep this on the down low. If, after a week, we like what we see, we’re going public.”

Herein lies the hard part of subterfuge. Depending on where you were standing, my plan could have been viewed in any number of ways. The other engineering director would have called it “disobeying a direct order,” whereas my boss, who got wind of the effort two days in, called it a “skunk works project” and told us to proceed. Phew.

Our skunk works took us three weeks, not one, but when we showed off our work, the VP of engineering and VP of marketing were impressed and wanted to see us finish the work. Rather than sacrificing the infrastructure effort, they gave me two requisitions so I could hire a team to do the job right.

Subterfuge is a risk. The infrastructure director never quite trusted me after that even though I still went out of my way to keep him in the loop after we went public with our work.

The use of subterfuge for good means keeping the intent honest. If you’re going commando to do what you believe is right, it doesn’t mean someone isn’t going to be pissed, but it should allow you to sleep at night.

Silence

Your most annoying employee is sitting across the table and he’s on a roll. This guy’s personality totally and completely clashes with yours and he’s in his second hour of rambling about something you don’t understand. My advice is simple:

Shut up and listen.

I mean it.

Now, if you know what he’s trying to get at and you’ve continued to let him blather, OK, you can start talking and directing him elsewhere, but if he’s valiantly trying to get to the point, you must shut up and listen. Your silence is giving him a chance to get something out.

I’m not a fan of public speaking. I’m not comfortable with the all-hands meeting where I’m laying out the next six months of work. My natural state is one of introspection where I’m soaking in the world, and the skill has taken me far because so many folks out there just can’t shut up. While all this talking is going on, I sit quietly and nod while learning what all these yammering people are about and carefully file it away for future reference.

Managers lead, and a lot of managers translate that into “managers lead by talking.” Combined with the tendency of employees to not say no to these managers, you can see why a lot of us have turned into professional windbags. We think we’re guiding you by filling the air with our thoughts. There’s a time and place for that, but in order to fill the air with something relevant, you’ve got to gather and process data.

In silence, you can assess.

My favorite use of silence is in a huge cross-functional meeting with a group I’ve never worked with before where I have no role other than listener. It’s a table full of people I don’t know and I feel like I’m sitting at the most profitable poker table ever because everyone tells you what they got.

Remember this: in most businesses, everyone’s basic agenda is visible after they’ve talked for about 30 seconds. I’m not talking about who they are as a person; I’m talking about figuring out what they have and what they need. In poker, you keep this information hidden as best you can because your money is on the line. In business, everyone throws their hand on the table, stands up, points at their hand, and says, “People, I’m one card away from the nut flush. Who’s going to give the queen of hearts?”

Asking for what you need is a good strategy in business; it’s called collaborating. Each time I hear “I need,” I learn another bit about those I work with and, in time, I can construct a better picture of how to interact with my coworkers. Still, I’m also wondering about that guy in the corner who isn’t saying a thing. His eyes are darting around the room just like mine and I’m curious . . . what is he getting out of his silence?

Business Isn’t War

The 48 Laws of Powerare the real deal, but they are focused on war, not business. Go buy the book if you want to know more, but read wisely. With each successful year on the job, I find myself adjusting to the ever-increasing complexity with which my peers play the chess game of management. Twenty years in, I can safely say there is one law—not in the book by Greene and Elffers—that is true: if you’re only interested in building power, you’re going to lose.