| On the one hand, I've previously suggested that managers should be quicker to fire underperforming workers, but on the other hand, it's absolutely true that some disappointments from workers are because of my own lapses in communication. When I wrote about one-on-one meetings, some people suggested to me that one-on-one meetings allow a manager to tell one worker one story but tell another worker a completely different set of facts, and the end result is that workers ended up feeling like they've been lied to. So when I recently wrote about this, I included this story, which I think shows both sides of the issue. There are times when workers feel they’ve been lied to when they have simply misread or misheard some communication from their manager. This is an actual communication that I recently had with a freelancer I was working with, putting together some preliminary numbers for a marketing campaign: Me: About Task 3, can you wrap this up by Thursday or Friday? Them: I’m busy on Thursday, but I can get to Task 3 on Friday or Saturday. Me: Are you sure you can’t get this done on Friday? Them: I don’t know. I’ve got some things scheduled for the afternoon on Friday. I’m not sure how long that might go into the evening. But I can get it to you by Saturday afternoon, for sure. Me: Look, this doesn’t have to be perfect. Don’t go overboard. Just put in what time you can on Thursday and Friday. In this case speed is more important than quality. Whatever you can do is fine. Around 9 PM on Friday I had not heard from them, so I wrote to them again: Me: Hey, can you please send me whatever you’ve got regarding Task 3? Them: I told you, I can get it to you by Saturday afternoon. Me: I told you the deadline was Friday. Them: You never said the deadline was Friday. Me: What I said was, whatever you have by this point, Friday night, is fine. I think I said that speed is more important than quality. Them: Yeah, but you never said that Friday was the deadline. Me: Okay, that’s fine, but please send me what you have. They sent over what they’d done so far, and it was fine. In this case, we were both a little bit in the wrong, in that neither of us made explicit what the deadline was. I thought I’d been reasonably clear that by Friday night they should just send me whatever they had, but they felt that I’d authorized them to keep going until Saturday. It’s important to be very clear about expectations, otherwise workers hear what they want to hear and then they sometimes feel that you lied to them. In this case, I simply failed to make 100% explicit that the deadline was Friday night. If I had invested a little more time into the communication, I probably would have made clear what my expectations were. I've previously suggested that larger, stable firms should do more to offer some kind of apprenticeships to novice tech workers. But in small startups, when the whole team is just 4 of 5 people, often you need for everyone on that team to be perfect, so if someone on that team isn't perfect, you need to be fast to fire people. This was one of the main conclusions that I put in my book "How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps." |