Leadership
Navigating Ambiguity
To get promoted, have to be able to make better decisions despite more uncertainty.
The Differences Between Coaching and Managing
[Y]our role as a manager is not to solve problems. It’s to help others solve problems, themselves. – Claire Lew At Tortuga, we use the same words as Help Scout does for managers and individual contributors: Coaches and Players. We call our managers "coaches," not just because words matter
Should You, the CEO, Hire a General Manager?
I didn't intend to become a manager. But today, I'm the CEO and the sole people manager of a 10-person company. I left Google in part because becoming a manager was the only way I could get another promotion. While I "consistently exceeded expectations" as an individual contributor, my career
Removing Barriers to Growth
> Your ability to succeed is in direct proportion to your ability to solve your problems. -Gino Wickman, Traction [https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business-ebook/dp/B007QWLLV2?tag=fredperrott01-20] Success is dictated by your ability to identify and solve problems. Pursuing new opportunities is fine but secondary to solving problems. Put another
How Do You Motivate Your Employees?
On a recent call with a fellow founder: Him: How do you motivate your employees? Me: I don't. Am I supposed to? I was joking to highlight a serious point. I am not a rah-rah, pound my fist on the table, give a rousing speech CEO. I won't be delivering
Goal-Oriented Communication
Goal-oriented communication is saying the "what" and letting someone else figure out the "how." This style defines a leader, rather than a manager.
A Thank You Letter to All the Bad CEOs
> Our CEO yells a lot. That's a real quote from someone I interviewed. I was so flabbergasted that I typed it up, in quotes, in my notes. For someone to mention this in an interview, the situation must have been bad. Even worse, other interviewees said similar things. In a
Psychological Safety
When Google studied their internal teams [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html?_r=0] to learn why some succeeded and some failed, they found 5 key norms for successful teams. > 1. Teams to need believe that their work is important. 2. Teams need to feel their
Decentralized Decision Making
> Like I Fucked Up [https://www.fredperrotta.com/i-fucked-up/], this post is the actual text of an email that I sent to the Tortuga team recently. I'm sharing it publicly because this is an important part of how Tortuga works and, in my view, most companies get this wrong. Ego
The Magnifying Glass
The highest leverage work a leader can do is to focus the efforts of his/her team on a single goal or priority. The usual analogy is of a boat where the leader's job is to get the right people in the right seats and all rowing in the same