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Power moves and power awareness in distributed companies (text first, not even video)
In PU, Lucio recommends to go to the office even if the company is distributed (many are as a reaction to Covid). Being 'home office' is bad for anyone interested in being power aware. You want to be seen and to have the highest-bandwidth channel possible top pick up cues: Face to face.
I read this and it made a lot of sense; in fact it's how we communicate in this very forum (no DMs, no video meetings, no nothing; and it works). Companies like amazon thrive on writing things down! Meetings are evil etc
https://xahteiwi.eu/resources/presentations/no-we-wont-have-a-video-call-for-that/
Yet I suspect a distributed company is a hard place for people who are power aware/want to be. It makes a lot of sense for individual contributors (most tech people are there; including the author of the article). You can pick up an issue from an issue tracker, work on it, report it as solved... no need for human to human interaction.
For 'execs' or managers, coordinating people must be harder in a 'writing first' culture, where there are no chats, no pings, no DMs... by design. And no meetings.
I run a company like that; but mine is not representative at all; as as we grow we will face problems that are serious; the culture is not designed for a big company.
What's your experience? Somehow this feels like a spot-on topic for an in-dept power moves article :)
- Probably dependent on type of role, company size and degree of collaboration required and the individual - are they primarily a talker or a thinker. That's like intro/extravert which makes you most tired.
If you're an individual contributor - classic is a coder as a mgr I want to shield you from meetings. But if yr a senior coder with years of knowledge in the biz you might be a defacto subject matter expert and solution architect. So I want you in the key meetings. Anything important, or where I need to cover the teams arse or only you can do it.
Obviously even for Devs you want to promote minimum socialization or they won't bond as a team
Also some systems and processes need deep knowledge so trying to share knowledge and tasks is inefficient. And knowledge sharing is good for the company not always the individual. Lot of fake agile shops around that are just sweatshops for the new millennium. Need to incentivise and work hard on embedding a good culture.
Yeah, I agree with Kevin, it's contextual.
PU advises going meet face to face to those who care about advancing in the organization. Because at parity of output and personality, the guy you meet face to face will (almost) always be the pick for promotion(s).
In many cases, even when not at parity of output.
There is a saying in English:
A closed mouth doesn't get fed.
And neither does the mouth that you rarely see face to face.
Transitioned: you assume there are meetings (virtual).
Lucio: you assume there's an office, and that it's optional to go there.
There's a (minority) new breed of companies where there are no meetings and no offices. This post got millions of views:
https://sahillavingia.com/work
It spawned a book (minimalist entrepreneur) and a few communities that more or less agree this is a very valid model. Example: https://www.indiehackers.com/ and https://join.trends.vc/
These are companies that were remote-first from the beginning (not only github, gitlab and zapier, but also less mainstream companies like buffer, convertkit etc). Github relented and got offices at some point.
The whole point is async communication (writting as thinking) rather than sync (meetings). I'm sure there are pros and cons for both.
A petri dish to test this idea is this very forum. It works async, no meetings, no DMs. And it works.
Hey LOF, yeah, you lost me here:
Quote from leaderoffun on September 2, 2022, 1:12 pmIn PU, Lucio recommends to go to the office even if the company is distributed (many are as a reaction to Covid). Being 'home office' is bad for anyone interested in being power aware. You want to be seen and to have the highest-bandwidth channel possible top pick up cues: Face to face.
I read this and it made a lot of sense; in fact it's how we communicate in this very forum (no DMs, no video meetings, no nothing; and it works). Companies like amazon thrive on writing things down! Meetings are evil etc
It goes from:
- face to face is better
- I agree face to face is better
- it's how we communicate here ("face to face", it would follow, but it's not how we communicate here)
May be you meant "I read this" referring to distributed companies' models.
In any case, I don't see it as "hard".
May be you mean it as ni "less scope for politics", which may indeed be the case.
But power aware also means developing better relationships and acquiring status and reputation when interacting with others (no matter where and how people engage in each other).
People are still the same, no matter the medium, and judge and like others no matter the medium.
Different people in this very forum have different statuses and reputations with each other, and that happened in spite it's all distributed.
Furthermore, distributed doesn't mean "never ever meet face to face or in video".
A few people here have also talked 1:1, in video, or even met in person.
As a matter of fact, the person who may be able to meet the founder / big boss face to face will even an even bigger advantage if he's the only one who did.
Bu otherwise, yeah, some of the dynamics are different and someone who's very good face to face may lose that advantage, someone with a strong voice and great body language may lose that opportunity to send out out power signals. And an introverted geek may gain.
But that doesn't mean that everything changes.
All other general principles that make someone respect-worthy, likable, or high power are still the same, just conveyed in written words only, rather than face to face -but then again, many of those companies' founders will meet several people face to face as well, so in a way, for whoever wants to advance, it becomes even more important to be able to meet the founder outside the written medium-
Edit:
Moving to the work/entrepreneurship section
May be you meant "I read this" referring to distributed companies' models.
Yeah, I mean I read the article that triggered this post (titled "No we won't have a meeting for that"). Poor use of predication on my side, 'this' could have been anything.
Transitioned, thanks for your comment. You are a PM and have managed a fully distributed team right? Were they communicating mostly by writing? Was it any harder to 'iron things out' when there were misunderstandings or tensions of any kind? Did you use video meetings for this? I'd love to dig deeper on the manager's perspective for a fully distributed company. In fact on that mega-popular blog post, there are no middle managers either! This is a radical departure from what we know, and I'm very curious on how well it works. Sahil also had a cohort based course that he ended up putting on youtube for free. I haven't read the book yet, he may cover more detail on those two mediums. I'm extra interested in incentive systems. With current 'fultime work' contracts, you are incentivized to go to the office, work the bare minimum so you don't get kicked out, and have as much fun outside of work as possible (the 'loser' in Gervais principle). Those who want career progression may be either (1) lucky they are in a company that values going above and beyond or (2) bad at reading the incentive system, and thus overperforming for no reward.
In that gumroad model (no meetings, no manangers, all async comms) everyone is a contractor (part time) and they have to deliver on what they are hired for. There's no room to 'hide under the table.' There's no incentive either. And there's no career progression, which is bad. If these companies do work with this method, we are facing a paradigm shift, and something that doesn't fit the Gervais principle. So very interested in this!
