I’ve learned a lot of stuff working with the fellows in my program, particularly Sarah Allen, who’s paired with me on the Smithsonian Transcription Center. I noticed that she’d often mention a policy she had on doing (or not doing) certain things. I remarked that there seemed to be a lot of them and has she ever put them in one place?
Well luckily for us she has. Here are some my favorite policies of Sarah Allen, an incredibly accomplished software developer, manager, and entrepreneur, and my comment on it.
I never take a job where I don’t know at least one team member very well. The most important indicator of success for any group is the quality of the people. VCs invest in the team, rather than the idea, since it is easier for a great team to change their idea, but impossible for a great idea to find a new team. Where you choose to work is an investment.
Most people would say it’s good to get along with your future coworkers when evaluating new jobs, but this policy takes it a lot farther. It essentially means companies where you’re applying cold, or who are pursuing you with no prior connection, is completely off limits. I think you need to be at a certain stage in your career to be able to pull this off, but that time frame is probably sooner than you think (5 years?)
Write stuff down. I take meeting notes and send them out afterwards. I don’t work without a contract. It’s not an issue of trust. There are a thousand small decisions about the work that go unsaid in a meeting. This applies to any collaborative work. Anytime I need to say to you “I will do this” or “I expect you to do that,” a follow-up email will solidify alignment or catch misunderstandings — saving time and forging stronger relationships.
Sarah and I have become known as the note taking fellows. We have a Google Doc pulled up for almost every meeting we’ve been in. A rough count of our Google Drive has around ~170 meeting notes, planning docs, spreadsheets and talking points in just three months.
Iterate. Celebrate. Iterate. Celebrate. I wish I knew where I read this. Celebrate the little things. You can’t really control the big win. It’s the small series of little wins that we can make happen. We need to celebrate these.
One thing I wish we did more at Ridejoy was celebrate the small wins. There was a feeling from some of my other cofounders that we should only celebrate when we hit a really big milestone, but it often felt too far away, and then the celebration was a huge endeavor in itself, which was not ideal. I like this policy.
Tell someone’s boss, in writing, when they do a great job, especially if they are far away in an organization.
This is like a karma thing – we all hope that if other people work with us and find it an awesome experience, that they’d tell our boss (if we had one) how awesome we were doing.
The #1 job of a good manager is hiring and retaining great people.When I’m in a management role and things get crazy, as they often do, I tell this to myself every morning and twice during the day. It takes discipline to spend time writing an excellent job description or having individual meetings with staff when there are urgent, pressing, seemingly more important issues to deal with.
This is exactly the difference between individual contributors and leaders of teams. Your effort as a manager is multiplied when you find the right people, invest in them, and prune when necessary.
Never hire until you’ve interviewed at least three great candidates.Hiring should be a tough decision. We should have to ask ourselves what is really important so we can decide between these amazing people. We should have cause to wonder if we should stretch our budget to hire more than one.
This is such a great rule for preventing a “He/She is the the one” situations where you fall in love with a candidate. I’ll admit that at Ridejoy, we definitely hired someone we fell in love with, but I think Sarah’s policy is the right one. If you can’t do this, you aren’t recruiting hard enough.
Read them all at: little rules for working life.