Last week a coworker asked me: “How do you avoid acting on your first reaction? Is there a process you go through before responding or a tactic to curb the first negative reaction/defensiveness?”

This immediately reminded me of some advice I heard from Farhang Kassaei (CTO of Google Store) during his talk "You are in the communication business" at the Plato Elevate 2024 conference. His advice?

I don’t know if you've ever sat quietly in a meeting for 60 seconds, but I guarantee it will feel like an eternity! So, what should you do in those 60 seconds?

Here’s a simple framework: Pause. Process. Proceed.

Pause

For the first five seconds, you should just… breathe. If possible, remove yourself from the situation—physically or mentally. The goal isn’t to suppress your reaction but to create space between stimulus and action. That split second between stimulus and response? Stretch it. Even a five-second delay can mean the difference between reacting emotionally and responding wisely.

Process

Next ask yourself: What am I feeling? Why am I feeling it? Are you responding to the situation at hand, or is something deeper being triggered? Naming your emotions reduces their grip.

Then, shift your perspective to the outside, with curiosity: Why is this person saying this? Which assumption could they be making?

Finally, shift back to yourself again: How would my best self handle this? What response serves my long-term goals? This should take you a good part of the remaining 60 seconds.

Proceed

Only after pausing and processing do you take action. Maybe that means saying nothing. Maybe it means asking a question instead of making a statement. Maybe it means waiting until tomorrow to respond. The right move is rarely the first one that pops into your head.

The best leaders—and the best decision-makers—aren’t the ones who never feel anger, frustration, or defensiveness. They’re the ones who don’t let those emotions drive the bus.

Next time you feel the urge to react, don’t. Pause. Process. Proceed.

Your future self will thank you.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

Recently, things have been really busy at work (as you can tell from the frequency of this newsletter).

When things get busy, I’m always reminded of the importance of delegating. Especially delegating decision-making.

But what decisions should you delegate?

What kind of decision are you facing?

Jeff Bezos has a great framework to help with this (bold mine).

So the next time someone:

• invites you to a meeting as a decision-maker

• ropes you into a document asking for your opinion or to approve the document

• sends you a chat message asking you to make a call on something

• ropes you into an email thread asking for a decision

• etc.

Stop and ask yourself.

Is this decision reversible? 

If the answer is yes, chances are you can delegate that decision.

Delegating decisions is crucial to preserve your headspace. If you, the captain, make every decision, you are not empowering people in your captainship circle to take the driver’s seat. Decision making is a skill and people need to practice it to become better at it.

Have a great weekend!

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

Did you ever get the feedback that you need to improve your communication?

🖐️ 

I most definitely did and every time I got this feedback, I was so confused about what to do next… Was it what I said? How did I say it? My tone? My body language?

For the longest time, every time someone gave me feedback that I needed to improve my communication, I would become super self-conscious of my “fairly thick” Italian accent and blame that for my inability to convey my point.

Eventually, I became better at communication (but my accent is still there 😉) and, since then, I have strived to give actionable feedback to people about improving their communication.

However, I never had a good framework in mind that I could use to define what good communication is. Until a couple of weeks ago when I discovered the proactive, deliberate, and structured framework.

I ran into this idea during Farhang Kassaei’s “You are in the communication business” talk at the Plato Elevate conference.

Here is my AleGPT summary of the talk, pulled together from hand-written notes (yes… I still take notes in a paper notebook).

1. Proactive communication gives people the information they need on their own terms. People shouldn’t have to come and ask you. You should distribute information proactively so that people have the information they need whenever they need it.

   This bit resonated with me because it is the reason why I started this newsletter. (No, I’m not trying to claim I’m an excellent communicator but I’m 100% claiming I got this one right, ha!)

2. Deliberate communication means you are intentional about what you share. You are what you communicate. Being deliberate requires empathy to understand where people are and frame your ideas in their terms. Deliberate communication is all about knowing your audience.

3. Structured communication is about making things easier to understand and remember. Structure helps organize the information you are trying to transfer and makes it easier to understand and grasp what one is trying to communicate. The human brain remembers better with structure.

So, the next time you are failing to get your point across, ask yourself if you are communicating proactively, deliberately, and with structure.

The next time you need to give someone feedback about their communication, use the framework above as a way to structure your feedback (see what I did there 😉 ).

Ciao!

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

In one of the early drafts of my last post on under promising and over delivering, I wanted to provide a longer explanation of this concept. (Then I remembered you are all smart people that don’t need extra words).

But, I was struggling to come up with something that I was happy with. So I did what I usually do recently whenever I’m stuck: I asked ChatGPT. What it produced was so cringe 😬 that I burst into laughs several times as I was reading it.

I wanted to share because it’s the weekend and we can all use a good laugh. 🙂 

MulletGPT at work…

Happy Saturday! 😀

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

Hi friends! 👋🏻

Guess what?

The Governator in The Expendables 2

I know… I know… This newsletter is called Captainship Daily and I was gone for a while.

Why was I gone? Because I over promised and under delivered.

Let’s get into it!

When I started this newsletter I was inspired by folks like Louis Grenier and Jonathan Stark and I wanted to follow in their footsteps and post every day. I loved consuming their “short and sweet” daily newsletters and I suspected I would enjoy writing in a similar style. So I decided to bake my expectations about posting every day right into the newsletter title: Captainship Daily.

Guess what though? When it came time to deliver, my expectations crashed against the reality that 1) I have a full-time job that keeps me very busy and 2) I have a family with a newborn who loves to keep me even more busy… especially at night. (Some of you have heard my joke that these days my son is my full-time job and Google is my part-time job).

Setting very high expectations and delivering poorly on them is a textbook example of the classic mistake of over promising and under delivering.

What I should have done instead, was to be more realistic and less idealistic and set my expectations based on my (scarce) time availability. I should have under promised and over delivered.

The good news for me is that you can always re-learn a lesson. So, from today I’m re-branding to Captainship Daily-ish. 🤣

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

Today I was reminded once again that project management is soul-sucking.

Since I can’t possibly conjure up words that are better than Oliver Burkeman’s, I’ll let him do the talking (err… writing).

More than happy to ramble further about this topic. Just let me know if you are interested 😜 

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

One of my favorite ways of showing vulnerability in front of my team is a tool I call the manager question. This is how it works.

During a meeting, whenever I suspect a good chunk of the attendees didn’t quite get the point that someone is trying to make, I will sometimes ask a super basic, “dumb” question I already know the answer to.

Why would I ask a question if I already know the answer?

First because, by doing that, I hopefully snapped people out of the “nodding zone” and got them to pay attention again.

Second, I just forced the person talking to re-articulate their point using different words, which will hopefully help more people understand what they were trying to communicate.

Third, and most importantly, because it shows that I’m not afraid of asking something super-basic that is gonna make me look dumb in front of my team.

Silly? Probably. But doing this over and over again, I noticed that people are consistently less afraid of asking questions in situations where they would prefer to just sit there silently and confused.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

Last week we talked at length about how to get the feedback you need.

What we didn’t talk about is the elephant in the room.

When we ask for feedback we are admitting that we need other people’s help. By doing that, we are also implicitly admitting that we don’t have all the answers. We are revealing our finitude. In other words, we are making ourselves vulnerable in front of others.

Teammates willing to be vulnerable in front of each other is the hallmark of a psychologically safe team.

Why is psychological safety important?

Don’t believe me? You shouldn’t 😀 But I’ve got data!

In 2015, Google launched a study known as Project Aristotle to identify the characteristics of effective teams within the company. Here is what they found out (excerpt from an NYT Magazine article).

Like everything else, being vulnerable in front of your team is a muscle that can (and should!) be trained.

As team captains, it is our responsibility to demonstrate the behaviors we want people in our captainship circle to demonstrate. It is our responsibility to lead by example since our behaviors have an outsized impact on our team’s culture.

Tomorrow I’ll share one of my favorite ways you can borrow to show vulnerability in front of your team. I call this technique “The manager question”.

See you tomorrow!

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

Today I f*ck up again.

Nothing too bad (phew!) but after a conversation where I got some great feedback I found myself thinking: “I gotta do better!”

Naturally, I remembered (and applied) the best advice I’ve ever found on how to apologize after you realize you screwed up.

It’s called the 3-part apology.

Here is a video of Randy explaining it himself.

If you found this email useful, please share it with a friend! 🙏 

See you tomorrow!

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

I’m fairly sure there is a running joke amongst my reports that goes something like this. You know a 1:1 with Ale is over when he asks you: “Do you have any feedback for me?” 😆 

I admit it. I do ask for feedback very often at the end of 1:1s. Most of the time I get a condescending “here he goes again…” smile and then the 1:1 ends.

But every once in a while my request reminds the person sitting in front of me that I really pissed them off. Or that they disagreed with me a couple of days before. Or whatever else they forgot/didn’t want to share. My prompt acts as a trigger and now the genie is out of the bottle.

The lesson here is that there is too much going on in people’s lives for them to remember to give you feedback on their own. So, if you really want feedback, it is on you to keep on asking. Do this without expecting anything back. As a gentle reminder.

99% of the time you won’t get anything back but 1% of the time you’ll strike gold.

This was the fifth (and final) post in a series dedicated to requesting feedback when you really want it. Read to the first, second, third, and fourth posts.

No time to read? Here is what you should do when you really want feedback:

• Create a culture where giving feedback is rewarded as real work

• Give people time to think about your work

• Make it easy for people to give you feedback

• Give a way for people to leave you anonymous feedback

• Keep asking people for feedback over and over again

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

When you really want to get honest feedback you gotta let people be anonymous.

Here is the thing.

Not everybody is willing to tell you the truth. In fact, most people will not tell you the truth when you ask them for feedback. This is especially true if they believe telling you what they believe to be the truth will hurt you or make you unhappy. Most people don’t like delivering bad news.

As Cate Hall points out in her excellent “How to Be More Agentic”:

I’ve seen this concept applied also at Google. Many people (me included) have a link on their internal page for anyone to leave anonymous feedback.

Another example? As assiduous readers of this newsletter, you surely noticed my daily attempts to solicit anonymous feedback. 😀 

This was the fourth post in a series dedicated to requesting feedback when you really want it. Read to the first, second, and third posts.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

Giving feedback is a lot of work.

So when you really need other people’s feedback, you should do everything you possibly can to make it easy for them.

You should try your best to make it easy for someone to give you feedback.

How?

What does that mean in practice? Here are some tips:

• Put yourself in their shoes. End of the work day? Probably not the best time to request feedback (people wanna wrap up their own work and go home!) Does the person you asked have a looming deadline? Perhaps pick a different person.

• Make artifacts easy to consume. One standard way is to break things up into smaller chunks. It is much easier for someone to review a chapter at a time than a 1000-page manuscript in one go. It is also much easier to review 100 lines of code than 1000.

• Ask for feedback contextually. It is much easier for someone to provide feedback as soon as something has happened when it is still fresh in their head (i.e. contextually). Best time to ask people how a meeting went? Right after the meeting. Best time to nudge someone in the right direction? As soon as you spot them making a mistake.

This was the third post in a series dedicated to requesting feedback when you really want it. Read to the first and second posts.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

Giving feedback takes a lot of effort and time, often more than doing your own work.

For this reason, when you are requesting feedback you need to give people time to think.

When giving you feedback, people need to understand what you are trying to achieve, understand the work you did, think about that work, and come up with alternative solutions, potential pitfalls, etc.

Doing this requires time which means that the quality of the feedback you are going to get is directly proportional to the amount of time you give people to think.

This was the second post in a series dedicated to requesting feedback when you really want it. Read to the first post.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

After sending Thursday’s and Friday’s emails last week I got a flurry of replies (thank you).

Clearly many of you are passionate about feedback, so I'll try to focus on feedback-related topics all week.

One of the messages I got was from my really good friend Gianluca (replying to “We’ll do it unless…”, emphasis mine):

The single most important thing to ensure that you’ll be getting the feedback you need is to create a culture where feedback giving is expected and rewarded work.

As I discussed already, incentives matter.

Giving feedback takes a lot of effort and time, often more than doing your own work.

If your culture doesn’t reward people for spending time giving feedback, people will soon stop spending time providing feedback. 🙂 

To avoid this, you need to make sure to recognize giving feedback as “real” work.

Do you recognize people spending time reviewing other people’s proposals?

For those of you working with code, are you regularly rewarding people who spend a lot of time and effort reviewing other people’s code, as opposed to writing their own?

Giving feedback to each other is a habit. If you don’t have the system and the incentives in place, whenever you ask for feedback you’ll get 🦗🦗🦗.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

When you work in a collaborative team, you often seek feedback from others on your ideas and proposals. I’m sure many of you are familiar with this process. If you have ever written a short document that you circulated among peers or given a presentation to your team about an idea you had, you know what I’m talking about.

One of the most frustrating things that can happen in this situation is when some of the people giving you feedback make a comment along the lines of: “Something something, I don’t think this is going to work because of something something”.

Needless to say, this type of comment is not very useful. A comment like this unveils a problem with the proposal but doesn’t really help move it forward. You are now stuck. The feedback givers have turned into gatekeepers.

One useful principle I found to avoid this type of situation is the endorse or improve principle.

Let’s rewrite the comment above according to the endorse or improve principle.

“I don’t think this is going to work because of problem A. If you do X instead you will avoid problem A and still achieve your goal.”

See the difference? The comment calls out a problem but it also proposes a solution to it. The comment improves the proposal.

If people can’t think of ways to improve the proposal, then the only choice left is to endorse it.

The reason I like this principle is that it essentially completely removes the gatekeeping option from the table. The principle doesn’t allow people to block work without showing a new way forward. This is especially important when more experienced members of a team are often asked to review the work of less experienced members.

The other reason I like this principle is that it shifts the responsibility of finding and solving issues to the whole team. This results in the whole team having a steak in the proposal and the solution. When people have skin in the game they give a sh*t. When people give a sh*t they produce good work.

Give this principle a try and let me know how it goes!

Have a great weekend!

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

A few days ago someone sent the following message to our team’s inbox, forwarded to all team members.

There are two issues with this message.

1. As soon as one of the recipients “complains”, the sender is blocked. They have to address the feedback of the “complainer” before they can move their proposal forward.

2. Unless all team members reply and give a 👍🏻, it is unclear when the proposal can move forward.

If you take this to an extreme, this message gives every team member veto power on the proposal. It also requires a unanimous decision to move the proposal forward. Not ideal if you are trying to move work forward quickly.

Let’s rewrite the message using the “We’ll do it unless…” principle.

Phrasing the message this way addresses both of the issues above.

1. It moves from “Please give us permission to do it” (Allow List) to “We’ll do it unless you stop us” (Deny List).

2. It introduces a time constraint to disregard the opinions of the people who are late to the party (“You didn’t give us enough time to provide feedback!”)

I use the “We’ll do it unless…” principle almost every day to get sh*t done faster. Give it a go and let me know if you found it useful.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

Have you ever heard the story of the blind men and the elephant?

How does this relate to captainship and getting people unblocked?

This is true for us but also for people in our captainship circle. As a captain, we are often a little more distant from our crew’s problems, which allows us to see them more clearly and identify them correctly.

When one of the people in our captainship circle is stuck up against a problem, sharing this perspective can help them realize that what they thought was a snake, a spear, a rope, or a tree is actually an elephant.

Once people know what problem they are up against, they can select the most appropriate tool to overcome it and continue to make progress toward their goals.

Helping people see what is blocking them and what problem they are up against is one of the most powerful things you can do as a captain.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

Yesterday we talked about how delivering results requires us to analyze our current situation and figure out what’s preventing us from achieving our goals. Once we know the problem we are facing, we can pick the right tool to overcome it.

Unfortunately, figuring out what’s blocking us on our own is often really, really hard. This is because when we are up against a wall, we are too close to it to see it clearly. We are too close to see the problem in its entirety.

Luckily, it is much easier to see a wall from afar. We might not be able to spot a wall when we are up against it but someone else, with a bit of distance from it, definitely can.

This is where captains can be tremendously helpful. Captains often have a little bit more distance from the problems standing in the way of their crew’s goals. Leveraging this vantage point to spot walls and sharing this perspective with people in our captainship circle is incredibly powerful to help them make progress against their goals.

The second best thing we can do is recommend the right tool to overcome the wall. I know I said there is no silver bullet but I have a favorite when it comes to walls…

Me at work

If you are now singing the song while thinking of yourself on a wrecking ball smashing a wall that says “my team’s problem” on it, I’ve done my job. 😀

By the way, what are some captainship topics that you would like me to cover? Reply to let me know or let me know anonymously.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

One of the things I hate the most about productivity gurus is that they all sell you the same sh*t.

What these people are selling us is a productivity silver bullet.

Guess what?

This, of course, is hardly news. In his 1986¹ paper No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering, Fred Brooks says: “There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity”.

This also makes sense intuitively. If a productivity panacea existed, we would all be taking it, and procrastination would be a thing of the past.

Delivering results requires us to think and analyze our current situation and figure out what is preventing us from achieving our goals. What is blocking us? What is standing in our way between where we are and the results we want to deliver? Once we identify what type of obstacle stands in front of us, we then need to reach into our toolbox and pick the right tool to overcome the obstacle in front of us. Sometimes we need a ladder, sometimes a wrecking ball, and sometimes we need to go around the boulder.

The key insight here is that each situation is different and getting stuff done requires more than just a hammer. It requires a set of tools and the ability to pick the right one at the right time.

The idea that a single system will allow us to overcome any obstacle is a mirage.

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.

This week was very hard for me and my team. The details of the why are not as important. We are all ok, so please don’t worry.

What is important is that my captain’s instincts kicked into full gear and I went into “I have to make sure everyone is ok” mode.

Result? Halfway through the week, I was already out of energy and exhausted.

Luckily I have an amazing team. On Wednesday evening I received this text from one of my teammates.

Put your own oxygen mask on first. Of course I heard and gave this advice many times in the past but “in the heat of the battle”, I almost forgot.

If you are feeling stressed and frazzled, don’t be like me. Don’t forget to put your own oxygen mask on first.

Have a great weekend and see you on Monday!

-Ale

P.S. What did you think about this post? Reply to let me know. You can also leave me anonymous feedback.