Posted by theorchid 6 hours ago
Occasionally I get this feeling for a large customer meeting or a public talk, because there are consequences and serious prep. But this is just trying to normalize extreme social anxiety and call it a management style.
One reason you get together to talk is so you can hash out details on potentially ambiguous topics, so you don't head in the wrong direction causing net negative contribution.
Another is that people are not automata. Humans require inspiration and motivation and you need to reinforce the vision of what you are building and why. Its also even sometimes a reasonable idea to ask about how their life is going and check up on their family and pets and career aspirations.
In general, some people should not be managers, and there is plenty of room in the world for super ICs.
And you need meetings to do all of this? There are so many other ways to communicate which you make more use of when you are less dependent on meetings. It's not a binary choice between meetings and extreme social anxiety.
Yes, "this meeting could have been an email", async communication and all that jazz. Nonetheless stating that a 10 minutes quick chat is going to be the center of that day for you definitely signals social anxiety.
It's important to show a client that you care by being there in person, it's important to see your coworkers once in a while and ask them how they're doing.
If you call yourself a manager--which is a questionable role at startups--then you need to be optimizing for the entire output of the team. Rigidly declaring everything must be async text is no better than scrum by numbers.
A call with your manager where they say "yes, I agree with everything you said - go ahead and do it, I trust you" can mean much more than the same thing said in a text message.
While I do know a feeling of dreading the upcoming call, especially if this is a call that I know won't be useful or rewarding for me personally ("let's quickly go through this infinite list of jira tickets", "let's do a quick round table"), it's important to remember that texting, including all sorts of corporate messengers, is one of the worst media to transmit emotions. Seeing another person's face while talking to them and their reactions to your jokes or struggles is sometimes as important as the message being transmitted. Of course, the camera must be turned on for this to work.
Like all team building I feel like the fundamental question is, “what works for this group of people?”
Rather than “teams with/without calls is superior,” and slamming every team you work with into it.
Richard Dawkins, coined the concept of extended phenotype which proposes that genes do not just build physical bodies, but actively shape the outside world to ensure their propagation.
But some teams, and some people, and some work is more effective with regular scheduled human interaction. People who need direction, guidance, or just to feel more physically connected with their work and team.
I'm so glad you are able to remove all "live human interaction" from your management style. I'd miss having a boss that felt like I was worth face-time. This feels like going too far for async work, I don't know how you wouldn't feel disconnected.
does anyone else have their entire day sidelined by a 10-minute call? is that common?
to me, it hints at something else, but i am not sure if i am the odd one out or not.
It's extremely common for me.
It really comes down to the point made in the article. If you have five or six calls already, the marginal cost of one more call is very low. If you have no calls, the marginal cost of one more call is very high.
My biggest issue with this concept is time. You write your wall of text, I see that you've failed to account for some factor, so I write my wall of text. You don't completely understand my wall of text and ask for clarification. Back and forth, asynchronously. In a call this can be resolved in minutes. Over text this could take days
I really couldn't disagree more strongly. I think it's much easier to correct misunderstandings over text. In a spoken discussion, there is a high degree of temporal entropy - the longer it's been since you made a point, the worse my recollection of your exact point may be. Detail and nuance is lost. But if you write your point down, I can refer to it at any point without any real loss of information.
In my experience, it's relatively common for two people to leave a spoken discussion thinking they have a strong, shared understanding, and only much later do they realize that's not the case.