Highly recommend Effective Remote Manager Training Conference for any manager dealing with remote work right now. I’m very grateful to my employer for getting my peers and I into one this week.
Manager Tools is giving away literally millions of dollars of research.
Tyler Peterson
My own team has been 100% distributed since late March of 2020. We learned a lot in the first month and I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished. And still, Mark Horstman had a number of compelling recommendations in his brief, 3-hour training. We’ve been doing it well for 8 months and I still learned some great tricks.
What did I learn? Why don’t I just tell you?
Most of what you find on the internet is recycled commentary—often, by the people least qualified to make it. Fredmund Malik gives a blistering assessment of this phenomenon in his 2010 book, “Uncluttered Management Thinking.” In this case, commenting on popular articles about “burnout and stress”:
Could it be that the—usually very young—journalists writing about the subject have very limited first-hand knowledge? … Could it be that, above all, they talk to the wrong people—the amateurs among the managers, most of whom fail because they have not achieved an adequate level of professionalism, and who cling to any kind of fad just in order to have an excuse?
Malik, Uncluttered Management Thinking, pp. 49
Successful managers “refuse to give interviews,” according to Malik, “because they do not want to waste their time.” I believe there is a lot of truth in this. So most of what ends up in blogs or publications isn’t the best thinking. The best thinking is busy doing.
So what about Manager Tools and Mark Horstman?
It’s the data, stupid.
Not Bill Clinton
Manager Tools is different. If you listen long enough they will tell you about this, but I don’t think the message really gets through. I know it didn’t for me — not really. They are so busy being good at what makes them different, that they don’t adequately advertise that difference. Today I tried to speak about that difference:
Finally met @mahorstman in a https://t.co/skKhToR9jl this week 😎. Like Manager-Tools? Get Q&A time with him. Dude either has an ocean of data behind him, or really good at on the spot BS. While the latter is likely also true ;-), I believe it is the former: data – he's got data.
— Tyler Peterson (@ManagerJS) December 18, 2020
To appropriate the phraseology of Bill Clinton (one of the former sitting American Presidents that Mark Horstman has coached): It’s the data, stupid.
Mark, and Manager Tools, have spent millions of dollars testing the theories. Like, real tests. Not what normally passes as tests in businesses. Actual control group vs experimental group test!
There are other guidance peddlers that do this, but most of them don’t look like a podcast that grew into a consulting company. That’s what Manager-Tools looks like, at first: an overgrown podcast. But that’s completely backwards.
The guidance they sell isn’t advice. It’s a product. It has been designed and scientifically tested. A product of a mature consulting company that predated Manager-Tools.
It’s a reboot: a consultancy that grew into a community.
I’m not going to rehash their guidance here because it isn’t just some slide deck that some guy slapped together based on their gut. They are refined, measured, and field tested models. And I have to say I totally didn’t get that at first.
About five years ago I was sharing some Manager-Tools stuff that really helped me. I’d written about it on my blog. One Saturday morning, August 22, 2015, I got an email from Mark, whom I never met until this week, telling me I just couldn’t do that.
Mark couldn’t have been nicer. Nevertheless, I was mortified. I had naively approached their product as if it were an answer on Stack Overflow. And I had even heard Mark explain in the podcast that their guidance was their crown jewels. If they didn’t protest them being copied and repeated then they could lose ownership.
I immediately scrubbed my blog of every article that mentioned any detail of manager-tools guidance. I felt so stupid for not seeing that quoting their models, even with attribution, was not OK. Of course this company would insist on enforcing copyright. But I didn’t really get it. Not yet.
As a developer, we often share answers to obscure technical problems. We share and copy freely from each other. Recycle, upcycle, retweet.
On Tuesday, I finally got to understand the difference.
Time after time, Mark fielded questions by recapping the results of a pertinent study. Not some study in the literature, a study unique to the company. I asked a question as specific as, “why do you recommend the manager initiate this action instead of the employee.” It spiraled out into multiple nuanced and researched threads. Mark leaned back thoughtfully elaborating the tapestry of thought. It hung in the air like an enchantment. Mark didn’t necessarily even like what he was telling us: it was the data.
That is rare: data driven management advice.
That’s the phenomenon I was clumsily hinting at it in my too-ambitious tweet.
… Dude either has an ocean of data behind him, or really good at on the spot BS. …
December 18, 2020 Tweet
Mark doesn’t just parry with the phrase, “we have data,” he’s a data raconteur. Of course, I didn’t demand to see all the data myself. And he’s a High I/D (DISC model) so I expect he’s good at telling stories. 😜
All kidding aside, I was struck by the resonating reassurance of data. It’s data. (I’m a High C/D 😉.)
Manager Tools has made the answers to vexing and important management questions feel as effortless as the perfect stack-overflow code snippet. Except where the volunteer on overflow gives away a knowledge gem won from 20 hours of debugging, Manager Tools is giving away literally millions of dollars of research. All they ask is that you respect the license.
So just get the training. They do it well. Sign up for the Effective Remote Manager Conference
I will tell you this: their conferences are affordable and focused. I’ve been to all of them. (Except the M Conference, fingers crossed.) And it’s all in their free podcasts, too. Check them out: manager-tools.com
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