New competency: Turning whispers into standards
| Research | Andy, with AI retrieval |
|---|---|
| Outline | Andy + AI |
| Writing | Andy |
| Editing | Andy + AI |
Hey, it’s Andy.
Management Craft 0.3.2 is now live. Here’s what’s new.
New competency
Turning whispers into standards is the third competency in Recruiting & Hiring. To be a great leader, you need standards to hire and manage to. But the things you want (and don’t want) in teammates are often… really hard to name. So that’s why I wrote this one.
It is for the moment you walk past an executive berating a junior in the hallway, scrunch your face, think “gross,” and go run your next interview. That reaction is data, but too often it gets lost. In this competency article, you’ll learn how to run a three-step loop for using that data: notice it, interpret it, and then systematize it.
It is long (about 6,800 words), with four custom figures, a novice-to-expert rubric, and twelve things to practice. But remember, I write each article for humans and agents. Try pasting the URL for this competency into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to read the article and help walk you through the steps to get to a real standard you can use.
New tools
- The Whisper List — the place you jot quick unprocessed thoughts so you can come back to them later. This is a quick read. Use it today.
- Personal User Manual — Claire Hughes Johnson’s “working with me” document, so a new teammates don’t have to read your mind to derive your preferences. Comes with a Markdown template you can fill in this afternoon.
Experiment: read the originals
I occasionally cite early management thinkers, but most people have never read them. As an experiment, I published two classics on the site in full, typeset for today’s reader, with a table of contents, linked footnotes, and an export to Markdown:
- The Principles of Scientific Management — Frederick Winslow Taylor, 1911.
- The Psychology of Management — Lillian Gilbreth, 1914.
Fair warning: these are period texts, and some of the language is pretty offensive. Each carries a disclaimer, and I redacted a couple of passages with notes where I’ve done so.
Also new
- 29 people pages and 24 source pages for the researchers, operators, and works cited on Turning whispers into standards, so every citation on it opens to a page you can reference. Start at People and Sources.
- Figures now read as numbered exhibits, lists sit on the baseline, and prose no longer hyphenates at the end of a line.
The full list is in the 0.3.2 release notes.
Cheers,
Andy
P.S. Know a founder who keeps hiring people they can’t explain? Forward this, or share it on LinkedIn or X.