Management Craft
0.3.2

Turning whispers into standards

In High Output Management (p.50), Andy Grove wrote:

“Beyond relaying facts, a manager must also communicate his objectives, priorities, and preferences… because only if the manager imparts these will his subordinates know how to make decisions themselves that will be acceptable to the manager… transmitting objectives and preferred approaches constitutes a key to successful delegation.”

The problem is, a lot of the preferences you need to communicate as a leader are sitting unprocessed and presenting as vague emotions or intuitions that “whisper” to you throughout the day. This release is about getting those whispers onto paper and how to use them.

New competencies

Turning whispers into standards

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 Turning whispers into standards.

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.

I’m also particularly excited about a couple figures brand new custom figures for this competency. Definitely make sure to check out Figure 2: The Feeling Wheel, to which I’ve added a toggle to make improve readability. You can also click “The Hallway” to see an example of how many emotions someone can feel at once using an example in the article.

The piece is 6,783 words long (okay, 8,180 if you count the figures and footnotes). So it’s a #long-read for sure. 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 Whisper List is the note you scrawl one line into before the interview starts, so the whisper survives the day. Capture now, interpret later. It’s short enough to use today; the deeper teaching page follows.

The Personal User Manual

The Personal User Manual is Claire Hughes Johnson’s “working with me” document: a short, revisable guide to how you communicate, decide, and give feedback, so a new report doesn’t have to learn your preferences through friction. It comes with a Markdown template you can fill in this afternoon.

Experiments

Hosting original works

I often cite early management thinkers and their work on Management Craft, and most people have never read them. As an experiment, I’ve added two in full:

To read an original, click the toggle between overview → original. Each original has the same clickable and hideable table of contents on the left side and extensive footnotes that link back to the text. I’ve also added an export to Markdown button on the top right for each original in case anyone wants a plain file.

Please note that each of these are period text, complete with language that is pretty wild and offensive. I’ve added a disclaimer. In a couple instances, I also redacted some language with notes because holy smokes I don’t want to be associated with some of it.

Product updates

  • Figures read as numbered exhibits, with quieter labels and a cleaner field around the graphic.
  • Ordered lists sit on the baseline and nested lists open with the right spacing, on tool pages and the hosted originals.
  • Article prose no longer hyphenates at the end of a line.

Also in this release