If youâre wondering how last weekâs big proposal went - we didnât get the work...
...yet.
The client asked us to increase the scope and go further downstream in the work. We'll meet one more time, later this week, and expect to hear yay or nay.
This sales cycle got me thinking about the cost of proposals. Weâve spent close to 15 person-hours on this one so far, six of them just on calls with the client. If we get the work, thatâs a fine investment, but Iâll need to develop some guardrails on this in the future.
Thinking about it another way, I'm impressed at how fast we went from first introduction to being in the running for a very large project. It's nice to have earned trust relatively quickly.
To make sure we're getting better from every experience, I created a Confluence template of our sales proposal. Ours looked snazzy! We also created a section called âWhy Choose Group 18?" that I want to build on. No sense starting from scratch next time. It took me three minutes to create the template, but will save me hours over time as we build out a library of sales proposals.
In other news, if youâre in Austin, Iâm putting on a one-day conference called the Founder Summit on November 6th with others in the Operator's Guild. Attendance is free. You get in automatically if youâre in the Operatorâs Guild, but other registrants will be reviewed before granting admission. During the event Iâll be doing 1-1 operational audits. You bring me your gnarly problems, and Iâll give you advice on how to improve them!
Iâve had to learn a lot about putting on an event over the past few months. Weâve had to design the agenda, find speakers, find sponsors, set up registration, locate a venue, solve food, etc.
It all made me realize that setting up events is not my passion. I'll leave that to others from here out. đ¤Ł
Lastly, the OKR Party is this week! Iâve attended some other âwebinarâ type events recently for competitive benchmarking, and they couldn't hold my attention. That's not going to happen at the OKR Party!
Attendance is small, so everyone who joins will be able to explore their personal interests and challenges with us.
PS - I plan on giving you an update on Meshwell next week, too. Things are heating up!
A Quote
â
Think about it: Most people donât even show up. Of the people who do, most donât really push themselves. So to show up and be disciplined about daily improvement? You are the rarest of the rare.
Host Russ Roberts had Julia Belluz on the podcast to talk about food and her new book, Food Intelligence. I didnât know of Julia before this podcast, but I enjoyed the episode exploring the complexity of calories. A calorie might be a calorie, but the body has all sorts of compensatory moves when you change what you eat. I like how Russ is good at politely pushing back on guests, like when Julia advocated for government regulation of what we can eat.
I really like using Granola for keeping track of meeting notes. Instead of getting a full call recording, you get concise notes of what happened and your action items. What Iâve really been interested in lately is their new ârecipesâ functionality. For example, they released one done in conjunction with CEO coach and author, Matt Mochary. It reviews your meetings for the past week and gives you coaching feedback. Mine was brutal, just like a good coach would be! đ¤Ł
Working at Atlassian I worked with people around the globe. While each of us are unique, weâre also products of our environment, so learning about the predominant ways of working for different groups can be really helpful. âIf your business success relies on your ability to work successfully with people from around the world, you need to have an appreciation for cultural differences as well as respect for individual differences. Both are essential.â
(please enjoy this 6ď¸âŁ minute read)
Deep Dive on Always Happy, Never Satisfied
Life is full of tension. As humans we have competing desires - to be loved and appreciated for who we are right now, and to strive to learn and improve for tomorrow.
Adam Smith captured this sentiment when he said: âMan naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.â
If you focus on being loved without being worthy of it, you have empty appreciation and participation trophies. If you don't improve, you may inadvertently fall out of being loved through lack of effort.
If you focus on being worthy of love by constantly striving to improve, youâll burn out AND likely not be loved anyway because of that relentlessness.
So how do we strike a balance between those two extremes?
In todayâs newsletter weâll explore how to stay in the productive middle part of the curve. Or, as I like to say: âalways happy, never satisfied.â
â
Where this phrase first appeared for me
I started using the phrase "always happy, never satisfied" during my time at Atlassian. The company grew roughly 30% per year, every year, for a decade. In that type of high growth environment there are always problems to be solved. There are always areas that need to improve.
I donât remember the specific meeting, but I was pushing for improvement in certain areas. Members of the team pointed out how much those areas had improved over the years. Wasnât I happy about that? Why did I need to push it further?
Lots of wins along the way, but plenty more to go.
Itâs true, those areas had improved quite a bit, and I was happy about it. But I also saw how much more those areas needed to improve in the future to keep pace with the rest of the business, customer expectations, and competitive pressures.
I started using the phrase, âalways happy, never satisfiedâ (AHNS) to represent the duality I felt.
â
Diving into the duality
AHNS doesnât mean ânever good enough.â It means things are good now, but we need to make them better next.
ANHS doesnât mean âwork more.â It means we need to consistently rethink our approach and the systems that drive these outcomes.
AHNS is a reminder for the leader to live in this duality, because living at either end of the spectrum isnât good.
I know this, because I tend to see the ânever satisfiedâ side of things very clearly, which in practice can mean I come off ârarely happy.â It was so clear to me how far we were from âbetterâ that I emphasized the gap and tried to close it.
The challenge with emphasizing the gap is that there are always problems to solve - it's a never-ending treadmill. If youâre constantly pointing out what needs to improve, then youâre literally never satisfied. Thatâs not fun to be, and thatâs not fun to work for.
The never-ending treadmill of "never satisfied."
Conversely, if youâre always happy with how things are, no matter the gap to what they need to be, youâre probably not getting much done.
If youâre celebrating all the things youâve done in the past, youâre not getting your team and company in the position it needs to be in the future.
âLeaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team. They must face the facts through a realistic, brutally honest assessment of themselves and their teamâs performance. Identifying weaknesses, good leaders seek to strengthen them and come up with a plan to overcome challenges.â
The challenge comes in being good at both sides of AHNS without overemphasizing either. You canât be so happy with everything that nothing gets done, and you canât push so hard to improve that you create burnout in yourself and others.
What are the ways we can balance this?
â
Celebrate, then Optimize
As Jocko said in the quote above, leaders need to build the mindset of improvement into themselves and the team. One way to help remember this is the idea to celebrate, then optimize.
There are many ways to implement this across many different scales. For example, imagine if someone on your team takes the initiative to create a helpful artifact, but it doesnât quite hit the mark on the first try.
Celebrate: Thank them for taking the initiative. Tell them what you love about what theyâve created. Optimize: Ask questions to get them to see the gaps you see. Offer advice and suggestions for how to improve it.
I love the creative color choices. For the final version, please make a digital version, not crayon.
In another scenario, imagine that an employee had a difficult goal to hit, and theyâve managed to get 80% of the way there with one week to go.
What would you do? Celebrate them for achieving the 80% and leave it alone? After all, it was difficult!
Would you immediately pressure them to hit 100% in the final week?
Thinking of âcelebrate then optimizeâ here are some things you could do next.
Immediate: Share appreciations on concrete behavior theyâve embodied and for achieving most of a difficult goal. Then ask, âWhatâs can you do to hit the final 20% this week?â
Within A Day or Two: Publish a public Slack post or email with the team - shared wins and progress! In a 1-1, ask: âWhat worked? Whatâs your constraint? What needs to be true to hit 100%?â
Next Week: Run a retro. What worked well? What could be better?
What youâre trying to do is strike the balance between appreciation and improvement. Youâre trying to push without being demotivating. You want to show the team that they have the capacity to improve.
âItâs not easy to live with the constant angst that we might not be doing enough. It would be more fun to do victory laps and pat everybody on the back all the time. But in the end, we will be all be better off because of our intensely vigilant posture toward our mission. We wonât rest on our laurels. The competition is getting more aggressive by the day, so this is no time to relax our focus.â
If youâre like me and tend to push heavily for improvement, youâll need to temper that instinct lest you run into burnout. This is especially important when running a team; not everyone may be built like you. Here it may be helpful to remember that youâre running a marathon, not a sprint.
Sure, you can push yourself and your team to relentlessly pursue goals and self improvement, and there may be times when you must do that for the importance of the mission or a critical milestone, but you canât do that forever.
Just like our bodies have the dual âfight or flightâ and ârest and rechargeâ nervous systems, youâll need to balance any periods of pushing with periods of lighter intensity.
â
Bringing it all together
âAlways happy, never satisfiedâ is a way of being as a leader. It starts by honoring the good work that youâve done to date, then challenge yourself to think what could be better next. Whereâs the final 10â20% hiding? What constraints can we remove to unlock it?
The loop is to celebrate, then optimize. It shows people theyâre seen and it gives them a path forward. We can be proud of today without getting stuck there.
Over-index on âhappyâ and you drift into victory laps. Over-index on ânever satisfiedâ and it turns into a grind. The middle path asks you to balance the tension between those two for better overall results.
Think marathon, not sprint. There will be weeks where the right answer is to push hard, but there must also be time to consolidate the gain, catch your breath, and make the next improvement easier to achieve.
Be proud of today, and earn tomorrow.
â
Call to Action
This week look for whatâs gone under-acknowledged. Is there a win or improvement that you can honor? Give yourself the opportunity to celebrate how far youâve come and what youâve achieved.
But donât stop there! Look for the 1% improvement you can make in an area of your personal life or business. Where have you gotten too comfortable and you need to challenge yourself to improve?
Choose to make one improvement by the time next weekâs newsletter rolls around.
Kevin
PS - Share the win with me. Iâd love to celebrate you as well! heykev@kevinnoble.xyzâ
â
Are you interested in topics like today's Deep Dive?
â