8 Posts found for Author: James Everingham

As managers, our jobs are simple: Get people to say what they’re going to do, get them to do what they said, and make sure they understand how what they’re doing maps up to making the company win.

Content: Quotation | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

You can have more decisions than decision-makers, but if you have more decision-makers than decisions, that’s when you run into problems.

Content: Quotation | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Management

When you think of transparency, you usually default to the communication aspect: telling everyone what’s happening or admitting when you’ve made a mistake. But when folks say that things aren’t transparent, what they’re probably getting at is that decision-making isn’t transparent. It’s the feeling that decisions sometimes roll on down from the lofty perch of the leadership team, seemingly out of nowhere. Instead, pull back … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior

Not long after James Everingham joined Instagram as the head of engineering, results came back from the employee satisfaction survey that’s conducted every six months. The marks were pretty good, but one problem spot caught Everingham’s eye: the low transparency score.

Transparency is a persistent, thorny problem because we’re not all on the same page about what it even means. To Everingham, transparency was about building … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Decision Making, Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: Instagram

Being a good manager is not about avoiding failure — it’s about enabling as many different paths forward as possible for as long as possible.

Content: Quotation | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Asking questions designed to empower and not instruct requires a lot of forethought. Consider putting 10 minutes on your calendar before any meeting to think through which questions will be helpful and won’t interfere with your team’s ability to win.

Content: Quotation | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Often, a manager will take their team into a room and say, “Here’s what we need to do,” or “Here’s what I’ve been thinking,” or “Here’s one way we can think about this…” as they start sketching on a whiteboard. They’re trying to add value. We always want to add value. But if you’re in any position of authority and you do this, you’ve just … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management

Setting up your team the way you would set up a machine can give you a ton of leverage — as long as you realize how complicated and unpredictable the people in that machine can be. This is where quantum mechanics (and my term ‘quantum leadership’) comes into play. As a discipline, it makes the unpredictable understandable. Similarly, by applying these quantum principles to management, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: James Everingham | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management