- Shower thoughts how to#
- Shower thoughts series#
I came across this wonderful article from John Danner where he writes about how to work with the ’10-50% focus’ workers. Working with non-‘shower thoughts’ workers Prioritising, after all, is one of the 3 jobs of the startup CEO. How do we know ‘shower thoughts’ thinkers are having the right thoughts? How do we incentivise obsessing over the right questions, she asks? This is important, and I suppose the best solution is when the leadership communicates priorities right. My colleague Ria Shroff-Desai, who leads our people practice, and with whom I shared an early draft version of this article, raised an important question. Are ‘shower thoughts’ workers thinking the right thoughts? Alternately the name of the ‘shower thoughts’ worker comes up prominently when asked ‘Who is the best _ person you have met?’ (insert growth / product / tech etc). Someone who has known the ‘shower thoughts’ worker writes ahead introducing the ‘shower thoughts’ worker. Interestingly, one rule I have seen is that, shower thoughts workers are typically introduced to the org through references.
I suppose there are more, and would love to hear what I missed out.
Cultures that enable ownership and initiative – most startups fall in this category – clearly support the rise of ‘shower thoughts’ workers. This could be either personal or even product performance feedback – they are interconnected – product performance eventually impacts personal performance. Cultures or processes enabling frequent, fair feedback as opposed to those where feedback takes longer time to emerge, tend to encourage the emergence and growth of ‘shower thoughts’ workers. Never make a ‘shower thoughts’ executive or engineer work with a non-‘shower thoughts’ manager. ‘Shower thoughts’ workers can also emerge when the ’10-50% focus’ category starts working with a manager who is from the ‘shower thoughts’ category. It is vital that the founder / CEO spend a certain amount of his or her time communicating the mission, how it came about and the key values underpinning the mission and the journey towards realising it. Missionary cultures and high purpose orgs attract a lot more ‘shower thoughts’ workers. Still from my experience there are a few. There is no one universal rule to hiring or even enhancing the number of these shower thoughts workers. Hiring and increasing the number of ‘shower thoughts’ workers As the company gets bigger, the proportion of the ‘shower thoughts’ workers drops to about 10-20% you also start seeing the first of the “<10% focused” folks. The rest are in the ’10-50% focus’ / meets expectation category. They are incredible brand and cultural ambassadors internally and externally. They work long punishing hours, are proactive and get things done, often without necessarily seeking permission. I find that early on, when team sizes are in the <20 number, you have about a third to half of the company as the ’50%+ focus’ workers – they have ‘shower thoughts’ about the company and its problems. It’s around when you start annoying your coworkers and/or significant other, although that part is avoidable with practice.” It’s when you start habitually asking “how could this go faster?” It’s when you get relentlessly resourceful. It’s when you start caring enough to think about it in the shower. 
“50%+ focus” is roughly when something becomes the top idea in your mind.
50%+ focus: superstar, 10x engineer, destined for greatness. 10-50% focus: “meets expectations,” gets regular raises. <10% focused on the job at hand: meaningful risk of getting fired. “That experience of mine resonates strongly with Byrne Hobart’s observation about focus in knowledge work : The output of knowledge workers is extremely skewed based on focus. Kuhn references a post by Byrne Hobart, and writes (bold and italics mine) – This metaphor comes from an article i read by Ben Kuhn titled ‘ Attention is your scarcest resource’. I have been thinking about this topic, and have found the metaphor of ‘shower thoughts’ useful to approach this. However as the team grows larger, these non-performers can sometimes linger for a while. Clearly when the team size is smaller, it is hard for non-performers to stand out, and hence they get weeded out faster, or even get the right feedback, and improve. Sometimes more frequently than that.Īs Blume’s team size has grown, we too have had our share of less motivated and low-performing teammates. Almost every month or two, someone is being let go, or counselled. Shower thoughts series#
Once a company nears Series A, team size crosses 30 - I haven’t heard of too many Indian companies with low team counts (this is a topic for another post!) – and invariably the founder’s attention is drawn to managing employee performance or the impact of this. A frequent conversation topic that comes up with founders is that of individual employee performance.
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