One of the hardest parts of management is letting go. Not doing the work yourself. You have to temper your fear that becoming more hands-off will cause the product to suffer or the project to fail. You have to trust your team—give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine.

But you can’t overdo it—you can’t create so much space that you lose track of what’s going on or are surprised by what the product becomes. You can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing. Even if your hands aren’t on the product, they should still be on the wheel.

Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. That’s exactly what you should be doing. I remember Steve Jobs bringing out a jeweler’s loupe and looking at individual pixels on a screen to make sure the user interface graphics were properly drawn. He showed the same level of attention to every piece of hardware, every word on the packaging. That’s how we learned the level of detail that was expected at Apple. And that’s what we started to expect of ourselves.

As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business. When you get deep into the team’s process of doing work rather than the actual work that results from it, that’s when you dive headfirst into micromanagement. (Of course sometimes it turns out that the process is flawed and leads to bad outcomes. In that case, the manager should feel free to dive in and revise the process. That’s the manager’s job, too.)

This wasn’t a moment to stand back and let the team figure out what to do on their own. I needed to make sure people knew exactly what they were working on and had the tools to find solutions as fast as possible. I had to command and control.

In a crisis, everyone has their job:

• If you’re an individual contributor, you need to take your marching orders and start marching. Do your core job while continuing to look for and suggest other options to solve the issue. Try not to speculate or gossip. If you have concerns or suspicions, report them up the chain, then get back to work.

• If you’re a manager, you need to relay information from leadership without overwhelming or distracting your team. Check in with the team a couple of times a day—try not to harass them more than that (hourly messages just freak everyone out). You need to be there for them, not just to ensure that the work is getting done, but also to make sure they’re okay. You’re the first line of defense against burnout. The pressure, stress, red-eyes, and bad food in the middle of the night will get to people. You may need to give everyone a break—even during a crisis. Remember to set expectations and limits. You’ll probably have to work over the weekend. Okay. That happens. But tell your team what the plan is: we’ll work hard on Saturday but everyone needs to get out of the office at 5 p.m. and then we’ll have a check-in on Sunday night.

• If you’re the leader of a broader group or company, you probably spent years of your life unlearning the tendencies of micromanagement. Well, if you’re in a crisis then it’s time to be a micromanager again.

You’ll need to dig into the details—all the details. But you can’t make every decision on your own or fix everything single-handedly. You have experts, so you’ll need to delegate to them. Agree on the microsteps that need to be taken, but allow them to take those steps without you. Schedule check-ins in the morning and at the end of the day and instead of getting the usual weekly or biweekly reports from your team, start going to their daily meetings. You have to be in there, listening, asking questions, and getting necessary information in real time. You might have to be the conduit of that information to the rest of the company, to investors or reporters or whoever else is watching this situation like a hawk. You need to be able to answer their questions. You need to keep up their confidence that you’re getting somewhere.

Clear your calendar of nonessential meetings. Focus entirely on fixing the problem. And don’t let yourself get knocked off balance— you’re human. Don’t make things worse by losing your mind and ignoring the things you need to keep your head on straight. That might be exercising or resting or having dinner with your family or lying on the floor under your desk for ten minutes quietly singing show tunes. Whatever you need. And remember, your team is human, too—people need to go home. They need to sleep. They need to eat. And they need to feel like things are getting better.

Instead of prematurely asking what you should do, try something new. Ask no questions rather than an action question. Try meditating, exercising, sensing your arms and legs, or any of the approaches we have suggested for putting you in touch with your inner creative ability. Then try answering any or all of the following questions:

• What is it I don’t yet understand? This question or ones like it can penetrate the mind for clarity and understanding.

• What is it that I’m really feeling? When there is a problem there are usually emotions - fear, anger, hurt, or sorrow - and this question can help you become aware of seeing them specifically.

• What is it that I’m not seeing? Problems usually come from not seeing clearly. By asking about what you are not seeing specifically, almost as if it consists of material objects, you heighten your perceptual ability.

• What voice is speaking? Is it your Voice of Judgment, your objective intelligence, your voice of childhood emotions or fears, or the voice of your Essence speaking inside of you? You can bet that if you have a problem, the objective intelligence and the Essence are relatively silent. But personifying and identifying the inner voices contributing to a problem sometimes is enough in itself to achieve the clarity needed for action.

This kind of exploratory questioning for clarity doesn’t take long, especially when preceded or followed by meditation.

“1. Pause to Start Right

When you launch a new project, team, or organization, pause to consider the talent, roles, norms, and resources that you will need to succeed. A great way to begin is to harness the human capacity for imaginary time travel: Pause to pretend that you have succeeded (a “previctorem”) or failed (a “premortem”) and write a story about the events that led to your wonderful or awful fate. Then build those lessons into how you design and do your work. Psychologist Gary Klein uses premortems to help teams identify dangerous risks and delusions. Gary asks teams to imagine that it is, say, a year after they’ve made a decision, and it is a massive and unambiguous failure. People look back from that terrible future and develop lists and stories to explain what happened. Gary’s research finds that premortems are “a low-cost, high-payoff” method for making better decisions and running better projects. Huggy Rao and his Stanford colleagues conducted a “back to the future” study that suggests doing a previctorem, in which you pause to look back from an (imaginary) successful future, may be even more effective than doing a premortem. Both forms of time travel can improve decisions and designs because treating an event as if it did rather than might happen—thinking about it in the past tense—makes it seem more concrete and likely to happen, which motivates people to unpack its nuances....

2. Ask Questions That Make People Stop to Think—Before They Do Something Stupid...

3. Where’s Your Times Square?

We learned this lesson from Becky Margiotta, who led the 100,000 Homes Campaign that we talked about in chapter 1. Becky is now CEO of the Billions Institute, where she advises leaders of nonprofits and government organizations on how to imagine and implement large-scale change. Becky has many impatient clients who want to go big with half-baked and unproven ideas. She asks them, “Where’s your Times Square?” That’s because, before she led the nationwide 100,000 Homes Campaign, Becky was hired by Rosanne Haggerty, founder of the nonprofit Community Solutions, to reduce the homelessness problem in New York City’s Times Square by two-thirds over a three-year period. That goal turned out to be unrealistic—it took five years. Becky’s team spent from 2003 to 2007 on the Street to Home initiative in Times Square. It took them until 2007 to develop the mindset, skills, and methods for tackling the problem, but that year, they surpassed their original goal and achieved an 87 percent reduction in street homelessness. It was a long, frustrating slog. Becky’s team tried many methods that failed before they figured out what worked. For example, it took them years to identify who was homeless in Times Square. They finally learned the best way to “get the count” wasn’t to visit Times Square during the day and to ask people if they were homeless. It was to go out at 5:00 A.M. and count the people sleeping there. They also learned to find homes first for people who had been homeless the longest and who suffered from the most severe health problems—because they faced the greatest risk of premature death. Becky says that, without those five years of frustration, failure, and—eventually—development of a “playbook” that would work elsewhere, she and Rosanne couldn’t have launched the 100,000 Homes Campaign in 2010. And the campaign wouldn’t have reached its goal of finding homes for one hundred thousand chronically homeless Americans as it did on June 14, 2014....

At Rippling, Parker’s approach was the opposite of what he did at Zenefits. In 2021, Parker admitted, “it was almost too easy for us to close customers early on” at Zenefits, and leaders made the mistake of believing that their employees could do the manual work for clients “with an eye toward automating those processes afterward.” They were wrong. The bigger Zenefits got, the harder it was to automate processes. Parker said that employees were doing so much manual work that costs soared and profits plummeted, and “that’s when a lot of things started to come apart.” In contrast, during Rippling’s first two years, Parker said, it was “basically me and like fifty engineers.” They focused on building a robust product, on “pruning any operational function and trying to replace it with software.” Parker prohibited employees from doing the manual chores that Zenefits employees did. Parker insisted, instead, that Rippling employees work with customers until they developed sound automated solutions. To assure that engineers understood customers’ needs and challenges (and to save money), Rippling didn’t hire any customer support staffers in those early years. Parker said, “I was personally doing—and the engineering team was personally doing—all of the customer support.” Parker learned other lessons from Zenefits that he applies at Rippling, including selling bundles of software to customers rather than individual products—and developing each kind of software, from the start, so it is easy to integrate with other Rippling products. Parker’s focus on getting things right before going big, and other lessons he learned the hard way at Zenefits, seems to be working. By May of 2022, venture-capital firms had invested almost $700 million in Rippling, and it was valued at $11.25 billion—nearly twice as much as Zenefits’ $6.5 billion in its (brief) heyday...

The struggles that we’ve seen in so many teams provoked us to suggest, and sometimes coach and lead, an exercise that Harvard Business School’s Tsedal Neeley calls “a team relaunch.” This intentional pause entails convening one or two meetings in which a team considers its goals, norms, rhythms, rituals, and use of resources. The team starts by discussing what is working and what isn’t. Then members decide what ought to change and how to implement their decisions...

Members generate wild and practical ideas about norms and practices that once worked but now get in the way. The team then selects up to three of these “targets” and commits to getting rid of each. Next, Kathryn guides them in “the strengths game,” following Gallup research that shows the best employees and teams play to their strengths. The team identifies and rallies around a few cherished norms, skills, or strategies that are (and will continue to be) crucial to their performance and sanity...

5. Use Friction to Create Cadence

Friction fixers can dampen confusion, reduce wasted effort, enhance coordination, and strengthen relationships by slowing down to implement routines and rituals that create a shared cadence...

John emphasizes that, as Mozilla grew from one team to multiple teams, rather than adding a lot of rules and specialized roles to bolster coordination and communication, his leadership team developed a “drumbeat that the organization marches to.” As Mozilla grew to roughly fifty people, confusion emerged—especially among newcomers—about how to fit in, whom to talk to and work with, and when to ship changes in code. Life got less chaotic after Mozilla’s leaders added a “closed” meeting every Monday where they made decisions and plans. Later that day, the leadership team convened a company lunch and an all-hands meeting where they announced goals, answered questions, and talked about challenges Mozilla faced. When Mozilla grew to about eighty people, the leadership team added more “pacing mechanisms,” including data reports every night at seven (to help people make short-term decisions) and quarterly company goals (to help people blend individual and collective efforts). Then, when Mozilla grew to about 120 people, and companywide goals were too vague, the top team added quarterly group goals. Mozilla also started holding a worldwide summit every two years for employees, people from outside the company who wrote open-source code for Mozilla, and other key stakeholders, as a “time to see everyone, reconnect, and remember humanity.”...

6. Communicate a Lot, or Not at All

Shared rhythms also help people get work done and avoid exhaustion because they know when to work with others and when to work alone...

Patty McCord, who was Netflix’s chief talent officer for the company’s first fourteen years, told us, “The most important role I played at Netflix was, at the end of every executive meeting, to say, ‘Have we made any decisions in the room today, and if we have, how are we going to communicate them?’”...

The differences between well-crafted and badly crafted endings are striking during employee layoffs. If you must lay people off, pause and remember there is a difference between what you do and how you do it.

The lesson for friction fixers, in the words of UCLA’s legendary basketball coach John Wooden (who won ten national championships in his final twelve years as coach), is “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?

Do yourself the favor of getting lots of options, then culling the list down to a short and manageable size (five max); then make the best choice that you can, given the time and resources available to you, get on with it, and build your way forward. Note that if you’re doing this with prototype iteration, you don’t have too much at stake, and you will be able to adjust as you go, before you really reach a significant investment. And once you make a choice—then embrace your choice and go with it. When the questions that lead to agonizing creep into your head, evict the thoughts, and direct your energy into living well the decisions you’ve made. Pay attention and learn as you go, of course, but don’t get caught with your eyes fixated on the rearview mirror of decision regret.

This letting-go step relies primarily on personal discipline. Keep your reframed understanding of decision making handy, and be sure to win the internal argument with yourself when you’re tempted to rehash and ruminate. Put in place the support you need to stick with it—find a life design collaborator or team to help remind you why you made the choice or choices you did; make a journal entry about your decision, and reread it when you get confused. Find what works to enable yourself to enjoy your choices fully.