The Middles

I’ve mentioned job descriptions a couple of times before in this newsletter. I was writing one this week, (maybe the second of my career), and I thought out loud that a job description is the first transaction between myself as someone involved in hiring and the the person I’m going to manage/work with. It says…

If you’ve talked to me in recent weeks, I will quote something from “The Hard Thing about Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz. It’s a book for start-up CEOs, but I’m finding so much of this applies to my field, journalism, and daily management. One choice quote: “A healthy company culture encourages people to share bad news.…

Sorry, nevermind. Once, I was having a particularly difficult edit with someone. In my exasperation I said, “It doesn’t matter to me, I don’t care, but this is your story and I’m just trying to help you make it better. It doesn’t help me when you get defensive.” They shot back “Well it hurts my…

My other half is brilliant. He is kind. He pushes me to ask for more money, knows I can take the responsibility. He tells me to stop working. He makes me sandwiches in the middle of breaking news. My other half is not perfect. He freelances and freelancing, any freelancer will tell you, is not…

“I’m sorry, but I think this is best for both of us.”There’s lots of reasons people quit. They could hate their job. They could hate you. They could just be ready for something new. Their spouse might have found a better job in another city. Some of it is in your control and some of it…

Perhaps it is on my mind because I am going on a short, but needed vacation next week, but let’s talk about time off.We can all complain about not getting time off or not enough vacation, but for a manager, there’s also how to *deal* with vacation and time off. Some thoughts, in no particular…

This is another week of travel for me, so I had less time to write, but I really wanted to share a poem I came across that reminds me gratitude can be found (and shown) everywhere. “Thank you” can be loaded, passive-agressive, kind, emotional or somewhere in between. It’s the tone and the moment that matters.…

I’ve been writing a guide lately, so I went on this search for how to structure them well. Here’s a few I came across. These are mostly employee handbooks, but they showcase how to write a newsroom guide to XYZ pretty well, too. 18F Handbook: 18F has always been committed to transparency. I tend to…

I took stock of things lately (this is what I do when on planes and my iPhone games aren’t distracting enough, nor is my Kindle) and I realized: When did I become “the man?” For so much of my career, I have rallied against the glass offices, the people who made crazy decisions and asked more and…

This week was hard. Really hard. Not just a ton of really depressing news, but on top of that the media/tech industry saw a slew of layoffs. A friend emailed me asking how she could better handle this, as a manager, which reminded me that this sucks, for everyone involved. The first time I got laid…