Welcome to Issue 2 of the Manager TLDR – the best in management, carefully curated by Fellow.app.

This week we’re talking about inclusive meetings, career conversations, 10x managers, and how high performing teams create psychological safety.

To build an inclusive culture, start with inclusive meetings

TLDR: Great leaders foster a culture where diverse contributors have equal impact and opportunities to speak up. Don’t know where to start? Here are 3 actionable tips to make your meetings more inclusive:

1. Set the stage for inclusion before your meeting even begins. For example, by sending a pre-meeting email or collaborating on a meeting agenda in advance.
2. Step in when one alpha individual is dominating the meeting, and try to actively bring all voices into the conversation.
3. Find out what is working and what isn’t by asking your team for feedback 🗣.

Career conversations with employees: Questions and tips for managers

TLDR: The world’s best managers coach employees on their career development. This article summarizes the 3-step career conversation framework that led to a 10-point increase in engagement scores at Google:

1. Ask employees about their life story. You’ll learn a lot about their values and motivations.
2. Encourage them to write a list of dream jobs and the skills they need to develop.
3. Build an action plan for the next 18 months and follow up on those goals every 3, 4, or 6 months.

Career conversations will help you boost employee engagement, foster self-awareness, and develop positive relationships 🌱.

Supermanagers

TLDR: While there is an ongoing debate about high performing individual contributors (10x engineers), not enough attention thus far has been directed towards exploring how managers can drive 10x impact through their teams. 

In this article, Aydin Mirzaee argues that 10x managers (or Supermanagers) are the highest point of leverage through which organizations can create exponential performance 🦸‍♂️🦸‍♀️. 

High-performing teams need psychological safety, here’s how to create it

TLDR: A massive two-year study on team performance revealed that the highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety – the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. How can you increase psychological safety on your own team?

1. Replace blame with curiosity. Don’t assume. If you believe you already know what another person is thinking, then you’re not ready to have a conversation. Instead, adopt a learning mindset and state the problematic behavior as an observation.
2. Ask for feedback on delivery. Close difficult conversations with these questions: What worked and what didn’t work in my delivery? How did it feel to hear this message? How could I have presented it more effectively? Asking employees for feedback will make you a more approachable leader.
3. Measure psychological safety. Make it a habit to ask your team how safe they feel to take risks and make mistakes, and what could enhance their feeling of safety 💬.