![]() Instead her reports see this more simple version of the chart: Using them in conversations would drain some of the objective, quantitative value from the exercise. The version her team sees is stripped down to just its X- and Y-axis descriptors and the “flow beam.” Terms included above, like “apathy” and “boredom,” are just for her reference. She’s since adopted, added to and iterated on it to fit her needs as a manager and to use in 1:1s she has run members of her team:Īt its most basic, the process is simple: during 1:1s, Maxwell asks her reports to mark the above graph to indicate where they are professionally. On the second day, during a discussion of flow, she saw a deceptively simple X-Y graph, and things began to click. Around that time, she took the Search Inside Yourself training, based on Google’s Chade-Meng Tan’s popular course. “As a manager, I wanted to find ways to recreate those moments for my team,” says Maxwell. The immersive, pleasurable state of flow is hard enough to describe, let alone generate and track. That’s how vital it is to help your team members experience - and create - a sense of flow in their work.” To Grasp Flow, Graph Flow It can be an offer from another company, the call of launching a startup or any number of professional gravitational pulls. “Truth is, it doesn’t have to be the lottery. “I can recall a few times where I thought to myself, ‘If I won the lottery tomorrow, I would still come into work.’ That’s flow,” she says. Maxwell had experienced flow at work, too, so she knew it was possible. “I have a quote of his here: ‘The more a job inherently resembles a game - with variety, appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback - the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the worker’s level of development.’” “My goal is to try to create what Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who defined flow, calls ‘autotelic jobs,’” says Maxwell. Indeed, the term is often associated with artists and athletes, who are understood to do their best work when they’re “in the zone.” Gamers, too, might intuitively understand flow it has been applied to game design for years, where deep user engagement is the benchmark of success. In looking for an answer, her mind would shift to her off hours as a yoga aficionado and DJ, during which she’d experienced firsthand the power of flow. The tools in her work life - from NPS to qualitative satisfaction surveys - didn’t quite capture it for her. First, though, she had to find a framework for more clearly defining satisfaction. She needed a way to assess job satisfaction quickly and candidly. At that speed, a "slow boat" to trust won’t cut it. I've been at three companies that scaled 5x while I was there. “No matter how strong your toolkit is for effective one-on-ones, not everyone will open up right away,” she says. But she kept bumping up against the limits of conversation. Why Flow is a Must-Have, Not a Nice-to-HaveĪs she grew from one management role to the next - leading interns and architects alike - Maxwell had always cared about her engineers’ feelings toward their work. And she describes how anxiety and boredom creep into a team, and how managers can supportively nudge engineers back into the ideal state of flow. She shares the simple graph that has become one of the most powerful resources in her management toolkit. In this exclusive interview, Maxwell, who’s held engineering management roles at Slack, Apple, Yahoo! and Pinterest, explains how she built a concrete evaluative framework around flow. She was missing a way to turn emotion into data, and she found it in an unexpectedly fuzzy place: the age-old concept of flow. Resolved to never again lose a great developer unnecessarily, Maxwell turned her engineer’s mind to the gaps in her management tooling. If she only had a clearer line of sight into how they were feeling, she could have responded better and earlier - and perhaps retained that talented programmer. ![]() ![]() Eventually though, she realized the problem was less about the work itself, and more about how her people were feeling about doing the work. She was deeply plugged into precise metrics like scrolling speeds, crash rates and memory usage. ![]() There had to have been a red flag, so she stepped back to examine the broader context: Her team was building a flagship application, and carefully integrating stakeholders in design, engineering and leadership. ![]() Then, one day, after a few months, he told Maxwell he was returning to Apple. It was the type of big, ambitious project engineers want to sink their teeth into - and she easily recruited one of her former coworkers from Apple. In fact, she turned it into a management tool that she uses every day.īack when Maxwell was the Director of Engineering at Yahoo!, she was tasked with building a brand-new, multi-platform messaging product. Many business leaders hesitate when you ask them to share their biggest mistake. ![]()
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