The 2-slide Deck and Summary Anti-patterns

Anti-Patterns to Avoid

One-Page Anti-Patterns

1. Useless summarizations

2. Framing progress incorrectly

3. Vague and high-level statements

4. 30 day plans with no details

5. Going over 1 page

6. Leaving out significant insights

7. Too many links

8. Hiding behind links

Two-Slide Deck Anti-Patterns

1. Lots of text

2. Laundry lists without prioritization

3. “Keep doing WSPro” as a plan

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Details and Examples

1 Page Summary Anti Patterns:

1. Useless summarizations

Poor Example: “First I enforced the quality bar, then I did a deep dive which set me up perfectly for my R&R. I saw how all the frameworks fit together.”

This does not add any value because we designed the program for all managers to do this. This can apply to every manager in the program and demonstrates nothing about your management.

Instead, you need to focus on specific insights you gathered from the frameworks and then the decision you made.

2. Framing progress incorrectly

Managers have talked about their goal in the context of increasing the average quality or productivity of the team. This is not the goal of Manager RemoteCamp.

You should talk about progress in terms of how many ICs have now reached the top performer’s level of quality and productivity.

3. Vague and high level statements

Saying things like: “I coached my ICs.”, “I removed the roadblocks”, “I coached my ICs to be more focused” indicates a lack of real insights.

Since you have spent 4 weeks close to the work, you need to pinpoint the specific insights which are unique to your team.

4. 30 day plans with no details

Throwing in a short sentence with a link to your 30 day plan is not a real 30 day plan. If you have not hit your goal, you need to concisely summarize the important elements of your 30 day plan to hit your goal in the last paragraph.

5. Going over 1 page

1 page means 1 page. This includes the table. If you can’t get everything on one page, ask your coach for help on how to be more concise.

6. Leaving out significant insights

After reading your 1 page summary, evaluators need to know the most significant insights from the past 4 weeks.

If someone reads your summary and thinks you produced weak insights, you either failed to include them or don’t have deep insights.

7. Too many links

If you need your reader to navigate to other pages to get the picture, you have not made your point. Links should be there as an occasional reference to more data.

8. Hiding behind links

Sometimes managers will put 100% of the important insights and decisions into a link and then expect their audience to click through to find what they’re looking for.

Don’t do this. Instead, concisely provide important decisions and provide links if there are additional details the reader may be interested in.

Poor Example: “Link to 30-day plan.”

Coaching: Summarize your 30 day plan in one sentence and then provide a link for reference

2 Slide Deck Anti Patterns:

1. Lots of text

We can tell in half a second if a 2 slide deck is bad just by looking at how much text is there. Managers need to be concise.

In a recent example, a manager had 7 bullet points which could have been consolidated into 2 without losing any meaning.

2. Laundry lists without prioritization

Often managers are putting together a laundry list of insights. This highlights an inability to prioritize. Instead of a laundry list, we want to see the core decision you are focusing on for next week.

It’s ok to list the other insights as secondary but you need to focus on the most important decision.

3. “Keep doing WSPro” as a plan

Managers at every level are expected to continually apply WSPro so saying you are going to keep doing CiCs, Gemba Walks, and Rank and Reviews, is not a plan.

Your decisions for next week should be based on the insights you found from doing WSPro the week before.