Personal weekly summaries are so 2022. There’s a whole other use case that I didn’t touch upon in that article 2 years ago: team or organizational-level summaries.
Wait, what?
Since writing that post, my organization (up to the senior director level) adopted a private weekly summary model. This means that all direct reports (🙋) provide a weekly summary in one document that had strict permissions on it: only our direct manager and direct peers could view, comment, or edit it. Managers are then encouraged, but not required, to do the same for their team(s), ensuring that no one has access to the document outside of their team.
This mechanism resulted in something I call a “pyramid of radical candor” that I now can’t live without. Instead of having to 1:1 with everyone weekly to know what’s on their mind, I read their updates every Monday and use it to schedule my week. But I don’t just read; I engage. I actively comment and get more details asynchronously as needed.
While I still have 1:1s with my peers, they are less critical and less frequent,1 which helps to hold my target of no more than 50% time spent in meetings. When we do meet, we then skip the status update sharing and dive right into problem solving. This results in an effective use of time, every time.2
Pyramids within Pyramids: Pyramids2
But wait, there’s more! If you have reasons to share your org roll-up externally, the leader of that org can filter the document to make an external version. This could be in the form of an email to a DL (similar to how I share my personal weekly summaries), or in the form of another document that is shared with certain individuals or teams. If you’re a platform team, I recommend the former sharing strategy, but if you’re in an organization where different roles report to different leaders, I recommend the latter.3 In this situation, you end up with pyramids within pyramids of radical candor, looking something like this:
Hang on — I have questions…
OK Straker, but that sounds like a lot of process.
It is process — I am not going to deny that. However, it falls within my core value: “I don’t bring process; I bring efficiency.” This process saves me time; I would rather write down my status update once and share that with all of my peers than repeat it verbally in 1:1s every week. Yes, this adds process to the leader of the organization, but it is their job to serve those whom they support after all 😉.
But Straker — I already am doing my own public weekly summary! Does this mean I now have to do two?
Yes, but — I can recommend this as I have lived it. I start my org’s private summary with a link to my public one. I then do not repeat my words, but add-on what I cannot share publicly. Be it difficulty with a problem or person, or a concern about a ball being dropped, I nearly always have more to share. I also do my personal weekly summary on Fridays and my org weekly summary on Monday mornings.
Not only does this space out the process, but it means my personal weekly summary is more focused on wins from the previous week, and my org weekly summary is focused on what’s coming next. In this way, the two compliment one another strongly; ideally, what I set out to do at the beginning of the week feeds my wins at the end of the week. Misses can then either be shared publicly or privately as needed.
Alright Straker, I’m convinced. How do I implement this?
Keep reading, dear reader!
How to Implement
So of course, I went and made 
a new template for you to copy and use. You’ll notice it’s extremely lightweight by design. I leave every person’s update open-ended to use whatever template they like; what matters is participation, not standard templatized updates.
If you have direct access to the doc, you should then subscribe to updates for all comments and text (even if you are the doc owner). This makes it so you get near real-time email notifications when people add their updates and comment on others’. This functionality is pretty hidden in Google Docs’ UI at the time of this writing; see their formal instructions for how to do this.
Now, all you need is a reminder mechanism for everyone to add their updates. If you are using Slack, create a private “staff channel for the people who need this reminder.4 Then, create a simple Slack workflow that sends a weekly reminder to this channel on Monday mornings to go put in your updates. That’s it; it’s that simple!
Conclusion
In summary, if you are in a remote environment and/or in an organization where different roles report to different leaders — both are true at Zillow — this is the best mechanism I have found to cut down on the cons of these approaches. It directly combats insular communication within an organization that isn’t shared across functional boundaries. Give it a try and let me know how it goes!
Footnotes
- I find this a useful compromise between the “tech norm” and Jensen Huang’s no 1:1 policy ⚖️. ↩︎
- As a reminder, Zillow follows my remote manifesto, starting meetings at the :05 and :35 minute mark. This means most 1:1s are “only” 25 minutes long. ↩︎
- If both situations apply to you, the broad, public sharing strategy takes priority, but consider both. ↩︎
- Honestly, this should exist already for other reasons that I hope are obvious! ↩︎
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