Weekend newsletter #10

The best of what I've read this week, about operations, training and education, communication, and more

Hello and Happy April!

I hope you all survived any April Fools’ Day jokes. My favorite was the Kyle Jepson HubSpot certification, though I was sad I could not actually earn the certificate to post about on April 1 like the Academy instructors! I did not see it as a gag in the actual Academy content! :)

Onto the resources!

What I've been reading, watching, and listening to:

LinkedIn

• Kim Scott of Radical Candor posted about putting great people into the wrong roles.

• Gaby Israel Grinberg of Proofpoint Marketing has an important message: 𝐈𝐅 𝐈𝐓’𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐃𝐎𝐂𝐔𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐃, 𝐕𝐈𝐒𝐈𝐁𝐋𝐄 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐎𝐏𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐙𝐄𝐃, 𝐈𝐓 𝐃𝐎𝐄𝐒𝐍’𝐓 𝐄𝐗𝐈𝐒𝐓.

• Gregory Dirick posted about the importance of naming structures and platform adoption.

• Justin Graci posted about various awesome things many people at HubSpot were working on in March.

• Wes Kao posted about how to ensure your employer is on board with you creating and teaching a paid class on your own.

• Sara McNamara posts about how enablement is very important in ops.

• Melissa McCready posts about using ‘soft’ skills to react well to difficult situations or feedback.

• Darrell Alfonso posted insights from the marketing ops vs RevOps event.

• Shadab Khan posted about why people still use Salesforce even if they dislike it.

Twitter

• Wes Kao, co-founder of Maven which I use for my courses, talks about documentating to relieve stress on your memory. Thanks to Leslie for the shoutout!

• Brooklin Nash talks about how they made documentation less difficult at his company, Beam Content.

Articles, Reports, Guides, Newsletters

• The Beautiful Mess newsletter talks about the problem of thinking that an intricate, tangled problem can be solved with “just” one solution

• What Works: How the Push for Efficiency Changes Us

• Harvard Business Review ($) discusses 5 Strategies to Empower Employees to Make Decisions

• Harvard Business Review ($) gives 6 Questions to Ask Yourself When You’re Frustrated with Your Team. Including when you’re frustrated that they are not documenting their work, which is why I saved the article, for class help ;)

• TaskRay: Are you seen as a cost or an investment?

• Fearless Culture talks about 5 habits that are holding your team back and how to fix each issue

Podcasts & Webinars

• Operations Nation published the recent documentation webinar from Riley McGhee on YouTube

• Travis Scott’s Winding Road podcast episode gives tips about being a better writer

• Kevin Dunn’s Agency Unfiltered podcast interviews Yamini Rangan, CEO of HubSpot

• OpsCast talks with Scott Vaughan about improving marketing ops’s relationship with the CMO

• Ilise Benun talks with Jenny Blake on her Marketing Mentor podcast, and of course, documentation appears in their conversations! Jenny recommends having contractors or anyone you hire to be required to document their work as one of their work items within the first few months, and how it is dangerous to have all the information about running your business only in your head so no one can help if you get sick or otherwise need help quickly.

Featured Event or Class:

• April 5: USING CLEAR INTENTIONS TO DRIVE OPERATIONAL SUCCESS from Drift’s Chain Reaction event, Session #3. You may need to use an incognito window to get the bot registration to work correctly. Note that the calendar invite has a different session name.

• April 25: Efficiency in RevOps from OpStars and Wizard of Ops. If you are near Silicon Valley, California, this event of RevOps experts is worth checking out in person!

• New HubSpot (real) class: Creating Internal Efficiency with Operations Hub. Marc’s video promoting it is also entertaining!!

Featured Book:

• Book recommendations from another book - Jenny Blake’s Free Time recommended Laura Huang’s Well-Balanced MBA reading list for books from a wider variety of authors than usually seen in these types of lists. It could be your reading list for 1-2 years, like an MBA! I may revisit the titles I own and will be requesting some of the others from the library! :)

Organizational Tip:

• Because I am bad at answering questions off the top of my head and my mind often goes blank when under this kind of pressure, I have been using and expanding a document for common job/other interview questions in STAR format where I can easily navigate to the right question quickly without a lot of scrolling (using headlines/anchor links similar to my documentation template’s table of contents). I am very grateful that all types of interviews are remote and I can use notes on my screen, so I no longer have to memorize all these answers like back in the in-person days!!

Featured Job:

• Ben Donahower of No Bounds Digital is looking for a HubSpot Administrator

• HubSpot is looking for a Senior manager of podcast strategy and ops

• SmartBug is looking for a VP of marketing.

Self-Promotion of the Week:

• One-day documentation writing workshop, April 20, 9-11:30AM Pacific time. Would love for smaller businesses, even one-person businesses, to join this session to help me tailor a future version of the workshop!

• One-day documentation system workshop, April 27, 9-11AM Pacific time. This workshop is more suitable for people who manage or influence the documentation for a team or across a company.

• If you enroll in a workshop and then decide to take the full course, I will discount the workshop cost from the full course cost.

Thanks for reading! Please comment below with anything you'd like to see from these weekly newsletters.

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