Workplace Skills in 10 Minutes

One idea from McKinsey's Barbara Minto that outweighs everything else on this page: state the conclusion first, then support it. Most people narrate their thinking in the order they thought it — background, analysis, obstacles, and finally the point. Your listener spends the whole time anxious, wondering where this is going. Flip it.

✗ "So I looked into the vendor issue. Their API changed in
   March, and our integration used the old auth flow, and the
   docs were outdated, and support took a week to reply, so
   basically... the migration will be late."

✓ "The migration will be two weeks late. Main cause: the
   vendor broke their API in March. I have a fix; I need one
   decision from you about the fallback."

Conclusion → 2-3 supporting points → what you need. That's
the whole pyramid. It works in emails, standups, and answers
to "got a minute?"

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. Honest take: the acronym itself is filler — the entire value is in M and T. If you can't say how it's measured and by when, you don't have a goal, you have a wish. The other three letters exist to survive the meeting where someone asks "why this number?"

✗ "Improve customer response times this quarter."

✓ "Cut median first-response time from 9h to 4h by March 31,
   measured on the support dashboard, without adding headcount."

Test it: could a stranger tell, on April 1st, whether you
succeeded? If yes, it's SMART. If it needs your explanation,
it isn't.

Situation, Task, Action, Result — the standard structure for answering "tell me about a time when…" in interviews. But it's not just for interviews: it's how you make any story about your work land. Two rules people miss: Action gets 60% of the airtime, and it's "I", not "we".

✗ "We had a big outage and it was really stressful but we all
   pulled together and eventually fixed it and learned a lot."

✓ S: "Payment service went down on Black Friday, 2am."
✓ T: "I was on call — restore service, then explain it."
✓ A: "I rolled back the deploy, isolated the bad migration,
     wrote the incident doc, and added a canary check."
✓ R: "Back up in 40 minutes. Same failure class: zero
     repeats since."

Situation, Behavior, Impact. The discipline is describing the behavior you observed instead of the character trait you inferred. "You're careless" is an attack on identity — instant defensiveness. "The report had three broken figures" is a fact — you can work with a fact.

✗ "You're being unprofessional in meetings."

✓ "In Monday's client call (S), you answered Slack messages
   while the client was talking (B). They noticed — and asked
   me afterwards if we were still committed (I)."

Then stop talking. Let them respond. SBI opens a
conversation; a verdict closes it.

Managing up isn't flattery. It's one rule — your manager should never be surprised — plus a boring, reliable update format. Surprises make managers micromanage; a steady signal buys you autonomy. The format that works is three lines: Done, Next, Blocked.

✓ Weekly update (3 minutes to write):
  DONE: checkout A/B shipped — +4% conversion.
  NEXT: mobile flow; draft to design by Thursday.
  BLOCKED: need staging DB access (asked infra Tuesday,
  no reply — can you nudge?)

"Blocked" is the highest-value line. A blocker your manager
learns about in week one is a favor; the same blocker
discovered in week four is a failure. Escalating early isn't
weakness — sitting on it is.

A meeting exists to make a decision. Status can be a message; brainstorming works better with pre-work; "alignment" is usually a decision nobody wrote down. Three habits fix most calendars, and none of them need permission from above.

✓ 1. Agenda is a question, not a topic.
     "Q3 roadmap" → "Which two of these five projects do
     we fund in Q3?"
✓ 2. End with owners.
     "Ana books the vendor call by Fri; Sam drafts the
     migration doc by Tue."
✓ 3. Send the decision in writing within an hour.
     Two sentences. Whoever writes it, decides what was
     decided.

Assume your reader is on a phone, between meetings, giving you eight seconds. The military calls the fix BLUF — bottom line up front. It's the Pyramid Principle applied to a message: the ask goes in the first line, ideally in the subject.

✗ Subject: "Question"
   "Hope you're well! So we've been working on the Q3 launch
   and a few things came up with legal that we wanted to run
   by you when you get a chance..."

✓ Subject: "Need your sign-off on Q3 launch copy by Thu"
   "Legal flagged two claims (doc linked, comments inline).
   Approve or edit by Thursday EOD and we stay on schedule.
   Context below if useful."

One message, one ask. Two asks = the second one dies.

Every yes is a hidden no to something you already committed to — the person asking just can't see your plate. So don't refuse the person; show them the trade-off and hand back the choice. "Yes, if" does the work of "no" without the friction.

✗ "Sure, I'll squeeze it in."   (the lie that breaks Friday)

✓ "Yes, if we push the report to Monday — this takes the
   same two days. Which matters more?"
✓ "I can't take the full audit, but I can review the
   findings for an hour on Thursday."
✓ (to your manager) "That puts me at three P1s. Which one
   should slip?"

The whole page in nine lines. Bookmark, steal, adapt.

# Any update, any audience
Conclusion first → 2-3 reasons → what you need.

# Any goal
A stranger can tell if you hit it, and by when.

# Any story about your work
20s context → what YOU did (with numbers) → result.

# Any hard feedback
Facts you observed, impact it had. No adjectives.

# Any manager
Done / Next / Blocked, weekly. No surprises, ever.

# Any meeting
It answers a question, ends with owners, decision in
writing within the hour.

# Any email
The ask is the subject line. One message, one ask.

# Any overload
"Yes, if ___. Which matters more?"

None of this requires seniority — that's the quiet advantage. These habits are how people get senior. Pick one, use it this week, come back for the next.