THE LEAFLET

April 18 2024

most important task, pizza culture, how to comment on docs

A LEADER’S MOST IMPORTANT TASK

I coach some people several times a week, others once a month, and I occasionally have clients who hire me for a single, one-off session with no follow-up. This last group forces me to ask myself, “What is the single highest-leverage leader behavior that would radically transform their team’s performance?” It’s shocking how often, across wildly different contexts, the answer is the same.

Consider: What was the last positive thought you had about somebody on your team?

Before reading further, text or email that person this thought. Take less than 60 seconds to send that message now. And, if it feels strange, feel free to blame it on this post (“I was just reading a blog, which triggered me to tell you: ….”)

[Do that now.]

Now ask yourself what downstream effects on that person’s performance you may see over the next week.

Read the rest here.

LET’S TALK ABOUT PIZZA

Suppose your organization has ritualized pizza parties. Consider the difference between: 

- Here, we have pizza parties every Friday

- Here, we have pizza parties every time we accomplish X milestone

The former definitely improves morale, builds connections, and makes people like your organization more. The latter, however, builds culture. Improving culture, by definition, improves outcomes and/or performance. 

Any time a leader does something to improve morale, there’s an opportunity to improve culture by connecting that thing to performance.

The nice thing about culture is that people’s motivation/vibe-enhancement is not dependent on the leader’s personality. I’ve seen plenty of organizations with salty leaders and joyous teams; I’ve also seen plenty of organizations with effervescent leaders and laser-focused teams. It all works. 

The other nice thing about culture is that it does not depend on the leader’s own affect; in high-culture organizations, leaders can have a stressful week and the vibe of the organization won’t shift because morale is tied to things going well at work not how much happiness orchestration the leader is doing for the team.

Read the rest here.

A GUIDE FOR COMMENTING ON DOCUMENTS

More and more, we lead via comments on a Google Doc, so I wanted to pass along a pair of questions I encourage all leaders to ask themselves before ever giving a piece of document feedback.

1. What is the single most important thing they need in order to improve? Always, your goal is to maximize your impact per leadership calorie expended. Thus it’s important that, before you leave a single comment, you identify in your own mind the highest-leverage piece of feedback you can give. This is doubly important because, in addition to (by definition) being the one piece of feedback that will most improve the document you’re looking at, you’re also creating an enduring mantra for teammates to repeat to themselves every time they sit down to create something similar.

As soon as you’ve clarified that for yourself, now it’s time to get inside their head and ask…

2. What is it that they want from me out of this feedback? Maybe they’re feeling insecure and are hoping for some affirmation. Maybe they’re set on the bigger picture of the document and are only open to hearing about minor tweaks. Or maybe they are unsure about the quality of the thinking and aren’t ready to begin considering the presentation or the writing. Whatever your teammates are hoping for, these wants are going to be shouting in their ears the entire time; you need to address these wants before your teammates will be open to hearing your bottom-line feedback. 

How you deliver the thing they need depends on (your best guess of) what they want.

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Novelist Martin MacInnes on acknowledgement in the wonderful In Ascension:

Everyone should be acknowledged. Everyone should be missed when they are not right there with you because of what they carry, this very distinct way they have of bearing themselves that is like no one else and that is built by everything they have done and everything they have seen.

Biographer Jonathan Eig on Cassius Clay’s insight:

It was all by design, as he said later. Angry fighters don’t think clearly. They don’t stick to their plans. They get frustrated, sloppy. Clay knew that Liston was sensitive about his image, that he yearned for respect, and so Clay worked to deny him that respect. By labeling Liston an ugly bear, Clay was tweaking his opponent’s most sensitive nerve…

Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson on greatness:

Great men, great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric