THE LEAFLET

August 29 2024

reveal the hidden x-th value, decision rights fight bureaucracy, the bias against introverts

REVEAL THE HIDDEN X-TH VALUE

If you defined a set of core values for your team at the outset - bravo, leader. Now you’re somewhere in the messy middle of your work. It’s worth taking a beat and asking, “what is the hidden x-th value of my team?”

You can ask this question descriptively and prescriptively. Descriptively, you’re looking at the work as it has unfolded. You’re looking for the move your very best people consistently make - the thing they do that gets results. That thing is an illustration of the xth value.

Prescriptively, you’re asking - what move is missing from the repertoire of even my best people? What is our current context / market / goal asking of us now that our founding context / market / goal wasn’t? The move that answers that call, that meets that demand, represents your x-th value.

Once you have a sense of what that value is, it’s a good idea to call your people’s attention to it. You don’t have to officially add the 4th value to the team’s existing set of core values. You probably should say “hey, this is a key to our success. Person Y does this consistently - here’s an example. I’m going to be looking for this from all of you. Be like Person Y [in this regard].”

This is also a task you can assign your top people. Have them identify the 4th value and share with you their plan for scaling the practice of that value across their teams. Don’t let the xth value stay a secret or become an insiders’ password. Open source it.

Read the rest here.

DECISION RIGHTS DISRUPT BUREAUCRACY

One of the more painful features of bureaucracy is dreadfully slow approval. It takes forever to get the green light to do stuff. Probably you need multiple approvals - it’s not enough for your boss to say yes. They have to get the yes of a committee and some combination of their bosses. This all takes time. All those committees and bosses’ bosses have other priorities. Your thing is important to you - who knows if it’s important to them?

The layered approval might not even be the worst version of this problem. Your org might not require that many layers of approval; maybe you’re pretty decentralized and most people in fact have the power to decide all by their lonesome. This situation can feel and actually be pretty bureaucratic, still, if these decision rights aren’t clear. You can find yourself in a tragedy of the epistemic commons - thoughtful takes and input seep in from more and more people until the commons are flooded. And there’s still no decision. You can ask yourself - how are we so smart and so dang slow at the same time?

Wherever your org sits on the Grand Spectrum of Bureaucracy, a good use of leader energy is scouting for and naming all the places where decision rights aren’t clear. It’s probably better, net net, to have named The Wrong Decider than to have no named decider at all. 

Read the rest here.

HUMAN TEAMS ARE BIASED AGAINST INTROVERTS

Recently I’ve been thinking alongside other leaders about how much responsibility we have to do something about this. My current answer is something like, “make the inherent, required extraversion of team life safe, accessible, and learnable.”

 This is different than “apologize for and try to shrink the extraversion of team life.”

Your people need to talk to each other. Teams have to do things that are awkward or unusual in other contexts. (Delivering direct, unsolicited feedback is one example.) Building a culture worth belonging to often means creating rituals that put people briefly on stage or put parts of their relationships to each other on stage. Lots of people very reasonably dislike being on stage at all, ever. 

This can be a thing, among many, that it’s worth a leader being direct about, to the point of didacticism or darkness. 

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Writer and perfumier Sasha Chapin on being yourself:

You say that you are curious about people, interested in trying new things, that you value beauty and novelty, that you want to finish this project. Well, okay: is there evidence of this on your calendar this week? If not, I’m sure there are reasons for this that come to mind. But perhaps these reasons are not genuine, or not the core issue. Maybe it’s a matter of gut feeling. And perhaps that feeling is derived from an incorrect lesson you didn’t choose to learn.

Writer Kathryn Schulz on being wrong:

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin quoting Teddy Roosevelt:

After a quarter of a century in politics, Roosevelt observed, he had found that change was realized by “men who take the next step; not those who theorize about the 200th step.”

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric