THE LEAFLET

December 12 2024

seeing what culture has taken root, 3 moves for delegation, write each sentence on its own line

SEEING WHAT CULTURE HAS TAKEN ROOT (LOOK AT THE MEDIAN AND MODE)

Your die-hard culture bearers and your disgruntled insurgents can be very distracting. They can mislead you as you try to get a handle on what kind of culture has taken root across your team and organization. Often their voices are louder, their moves are flashier, and their needs are greater. Wise leaders regularly put attention on these tails of the distribution - the very best performers and the folks who are struggling the most once they’ve decided what needs to change. 

If, however, you’re at the stage where you’re just looking for a diagnostic, a read of the room, try to screen out the people on the ends of the spectrum. Look at your median and your mode: the average performer and the most common (kind of) performer. What are the default moves of these people? Distill their behaviors, their revealed preferences, into 4-5 words and you have a rough summary of what your organization’s core values actually are.

These median and modal folks offer you the most telling indication of how your culture is understood when you aren’t there to preach about it. They show you the way we actually do things around here. 

-eric

Read the rest here.

3 MOVES FOR SUCCESSFUL DELEGATION

How can you (a) get your people to meet your expectations of quality (b) with as little input from you as possible?

Three moves worth making:

1. Promise (and deliver) a check in with a living rubric — Tell them you will be checking in on the delegated task (then actually do check in). Create an inventory/checklist/rubric for gauging the quality of the work. If them saying “I’m on track” isn’t reliable, add to the rubric. A regular cadence of spot-checking for quality can build confidence for both of you - you do this not as a “gotcha” exercise - you do it because you genuinely want them to own this thing and the satisfaction and power that go with that ownership.

2. Turn standard 1-on-1 meetings into live observations or spot-checks of things needing to be evaluated. Leaders who switch from weekly hour-long meetings to monthly half-day shadowing get to do this all the time! They can’t possibly live up to every micro-level, ineffable standard you have and those standards might not be readily captured in a rubric. Instead of always trying to grade work post hoc, be in it together.

3. Use a “safe handoff” protocol: They must watch you do the thing in real time. Then you watch them. Rinse repeat until it’s no longer needed. 

-ben

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TRY WRITING EACH SENTENCE ON ITS OWN LINE

Verlyn Klinkenborg wrote one of my favorite books about writing, appropriately titled Several short sentences about writing. It hits a sweet spot I’m especially fond of: practical and profound. You get stuff you can try as soon as you close the covers. And you get stuff you can wrestle with long beyond that. 

One of the moves he suggests that I quite like is drafting your prose as if it were some kind of poem or legal brief - every sentence gets its own line and a carriage return after. So your writing looks like this:

This is my next sentence.

And this is the sentence after that.

Oh my, here is another sentence.

Klinkenborg’s take is that your sentences should be wasteless, pleasing, and complete units of thought. Making them stand alone, each on its own line, lets you see if they meet that standard. 

Sometimes, part of your job is writing to the team about a recurring event or a familiar topic. Using Klinkenborg’s tactic can help you freshen and free your writing. You may be less likely to drive into the big hungry ditch of cliche.

-eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Poet David Whyte in conversation with Tim Ferriss about maturity:

I think one of the great disciplines of a human life is to catch up with yourself. This part of you that lies below the horizon of your understanding is the part of you that’s already matured into the next dispensation of your existence. It doesn’t need the same things that you think you need at the surface of your life now. And so you know intuitively that if you drop below that horizon, your surface life will fall apart, and so might many of your friendships or relationships, you don’t know, they may or they may not, but you’re afraid. You’re afraid that you’re putting things in jeopardy, and this is why we turn our face away from that edge of maturation.

A pile of top scientists on a major risk, caught years in advance:

Unless compelling evidence emerges that mirror life would not pose extraordinary dangers, we believe that mirror bacteria and other mirror organisms, even those with engineered biocontainment measures, should not be created.

Journalist David Halberstam on changes in the NBA in the late 1970s in The Breaks of the Game:

All this took place in less than a decade - sudden growth, the shift in values from those of pure sports to entertainment and advertising. What had happened to basketball was typical of altogether too much happening the new American scheme of things: there was more, but it was less.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric