THE LEAFLET
January 09 2025
you have a struggling new leader, show up with a draft, don’t get precious about your templates
YOU HAVE A STRUGGLING NEW LEADER
A first question to ask: Do they just not know how to lead?
Leaders’ job descriptions typically don’t contain leadership skills that transfer across domains. Leaders often get selected for proving themselves in different competencies than the ones they need now.
Even when they know better, these new leaders will think their job is something like “devise, roll out, and manage a scripted curriculum / feature like the one you used to build.” But the real job is handling disgruntled adults. Handling disgruntled adults requires a small bundle of skills, skills which can be taught, skills which you, as the leader of this new leader, must teach her.
If your new leader was a coder before, there’s a good chance she’s trying to code (or edit code) instead of trying to manage people. The best way to teach her how to shift this is for you to model it for her, narrating your choices and moves as you make them. You slip into her role while she observes. You tell her what decisions you’re making.
As you’re modeling and narrating your own decisions, prompt her to notice
her bias toward thinking in terms of the technical competencies of her prior role and
that you keep returning instead to the question “What leadership skills should we use to address this shortcoming?”
-ben
Read the rest here.
SHOW UP WITH A DRAFT (FOR PROFICIENCY, POLITICS, AND PACE)
You’ve got a meeting ahead where some kind of brainstorm is going to happen. Or some kind of policy will be debated. No one in the group has been assigned anything except maybe some pre-reading.
Assign yourself the job of showing up with a first draft of whatever might come next. There are at least three good reasons to do this:
Proficiency: Even if you never share the draft with the group, your writing will force you to master the relevant content better than anyone else.
Politics: If you do share the draft with the group, you give yourself a first mover advantage, exerting an anchoring effect on the conversation that follows. The agenda item for the meeting becomes “Your Proposal or Not” or “Your Proposal vs Some Undetermined Other Thing” instead of “What Might We Do?” This gives you power and gives your point of view centrality you might not otherwise have. Unless you’re in a particularly dog-eat-dog kind of workplace, this won’t read as a power move - it will look like you are exercising admirable ownership and responsibility (which you are doing).
Pace/progress: On a “first butterfly” basis, your draft probably sharpens and accelerates the conversation, even in cases where the group quickly decides you were on the wrong track. It’s way clearer and faster to edit or vote on a draft than to discuss an unbounded universe of options lacking defined features.
-eric
Read the rest here.
DON’T GET PRECIOUS ABOUT YOUR TEMPLATES (IN THE MESSY MIDDLE)
I love the early days of a project, when it’s all ugly google docs and impromptu meetings. This is a fun season, one that feels full of possibility.
It can also be a really inefficient season - you’re often digging around looking for that one template you used on that other project. You’re trying to remember that gsheet formula (or the specific prompt you gave Claude to generate that gsheet formula).
With a good ops-y detail-oriented person around, some order will be imposed on these early, clumsy efforts. You’ll find your way to templates that save time for more important thinking and doing.
Most teams I’ve been on fall into a trap though, in their adolescent phase. They get precious about their templates. They lose sight of the thing the templates were supposed to accomplish. This can show up as two distinct failure modes:
1) too little attention, leading to staleness: you barely adjust the template from one use to the next, so that the content in the container becomes stale and easy to ignore
2) too much attention, leading to irrelevant boxchecking: you obsess over the completion of each subsection of the template, even when the current situation doesn’t match the one the template was originally created for.
I see this happen most often with quarterly or annual goal setting. (It shows up sometimes with data tracking, too.) Meeting the stylized criteria of OKRs or KPIs or SMART goals stands in for good, clear thinking about what the heck Must Be True by the end of the time period we’re talking about.
You probably chose this template in the first place because you wanted to do or change something with the information in it. Double check, now: will I do or change anything based on what I put in this template? If not, chuck it.
-eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on faith, hope, and love:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate contest of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we ever do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love.
Novelist Steven Pressfield on self-mastery:
The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them
Philosopher Denise Riley on sharing pain:
Many kindly onlookers will instinctively make use of this formula: ‘I can’t imagine what you are feeling’. There’s a paradox in this remark, for it’s an expression of sympathy, yet in the same breath it’s a disavowal of the possibility of empathy. Undoubtedly it’s very well meant, if understandably fear-filled. People’s intentions are good; a respect for the severity of what they suppose you’re enduring, and so a wish not to pretend to grasp it. Still, I’d like them to try to imagine; it’s not so difficult. Even if it’s right or at any rate unsurprising that those with dead children are regarded with concealed horror, they don’t need to be further shepherded away into the inhuman remote realms of the ‘unimaginable’.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric