THE LEAFLET

January 11 2024

finding shadow sides, ride alongs, against ellipses

FINDING SHADOW SIDES

A useful thing to do once you’re in the messy middle of your organization’s life (really any time after the founding), is write a companion piece to your core values that captures their shadow sides.

What happens with each value if it is overdone? Your answer to this probably stems from real experience with your team. You’ve seen things go south, at small or large scale, because someone leaned too hard into a virtue and missed a chance to act with greater subtlety and skill. A lawyer exercised Responsibility so diligently that she killed a viable project before it could come to life. A teacher practiced so much Compassion that he let a student wriggle out of that uncomfortable (but safe) place where the richest learning happens. A manager so thoroughly embraced Ownership that their direct reports missed the chance to lead in their own right. 

Read the rest here.

RIDE ALONGS

Managers often find themselves at a loss when their feedback falls flat and their people don’t improve. These managers don’t observe their people in real time. Maybe more importantly, they don’t have their people observe them doing the thing they want with the right moves. 

In much knowledge economy and creative work, you can reasonably assume that someone can’t replicate what you do just by watching you. But this is often wrong! Even idiosyncratic stuff like writing emails in your voice or drafting legal documents can be done well, even beautifully, when someone has the chance to ride along and watch how you do it. 

Tools like Loom make these ride-alongs pretty easy to achieve asynchronously, too. If it seems like someone you manage has hit a plateau they can’t get beyond, let them ride along while you make the right moves. 

Read the rest here.

AGAINST ELLIPSES

In email and Slack I found myself annoyed or even outraged when a teammate would close a sentence with those dang dots. They were so hard to interpret! They felt slippery and suggestive and vaguely critical - passive aggression brought to you by e e cummings.

My sleep-deprived preferences from 2020 aside, if you find yourself closing out statements with ellipses, consider replacing them. If you want to convey uncertainty, use a question mark. Ask a question. If you want to make a suggestion, use a period. Make a statement. Have the courage of your convictions. 

Otherwise, you might just be relying on those dots to convey latent anxiety of your own that leaves your reader mostly powerless to respond…  

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats with one of the company’s rules for storytelling:

You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

Teacher Jane Stembridge in a memo to incoming teachers to Mississippi schools during Freedom Summer:

Honesty is an attitude toward life which is communicated by everything you do…It means that you will not “act” a part in the attempt to compensate for all they’ve endured in Mississippi. You can’t compensate for that and they don’t want you to try. It would not be real, and the greatest contribution that you can make to them is to be real.

British leftist Nick Cohen on biases we live within:

Never mistake your Twitter feed for your country.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric