THE LEAFLET

March 20 2025

love enough to rewire, situation crafting, boss as principal

LOVING YOUR PEOPLE ENOUGH TO “REWIRE” THEM

A deceptively simple fact animates a large number of social phenomena: the way people think of us changes our behavior and shapes our identity.

If we are labeled “high achievers,” our teachers treat us as high achievers. We think of ourselves as high achievers. We act like high achievers. When we achieve highly, we see it as a foregone conclusion. If we have a fixed mindset, our “high achiever” identity becomes something we cling to, and we never take chances on things that challenge us for fear of losing that identity.

A similar thing happens if we’re labeled as “poor achievers,” or “bad,” or “stupid,” and so on. We’re treated that way, we think of ourselves that way, we act that way, and in the end, we are that way. It becomes our identity. If we have a fixed mindset, we don’t believe there’s anything we can do to overcome this, and we stop trying.

So how do people form their opinions of us and decide what their expectations should be? It isn’t pretty. A lot of it is based on snap judgements, conscious and unconscious prejudice, and faulty assumptions. We fail to understand the impact our beliefs have on others. And the fundamental attribution error — a cognitive bias that causes us to attribute people’s actions to their personalities or character traits rather than factoring in external circumstances — means most of us rarely pause to consider things from another’s perspective or wonder if we should give someone else the benefit of the doubt before drawing a harsh conclusion.

I’m not asking you to play psychologist and figure out how and why your colleagues formed negative beliefs about themselves. I’m suggesting you rewire the internal circuitry that tells them how to think about themselves now. I’m asking you to love them enough to put in the work to reframe their identities as high achievers. If you expect them to do well, others will too. They’ll be treated that way, they’ll act that way, and eventually they will be that way. Resetting someone’s expectations of themselves changes their identity and boosts their performance.

-ben

Read the rest here.

“SITUATION CRAFTING” TO TURN AROUND A FAILING EMPLOYEE

Helping managers learn how to flip their thinking from “fire” to “grow” is an integral part of my coaching. One great coaching technique (championed by Geoffrey Cohen in his book Belonging) is called “situation crafting.” All too often, we use vagueness to preserve obstacles in our path. This is simple human nature, but it can be overcome. In a situation-crafting exercise, I ask a series of increasingly specific questions to break down obstacles into ever smaller and more concrete pieces. Ultimately we arrive at a future where “impossible” has been removed as an option.

What does this look like in action? When I start working with a client who has a struggling employee, one of the interactions we have typically goes something like this:

“How long until you fire this employee?” I’ll often start with. 

“Three to six months,” is the most common response.

“So regardless of their performance, they’re going to be here, contributing at this company for the next quarter- to half-year, correct?” I’ll ask.

This elicits—without fail—a defeated-sounding, “Yes.”

At this point I help my clients transform the upcoming three to six months from a phase to endure to a genuine opportunity to turn things around. “Do you really want them screwing up for that long?” I’ll ask. “Wouldn’t it be better if you were able to extract more value out of their work? Wouldn’t teaching them to be more productive support a tremendous savings of your own time and money as well?” This set of questions almost always resets the room with the tone of inspiration and builds to a conversation about creating a new relationship with that employee from the ground up.

-ben

Read the rest here.

BOSS AS PRINCIPAL; EMPLOYEES AS STUDENTS

Let’s imagine that you’re a school principal. If you have 100 students with D’s and F’s, you’d conclude you had problems that were bigger than any one student, right? You’d try to figure out why they’re failing. Who is experiencing trouble at home? Who has undiagnosed learning disabilities or eyesight issues? Are some working to support their families or providing childcare for siblings? And have others simply fallen behind in the material and can’t catch up? 

It’s important to ask similar questions in the workplace, implicitly or explicitly. People are people, and knowing how to help them through hard times is one of the ways a good leader does her best, most empathetic work. If you’re a manager or employer, once you’ve gained your employees’ trust that you’ve created an environment where you’ll help them grow and won’t give up on them, you can start to act on what you’ve learned about them. Are they a caregiver? What stresses are they under at home?

If you have power and authority to help them, do so. It really can be that simple: help them navigate HR; work with them on accommodations; improve their ergonomics. Change their schedule. Offer them additional leave. Advocate for improved parental leave policies, hybrid work from home rules, and flex days.

That’s the macro level. On the micro level, here’s what you want to do with every struggling employee:

• Target specific things that are gumming up the works.

• Make sure employees know that changes in strategy do not indicate failure.

• Reevaluate expectations and plans that may not be working as initially envisioned.

-ben

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

COO Anna Weldon on misconceptions about culture:

Organizations don’t “have” a culture, they “are” a culture. Teams are more than just a collection of individuals through their norms, habits, and behaviors—that’s culture. Culture is not actually that complicated, but we make it complicated. It’s easy to get lost trying to make a nebulous “good work culture” that exists separate from and apart from the work.

Investor and blogger Auren Hoffman on the limits of EQ:

"The more EQ the better" is not true. Reality: EQ is like sunshine - you want a good amount of it but too much will give you skin cancer.

Poet Jack Gilbert on Rome, raccoons, and insisting:

Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound / of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls / of the garbage tub is more than the stir / of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not / enough. We die and are put in the earth forever. / We should insist while there is still time …

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric