THE LEAFLET

March 27 2025

what a goal can do, unpacking the conspiratorial “they”, why I avoid “manager”

ONE IMPORTANT THING A GOAL CAN DO

If a leader doesn’t clarify what success looks like and get the team to agree, people's assumptions about what constitutes success are often too low. They formulate their assumptions based on their assessment of their own capacity. In my experience, that assessment is always an underestimate. They assume too little of themselves.

A goal is valuable because it prompts you to surprise yourself. You can do better and do more than you might have thought if you were being strictly actuarial or historically focused. Put differently: without a good goal that a leader maintains as a focus for the team, people benchmark to themselves… and not the best of themselves. 

I tend to ask: don't you want to know if you’re actually underperforming? Don't you want to know what you're capable of at the individual level? Of course, at the team level, if you've got a bunch of people consistently underperforming their best, you have a resource problem. This is the kind of problem a leader is typically tasked with fixing.

The very presence of a shared goal can prevent all kinds of waste that is really draining for employees. Absent a goal, you’ll see undue time, cash, and energy spent on arguments and workplace politics. A goal can helpfully simplify the life of the organization and channel the energies of your people, so that the same volume of inputs from them (hours, meetings, etc) generates much better outputs. Outputs they might not have thought they were capable of.

-ben

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UNPACKING THE CONSPIRATORIAL “THEY” TO INCREASE YOUR POWER

Leaders sometimes attribute an unhelpful circumstance, pattern, or policy to an ambiguous “they” or a big, immovable system. This could be as large as “capitalism” or “this administration”; it could be as small as a 5-person board of elites that regulates your organization’s work or the nearby franchise of a much larger company. This can erode the leader’s (and organization’s) power, ironically ceding MORE power to whatever institutions or systems appear to be obstacles.

Instead of conceding defeat and congratulating yourself on your ability to see the stubbornness of big bureaucracies, ask: Who is a local actor you can talk to, learn the first name of, find common cause with? Sometimes you’ll be surprised to find that this person, the closest thing you have to a face of / voice for / representative of The Big System, wants an outcome similar to the one you want. They may be in the game for similar reasons and share some core values with you. Your appearance in a friendly and collaborative posture helps and surprises them. Now there’s a chance to build something together instead of a) you lobbing anonymous complaints in one direction and b) them sending boilerplate in the other.

A leader often has a dual responsibility - to manage the performance and experience of their team doing the work right here at hand and to address external stuff - policies, competitors, vendors, partners out there beyond our walls. If you’ve been promoted because you were quite good at the first category of stuff - the work right here at hand - the external category can be an opaque, intimidating one you’d prefer to ignore or assume is immutable. This risk is especially high if you’re working across a partisan or political divide.

Shrinking the big system or immovable institution to a super small number of people you can meet and cultivate can make this intimidating part of the work tractable to start (there’s a thing you can do with the resources you have) and effective over time (the things you’re doing make a difference that’s worth the cost of doing them).

Shrink the big, amorphous “they” to “Terrance in District 7”. My hunch is that this tactic becomes more valuable, if more challenging, as organizations gradually wrap themselves in thicker layers of AI. Finding the human you can build a tie with will serve you even more than it did before.

-eric

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WHY I AVOID THE WORD “MANAGER”

“Manager” is a word that I prefer to never use. It's one of those words like “professionalism” or “unprofessional” - what we value most about them is their ambiguity. When we say, for example,
“we need you to manage this problem,” there's some reason why we’re not saying “solve the problem.” In organizational leadership, when you're talking about a supervisor, a person who is responsible for the work of another, we miss conveying that responsibility entirely by saying “this person manages somebody else.”

“Manage” is softer, broader, and vaguer than “takes responsibility for”, “supports”, “coaches”, “improves”, “develops”, or “even supervises”. It obscures those concrete responsibilities.

Some would argue that “lead” instead of “manage” is just as ambiguous. But for me, leading someone profoundly implies that you are changing this person's behavior to make them more effective. 

I sense that a lot of the people who seem to want me to use “manager” are looking for a way to talk about a leadership job without acknowledging the power inherent in such a job. The pro of that is that they're not letting that power go to their head. But they’re inviting a different, classic problem. It is a mistake to ignore that you have power when you legitimately are given it over another person's workflow and decisions and therefore their psyche for a good portion of the week and to some extent their life path as a result. Anybody reasonably new to a leadership role would want to avoid thinking of all those things. It’s intimidating.

A shrewd leader will assume that everybody new to leadership will want to avoid the full scope of that responsibility. So perhaps by default, we should assume that anybody who has not been a leader before who is given responsibility to supervise another person will want to be and identify as a manager, rather than a leader.

And it’s probably wise for those who are put in those positions to recognize that  perhaps coming with the desire to be a manager is a privileged avoidance of what is very clear and unavoidable on the supervisee side. The supervisee know that the supervisor has startling amounts of structural and informal power over them.

-ben

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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