THE LEAFLET

November 07 2024

building relationships by doing, ambition masking cynicism, two radical questions

BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS BY DOING A SHARED THING

Bill Cunningham, famed coach to Silicon Valley founders, recommended shared projects for building relationships between people, especially people who might otherwise be at odds with one another. If it’s going to be useful for your team for two people to have a strong rapport, to know each other’s moves and operate with higher than average trust, give them a goal they have to achieve together. 

The language of psychotherapy has infiltrated our day to day diction, especially in pro-social and left-coded workplaces. Leaders often believe - in good faith - that time, vulnerability, and conversation are the essential ingredients for a strong working relationship. They assume that trust won’t take hold between teammates without these ingredients - the ingredients, it turns out, of talk therapy.

My experience has been that this is misleading. Rather than directing teammates to stare at each other (which can be mortifying or boring or annoying, depending on the personalities involved), you’ll probably build more trust and get more done for your team’s mission if you steer your folks to look out together at a common goal.

Ben and I are advocates for laying this all out, by default. You don’t have to arrange the collaboration as a sneaky diplomatic maneuver. You can tell the two people that you’re having them work together on this thing, and that one reason for that is you want them to have a stronger working relationship. 

Read the rest here.

AVOID AMBITION AS A MASK FOR CYNICISM

In K-12 education, in electoral politics, in public health, and in philanthropy I’ve seen a distressing tendency among leaders who have signed up to attack really hard problems. Some of these leaders lose the belief that they can make headway on the piece of the problem that is right at hand. So many have tried before and failed, maybe we’ve also tried and failed. We can’t make it happen for the kids in this classroom / the voters in this precinct / the non-profits in this city - look at these giant forces arrayed against us! 

This is a pretty ugly thing to admit to oneself and maybe even uglier to say out loud. So instead of admitting this and saying it, the jaded leader looks out at a scale much bigger than the problem at hand. They look at the giant forces. They get swept up in systems change or policy questions or macroeconomic fantasies. Teaching the kids to read (these kids, this semester, in these chairs) gets lost in a quest to upend capitalism (or structural racism or maybe just the current school board).

This is a vote for housekeeping. The leaders I’ve seen make the most impressive pushes on the macro forces were true believers in micro-problem solving. They built a great product for a specific group of customers. They carried a classroom in a Title I school to stellar end of year results. They routed one lousy bill through the state legislature on a very unsexy issue. 

Ambition was a fuel for their optimism, not a mask for their cynicism. They built small things that proved what was possible for their own teams and that gave them license, over time, to build big things that changed what was possible for everyone else.

Read the rest here.

TWO RADICAL QUESTIONS FROM JAMES HOLLIS

In A Life of Meaning, Jungian therapist James Hollis prompts his readers to ask themselves:

Who am I apart from my history, my roles, my commitments?

and

If I’m not here just to be adapted to the world that I receive, what am I here to serve and what wants to enter the world through me?

These are rather radical questions. If your organization is somewhere in its “messy middle”, they can be useful ones to gnaw on, swapping out “me” and “my” for “us” and “our”. Maybe have some of your culture bearers take a crack at 1-page answers to each. 

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Poet and science writer Helen Macdonald on gaps:

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

Crime novelist Chuck Hogan on martyrdom:

Sometimes the most difficult decision is to not martyr yourself for someone, but instead to choose to live for them. Because of them.

Wag Mark Twain on measurement:

It was so cold that if the thermometer had been an inch longer, we would have frozen to death.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric