THE LEAFLET

September 14 2023

connecting granular and grand, cheap mistakes, and the gift of rock bottom

MOTORCYCLES

I have found it useful, no matter which gap is preventing execution, to restate the reason the thing is needed. “Because I said so” is rarely motivating or clarifying. “Here’s how this small, near-term thing enables us to hit our goal and achieve our mission” can be quite motivating. It’s also a contribution to the thinking of a leader-in-training. 

With this guidance from you, they can stop looking at their work through the narrow lens of a widget-maker and start seeing that work through the broader lens of a designer. The component, the task, has a purpose beyond itself. It leads to an outcome the team exists to produce. 

Great leaders are really clear on the connection between the granular and the grand and they teach their people to see that connection, too.

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CHEAP MISTAKES

Making no mistakes is fantasy; making only expensive ones is foolish. Instead, make beaucoup cheap mistakes. Name that attitude for your team, model it, and celebrate it. 

If things go well in your endeavor, you will end up with an opportunity to act in a space where you are inexperienced. You get to expand to new markets or communities or launch a different product or absorb operations further out into the ecosystem around you. You’re likelier to succeed in that new space if you’ve built up the culture, habits, and skills for rapid, inexpensive learning. Cheap mistakes are your teachers. Enroll yourself and your team in their school. 

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THE GIFT OF ROCK BOTTOM

When things are the worst they’ve ever been, I have not found it helpful to pretend to the team that it is otherwise. What is so may be very bad. Leaders I’ve loved most level with me on that. Then they ask, “so what?” Given who we’ve said we are here to be for each other, what are we going to do about it? What is yours to do?

Their positivity in the face of the suckiness is not false or falsifying. It’s gratitude for the discovery of rock bottom and a resolve to keep moving forward. To continue “positing” something in service to the mission. 

When you can’t get any wetter and you know it - you’ve opened a gift. 

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Keep going, keep growing,

Eric