THE LEAFLET

September 19 2024

the anti-romantic approach, act like a teacher, re-hiring halfway

THE ANTI-ROMANTIC APPROACH

Your life feeling pretty stable these days? Congratulations: You’re not in emergency mode, you’re not underwater, you’ve got a lasso around your life. Now you have a chance to build a new ship, to spend time in ways that are more intentional, more aligned with your zoomed-out aspirations for what you want from life. 

My solution for accomplishing this is completely unromantic: Time management. Specifically, the key is to translate things you want more of in your life (even things as abstract as “be nicer to mom”) into events on a calendar. 

Aspirations for self-enhancement — more exercise, more meditation, more time one-on-one with each of your kids, and so on — typically fail because other things creep in. The key to preventing this is to translate all of these aspirations, crass as it may seem, in terms of hours. Putting things in terms of hours, then concretely plotting those hours on your calendar for the months ahead, allows you to get ahead of your schedule. Budgeting time for your higher aspirations will force you to confront conflicts: You’ll notice in advance when something needs to give. The alternative is magical thinking (maybe this will finally be the year that I start journaling). 

Read the rest here.

UNDERPERFORMANCE? ACT LIKE A TEACHER

Someone on your team is underperforming. To avoid the malaise and frustration that can persist for you and this person, ask yourself, first: Do I plan to fire this person? 

• If YES: Ask yourself, next: what do we need to do to fire this person (responsibly, humanely, with honesty and care)? Do those things.

• If NO: Pretend you are a K-12 teacher (a leader who cannot fire the people they lead). If this employee were a student who needs to behave well, succeed, achieve, and you can’t kick them out, what would you do for and with that student? 

Once you know the answer to the firing question, you no longer need to feel trapped. You become a proactive driver - of an exit or of a leap in performance.

-Ben

Read the rest here.

RE-HIRING HALFWAY WHEN MOTIVATION LAGS

When you lead a team you didn’t originally hire, or you lead your own team during a period of rugged change, you can find it’s hard to get people motivated. You face a little resistance from them in certain key contexts that weren’t necessarily advertised in the job description.

If you had hired this person in the first place - or if you had known then what you know now about the challenges of the work - you would have told them to expect what you’re now facing. You would have told them, during the early interviews, that a core expectation of the job is succeeding in a situation that looks like this. If that had been so, you wouldn’t be stuck in the mud with this person now. You would be running, together.

But you didn’t do that. Maybe you couldn’t have!

The good news: You can do it now. In your next conversation with your teammate, reset expectations along these lines:

“I have realized that your role has become something in my mind that I didn’t advertise to you when you took the job, which is ___. Success at ____ is going to require ___ of you. I want you to think about whether you’re game for that, because that may not be what you expected.

Don’t tell me here and now - I want to give you the [weekend] to think about it. And, btw, here’s what we’ll do if you’re not up for it (offer available re-assurance: you won’t lose you job, lose pay, etc and/or I’ll support your transition to something else). I’m telling you what the new landscape is and how it’ll feel different and I want you decide if you’re here for that.” 

-Ben

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Novelist Vassily Grossman on time’s revelatory power:

Time is always the enemy of opportunists and a friend to those who stand on the side of history. It exposes false strength and rewards true strength.

Writer Maria Popova on chance and choice:

It is not cowardice but courage to acknowledge the superior role chance plays in steering the course of life, and at the same time to take responsibility for the margin of difference our personal choices do make within the parameters of chance.

Novelist Ursula K. Leguin on love:

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric