Category: Leadership
-
Kindle a light, not a bonfire
Leadership Moment: Spotting burnout A quick-read article on HBR covers burnout, when chronic stress creates a sort of perpetual exhaustion, and spotlights six categories of stress: workload, values, reward, control, fairness, and community. While I haven’t yet read the source book (The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs), I’d likely place “control” as…
-
Notice who you take for granted
Leadership Moments: Make-A-Hero David Ortiz – Big Papi to Bostonians – was recently honored by Make-a-Wish for his work in the community. By granting the wishes of children with critical illnesses, Big Papi has brought a little more light into the world; it’s a use of his position and celebrity that exemplifies sports leadership. It’s…
-
Plan for the future
Leadership Moment: Founder’s Syndrome Founder’s Syndrome occurs when a company founder remains in control for too long. Their approach, which might have been fantastic a decade ago, may no longer be appropriate for the situation that they find themselves in. While they might ostensibly be seeking a successor, what they seem to be looking for…
-
Learning More from Accidents
When accidents happen, there’s a seductive call to look for a root cause – that is, a chain of events without which, the accident would not have happened. In hindsight, root causes are apparently easy to identify; one works backwards from the accident, identifying causal threads until reaching the “root cause.” It’s simple, and it’s generally wrong.…
-
Making it safe to speak up
This week in DuhaOne: SVB’s miss, keeping onboarding fresh, make safety to spot danger, and tackling inclusion. Leadership Moment: Silicon Valley Bank The postmortems have already begun for the SVB failure, the second-largest in US history. This line inside CNN’s summary leapt out at me: Several experts who spoke to CNN said it’s likely that…
-
Food as Inclusion
Every Friday night, Jews around the world welcome Shabbat around the dinner table. Saying blessings for each, we light candles, we drink wine, and we salt and eat bread. Fire. Wine. Bread. Salt. These aren’t just Jewish traditions; I just happen to think of them that way because that is the culture in which I experience…
-
You’re behind
“You’re behind.” Legacies are complicated. Sometimes a catchphrase so oversimplifies an interaction that, in filling in the missing pieces, we create a false caricature, and do disservice to the person we would honor. Danny Lewin was murdered a score of years ago today. He left behind a family, friends, colleagues, and the company he’d…
-
Leading to Representation
It’s a trope among managers and executives that making significant inroads on building a more representatively diverse workforce is almost impossible. Moving the needle by even a fraction of a percentage point in a normal year is considered a massive success worth celebrating. That’s a cop-out. It’s not easy, but it isn’t impossible. And here’s…
-
Kremlinology
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. Sometimes, your own! There is a natural human tendency towards kremlinology – that is, the attempt to impute motives by observing only a few characteristics or outputs. In one application, it is called Fundamental Attribution Error, when we assert that someone has ill motives just because…
-
The Future of Work
Here we are. Three to six months into CoviDistancing – call it lockdowns, social distancing, isolation, shutdowns – and, really, there’s no end in sight. Let that sink in for a few minutes. It’s possible that there’s an effective vaccine just around the corner – which generally means a year of human trials so we know it’s reasonably safe. …