Category: leadership

  • Resuscitating Canaries

    Resuscitating Canaries

    There are a couple of processes at work that I think of as canaries. They are the first things that start to slip when I (or a teammate) is no longer working at their best. The actual task is different for each person but usually it’s something that is supposed to be done regularly; it…

  • Stuck in the Story

    Stuck in the Story

    Sometimes we are just going about our day, minding our own business when out of the blue we are “acted upon by an outside force.” A car cuts in front of us, we get bad news at work (or, more likely, vague news that we don’t know what to do with), Our spouse turns up…

  • Awesome things about being wrong

    Awesome things about being wrong

    When you are stuck, discovering one of your assumptions was wrong opens the door to all kinds of new ways to move forward When you are are able to admit being wrong, it builds trust and connection between other humans who have also experienced the uncomfortableness of changing your mind in public. It’s the first…

  • On doing a “Good Job”

    On doing a “Good Job”

    I was talking to a teammate the other day about work feelings and she said something profound : You want to do a good job, and you want others to think you are doing a good job. She didn’t say it as a great epiphany, more like a statement of obvious fact: of course you…

  • Leadership Lessons from the Age of Covid-19

    Leadership Lessons from the Age of Covid-19

    I read this article sometime last week and my original take away was the intended one: testing is important, we didn’t do it when we needed to, and we aren’t really catching up. What stuck with me, and prompted me to go back and find the article again was Dr. Helen Y Chu. The TL;DR…