I recently finished reading The Splendid and the Vile, a fantastic novel depicting Winston Churchill’s first year as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. While reading, I was struck by the gravity of the situation Churchill faced immediately upon stepping…
A fellow Automattician passed along this older HBR article that originally appeared in 1974. In the piece, the author describes how managers and leaders often take on unnecessary responsibility from teammates inadvertently. These responsibilities are referred to as “monkeys.” An…
I really enjoyed this article from Eugene Wei about the power of rhetoric. He cites the perennial question: Walk up to anyone in the company in the hallway and ask them if they know what their current top priority or…
Good leaders paint a vision of the future that their team can attach to. As Adam Grant puts it in Originals, they create a gap between how things exist now and what they could look like: The greatest communicators of all time…start…
In Primed to Perform, the authors discuss the importance of building a few different career ladders within your organization. The typical career ladder (become good at something then move to managing people) isn’t for everyone and susceptible to the Peter Principle.…
Consider these two ways of asking for feedback: We need to increase our sales numbers. I was thinking of moving Sarah over from Marketing to lead a new team for Q4. What do you think? We need to increase our sales…