Field notes
Field Notes
Our daily Field Notes email is just the kind of jumpstart you need. A fast read. Maybe less than a minute. Because sometimes it just takes one insight to change the trajectory of the day.
Search Field Notes
Some advice is solid but hard to enact, sustain, or live up to. This is one of the all-time gems: The best rule of thumb is to only speak about others as if they were in the room with you.
Leaders who express disappointment in people can unintentionally create a tsunami of doubt and insecurity. When leaders prefer not to be so direct, it becomes challenging to offer criticism without causing alarm.
Good leaders stretch people. They provide opportunities and experiences that require new thinking, skills, and behaviors. They design or offer challenges that require sustained effort and that reward experimentation and initiative. They know people grow fastest when they operate with autonomy. So they design challenges that require independent decision-making.
In many organizations, leaders presume that the collective knowledge that makes the organization effective will persist without a structured approach to retain it. Because they undervalue the tacit knowledge, expertise, and experience that an organization accumulates over time, they allow team members to leave, retire, and switch roles without much consideration for the consequences.
Leaders view failure and error very differently on purpose. It may sound like a matter of semantics, but for leaders, failure and error are very different outcomes that must be addressed distinctively. So they choose to treat these two outcomes differently to jumpstart improvement and to make more progress.
Several years ago, elementary school teacher Kyle Schwartz wrote “I wish my teacher knew _______” on the board and asked her 3rd-grade students to complete the sentence. They responded with honesty, comedy, and vulnerability. What she learned changed her as a teacher.