Just a periodic reminder that someone’s DiSC score tells you nothing about their maturity and self-control. I find it helpful to think about a DiSC score as the default behavior pattern when a person is weary and lacks the wherewithal to fake anything. But leaders always retain the ability to choose how we interact with others. This is an ongoing opportunity and responsibility.
The challenging reality of this age is that most of our community life is… online. Even some physical communities are strongly supported by their online connections. Some studies have been done showing how online communities collapse and flail:
What are the characteristics of successful online communities?
Can you think of others?
These apply to in-person communities, and strong institutions as well. Worth pondering if you’re an opportunity space to create and build up communities.
Minnesota’s “Land of 10,000 Lakes” has an important leadership communication lesson.
Imagine this: I throw a boulder into the center of one of those lakes, which raises a wave that reaches all the shoreline. The impact of even the biggest boulder wouldn’t touch any other lake, even one separated by a few yards of land.
Your organization is like this, full of independent lakes. You’ll need to get to each lake to communicate with each effectively to create a change. You might need to shape the context of your core messaging to be effective in different kinds of lakes – depth, shape, age, clarity of water, access points to others.
A common mistake in big organizations is to pull together a team of people representing each region or department. Most of these are big enough that they have several ‘lakes’ – so one person is unlikely to be effective at reaching them all. Organize sub-team members to cascade messaging and action plans, so that each lake is reached. A significant mistake many exec leaders make is to call a big department or whole company town hall and share their message. Trust me when I say that your message didn’t reach everyone equally well. Do necessary follow-up work.
Christians are fond of the story of the thief crucified with Jesus, who believes in Jesus and is told, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” Great story of salvation by grace! Multitudes of people who did scummy things identify with this nameless guy.
We should also celebrate the story of Matthias in Acts 1. Jesus didn’t select Matthias as one of his 12 Apostles. We’re told Matthias has been a faithful follower for years and is a witness of the resurrection. He’s selected to replace Judas by roll of the dice over another equally qualified disciple named Justus. Matthias is never mentioned again in the New Testament. There are different traditions (some conflicting) about him ministering in Ethiopia and Jerusalem.
Here’s the story of a pretty good guy, JV team at best, who gets to be called one of the 12 Apostles. We have his name. That’s a great story, too, and easy for many to identify with. I’d like to know more about Justus, too.
The Daily Stoic posted this:
“Napoleon famously would wait three weeks until he opened his mail because he knew that most issues would resolve themselves. If you are always reachable, if you can be gotten a hold of at a moment’s notice, you will not be focused on the big important things, you will not be doing your work.”
For most of my career I prided myself on efficient and rapid response to emails. I could get to inbox zero pretty often, moving only a subset of items to my @action folder. Of course this meant I was constantly busy, and it almost hurt to ‘unplug’ from work because of the addictive adrenaline spikes. I was rewarded for this, especially when I was in direct support and operation leader roles. My main strategy for getting blocks of time for project deliverables was to work early and ‘clear the decks’ to give me some flexible time mid-day.
I’m not in those kinds of roles now. And neither are most senior managers, up to the CEO. They need to structure their accessibility and time quite differently. They’ll pay attention to email or texts from a specific subset of people, but they’re not rewarded for inbox zero across the board.
Here’s my challenge for you: What more could you accomplish with a disciplined approach to being less available and less responsive-in-the-moment? What issues will you force others to resolve (as they should) rather than you driving a resolution? What’s the $10,000/hour and $100,000/hour work that only you can do?
I’ve written before about how you must choose one thing to optimize, and then maybe a distant second. This is simple reality.
Project managers know that you navigate the 3 classic elements of tradeoffs: Scope, Time, Resources. Sometimes you’ll hear “Pick any two.”
This pattern is widespread:
Want to buy a car? Exactly what you want, customized? You’ll pay more and wait much longer than accepting one of the cars available on the lot.
Health coverage options? People want universal coverage, low prices, and high quality – but the reality is that you must pick 2 of these.
Leadership decisions are frequently about these kinds of tradeoffs. Lean into options and be prepared to explain to people (repeatedly) why their fantasies of optimizing on all three dimensions is impossible.
One more thing: If someone gives you an example of all three, I guarantee that someone else is subsidizing the costs or absorbing some complexity.
There are two Greek words translated as “time” in the New Testament. Chronos is chronological time, the passing of the hours, days and years. Kairos is qualitative time, or opportune time – the characteristic of a moment or a movement. When Jesus announces, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15), it’s kairos.
We all tend to worry about the passing of time (chronos) and the difficulties of the current time (kairos), and the anxiousness of the coming time (kairos). We develop practices which help us be efficient and effective with chronos. We must have wisdom, insight, and faith to respond well to kairos. An awesome message of the Bible is God saying “I’ve got this. I’ve got you. Trust me.” Living in the truth of that message is how we recognize the kairos in our lives. Truly, we were all born for such a time as this.
Note: This is an excerpt from the draft of an upcoming book about the journey to becoming a deep person.
The deep people you know and admire are interesting and brilliant.
I’ve thought about how to be fully yourself, maximally using your intellect, and be considered interesting (even brilliant) by others. What do you do to stand out? What practices, done consistently well, make you a compelling and trustworthy character? What avenues should you take and what traps to avoid?
I’m barely treading in the foothills of possibilities. Still, here are my recommendations:
Decide to be this way. No hiding, no excuses, willing to be different. Pre-decide that you’ll be ok if many people misunderstand you. You risk being ruled by fear of others until you make this decision.
Do things better than others. Execute at a consistently high level, working to your strengths. Focusing on fewer things improves your excellence with what you deliver.
Be fantastically curious about multiple domains. Ask questions. Follow-up with more questions. This is true for people you meet in person, or dead authors, or historical events. Don’t name yourself a problem solver; think of your identity as an explorer across a landscape of possibilities.
Care for yourself as a discoverer, inventor, and creator. Feed your mind and body with good-for-you food. Sleep well. Exercise your body so your mind gets what it needs, including toughness and resilience. Develop rhythms of hard work and breaks. This is investing in yourself.
Make plans, then act. Revise plans. Repeat. Navigate forward, adjusting your traveling vector without surrendering. Be willing to be bad at something so you can (with feedback) become good at it. Focus on what you can control, within your domain. Waste no energy on what you cannot control, but influence by words and example.
Help others and encourage them. Develop and nurture relationships for they are the stuff of a thriving life. Draw near to people who are also curious, questioning, and seeking wisdom.
Be different without being frightful to others. The person who follows a trend is in a herd. Find opportunities to lead.
Stay hungry and stay lean. Travel light, dropping unhelpful mental and physical baggage. Don’t allow your passion to settle after a success but go on to the next thing.
Savor steady 1% improvements while looking for occasional big leaps. Abandon perfection as the only goal while striving for it. Share your work and listen for feedback. This is the way of mastery.
Get outside, breathe deeply. Walk. Get away from screens and fancy technology. Move.
Do hard things to develop self-control. Lack of self-control sabotages your potential. Measure how many decisions you make which are about your comfort.
Treat every experience as input for your creative output. Capture notes, make connections, explore metaphors.
Tap into Wisdom. The world didn’t begin when you arrived. Seek Lady Wisdom. Learn from others. Take C.S. Lewis’ advice: Read at least two old books (pre-Gutenberg preferred) for every contemporary book you read. Dive deep for principles, and the tactics will take care of themselves.
Be responsible. Do the work. Be a professional, especially with the basics of your craft. Excuses are lies you tell yourself.
Be unsurprised at the foibles and sins of others, even as you aim to be trustworthy and true to them.
Devote yourself to a consistent creative practice, with rituals, and (ideally) hold your workspace as sacred. (HT: Steven Pressfield) Create and teach others as a means of learning and reinforcing.
Cultivate self-respect; crush pride. Measure yourself by yourself, not others. Are you better today than yesterday? Are you on the correct vector? Neither lie nor boast. Celebrate the work of others. You are part of a Larger Story, accountable to higher Power.
Treasure a dynamic, changing world. A static world has no learning, no adaptation, no resilience and no renewal.
Reframe fears as a guide to where you’re supposed to act. Replace worry with a focus on being resourceful.
Start. There is no ‘someday’ or ‘somebody else.’
I’m all for clean air, clean water, preserving natural beauty, and abundant energy & food for every person. Net-zero goals are unlikely to achieve what some believe.
Imagine that we reach net-zero C02. Human activity is no longer introducing more C02 into the atmosphere.
What other climate-driving forces aside from atmospheric C02 will still be at work?
No one knows what the “right” temperature is, or the “right” amount of C02 in the atmosphere. Everything in the physical world is dynamic.
So, it’s important to think carefully about the costs of net-zero (for everyone) and the tradeoffs. About 1.5-2 billion people do not have enough energy (fuel, electricity) to thrive. Despite our terrific progress in reducing starvation to almost zero, about 1.2 billion people a month are getting only enough calories to survive. Clean water is not readily available to 800 million people. We need to make progress on these for human flourishing. I’d be in favor of addressing those issues and then using energy and calories with clean water to adapt to variations in climate.
I am not giving dating advice.
I am not giving dating advice.
I am not giving dating advice.
I am not giving dating advice.
But I will say this…
People often focus their energy this way: “I want to be with someone. I’m ready to be with someone. I just have to find them.” Instead of spending all your energy and focus on that mindset, devote yourself to becoming a better person – taking care of yourself, developing competence, pursuing things that interest you, practicing self-control. That is the path to becoming an interesting person, and far more likely to find someone who is a meaningful match.
It’s the same with friends and good neighbors.