This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention, and learn how our unconscious patterns are holding us back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or let them know they can set up a free intro chat with me.
New blog post about building a community of alignment by vulnerably sharing your intention or aspiration, and approaching other potential fellow travelers with humble curiosity and invitation:
If we commit ourselves to an impossible aspiration of changing the world, it’s likely going to take more than our own actions to bring it into existence. We are more powerful in community than alone.
But such community and togetherness starts with treating others as equals and collaborators. Alignment in this sense starts with acknowledging people as they are, understanding their backgrounds and skills and motivations and dreams. When we see them fully in that way, we honor and respect them for who they are, rather than who we want them to be.
Re-reading that excerpt a couple weeks later makes me wonder what my own “impossible aspiration” is, and how I am building my community towards that. And then I realized that my aspiration is to help leaders improve.
Just yesterday, I was telling somebody that my “origin story” as an executive coach was my time at Signature BioScience from 2000-2003. I was a software engineer at a biotech startup with a promising technology, and a world-class technical team - we were literally doing things nobody else in the world could do. The company raised $17 million in 2000 (just before I was hired) and $43 million in 2001…and managed to go bankrupt by 2003 due to horrifically bad leadership (and a sweet HQ in SoMA SF).
The CEO, Mark McDade, somehow managed to negotiate his way into another CEO position before Signature went bankrupt, but that was the end of the line, as he was spectacularly taken down by Daniel Loeb, an activist investor, in this letter: “Mr. McDade's record of incompetence, egregiously bad business judgment and serious ethical lapses has been well documented” in part because he created a “work environment [that] is rife with employee unhappiness and self-interested management, one in which blind loyalty to Mr. McDade is rewarded over competence.”
I lived through two years of that culture at Signature, and it was infuriating to watch great technical work (still some of the best people I have worked with) be wasted by an incompetent leader.
That experience convinced me that no matter how good an engineer I was (and I wasn’t very good), my efforts could be wasted by poor leadership and strategy. So I started learning about business and leadership, including moving to New York to join a Software Management Training Program at Fog Creek Software, and pursuing an Executive Master’s in Technology Management at Columbia, then taking a job on Google’s finance team doing revenue forecasting before becoming the Search Ads Chief of Staff for several years, and finally pivoting into coaching.
And my passion for executive coaching is because I’ve seen the multiplier effects of leaders, both negatively in wasting great talent at Signature and elsewhere, and positively in amplifying people’s gifts among leaders I worked with at Google. I want to help more leaders act as amplifiers and positive multipliers in the world.
I invite readers of this Substack and my followers on LinkedIn to join me in this aspiration, as my goal is to learn with you how leaders can be more effective and impactful. And to be clear, leaders are not just those with organizational power, but anybody who is willing to step up and mobilize others to address a gap. I haven’t made these communities as interactive as I’d like, but I will always respond if you write me an email or drop a comment.
Lastly, the post above is the final one planned for the alignment series. My hope is to use these alignment posts as the outline of a book, where I fill out the chapters with relevant LinkedIn posts I’ve written, personal stories from my experience, and anonymized stories from my clients. I’d love any feedback you have on the posts I have shared so far, and any advice or stories you have that might be relevant.
And now for the normal personal development content:
LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience.
Hold empathy for the people not present. New leaders naturally focus on the person in front of them, wanting to make sure they feel good. This can lead to difficulties when they need to deliver difficult feedback. One mindset that can help is to remember the other people not in the room who are being affected by this person’s performance, and speak on their behalf.
Use the power of positive feedback. Using only negative reinforcement (“Don’t do that!”) can confuse people because they don’t know what they should do instead. Try to catch them taking even a tiny step in the desired direction and praise that step to get more of that behavior.
A quick no is better than a lingering maybe. Keeping an option open can have an opportunity cost in the form of anxiety about the ambiguity, or effort spent analyzing the potential option. You can save mental effort by quickly making a decision, and deciding to revisit it at a future point if circumstances change.
Executives are exception handlers. I believe that executives who have built out their team should let go of day-to-day operations to focus on handling issues that only they can address e.g. a tradeoff between two company priorities or values, a people issue, or because a surge overwhelms the capacity of the current system. The executive's job is to step in, handle the exception, and build the company capabilities to handle that situation next time.
Articles and resources I’ve found interesting
Everyone Lies to Leaders by Jade Rubick, where he shares ideas on how leaders can deliberately design their interactions to reduce the paradox that "The higher you go in an organization, the less you know what is going on. Yet, the higher you go in an organization, the more you’re responsible for fixing what’s going on."
The Control/Responsibility Matrix by Seth Godin. We have the freedom in most situations to choose how much control and how much responsibility we are willing to accept, and true leaders accept the responsibility that comes with asserting control.
Changing Others is the Most Important Capability a Leader Can Develop by Peter Bregman. “Your job as leader is not to play all the instruments, but to be the conductor. Changing others is how you scale your vision.Through what you say and do, you can guide and support your people to overcome the dysfunctional habits that are getting in the way of success.”
Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks.