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.
In his book The Advantage (which I summarize here), Patrick Lencioni says "The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health…when its management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense.” Yet very few organizations actually achieve such health, as it requires conscious attention from leaders to identify and correct misalignments.
I'm putting together a talk on creating organizational alignment, where I will share frameworks and tactics that I have seen and used as a Chief of Staff and as an executive coach. My intention is to provide tools for leaders to make their organizations more effective by aligning their teams around what matters most, and to start converting my alignment blog posts into more actionable content.
I plan to pilot a first draft of the talk next Friday, April 29th, at 11am Pacific. I would love to get feedback, so if you're interested and available at that time, here’s the Zoom link.
If you have any resources or ideas you'd like to share on the topic, I'd love to receive those as well!
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.
Look for what’s not there. When you see somebody online that makes you feel jealous, or wish your life were different, look at what they’re not doing. We each have to make tradeoffs with our limited time and attention, so focusing on one thing means giving up another. Would you make their trade?
Live your values. When facing difficult professional situations where it's impossible to predict what will happen, I believe that living your values is a way to minimize regrets, and potentially increase your impact by demonstrating aligned actions to others.
Articles and resources I’ve found interesting:
Enough with the Corporate Non-Apologies for DEI-Related Harm, an HBR article by Lily Zheng. I appreciated the specific language they share on how leaders can apologize while making a commitment to do better after they fall short in Diversity, Equity or Inclusion.
The Expanding Job, by Anne Helen Petersen. “When it’s left to the individual to resist a system like this, these jobs will continue to expand their expectations of what a single worker can provide. … The bar for acceptable and expectable work loads will just keep moving higher, as everyone else keeps stretching themselves as thin as possible to reach it before collapsing on the ground, convinced the failure was theirs alone.”
Soccer Looks Different When You Can’t See Who’s Playing. Fascinating study where a company took soccer game videos, and anonymized the players as stick figures. Without being able to see gender or skin color, viewers appreciated women’s soccer much more, and completely changed their opinion about which players were athletic or quick.
Nigeria-born Tope Awotona Poured His Life Savings Into Calendly. Now He’s One Of America’s Wealthiest Immigrants. I’m a huge fan of Calendly as it has completely automated scheduling for me, and yet I had no idea of the story behind its founder, a 40-year-old Nigerian immigrant who started it to address his frustrations with scheduling meetings as a software salesman, and is now a tech billionaire.
Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks.