How to Maximize Your Most Scarce Resources as a Business Leader: Time, Energy and Talent

What are today’s most scarce resources?

While money can be found, borrowed, printed or even invented, we all know that no amount of money can buy a 25th hour in the day. Time is limited, tomorrow is not guaranteed. And no amount of money can make someone really care. No amount of money can motivate someone to give every ounce of their energy and talent. You can’t buy real enthusiasm! The only way to get the best work from someone is to inspire them and then get out of their way.

For most companies, the most scarce resources are the time, energy and talent of their people, and the insights, ideas and wisdom those people generate. As Michael Mankins and Eric Garton write in Time, Talent, Energy:

““Ideas don’t just materialize; they are the product of individuals and teams who have the time to work productively, who have the skills they need to make a difference, and who bring creativity and enthusiasm to their jobs…what separates the best from the rest is leaders’ ability to manage human capital in the broadest sense.””

It can feel like we never have enough time. Our energy doesn’t feel unlimited. And world-class talent is hard to find and afford. But without these three elements, time, energy and talent, it’s nearly impossible for  innovation-and-profit-driving ideas to be uncovered, refined, and brought to life.

Step Zero: Start with yourself

As a leader of people, it's your job to unlock and maximize the energy and talent of your team by helping them use their time well. While it’s tempting to start with your team, I recommend starting with yourself: be the change! Start by using your own time, energy and talent well. Then, coach your team to do it, too. Leaders can do this by:

• Modeling the intentional use of time - by focusing on the important over the urgent (bullet point #4 below)

• Modeling the intentional use of talent- by focusing ONLY on things that are great uses of your unique skills, your Zone of Genius (bullet point #3 below)

Once you start intentionally focusing your time and talent, and coaching and encouraging your team to do the same, the creative energy in your organization will start to be unleashed on an individual basis. But to scale your team’s impact, you need to have the facilitation skills to ensure that the meetings you host don’t waste anyone’s time or suck anyone’s energy. This is the magic key to unleashing the time, energy and talent of your team: creating moments of impact with your team by bringing folks together to solve problems in effective ways that wouldn’t have happened without that meeting. Without the key ingredient of Facilitative Leadership your meetings will waste your team's resources, rather than unleashing them.

Facilitative Leadership is rare, but leaders who master it can intentionally create spaces and places where people are empowered to do the best work of their lives. It’s a topic too big for this essay. But you can read more about Facilitative Leadership skills like mastering turn taking, asking powerful questions, the 5Es of meeting experience design and even leading silent meetings at the links embedded here. You might even need to lead a meeting about meetings with your team or work to make your meetings less “leaky". 

There’s another way to describe the outcome of this approach, the real goal: creating a platform for human flourishing. (Those words are from Ashley Goodall, former Cisco Exec and currently a leadership expert and author of the Bestselling books, Nine Lies about Work and The Problem with Change, AND a wonderful guest on my podcast.)

1. Ask for their best and create a platform for human flourishing

I love this phrase, “a platform for human flourishing”.

It’s a reminder that the real job of a company is not *just* to maximize shareholder value, which it must do - that’s table stakes! A company exists to serve a customer, to make their lives better. But that’s just one side of the platform. On the other side are all the people who come together to make that happen. Employees are customers of another sort, and creating a place to work that’s a drag for employees while creating value for your external customers is not just a missed opportunity, it's unsustainable.

Recently, a coaching client of mine complained about the quality of work coming from their team. They wanted to communicate clearly what the “minimum standard” looked like—and make it crystal clear that nothing should get out the door without meeting that standard.

I pushed back with a question:

“Are you trying to create a minimum standard company? A minimum standard culture? Or do you want a company where people know they have an opportunity to do the best work of their lives?”

“The best work of their lives?!” my client asked.

I asked them—and I’ll ask you to consider this as well—when were you first on a team where everything hummed? A place where you look back and think, “Wow, we did some great stuff”? A place where you were proud of the output, even though it was a lot of work? And that you still feel pride about?

Now, think about the team you lead today. What are you inviting them to do? Just “good” work? Or work that they will continue to be proud of in 10 years? As a leader, you can create that opportunity. Setting the expectation that people can do “the best work of their lives” under your leadership is a bar that people can be excited to meet. And when your talented team members are excited about their work, you’ll get the best energy and application of talent from the time they spend.

2. Architect moments of efficient collaboration through Facilitative Leadership.

Remember the quote from Mankins and Garton that we started with:

““Ideas don’t just materialize; they are the product of individuals and teams who have the time to work productively””

That work never happens 100% alone - we have to come together to talk, to coordinate, to collaborate. And… We’ve all been in meetings that intend to help us do just that, but instead waste people’s time by not delivering on real value. It’s exhausting for everyone. In fact, it’s a real drag.

The more intentional you can be about the time your team spends together, the higher the chances are that you will get the most out of that time. Intentionally designing the time people spend together is the heart of Facilitative Leadership. In order to unleash the time and talent of your organization, you need to be able to facilitate these moments of impact. Otherwise, you create what Mankins and Garton call "Organizational Drag”: friction that drains people’s energy and wastes people’s time. 

Many organizations, even at small sizes, create organizational drag. For example, one founder I worked with had a senior team of only five people, plus another 15 or so in the rest of the org. They were very early in their product-market fit iteration, but challenges were already emerging from the way they ran leadership team meetings. When I hosted 360-degree review interviews with the leadership team, I heard again and again that they felt several of their meetings duplicated or overlapped efforts and that they didn’t feel that their time was being well spent. Many of the team members also commented in the interviews that the CEO took up the most airtime in the meetings. While it was critical to the team that the CEO share what they felt were the biggest challenges facing the young company, the C-suite wanted the opportunity to contribute more, not just listen to the CEO.

Facilitative leadership creates opportunities to unleash the energy and talent of your team, and this is a mindset and skillset I had to start coaching this leader on - how to make sure they were making sure the entire leadership team felt like they were contributing their time, energy and talent in every meeting.

Every meeting is a potential moment of impact. In our podcast conversation, Lisa Kay Solomon and Chris Ertel, co-authors of Moments of Impact, made this idea clear: “At these critical moments, everyone will be looking at you—not for all the answers, but to help them unearth the answers together.”

Solomon pointed out that what she and I call “Conversation Design” is one of the most impactful leadership skills—and one of the hardest to teach. The ability to architect efficient, collaborative conversations is an impact-multiplier skill, because doing so enables people to leave meetings with a sense of momentum rather than feeling like it could have been an email. Refreshing your facilitative skills is one way to make sure you're creating opportunities for your team’s best work to be unleashed and connecting their diverse talents to drive creative thinking.

In Solomon’s definition, the basics of facilitation are simply about the non-negotiable, essential mechanics of leading a conversation, like starting and ending on time and being able to run different modalities of participation effectively. Conversation Design is about the questions leaders need to ask themselves in shaping strategic conversations to make sure they don’t run efficient but ineffective gatherings.

Questions leaders can ask themselves before hosting a meeting
(after asking the all-important question, is this meeting necessary?):

• "What do I want this conversation to advance?"

• "What do I want people to know, feel and do long after this conversation?"

• "What is the culture I want to build by the choices that I make in this session?" 

• How will this gathering unlock the time, energy and talent of my team?!

3. Optimize time and talent. More Energy follows.

Physics teaches us that Energy can’t be created or destroyed - we can only use one type of energy to create another. Like how our bodies change the chemical energy in the food we eat into mechanical energy when we move things around. Or when a roller coaster’s potential energy at the top of a hill turns into fun kinetic energy as we roll down the hill. In other words, you can’t “make energy”. But when you let your team know that you’re all about creating a platform for their flourishing by inviting the best work of their lives, and intentionally creating moments of collaboration that reduce drag, you can start to get the energy in your team moving.

But what are they going to apply their best energy to? What’s the best use of their time and talent? Once you start focusing on the ideal use of your time and talent, and then your team’s, you start to create a powerful feedback loop of energy creation.

The intersection of time and talent: The Zone of Genius

One of my favorite diagrams to draw for my clients is the Zone of Genius map adapted from Gay Hendricks’s book The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level. The Zone of Genius map plots the best uses of your time on one axis against the best uses of your talent on the other, to create four zones: the zone of incompetence, the zone of competence, the zone of excellence, and the zone of genius.

The zone of incompetence encompasses tasks that are the worst use of your time and talent—others can do these things better than you can. The zone of competence are those tasks that are a good use of your talent but not a good use of your time— because others can do these things just as well as you can. The zone of excellence includes those tasks that maybe aren’t the best use of your talent but they are a good use of your time - these tasks create value and you're good at them. But the highest value you can deliver is in the top-tier quadrant, the Zone of Genius. These tasks are the best and highest use of both your time and your talent, leveraging your unique genius.

Before using the Zone of Genius map as a tool to figure out where leaders should spend their time, it’s important to first ask: What is the job of a CEO or CXO? Some use the metaphors of a firefighter, or a visionary, or a cheerleader. I worked with a CEO who decided to make sure he spent one day a week being a cheerleader, going around the company telling people what they were doing well. The impact was awesome: his team felt seen for their hard work and efforts, and as a result, morale, engagement and retention in the company went up. 

Some leadership theorists advocate that, especially for early-stage founders, keeping wide swaths of time open is ideal - so that these leaders can step in to be the firefighter, generating solutions to emergent problems that have no standard procedure or dedicated employee to resolve them. Others suggest that the real job of a CEO is creating the next iteration of the org by getting clear on the biggest vision possible, and communicating it relentlessly.

I say, the CEO should do only those things that fall into their Zone of Genius, —work that doesn’t feel like work, work that gets you in a flow state, work that you can have an outsized impact on, work that creates energy.

For anything that doesn’t fall into this zone, CEOs should hire and delegate to people for whom the tasks do fall into their Zone of Genius (or make a specific plan for doing so when funds are available). Developing a platform for human flourishing means finding talent that loves to solve the challenges that you can’t or don’t get juice from solving. And by “juice” I mean the inner satisfaction that comes from working in your Zone of Genius in order to make a difference on a problem you care about.

I’ve found that when my clients start focusing on their zone of genius they start to notice and appreciate the zone of genius of their team and are able to help their team members redirect their focus towards activities in this zone. 

ZOG-obsessed leaders can proactively build a culture of genius—a place where every team member from the CEO on down is expected to understand and operate in their ZOG as much as possible. When people are working in their Zone of Genius, their time is always well spent, and their talent is always well used.

If you want to start uncovering your ZOG, start by doing a time and energy audit. You can find some instructions and guidelines for doing that here. That audit can help you start to zoom in on where your ZOG might be.

4. Focus on the important and not the urgent

Identifying your ZOG is just the start; actually executing wise time management, learning to delegate, and practicing saying no are an iterative learning process. The truth about time management is that it is, in and of itself, work that we all must learn to do competently. We all have a million things coming at us at once. And our brains are uniquely suited to focus on NOW. It’s a fundamental cognitive bias that has helped us to survive for millions of years. For millennia, if there was food in front of you, you ate it, while you could! Delayed gratification is not a gut instinct for most of us. Learning to focus on what is really important, rather than merely urgent, is why I nearly always introduce my coaching clients to the Eisenhower Matrix, a classic time management framework, because it takes the idea of a “to do” list and makes it much, much more impactful.

Former US President Eisenhower is quoted as saying, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” The Eisenhower Matrix plots these binaries (the urgent and the important) on two axes, resulting in four quadrants.

The “Classic” Eisenhower Matrix:

Usually, people rank the priority of the quadrants thusly:

• Quadrant 1: DO IT. These tasks are both urgent and important. And you just do them, asap.

• Quadrant 2: Schedule it! These tasks are really important but not breathing down your neck. So, put them on your calendar, and do them in a timely manner.

• Quadrant 3: Delegate. If the tasks are not important but persistently urgent, or not in your ZOG, get someone else to put it on their DO quadrant going forward.

• Quadrant 4: Delete it. As I learned from Randy Paush’s EPIC time management lecture, it’s amazing how much better your life can be if you just patiently and consistently ignore things that are neither urgent nor important. (watch that video. Listening to a person that is rapidly dying of cancer talk about time management is humbling, to say the least. And the fact that the talk is nearly the same as one he delivered using OVERHEARD PROJECTION SLIDES nearly a decade earlier speaks volumes about dying the way you lived.)

Again, because of our millennia-old lizard brains, it’s fundamentally hard to pull away from the DO quadrant, and the tyranny and the urgency of NOW, to focus on the “Schedule It” orange quadrant. These “Not urgent and important” things are exactly those things that will create an outsized impact tomorrow. Focusing further out than today is how you create the most impact. It’s also how you start to tame the tyranny of the urgent and how you inspire your team to get the best from themselves.

It is hard to think clearly, strategically, to focus on our zone of genius, when we are always pulled into the swirl of the DO quadrant. Unfortunately, the way the Eisenhower Matrix is drawn traditionally is deceptive and wrong…each area is not equal, or rather, SHOULD not be equal, in terms of time spent daily, nor is the DO quadrant the one that should be in green signifying “go do it”!

“The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent”

Remember the quote the Eisenhower matrix is based on. The Important/Urgent quadrant, according to Eisenhower, doesn’t actually EXIST. And it should not be green-quadrant-priority #1…at least not according to the person the idea is attributed to!

I coach my clients and their teams that their IDEAL Eisenhower Matrix should have very, very little seemingly Important/Urgent work and instead focus mostly on non-urgent but important work, because that is how you stay focused on strategy—on creating the future you want, not treading water today. Maybe the ideal Eisenhower matrix actually looks like this: Almost ALL important, non-urgent work (in green, upper right), and some thoughtful delegation work (non-critical and urgent, in blue, lower left). Since the important is never urgent, and it’s a trap, let’s make it a dark, tiny square in the upper left.

Time, talent, and energy unlocked

Maximizing time, energy, and talent is the cornerstone of a flourishing company. Leaders have to start with themselves - by knowing what their Zone of Genius is before coaching their team members to help them do the same.

Unlocking people’s TIME means everyone plays a vital role in driving success by working on the right problem for the organization, but it also means working on the non-urgent problems that help the team stay ahead of the curve - working on tomorrow’s challenges before they become urgent headaches.

Unleashing people’s TALENT happens when leaders hire and delegate effectively, empowering team members to operate in their own Zones of Genius and contribute at their highest potential. 

Leaders can unlock the ENERGY of the team through moments of intentional collaboration, facilitative leadership, and the elimination of organizational drag. When the time, talent and energy of your team are aligned in well-facilitated moments of impact, unlocking innovation through sustained creativity is the natural result: a thriving, high-performing organization, where people feel inspired, valued, and supported to do the best work of their lives.

Goals Won’t Lead You to Greatness

One of my favorite ideas is expressed in an oft-mis-quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald essay titled, “The Crack-Up,” published in Esquire in the 1930s:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

Usually, people stop the quote after this first sentence, but the rest of the passage gives useful context:

“One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the ‘impossible,’ come true.”

I’m holding two opposed ideas in tension right now:

1. Having clear goals and making bold choices create powerful results.

2. Clear goals inhibit the achievement of greatness.

As an executive coach, my clients invest significant time, energy and resources into creating what they want in their lives, and into working with me to help them get to their next level of greatness. They have big, transformational goals: They want to transform industries. They want to create their next big dream after a successful exit. They want to lead their companies 100% authentically and powerfully as their companies grow at an improbable rate. To achieve these sometimes nigh-impossible goals, they need to make bold choices.

Often, potential clients say they want to work with a coach, like me, to ensure they remain accountable and diligent in reaching their goals and creating the life that they choose. 

The goal math is simple:

Big Goals + Accountability = Success!

But the reality is more complex. 

Sometimes these transformational changes take more than goals and accountability, clarity and dedication. Transformational changes in our life often entail transformational shifts in how we think, what we value and how we see ourselves.

And sometimes, real transformational change requires us to give up our goals and objectives entirely.

(Insert record needle scratch here.)

Wait…what?!

You read that correctly. I hear your skepticism and simply ask that you join me on this thought experiment for a few minutes and see if we can pass the Fitzgerald test and think differently without breaking our brains. At the end, you may be willing to free yourself of the need for specific goals for everything and leave open the possibility that curiosity, wandering and dreaming might be the key to a life worth living, and yes, greatness.

Truth One: We need bold choices to get anywhere

I was reminded recently of this amazing moment in Viola Davis’s interview on Hot Ones, a super fun web series where guests eat progressively spicier hot wings while answering questions from host Sean Evans. Evans had asked Davis (who is one of only three actors in history to earn both the Triple Crown of Acting and an EGOT!) about her Oscar-nominated performance opposite Meryl Streep in Doubt, in which her character appears for only about 10 minutes but is, as film critic Roger Ebert wrote, “the emotional heart and soul of the film.” Specifically, Evans asked about Davis’s perspective on the opportunity an actor has when their performance is limited to a single, and in this case pivotal, scene.

Davis’s response? Prepare everything you need to, and then take a risk.

“Whatever you're thinking in your mind, make a bold choice.

“Even if you think you're running in the wrong direction, make a choice so bold and so out there, and maybe it'll stick. Or maybe you'll fail—which I've done a lot—but maybe it'll stick.”

As Davis points out, when we’re given a rare opportunity, or a chance to go after a dream, it’s worth it to make a bolder choice and turn the wheel of chance rather than playing small. Those bold choices can transform our trajectories in big ways. Without taking these bold choices, we risk relegating ourselves to smaller, meeker paths, scant achievements, and paltry dreams. Or worse: we drift—we just go with the flow of life and never really get anywhere. 

Or at least, that’s how the “bold choices” narrative goes. The implication is that without clear objectives and bold choices, we can’t really get anywhere at all. Inverting this truth, we can get another truth: Getting anywhere is better than drifting.

That idea is from Richard Hamming in The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:

“The accuracy of the vision matters less than you might suppose, getting anywhere is better than drifting, there are potentially many paths to greatness for you, and just which path you go on, so long as it takes you to greatness, is none of my business.”

So far, Davis and Hamming are lining up in the bold goals and choices camp! Making a big choice is better than making a small choice. Having a big goal is better than an itty bitty goal - because you might hit it big. Aim for the stars and you’ll reach the moon. Just reach for the moon…and that’s as far as you’ll get.

But Hamming’s ideas seem to open up a crack in the simplicity of goal math - maybe goals are less important than we think? He is proposing that vision and goals matter less than making a choice to keep moving forward, to never drift. And to stay open to the many paths before us. Davis says “the bolder the better" since maybe it’ll stick…Hamming seems to imply that boldness is only important in that boldness is a way of moving forward.

Truth Two: Objectives help us move in the right direction

Books like Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke popularized and clarified the “Management by Objectives” approach used at Google and other vanguard tech companies, underpinned by the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) framework. In her book, Wodtke tells the novelized story of a young company that spreads itself too thin, spending too much time and energy focused on non-strategic initiatives instead of those that could create more profound business impact. The characters in Wodtke’s story make a lot of Davis-like bold choices but ones that are always running in the wrong direction, or just too many directions at once. Eventually, Wodtke argues, companies operating in this way run out of time, energy and resources and cease to be.

Instead, Wodtke suggests that teams align on what their objective is (a.k.a. what they define as greatness) and what it would look like when they achieve it—in other words, how could they measure that greatness? These measurements are the “key results” that help them to stay on track and even shift tracks, when necessary, to stay on course for greatness.

Hamming’s view aligns with the OKR approach: There are many paths to greatness, but we can’t try them all out at once, so let’s just pick one to start and see how we go for the next three or four months! We can change course if we need to after seeing the data. 

These regular periods of setting OKRs and checking in on them are meant to keep organizations and teams on a path to greatness.

Defining what greatness is, for ourselves in our lives, and for our businesses, is no small task. This is something that I regularly help my coaching clients with, what I call “The Spice Girls Question”: What do you really really want? It’s essential to question our goals and ask why we want them. Is it because of cultural programming or parental wounds? Is what we want to create really, really aligned with our core values, beliefs and identity? After all, following a great goal for the wrong reasons is not likely to satisfy us once we get there.

It’s worth questioning the motivations behind our objectives and goals regularly, to make sure they are really really our own and will move us in the right direction.

Truth Three: Objectives rarely lead to breakthroughs

I apologize, since we’re now going to try to hold a few more than two ideas in our mind simultaneously

I’ve been reading Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman’s 2015 book, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, which picks apart what they call “The Myth of the Objective”. Reading this book, I found it surprising to hear the authors point out the deep flaws and contradictions they see in the notion of objectives, since they both have deep technology backgrounds, and the OKR framework is often deeply embedded in many modern tech companies and with folks of a technological bent. 

Maybe there is no Fitzgeraldean paradox here. Stanley and Lehman suggest that objectives are useful for near-term, modest and conventional goals. And indeed, OKRs are often used for that specific purpose - near term goals, looking 3-4 months out.

But objectives fall apart (in their view) when we want to create something truly BOLD: shockingly, world-changingly, innovative.

Why? History is one guide.

The authors point out that in most significant technological advances in history, the “stepping stones” towards the breakthrough were usually unexpected. These breakthroughs didn’t come about by keeping a laser focus on one initial objective; finding these outcomes came from winding down unforeseen paths, sometimes completely unrelated to the initial objectives. Even the scientists who invented the laser were working on solving another problem entirely!

Stanley and Lehman give the example of vacuum tubes and computers:

The first computer, called ENIAC, was built in 1945 as a result of a two-year government contract. At 8 feet tall and over 100 feet long, it was 1,000 times faster than existing electro-mechanical computing machines at the time. Vacuum tubes made the innovation of this first computer possible. However, vacuum tubes weren’t created as part of the process of building a computer. They’d been invented 50 years earlier by people who did not have the invention of computers in mind at all; they were solving a set of very different problems.

Stanley and Lehman posit that, even with Viola Davis levels of boldness, if a scientist in 1943 had chosen to build a computer as fast as ENIAC the size of a coin—a capability we achieved decades ago – they wouldn’t have been able to. The stepping stones to get there weren’t at all obvious and were all arrived at serendipitously. They would have boldly and diligently sweated out the two years of the contract fruitlessly—which leads to the author’s broader point about objectives:

“Objectives are well and good when they are sufficiently modest, but things get a lot more complicated when they’re more ambitious. In fact, objectives actually become obstacles towards more exciting achievements, like those involving discovery, creativity, invention, or innovation—or even achieving true happiness.

“In other words (and here is the paradox), the greatest achievements become less likely when they are made objectives. Not only that, but this paradox leads to a very strange conclusion—if the paradox is really true then the best way to achieve greatness, the truest path to ‘blue sky’ discovery or to fulfill boundless ambition, is to have no objective at all.”

As the authors point out, the structure of human progress is complex: the only possible pathways to many discoveries are counterintuitive and cannot be planned ahead.

Remember the Adjacent Possible!

Transformation and innovation following these possible pathways are sometimes called “the adjacent possible,” an idea coined by Steven Johnson, who summed it up in a 2010 Wall Street Journal essay, “The Genius of the Tinkerer,” this way:

“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself…

"The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.”

If we become laser-focused on our goals, as many folks in the hustle-culture-sphere assert, we ignore all the potentially interesting possibilities that hover outside of our tunnel vision. And it is these adjacent possibilities that can unlock amazing potential.

There are so many stories of companies that pivoted into something much more interesting and much more successful than their original idea, often leveraging some forgotten side project. Just google the stories of Odeo, a podcast tool that turned into Twitter, or the tale of Flickr rising from the ashes an online RPG called Game Neverending…or Wrigley Gum, which started as a giveaway for a home goods company. The gum was more popular than the actual product and once Wrigley focused on that, he eventually unlocked a billion-dollar industry. If any of the folks behind these pivots had persisted in their objectives relentlessly, they might have missed the real opportunity.

It turns out that being laser focused on our goals can cause us to lose sight of some alternative, magical futures hovering just outside our field of vision, in the adjacent possible. And worse: goals can seriously backfire. Stanley and Lehman’s big take home is that greatness is often the result of serendipity - looking for a needle in a haystack and finding something better than you can imagine, something you weren’t looking for at all - like a magnet to find a million needles, or a pot of gold.

Truth Four: Goals can backfire

A goal or objective is the end towards which all our efforts are aimed. Stanley and Lehman point out that with an OKR framework, we’re always working towards better numbers for our key results. It’s like the childhood game of “Hot and Cold”—we all figured out how to move closer and closer to our goal as we got “hotter, colder, hotter!!”

Yet, goals and objectives are only about what we can measure. And much of life, including its ultimate purpose, can’t be well-measured. Viktor Frankl wrote about this in Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it…success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.” (emphasis mine)

Frankl lived through the holocaust in Nazi Germany. His philosophy of meaning would be striking in anyone, and is only more striking because he was able to persist in finding meaning through his horrific experiences.

So, what do we ultimately want? In other words, what’s our real goal in life? For many of us, it’s likely things that have no limitations and can’t be measured—“to live well” or what the Greeks call eudaimonia, flourishing. And yet, we often sacrifice flourishing for a smaller or more temporary goal, due to our relentless pursuit of a single-minded goal.

Emmanuel Acho knows this all too well. Acho is a former NFL player and current TV sports analyst and author. In 2023, he delivered a TED Talk entitled “Why You Should Stop Setting Goals (Yes, Really)” in which he asserts that “the surest way to fail in life is to set a goal.”

He tells his story of wanting to get into the NFL as a first, second or third round pick, but his Big Hairy Audacious Goal was *actually* to be a millionaire by 21; getting into the NFL was, he resolved, his surest path. So, he trained relentlessly in his senior year of college, bulking up and getting stronger and stronger. Two days before the NFL Combine (the “job interview” for the NFL, where potential recruits literally get put through their paces), Acho realized he had bulked up too much and needed to drop 10 pounds, which he did through ruthless fasting and sweating out water weight. 

Dehydrated and stressed, he got on the starting line on the day of the Combine to do a 40-yard dash as all 32 NFL team owners looked on. In Acho’s words:

“The 40-yard dash is one of the testing metrics you use at the NFL Combine with millions of dollars on the line. The faster you run, the higher you get drafted. 

“I take my mark. 

“I proceed to run. I hear pop, pop, pop. I keep running. I think my heels are clicking. Pop, pop. I clutch my quad. I fall to the ground. 

“It was my quad being torn off the bone. I rip my quad off the bone. I'm falling to the ground in agony in front of these 32 billionaires. I didn't get drafted in the first three rounds of the NFL draft. I made a decision that day, in that moment, to stop setting goals.”

It’s a horrifying story. Acho was so focused on his near-term goals (getting into the NFL) that he caused harm to himself and to his larger, longer-term goals.

Acho goes on to point out other ways our goals can harm us. If we fall short of a goal—for example, to read a book a month or grow your business 20%—we’re often very hard on ourselves. While we may have learned a lot from the seven, eight or even nine books we read in the year, we punish ourselves for not reading the additional three, four or five. While we may have restructured our business thoughtfully to be well-positioned to achieve rapid growth in the future, we easily dismiss or feel disappointed by the modest growth we wrangled so far.

Falling short of our goals often puts our focus on what’s missing, not what we’ve achieved.

Instead, Acho suggests picking goals that are more open-ended, like the Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett whose goal is simply “to play my guitar a little better every day.”Such a goal doesn’t have much of a downside and has exponential upside. A little better every day compounds quickly.

Use Four layers of goals

I recently watched a video from Cassie Kozyrkov, who served as Google’s first Chief Decision Scientist, advising leadership on decision process design, AI strategy, and building data-driven organizations. She suggests setting a structured pattern of goals in three layers:

1. Outcome Goal: This is your North Star—something you really want to achieve that keeps you moving forward. This goal is not in your control (Acho can’t hire himself to the NFL, for example.)

2. Performance Goal: A way to measure success (that is ALSO not in your full control, but you can track how much stronger or faster you’re getting. For Acho, performance in the Combine was key.)

3. Process Goal: Something that you CAN put into your control that will help you achieve Goals 1 and 2. (For example, following a good training plan, which Acho did.)

Kozyrkrov points out that we ought to NEVER let a Process Goal take precedence over an Outcome Goal. Stubbornly running too much too fast, or running on an injured knee, according to the process plan, isn’t going to help your outcome goal. Trust the process, sure, but make sure you verify that the process isn’t moving you in the wrong direction from your North Star from time to time. Acho attempted to sacrifice short-term physical wellbeing for long-term financial wellbeing, and his gamble backfired. 

In fact, we might need to add a FOURTH goal layer: anti-goals. Anti-goals would clearly describe the signs to watch out for that indicate you’re moving away from your ultimate Outcome Goal. In Acho’s case, he certainly did not want to tear his quads off the bone and spend months in rehab. It might have helped to have set an anti-goal around injury or markers of worsening physical health.

Truth Five: Goals can miss the bigger picture

Acho learned a hard lesson: goals can cost us, and sometimes more than we realize. We set goals as our current, present-day selves. Our present-day self knows only what we know now, and our vision for our specific goals is limited by that.

The 1985 classic Weird Science illustrates this point well (if bizarrely). Two computer nerds hack into the government mainframe and build “the perfect woman” inside their computer. A freak electrical accident brings their design to life. They name her Lisa.

Hijinks ensue, and Lisa helps the boys enjoy life a lot more. The boys get more mature, cooler, learn a lot, and eventually meet some real, live girls. Explaining Lisa to his new girlfriend, Deb, one of the boys says: “Deb, Lisa is everything I ever wanted in a girl—before I knew what I wanted. I know that if I could do it again, I'd make her just like you. Honest.”

The local maximum problem

Like Acho and the Weird Science boys, in setting goals with our current levels of thinking and being, we can easily choose a goal that is a local maximum. A local maximum is climbing a hill and ignoring the mountain beyond it. The builders of ENIAC didn’t know they were building a local maximum computer. For 1943, it was the top of the mountain, the best they could do…but there are always other mountains to climb.

In setting a goal we should slow down and take a look around…and ask if we’re setting the bar too low.

Goals are a Continuous conversation

Not surprisingly for someone who wrote a whole book on how conversations are the fundamental unit of change, and how conversations can and should be designed, I think goals and objectives are a conversation.

Normally, they are a one way conversation - present us, telling future us what we will accomplish. 

It’s clear that we need to have a continuous conversation along the way to check in:

Are we achieving what we really, really want? Is our process of achieving our goal working for or against our real objective? Are we achieving our anti-goals by being single-minded in our approach?

The Weird Science example makes me pause - and ask a weirder question. What if goals were a conversation between my present and future self? Rather than a top-down process of goal-setting, what if we had a deep-dive conversation between our present-day self, the person setting the goal, and our future selves, the person who can see what the next mountain might be?

It’s worth pausing to ask some of these questions before setting any goals:

What does future me know that I don’t? 

What does future me believe in their bones, or see clearly, that I simply can’t? 

What are the BHAGS of my future self?

Fitzgerald's test of first-rate intelligence - holding opposing ideas while still functioning - offers us a framework for approaching goals: We ought to always hold our goals loosely, since we can’t always see around them to the next mountain. Goals are not just about what we want to achieve, but about who we want to become, to live a life we love. Viewing goals as an ongoing conversation between our present and future selves, rather than as fixed destinations, frees us to grow beyond our current vision. The true art lies not in setting perfect objectives and following plans with diligence, but in weaving a delicate balance between determined action and open-minded exploration. By leaving space for serendipity - those unexpected discoveries and adjacent possibilities - we might reach heights our present selves can't even imagine. Greatness emerges not from achieving our carefully planned goals, but from growing beyond them in ways we never could have predicted.

Handle Holiday Conflicts with GRACE: A Framework for Navigating Tough Conversations

The Holidays are upon us! These times can be opportunities for family, food, and heartfelt connections—but let’s be real, they’re also ripe arenas for tense conversations that can derail the best of gatherings. Before you dive into a battle over politics or who gets to carve the turkey, consider using the G.R.A.C.E. model. It’s five easy steps to help you navigate any sticky conversations with more grace and ease.

If you really want to dive into conversation mastery, get some free chapters from my book Good Talk: it’s all about how to design conversations that matter.

The G.R.A.C.E. model stands for:

Ground Yourself and the Conversation

Right Channel

Attend to Their Perspective

Co-Create Solutions

End With Commitments

Let’s say you're at Thanksgiving dinner, and a family member expresses a strong political opinion you deeply disagree with. Or vice versa - you say something you feel any sane person would agree with, and they disagree with you, strongly and loudly. The conversation gets heated and you want to approach it constructively instead of escalating the conflict.

Ground Yourself and the Conversation

In any conversation, at any moment, we have choices: We can react, or we can pause. Before heading into a conversation that we know might be difficult, it’s a good idea to ground yourself: Why are you engaging in this conversation? What are your goals, needs and objectives? Can you align with your conversational partners on shared goals and objectives of the conversation?

Applying Grace:

Try to reset the tone by shifting the ground (or the why) of the conversation from winning the argument to maintaining respect.

"I can see this is an issue we both care deeply about. I’d like us to talk about it in a way that helps us understand each other better."

Establish shared values if possible:

"We’re all here because we care about family and spending time together."

Right Channel

Often, I find that arguments can get heated if they are happening in the wrong place - text messaging, emails, slack - are all places where reduced context can get conversations off track and spiraling out. But the dinner table, with the whole family watching? That might not be the best venue for a full-on political debate. That venue is on the PBS News hour!

Applying Grace: Ask to change the channel

Suggest a calmer, lower-stakes one-on-one conversation later, if you really want to get to the bottom of things and do some deep canvassing:

"I think this topic deserves more attention than we can give it over dinner. Can we talk more about this after dessert or on a walk after the meal?"

If they refuse to shift the conversation to later, think of “channel” in an even broader way - change the channel from the “facts” channel to the “feelings and stories” channel. Research shows that, unfortunately, facts don’t change minds, so get them to share some stories instead.

"Maybe we can both share why this issue matters to us without trying to change anyone’s mind right now…

When did you first start thinking about this issue in this way?”

Using a “time shift” question like this is a great approach to get out of the present-moment conflict and into their backstory.

Attend to Their Perspective

Deeply listen to whoever you’re having the friction with. Attend to their perspective. It will de-escalate the conversation and help you empathize with them more completely. 

Applying Grace: Seek to understand first. Ask curious, non-confrontational questions to draw out their reasoning:

"What makes you feel so strongly about this issue?"

"How has this impacted you personally?"

Acknowledge their feelings, even if you don’t agree with their conclusions:

"It sounds like this is something that’s really important to you, and I respect that. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Pass the cranberry sauce, please.”

Co-Create Solutions

In a complex, difficult conversation, once you’ve understood their perspective from deeply attending to it, it’s possible to find common ground or ways to move forward without division. This is also an opportunity to reconnect with step one: Grounding yourself and the Conversation in a shared Why. Reconnect to that why in any solutions you propose, or invite your partner to propose solutions that align with what they see as your shared why.

Applying Grace: Offer options grounded in a shared why, together

"I think we both want what’s best for [the country/our community]. We might have different ideas about how to get there, but that’s something we share."

“What do you think is the best way forward for us today, given that we agreed we don’t want to win this argument, and that we all want to have a great time as a family together?”

If it’s clear that agreement on the issues isn’t possible, suggest shifting the focus of alignment to something you both can value, like enjoying dinner together:

"I’d rather not let this issue get in the way of enjoying our time together today. How does that land with you?"

End With Commitments

The best movies have great endings that satisfy us deeply. Ending a conversation with “Well, let’s just agree to disagree.” or “well, it is what it is” doesn’t give us a very satisfying ending. Such endings are 

“Thought-terminating clichés” which are part of the language of totalism. This kind of language ends thinking, feeling and humanity. It’s the opposite of a GRACEful ending.

Applying Grace: Find something, even something tiny, you can both align on.

Ending with commitments keeps the conversation grounded and meaningful. It’s how you make sure all that talking wasn’t for nothing—by agreeing on next steps, even if it’s just agreeing to revisit the topic later or agreeing that you both think differently. It leaves both participants feeling heard and respected, with a clear sense of where things go from here.

Saying:

"I’d love to understand your perspective more deeply when we’re both in a calmer setting. For now, let’s focus on enjoying dinner and catching up as a family.”

Such language connects us, and allows positive conversations in the future, rather than freezing it out.

Handling a Challenging Conversation with G.R.A.C.E. in a nutshell

If you’re feeling up to it, you can even use all five elements of GRACE in one elegant swoop:

Ground: "I know we both have strong feelings about [political issue], but I don’t want this to overshadow the holiday."

Right Channel: "This might be a better conversation for another time when we can really dive into it."

Attend: "When we have more time, I’d love for you to tell me more about why you feel this way—I want to understand your perspective."

Co-Create: "I think we both care about making the world better, even if we have different views on how to get there."

End: "For now, let’s focus on enjoying dinner and catching up as a family. Pass the cranberry sauce.”

Holiday dinners don’t have to end in frustration or silence!

Navigating difficult conversations doesn’t have to mean avoiding them or letting them escalate. With the G.R.A.C.E. framework, you can approach challenging conversations with thoughtfulness and empathy. When you slow down, choose your words carefully, and truly listen, you create space for understanding—even when you disagree. The goal isn’t to win an argument but to honor the relationships that matter most. With a little effort, you can keep the peace and keep the holiday spirit alive. Remember, the goal isn’t to win but to connect—and to leave the table with relationships intact and tupperware filled with leftovers.

If you’re still hungry for more tips, check out my 2022 essay on this same crucial question or check out my book, Good Talk.

11 Ways CEOs can use one-on-ones to scale excellence in their leadership teams

Founders often want to stay involved in many or even most aspects of their businesses (see the conversations over “founder mode”). However, most soon realize that if they ever want a vacation, a sustainable romantic relationship, or a sustainable, scalable business, they need to scale the capacity of the people on their leadership team to lead the organization without them.

Instead, CEOs are using this precious time to manage projects and run through a to-do list with their most senior leaders.

One-on-ones are an extraordinary opportunity to unlock the potential of your team to think more clearly, lead more effectively and to unlock growth for your company. 1:1s are an opportunity for a creative conversation (see item 10)

I know you’re busy, so here are the 11 ways you can use one-on-ones to scale excellence in your leadership teams:

1. Have them regularly. (read why below)

2. Limit the number of agenda items.

3. Get more feedback than you give.

4. Start with wins and increase your positive to negative feedback ratio.

5. Use 1:1s to coach your team to solve their own problems, not to solve problems for them.

6. Align on a time horizon to focus each conversation on.

7. Listen actively and deeply before responding.

8. Follow up on past conversations.

9. Flip who runs the show

10. Create a standard agenda with each direct report.

11. Get feedback on the meeting format.

I just saved you a few minutes!

The first four easy pieces are crucial to making your 1:1s better. If you want to know the reasons why and some research that proves the point, read on.

The real, outsized impact is in items 5, 6, and 7. These are deeper mindset shifts backed by powerful frameworks. Putting them into practice will take time, effort, and feedback to realize the real value and potential, but the possible gains are enormous.

Items 8-11 are ways to lock in the gains from items 1-7. Use these moves to make sure your 1:1s are continuously improving.

1. Have them!

Many leaders cancel or reschedule 1:1s when more urgent issues come up. But a big part of leadership is about creating stability, and keeping your 1:1s at a steady cadence is one great way to build stability. Plus, it bears fruit: research from Gallup found that employees who have regular one-on-one meetings with their managers are almost three times more likely to be engaged than those who don’t. We can guess why just having them is better than not having them - keeping the meeting as planned sends a signal that the meeting matters and that the employee matters.

Set the example for your direct reports by holding regular 1:1s with them, and ensure they do the same with their teams. 

(For more on why great leadership creates stability in the midst of change, listen to this episode of the Conversation Factory with author Ashley Goodall. He co-wrote the blockbuster Nine Lies About Work, and most recently, The Problem with Change).

2. Limit the number of agenda items so you can make meaningful progress.

If you try to talk about everything, you can’t go into depth about anything. Boil it down to a handful of items to dive into - 3-5 tops. Don’t run through the whole To-Do list!

3.  Get more feedback than you give.

A positive side-effect of asking questions to get feedback is that you’ve demonstrated you seek and can process challenging feedback. Over time, this creates trust and allows you to offer more challenging feedback to your reports.

During your 1:1s, ask questions that help you be a more effective leader for them:

• “Is there anything I can stop/start doing that would make your life easier?” 

This is a good place to start. When you’re ready, ask this varsity-level question:

• “What’s one thing you think would be really hard for me to hear, but that I really need to? I’d like to hear that feedback.”

Set the example of being radically open to feedback and make sure your FQ (Festering Quotient) is low in your relationship. Simply put, the longer you wait to talk about an issue, the more stinky it gets, for everyone involved.

(For more on the FQ and the SBIO model of giving situational feedback, listen to this podcast about The Intentional Conversations That Build Powerful Co-founder Relationships, with Rei Wang and Anita Hossain, co-founders of coaching platform The Grand.)

4. Start with wins and increase your positive-to-negative feedback ratio

Top performing teams maintain a nearly 6:1 ratio of positive to negative comments, according to HBR. It is likely that the abundance of positive comments helps create a deeply felt sense of psychological safety and the connective tissue that allows feedback to be heard as constructive rather than negative…and to be acted on, all while driving performance.

You can leave this ratio to chance, or you can choose, as the leader, to create a culture of celebrating wins. One-on-ones are the perfect opportunity to plant the seeds of that culture. Too often, I see 1:1s getting bogged down in project management and troubleshooting. Start with wins, and start creating a better feedback ratio early.

Also note: the more specific your feedback is, the better. 

Think about feedback as four quadrants, represented by the suits of a deck of cards: Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades. Feedback can be Warm (positive) or Cool (negative), and Sharp (clear) or Fuzzy (vague). Note this is not my framework! I first learned it from my friend Peter Haasz.

Giving people “Warm and Fuzzy” feedback in your one-on-ones is nice, like the Heart that represents it, but giving pieces of Sharp and Warm feedback, like little Diamonds, makes people feel really seen. An additional positive side-effect is that the more you notice and name their excellence, the more excellence you can evoke in them over time.

For example, compare these two pieces of feedback:

“Great job on that client presentation.”

vs. 

“The way you reframed the client’s objections to the roadmap shift as a natural evolution that would be a win-win took a lot of presence of mind. You really commanded the room in that moment. Great job.” 

Spend more time in the Warm-and-Sharp Quadrant than you do in the Warm-and-Fuzzy Quadrant of The Feedback Matrix, and spend time between your 1:1s collecting diamonds to share with your direct reports.

It’s best practice to give your direct reports cool-and-sharp feedback in the moment or as close as possible to whatever happened to evoke the feedback. Don’t wait for a 1:1. The Feedback Matrix above classifies cool-and-sharp feedback as the playing card suit “spades.” (Spades are what the British call a shovel). Just as a spade is a handy garden tool, think of cool-and-sharp feedback as a tool to help folks get better. Share that feedback with them when you can be cool and calm about giving them the feedback—, i.e., when you can share the feedback in a helpful, non-clubbing- them-over-the-head kind of way

5. Use 1:1s to coach your team to solve their own problems, not to solve their problems for them.

After working with me for a few months, many of the CEOs I coach ask me, “How can I work with my team the way you work with me?” These leaders see how our coaching conversations make space for their own deep thinking and strategic problem solving and they want to do the same for their teams. But these CEOs are all smart and effective problem solvers; it’s easy for them to slip back into their problem-solving habits. But, “what got you here won’t get you there.” 

In order to scale your leadership impact, you need to scale your team’s impact. That scale will happen more rapidly if you slow down and learn to coach their thinking, instead of doing it all for them. 

Slowing down and leveraging a coaching approach can feel frustrating at first. The best way to make progress with anything is to put it on your calendar and stick with it. Developing a coaching habit with your team is no different. Insert a regular coaching conversation agenda item in your standard 1:1 agenda in collaboration with your direct reports.

In short, remove the option to NOT coach by telling them you will be coaching them, not solving problems for them. Ask them to come to the conversation with the key priorities they feel blocked on and what they think their best solution options for each one are. 

Then, to help coach them to think through problems, leverage the SSOON Model of Coaching Conversations.  The SSOON model helps make their implicit thinking explicit in five simple steps so you can understand their thinking process.

1. Situation: What’s the context around the challenge the coachee is facing? A coaching stance here is to just ask more questions to uncover what’s really going on and encourage the coachee to share their thoughts and experiences fully.

2. Success: Here, the focus shifts to envisioning the desired future. The coach helps the coachee articulate what success looks like and explores possibilities that may exceed their initial expectations, often using imaginative questions to clarify their vision. 

3. Obstacles: In this step, the coach encourages the coachee to identify any barriers preventing them from achieving success. By reflecting on these obstacles, the coachee can gain clarity on what stands in their way.

4. Options: Once success is clearly defined and obstacles are acknowledged, the conversation moves to exploring potential actions. The coach facilitates brainstorming and may offer gentle suggestions to help the coachee consider various paths forward that they haven’t considered.

5. Next Steps: Finally, the coach guides the coachee to commit to specific actions they will take moving forward. This involves selecting manageable and impactful steps that can lead to the desired outcome, reinforcing a sense of accountability and momentum.

Together, these five elements help create a structured and reflective coaching dialogue, empowering the coachee to navigate their challenges and achieve their goals through clearer thinking, guided by you.

6. Create a standard agenda together, but follow the structure of creative conversations.

I talk about these phases in more depth here, but you can also read one of my favorite books, Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, which is the source of the delightful diagram above. 

(See below for 22 questions to use across these three phases to create your own ideal 1:1 agenda with your direct reports.)

7. Listen deeply and actively before responding.

Remember the Talking and Thinking Gap, which captures the fact that while people can think at up to 4,000 words a minute, most of us can only speak at 125 words per minute. So, in every interaction, people always have more to say than they can ever express.

For leaders, this means that in your meetings, you don’t hear everything your direct reports want to say. Plus, you’re often likely thinking a bit about what you might say in response, or something else entirely! Don’t forget this classic quote from the late U.S. ambassador Robert J. McCloskey:

““I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure that you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” ”

— Robert J. McCloskey

Assume that you did not fully understand everything your teammate meant to convey.

Active listening is usually defined as making sure you heard what you thought you heard by repeating it back and getting confirmation.

To listen more deeply, try leveraging the Listening Triangle to get to the heart of what’s being said.

When you get confirmation that you heard them right (by sharing your active-listening paraphrase), ask another question from a slightly different angle to deeper into their response. The listening triangle helps you get to the heart of what someone is really saying.

Re-asking also helps create the kind of psychological safety essential for an effective leadership relationship, confirming that you really want to understand their perspective.

8. Flip who runs the show.

Share your plan to coach more, and share this article with them so they know the game plan you’ll be sourcing from. Sketch out an agenda together (Item #6!) then hand the agenda over to them and let them take the reins. This eliminates almost entirely the possibility of backsliding on your intentions!

9. Align on a time horizon to focus each conversation on.

Often, 1:1s can get stuck in the now—the immediate challenges of a company’s day-to-day survival and growth—which is natural. 

In fact, most people are encouraged to focus on the most urgent and important items on their to-do list. This is a trap! The idea of focusing on the urgent and important is a mis-application of a speech by former president Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. In the speech, Eisenhower was quoting Dr. J. Roscoe Miller, President of Northwestern University, as saying:

““I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important.
The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
”

— Dr. J. Roscoe Miller

This "Eisenhower Principle" is said to be how he organized his workload and priorities. For years, I was told to focus on the Important/Urgent quadrant (in red, far left) as a first priority and to delegate or ignore the Not Urgent/Not important (in blue, lower right on both matrices below). But the quote is actually pointing us to the upper right yellow-green quadrant - the NOT urgent YET Important quadrant. 

These NOT urgent YET Important items are the ones that easily fall off a to-do list filled with urgency but lacking items that address longer-term or even medium-term strategic impact.

Working with your leadership team to focus weekly or bi-weekly conversations on the non-urgent but important items will slowly create a buffer against the tyranny of urgency. The matrix on the right is the ideal Eisenhower matrix - intentionally making ample time for the non-urgent as the lion’s share of our focus.

Make sure you use periodic conversations to look even further ahead - where does this person want to be in 10 years? In five? Where do you both see the company in three years? Shift the time horizon for each conversation intentionally.

10. Follow up on past conversations.

Make sure topics and issues don’t dangle. Following up on past issues with your direct reports will remind them not only to stay accountable to you, but also to follow up with their direct reports so that they remain accountable too. All of it trickles down to create a culture of accountability organization-wide. I hosted a lovely podcast conversation with the co-founders of Huddle who called this shift "building an Integrity Culture" - a culture where you expect yourself and others to do what they say they will. Listen here.

11. Get feedback on the meeting format.

Regularly check in with your direct reports and ask them: Are you getting what you need from these conversations? What’s working? What could be improved? 

As mentioned above, you will find that the unique needs of each member of your team will shape the 1:1s over time, even though they will all follow the same open-explore-close architecture.

22 questions to try out in your 1:1s

Questions are the rocket fuel of conversations, and 1:1s are no exception. Here are some tried-and-true questions to take for a test drive on your next one-on-one, organized according to the open-explore-close pattern of powerful, creative conversations:

Opening:

1. The “Traffic Light” check in. 🚥 Are you Green (all systems go, full speed ahead), in the Red zone (ie, having some significant challenges you’re managing that are stopping you in your tracks) or yellow (ie, you need to slow down to stay safe)

2. What has your attention right now?

3. What's driving you crazy these days? 

4. What's making you happy to come to work these days? 

5. What is the general mood and morale of the team(s) you're on? 

6. How are things outside of work?

7. How is stress at work?

8. How is your workload at work?

Exploring Key Topics:

1. Progress towards goals:

a. What Victories do we need to celebrate? 

b. What are some important Roadblocks we need to remove?

2. Career development:

a. Where do you want to go? How are we going to get you there?

3. Coaching questions:

a. How can I help (with challenge X)?

b. What does “good” look like? What’s your real goal?

c. What’s the real challenge for you here?

d. If you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to? (nod to Michael Bungay Stanier for this powerful question)

e. Check out the SSOON model of coaching to make sure you lead a coaching conversation effectively.

4. Feedback for the leader:

a. What’s one thing you think would be really hard for me to hear?

b. Anything I'm doing that I need to stop? 

c. Anything I should be doing that I'm not? 

d. Anything I'm doing that I should keep doing?

e. What should I be doing more of, or less of, to make your experience at ___ the best it can be?

Closing:

1. What's your next step?

2. What was most useful to you?

Leading Teams to Unlock Creative Potential with Design Thinking

There is more intelligence inside our organizations and our teams than we are using.

It’s the job of leaders to unlock the creative power of their teams - not to generate solutions to all problems for them.

Leaders can do this by leading conversations that leverage the power of a creative process - finding new, unexpected and innovative solutions to challenging problems instead of business as usual. 

This creative process has gone by many names, has been studied for decades, and offers leaders powerful, practical tools to drive change and innovation through creative conversations. My book, Good Talk: How to Design Conversations that Matter is just one of many, many books on this topic. In this essay I’ll break down some essential tools of leading creative conversations and share some other books on the topic for your further reading.

At various times, this process has been called Creative Problem Solving (CPS), and more recently known as Design Thinking. Over the decades these approaches have been hailed as practical and functional, or a terribly failed experiment.

While the realities on the ground of how these methods get implemented is nuanced (to say the least!), Creative Problem Solving and Design Thinking work because they leverage some fundamental forces of creative gravity. In my days as a physicist, we liked to joke that gravity isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law. 

You try to get a plane in the air without understanding aerodynamics and the fundamentals of gravity! Working with a basic understanding of the laws of creativity means leaders can make meetings soar, instead of feeling like a drag. And yet most leaders are flying blind or working with outmoded theories.

These methods are best learned in action, so…Let’s do an experiment, shall we? After the game, I’ll unpack the five keys to leading more impactful creative problem solving meetings with your team.

I’ve been playing improv games to help teams learn design thinking in action for years. And I remember the first time I saw a colleague lead a group through this particular game more than 10 years ago. At the time, I had taken some improv classes and had already been teaching design thinking for awhile, but had never thought to put them together. It lit a spark in me that still burns to this day. There are many ways to lead this game and to help teams unpack their experience and make meaning of it. This is my approach.

Setting the Scene

I set the scene by asking the group if anyone has done any improv.

Some have, some haven’t.

I remind those that have done improv that we will be “breaking” some of the rules of improv. This will create some discomfort, and I ask for their patience and curiosity with the discomfort. 

For those who haven’t done improv, I *also* ask them for their patience and curiosity with the exercise ahead.

Yes, But

“Grab a partner and plan a party together for the next 2 minutes. One person will suggest a party idea. The other will respond with yes, but….

And you’ll continue to offer suggestions, back and forth, always starting with yes, but…”

It’s a simple instruction. If you do this exercise in person, you’ll hear the noise in the room rise as people dutifully try to follow your instructions and have a “Yes, But..” conversation. And one minute later, you’ll hear the chatter in the room die down as people struggle to keep the conversation going.

At two minutes I rescue the room from the pain of continuing. 

“What was that like?” I ask

“Painful”

“Hard”

“Slow”

“Argumentative”

…come the replies.

“Did anyone actually get to plan the party?” I probe

Most teams admit that they got bogged down pretty early - where to get the ice became an intractable problem. They got lost in the details.

I draw the axes of Energy over Time and ask the teams - did your energy go up or down during the conversation? The chart below summarizes the overall experience - Energy in the groups drops, fast.

Now, there will be one or two pairs who had a BLAST during this conversation. In some organizations the proportions of “Yes, but” enjoyers are even higher.

“I loved how they kept poking holes in my ideas and I had to find solutions!”

But the room as a whole admits that such conversations create a one-sided effort that does wear thin over time since poking holes is a lot easier than plugging them.

The main points I want teams to notice is that:

Many people do not enjoy “Yes, But” Conversations.

Some people like “Yes, But” Conversations

Overall, “Yes, But” conversations drain energy

Yes, And

“Grab the same partner. The other partner now gets to suggest a party idea. You’ll continue to offer responses, back and forth, always starting with yes, and…for the next 2 minutes”

Again, if you do this exercise in person, you’ll hear the noise in the room rise as people dutifully try to follow your instructions and have a “Yes, And..” conversation. And one minute later, you’ll hear the chatter in the room continue to rise as people really get into the party ideas

At two minutes I have to shout to be heard and get the room to settle down.

“What was that like?” I ask

“Fun”

“Energizing”

“Collaborative”

“Flow”

…come the replies.

“Did anyone actually get to plan the party?” I probe

The room usually explodes with people ready to launch their party ideas into the stratosphere.

Returning to the Energy X Time Chart, I ask the room how the arc of their energy was for this conversation. 

“Was it going up and to the right?”

Most of the room agrees.

“Or was it starting to level off?” I enquire

Now, in a mirror to the “yes, But” portion, there were several  pairs who felt like the “Yes, And” energy was getting to be a bit much towards the end of the conversation. Could they really afford Jay-Z and Beyonce for this intergalactic unicorn party on the moon? Who was going to fund the rocket flight - Bezos or Musk?! Things were starting to feel a bit out of hand for some.

At this point, I want the group to understand:

“Yes, And” Conversations are energy producing

Some people run out of steam with “Yes, And” Conversations

Different people run out of creative energy at different rates.

It is the job of a leader to make space for these modes of creative thinking. We need “Yes, And” thinking to make sure we have MORE creative ideas on the table. And we need “Yes, But” thinking to make sure the ideas actually hold water.

Opening and Closing at the same time sucks

At this point, I can point out the fundamental problem:

There are people who LOVE poking holes in ideas.

There are even folks who love having their ideas being poked.

But generally speaking, it’s more energizing to build on ideas.

So why are our creative meetings so broken?

The problem is that teams are generally playing BOTH games at the same time. We have all been in meetings where people are simultaneously generating and destroying ideas.

“What if we try___________?”

We did that last year… it didn’t work.”

“What if we try___________?”

“We can’t get that past legal.”

“What if we try___________?”

“That sounds expensive”

Like a quantum foam of particles being born of the vacuum and disappearing from existence in an instant, almost nothing escapes this kind of meeting, where “Yes, And” people are cut off by “Yes, But” people before ideas even get to develop or mature.

The leader who understands the physics of creative conversations makes sure we play both the “Yes, And” and the “Yes, But” games ONE AT A TIME. 

Yes, And is Opening. Divergent or Generative Energy.

Yes, But is Closing, Convergent or Subtractive Energy.

Electrons and protons are negatively and positively charged, respectively…but we need both in balance to make up the universe we live in.

So, too, do leaders need to balance positive and negative energy to drive creative thinking.

Creative Culture is limited by classic Cognitive Biases

At least two common cognitive pathways keep us from pushing through “Yes, But” thinking into new and innovative solutions: The Loss-Aversion Bias and the Negativity Bias.

The Negativity bias is thought to be an adaptive evolutionary function (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1999; Vaish et al., 2008; Norman et al., 2011). Our prehistoric ancestors were exposed to environmental threats that were truly threatening - the sound of snapping branches in the woods could actually be a tiger or worse. Being highly attentive to potentially negative stimuli played a useful role in survival. Seeing gaps and challenges in ideas as fatal flaws to be avoided at all costs makes us flee from new ideas.

The Loss-Aversion Bias is summed up by the old saying “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. Loss aversion was first proposed back in 1979 by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman as an important framework for prospect theory – an analysis of decision under risk. We feel the possible loss of, say $10, much much more sharply than the gain of $10. Investopedia suggests that “human beings experience losses asymmetrically more severely than equivalent gains. This overwhelming fear of loss can cause investors to behave irrationally and make bad decisions, such as holding onto a stock for too long or too little time.”

Samuelson and Zeckhauser, in their 1988 paper “Status quo in decision making” pointed out that incumbents do much better than they would in a neutral election.

These cognitive biases keep us rooted in protecting what we have instead of exploring new possibilities - because doing so costs time and energy.

Creative leaders make space for Opening, Exploring and Closing.

In 2010 I read Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers. Gamestorming brought together decades of practical wisdom and research into how groups can work together, better by thinking of work through the lens of game theory.

Yes, And is a Game. The rules create an additive thinking space.

Yes, But is a Game. The rules create a thinking space of subtraction.

It’s easy to get frustrated when you are playing a different game than everyone else on the field. Can you imagine trying to play soccer while everyone else is playing rugby? Or playing chess while your partner is playing backgammon?

It’s impossible to make any progress this way.

Gamestorming opened my eyes to the importance of balancing these three games, in sequence, as in the diagram of a creative process below. The authors also  opened my eyes to a third energy: Emergence, or exploring.

Opening: Divergent (positive)

Exploring: Emergent (neutral)

Closing: Convergent (negative)

In the universe, we have electrons and protons, but it’s actually neutrons that help hold atoms together. And just so, a culture of innovation is found in making space for creative emergence - a kind of “neutral” space, where we are not generating or eliminating ideas, but holding space for them to be heard and to combine and recombine.

Openers love opening and may resist closing.

Closers love closing and may drag their heels in opening.

Almost everyone finds exploring a bit challenging, which is why Sam Kaner’s Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making describes this middle part of the creative process as the “Groan Zone”.

We all need to become switch hitters in the creative process if we’re going to work together.

Openers need to learn to close - to choose and launch

Closers need to learn to lean into opening, to get curious about ideas before poking holes in them.

Leaders can create the guardrails for conversations that make this possible. 

Creative Leaders are Multipliers

Leaders have an outsized influence on how teams solve problems. They can intentionally set up a space where these three modes of creative conversation can flow. If they know where the rough air is going to be in the process, they can plan for it.

For example, in her bestselling book Multipliers: How the best leaders make everyone smarter, Liz Wiseman posits that there are at least two types of leaders 

- Multipliers, who expect great results from their teams AND create the conditions for genius to emerge 

and …

- Diminishers, who micromanage, take credit and waste the genius in their teams and organizations.

Multiplier leaders provide the support and forward movement for teams to navigate the perilous middle of the creative process with grace. They expect great results and know that setting time aside for thinking through options and opportunities creates the best results - what Daniel Kahneman calls “Thinking Slow” in his book “Thinking: Fast and Slow”.

How might we create the conditions for effective creative thinking for our teams?

At this point, the hour is coming to a close and there’s precious little time for much more than reflection and projection - getting people who’ve gone through this improv game to think about what it was like, and how they might lead differently in the future. And for them to share what they might already be doing that looks and feels like what we’ve been talking about for the last 45 minutes or so.

Five Steps for Leading Creative Conversations

Make space for Opening, Exploring and Closing. Doing all three in one short meeting may not be possible or feasible at first.

1. Open with a clear challenge statement. What problem are we here to solve? Defining the problem well is a powerful form of creative leadership. More on that here.

2. Open Pt 1: Think alone, then think together. Get everyone to write down their ideas in silence. For more on why, check out “Your next meeting should be silent”

3. Open Pt 2: Get people to share their ideas. No “Yes, But” energy allowed…yet!

4. Explore: Share ideas and remix them. Combine the best parts of ideas together. While some people criticize collective creativity with the saying “A camel is a horse designed by committee” I challenge you to cross the Sahara desert on a horse!

5. Close: Decide on one or more ideas to prototype, test or evolve.

Step Zero should usually be “Decide how you’re going to decide”.

Leaders need to set groups up for success by letting them know if this is a democracy or an advisory committee. Leaving things vague just causes a mess.

Step Six should usually be “Let’s talk to real people facing the challenge we described in step one without showing them our ideas yet” so that we reduce the chances of a third dangerous and common cognitive bias - the Confirmation Bias, ie “the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values”.

In the Toyota System of continuous Improvement, this is called Genba, or Genba Walks - “going to the real place where the actual work is done”

Leadership is Designing and Facilitating the conditions for Transformative conversations.

Left to our own devices, conversations will be an unstructured mix of “Yes, And” and “Yes, But” modes of working. Leaders have the opportunity to set up conversations to run on a different operating system - one where teams cycle through “yes, and” and “yes, but” thinking in ways that create respect, psychological safety and forward movement.

This mode of leadership isn’t directive or authoritative, but is more akin to the style of leadership Daniel Goleman described in HBR in 2000 as a Leadership That Gets Results - a coaching mode of leadership. Coaching and Facilitation are two sides of one coin - leadership based in empathy and an understanding of how humans are built - but that’s a conversation for another time.

The Support Matrix

In early May of 2023, the surgeon general of the US released an advisory report calling attention to the loneliness epidemic.

If you’re new to this topic, in short, people today have fewer friends and fewer systems of support than ever before.

Why is this important?

At a societal level, if a population is lonely and disconnected, you’re going to see the impacts in an uptick of negative health outcomes from an increased incidence of heart disease to increases in suicides - that’s why it’s so powerful that the surgeon general is weighing in on this.

Why is this important to you, the reader, in your life?

How much support does a person need?

Some ages back, I wrote about how founders can’t emotionally bootstrap their companies.

Since I wrote that essay, that perspective has been reinforced and expanded through many, many conversations I’ve had with founders and leaders who tell me that they need a whole spectrum of support to sustain themselves, their companies and their relationships.

For example, my podcast conversation with the co-founders of the next-gen gaming platform Artie confirmed that having a coach and a therapist is totally a thing, and nothing to be ashamed about!

What kind of systems of support?

For me, I have a five-legged stool of support systems, regular conversations and gatherings that are blocked in my calendar.

My Therapist (one hour weekly, on and off for 15+ years)

My Men’s Group (two hours weekly, four years strong)

My Coaching Forum (five hours monthly, currently entering our third year)

My Sunday Dinner + Drinks (2-3 hours weekly…this dinner with friends has been going strong for over 10 years).

My journaling and sketching habit - sometimes daily, sometimes less. I have notebooks for my mental health and for my coaching practice.

But we could bucket these into a basic spectrum of support, sized like t-shirts: Large, Medium and Small. The three key conversational buckets, or legs of support are:

• Groups,

• One-on-one conversations, and

• Conversations with myself

Now, I love sorting conversations by size, ie, amount of people, as the Spectrum of Support stool diagram does above, but we could just as easily sort these spectrums of support with many other lenses.

For example:

Self/peer facilitated vs expertly facilitated. My therapist is accredited and expert in their field, while my men’s group and coaching forum are peer-facilitated. It’s great to have self/peer facilitated spaces because guiding conversations is such a critical leadership skill, and these spaces can create opportunities to hone your own approach. Experts, on the other hand, bring safety, clarity and assurance to their approach, and I always learn something new I can steal!

Self-growth focus vs Life Focus: My Sunday dinner conversations are sometimes about life, the universe and everything, but often we talk about media, politics, and other tomfoolery. On the other hand, my men’s group is only focused on personal growth and self-transformation. We don’t talk about stories, we process emotions. I find safety and security in knowing that I have a space like my men’s group that will always be laser focused, vs a space that is flexible and loose.

Self/Others/Nature/Transcendence: My friend and podcast guest Casper ter Kuile uses four very different categories, when he describes rituals that foster connection. Ritual can simply mean “a way to create space and time for something that matters.” He thinks about:

• rituals for connecting with yourself,

• rituals that connect you to others

• rituals for fostering connection to nature

• rituals that create time to connect with something transcendent, which for some might be a sense of “god”, oneness, or something else.

Since he’s largely inspired by what I like to call “Biomimicry but using religion” it’s not surprising that he includes time for focusing on something larger than what we can see with our eyes - connection with the transcendent is a feature of all religions. Connecting with something bigger than ourselves helps inspire awe and wonder, both surprisingly helpful experiences. His company, The Sacred Design Lab explores what we can learn from religion to inspire leadership, gathering and transformation and he wrote a wonderful book on the power of ritual. You can check out our conversation here!

Why is regular, even structured, self-talk so important? Check out my essay here on how impactful self-talk can be on your quality of life. In short, how you talk to and with yourself is the fundamental rate-limiter of your overall success and happiness.

The Commitment-Intimacy Support Matrix

The spectrum that has been on my mind is at the intersection of commitment and intimacy - what I am currently focusing on as the essential factors in any Support Matrix.

I began to realize that the systems of support, the spaces and places that had delivered the most impact to me were all high-commitment and high-intimacy spaces.

For example: My men’s group is a high-commitment space - we commit to coming together each week. If we need to miss a session, we have to reach out to other members and have a 1-1 check in with someone to share what we’re making more important than the meeting.

(Note - it’s 100% okay to say - “I am prioritizing going to a party with my partner” - and committing to being 100% present to having a great time at said party and coming back and sharing that joy with the group!)

Since we’re a high-commitment space, you can’t just flake out. If you do, we’ll call you out on breaking your commitments. We’re also high-intimacy, in the sense that we can bring anything to the group to talk about - it’s one of the few spaces where we can say whatever we need to.

My coaching forum is also a high-intimacy space. Even though we focus on helping each other grow our coaching practice (both in professional excellence and revenue) we also focus on sharing what is really going on in our lives - losses of family members, parenting, fertility journeys, self-doubt, and so on.

Often I see people trying to learn, develop and grow using low-commitment and low-intimacy spaces: Webinars, reading, social media.

These are like snacks. They can keep you alive and moving forward, but they are just not enough.

Deeper commitment is more deeply nourishing.

Deeper intimacy, allowing yourself to really be seen and to see others, is powerful.

The Holy Trinity of Professional Development: Coaching, Mentoring and Peer Forum

With my executive coaching clients, I find there is a powerful trinity of support systems they need to thrive in their roles: Coaching, Mentoring, and Peer Forums.

Sometimes these support systems are more ad-hoc and casual, but I’ve found that they are all like 401ks - the value of commitment and intimacy compounds over time as you reinvest.

Coaching is powerful because it focuses on the belief that the coachee has the answer within, that they can and should find their own way. It creates the space and time for them to think deeply, with a caring and committed thought partner (like me! - learn more about my coaching here).

Coaching is less directive, which means the coachee can tap into their own reserves in a powerful way.

Mentoring is powerful because it helps a leader get vital feedback and information about their unique context. No matter how much confidence and clarity a person can get from coaching, it is incredibly helpful to connect with someone who’s “been there/done that” in some relevant way. Finding great mentors (plural - the more the better) is hard, but worthwhile.

Peer Forums can go by lots of different names: Peer Coaching, Peer Exchange Groups, Masterminds. Organizations like EO, YPO, Starting Bloc, and Vistage host peer groups that are powerful in five ways:

1. They are long (in duration - for example, YPO-style groups meet monthly for a full day in person, while my coaching peer group meets monthly for five hours online.

2. They are ongoing - they usually continue to meet with no end date in sight.

3. They are small - often capped at 10 people - which feeds intimacy.

4. They are highly structured. Either they are expertly facilitated or the people in the group are expertly trained to self-facilitate.

5. They are normalizing. When the group is more similar than different in essential ways, they can provide deeply nourishing feedback that, yes, the challenge you are facing is face-able, since others have also faced it in some manner.

Balancing Diversity with Similarity in Support Systems

Balancing variety and diversity with similarity and familiarity is essential, and also a fundamental challenge of peer groups, coaching and mentoring.

For example - in my men’s group, it's very powerful that some of us are dads, some of us are trying to become dads, and some of us never want kids. It provides richness to the conversation.

On the other hand, when someone is struggling with parenting, it’s incredibly helpful for someone else in the group to be able to say, “I see you,” from having had a similar experience.

On the other hand, there are men’s groups only for dads - having someone who never wants kids in such a group just makes no sense!

Similarly, it can be helpful for a CEO group to only have CEOs or for a CTO group to just have CTOs, but it can be very helpful for them to be in different industries and stages of growth. On the other hand, the peer groups in EO, YPO and others often work to create groups that are in similar stages of development.

Filtering in this way can have advantages …but also drawbacks: too much sameness sucks the richness from the conversation.

How can we find the sweet spot between diversity and similarity?

The Q of a gathering

In 2012, Jonah Lehrer wrote a wonderful article in the New Yorker about Groupthink. In the later half of the article, he discussed the work of Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, who dedicated his career to uncovering the ideal team composition. He focused on Broadway musicals as an ideal way to study the complex ways team creativity can impact success, with easy to measure inputs (people) and outputs (box office numbers!).

Musicals, to Uzzi, epitomize group creativity. Collaboration is paramount – composers work with lyricists, choreographers with directors, etc. - to create a successful show. Uzzi studied all 474 Broadway musicals from 1945 to 1989, tracking relationships and using a value he called "Q" to measure the amount of social connectivity and familiarity a team had.

Often musicals are developed by teams of artists that have worked together several times before—a common practice to reduce risk with “known quantities." We still see this today in marketing “from the team that brought you X.” Such musical productions would have a relatively high Q. A musical created by a team of strangers would have a low Q.

Uzzi, in essence, compared familiarity with success and reported:

“Frankly, I was surprised by how big the effect was…I expected Q to matter, but I had no idea it would matter this much.”

A low Q (low familiarity, or an overly-fresh team) correlated with low success, which Uzzi expected - it may take time to develop a successful collaboration. What was surprising was that a very high Q was also correlated with low success!

It was possible to be too familiar.

Lehrer summarized Uzzi’s insight:

“The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation.”

I love this idea of balancing freshness and familiarity in all our gatherings, not just in the success of musicals or the general creativity of teams.

I have seen this play out in my own life - I have an annual eggnog party where I make a quadruple batch of the New York Times classic Nog. It’s been going for about ten years, with a small break for the pandemic. In the before-times, the gathering was often a familiar group of groups from my life - grad school, work, other friends, who knew each other a bit, and more and more over the years. It was always a large and raucous group, but our Q was increasing too much, as it turned out. I had created a guest list that was more regulars than new additions. (although the addition of my wife about five years ago did provide a solid Q-infusion since she has fun friends!)

Last year, I started hosting a series of smaller salon-like gatherings dedicated to serendipity. My wife and I split the invite list and started reconnecting to old acquaintances and new folks we were meeting as we ventured out in the post-pandemic re-socializing of New York. Some folks would get re-invited, others were one-offs. After hosting just 2-3 of these gatherings, the dates of the Egg Nog party approached. We decided to invite everyone who had been to a salon and the whole old timers Nog list.

The group that wound up coming to Nog Fest 2022 had a really great Q-value. A solid balance of freshness and familiarity that everyone commented on.

Similarly, in peer groups, we can be tempted to find a group that all narrowly meet a certain criteria or be a certain type to create a maximal Q-value. But Uzzi’s Q research shows us that variety is the spice of life, and that cultivating diversity of many types can have outsized rewards.

We are social animals and we require varied social nourishment

As a professional, I focus a lot on my own professional development and on helping my clients develop themselves. But, of course, we’re more than just our work.

This is where the conversation moves into the ideas of third places, long-term conversations, and, the importance of clubs in helping us stay connected to each other (which is what the film by my friend Rebecca Davis, Join or Die is all about — Robert Putnam’s groundbreaking work on why you should join a club, and why the fate of America depends on it. If you are dubious, check out the trailer!)

Lower commitment spaces with medium intimacy, like communities and third places, can be extremely helpful for overall mental health and personal flourishing.

Each of us has our own loneliness epidemic that we need to attend to with a spectrum of support tailored to our needs and goals.

My friend and podcast guest Kat Vellos wrote a whole book called We Should Get Together on how challenging it is to build adult friendships due to many, many structural factors, and she shares tons of suggestions on how to build deeper connections. You can check out our podcast conversation here and find links to her work.

My podcast guest Nick Gray says to host more parties, and his work is around helping people do just that. If you haven’t listened to our conversation, you should! And he’s right…if more people held more parties more often, that would be great. But 2-hour, mid-week cocktail parties, while surprisingly powerful, only scratch certain itches and can only provide certain types of support. That said, being the host and creating the support you most want to have is incredibly powerful. In fact, that advice is the advice my coach Robert Ellis gives!

I’d love to hear how many legs your support stool has, and what your key legs of support are!