Table of Contents

• Roombas and Natasha Rothwell

• Topics To Add to Your Leadership Team Meetings

• 1% Solutions

• What I’m Reading

• “Who Smuggles a Whole Ham?”

Roombas and Natasha Rothwell

I love a good show with a smart and messy female lead. It started with Murphy Brown. I was likely the only 5th grader in South Brooklyn watching this show religiously and I definitely had to be the only one who then began an early love of blazers. After a void (I watched a lot of teen dramas where everyone is messy), I then discovered Grey’s, then The Mindy Project, and then Scandal…the list goes on and on. (I fully appreciate there is a lot to unpack from this- Please respect my privacy at this moment). My current obsession is How to Die Alone.

How to Die Alone stars Natasha Rothwell, who I’ve loved since Insecure. It’s a story about a single, broke woman who works in a airport, despite being scared to fly- and how she tries to turn her life around after a near-death experience.

In one scene, she is talking to her friend Terrance. She claims she keeps getting stuck, that no matter what she does to change her situation, she finds herself in the same position. Terrance responds with a story about his Roomba. For the first two days he had the Roomba, it kept knocking into the wall. He figured it was broken and had to return it. On the third day, however, the Roomba easily maneuvered around the room. Why the initial struggle? “The failures were data.” In other words, the failure is part of the process. And instead of writing something- or someone off- consider what data you are gathering about what’s NOT working to inform what COULD work.

This is naturally the time of year where there’s a need for reflection. Perhaps you are a school leader, 6-8 weeks in, past the honeymoon stage, and starting to see bumps and plateaus. Perhaps you are closing Q3 and thinking ahead to next year’s goals. Whatever it is, you’ve likely faced some wins and inevitably some challenges and failures.

Rather than treat the latter as a moral failure, I think we need to treat it as a systems failure. Most people WANT to do the right thing. So, what’s going on when your team gets stuck or flat out fails at something? It’s important to analyze this with the same rigor you would any other data. Some questions to ask yourself and your team:

• Do folks actually know what to do? Sometimes failure (or at least, lack of progress) is actually due to a lack of clarity. This happens sometimes with the use of jargon (collaborate! innovate) instead of concrete behaviors and actions we want folks to take. And when we are vague we privilege people who think like us. For example reframe "Be inclusive!" to "Ensure that any decision is based on multiple stakeholders' experiences."

• Do folks care? This one can be hard in a mission driven organization because yes, folks care about the mission. But why should they care about a given initiative? How are you painting the picture of the impact you want to have? One leader shared a really powerful example of this in action. They were working on equipping staff to use asset-based language about students. One way they made this connection was having actual pictures of their students up in the room. "What kind of words would we say to our students?" This took the initiative from yet another thing to do to a true rallying cry for the team.

• Are systems and space set up to facilitate action? Too often we are not aware of the friction that can exist within an organization. Are processes overly clunky? Are you making people go through five steps when two might be ok? Years ago I was working with an emerging leader who was trying to make the teacher work space a clean and welcoming area, and support everyone in being. a part of that responsibility. As we walked through the space, I asked where the Clorox Wipes were. "Down the hall in the closet." If we want folks to do something, we've got to make it easy for them to do it. Think of Amazon's one-click payment- they make it very easy for us to give them our money. How do we apply that same principle?

• Are there processes and plans to support people, gauge progress and course correct? As a very smart friend noted, sometimes internal resistance is just fear. With change comes a new way of operating and that can be scary. It can also feel overwhelming. Instead, listen to what folks are scared about. Besides being an excellent way to stress-test your plans, it also helps you to understand the training and support folks may need and what unintended consequences you need to monitor.

Another thing? Be sure to talk to your team. Their perspective on the disconnect will be invaluable, and their feeling heard will help reinvest them in the work that lies ahead.

Topics To Add to Your Leadership Team Meetings

I’ve been leading facilitations and trainings over the past few weeks, and love beng able to give a quick jolt of inspiration and guidance to leaders. As we look at the talent calendar, there are a few topics that should be on your leadership team agenda in the next 6-12 weeks. If you’d like a co-planner or a facilitator to lead these sessions, email me to discuss (or find us time here)

• Delivering Critical Feedback- and What to Do When That Doesn’t Work (anytime)

• Preparing for Fair and Equitable Performance Reviews (this should ideally happen 2-3 months before reviews)

• Growing Your Team (Concurrent or right after performance reviews)

• Auditing Your Team to Prepare for Hiring (Concurrent or right after performance reviews)

1% Solutions

• Share an evaluation audit with managers and add this to your next check-in- It is September— meaning that you are a few months away from giving a performance review. How are folks doing? How do you know? Have you shared that with them? Take the time to do a feedback audit and then follow up with folks accordingly. If folks are making great progress or are consistently doing well- tell them! And if the needle isn’t moving, get curious as a first step. And also, please talk to your HR Business Partner for ideas on how to engage in this conversation with the person you are supporting (If you don’t have one and need one, feel free to email me)

• Set aside time for (written) gratitude- I’ve seen a lot of ways for orgs to share gratitude for teammates. For me, the one that has always resonated is to set aside time for people to give thanks to each other in writing. This can be by giving each person 5 thank you cards. It could be having each person’s name on a piece of card stock. But give time for folks to do the writing, which feels more significant than the shout outs you may give in a meeting or Town Hall. And yes, I’ve kept every note I’ve received, and reread them when I’m doubting myself or ready to throw in the towel.

What I’m Reading

• Identifying and building human skills in the Age of AI- Increasingly we are seeing that AI is a tool to free individuals to do the work that is uniquely human. This article outlines those key human skills, and shares resources for building those skills. This is ostensibly a bit of an ad for LinkedIn learning courses but I appreciate any article that clearly maps skill to support.

• 4 Pillars of Innovation Every Organization Needs- Most organizations want to be innovative in some ways. But truly being innovative means having the direction and infrastructure to nurture that innovation. Through interviews with 50 leaders, several patterns emerged, leading to the authors identifying these four pillars.

• Textio’s Language Bias in Feedback Report- I’ve just started to delve into this report on how language bias shows up in our performance reviews- and how that in turn negatively affects women and people of color. More next issue on this as I’ve just started to read through but looks like a lot of tangible takeaways as we all begin to prep for performance review season.

“Who Smuggles a Whole Ham?”

You made it! So, yes, my grandmother- Nicolina- had been visiting Italy and decided to smuggle a large prosciutto in her bag (I see nothing wrong here, and if you do, please keep it to yourself). When asked what she would have done if customs had found it, she simply replied, “I would have sat down and ate the whole thing before I handed it over.”

And you wonder how I am the way I am.

This is a picture of her on a cruise.