why we shouldn’t “refrain” from refrains
Leaders avoid refrains for different reasons. A few reasons that I’ve leaned on and a few more:
"I’ve said this already. I don’t want to insult people’s intelligence.
“I’ve said this already. I don’t want to repeat myself.”
“I’ve said this already. It worked that time! I need to find a new thing.”
“I don’t want to be a micro-manager.”
In a few unexpected places, I’ve been reminded lately of the special power of refrains:
Matt Levine’s Money Stuff is a daily multi-thousand word newsletter on financial matters, many of them pretty arcane. Somehow, it’s very entertaining. You can learn a lot from it. In nearly every piece, he has a section titled: “Everything is securities fraud.”
Dr. Becky Kennedy, author of Good Inside, returns to her central theme, the title of the book and the name of her company, over and over. “You are good inside.” “Your kid is good inside.” I listened to the audiobook and got a little verklempt more than once as she coaches you to say this very thing to yourself and your kid.
Jerel Bryant, CEO of Collegiate Academies, an organization where he started out as an early-career social studies teacher, says, ten years into his tenure as principal of GW Carver High School and two years into his time as CEO: “it’s not what you have to do - it’s what you get to do.” (This is a message I heard weekly, daily, from him in teacher morning meetings when I taught there years ago.)
I think there’s something counterintuitive about refrains in each of these contexts. You could reasonably assume a refrain would be a bad move for each of these leaders.
Levine is a writer or “content creator” - you assume he has to say new, splashy, viral things every day. Clicks come from controversy, not predictability, right? Saying the same thing, having a tagline, is Rodney Dangerfield stuff. Out of date. Corny.
Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist speaking to parents of kids. She’s worth her salt. She knows every kid is different, every context is different, every parent is reckoning with demons, patterns, and priors of their very own. Therapy is about helping individuals not categories. Repeating a simple one sentence piece of advice ignores special needs - and isn’t the whole game about meeting special needs?
Jerel is the CEO of an organization with hundreds of employees and a $50MM budget. He operates at levels of leadership that should be “strategic” - the province of matrices, stepbacks, and power struggles with boards. You can’t just stand on a chair at halftime and rally the team with inspo. And won’t a timeworn refrain from teaching days weaken trust in executive moves?
Each of these three leaders is a peak performer. They excel at a variety of things. One that they’ve all seized: even in intellectual, creative, strategic work - the job isn’t to be the most interesting. It’s to be the most clarifying. The one who can access all the facts and flavors of experience and turn over something compact and cross-cutting. The one who can reckon with volatility and point with confidence at the thing that doesn’t change. They draw a through line and they give it a name.
A person with a phone has so many demands on her attention day to day, hour to hour. Layer on Slack or text threads or an inbox and parsing noise and signal becomes nearly impossible.
A leader with a refrain does a service to these folks with cluttered calendars and burdened consciences. They offer a pure dose of signal.
If you haven’t yet, begin offering your people the gift of a refrain. It doesn’t have to be eloquent. You do have to say it all the damn time.
-Eric
