THE LEAFLET

April 17 2025

on the limits of self-awareness, beware of “passion” as a euphemism, more on enriching practices

ON THE LIMITS OF SELF-AWARENESS

When I was a CEO and Ben was my coach, I went to him once and said, “Hey, I want to be more self-aware! I have blind spots. How do I fix that?”

Ben’s response was something like, “Um, you don’t. Self-awareness is knowing you have the blind spots. Self-awareness can’t cure the blindness. To manage your blind spots, you need people and systems outside of you. Enlist people to give you information that sits in the blind spot; enlist them to give you feedback when you’re acting or looking through the blind spot.” 

This was humbling and helpful at the same time. It was of a piece with Ben’s advice on email management and praising each member of my team - my most effective work in this wouldn’t come from heroic effort or sudden leaps in skill. It was likelier to come from a simple system that was easy to implement consistently.

-eric

Read the rest here.

BEWARE “PASSION” AS A EUPHEMISM

When you’re a leader, you have power over others. They usually know this and make choices accordingly. One reasonable thing they might do is avoid criticizing you, for fear of upsetting you.

One way to confront this is explicitly asking for criticism, then publicly praising the people who offer it, with evidence of how you’ve changed things in response to the criticism (when you have in fact changed things). Another tactic is to look out for words that teammates will use to soften or mask a critique. 

One of those words, in my experience, is “passion.” I’ve lost my temper in meetings before. In some cases, when I’ve gone to apologize for this, I get met with reassurance that it’s all ok. I was just being “passionate.” This was easier for my team to say than “yeah, I think you have some anger and resentment you need to handle better.”

For men in particular, I’ve found that workplace expressions of anger get chalked up to “passion.” So if you’re hearing yourself described this way, take stock. How many times in the last month or so have you lost your cool, raised your voice, or shut down a conversation you just didn’t like? Ask people on the team who see you in a variety of settings, maybe with a heightened standard in place. Consider: “I want to model exceptional self-regulation for the team. Where have I fallen short of that in the last x weeks that you can remember?”

-eric

Read the rest here.

MORE ON ENRICHING PRACTICES

Last week, I wrote in praise of practices that you can keep getting good at over decades and that make you good as you do so. My rough theory is that such practices exist for individuals and for organizations and it’s good for both to identify them.

Some examples of enriching practices on the individual level:

• writing

• exercise

• gardening

• deep listening (to another person, maybe especially one of another generation)

On the team level, I think it can depend a good bit on what the team exists to do or deliver. Sometimes I think of all teams as having a "widget" that they make: this might be smaller and less shiny than the thing they sell or advertise or fundraise on. The action or choice required to make that widget can be a practice like the one I'm pointing to in the blurb. On Ben's teams at Collegiate Academies, I think one of our widgets was "a candid feedback exchange among adults" and another was "explaining to a teenager why the work at hand matters". Those widgets weren't test scores or college acceptances or years-long relationships with colleagues / teachers, in and of themselves. They were practices that led to those outputs, practices that CA folks got better and better at over time. And practices I found matured me and the people around me. 

I could muster widget examples from political campaigns and biotech startups – two other kinds of places I've spent some years trying to make sense of really impressive people around me doing really good work. If I abstract from the concrete examples across these contexts, I think of these widgets as small - maybe the smallest - discrete units of the organization's mission. If the mission is a humane one, these discrete units often seem to be humane and humanizing, too. 

Knowing your widgets can be really helpful - you can have job candidates create them during hiring and orientation, you can dedicate cash and time to training people how to make them, you can use your COO-brain to strip away costs and faff that keep people from making more of them.

-eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Science writer Robert Macfarlane on trace fossils:

We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.

Writer Sarah Broom on the rights to a place’s story:

Who has the rights to the story of a place? Are these rights earned, bought, fought and died for? Or are they given? Are they automatic, like an assumption? Self-renewing? Are these rights a token of citizenship belonging to those who stay in the place or to those who leave and come back to it? Does the act of leaving relinquish one’s rights to the story of a place? Who stays gone? Who can afford to return?

Unionist James L. Petigru on his home state, shortly after it voted to secede:

South Carolina is too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric