THE LEAFLET

July 10 2025

against “just”, negative sell in job offer, leading leaders

AGAINST “JUST”

I’ve written here before to caution you, dear leaders, against the use of adverbs (and ellipses, too). My target this week is one mean culprit within that gang. You and your team will be better off if you delete “just” from your vocabulary.

Almost any sentence I can think of that includes “just” gets better without it.

• I was just … sharing my opinion, stating facts, waiting for you to do it.

• It’s just … an interview, a small mistake, a random occurrence, a few (hundred/thousand/million) dollars.

When I look back at the ways I’ve deployed this word, I don’t like what I see. “Just” shows up when I indulge the belief that they shouldn’t feel that way. “Just” shows up when I’m pretending to observe facts but I’m actually making an argument. “Just” stumbles along the line between kind, generous communication and reductive, aggressive communication. 

That line is an especially dangerous one for a leader to tread – your people are aware of your power and they – rationally – draw rich inferences from your small choices of diction and facial expression. When you use “just”, you teach a mini-lesson about how we make a case around here. How we take or shirk responsibility. How we reckon with the emotional impact of our choices.

As you might expect, the word shows up in instances of self-justification. It’s four letters worth of defensive crouching. If you find yourself wanting to use it, slow down and erase it. 

-eric

ps: If you are Just, The Adjective please don’t take this as an indictment of you, too. We need just laws, just hiring policy, just compensation plans, a keen sense of what is just and unjust.

Read the rest here.

A TAILORED NEGATIVE SELL IN JOB OFFERS

For almost any role you hire for, your new person is going to need to grow and adapt to excel. This is true if they’re an insider who knows your culture backwards and forwards. It’s true if you’re hiring an elite veteran with a glittering resume. It’s true if the job has the exact same title and responsibilities as the one this person just held somewhere else or was just doing as an independent contractor.

Ben has long touted the value of early, assertive “negative sells” in interview processes. In organizations he leads or coaches, the negative sell often comes early, even in an opening phone screen. The recruiter tells the candidate what current employees, even the high-performing culture bearers, find challenging, unpleasant, and hard about working here. Candidates get an early, no-judgement opportunity to opt out if this isn’t the set of challenges they want.

I have found it helpful to bring the negative sell back at the end of the process, when you’re making the offer to your top candidate. By this point in the process, you’ve gathered more information about them and they know more about you. Hopefully, you’ve put them through the paces of some kind of true-to-life scenario and talked to other people who have managed them or worked with them. This should give you a sense of what their growth and adaptation will need to look like for them to excel in the job. 

It can be tempting, once you’ve made it all the way through a multi-step process, to shift into pure sales mode. You bring down the opaque shield of professionalism and express unbounded enthusiasm for this person. You try to win them over. 

Don’t do this – or at least, don’t do it without offering the clear, tailored negative sell. That negative sell usually sounds like this, 

“We’re really excited about you because [reasons x,y,z]. We believe you can be great at this and we’re enthusiastic about working together. We’re offering you the job! This might be an unorthodox offer but we don’t want you to accept on the spot. Don’t take this job unless you’re excited about getting excellent at [growth areas a, b, c]. That’s a non-negotiable element of this offer.”

-eric

Read the rest here.

LEADERS ALLERGIC TO LEADING LEADERS

One of the hardest challenges for a leader in a growing organization is building and trusting senior leaders who report up to you. In early days, at smaller scales, you can not only get away with running around supervising everything - that might be the smartest and best thing to do. Cruelly, your success at this usually brings your team and opportunities to a size where Manic Omnipresence is not possible. Where your dogged attempts to maintain it actually hold the team back and limit everyone’s impact. 

I have seen excellent, talented leaders struggle with this in schools, the private sector, and government. I don’t have a silver bullet to offer. My prompt to you, if you’re a leader in an organization that is big or is gonna get bigger, is to invest in that next layer of leaders now. Cultivate your internal prospects; always be recruiting from outside. Give people big responsibility, coach them on carrying that responsibility, hold them accountable for the results with the understanding that their goals are your goals, too. 

This will probably feel bad and look bad at the beginning! These leaders will not be as good as you were or are, to start. Tactically, if the thing they’re responsible for is urgent and stakes-y enough, you may need to lay your hand on theirs while they hold the wheel. 

In The Strategy Paradox, Michael Raynor points out that the time horizon leaders are responsible for lengthens in direct relationship with seniority. Front line workers may need to think in terms of weeks or quarters. Senior leaders think in halves or years. Responsible CEOs and boards reckon with multi-year timelines. 

Getting your leadership tiers set and trusted with big, critical portfolios is a play for the long haul. It raises the ceiling of what your team can accomplish. Refusing to do this caps what is possible. 

-eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Chef Molly Baz on going for it:

I use jumbo muffin tins … because if you’re gonna muffin, muffin.

Author Erica Stern on collapsed empathy:

Babies and small children don’t understand themselves as separate from their caregivers. The boundaries are fluid. Psychologists say theory of mind, that ability to think about the consciousness of another, develops gradually over many years. When a young child feels sadness, they assume their mother does, too, and the reverse applies. If they see their mother sad, they feel it themselves, as though the emotion is theirs. This is an empathy so expansive it collapses into selfishness.

Conductor David Robertson on connecting with his orchestra:

One of the challenges for a conductor is, as quickly as possible with a group you don’t know, to try and actually memorize when everybody looks up because I always say, this is like the paper boy or the paper girl. If you’re on your route, and you have your papers in your bicycle satchel, and you throw it at the window, and the window is closed, you’ll probably have to pay for the pane of glass.

Whereas if the window goes up, which is the equivalency of someone looking up to get information, that’s the moment where you can send the information through with your hands or your face or your gestures, that you’re saying, “Maybe try it this way.” They pick that information up and then use it.

But the thing that no one will tell you, and that the players themselves don’t often realize, is that instinctively, and I think subconsciously, almost every player looks up after they’ve finished playing something. I think it’s tojust check in to see, “Am I in the right place?”

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric