THE LEAFLET

May 01 2025

taking care of your all-stars, subdivide and conquer, audience indulgence

TAKING CARE OF YOUR ALL-STARS

Once you really understand who your all-stars are, it’s key to take active steps to discuss their growth with them during regular, direct, career-focused conversations. Take them out to lunch or dinner, or on a one-on-one walk through the park. Get to know them on a personal level, if you haven’t already, and forge a genuine connection with them. Learn what they want—their direct career goals and priorities, yes, but also what they imagine for themselves in their wildest dreams. 

To generate your own ideas for keeping your all-stars engaged in fresh, inspiring work, consider the gaps that would arise if their managers were suddenly gone. What would you do? Who would you call on first? This though experiment can unearth useful, motivating challenges your all-stars can take on now, while building resilience into your corporate structure. 

Encourage those all-stars, even if it means they may fly the coop. President Harry Truman famously said, “The best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it,” and this applies to rockstar employees as well. While it may sound antithetical, knowing that they have your blessing to leave often makes them feel secure enough to stay. A superlative employee who knows she could work anywhere will stay with a company that values her contributions and professional development, gives her flexibility to look after her family and health, and demonstrates a willingness to cut her slack when she needs it.

-ben

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FOR STRUGGLERS, SUBDIVIDE & CONQUER

If you want to help one of your people get on the right track, subdivide and conquer. Consider shrinking the size or duration of the challenge ahead of them. More precisely, draw their attention and apply your own to an increment of the challenge, rather than the whole. Look carefully for any and all early signs of progress or growth as they attack this increment. Note, even celebrate, that growth for the struggler.

This is something elite teachers and coaches do. These are leaders who don’t have the luxury of firing the people they’re responsible for — or even of issuing formulaic warnings (like performance improvement plans). It’s a move worth stealing even if you do have those “luxuries”. Someone who struggled and then found success thanks to your guidance is likely to bring the zeal of a convert to the work that lies ahead. They’ll feel a special and deserved loyalty to you personally and perhaps apply that loyalty to the mission and values you espouse, too.

In other words, anyone who is struggling on your team is a potential culture bearer. They’re a leader-in-waiting. Looking at them that way can unlock proactive and prosocial options for you. All of which are usually way cheaper than firing and hiring anew.

-eric

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SELF-INDULGENCE vs AUDIENCE INDULGENCE

A mistake common among amateur writers and rookie teachers is self-indulgence. Sometimes you see this in sheer number of words used. The young writer hasn’t yet gotten proficient at cutting out material that doesn’t serve the reader. The young teacher protects students from hard thinking and productive mistakes by talking at them non-stop, even answering his own questions before the kids have a real chance to do so.

A two part self-centeredness can animate this bad habit. One layer of it is fixation on what you (and your ego) find gratifying. Another layer is ignorance of what your audience wants and needs. (Maybe a third layer is ignorance of how to deliver what your audience wants and needs. This last one is a deficit of skill, not virtue.)

Curiously, this self-centered behavior can emerge from a very common anxiety young writers, teachers, and leaders share. They’re afraid of their own power, specifically the power over the people in front of them. Good-hearted but unhelpful doubts about their own worth, unfinished battles with their own shame, lead these leaders, teachers, and writers to talk too much and say too little. They erase the space/opportunity for those they’re responsible for to do their own talking, attempting, and growing.

-eric

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COMPELLING QUOTES

Novelist Larry McMurtry on familiarity with failure in Lonesome Dove:

I'm glad I've been wrong enough to keep in practice. . . You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it. If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day--that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave.

Poet and classicist Anne Carson on adjectives:

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning 'placed on top', 'added', 'appended', 'foreign'. Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions, but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.

Writer Hanif Abdurraqib on ephemerality:

…all of our living can so easily be turned into decoration. We can become the flowers lining the sidewalks where people sleep and are stepped over.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric