THE LEAFLET
May 15 2025
performance and identity for your kids, AI tools for career coaching, rubrics and riffs
PERFORMANCE FOLLOWS IDENTITY FOR YOUR OWN KIDS, TOO
Growing into better home-leaders for our children often has more to do with managing ourselves than managing them. As at work, failures are inevitable. The most important thing that determines what your child learns from a moment of adversity is your reaction. That’s because parenthood is comprised of so many acts of faith: you have to trust your kids to grow in order for them to trust themselves to grow. When strong relationships are built on trust and praise, everyone is more confident about pushing themselves, because there’s always a support structure to lean on.
If your son is arrested for underage drinking, it’s going to be a struggle to find something to praise him for, but there will never be a more important time to recognize the good choices he did make, surrounded by friends with even more questionable judgment. Finding something good amidst the bad in that moment—and making it clear you expect more of that from him in the future—will speak louder than any scolding or screaming match.
Likewise, if your daughter comes out of the closet and introduces a girlfriend you absolutely can’t stand, if you can concentrate on telling her you’ve always admired her ability to be true to herself, no matter what, she will replay that moment in her mind for the rest of her life. She’ll draw strength from it personally and professionally, in challenging times that you may never even know she’s facing. Performance follows identity, and you will have given her the encouragement and praise to keep her identity as someone who’s “true to herself, no matter what” firmly fixed throughout her life.
-ben
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AI TOOLS FOR CAREER COACHING
If you’re between jobs or careers right now, a couple of AI tools could be useful thought partners for you. You can also ask a direct report or mentee on your team to try the following and bring the results to your next 1:1 meeting.
Google’s Career Dreamer: You input your job experiences and interests, the Dreamer suggests jobs and careers that match those and then helps you draft a resume and cover letter.
Prompt Claude to act as your career coach: Use the prompt below as a template or mad lib. You fill in the categories with your own desiderata.
Template: “Please act as a [trait], [trait], and [trait] career mentor. Based on the information in my LinkedIn profile [link to profile], what job or career should I consider next if I want to maximize my [form of impact: income, status, positive impact on the world] by using my [skill / experience / interest]?”
Example: “Please act as a wise, artistic, and philosophically attuned career mentor. Based on the information in my LinkedIn profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericparrie/ what job or career should I be considering next if I want to maximize my positive impact on the world by using my creativity?”
AI can see patterns humans don’t and then suggest places those patterns can lead. I’ve found this can apply to a dataset as small as my own resume.
-eric
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RUBRICS & RIFFS
When I was CEO of a public health startup that administered COVID tests and vaccine doses, I saw a surprising parallel between our top performers and the very best teachers at the high schools Ben led in New Orleans. At our peak, my startup team was swabbing noses and sticking arms by the hundreds of thousands at locations all over Colorado and other parts of the country. We started with a tailgate tent in the parking lot of one child care center. Then we scaled.
The scaling only worked because smart, empathetic, detail-obsessed leaders built a replicable rubric and playbook. When we open a new location, we have all these supplies on hand. We run these setup and break down procedures. When a patient drives up, we say this set of scripted things to them. The rubric set a reliable, replicable floor for our performance.
Our very best COVID testing sites, like the very best teachers, went beyond the rubric. The leaders of those sites adapted the rubric in the moment, using our values and mission and their emotional intelligence to make the rubric better serve the patient. They riffed. And their riffing raised the ceiling for patients, opening the possibility of an outstanding experience, one that was so surprisingly good that patients told other people about it. In the business literature, you hear stories like this about Disney, Southwest, Nordstrom, and Danny Meyer’s restaurants.
When it goes right, big companies and exceptional teachers have their -ish together, operationally – systems mostly invisible to the customer or student whir efficiently in the background. And leaders on the front line get the chance to bend and use those systems in the moment for the benefit of the people right in front of them.
Companies and classrooms often struggle by leaving out one of these two. They go all in on rubric and create rote, faceless experiences. Or they rely on undisciplined riffs, and fail their teams and customers with inconsistency.
-eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Novelist and Calvinist Marilynne Robinson on preaching:
I have an other than academic interest in preaching, an interest in the hope I, and so many others, bring into the extraordinary moment when someone attempts to speak in good faith, about something that matters, to people who attempt to listen in good faith.
Marketing maven and home cook Seth Godin on significance:
Significance is the generous incremental process of possibility. The smallest useful change produced for the smallest viable audience. Again and again, with humanity.
Historian Alan Taylor on American identity:
The colonists were reluctant nationalists, and the revolution began, rather than culminated, a long, slow, and incomplete process of creating an American identity and nation.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric