Check-In:

• What has recently become less important to you?

Big Ideas:

• Look at the lattice of the organization, not just the ladder
• Leap between individual contributor and manager
• No change of nature between the different levels of managers - shift in intensity, but not the nature of the work
• Develop a network of people at and around your level
• At some point you'll be playing the game, so need a wide network to support you
• How do we define a "good working relationship" with your manager?
• Being too passive in the relationship with your manager
• Lack of clarity of expectations and not asking for more clarity
• Bringing people's reputations into your relationship
• Confirmation bias - when you see people through the lens you want to
• Asymmetric power relationships
• When you think your boss should do something differently - you suffer, not them
• Relying too heavily on your power of expertise and not your power of connections
• Managing up connotates teaching your manager how to do their job
• First step - check your own ego
• Second step - develop self awareness, know your triggers, what pisses you off about people
• Third step - Know what motivates you and how your manager aligns or not with those
• Fourth step - Take the time to develop a relationship
• Know your external motivators which are context driven
• The power of working their way gains capital with them and builds trust
• Prove that you can work in their system
• Do you known what your boss needs? How can you "manage up" if you don't know what your boss needs?
• Develop a coaching mindset up toward everyone around you
• Do you ever ask your boss "How can I help?"
• Whether we like it or not we are in service to our manager - we aren't just in service to our direct reports
• Not standing in someone else's shoes for a while
• Empathy can be dangerous. Compassion is less taxing

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Check-In: What's giving you hope right now?

Big Ideas:

• What constitutes inequity?
• When your unbelonging can connect you with other people who feel unbelonging
• Gender equity issues not coming up in some leadership trainings
• Cultural and country differences in gender equity
• Calling out misogynistic jokes - Should I? Context dependent?
• "isms" as part of the air we breathe - it's conditioned into us
• Creating the system and benefitting from it - are they separate
• Unconscious bias that comes out in small ways as a parent
• Is awareness enough to change behavior?
• If we are all sexist, does that make the word meaningless?
• Sexists are actively causing harm...???
• Sexism is mostly unintentional - men don't even know it's sexist
• What do we call people who are functioning in patriarchy in unconscious ways, but still causing harm?
• The myth of meritocracy
• Meritocracy - achievement is based solely on your skills
• Blind assessments to even things out
• Performance review differences between men and women
• Transparent data and decisions on manager, causing inequities to even out
• Be internally transparent with income differences
• Women tend not to negotiate their salaries, but they will negotiate on the behalf of others
• Women less likely to nominate themselves for promotions
• Asking women to be like men doesn't work
• Double bind - not assertive enough, not seen as a leader, too assertive, seen as being bitchy
• Anger as a man is okay, being sad/emotional as a man is associated with weakness
• Expectations in our gender roles
• When there's no problem, there's no data usually
• Believing you are objective, makes you more likely to be sexist.
• Thinking of the behavior separate from the identity

Resources:

• Invisible Women by Caroline Criando Perez

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Check-In:

• Which projects give you energy?

Big Ideas:

• 3 skills that lead to successful groups: building safety, sharing vulnerability, establishing purpose
• cohesive groups - telling stories and reminding one another what they stand for
• murmuration - how birds move together
• using small signals to link the present moment to the future ideal
• organizations that don't have a purpose, mission, vision, etc.
• the challenge of extracting a purpose
• how to detect weak signals and act on them
• going through the motions of purpose - some people feel it's not worthwhile
• "What's the purpose of having a purpose?"
• Purpose is a higher order construct - something you can build everything else around
• If there are no words, there's no knowledge
• Purpose seems too impractical - not actionable, practical enough
• Cultural differences in focusing on culture
• A tool without a purpose is just an object.
• Leadership without purpose doesn't serve anyone
• You can pivot around a purpose, and shift your business structure
• Don't sell change
• When companies focus their purpose around a story or stories, it can motivate employees in a new way
• Having a clear beacon of purpose
• What can organizations do to re-engage employees? Is story enough?
• Belief that narratives only apply to children and politicians
• Stories are a way to make groups work together - story-telling goes back thousands of years
• Any good story has conflict and strong emotion -- some organizations still try to separate emotions from work
• How to help people identify the stories that they are telling themselves?
• Once you identify the story, you can change the story
• How stories drive our emotional world.
• Our brains want to close the loop, so we make up the rest of the story so we can move on - a necessary evolutionary device
• Being in the matrix and not knowing you are in the matrix
• Leading for Proficiency (being the lighthouse) - establishing priorities and connected behaviors
• Leading for Creativity (being the ship's engineer, not the captain) - safe flat, high-candor environment, not about how to
• What's your leadership purpose?
• Transactional versus transformational leadership
• The leader's job isn't to motivate others, but to create conditions for people to be motivated

Resources:

• The Culture Code, by Daniel Coyle
• Start with Why Simon Sinek
• Find Your Why, Simon Sinek
• Adam Grant

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