Articles and Posts

Will shared crisis forge civil society or fuel its decline? Hope and caution. Patience and gratitude. Protect health. Be of use. Conserve cash. And stock two weeks of food.

A Stride principle is “Do what you say, say what you mean.” An expression of integrity. I now realize it’s also a call for transparency. Not only following through on actions and driving from ethical intent but also communicating both. Do, mean and say are equal imperatives.

A lot of my confidence derives from experience and expertise. To grow as a leader, I need to coach outside that domain — helping people solve problems themselves by asking open, even naive, and granular questions.

Learning that autonomy and accountability in an organization vs a team is less about me trusting people to make decisions and more whether I foster conditions where people trust they can make decisions themselves.

My daughter has saved some of our old devices. Some oldies but goodies. I miss keyboards.

I’m finding empathy, humility and a learning mindset are far better tools for navigating a day to day outside my lived experience than instinct and common sense.

I’m learning to be faster in collecting and sharing information and clearer on my rationale for decisions so that people I work with have more confidence in their own decisions.

Stride is running our cash preservation plan and Striders are one in focusing on our clients and taking care of each other. So many small businesses had no chance. Stride was lucky. We won’t squander it.

Here’s my experience of organizational change. It feels chaotic. Both too fast and too slow. Hidden conflict surfaces. Reasons why not or more immediate than why to. Performance gets worse for months. But people start to go with it. You keep going (rare) or you don’t (common).

Stride made BuiltNYC’s 50 BEST SMALL COMPANIES TO WORK FOR IN NYC 2020 (#25). It’s hard for a small company, especially a consulting company, to have our people’s backs. That is our commitment. Much work to do. https://bit.ly/2tYZ1cg

For my weekly company updates, I write a draft, record audio and transcribe. Feed the private pod, publish the transcript, announce on slack and email and then repeat in person when I can. It’s a small piece of our expanding internal communication practice.

I hope to reframe the top down / bottom up quandary in agile transformation: won’t impose across the organization rather will form cross functional, self organizing leadership and strategy teams approached as I’d do with a product team. Increase transparency across the company.