A wise old owl sat on an oak, The more he saw the less he spoke, The less he spoke, the more he heard, Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?
This poem is from the 1800s and was quoted periodically by John D. Rockefeller.
Rockefeller was a quiet person who didn’t typically speak up in meetings, but he was always paying attention.
Introverts, like me, are often quiet in meetings. We replenish our energy by being with ourselves, and we typically process our thoughts by thinking quietly.
Extroverts replenish their energy by being with others, and they typically process their thoughts by vocalizing them to the group.
If you have a meeting-heavy culture - which has increased with remote work - extroverts often get a leg up in leadership.
They’re seen as assertive. They’re granted the elusive “leadership presence” trait that comes up in every promotion process.
It’s really easy to see models and examples of extroverted leadership, but less easy to see the same for introverted leadership. It’s why this poem, and the Rockefeller example, stood out to me.
Rockefeller achieved success as an introvert. By not taking up all the oxygen in a meeting he was able to see things others could not. This was his advantage.
If you’re a little more on the extroverted side, experiment with cultivating your “wise old bird” side. What do you observe?
If you’re a little more introverted, recognize the power in hearing more. But remember to speak up eventually 😁
Have a great week! Kevin 🦉
A Quote
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Just as any relationship requires honest and open communication to stay healthy, so the relationships within corporations improve when information is shared accurately and freely.
— Max Depree in "Leadership is an Art"
Three Things
1 - ❤️ Senja - If you’re running a business that benefits from testimonials, take a look at Senja. It makes it easy to gather text and video feedback, then analyze and display it. I’ve seen businesses get de-platformed from places like Google, losing all their reviews, so it’s nice to have another option.
2 - 🥮 150-hour Chocolate Cake - This is less baking, more art. It’s a calming and creative video of the roughly six day process this person went through to create a chocolate cake. As you’d expect, it’s not a classic cake, but “rich chocolate mousse, brown butter espresso, infused honey bourbon, hot chocolate cake soak, and about 5 million bars of chocolate.”
3 - 📊 MyLens, AI Visualizer - Here’s a neat visualization-focused AI visualizer tool. Tell it what you want to know more about, select how you want it visualized, and off you go! The free tier is pretty limited, just enough to get a taste. Paid tiers allow you to connect data and YouTube links, among other sources. (thanks Carl for sharing this 👋)
Deeper Dive on “Practice” vs. “Performance”
How do the people around you react when you mess up at work?
Knowing how they’ll react, how does that influence: - your behavior immediately after you mess up? - your behavior leading up to your next opportunity for failure?
As an example, let's imaging you have a somewhat rare meeting with your skip level boss. You’re so nervous that you talk too fast and gave too much detail! Oops, that's a mistake.
How does your boss react after the meeting?
✅ Practice
"I noticed something in that meeting, mind if I share it?
You were speaking a little too fast and with too much detail. I noticed the boss getting lost, which means your points weren't landing.
Are you open to suggestions for what to do differently next time?"
❌ Performance
"You totally screwed up that meeting!
You spoke too fast and brought up all these irrelevant details. That was a boneheaded move.
The boss totally thinks we're both screw ups now.
I'm going to take you off this project."
Same situation, same desired goal (performing), but totally different approaches.
In which environment do you want to work?
In which environment would your skills develop more rapidly?
In which environment would you be willing to take more chances?
These are the differences between creating a "practice" culture versus a "performance" culture.
“As virtually every leader I talked with said, there can be no growth without risks and no progress without mistakes. Indeed, if you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t trying hard enough. But as mistakes are necessary, so is a healthy organizational attitude toward them. First, risk taking must be encouraged. Second, mistakes must be seen as an integral part of the process, so that they are regarded as normal, not abnormal. Third, corrective action rather than censure must follow.”
This environment emphasizes results, with employees feeling like they’re constantly “on” and being evaluated.
Performance metrics, judgment, and evaluation are ever-present, contributing to this sense of pressure.
Because of this, employees are afraid of making mistakes, further creating a culture of fear. Mistakes are seen as failure and errors to be avoided.
Because of this fear, employees begin to play it safe instead of driving innovation.
The constant pressure leads to burnout, disengagement, and lower creativity.
This negative cycle is ironic, because the leader who focuses on performance actually creates a culture of under-performance over time.
It's tough to keep submitting yourself to this kind of judgment. What gymnast wants the Olympics to be year-round?!
Practice Culture
This environment emphasizes learning through experimentation. Mistakes are embraced as part of the learning process.
The focus is on progress, not perfection.
Employees have freedom and agency to try new things, take calculated risks, and develop new skills. The emphasis is on growth and continuous improvement.
Ownership and agency feature prominently in this culture as employees are free to act without fear of harsh judgment.
This creates a longer-term view that fosters creativity, innovation, and resilience. The result is higher performance than the Performance Culture!
How does behavior change in response to a Performance Culture?
I’ve watched these dynamics play out across teams. Negative loops develop, making it very hard to correct.
When a leader in power pushes teams in a Performance Culture direction, in invites negative feedback because people need to know where they're missing the bar.
With negative feedback, teams become nervous to present to the leader. Fear is present.
In response, the team now takes extra time to prepare. Instead of being ready tomorrow or next week, the team wants a couple weeks to get things ready.
The team is now potentially wasting time refining an idea that doesn’t need to be refined. Or, they waste time practicing their presentation or tweaking the language in a document.
Because meetings are delayed, ship dates get delayed. Instead of shipping things in days or weeks, it’s measured in months, quarters, or years.
Teams also begin working by committee. No one wants to stand out because of the risk of judgment. Instead they work to get everyone aligned. They ask more opinions. The result is a milquetoast idea, refined by hundreds of people-hours.
Since things are underperforming and leaders what to hold the under-performers accountable, they start formally tying metrics into the review process.
Employees now focus on those metrics, with negative consequences to innovation and the customer experience. You see people starting to game the system to ensure those metrics look nice, instead of focusing on solving business and customer problems.
"I've gathered you all here today to discuss how we should prioritize our backlog. This is only our third meeting; we'll nail this soon!"
How does behavior change in response to a Practice Culture?
When mistakes are embraced, interesting things happen.
People are willing to try new things. People are willing to speak up. There’s a strong sense of agency and ownership.
People raise their hands to run down work.
It’s actually quite fun to solve problems when you’re not constantly looking over your shoulder or protecting yourself from judgment!
All this speed and ownership brings down cycle times. Ship dates are faster.
People are learning faster than their competitors. They get so many more attempts to solve a problem!
Instead of a team of 10 spending 12 weeks refining a single idea in order to present it to a judge who tells them whether it’s good enough to proceed, you can get a team of 5 who shipped 6 ideas in the same amount of time! Who do you think is going to win?
Feedback is more constant because everyone is trying to succeed and sharing lessons and suggestions along the way. Feedback is also more likely to be accepted and acted upon because employees are less worried about repercussions, and more interested in how to be better.
“Negative results are just what I want. They’re just as valuable to me as positive results. I can never find the thing that does the job best until I find the ones that don’t.”
- Thomas Edison
How do you encourage a Practice Culture?
Mindset It starts with you as the leader. You truly need to cultivate your own growth mindset instead of a fixed mindset, as they’re very closely related to the concepts of Performance and Practice Culture.
If you think people are inherently bad and you need to protect the business from mistakes, that’s essentially a non-starter.
If you think people are inherently capable and need space to be their best selves, you’re off to a good start.
Language How you talk to people has a huge impact on your culture.
If you’ve played sports, think about what a good practice session is like, and use language like that.
It’s supportive. It’s encouraging.
The whole idea is that athletes are practicing so that they can perform in a competition later. You need to inculcate that practice mindset.
Some things you might hear: ↪ “You’ll get it next time, baby!” ↪ “Let’s try that together one more time.” ↪ “It’s alright.” ↪ “Good idea!” ↪ “I like how you’re thinking.”
Let's revisit the scenario of presenting to a skip level boss, but you’re now playing the role as the skip level manager.
How could you create the right mood at the start?
“Hey, good to see you! I’ve heard good things about your work on this project. I’m really interested in what you have to say on this topic.”
If the presenter talks too fast and goes into too much detail?
“Excuse me, I’m not as familiar with this as you are, so would you mind slowing down? I need time to process my thoughts and ask questions. Great, now could we go back one slide? I’d like to ask you to synthesize the takeaways for me.”
Maybe it takes an extra minute to be kind, set the mood, and be supportive, but the return on that investment is exponential.
“And if people shoot for the stars and only hit the moon, don’t treat them too harshly. Ease the pain of failure to leave room for learning. As Larry often says: If your goals are ambitious and crazy enough, even failure will be a pretty good achievement.”
Model You’re not done developing yourself, so don’t pretend like it!
Share what you’re working on in your own development.
Be vulnerable. Admit your own mistakes, and laugh at them. Show how you used it to fuel greater performance later.
Reward Effort Yes, results matter, but effort is how you get results.
If someone is putting in the work, adjusting, learning, experimenting, but hasn’t quite nailed it, don’t withhold praise.
Let this person know you see them and you acknowledge the effort.
Going back to sports practice, I’ve actually heard this used to great effect by one of my son’s soccer coaches. The kids are still learning and don’t have all the skills nailed. If someone attempts a pass, but totally misses their teammate, guess what the coach says?
“Great thinking!” or “I like that idea!”
This encourages the players to keep trying! You should do the same with your employees.
"That's okay! Reset, and try again."
What do you owe in a practice culture?
We’ll touch on this subject in the future when we get into the other stages of psychological safety (here’s the first), but a Practice Culture isn’t a get out of jail free card for employees.
Employees owe improvement.
As a leader you’re putting in a lot of work to create space for experimentation and development. That only works if your team is actually learning and developing.
If they don't, you get a pleasant environment, but one that’s underperforming. Eventually you’ll go out of business, or just tread water.
If your team is repeating the same mistakes and not taking feedback, that doesn’t work. Find them a place where they can be successful. Make room for people who can take advantage of your environment to achieve great outcomes.
"I hate excuses and I despise with my entire soul when people just try to save face instead of learn from how they messed up. Mistakes are okay! Genuinely they are and I expect you to make a lot. That’s perfectly fine. Every veteran here has cost me a million dollars at one point or another, and you can go ask them yourself if I ever held it over their heads. The reason i’m okay with fuck ups is because I know that’s how you learn. I see it as me investing in you and your brain... I just beg you that you learn from every mistake and try not to repeat it, that’s when it gets annoying."
- Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast) in his "How to Succeed in MrBeast Production"
Call to Action
Start with a reflection. On the spectrum of Performance Culture to Practice Culture, where is your team? Where is the bigger organization and the company overall?
As a leader, get started by making any adjustments to your own behavior. How’s your mindset? How’s your language? Are you modeling this yourself? Where could you reward effort?
Good luck and have fun! This is hard work, but pays dividends.
