"I See Out and Around Myself" - Henry David Thoreau

Photo by Stanislav Vlasov on Unsplash

Greetings -  

I hope you, your family and friends are all well!

As of this writing, your fearless, peripatetic duo finds themselves in the lovely, sunny and toasty warm confines of Healdsburg, CA, in the heart of the Sonoma wine country. We are (tentatively) declaring the arrival of Spring (at least here), as shorts and flops can finally be added to the wardrobe repertoire. The weather has been a salve and an incredible treat to enjoy, as we continue to explore our soon-to-be new hometown on foot (super easy to get to amble around here). The folks in town are incredibly generous and friendly; they continue to pleasantly surprise me with unprompted hellos and amiable chit chat. As an amiable chit chatter myself, I find this a most welcome change from the hustle and bustle of the Bay. There is a slower and much more deliberate pace here - one that I find myself slipping quite comfortably into. And as a foodie, we are in a block-for-block gastronomical paradise that is stunning in both its breadth and depth of options. We are most fortunate!

We have a few more days here before the Jordan World Tour heads back to Alameda for a week and then begins a series of dates in Chicago and Paris. The latter will include the magical company of our lovely daughter, fresh off of completing her first year of college. We are very excited to spend time with her and take some time to recharge as a family.

Adaptability and flexibility continue to be our mantra, as we navigate living and working spaces of all shapes and sizes. It has been a fun (mostly) adventure, one that I am grateful for the opportunity to enjoy with my much better half. I have never felt quite so grounded and destabilized all at once, cycling through a variety of perspectives and feelings. It's a good thing we like change and diverse experiences! Come June, we will move into a rental house in town for the foreseeable future as we consider our home purchase options.

So as we kick-off this edition, personal and professional adaptability, flexibility, change, etc. are top of mind and deeply resonant these days. We start with three points of view on the need for a flexible, holistic leadership style, one that continually adapts to the macro and micro aspects of our work and the teams we lead.

I am also including an array of other reading and listening. Diverse in content and sourcing, these pieces offer a variety of perspectives that piqued my curiosity and desire to learn more. In particular, several articles in the Articles section look at the interplay of emotional work, mental health, strategic vulnerability and personal boundary management on our ability to thoughtfully and purposely lead (and take care of ourselves and our teams). Lots to consider and reflect upon. 

Spotlight Articles: Harvard Business Review: You Need Two Leadership Gears, Finding the Right Balance — and Flexibility — in Your Leadership Style, and The Power of Options.

1. "Question your assumptions about power and fixed hierarchies;
2. Study your habits and your team’s to see if you’re stuck in one mode or the other;
3. Set clear expectations with meeting agendas and rituals that mark transitions; and 
4. Reinforce shifts with your own words, deeds, and body language" 

Effective leadership necessitates a nuanced or "adaptive" approach, one that keeps the context and the people we are working with at the forefront. Adaptability and flexibility are key; the best leaders are highly competent at leveraging these behavioral attributes to navigate the continued uncertainty and tension in our workplaces. Their malleability allows strong leaders to strive and thrive, while setting them up to succeed in meeting the ever-changing demands of their business context and organizational needs. 

Our leadership capital derives from our ability to discern those opportunities when it is best to empower those around us versus those circumstances that require us to take charge. Leaders have an opportunity to create environments for us to flourish and the responsibility to flex their leadership style to meet the ever-evolving needs of the 21st century workplace.

As always, happy reading and listening! This will be my last post until late May/early June, so I can enjoy downtime with the fam.

Be well, take good care of your families and community. 

-kj

Articles 

Psychology Today: 21 Rules to Live By. "4. Casual kindness is the most powerful kind."

The New Yorker: How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking? "Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in words. But our mental processes are more mysterious than we realize."

Harvard Business Review: When Your Feelings Conflict with Your Leadership Role. "While the emotional work you do as a leader may go unrecognized and undervalued, it is more vital than ever in today’s work world. This labor is often a selfless and prosocial act, allowing you to care for and positively impact others even when you’re not feeling it. However, it should not come at your personal expense."

Kellogg Insight: Leaders, Don’t Be Afraid to Admit Your Flaws. "We prefer to work for people who can make themselves vulnerable, a new study finds. But there are limits."

The Wall Street Journal: When Bringing Your Whole Self to Work Is Too Much. "Talking about emotional health with co-workers can break down taboos—and reveal too much information."

The Wall Street Journal: As Tech Jobs Disappear, Silicon Valley Veterans Reset Their Careers. "Laid-off workers from companies such as Meta and Amazon choose stability over status."

Pew Research Center: About a third of U.S. workers who can work from home now do so all the time. "Roughly three years after the COVID-19 pandemic upended U.S. workplaces, about a third (35%) of workers with jobs that can be done remotely are working from home all of the time...This is down from 43% in January 2022 and 55% in October 2020 – but up from only 7% before the pandemic."

Blog Posts & Opinions

Granted [as in Adam Grant]: The Most Meaningful Way to Succeed Is to Help Others Succeed. "Success is not about winning a competition. It’s about making a contribution."

Harvard Business Review: How High Achievers Overcome Their Anxiety. "...My message is simple: If we harness our anxiety and lessen its personal toll, we will help ourselves work with more energy and ingenuity. We will perform and feel better, become leaders whom people want to work for, and take the visionary risks needed to create positive change. We will achieve the same if not greater career success—without feeling constantly stressed out."

The New York Times: Whatever the Problem, It’s Probably Solved by Walking. "Perhaps because we take walking so much for granted, many of us often ignore its ample gifts. In truth, I doubt I would walk often or very far if its sole benefit was physical, despite the abundant proof of its value in that regard. There’s something else at play in walking that interests me more. And with the arrival of spring, attention must be paid."

Podcasts

HBR IdeaCast: Ron Howard on Collaborative Leadership and Career Longevity. "A conversation with Hollywood legend Ron Howard about talent, success, and taking chances."

The Reboot Podcast: Adaptive Leadership - with Ali Schultz & Jerry Colonna. "Adaptive leadership is the notion that a fixed leadership style isn’t a quick fix or one-stop-shop for all your leadership needs. Adaptive leadership asks you to be keen enough to be with who is in front of you, in any situation, and be able to connect relationally and with what matters. That requires a different skillset than a fixed leadership style...Ali and Jerry consider why adaptive leadership is so important for your organization’s leaders, why it matters on an interpersonal level, and how it’s tied to an organization's success."

McKinsey & Company: What matters most? Six priorities for CEOs in turbulent times. "Managing complex organizations is much harder today than it was just a few years ago. A CEO’s most difficult task is deciding what must be done now and what can wait." [KJ note - great nuggets for all of us, not just executive leaders.]

Arts, Music, Culture & Humor Corner

The Guardian: Bruce Springsteen Day. "New Jersey will on 23 September celebrate Bruce Springsteen Day for the first time, a move announced by the governor, Phil Murphy."

The New York Times: Lucinda Williams Tells Her Secrets. "The singer-songwriter reveals herself in a memoir that captures her adventures with charming rogues, puzzled music executives and her own demons."

SF Gate: ‘It changed the world’: 50 years on, the story of Pong's Bay Area origins. "How Atari created the world’s most famous video game."

The New Yorker: Shouts & Murmurs: Upstate Fantasy. "I buy a big Victorian house in the Hudson Valley for a song, chop wood until I get buff, and play poker with the colorful locals, who love my work. With cameos from John Oliver and A.O.C."

Reflections

"I come out to these solitudes, where the problem of existence is simplified. I get away a mile or two from the town into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself." - Henry David Thoreau

"Walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together, connecting up neighborhoods that might otherwise have remained discrete entities, different planets bound to each other, sustained yet remote. I like seeing how in fact they blend into one another, I like noticing the boundaries between them. Walking helps me feel at home. There's a small pleasure in seeing how well I’ve come to know the city through my wanderings on foot, crossing through different neighborhoods of the city, some I used to know quite well, others I may not have seen in a while, like getting reacquainted with someone I once met at a party." - Lauren Elkin

Sleeping in the Forest by Mary Oliver
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.