Greetings -  

I hope you and your families are well and enjoying the holiday season. It is hard (or maybe not :)) to believe that the year is quickly drawing to a close!

We recently returned from Portland, OR, where we had a fun and festive trip (multiple family birthday parties!). It is always a treat to spend time with this great group of family, friends and clients, especially as we embark on the holidays!

I am including reading and listening that influenced my perspective, curated from the year's editions. I welcome your suggestions as well, so please feel free to drop me a line. (At the end of this newsletter, there are links to posts from previous years with reading and listening that has and continues to speak to me. Enjoy!)

This will be my last publication for 2024. I will resume in January, after an extended period of reflecting and recharging with family and friends. We are especially looking forward to visiting with our daughter (she is already home!) over the coming weeks.

I would like to recognize and thank each of you for your support, partnership and, in many cases, business. I deeply appreciate you sharing your journey with me and being an integral part of mine! I wish you, your families and friends a happy and gratitude-filled holiday season! Safe and expeditious travels for those of you on the move over the next few weeks.

As always, happy reading and listening!

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

-kj

PS - (Missed a newsletter? Past editions can be found here: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog. And if you hit paywall on an article(s), feel free to send me a note and let me know what you need. I have subscriptions to many of the sources that I cite.)

"To love what you do and feel that it matters -- how could anything be more fun?" ~ Katharine Graham

“There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing.” ~ John O’Donohue

Articles

Harvard Business Review: How to Actually Encourage Employee Accountability. "To treat mistakes restoratively, leaders need humility, grace, and patience. They must see any person’s arc of professional success as more than the sum total of any single assignment. Leaders also need the humility to acknowledge their contribution to people’s failures...We have a long way to go before accountability within organizations becomes a welcomed process that yields fair, actionable feedback and encourages employees to embrace the opportunity to improve their performance and expand their contributions. Making dignity, fairness, and restoration foundational components of accountability systems is a powerful place to start."

Harvard Business Review: How to Give Tough Feedback That Helps People Grow. "Giving developmental feedback that sparks growth is a critical challenge to master, because it can make the difference between an employee who contributes powerfully and positively to the organization and one who feels diminished by the organization and contributes far less. A single conversation can switch an employee on — or shut her down. A true developmental leader sees the raw material for brilliance in every employee and creates the conditions to let it shine, even when the challenge is tough."

Harvard Business Review: Building Organizational Resilience. "To cope—and thrive—in uncertain times, develop scripted routines, simple rules, and the ability to improvise."

Harvard Business Review: The Emotional Labor of Being a Leader. "Leaders are expected to attend to employees’ mental and physical health and burnout (while also addressing their own), demonstrate bottomless sensitivity and compassion, and provide opportunities for flexibility and remote work — all while managing the bottom line, doing more with less, and overcoming challenges with hiring and retaining talent. They should appear authentic, but if they get too honest about their distress, others may lose confidence in their leadership, known as the 'authenticity paradox.'"

Harvard Business Review: How to Be a Purpose Driven Leader Without Burning Out. "Servant leadership brought us to a more compassionate, human-centered work environment. It’s time for us to make the next leap. In today’s environment, burned-out leaders endlessly trying to serve will struggle to drive the innovation, resilience, and sense of meaning required for future growth. Elevating the lens to noble-purpose leadership has the power to unite employees and managers in the pursuit of making a difference."

McKinsey Health Institute: Addressing employee burnout: Are you solving the right problem? "Employers have invested unprecedented resources in employee mental health and well-being. With burnout at all-time highs, leaders wonder if they can make a difference. Our research suggests they can."

In her Harvard Business Review article, Why Career Transition Is So Hard, Herminia Ibarra posits that "you need to diverge and delay, exploit and explore, and bridge and bond to find a new narrative thread. In doing so it’s essential to engage with others and tell them your story—again and again, as much to make sense of your experience as to enlist their help...As constant reinvention becomes the norm, the stories that define us have no start or ending. Instead of closure, the prize is learning: What we learn about ourselves when we embrace, rather than resist, the loss of status and identity will give us access to more options in the long term. Proficiency in being liminal won’t reduce the great uncertainty before you. But it will increase your capacity to successfully navigate the present and future transitions that are the signature of a modern career."

Harvard Business Review: 6 Questions to Ask at the Midpoint of Your Career. "It’s common to wrestle with feelings of unmet expectations, missed opportunities, and paths not taken when you reach the midpoint of your career. But experts say that arriving at middle-age is also a profound opportunity for growth and self-reflection. It’s a chance to reevaluate your priorities, draw from your experience, and carve out a path that aligns with your goals for the second half of your professional life."

Harvard Business Review: Leaders Must React. "To be successful, CEOs must articulate a compelling vision, align people around it, and motivate them to execute it. But there’s one thing that can make or break them: how they respond in real time to unforeseen events. On average, addressing unexpected issues—which range from fluctuations in stock price, to just-discovered product flaws, to major accidents and crises—consumes 36% of a CEO’s time. That’s a big proportion, and not all those problems merit a leader’s attention. To help CEOs understand which ones they truly need to focus on, [Nitin] Nohria...has created a framework that sorts events into four categories—normal noise, clarion calls, whisper warnings, and siren songs—and offers guidance on how leaders should handle each type."

Harvard Business Review: 5 Harmful Ways Women Feel They Must Adapt in Corporate America. "For women, it’s time we evolve beyond these maladaptations and (re)claim our agency. Rather than maintain the status quo, company leaders need to collectively change their acceptance and tolerance of maladaptations and reject the binary of “leaning in” or “leaning out” as the makers or breakers of success. Instead, they need to recognize that women need to lean within and listen to their own wisdom about what it means to be healthy, whole, and successful. Women can’t just stop these maladaptations and survive on their current tracks; companies need to evolve, too."

Harvard Business Review: Leading the 6-Generation Workforce. "...Giving each generation — and, importantly, each individual — the opportunity to be seen, understood, valued, and leveraged in the workplace throughout the course of their career is essential for personal, social, and even societal well-being."

The Wall Street Journal: The ‘Coordination Tax’ at Work Is Wearing Us Down. "Mismatched schedules, wasted commutes and too many ways to communicate. Getting in sync with co-workers isn’t getting easier."

Harvard Business Review: How to Become a Supercommunicator at Work. "...Great communication is a skill that nearly anyone can learn by taking the following steps: preparing before a conversation, asking deep questions during a conversation, and asking (and answering) follow-up questions throughout. In the context of work, mastering each step can help you...build lasting connections with people at all levels of your organization — connections that go a bit deeper than your typical professional relationship...Ultimately, they can help you grow in or beyond your role."

Harvard Business Review: The Art of Asking Smarter Questions. "Our research reveals that strategic questions can be grouped into five domains: investigative, speculative, productive, interpretive, and subjective. Each unlocks a different aspect of the decision-making process. Together they can help you tackle key issues that are all too easy to miss."

Harvard Business Review: Research: People Still Want to Work. They Just Want Control Over Their Time. "As many organizations continue to wrestle with how to structure work policies, now is the time to figure out how to grant employees control over their time in ways that can motivate them to do their best work, and experience greater satisfaction in both work and life. In our research we found that employees who have greater control over their time tend to be more satisfied with both their work and their lives. This suggests that work arrangements that grant employees more control and flexibility may not only improve employee well-being, but may also help employers retain the top talent they’ve been struggling to keep."

Harvard Business Review: New Rules for Teamwork. "Collaboration is more complex than ever—and more difficult to get right. Here’s how organizations can build better teams."

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Why Employees Quit, the authors look at the motivators and behaviors that both "push" people to leave their employers, as well as those that "pull" them to stay. Many people are pushed due to a lack of respect, trust, engagement, sense of purpose, porous boundaries and unclear paths for growth, development and advancement, to name a few. They are pulled, essentially, by the exact opposites forces that push them, with many attractive pull features coalescing around autonomy, mastery and purpose.

The Irish Times: Why psychological safety at work boosts employees and productivity. "In a psychologically safe workplace staff feel free to speak up and be creative, which is good for business." [KJ: In addition, here is an excellent companion piece that focuses on the rapid erosion of psychological safety in the context of newly hired employees: HBR: Research: New Hires’ Psychological Safety Erodes Quickly.]

Harvard Business Review: The Surprising Benefits of Work/Life Support. "Employers sometimes worry about the bother or cost of implementing work/life programs, but what they should really worry about is the bother and cost of not implementing them. Specifically, they should be concerned about losing workers who are good at their jobs, about the cost of finding and training their replacements, and about losing the battle for diverse talent."

KelloggInsight: It Literally Pays to Love Your Work. "When products or services are also a labor of love, customers perceive them as more valuable—and are willing to pay more."

Blog Posts & Opinions

The Quiet Life with Susan Cain. "For 2024, how about living a truly quiet life? It's not about making the right New Years resolution; it's about how you direct your attention."

Scientific American: To Lead a Meaningful Life, Become Your Own Hero. "From Gilgamesh to Star Wars, the narrative blueprint underpinning many heroic tales can offer a powerful way to reframe experiences."

Paul Graham: The Acceleration of Addictiveness. "The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40." [KJ note: a prescient piece, as relevant today (if not more) than when he originally wrote it in 2010.]

Cal Newport (The New Yorker): It’s Time to Embrace Slow Productivity. "We need fewer things to work on. Starting now."

Seth's Blog: Boyle's Law. "One way to change the pressure of work is to expand or contract the size of the container that holds it. It’s a trap to embrace a productivity shortcut that isn’t a shortcut at all–simply more time spent."

Psychology Today: What's Holding You Back? Wish yourself good morning, celebrate, and touch water. "How to manage the mental fatigue of nonstop overload."

Chicago Booth Review: In a Changing World, Embrace Ambiguity. "Companies are looking for executives who can navigate through uncertainty."

The Atlantic: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me 30 Years Ago. "Life is not measured by a moment. Focus on getting the big things right."

The New York Times: David Brooks: The Quiet Magic of Middle Managers. "The democratic fabric is held together by daily acts of consideration that middle managers are in a position to practice and foster. The best of them don’t resolve our disputes but lift us above them so that we can see disagreements from a higher and more generous vantage point. Democracy is more than just voting; it is a way of living, a way of living generously within disagreements, one that works only with ethical leaders showing the way."

UChicago Magazine: Optimal quitting. "An economist’s advice on when to fold your hand in favor of the next opportunity."

Seth's Blog: Empathy at a distance. "Empathy is really difficult. It’s generally worth it. Because empathy is the key to connection, trust and community."

Korn Ferry: Why Gen Z is Saying No to Management. "It’s called 'conscious unbossing,' with seven in ten Gen Zers passing up better titles. How this is becoming a leadership problem."

Substack: Granted (Adam Grant): No, you don't owe me a favor. "Generosity is not a loan to repay or a debt to settle. It's a gift to appreciate."

Seth's Blog: What Do We Owe The Future? "The circle of now is how far into the future you’re hoping to make an impact. Do you care enough to invest in a thousand tomorrows? What will you invest in (or sacrifice, depending on your point of view) to receive in the future?"

Seth's Blog: Choose Your Fuel Wisely. "We thrive when we find a goal and a metric that’s resilient and easily replenished. It turns out that making a contribution is something we can do, again and again, and it never gets old."

Seth's Blog: Practical approaches for more effective teamwork. 

Simon's (Sinek) Journal: Purpose Cannot Be Rationalized. "Because a true sense of purpose is deeply emotional, it serves as a compass to guide us to act in a way completely consistent with our values and beliefs. Purpose does not need to involve calculations or numbers. Purpose is about the quality of life. Purpose is human, not economic."

Podcasts & TED Talks

TED2023: Why you should stop setting goals (yes, really). "In athletics, in business, in life, everyone sets goals. But that's not the way to excel, according to former NFL player Emmanuel Acho, now an author and TV sports analyst. Here's what he says to do instead." [KJ note: his mental model is counterintuitive and quite interesting all at once.]

Freakonomics: The Hidden Side of Everything. How to Succeed at Failing: Parts 1-4.

Part 1: The Chain of Events. "We tend to think of tragedies as a single terrible moment, rather than the result of multiple bad decisions. Can this pattern be reversed? We try — with stories about wildfires, school shootings, and love."

Part 2: Life and Death. "In medicine, failure can be catastrophic. It can also produce discoveries that save millions of lives. Tales from the front line, the lab, and the I.T. department."

Part 3: Grit vs Quit. "Giving up can be painful. That’s why we need to talk about it. Today: stories about glitchy apps, leaky paint cans, broken sculptures — and a quest for the perfect bowl of ramen. Part of the series."

Part 4: Extreme Resiliency. "Everyone makes mistakes. How do you learn from them? Lessons from the classroom, the Air Force, and the world’s deadliest infectious disease."

HBR IdeaCast: Making Peace with Your Midlife, Mid-career Self. "Research shows that happiness bottoms out for people in their mid to late 40s. We might struggle with mid-career slumps, caring for both children and aging parents, and existential questions about whether everything has turned out as we'd planned. But Chip Conley says we can approach this phase of our personal and professional lives with a different perspective. He's a former hospitality industry CEO and founder of the Modern Elder Academy, and he explains how to reframe our thinking about middle age, find new energy, and become more fulfilled and successful people at work and home."

Joan Gary: Emotional Intelligence is the Key to Better Leadership (with Daniel Goleman). "How can we improve our emotional intelligence and become better leaders as a result?"

WorkLife with Adam Grant: Malcolm Gladwell on the importance of self-correction. "...More than 20 years after releasing his blockbuster book The Tipping Point, Malcolm has decided to rethink his first famous ideas by writing his new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. He and Adam riff on the value of acknowledging our past mistakes, strategies for coping with failure and ways to avoid the traps of homogeneous cultures."

WorkLife with Adam Grant: You have more control over your emotions than you think with Lisa Feldman Barrett. "Emotions are like opinions — everyone has them...We know that it’s possible to transform our feelings by changing how we think and talk about them...In this episode, Lisa and Adam bust myths about how emotions are constructed in the brain and experienced in the body. They discuss the surprising evidence that language doesn’t just describe emotions — it shapes them. And they examine how managing your emotions is easier than you may realize."

WorkLife with Adam Grant: The Science of Recharging on Weekends and Vacations. "Many people don’t use all their paid time off from work — and struggle to relax and recover on nights and weekends too. What does it take to make our breaks more restorative? Adam examines the evidence on recovery and burnout, explores how workplaces can reimagine vacation policies, and highlights what kinds of hobbies are best suited to different times of day."

Re: Thinking with Adam Grant: Poet Maggie Smith on embracing ambiguity. "Poet and author Maggie Smith isn’t sure where she falls on the spectrum from optimism to pessimism. But her viral poem 'Good Bones' and her bestselling books have inspired countless readers with profound insights on the messiness of being human. In this episode, Maggie and Adam discuss strategies for handling complex emotions, sustaining hope while acknowledging reality, and accepting ambiguity in life and art. They explore the value of asking questions that may not have a satisfying answer — or any answer at all." 

WorkLife with Adam Grant: How to Rethink a Bad Decision. "In life and work, we have a hard time changing course. When we wind up in a miserable job, a failing project, or a floundering romantic relationship, we rationalize, make excuses, and stick with our bad decisions—even when the writing's on the wall. Why? Usually we assume the driving force is sunk costs: we don't want to admit we've wasted that time or money. But in fact, the root of our stubbornness is a psychological trap called 'escalation of commitment.' Once we understand that, we can start taking steps to protect ourselves from… well, ourselves."

TED: WorkLife with Adam Grant: How to design teams that don’t suck. "Too many teams are less than the sum of their parts, and building a great team requires more than just picking an all-star roster or doing trust falls. Adam dives into the hard-hitting research on what makes teams work."

For prior year faves:

2023: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog/2023/12/10/time-keeps-changingrearrangingme-michael-stipe

2022: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog/2023/1/15/reading-is-migratory-an-act-of-transport-from-one-life-to-another-one-mind-to-another-jenny-xie

2021: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog/2021/12/12/this-is-water-my-favorite-reading-amp-listening