A Tale of 2 Post-its
In today's episode, we delve into the world of immediate leadership development and uncover its transformative power. Join me as we explore the crucial elements of clarity, alignment, and nimble teams in driving impactful leadership.
Discover how leaders can find clarity in their purpose, align their actions with their values, and create teams that facilitate rapid progress. Gain practical strategies to enhance your leadership skills and make a meaningful impact starting today.
So tune in now and embark on your journey to becoming a more effective and influential leader.
On this episode you’ll hear…
The goal behind Coffee on Leadership workshops
The most important things you can do for your leadership development
The power of clarity and alignment as universal goals for leaders
The importance of constantly encouraging practice
The story behind the two-pizza rule from Jeff Bezos and how Amazon keeps teams small and nimble
How to create a more nimble process, workflow, or project team within your own organization
Ready for more?
Listen in:
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** This is a raw, unedited transcript
Chaili Trentham 00:00
When I started coffee on leadership workshops, the entire goal was to bring together different leaders from across different disciplines and spaces and put them in a room together or in chairs in my backyard, that's when it started. And to have them dig down to their deeper core values, and what drove their leadership, what defined their personal mission and purpose in the work that they were doing. And then to have conversations about it so that they could see that part of their leadership development was as simple as finding clarity in that moment, and then aligning with others who felt the same. And it all started that way, because I had already been having conversations. In my living room with leaders. I called it coffee house, but weekly conversations with leaders around this idea of identity and purpose in our leadership. And those three years of conversations started because Kimmy, one of my students, and I were on a walk, and she said, I just feel like nobody else is having these same conversations. And because I'm a person who likes to connect people, who said, Oh, no, there are lots of people having those conversations. But you want people who you can connect with on a deeper level, and I will pull them all together for us. And we will have these conversations over coffee in my living room weekly. But this is a reminder that your leadership development doesn't have to be some big lofty plan that spans out over the next three 510 years. While those types of developmental plans are really, really important. The most important thing that you can do for your leadership learning and development is to start today. Literally start by listening to a podcast and reflecting on it by picking up a leadership book from somebody that you know, and or have heard of, and respect and feel that you could learn from them by asking your supervisor over a cup of coffee, what you could do differently tomorrow, right. And the key part of this is to recognize that often as leaders and I say this a lot, but as leaders, we don't have a lot of time. Time is one of those resources that we do not have enough of and always need more of. But that shouldn't limit us from being the best leader that we can be in the moment right now, today.
And so I want to tell you about two posts that are on my desk right now I have to post it notes stuck to my screen, and probably about 30 other post it notes stuck around my desk, it is atrocious. But the two that are on my screen with writing in thick Sharpie marker, say this
one is clarity and alignment. And I wrote that on a note a few months ago and put it on my desk because in the season of leadership that I am in my every day mission and purpose is to bring clarity and alignment for myself, for others. For the organizations, I work with clarity and alignment or the overall goal. And I think that those can be kind of universal goals for leaders, right. We should always be open to having more clarity in our teams and our projects and our tasks, in the way that we communicate out. There should always be more clarity, whether we need more of it, or we're creating more of it. And alignment. I firmly believe that alignment should be the thing that we're striving for alignment between what we say and what we do alignment between our personal values and vision and our organizational values and vision, alignment between in our relationships, alignment on our teams of we're all walking towards the same vision. And so we're setting the same checkpoints and the same goals. There should always be alignment. And so it's your job as a leader to consistently be looking for ways to encourage practice, guide. All of the positive things that you can do as leader to do that with clarity and alignment as your goal. So if you've been looking for a way to start developing yourself today, I want you to write down those two words on a post it note or next to you on your desk, clarity and alignment. And I want you to think about the ways that you can start doing that now and reflect on the ways where you've maybe been falling a little bit short on those components.
The other post it note that I have on my desk says to Pizza rule. And if any of you know Jeff Bezos says to Pizza rule for his son For two development teams, it's that you should be able to feed a team with two pizzas, two large pizzas, and I did I maybe talk about this a couple episodes ago, I baby brought that up. But I have put that post it on my desk because I needed that reminder. To keep it simple and keep it small. The reason why there's a two pizza rule for Bezos and his software development teams is because when you start adding more people into a room, you cannot be nimble. And development in the Amazon world that happens so fast at such a rapid pace, that they have to be able to respond quickly. And so they keep teams small, nimble, able to respond really, really expeditiously. And I think for leaders, we tend to think big picture, right, we want the balcony view, we want to see all of it. And while that is really important, we have to balance that. And align that with this idea that leadership, and our success starts with each individual person in our organization, or on our team or within our sphere of influence. And so while we want that balcony view and big numbers and big impact, it starts with one person, or two, or three, or four or however small, you can actually keep your team because that's where the movement happens. That's where the work happens.
So if you are leading a large team, what are the ways that you can today? Because remember, we're talking about immediate leadership development today. Today, what are the ways that you can look at your team and create a more nimble process or a more nimble workflow, or a more nimble project team so that you have maybe more points of contact, but you're creating those groups within the greater group, right? That you could go to and be like, this team is in charge of a, b, and c, and it's these five people. And that's my go to when we need to have that conversation. And then over here separately, is a separate project team or task team or group. And so think about the ways that you can streamline your groups, think about the ways that that group should not be bigger than two large pizzas. When we look at group dynamics and team dynamics, remember, I was a Communication Studies major. So spend a lot of time looking at small group dynamics and what was most effective. And we know that clarity, going back to the clarity is clarity in our communication. We become less effective, the bigger the group gets, right. So smaller groups, five to eat people, small teams. That's where the magic happens.
So if you're thinking today of Shaylee, I want to find a way to lean into my leadership today. Write it down to post it's one clarity and alignment. How will you strive for clarity and alignment? In the way that you're externally showing up? How will you strive for clarity and alignment internally for yourself as a leader? And even every task you take on or every project you're on, think about how can we bring more clarity to this project or task or effort? How can we create more alignment to this project or task or effort? And on the flip side to Pizza rule? How can I keep this nimble? Keep this team moving quickly? Keep it so that we can have rapid iterations and we can fail fast and fail forward? The answer is a smaller team. And even more growing, how do we create moments for the smaller teams to define their responsibility within a smaller context or setting, but then, with alignment, knowing how that fits into the bigger picture, right and knowing how to communicate for clarity across project teams. So just because you're streamlining and minimizing teams on task doesn't mean that you can minimize clarity and communication. That needs to increase. Because if you start sectioning and segmenting out your teams, part of being nimble is communicating quickly and communicating efficiently across the board. So think about that. Let me know how that impacts your leadership today. And remember, while leadership is about the big picture and standing up on the balcony Casting vision and seeing the overall picture it's also about the one person who you have the ability to impact in profound ways with your leadership