The Leaflet #126: thick and thin cultures; management literature moves; naming contributors

Should I make my culture thick or thin? What has to be true either way?

When I’m building a new organization, I’ve often found I’m integrating teammates who come from places across a spectrum of thick-to-thin cultures. Some draw motivation and a sense of safety from a heavily prescriptive culture where clear rules govern nearly all the patterns of our work together. There’s a particular way we open and close meetings, give shoutouts, write email subject lines, etc.

Others find this deeply aversive and constricting. These folks prefer thin cultures where teams are loosely bound together by a sense of shared mission but each teammate can freestyle with relative autonomy.

I’ve seen orgs from each of these schools thrive. When you will have teammates with histories across the spectrum, it’s ineffective to be a dogmatist of the thick or the thin. Fundamentalists of either sect alienate people who would otherwise do excellent work and champion the culture, whatever its breadth.

Ok ok, so what’s the vibrating quantum of culture that must be there, whether you’re thick as a charter school or thin as a consultancy or somewhere in the elastic space between?

This may sound pat. But I think it’s integrity. That is - whatever set of precepts you have, however thick or thin, you honor them. You walk your talk, especially in cases where there are real stakes for the organization or real stakes for you, personally, as the leader. (Those cases are the ones where people can most easily see that you mean it).

Thick and thin leaders both get in trouble here. If you tell your people there’s a long list of detailed ways we do things around here, and then there are obvious, rampant, consequence-less examples of that not happening, your culture is thick as an oak and hollow as a canoe. And the canoe probably has a raggedy hole.

Similarly, if you tout the freewheeling autonomy of your outfit and then swoop in all over the place to dictate local details. Well. That’s also hypocrisy and the unmistakable stink of it will be in everyone’s nose.

Something wise leaders can do well is explain the work ahead, including the cultural refinement and enforcement, as pragmatic experiments. We’re going to do things in this way because we think it will bring out our best. We’ll test that proposition, with diligence and intellectual honesty. If we find that our hypothesis is wrong, we change course. The culture is a means to an end. It’s a tool with a job.

-eric and ben

I’m a new manager. How do I make sense of all this management literature?

This post isn’t a syllabus (although we do like stuff from Lencioni, Jim Collins, Kim Scott, and Stripe Press). A challenge of management literature, especially for truth-seeking folks who know how to sniff out the difference between a sales pitch and a rigorous study, is that so much of the writing is rooted in small case studies rather than big data sets or first principles thinking. (This is reflected in MBA programs, too, where you’re often reading and play-acting through case studies). You’ve got a lot of books that should have stayed put as 1,000-word blog posts. Things can seem under-researched and over-confident at once.

And yet, one of our most consistent recommendations to leaders is to read from this stuff.

The kind of reading we recommend is pragmatic. One way to make it so: when you sit down with a management book, treat each chapter as a candidate for one specific behavior you’ll try. One move. Pick the move and write it down before you put the book down. Even better than writing it down – put in your calendar as a 15-min task (or tell your army of OpenClaw agents to do that for you). Use the move this week and see what happens.

One risk this helps mitigate is reading-as-procrastination. Because these books are often written to be consumed between one airport and the next, they’ve got frictionless prose and a sunny tone. It’s like watching an old sitcom on mute. It’s easy to rip through one, feel proud of yourself for shouldering your professional development, and then change nothing in your practice.

A second move we like is compiling a cheat sheet of all the moves you’re pulling from these books. Keep a running record of them in one place over time. This can be a google doc, notion page, note in Notes app on your phone. Gradually, you’re amassing your own management and leadership curriculum. You’re making it easier to teach future leaders on your team how to lead like you do.

-ben and eric

Micromove: naming contributions and naming contributors

We’re fans of consistent, public acknowledgement around here. It’s one of the cheapest and most powerful levers leaders have and most of them under-use it.

One way to pull the lever: when you’re addressing the team, discussing some effort underway or accomplishment completed, name other people who contributed.

If you’re the leader, especially if you’re the founder, there’s a certain gravity you exert on status and accomplishment. People will attribute success to you by default when they didn’t directly witness the collaboration that led to the success. They assume it’s a you thing. This can have the unintended consequence of lowering others’ expectations of themselves while heightening their sense of the leader’s genius or charisma or special sauce.

If you’re the leader, you don’t want this. You want everyone on the team developing new skills and wiser perspectives and, ideally, making you replaceable. You don’t want them shrinking from leadership challenges and assuming their own incompetence.

So fight against your own gravity. Tell people who contributed and how. Even if the contribution was just an early conversation with you about an idea that has now come to fruition.

This doesn’t have to be fake, inflationary praise. It can be a simple statement of fact. It will likely mean a lot to the person you acknowledge. And it exerts subtle, important pressure on everyone else’s understanding of what people-who-aren’t-the-founder can do around here.

-eric

COMPELLING QUOTATIONS

Polymath Kevin Kelly on you-ness in the age of AI:

The less predictable you are, the less likely you are to be replaced by AIs. Machines are efficient, and they are powered by the predictable. Current LLMs are trained to generate the most predictable solution. So far they are not very good at duplicating what a creative, one-of-a-kind improbable human can produce. To distance yourself from the machines, aim to be as improbable as you can be.

9-time NBA champion Steve Kerr on the challenge of retirement:

The biggest thing that athletes miss when they retire is the structure and routine. A higher purpose and a process to reach that.

Writer C.S. Lewis on types of pain:

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say ‘My heart is broken’.