The Art of Leadership

Chapter 29. How to Rands

Hi, welcome to the team. I’m so glad you are here at $COMPANY.

It’s going to take a solid quarter to figure this place out. I understand the importance of first impressions, and I know you want to get a check in the win column, but this is a complex place full of equally complex humans. Take your time, meet everyone, go to every meeting, write things down, and ask all the questions—especially about all those baffling acronyms and emoji.

One of the working relationships we need to define is ours. The following is a user guide for me and how I work. It captures what you can expect out of the average week working with me, how I like to work, my North Star principles, and some of my, uh, nuance. My intent is to accelerate our working relationship with this document.¹

Our Average Week

We’ll have a 1:1 every week for at least 30 minutes, except during HIGH ALERT (see below). This meeting is for discussing topics of substance, not updates. I’ve created a private Slack channel for the two of us to capture future topics for our 1:1s as well as to provide a handy historic record of what we’ve discussed. When you or I think of a topic, we dump it in that channel.

We’ll have a staff meeting with your peers every week for 60 minutes, no matter what. Unlike for 1:1s, we’ll have a shared document that captures agenda topics for the entire team. Similar to in 1:1s, we aren’t discussing status at this meeting, but issues of substance that affect the whole team.

You can ...