Category Archives: Leadership

Frank and Ted in Columbia academic garb

Seen and Heard

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My calendar reminded me that it was Frank Moretti’s birthday. I worked for him for five years at Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. He died in 2013. I still miss him. He introduced me to the practice of appreciations — the idea that you would address a colleague directly and thank them for something they’d done that helped you. All these years later, I am still grateful for all Frank taught me. I also have tried with varying degrees of success to bring this practice into other workplaces and settings.

It’s simple but powerful. At the top of every staff meeting we take a moment to pause. Whoever is facilitating the meeting that week will ask, “Are there any appreciations?” There may be some weeks when we don’t have them, but we usually do. Holding the space matters.

The basic recipe is that you address a person by name, tell them the thing they did and its impact on you.

  • “Jess, I want to appreciate you for the remarks you previewed for me in advance of the awards dinner.They inspired me.”
  • “Steve, I want to appreciate you for the updated budget format. The groupings are more logical and make it easier to communicate about our work.”
  • “Erin, I want to appreciate you for noticing that no volunteers signed up to support the talk. You caught it in time and we were able to avoid what could have been a stressful crisis.”

Once you start this practice of appreciating in one meeting, it spills over into others, one-on-ones, or just conversations.

  • Here’s one I received recently: “I was glad you pushed on adding that recommendations section to the finance proposal — it helped move the conversation forward when we were stuck.” I’d hesitated about doing that because it felt like overstepping. Turns out a colleague was grateful for the contribution.

Appreciations might feel awkward, stiff and/or vulnerable at first, but once a team realizes it isn’t performative, the rhythm settles in, the team finds its cadence, and it becomes powerful.

A related practice: noticings. I credit this one to my friend and former colleague, nova. Every team meeting has a designated facilitator and noticer. It’s the noticer’s role to share a few observations about the meeting when we close. Noticings may be positive or negative. The practice of having it rotate ensures that everyone gets a chance to notice. Examples might include:

  • “I noticed that Erin was very effective at bringing us back to the agenda item when we started to wander.”
  • “The dad puns were especially ooof-inducing this morning.”
  • “I noticed that we kept interrupting each other today, and we’ve agreed not to talk over each other.”

Once the designated noticer shares, then anyone else with a noticing is welcome to chime in. This practice is a logical close at the end of a meeting and its impact builds over time. Easy noticings can lead to more insightful ones. For our team, we realized that we were regularly bringing up issues that needed more time. That led to the creation of time-limited project meetings that then reported back to the whole group. Noticing is an essential ingredient for change or keeping things the same. We cannot change what we do not see.

I want to acknowledge that this piece is, itself, an appreciation of Frank and nova. What practices have you brought from one context or organization to another? Who taught you that practice? Who helped you see what you couldn’t see alone?

Move at the Speed of Trust

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When I joined NYC Quakers, our buildings were neglected and the audit had 126 open items. We had a stretched skeleton team. And I wasn’t sure where to start.

Around this time, I came across adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. Brown is a facilitator and writer who’s worked with major social organizing movements including Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street; her framework draws on Octavia Butler’s Earthseed philosophy, which I fell in love with when I read Parable of the Sower.

Parable of the Sower is worth a read. Here’s just one of the gems:

All that you touch / You change. All that you change / Changes you. / God is Change.

The work you do changes you as you do it. You can’t stand outside it. Instead you work within it. Transforming and being transformed.

Brown’s title caught my eye because it referenced a concept from a business course on disruptive innovation I’d taken that outlined deliberate and emergent strategies. Deliberate strategy works when the landscape and outcomes are known. You’re running a marathon, you’ve run shorter races, you have a base of fitness. You grab an off-the-shelf training plan and execute. Emergent strategy is for when you’re discovering the landscape and holding outcomes loosely. You experiment. You set shorter interim goals and see what sticks.

When I arrived three years ago I knew our landmarked meeting houses had good bones but needed TLC after years of deferred maintenance. Instead of arriving with a vision, I did three things:

100 conversations in 100 days. I wanted to understand the landscape before trying to change it. What did people care about? What was working? What wasn’t? What excited people? What gave them pause?

Listen and make no major changes. This was harder than it sounds. There’s an expectation that leaders arrive with answers. I had hunches, but I held them loosely. Brown writes: “Move at the speed of trust.” That’s what those early months were — moving slowly enough to build trust before asking anyone to follow me somewhere new. This is especially true in Quaker contexts where “leadings” can and do come from everywhere.

Log and fix small things. A broken link, a missing door stopper, a sign that needed posting. Brown calls this “small is good, small is all” — the idea that large patterns reflect small ones. Nothing strategic, just things that made our places a little better and signaled that we were listening and acting on what we heard and saw.

Brown also writes about “critical connections over critical mass.” Those early months were about connection: not building consensus for a big move, but learning who the organization actually was.

The book’s core frame has stayed with me as we continue the work: when you’re transforming, you can’t execute a known playbook. You have to discover the path by walking it — and let it change you along the way.

Now we have a strong team in place to nurture our spaces and our community. We’re still listening, noticing, learning and doing. Our strategy is emerging.

If your organization knows what it is and where it’s going and how to get there, you probably don’t need this book. If it’s trying to figure that out, the frame might give you permission to experiment instead of pretending you have answers you don’t.

What’s a book that’s helped you in your role? What’s something that’s stayed with you?