Timeless wisdom & sharper thinking for leaders. Alpha Insights is a weekly newsletter helping you navigate critical decisions and think clearly under pressure. Built on hard earned experience and deep reading, from ancient thinkers to modern day trailblazers. Each weeks read pairs a clear read on human behavior with practical leadership insights. [Personal views, written independently of my role at Databricks.]
Problems Are Just Opportunities in Work Clothes
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I had a member of my team, a high energy type A person, and another leader we worked closely with who were not clicking. The friction was real, and it kept impacting how work actually got done. On the verge of a full escalation. My first instinct was to "fix" the communication style with my team member. Address the tone, the timing, the delivery. What's the real problem? The communication problem wasn't actually the problem to solve. The real question was more basic. What is our job here? Our role, among other things, was to support the people on that other leader's team, to help them reach their goals. If we weren't doing that, whether my team member technically had the right of the argument stopped mattering. "Slow down and listen, then move fast" became the coaching that worked. Not slow in general, but slow at first, to actually hear what the other side needed. Then top speed, pointed at the right thing. Marcus Aurelius wrote about exactly this, in the passage Ryan Holiday's book The Obstacle Is the Way took its title from; "In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them... The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way." This isn't about obstacles in general. It's not a call to just push through friction and move on. Rather it's an invitation to practice the principles and values you hold. The personality conflict on my team became the exact place to practice courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom, the four virtues I wrote about this Sunday. Courage to have the actual conversation instead of avoiding it. Discipline to slow down when every instinct said speed up. Justice, making sure the argument didn't matter more than the shared goal. Wisdom, checking my own first instinct against what the situation actually needed. What an escalation actually reveals With time and experience, I've come to see escalations differently, especially with partners. When something breaks badly enough to get escalated, it tends to reveal one of three things. The partnership wasn't real to begin with, and the escalation ends it. Or it survives, revealing an okay partnership without fully shared incentives, patched but not strengthened. Or it makes us grab the opportunity and make it a real Partnership, because the crisis forced us to truly align and partner on what mattered for all. So, never waste a good crisis. Years ago, in the pre-cloud era, I worked for an IT outsourcing company. One of our customers had a major physical security incident, a break-in at one of their facilities. It escalated fast and hard. Inside that crisis was an opening none of us had asked for: budget to fix IT gaps that had sat neglected for years, a case for real security investment, and a partnership that came out tighter than it went in, because we'd helped them through the worst incident they'd ever had. What's the next escalation heading your way going to reveal about the customer relationship, partnership, or collaboration, and are you going to treat it as work clothes or just a problem? Thanks for reading! If you liked it, forward it to someone who'd value it. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe here to get it every week. And if you want to browse the archive go here. /Jonas Everything here is built from my own ideas, drawn from my reading, and life experience. For structure, validating research, proofreading, and edits, I use AI tooling to help make it a better experience for you, the reader. |
Alpha Insights
Timeless wisdom & sharper thinking for leaders. Alpha Insights is a weekly newsletter helping you navigate critical decisions and think clearly under pressure. Built on hard earned experience and deep reading, from ancient thinkers to modern day trailblazers. Each weeks read pairs a clear read on human behavior with practical leadership insights. [Personal views, written independently of my role at Databricks.]
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