THE LEAFLET

August 14 2025

culture of internal promotion, the surprising thing the whole team wants from you (the leader), a chance to get good

A CULTURE OF INTERNAL PROMOTION

The curious, ambitious, dedicated people you want to have on your team are also very often the kind of people who are really interested in paths to advance within the organization. They want to do the kind of work that gets people promoted. They want promotions. For some, even many, of these folks, their upward trajectory at the organization matters as much or more to them as the number on their paycheck.

But what if your organization is quite small? Or you’ve got leadership roles that have been filled for a long time with great people who have no intention to leave? What if you lead a team within a pre-existing bureaucracy where salary bands, titles, and roles are tightly regulated? In other words, what do you do if you can’t reward your people with the traditional trappings of a promotion (new role, new title, and a raise)?

The culture is always something you can control as a leader. Whatever is true of your HR policies, you as the leader run a distinct, parallel economy within the organization. Your values, your acknowledgement, and your attention all create incentives for the other people on your team. Whether you have the cash or clout to offer old-school promotions or not, you can build a culture where people draw energy and satisfaction from promoting themselves.

The culture you build can value people who grow within their roles and take on more and more within their roles. Eric and I have both led award-winning workplaces where employees touted the culture and recruited friends and family, even though the number of traditional promotions available were few. The folks we tried to hire and reward were ones who found growth profoundly satisfying, whether there were extrinsic benefits like bigger salary and weightier title on the other side.

When I've witnessed an excellent cultural leader in action, I actually don’t see that much of the leader. What I see in motion is a value system that helps people value parts of themselves they previously didn't and build skills and a record of accomplishment they might not have thought to aspire to without it.

Leaders can establish a system like this with relative ease, through clear definitions of what is valued and clear acknowledgements of even the smallest instances of those values in practice. 

-ben

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THE SURPRISING THING THE WHOLE TEAM WANTS FROM YOU (THE LEADER)

The whole team wants an executive that is thinking about all the things that they themselves are not thinking about. Typically, in a decently healthy organization, people joined at least in part because the executive presented some promise of direction-setting, vision, and achievement of the organization’s purpose that prospective teammates really trusted at a personal level.

So when those teammates hear that the leader is doing all kinds of low-level work, consciously or not, teammates closer to the front line are pretty disenchanted. They feel that the promise they signed up for is being broken. Coming to them with the news that "I'm finally able to just sit and think about what's next, and really strategically plan, and really vet and test, and understand internally where we are, and where that fits within the larger external context"—people are delighted to hear this about their executives.

Yet many executives suffer from the "what got me here won't get me there" problem. They resist the delegation and executive thinking the team needs and wants from them. They think, "No, no, the team just wants to know that I'm working as hard as they are." These executives miss out on the chance to build the power of the team to do new, big, hard things the executive would otherwise have held onto herself. And so often, despite inordinate sweat and too-little sleep, they don’t get “credit” from their teams for all their heroic individual efforts.

My take is they shouldn’t get credit for those efforts. In that mode, executives are mis- using their power. The highest and best use of that power may fairly be called their central responsibility. 

-ben

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GIVE YOURSELF A CHANCE TO GET GOOD

So much of the culture we surround young people with is dedicated to sorting and ranking them. Understandably, we totter into adulthood boxed into a number of categories. Most of these categories are altogether made-up. We see a lot of our abilities and our prospects as fixed. Politically, we turn into resentful haters of systems around us or delirious believers in Fate - in both cases, denying ourselves agency that could change things for the better now and later. When we consider a new project or a job transition or social opportunity, our inner voices chant things like:

• Oh, I’m not a ____ person.

• That wouldn’t work for me — I’m a visual/auditory/kinesthetic learner.

• I’m not good at _____.

• I’ll never _____.

• I’ve seen people who are good at _____, and they’re way better/richer/smarter/more connected than me.

Many of these self-defeating mantras cash out as a skills assessment, one you might even be proud of because it shows how humble and self-aware you are: “I’m bad at ____.” “I’m just not a good _____.”

Some of the best thrills and most enduring satisfactions come from undoing these mantras - with evidence. Proving to yourself that you can do something that goes against the stereotype you’ve imposed on yourself.

Preference is not identity. Personality is not ability. I’ve seen outstanding high school teachers, among the very best in the country, with radically different personalities. Stoics to bleeding hearts; anxious young wrecks to wise old heads. Ditto for parents, horticulturalists, and writers.

Before you sink into the familiar comfort of typecasting yourself, double check: have you given yourself the chance to be good at this? I don’t mean “casually attempted a thing a few times to see if you were an effortless genius.” I mean something more like:

• read 5-10 books about it

• watched a 90-minute instructional video (and actually paused it and did the exercises)

• got 1:1 coaching from someone trustworthy (because they really know you or really know the discipline)

• pushed all the way to a complete sh*tty rough draft, solicited feedback on it, then “rewrote” based on the feedback (there’s a viable rough draft of pretty much everything, from native plant gardens to small businesses to feature films - don’t limit your thinking to writing)

-eric

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COMPELLING QUOTES

Creative strategist Cayla Vidmar with a good icebreaker question:

If you died but could be summoned back with a specific sound, what sound would it be?

Writer Elizabeth Gilbert with an adaptation of the Celtic Prayer of Approach:

I honour your Gods,

I drink at your well,

I bring an undefended heart to our meeting place,

I have no cherished outcomes,

I will not negotiate by withholding, and

I am not subject to disappointment.

Poet Wendell Berry on peace:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric