THE LEAFLET

November 27 2025

glamorizing the BTS for your team, so efficient … you don’t even do the thing, the double benefit of teacher as leader

GLAMORIZING THE BTS WITH YOUR TEAM

Whatever thing it is you produce for your customers, community, or company, that thing likely represents a fraction of the team’s end-to-end action and output. Nearly every product and service has a comparatively large behind-the-scenes operation. 

It’s easy for the on stage, for-the-customer stuff to get all the glory. This misallocation of attention can distort the team’s incentives. Those doing the behind-the-scenes stuff can feel forgotten or resentful. The quality of the vital BTS work can suffer.

Leaders and managers can prevent this distortion, cheaply. Tracking progress toward on-stage success and celebrating milestones on that path can be done with tools you probably already have: a spreadsheet, eg, and email/Slack. Shout out people doing excellent BTS work; draw the team’s attention to the completion of key phases of that work and explain to them why it matters. 

A K-12 example: One of my favorite leaders ever, Margie Scribner, is a master at making teachers find meaning in and feel appreciated for mundane processes. These processes are essential for student success but they usually happen when students aren’t in the room. One of those processes is decorating the classroom and building big data trackers on chart paper in July, before kids are even in the building. Margie turned her routine assistant principal audit of classroom design into an iPhone shot mini-show called “MTV [S]cribs”: teachers with the most inspiring, edifying, and student-friendly designs gave tours of their rooms and pointed out their best features. She turned something that could have been a low morale, compliance-y drudge into a high engagement co-opetition.

-eric

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SO EFFICIENT … YOU DON’T EVEN GET THE THING DONE

A shrewd operator looks for ways to automate process. Fewer keystrokes from fewer participants probably means fewer errors and more speed. 

With a new endeavor or a cash-strapped team, you might be creating this automation for the first time. The automation set-up is an experiment that necessarily involves some trial and error. 

I’ve been on teams where achieving this automation becomes an obsession. A very time-consuming obsession. The manager responsible outsmarts themselves. They miss a goal or deadline because they spend so much time trying to construct the dashboard or script or killer app.

Once their intellect and ego are engaged in this kind of pursuit, smart managers can miss an annoying truth: there are cases where the person willing to blister their own hands on the ax will beat the person trying to build a chainsaw from scratch. It can be worth a minute in a pre-mortem or other planning meeting to sketch a threshold where the automation experiment stops and we just do it the sweaty, old-fashioned way.

-eric

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THE DOUBLE BENEFIT OF LEADER AS TEACHER

When you’re a skilled leader, there’s a double benefit available in every good move you make. Many leaders only grab one of the two benefits, by default. 

The first benefit is The Thing Goes Well. You give a good speech, or write a good report, or navigate a sensitive partner meeting. Yay. The company needs that and you delivered.

The second benefit, the one too often ignored, is Someone Other Than You Learns How to Do the Thing Well. The taller the hierarchy, the easier it is to assume a special province of leader stuff that folks lower in the hierarchy can’t or shouldn’t participate in. The easier it is for folks outside of that province to assume that The Thing Went Well because the leader is possessed of “genius” or “talent” instead of skill from practice.

You can get some of the second benefit with something as simple as a ride-along. Someone just joins you and watches you do your thing. You can get more of that benefit with deliberate teaching and delegation.

From what I’ve seen, teams that achieve significant growth, person by person, flip the presumption from “Leaders do leader stuff alone, they’re leaders, duh” to “Leaders constantly teach others how to do what they do.”

-eric

Read the rest here.

COMPELLING QUOTES

Novelist Larry McMurtry on heartbrokenness:

Do you know what it means to be heartbroken?...It means your heart isn't whole, so you can't really do anything wholeheartedly.

Poet David Whyte on friendship:

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

Poet Terrance Hayes on whom to fear:

It's not the bad people who are brave I fear, it's the good people who are afraid.

Keep going, keep growing,

Ben & Eric