THE LEAFLET
October 02 2025
delegate and teach with Loom, hiring as performance management, less boring presentations
(QUICKLY) DELEGATE AND TEACH WITH LOOM
Ben and I have found Loom really useful. Loom is a freemium app that lets you record video of yourself and your desktop and send it to others. Specifically, we like it for the following uses:
Feedback: Delivering edits on a document or deck instead of just putting in comments or track changes.
Pre-reading: Doing a voiceover of your own deck before a meeting, so people can watch it ahead of time. This can replace the presentation altogether, so you’re not reading slides at people real time. You can also keep your slides for the meeting and concentrate time and energy on discussion or creating stuff together, with quick references back to the slides as needed.
Teaching: Showing someone how you do something, so that they can do it on their own for/instead of you. It’s much faster and clearer than writing out a stepwise how-to document and, for me, lowers the barriers to delegating.
A couple features that make this speedy and low-friction:
Loom automatically makes a searchable transcript of what you say in the video
Viewers can play back the video at up to 2.5x speed.
A sneaky additional benefit for feedback: I think Loom saves time and angst on both sides of feedback delivery because the recipient can experience the author’s tone of voice and body language. As the author of the feedback, there’s lower risk that you say something unintentionally hurtful or unclear or spend undue time wordsmithing a simple message. As the receiver of the feedback, you can read all that body language if you want or just read the transcript.
As with any tech or app suggestions here, you don’t have to use the precise tool we’re suggesting. The real thing we’re promoting is increasing the volume of your feedback, pre-reading, and delegation-focused teaching.
-eric
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HIRING AS PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
In a recent workshop on building scorecards, several folks mentioned that they might find the scorecard even more useful for hiring than for performance management. The scorecard model we use forces you to
Define the reason the role exists in the first place
Name the specific chunk of the organization’s mission that the role owns and
Specify how you’ll measure success in that ownership.
You could easily call that list^ of stuff a “job description.”
Sounds good to us. We think it’s more effective all around to think of hiring as the first phase of performance management. Your job description and interviews are teaching tools you use to educate candidates about what success looks like around here and how we achieve it.
We suggest this in place of what I see in practice in many organizations. Hiring is understood as wholly distinct from performance management. A mysterious endeavor, where luck, intuitions, and hazy hope predominate, where you can’t reveal too much of your inside stuff, where all the moves on both sides are somewhat artificial. No wonder
When you drive your hiring with a scorecard and make it the first phase of performance management, what you’re doing is less like fishing in a murky pond and more like teaching a new cook your restaurant’s take on a signature recipe. It’s more obvious for you what you should do and it’s much easier to identify and achieve success.
-ben and eric
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LESS BORING, MORE USEFUL PRESENTATIONS
The main thing to avoid is reading at people. If you’re in person, the worst version of this is a presenter half-to-three-quarters turned away from the audience, looking up at the screen and reading the same words everyone in the audience can see. Please never subject your people to this.
A few lightweight moves to get deeper engagement with your material:
“In a breakout room, discuss [prompt] with your group. By the end of the 8 minutes, you should have [answer that meets these criteria].”
“Read this slide to yourself for 15 seconds, then I’ll have a couple of you summarize it for us in your own words.”
“Everyone type into the chat your response to [this prompt]. Now, someone pick a response from the chat other than your own and comment on it - how does it affirm or change your own thinking about this?”
If these moves seem unhelpful or inappropriate for your context, it may be the case that you just need to Convey This Info to These People. If that’s so, I vote for recording a Loom of yourself voicing over the slides and emailing that out instead of having everyone watch you read the slides in real time. Then your people can watch it in the best moments of their schedule, read the transcript, and play it back at faster speeds as desired.
-eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass on patriotism:
The best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins—and he her worst enemy who, under the specious…garb of patriotism seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them.
Historian David Blight on the end of slavery in the US:
Slavery “did not die honestly.” It had died in all-out war, from necessity, not from enlightenment and morality alone. It had been crushed in blood, not merely legislated out of existence.
Former Mayor of Philadelphia Michael Nutter on public service:
You will never make a lot of money in public service. Most of the people who try to make money end up going to jail. But there is something entirely unique about the opportunity, every day, to make somebody else’s life better. It’s a feeling that you can perhaps get in some other professions, but I know that it happens in this one. I would contend that being the mayor is the best job in politics, and possibly the best job in America.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric