Lessons from Building Homes in Haiti, Mexico, and Beyond
My guest on the podcast this week was Matthew Marshall. He has dedicated the past decade of his career to building New Story, a not-for-profit dedicated to expanding access to home and land-ownership for people who deserve better, safer housing.
We spoke at length about doing mission-driven work. In this clip, we spoke directly to the dark side of mission. It can be all-consuming and emotionally heavy to see the small dent your herculean efforts are making on the issue you’re working to solve:
Matthew goes on to share how he takes care of himself to maintain his effort and energy for the long haul. This is an example of short, but impactful clips the team is producing to make the podcast approachable (I know two hours per episode is a lot!)
We also talked about the power of the intentional practices New Story uses to build a strong culture, including:
- A 50-page culture book that’s given to all new teammates
- An extensive onboarding process that goes deeply into detail about the organization’s history, its org structure, their theory of change, the customers they serve, and more
- Fun activities on team retreats like a cooking competition that are designed to form team bonds and create lasting memories of shared experiences
- Values shout outs in every team meeting, wherein teammates share specific praise for how a colleague has demonstrated an organizational value in the past week
There’s a lot to learn in this episode. Listen to the full thing here.
Take Your Seat as CEO
My mentors and teachers at Reboot.io use this language to describe the transformation required of a founder as they grow into the CEO their company or organization needs: take your seat.
This comes up in my coaching work with founders nearly every week, and this week was no exception.
When you take your seat as a CEO, you embrace realities like:
- When your team brings you feedback about a leader who works for you, they’re asking you to solve an issue they haven’t been able to solve on their own
- When your team shows you a data-driven analysis about something that is broken in your product or business model, they’re asking you to give them permission to fix it
- If a teammate asks what you think they should do in their role, it might be comfortable to tell them, but it’s your job to keep the agency where it belongs: with the person most responsible for the outcome of the decision
- It’s your job to make the hardest decisions facing the organization. Your team needs you to confront, process, and integrate the emotional burden of those decisions without burdening them with the weight. (This is what boards, peers, coaching, and therapy are for)
- If a key leader needs to be fired or moved into a new role… If you need to pivot your business model… If you need to oust a board member working at odds with the organization… If you are no longer capable of leading as CEO… These are the kinds of problems only you can solve.
When a leader abdicates their responsibility, their team suffers. Your team is probably waiting on you to make the call on 2, 3, 8, or 18 different things right now.
In what ways are you abdicating responsibility? What issues are holding your team back? What decisions does your company need you to make because only you can make them?
Build the Knowledge and Skills Necessary to Lead Well
In preparation for interviewing bestselling author and strategist Josh Kaufman for an upcoming podcast episode, I read each of his three bestselling books:
If I had to summarize the value of Josh’s work for a person like you it’s this:
- There is a concrete set of business knowledge you are likely to need to lead effectively.
- As you lead, you’ll need to continue to build skills to level yourself up and stay ahead of your team’s growth.
- And at every step along the way, you’ll need to courage to make hard decisions and take on big projects.
I’ll leave with you with this excellent Charlie Munger quote from The Personal MBA, which is a business reference book almost anyone can benefit from thumbing through occasionally:
I’ve long believed that a certain system — which almost any intelligent person can learn — works way better than the systems most people use [to understand the world]. What you need is a lattice-work of mental models in your head. And, with that system, things gradually fit together in a way that enhances cognition.
[…]
It’s kind of fun to sit here and outthink people who are way smarter than you are because you’ve trained yourself to be more objective and more multi-disciplinary. Furthermore, there is a lot of money in it[…]
– Charlie Munger as quoted by Josh Kaufman in The Personal MBA
Four Tweets to Make You Think / Act
1. Do you really need email on your phone?
2. Communicate Proactively and Honestly When You Fire Someone
3. Increase Your Agency, Improve Your Life
4. Go to work with Good Work ep 5 guest Sophie Purdom
If you’re not (yet) a founder, the next best thing is going to work with talented founders working to solve hard problems. Sophie is a great example of this:
Much love and respect,
If you enjoyed this newsletter, forward it to a founder friend. You can also recommend me to a founder or creator as a coach.