What’s in this issue:
💭 Thought: Avoiding single points of failure
📚 Read: Handle Hard Better
😆 Today’s Laugh
Here are 10 more tricks to appear smart in meetings, courtesy of Sarah Cooper.
💭 Today’s Thought
Avoiding unknown risks is, almost by definition, impossible. You can’t prepare for what you can’t envision. If there’s one way to guard against their damage, it’s avoiding single points of failure.
- Morgan Housel, The Psychology of Money
While Housel’s guidance is offered in the context of money (and arguably, life in general), it can also be applied to how you choose to lead yourself and others.
For leaders, it prompts questions like…
Knowing you can’t plan for everything, how can you eliminate single points of failure, both in your own work and across your team?
and
How can your team be great, even without you?
If either of those questions resonate with you as a place worth exploring, try diving into the following prompts to see if they reveal any single points of failure:
What tasks do you do that nobody else does?
What context, knowledge, or experience do you have that no one else does?
What activities or outcomes require your presence in order to occur?
What tasks, knowledge, or experience are confined to only one individual on your team?
What processes, tooling, or equipment does your team use that, if they were gone tomorrow, would present a significant risk?
For each area/task you identify, what would it look like to share that responsibility with others or come up with a back-up plan?
Knowing that you can’t possibly plan for every future scenario, eliminating single points of failure builds the resilience necessary to help you and your team weather whatever storms come your way. Will you leave the team more resilient than when you found it?
📚 Today’s Read
“Make yourself a person that handles hard well.” - Kara Lawson
If you need some motivation to get through a challenging situation, or to continuing pursuing a dream or something that you love, this is it. 💜 Click here to watch.
See you next week!
xo,
Anne