Herding Cats With a Light Touch

[Music] I want to talk about hurting cats this week I was in Houston working with a group of folks who were preparing for a big interview and we had the day planned out but professionals are professionals and squirly people are squirely people and the conversation got off track a couple of times or at least clearly the team felt like it was off track at times because they would say things like sorry I know this is all about hurting cats and you know I know we went down that uh rabbit hole for a while I was actually cool with all of it and I was cool with all of it because we had planned the day in a useful way we had designed what needed to get accomplished over the course of the day we didn’t overstuff it we allowed for exploration time we allowed for time for the folks to just kind of talk through the project wrap their brains around it get to know each other explore some of the nuances find aspects of the project that they were passionate about that really got their creative juices flowing and I thought you know this is exactly the way the day should be going and I thought that pretty much the whole day even though occasionally team memb members including the CEO of the firm who was on this team were sort of furtively glancing at me and like checking in with me and and saying like sorry sorry the whole thing was going exactly the way that I wanted it to go we were progressing over the course of the day I could tell because there were really only like five things that I wanted to do over the course of the day and I knew that if I tried to just keep folks on track and motor through it throughout we wouldn’t be building the team skills that we needed to have this was members of two different firms coming together to form a joint effort around this Pursuit and I knew I needed to let these folks just play with each other and have a good time with each other so I want to encourage you to do that too when you are in charge of a group and you need to get stuff done you need to look at the day before the day begins you need to schedule things out so that you’re not trying to do too much in too little time and you’re not forced to push people to go too far too fast you need to take personality into account you need to just allow folks to be themselves you need folks to take the time to be human with each other and when things run short on time you need to let people know okay here’s what time it is here’s what we need to get done before the day ends do that and you will stay on top of things you keep an eye on the clock don’t force them to keep an eye on the clock don’t force them to stay on task all the time even though a fair amount does need to get done allow them to blow off steam by coloring outside of the lines by doing what they want to do by covering what they need to cover do that and see what this new experience of hurting cats can be like