Pain in the….Arm

March 25, 2025March 24, 2025 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

The time I’d normally have spent, yesterday, finalizing today’s post was after the plasma injection I got in my arm for persistent (last 10 months) tennis elbow.

The doctor told me not to use my right arm (includes typing) for the week.

So, that post will go live next week. In the meantime…

I remind myself that I am More than the Broken Parts.

And, for further reading that may not have crossed your desk: here’s the memo about what is happening to U.S. foreign aid in the aftermath of the dismantling of USAID.

Hopefully what emerges will be some semblance of what is described.

“Our Values” vs. “What’s Valued”

March 11, 2025March 12, 2025 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

While I have written “values statements” many times over the years, it’s not an exercise I’ve embraced.

It often has felt like a smokescreen-inducing, hand-waving endeavor.

“Let’s write down a bunch of statements that are, at worst, non-specific and disassociated from everyday reality; at best highly aspirational.”

Therein lies the problem.

I’ve been thinking of ways to approach this exercise differently: instead of framing it as “values,” we should start with “what’s valued here.”

Meaning: what are the specific behaviors and orientation that we, as a culture, deem important to our collective success?

How do we believe each of us should show up to create maximum impact?

What types of actions do we want to see more of, in anyone and everyone, no matter who they are and where they come from.

I wrote about this in my Culture Graphs post, which talks about the ongoing, iterative interaction between your today values and your tomorrow values. These values—literally the behaviors that are valued in your organization—are not static and they are not determined by what you’ve written down. They are the sum total of how people interact every day. These actions interact with your cultural fabric and weave something new.

So, start with asking yourself, “what behaviors / attitude / orientation do we value here?”

Things that are concrete, real and specific. Things that we see embodied in the people who make the most impact?

The process of writing these down is a way of uncovering desired behaviors that have been implicit or hidden from most of your team.

You aren’t “creating a values statement,” you are revealing, to your team, what is valued here.

When people struggle in an organization, part of what is holding them back is the fact that no one has taken the time to say “this is how we expect you to behave.” These people feel unseen or culturally out of sync because these behaviors haven’t been made clear to them. Worse, if your senior leadership cannot agree what these behaviors are, they have no way to reinforce your culture.

If you’re ready to jump in to writing down a “what’s valued” statement, I’d recommend this 2002 Harvard Business Review Article, Make Your Values Mean Something by Patrick M. Lencioni. It breaks down values into these four categories (paraphrased):

Core values: deeply ingrained principles that serve as cultural cornerstones
Aspirational values: those that a company needs to succeed in the future but currently lacks
Permission-to-play values: the minimum behavioral and social standards required of any employee
Accidental values: arise spontaneously, without being cultivated by leadership, and take hold over time.

Without a clear articulation of values, Accidental Values take over, and your Culture Graphs take on dangerous level of randomness. Whereas with articulated Core, Permission to Play and Aspirational Values, you create clarity for your employees and take responsibility for building the culture your team has decided it needs to succeed.

The F Chord Opportunity

March 4, 2025March 4, 2025 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been working on playing guitar for about a year.

It is, mostly, harder than I’d expected—given my lifelong experience as a musician—but also extremely enjoyable. Moments of playing a truly beautiful, soulful tune, or of getting my girls to sing while I play, are nothing short of transcendent.

One of the challenges every beginner guitar player will face is learning to play an F chord.

The F chord – image from https://notesonaguitar.com/how-to-play-an-f-chord/

To play it properly, you need to curl and press down firmly with your middle, ring and pinky fingers, and, simultaneously, press down three other strings with your second finger.

Getting it to sound like anything other than a buzzing mess was, at first, impossible. Playing this F in tempo, as part of a song, still seems ludicrous to me.

Each beginning guitar player must decide how to confront this challenge. The natural thing to do is to avoid it: you can do a lot on the guitar without being able to play this awful chord. You can avoid songs that have it. You can play a ‘mini’ F chord, which is much easier. Never learning the F chord, and all the associated bar chords, seems like a viable path.

And yet, there’s not a single “real” guitar player out there who can’t play an F chord.

So how do we handle this as guitar players and in other part of our lives? How do we approach the skills that we could easily dodge and we think no one would notice—skills that are high leverage specifically because the only way out is through.

Skills like learning how to: