Leadership is a Constant Struggle
Leadership exists in the tension between vision, storytelling, and operations. How we navigate this tension is the heartbeat of organizational culture.
“Tense excitement” was how a Media team member described the state of their mind at the top of this week’s Media sync at Seed Club. It resonated.
Q3 is over. This was the first quarter with the Media team as its own working group, with me as a fresh-faced steward. Being in a leadership position is not a new experience for me — either professionally or socially. But leadership remains a constant struggle. [To fork the title of a very important book by Angela Davis.]
My experience of stewarding the Media team at Seed Club reflects this constant struggle. I say this lovingly — what is struggle but conflict? And what is conflict but the core life force of a relationship?
As people in leadership positions, we’re tasked with holding the vision of the organization as a whole — a vision that’s perpetually emerging and iterating as we uncover new insights at a dizzying velocity. We need to keep sight on the nearly imperceptible destination just beyond the horizon, ensuring that our people are resourced for the journey. More often this sight takes the form of intuition rather than sharp perception. Self-trust in that intuition and the ability to fluidly course-correct are critical practices for anyone in a position of leadership.
We also need to be effective storytellers. Surprisingly, this is the piece of leadership that I most often neglect. The operational impulse in me is strong lately. I have days, sometimes weeks of this as a parent, getting sucked into the dust storm of logistics required to maintain a healthy and well household with five distinct beating hearts. We need to keep our people in touch with the evergreen vision. We need to contextualize the day-to-day operations within the long-arc of where we’re hoping to go. We do this with storytelling.
Yet we must remain operationally sound. There’s probably an apt maritime analogy here; the vision only manifests if we coordinate well. Coordination, as we know, is the richest design space in web3, and it’s the area where I most often experience the tension of leadership. Operational wellness is the difference between over-extending your sail with big ideas and elegantly trimming it to align your keel depth. [I have 0 sailing experience, but hopefully you get the point.]
Leadership exists in the tension between these things: vision, storytelling, and operations. How we navigate this tension is the heartbeat of organizational culture.
“Tense excitement” is the sensation of being on the edge of something big while holding the inherent uncertainty of innovation. Anticipation could be another way to describe it. That’s how I’m entering this final quarter of 2022, my first year in crypto. This is the same way I’ve entered nearly every week at Seed Club: with the undeniable sense that we’re building something truly meaningful, if not world changing — I can’t wait to find out how we’ll get there.
What I’m listening to:
An interview with Dr. Emily Anhalt on Ordinary Astronauts, a great podcast from Every. Emily is a psychologist and co-founder of Coa, the “gym for your mental health.” She talks through the common psychological traits of founders — why they’re distinctive and why they’re challenging. This episode will likely resonate with anyone who’s instigating or building in web3.
What I’m reading:
An article in the latest issue of Harvard Business Review, Building Your Own Brand Platform. This piece pulls apart an emerging trend in retail brands, what HBR calls the brand flagship platform. Emerging in response to brand aggregators (think Amazon), brand flagship platforms are defined by the inclusion of products, services, and content with 4 distinct frameworks of community interaction — contained within a brand’s owned platform. This piece has insights for anyone building DAOs and tokenized communities.