005 | How we demonstrate our readiness for leadership

EDITION 005 | More Room to Think (Archives) | Formentor Labs​
​READ TIME: 3 minutes

🗓️ New this week

I said "yes" this week to extending another engagement, but it took me longer this time...

This week I've been reflecting on balance in my work.

I've built a solo practice in order to fill my "buckets";

I need to earn a living.

I love to teach.

I give some of my time away for free.

At the moment I'm filling each of those buckets across a number of activities with great organizations - and yet I still feel left-of-center. Off-balance.

While I don't have the remedy - what I do know is it's something I can solve by sitting in it for a while.

Some of my life's biggest moments have felt super-urgent; buying a new house before we sold our condo, finding work after a layoff, becoming a dad to two very premie babies.

Each of those moments marked a chapter.

Those were important enough moments that I knew to slow down, even before I knew why.

Now that I understand more about myself - from my late-in-life ADHD diagnosis, to how a nervous system works, to what types of work light me up - I'm choosing to slow down here too.

Make a little room to think Now is a perfect moment to take a breath. 8 seconds in, pause, 8 seconds out.

🔬 This week's topic

How we use an experiment to demonstrate our best leadership capabilities.

THE PREMISE

We want to be recognized for our work. Trouble is, too often our presentation of our results are regrettably short and don't paint a complete picture of the leadership skills we developed.

This is why we structure our collaborative work as an experiment.

Taking the experiment-led approach: we set our goal, we develop a hypothesis, we collaborate on a prototype, and we collect the evidence to make our case to leadership.

​More product and marketing people are adopting experimentation into their skillset, explained by a friend, Johan Rydberg, at Spotify.

WHY IT'S IMPORTANT TO GROWING IDEAS

Whether our function is marketing, PM, even creative - how we share ideas in a room demands a different skillset.

An org is always evaluating leadership skills - but those are different from our already-honed functional skills.

By design, a complete experiment already has the key leadership skills built-in. Think about how our leaders view us when we demonstrate:

• Organizing peers without authority. We got our teammates to deliver a result on time.
• Making decisions without complete information. Show we're comfortable making the call - and won't punt another decision back to leaders.
• Communicating at altitudes. A skilled presenter can summarize key learnings and decisions for a roomful of leaders, while getting into the weeds on experiment design with the delivery team.
• Ownership & follow-through. Taking an idea through every stage, from research to design to prototype to experiment, proves we're able to own a project from end to end.

HOW WE CAN USE IT THIS WEEK

• Take that idea we have and shape it into experiment format. Ask to sit with a trusted peer, or prompt a Claude session following the experiment framework. Take it step by step.
• Choose a goal metric. All experiments take observations and those must be measurable. We want to design an experiment that moves a metric that the business cares about - usually this will be revenue, user growth, retention, or cost-savings.
• Be willing to change our minds. Experiments deliver results but those results may not be what we expect - what's key is following the data and taking an evidence-led stance. Sticking to our guns because "it was our idea" looks like putting ourselves before the needs of the customer.

Pssssst, hey

These are the early editions of Room to Think.
I could use any support to nurture my growing audience:

• Forward this to the author of your favourite marketing newsletter. Collabs are how newsletters grow.
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• I'm an active speaker and looking for more speaking stage and guest podcast appearances. A quick intro is more than helpful.

Did you learn something from this newsletter? Did you put it into practice? I'm dying to hear how it went. Please email letstalk@formentor.ca and share your thoughts.