Fire in the hole

Finding time for myself this past month has been hard. Between work, trying my best to be present and genuinely engaging a team of 16 direct reports is taxing and , no I am not complaining. In our daily stand up meetings I've asked the team to begin answering a NEW question every morning 'what are the obstacles to your success today'? Amazing what you learn when a leader learns to ask the right questions. My job is not to zoom in on their inability to be perfect or point out everything that they do wrong; we all know perfection is a problem without a solution and asking them for something that can't be solved is demotivating in the long term. My job as a leader is to remove obstacles in their path so they can do their jobs more effectively. That's my management insight of the month.

In other news -- I caved in and went iPhone and am still smiling when I think about how intelligent and practical a device it is. It is changing so many of the ways I collect, consume, and produce data. Other than that -- looking forward to some snow shoeing in the coming days. I took this photo near the entrance to Forest Park in Portland near NW Thurman. The whole photo was wabi sabi -- beautiful and imperfect.