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Newsletter Issue 32

Every week or so, we send you our most recent blog posts on leadership, a new Heartbeat podcast episode, and recommended readings on management.

Subscribe to our Newsletter here.


From The Heartbeat Podcast: Interview with Natalie Nagele, CEO + Co-Founder of Wildbit

Natalie Nagele is the CEO and Co-Founder of Wildbit, a software development company that has built multi-million dollar products used by over 100,000 people all over the world. In our conversation, we chatted about her biggest leadership lesson learned in running Wildbit over the past 18 years. Watch the video interview below – or scroll down to listen to the podcast (yes, The Heartbeat is now a podcast too, yay!)


Listen to the podcast here.


Transcript of the interview is here.


What I’ve been writing lately

Leadership is your product, not your identity.
“The minute we fuse our identity to our leadership, we cling to it – and it blinds us.”

How to discuss poor performance with an employee
“Figure out if you have Problem A or Problem B.”

The 5 bottom-line benefits of building trust in the workplace
“85% of managers say they spend a moderate to large amount of time and energy on building trust. Yet, how many of us could specifically say what the specific outputs of trust are?”

31 best management quotes from The Heartbeat
“‘Don’t worry about most things because most things don’t matter.’ – Jason Fried, CEO and Co-Founder of Basecamp, from Episode 1”

What I’ve been reading lately

How to Tell Leaders They’re Not as Great as They Think They Are
“Although leadership talent is normally distributed, 80% of people think they are better-than-average leaders.”Written by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Harvard Business Review

The Surprising Value of Obvious Insights
“When leaders there started training and evaluating managers on what sounds like Management 101 — setting and communicating a vision, caring about your team, staying results oriented — the company was able to improve performance for 75% of its worst managers.”Written by Adam Grant, MIT Sloan Review

When Collaboration Takes a Toll on Productivity
“Being busy may increase interruptions. At the end of the day, being busy may not equal being productive.”Written by Emily Stone, Kellogg Insights

Do You Offer as Much Flexibility as You Say You Do?
“Employees are 43% less likely to experience high levels of burnout when they have a choice in what tasks to do, when to do them and how much time to spend on them.”Written by Nate Dvorak and Rachel Breck, Gallup

A handy leadership tip

From our online leadership community of 1,000+ managers, in Know Your Team

What’s the best use of a leader’s time?

  1. Recruiting + Hiring
  2. Long-term strategy
  3. Communicating the direction to the team all the time

Read more here.

Just for fun

In Conversation: M. Night Shyamalan. The director on his failures, his successes, and Glass.
“Oftentimes, the reason we get into a cycle of success and failure is because we get blurry about what we can control. “

Written by Claire Lew

CEO of Canopy. My mission in life is to help people become happier at work. Say hi to me on Twitter at @clairejlew.