Honor The Maker's Schedule
"As an innovation leader, it is your job to ensure that your organization has explicit norms that enable your people to do deep work." Meeting culture is one place they often fall down – this is a great way to better support your teams.
Everything Corey says here, all day long.
“Everyone needs (some) meetings for alignment, feedback, brainstorming, hiring, speculative networking, etc. And everyone also needs the space to focus on deep work, whether they consider themselves a "maker" or not.
The problem is that the people with the most power (leaders like you!), tend to work more on a manager's schedule and, if they're not intentional about establishing team norms regarding how time is valued, they can suck away the ability for anyone else to do deep work.”
As always, Corey breaks a problem that may seem intractable down into an easy-to-follow framework.
The key here is shared norms, created through intention — which also means that there needs to be a shared agreement with leadership that protecting deep work really is important.
In turn, that’s about respect: a culture where a manager can drop an event on your calendar at any time signals that they don’t really care about your experience or needs. That’s the kind of culture that can easily evolve organically if nobody’s tending to it; it’s not necessarily intentionally disrespectful, but it’s disrespectful nonetheless.
As an aside, I was delighted to see that Corey’s turned his week-long training camp — something I’ve both participated in and helped to participate back in my Matter days — into a service that anyone can book for their team. I found it transformative, and I think a lot of teams could use it.
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