August Public

2025 marks August’s 10th anniversary. To celebrate, we’re writing a book! ???? Authored by Karina Mangu-Ward, the book makes the case for elegant, well-designed teamwork as the engine of organizational value, and the key to unlocking human potential. ???????? Karina will detail the powerful team practices we’ve honed over the last decade to help teams meet this moment with agility, inclusion, and impact. To help bring these practices to life for our readers, we want to hear your stories! How have August’s team practices helped you and/or your team break through barriers, achieve big milestones, and transform how your org operates? You can share your story with us in the comments below, at l.aug.co/stories, or drop us a voice memo at [email protected]. No need to write a perfect narrative; a simple summary is fine for now. We may reach out to hear more. We may also request permission to feature your story in our newsletter, on LinkedIn, and/or in the book itself! Thank you so much. We can't wait to hear from you. ?? #transformation #orgdesign #consulting #storytelling

Saturday Night Live is a famously intense workplace. But for all its seeming chaos, its success and hilarity is actually built on an extremely stable and predictable set of workplace behaviors and norms. Who knew that agile team practices could lead to something as bizarre, or as successful, as the More Cowbell sketch? ?? In our latest newsletter, Mike Arauz digs into how SNL uses responsive ways of working to continually create one of the most enduring pieces of entertainment in television history. Read the full note below! #agility #teams #comedy #culture

HR leaders these days are working hard to integrate GenAI into HR operations, and rightly so! In our view, CHROs are some of the best-equipped people out there to lead GenAI-business integrations. Here’s why: - AI can learn and grow over time, just like human talent.? - AI excels at innovation and problem solving – a CHRO’s dream. - AI can be retrained and reassigned for evolving business needs. - Like human talent, AI brings unique skills and perspectives to the team. - Working with AI requires ethical guardrails and accountability. The capabilities of GenAI are uniquely aligned with the CHRO’s skill set. In our view, GenAI is more HR than IT. #ai #talent #hr #collaboration #tech

Thank you for sharing Craig Saila! So glad to hear your perspective on these practices, especially Safe to Try. Orgs really can drive extraordinary change through elegant, simple adjustments to everyday team behaviors.

Culture design is a core challenge for fast-scaling companies. Often these orgs begin with a scrappy, can-do culture that requires everyone to wear many hats and pull together as one. This type of culture can invigorate the company’s launch and early growth. But the intimate, hands-on cultures that get so many innovative companies off the ground often aren’t equipped to propel them beyond the startup phase, into commercialization and scale. So what can you do when the vibrant culture that got you here isn’t equipped to get you to the next milestone? Businesses that forge ahead with swift transformations, without adapting their cultures in tandem, can easily damage trust with their teams and jeopardize their long-term success. But organizations that commit to a culture redesign at this pivotal stage can turn that vulnerability into an opportunity to build trust within the everyday actions of scaling the company. For insight into how August approaches culture redesign, read the blog by Keara Mascare?az and Alexis Gonzales-Black! ???? #scaling #startup #tech #transformation

The attacks on DEI are disheartening, to say the least.? But they’re also an opportunity to step away from surface arguments about labels and language, and start finding deeper ways to advance equity and inclusion through our behaviors, processes, and mindsets. Levi Baer shares his POV on this moment in the latest August newsletter. He argues that the work of building equity and inclusion in the workplace is still critically important, no matter what you call it. He also offers several pragmatic examples of team practices you can use to cultivate equity and inclusion through psychological safety, trust, engagement, innovation, and learning. Link to Levi’s note below! #DEI #equity #justice #accessibility #inclusion #diversity #culture

Consensus-based decision making can be excruciatingly slow - but many leaders believe it's the most inclusive option available. It’s not! There’s a better alternative called Consent, aka Safe to Try.??? Check out the clip below for Alexis Gonzales-Black's breakdown of how Safe to Try lowers the bar for “yes,” thereby opening up decisions for greater speed and progress while still including diverse perspectives.??? Visit aug.co/decision for more! #decisionmaking #consensus #collaboration #leadershipdevelopment

Where does your organization fall on the trust spectrum? ?? Most organizations fall somewhere in the middle, between active trust and trust debt. Here they have a choice: to passively allow their culture of trust to coast on its own, or to commit to building trust through intentional, ongoing practices. The downside of letting trust coast is that when left on its own, it will almost always drift towards trust debt. That’s the thing about trust. It isn’t fixed or permanent. It requires ongoing care and maintenance. Trust debt is hard to climb out of once you’re in it. It’s much easier to start intentionally building trust when you’re at the center of the spectrum. For more on our approach to proactively building trust, download our free whitepaper. ???? #trust #culture #transformation

As controversies rise in the global conversation around racial equity, this feels like a good moment to return to Glenn E. Singleton's model of Courageous Conversations About Race. Singleton offers four participant agreements for these conversations, which together make space for complexity, nuance, and learning: ?? Stay engaged. ?? Experience discomfort. ?? Speak your truth. ?? Expect and accept non-closure. These are incredibly helpful agreements – particularly that last one, which is a favorite of ours. By accepting non-closure, we make space for the complexity and ongoing nature of this work. We frequently reference Singleton’s guidance in our E&I work with clients. Get more resources and tools for this work at https://lnkd.in/gSE6-YRd. #diversityequityinclusion #courageousconversations

Measuring culture change outcomes may seem impossible. How do you quantify such a qualitative effort? But Alexis Gonzales-Black and Keara Mascare?az have come up with an objective tool for doing just that. ?? ? Click through for a detailed breakdown of how you can use an OKR-inspired framework to compare a culture transformation’s inputs, outputs, and outcomes in order to assess what’s working and calibrate your approach as you scale. Thanks to John Doerr and Measure What Matters | OKR Resources for inspiring this framework! #transformation #culture #impact #okr #measurewhatmatters