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

If you’re exhausted by the news cycle and struggling to lead your teams during these ever more unprecedented times, check out these compassionate leadership tips from Liz Fosslien. ?? ?? How are you taking care of yourself and your teams these days? Any further tips to add?

Learning from failure takes courage and skill. It also takes practice! Thank you Amy Edmondson for this clear breakdown of HOW we can effectively learn from failure, beyond just resolving to do better next time. This is how we build a thriving culture of learning and growth: by creating the psychological safety to come together and honestly debrief our failures with detailed transparency, extreme accountability, and forward focus. #failure #learning #psychologicalsafety

What’s your favorite August team practice? ?? Safe to Try, Even Overs, Meeting Cadence, Rounds, Retrospectives, Work in Public, Candid Comms, Make a Proposal, User Manuals…we’ve shared dozens over the years. For our 10th Anniversary, we’re gathering stories about how these practices have helped teams get better at working together and achieve real results. Karina Mangu-Ward is curating some of these stories to feature in her upcoming book about August’s approach to teamwork! If a story or example springs to mind for you, we would love to hear it. Seriously, no story is too small. We want to know how this work has landed and grown in ways we might not know to ask about. ?? Your submission is just between us –?we won’t share it without your permission. And no need to write it perfectly –?we just want to hear the gist! Bad grammar and typos welcome. ?? If we decide to use it, we'll follow up with you to develop it further. ?? Visit l.aug.co/stories to share your anecdote, or record it out loud in a voice memo and email it to [email protected]. Thank you!

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