Teamership: Missing in action

I have a number of places in my life where I want to show up - and do it well. As a husband, a father, a friend. For the leaders and teams that I am privileged to work with. For the people who might become future clients and are wrestling with team and leadership performance challenges.

An important place for me is here - in these weekly notes. For over three years, I have written a note every week with the exception of a break over Christmas / New Year.

It is important for me to show up here for a few reasons.

1. I really believe that every message I send has the potential to help improve team and leadership performance. It’s unlikely that every post will help every person that reads it, but there will be at least a few people every week that it helps. I think that’s worth showing up for.
3. It is important because it helps me to keep my thinking current and accessible. Doing what I do, it is important that I am not only capturing or curating other people’s work, I need to be articulating my unique interpretation of a topic.
5. It is important because you get to know a little bit about me. Over the course of the notes, I have shared that I am a father, husband, golfer (with a temperamental back) who loves netball, The Wire, Seinfeld and Back to the Future. Having you feel like you know me a little helps accelerate the conversations and connection when we have a conversation.
7. By the way, I always love and appreciate it when anyone of you take the time to reply to these emails. Always feel free to say hi, thanks or challenge my perspective.

As you can see, me showing up weekly means a lot to me. And yet, I have been missing for more than a month.

I’ve been missing in action.

In short, I have been busy working on important projects like designing and delivering client work. I’ve also been busy finishing and preparing my second book, Teamership for release in November. All of this action has meant that I have been missing.

As I reflected on this, I realised that a version of this is happening for the leaders and teams that I support. Every single one of them is busy. They have important work that requires their energy, attention and time. At the same time, they find it hard to show up in the places that they want to in the way that I want to.

Most of us go missing in action.

I’m sure that there is no simple solution to this. Often an awareness and acknowledgement of a situation can be helpful. We can then take steps to do something or make a conscious decision to live with it.

For what it’s worth, I’ll be showing up again next week. I’ll share some related thoughts. Here are some questions for you to consider this week.

1. Where are the important places that you want to show up well?
2. Are you currently missing in action in any of those places? Have you ever found yourself missing in action?
3. How might you prevent yourself from going missing in action?

Go well,

Keegan