Impulsive Leadership

When we interview candidates for jobs at the Taproot Foundation, we always start by asking the candidate why they want to work on our team. It screens out a lot of candidates, but it also teaches us a lot about how we are perceived and what we communicate on our website (their primary source of information).

Adding an org-wide holiday: Matt O’Grady Day

Yesterday we interviewed a candidate for our NYC office. He passionately listed a number of reasons why he wants to be a Root. The one that stood out to me was that he read on the PBJ blog that we celebrate Matt O’Grady Day , a day honoring the legalization of gay wedlock in California.

Matt O’Grady is a Root who was one of the first to marry this year after the California Supreme Court ruled against restrictions to equal access to love and companionship.

To add a holiday to our annual calendar would normally be something that would require management team approval and perhaps even board alignment. In this case I conceived the idea and sent out a proclamation to the whole team 10 minutes later without seeking input from anyone.

The response was almost universally positive. We did get one Root who was concerned about meetings that were already scheduled that day and a board member wondered if it was wise to name a holiday after a Root as they will one day leave the organization and it might not be on good terms.

I was raised by parents practicing Tibetan Buddhism. Their teacher wrote a number of books including one titled – ‘First Thought, Best Thought’. Not surprisingly, this is not a title taught in business school, but I wonder when this philosophy is the better course at times. When does analysis and strategy get in the way of a simple good idea? Does the analysis validate and strengthen an idea or suck the life out of it?

Do we as a society need to start giving more permission to people to act impulsively? There are a lot of bad ideas out there (I am the owner of a healthy number), but at what cost do we subject all ideas to analysis?

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