Draft mode — just for you, Kirsten. This essay doesn’t exist yet, and you don’t have to write it — just talk it. Open Granola (or a Claude voice chat, or Voice Memos), read the thought starters below, and answer them out loud like you’re telling a friend over dinner. Twenty minutes of “rambling” is perfect — stories beat summaries, specifics beat theory. Send over the transcript and we’ll shape it into the essay together.
Thought starters
- What have you learned about building and leading teams across your career — what do you know now that you didn’t at W+K?
- How do you actually bring a team together? What are the rituals, habits, or small moves that make a group of people feel like a team?
- Tell a story about helping a team through a hard time — a brutal project, a layoff season, a failure. What did you do, and what did you learn?
- How do you ensure excellence without burning people out? Where’s the line between high standards and grind?
- How do you approach hard conversations — underperformance, friction, bad news? Walk through a real one (anonymized is fine).
- What are the hallmarks of your best teams? How would you recognize one of your teams from the outside?
- What team moment are you most proud of? Paint the scene.