How are you communicating your priorities and workload to others? (1-21-26)

Happy Wednesday,

Last week was asked ourselves the challenging question, “How broken am I willing to be to achieve my goals?” This week I want us to explore a question that should help us avoid being broken, and that question is, “How am I communicating my priorities and workload to others?”

I like my boss. He’s a cool dude and pretty smart. However, he can’t read minds. #bebetter Since I know he can’t read minds, this shapes how I talk to him about priorities and workload. Here was our conversation last week as we discussed goals for the year. I started by explaining the major workstreams and the ones I felt would provide the most value. I explained that in our current state I couldn’t do all of them justice. My boss asked me what my top 3 were. I explained, “Project A and B provide the most value and will take the most effort for X, Y, and Z reasons. I need high quality deliverables for A and B. That basically eats up my Q1. I won’t be able to do Project C justice unless I give up sleep and run myself into the ground, or I get some help. Help looks like this…” My boss tells me he agrees with my rankings and that if we can’t get help in that way we will have to push C until later in the year. We established priorities, trade-offs, and now I have the air support to not burn myself out. It was a 5 minute convo, but all we needed to ensure alignment.

Let’s connect dots. As good as my boss is, I can’t expect him to know everything on my plate. #slacker I can’t expect him to understand how long and how much effort everything takes. If my boss would play in radioactive waste, he might develop mind reading powers, but since that likely won’t happen I need to verbalize these things to him. Once I talk about these things, we can shift into problem solving mode where we can make actual trade-offs where we focus on some things and let others go.

Gut check. How often do you give an HONEST assessment of your workload and capacity? For many years in my career I just sucked it up and ran myself into the ground. I was scared to ask for help. I was scared to say that I had too much. I paid the price for this with my health, and it’s not a price I want to pay anytime soon. We can only address a problem if we know it exists.

The challenge: How will you communicate your priorities and workload to others?

Bonus for the leaders: Are you creating the environment to have these conversations? If your people come to you and discuss legitimate constraints and your default response as a leader is “Just figure it out” you’re likely doing more harm than you realize. I hope as leaders we are creating the environment to have these conversations where we can acknowledge legitimate barriers AND be problem solvers.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Lesson 1- Leadership Matters (10-29-25)

I listened to a podcast once and the interviewer asked, “What lessons does life keep putting in front of you?” This series is inspired by the lessons that continued to show up in front of me this year. This week is an analogy about baking and how leadership matters.

I have many skills, but baking is not one of them. If you give me eggs, salt, butter, flour, milk, a pan, and an oven I will give you a disaster. If you give those exact same things to my wife, she will make you an amazing dessert. It’s the same challenge. It’s the same ingredients. However, it is totally different outcomes, based on the knowledge and skills of the people involved.

What does this have to do with leadership? In the above example, it’s not about the ingredients, it’s about the baker and their knowledge and skills that lead to different outcomes. In a similar way, it’s not the ingredients, it’s the leader. Think about when times have been tough and you’ve had a good leader vs a not so good leader. Under good leadership my vibe is, “Bring the challenges. I’ll just run through those walls or jump over them.” My vibe under not so great leaders is, “Dude, why am I always running uphill with hundreds of pounds on my back while people throw rocks at me?” Any of those vibes feel familiar to you?

Right now, the world is giving us a lot of ingredients, and they aren’t all easy ones to deal with. There is chaos, burnout, turmoil, stress, competitive pressure, AI (totally a fad by the way, just like the internet 😉), shifting priorities, lack of stability, and more. This is why leadership matters now more than ever. While people are handed the same ingredients, there are VERY DIFFERENT outcomes. Good leaders are finding ways to take these ingredients and turn them into opportunities and paths forward. Other leaders are overwhelmed by these ingredients, creating lost teams filled with doubt, uncertainty, and low engagement.

The challenge: How can you continue to grow as a leader to be ready to bake with any ingredients sent your way?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Mario Kart and Choosing the Right Set up for the Task (8-13-25)

Mario Kart 8 Kart Customization

Happy Wednesday,

Recently, my family and I have got back into playing Mario Kart 8 on Switch, which is the inspiration behind this blog series. Our first entry will be about choosing the right set up for the task in front of you.

In case you’re not familiar with Mario Kart, here is how it works. You choose from a collection of Super Mario characters along with a variety of vehicle, tire, and glider options. These choices impact your speed, acceleration, weight, handling, and off-road capabilities. Here was my predicament. Typically, I would choose characters and set ups that were higher on speed and not so much on acceleration. This was great at the lower difficulty levels. Then, once I got to 200cc, I was no longer able to have success with this set up. I slid off courses, struggled, and ultimately lost. As I reflected, I realized that 200cc is more about stopping and going vs staying at a continual top speed. My builds focused on speed may have worked in previous situations, but now I was facing a different challenge. I needed to adapt. Maxing out speed was no longer serving me. Instead, I needed to choose characters, carts, tires, and gliders that would give me high acceleration. Once I switched to this new set up, I started winning!

Making connections. Work is a lot like Mario Kart. We have different options of tools and skillsets we can use to solve problems. Over time, we find set ups that we become comfortable with that we can use over and over again. This serves us well, until things change. Then, our tried and true methods are no longer effective. Has this ever happened to you? You better believe it’s happened to me. From time to time, we need to take a step back to understand the problem we are solving for. From time to time, we need to take a step back and ask whether our current tools and skills are the right ones to solve this problem.

The challenge: Will you be willing to switch your set up when the environment and challenges around you change?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Obstacle Course Racing and Avoiding Injury

Happy Monday,

I have a bonus blog for you about obstacle course racing and avoiding injury.

Whenever I do a race, I have 3 goals: don’t get injured, enjoy myself, and finish. My safety and health always come first because not only do I want to be able to do more races, but I have a life outside of racing where I want to be a great husband, dad, and friend. When I began my race on Saturday, I started off running. Very quickly, I felt the pain in my leg, giving me a signal that something wasn’t quite right. I have a history of stress fractures and knew this could lead to an injury. At this point, I had a choice. I could keep running and risk injury or I could slow down and walk. The young and less wise Andrew would have kept running and likely hurt himself. I decided to slow down and walk. While I might have been slower than I had hoped, I enjoyed the trails, had fun tackling the obstacles, and overall had a great time. Best of all, my leg (and the rest of me) feels pretty good today!

What does this have to do with work? I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen and heard of a lot of people running themselves into the ground at work. It’s like they are running with leg pain and keep running until the bone eventually snaps. Have you seen this? Have you experienced this? I know I have.

In the story this week, I mention how there is more to my life than just races, which is why my health and safety is so important. In a similar way, while work is important, it’s not the only thing in our lives. We are more than just employees. When we push past exhaustion at work, not only are we less effective at work, but we’re not the spouse, partner, parent, friend, etc. that we’d like to be. At least that’s what I’ve found from first-hand experience.

The Challenge: How can we pay attention to the pain signals and adjust accordingly before we get injured?

The Leader Challenge: How are you creating an environment that protects people from being ran into the ground?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

World-Building and Culture (4-22-25)

Last week we kicked off a series focused on different storytelling tricks and mechanics, and we analyzed unreliable narrators. This week we are going to dive into world-building and culture.

World-building is the creation of a fictional world that is believable and consistent within the context of the story (WORLDBUILDING Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster). It is comprised of all of the details that describe the world, how it works, and how the characters operate in that world. Some fictional worlds are grounded in realism, while some are grounded in fantasy.

Pretend for a minute that you’re reading a story that takes place in England. There are dragons in the story. Does it make sense to have dragons in the story? It depends. If the book is Pride and Prejudice, and the world is built more on realism then the dragons don’t fit. If the book is Harry Potter, and the world is built on magic and mythical creature than a dragon fits right in.

You’re probably wondering how this connects to work. Pretend for a minute that someone challenges the leader in a meeting. Is this okay? It depends. If the culture is one that is built on hierarchy and fear, then this is not acceptable behavior. If this is a psychologically safe culture where people are encouraged to challenge ideas, then not only is challenging the leader acceptable, but it is also expected. I’ve been on teams in both situations, have you? How did you feel about living in each of those cultures?

With all this in mind, what if building culture is the same thing as world-building? Building culture is comprised of all of the details that describe the group’s mission, how the team works, and how the characters operate within that culture. We can influence all of those things. We can set the mission. We can set the tone for what mindsets and behaviors are acceptable and rewarded. We all have the power to influence and build the culture we want to be in.

The challenge- What kind of world, what kind of culture will you build?

Bonus deep reflection- What kind of culture/world do you think your actions create around you? How do your behaviors create that culture/world?

I’d hope that people say, “Andrew creates a culture of care, creativity, and nerdtastic fun and authenticity.” These are the things I’m intentionally trying to build. I try to invest time in understanding people and showing them I appreciate them. I build a culture of creativity by embracing messy problems, making connections, and being willing to try new things. I’m nerdtastic fun from my socks to my Team’s background, which sends a message that I’m comfortable with who I am and I want you to be who you are too. I may not always succeed at building this world, but that’s what I constantly try to do.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Parenting and Setting Incentives (2-19-25)

Last week was about parenting, cleaning the house, and being flexible. This week is about parenting and creating incentives.

We already have 2 cats in our house, but my son Cameron (11) really wants his own cat. My wife and I ultimately agreed that he could get one for his 12^th birthday. Cam, ever the negotiator, talked to his to uncover what he could do to get it sooner and said he was willing to do anything to make this happen. My wife and I saw this as an opportunity to provide an incentive for Cam to do the right thing to earn the cat sooner.

Before setting the incentive, the first thing my wife and I did was talk about our overarching goal for Cam, which is for him to grow up to be a kind and compassionate self-sufficient human. From there, we got VERY SPECIFIC about what behaviors he could work on building now that would lead to this. Based on our understanding of our son, we settled on three things. First, we wanted him to get better at doing his chores without being asked or reminded, because this would help him learn how to take care of himself and his future house. Second, we wanted to help him get better at stepping outside of his comfort zone, which in this case includes trying new foods which is really hard for him. Third, we wanted him to continue to develop the ability to advocate for himself in situations, whether that is clearly expressing a boundary or just speaking up for himself. With these things in mind, I developed a point system and Excel sheet tracker that shows his progress over time. If he does those three things relatively consistently he will get his cat early. We talked to Cam about these things, and he’s on board. We even through in some extra hard bonus things worth a lot of points, and he’s strongly considering doing those things too.

How does this connect with anything? Often when we think of incentives we think of base pay, bonuses, or some other compensation. However, in my experience, we don’t do the best job thinking about the behaviors we are trying to drive in a culture or an organization. Then, since we haven’t truly thought about the behaviors we are trying to drive, we don’t have a way to directly link those behaviors with incentives (compensation, bonuses, verbal praise, Inspire points, etc.). Without that direct link, it’s difficult to reinforce the behaviors we want to see, which makes it hard to drive behavior change.

The challenge- Do you know what behaviors you are trying to drive? Do your incentives connect to those behaviors?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Parenting, Cleaning, and Adapting as a Leader (2-12-25)

Be stubborn about your goals and flexible about your methods. | Life ... This week we are going to kick off a series about lessons I’ve learned from being a dad. This week is about parenting, cleaning the house, and being flexible and adaptable when leading others.

When I was a kid and would help my family clean the house it would look like this. My mom would blast music (usually Prince, Rod Stewart or Alanis Morisette). With the music blaring we would all start jumping in and helping with little direction. When I initially tried this approach with my own kids, it didn’t go so well. In case I’ve never mentioned it, we have some neurodivergence in my house, so cleaning the way I did as a kid is EXTREMELY overwhelming for my kids. The loud music is overstimulating and the lack of clarity on what needs to be done is anxiety inducing. Trying to clean this way would result in everyone being overstimulated, grumpy, and the house not getting clean. #failure

After failing a few times, I needed to reevaluate the situation. At the end of the day, my goals are to get the house clean and to help my kids become more self-sufficient. I’ve learned to be flexible in HOW I achieve those goals. When I clean with my kids, we don’t play music to avoid overstimulation. Also, I create a list of the tasks and add some gamification, so there is clear direction. We don’t clean the house. We save Hyrule! (a nod to The Legend of Zelda video game series) My list might look like, “Beat the Water Temple aka Clean the Bathrooms for 50 points,” or “Straighten up Goron City aka The Kitchen for 20 points.” My kids then methodically work through the list, accomplishing tasks, and checking stuff off until the house is clean. It’s very different from the way I grew up cleaning, but it is still very effective.

Where exactly is this going? As a leader, it’s your job to enable the other people around you to be successful. Often, this means being strict about the goal, but being flexible in HOW to achieve that goal. Did my kids have to clean like I did in order to be successful? No. We found a way that works for them and enabled their success. Think about work. How often has a leader more or less forced you to do something their way, even though it wasn’t the only path to success? What were the consequences of that? When I’ve had those experiences, I’ve often felt disengaged and often saw how more value could have been provided if the leader would have just been a little more open to thinking differently.

The challenge: As a leader are you being adaptable and flexible enough to enable others to be successful?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Finishing Strong, Resting, and Being Mindful of our Pace (11-20-24)

This week we are going to have a one-off entry about finishing the year strong and reflecting on running races, our pace, and finish lines.

Let’s say that I’m running a race. I just passed mile marker 12 and the next marker will be 13.1. Should I go all out and sprint until I hit 13.1 miles? It depends on how far the race is. If it’s a half marathon, then 13.1 miles is the finish line. I can go all out, because after that I’ll have days and weeks of recovery before I push myself that hard again. If it’s a marathon, then 13.1 miles is only halfway, and going all out will only exhaust me and decrease my chances of finishing strong without injuries.

What does this have to do with anything? How many times have you heard, “We need to finish the year strong!” during a staff meeting, a town hall, etc.? Per our race analogy, when we think about finishing strong, we need to understand where the finish line truly is. We need to adjust our pace and effort based on where the finish line is and our ability to rest and recover.

Earlier in my career, I felt like Q4 was a true a finish line. Finishing the year strong meant sprinting hard AND knowing that I’d have time to recover and would be able to ease into the next year before sprinting right away again. Over the past few years, I’ve come to feel like there really isn’t a clear finish line anymore. Just the other day someone was talking about how Q4 isn’t the end of the year but is really just the kick-off to having a strong Q1. It’s like everything blurs together into a frantic frenzy. I end up going all out in Q4 only to find myself spending the holidays sick, burned out, and exhausted both physically and mentally. By the time the new year rolls around, I’m still not recovered, and I’m being asked to start sprinting right away. Does that sound familiar? Somewhere there must be a happy medium, where we work hard without running ourselves into the ground and starting the next year burned out from the moment it starts. Somewhere, there has to be a happy medium where we take care of ourselves and each other.

Challenge 1: How can we all be more mindful of our pace and its sustainability as we close out the year?

Challenge 2: How can you lead and set a pace that is sustainable? (Ex: When is the last time you clearly told your team that you don’t want them to run themselves into the ground, and made trade-off decisions where you would be okay with some things not getting done?)

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Parenting, Leadership, and Stepping Beside Someone (7-24-24)

Last week was about parenting and being okay with joining the failure club. This week is about parenting, leadership, and stepping beside someone.

A couple of weeks ago, the kids and I were on a pontoon ride at the campground. We were having a nice ride when Cam asked if he could get in the lake. This is a big deal, because Cam is usually scared of lakes for a variety of reasons. I tell him that he can go ahead and get in, and that he can just change into his extra pair of clothes when he gets back to the camper. He puts on a life jacket, and sits on the edge of the boat, putting his feet into the water. I’m happy that he’s even doing that. I keep giving him encouragement to get in. He asks me to get in with him. I don’t necessarily want to, because I don’t swim well and am not a huge fan of water myself. However, I also recognize this could be the support he needs to take a big step forward. I throw on a life jacket and jump in too. Cam gets in and loves it! It’s one more fear he’s conquered, and I’m so proud of him.

What does this have to do with anything? I was supporting Cam. I could have just kept giving him words of encouragement while staying on the boat. However, at this time, he didn’t need words from a distance, he needed someone beside him. When I saw that, I hopped into the lake and that’s what he needed to be confident. Now think about work for a minute and for the different leaders you’ve worked with. I’ve seen some leaders who tried to lead from their high seat. They said the right things, but they always stayed distant from the team. I’ve also seen leaders who were willing to step beside their people when that was needed. These latter leaders are my favorite. What about you?

The challenge: Will you be willing to step beside someone to lead?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry

Parenting, Obstacle Course Races, and Tailoring Support (6-19-24)

Last week was about Alice’s wisdom, “Have a day you can be proud of.” This week is a story about parenting, obstacle course racing, and tailoring support. Shout out to Mud Run – Hollis Adams for putting on such a fabulous family friendly event.

On Saturday, Alice joined me for her first ever obstacle course race. To say that she was nervous would be a major understatement. I told her it was okay to be nervous, and that I’d be there beside her. I explained that I wasn’t going to swoop in and do the obstacles for her, but I would be there to help her if she needed it. Sometimes, helping her looked like me giving her advice on how to attempt an obstacle. Sometimes, support looked like me giving her a boost, so she could get her footing while climbing a muddy creek bank. Sometimes, support looked like me saying, “I know you’re scared because you’re on top of this tall wall. You can still do this. I’m here. Just swing your leg over.” Sometimes, support looked like me just cheering her on and high fiving her for conquering an obstacle. By the end of the race, we had achieved our goals, and Alice was so excited and proud of herself. I was super pumped too! (The picture on the right is out before picture. The after picture is at the bottom).

What does this have to do with anything? There were several times where Alice was nervous or flat out scared. It would have been EASY for me to do all the work for her, but that would have robbed her of a chance to grow and see what she was capable of. Instead of doing it for her, I helped and offered support. That support took different forms based on HER needs in that specific moment. Now think about work for a minute. The best leaders I ever had weren’t the ones who swooped in and saved me from a challenge. The best leaders I ever had were the ones who knew how to tailor their support to the situation. Sometimes, I needed explicit direction, because I was lost. Sometimes, I needed a thought partner to challenge my assumptions. Sometimes, I just needed someone to say, “I trust you. Go get’em!”

The challenge: How will you tailor the coaching and support you give to people?

Bonus lesson- I mentioned that Alice was nervous about the race. In particular, she was worried about what would happen if she wasn’t strong enough to handle an obstacle. She’s a planner and needed to know how things would work out. I needed her to trust that I was strong and able to help her in any situation. Here’s what I did. I came home after my 20 miles of racing, and said, “I did 20 miles of racing yesterday. I’m at my weakest and most tired point. I need you to know that even now, I’m strong enough to support you. I want you to know that I’ve helped boost and lift people who are my size, so you’ll be easy. We are going to practice, so you know how this will work.” From there, we practiced me giving her boosts and lifting her up. I even had her sit on my shoulders while I squatted her for reps. I walked around the house with her on my shoulders, so she knew I could carry her. I know this all sounds ridiculous, but those actions showed her that she could trust my strength. She realized that if I was able to do that when I was tired and weak, I’d be even better when I was rested up for our race. As a leader, I’m not asking you to pick up people and squat them for reps (I’m pretty sure HR would frown on that 😉). I am asking you to consider what you could do to inspire trust in the people you lead.

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry