A Fresh and Focused Next Step

Creating a new space where we talk about how to work better together

Welcome to Better Team Habits, a stack about cultivating better team habits. Yes, the double endrendre is intentional, as I mean the team habits our team participates in and the habits that we individuals do to create better teams.

While this is a new stack, I've been writing about leadership, teamwork, and organizational dynamics since 2008 at Productive Flourishing. I'm a bit of a dinosaur in the creator economy, as I started back when the term 'blogosphere' was still new. My work at Productive Flourishing has always been wide-ranging, but my work most resonated with individual knowledgeworkers, creators, and entrepreneurs. That resonance and demand are what led me to publish my first two books, The Small Business Life Cycle and Start Finishing.

But there's always been a core of executives, managers, leaders, and people interested in teamwork and collaboration that I haven't spoken to and for nearly enough. And, if I'm being honest, I've been a bit frustrated, resentful, and stuck with Productive Flourishing because most of my fieldwork and the work I've been the most wonder-full about since 2015 has been ... wait for it ... related to leadership, strategy execution, teamwork, and organizational dynamics.

Over the last few years, I've experimented with sharing this work on Productive Flourishing because I really didn't want to create a different website/blog/publication. To me, this work was part of what we did at Productive Flourishing because our readers inevitably end up becoming leaders, executives, and managers. Many of the more mature companies in my specialty areas - take FranklinCovey as an example - were able to cater to people who wanted to be more effective in their personal work and more effective leaders and managers at the same time.

That's great in theory and principle. In practice, the 2/3s of our audience at PF that want to focus on doing their best work want more of the foundations content and the 1/3 of our audience that wants more of the team and leadership content have had to wade through too much noise to find what they want and need.

If you've experienced my work before, you know I'm adamant about minimizing noise. Our attention is one of our scarcest resources and we need to direct it well.

So, rather than adding more noise to both segments of our readers, I've decided to build different spaces for our readers. I still believe that everyone can lead and that leadership is about posture, not position, but I'm going to practice what I teach creators and will focus on preaching to the curious and converted. The technology and marketplace trends make the split so much simpler; it's high time for me to shake off the dinosaur dust and get with it.

Better Team Habits is going to be the space where we talk about leadership, teamwork, organizational dynamics, and collective action. Collective action is fundamentally different than individual action because it's inherently social.

Productive Flourishing will also become a more focused room in this switch, as I'll be able to lean into more of the aspects of personal thriving and effectiveness.

If you need a quick mental map: Better Team Habits = work better together; Productive Flourishing = do your best work.

I'm excited about this new beginning because I've actually been holding back from both conversations. I've always been more prolific than my audience can keep up with, so I'll be more likely to share at a cadence that works for my creative output.

Fifteen years in and I'm still just getting warmed up. Thanks for joining me here and let's get it!