Hi Reader,

Have a topic you’d like to see covered in The Murmuration? Just hit that big ol’ reply button and let us know—we love responding to reader suggestions and have received some great ones recently.

In the meantime, let’s get right to it, shall we? Enjoy this edition!

Each week, we share an applied tip or did-you-know to help you build knowledge and hone essential skills that help you kick butt at work and in life.

Rethinking Delegation

Ask any new manager what their biggest challenges are, and you’re likely to hear The D Word: delegation. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard even experienced managers say they struggle with delegating work—heck, I still struggle with it. As leaders, we all know we should share work with others instead of keeping it all to ourselves, so why is it so hard?

Difficulty delegating often comes down to a mindset issue. We may be carrying with us beliefs we held as individual contributors that no longer serve us in leadership positions or unintentionally operating with an outdated top-down leadership model. Let’s look at some of the main barriers to delegation, what they might say about your underlying assumptions, and how to reframe your thoughts.

Becoming a leader requires a fundamental shift in mindset from individual performance to collective achievement. A 2017 HBR article describes it as “a shift from doing to leading.” However, the term “leading” itself can sometimes imply a hierarchical, top-down approach that requires reframing.

What if, instead, we thought of our role as different, not better? As alongside others rather than above them? What if we didn’t even use the word “delegate” (replete with inherent power dynamics) and considered it “distributing” or “sharing?” What if we considered it our responsibility to give away most of the work that came across our plates, keeping a select few tasks, instead of keeping most of it and giving away just a few?

​Empowering employees by giving them autonomy and responsibility leads to higher motivation, job satisfaction, and performance. Sharing leadership responsibilities across a team leads to increased innovation and better decision-making. And inspiring others to achieve more can boost creativity, productivity, collaboration, and more.

So ditch The D Word and embrace a mindset of sharing and collective empowerment. Your success as a leader isn’t measured by how much you do, but by how much you enable others to achieve.

Each week, we touch on an aspect of happiness and health at work, how to build it, and how to drive positive change in the workplace.

Rethinking Thinking

What comes to mind when you picture thinking, learning, and working? According to Shutterstock, they look a little like this:

A bunch of people sitting down, hardly moving.

I’m here to tell you that our deep cognitive work should look a little more like this:

OK…not exactly that, but it should definitely involve more movement.

From a very young age, we’re told to sit still in school, and when we grow up and get big kid jobs, we end up sitting in front of computers all day. Did you know that more than one-third of Americans sit for more than eight hours a day?

And that’s a shame because movement helps us think.

Check out these tidbits from Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain (highly recommended):

• A school in San Rafael, California that replaced traditional furniture with standing desks and more “activity-permissive” equipment found that students were more alert, more attentive, and more engaged.
• In a study of radiologists, those who remained seated identified 85% of x-ray abnormalities, while those who walked spotted 99%.
• A German study compared how people fared solving math problems while sitting still with how they fared while moving rhythmically—brain scans showed that those sitting still experienced higher cognitive loads and worse performance.

Don’t want to believe Annie Murphy Paul? Believe Stanford researchers who found that walking boosts creativity, or researchers from the University of Melbourne who found that performance on a cognitive task to point out specific targets improved while walking.

So, here’s your permission to invest in that under-desk treadmill, wiggle while you work, and wield your Fidget Spinner proudly…because you’re onto something, ya mover and shaker.

Each week, we collect a few great reads from a variety of disciplines to help you forge new connections and gain fresh perspectives.

• ​Why are Gen Z and millennial workers descending the corporate ladder (Fast Company). How managers and mental health are impacting our paths.
• ​Does Your Boss Practice Toxic Positivity? (HBR). Positivity is great, until it’s not. Signs that positivity has gone too far.
• ​What is meaningful work? A philosopher’s view (The Conversation). An examination of what it means to be meaningful (and meaningless)—and how to cultivate it.
• ​What is complexity science and why should you care about it (Simplifying Complexity podcast). It’s becoming a buzzword…this podcast covers the basics in an easy-to-understand way.
• ​The need for invisible learning (Education Futures). Some of our most important learning happens in informal, unstructured spaces.

Each week, we highlight some of the great things going on across the Starling community. Members can click on any of the links below to explore further.

• On Tuesday, Christine, Andrea, Jeff, and Clea discussed the challenges of working in a culture that overly relies on meetings to make decisions.
• On Wednesday, Clea, Dawn, Rachel, and Andrea discussed what type of baked goods best represent their leadership qualities. Rachel feels her leadership qualities are best personified as a mille-feuille.
• Throughout the week, the job board was lively with posts for job openings in instructional design, customer success, marketing, product management, and more!

Given that you made it this far, we felt you ought to be rewarded with one of Jeff’s Famous Dad Jokes:

Rachel & The Starling Team