Kristin Vale

It's Friday, and I want to give you permission to rest.

Not answering-email-from-the-couch rest. Real rest.

Rest isn't the opposite of productivity. It's productivity's most underrated input.

The best leaders I know protect their rest the way they protect their pipeline: with a system, a tracker and a weekly review.

So this weekend, close the laptop. Go outside. Notice a tree.

And if you'd like to learn to rest at a higher level, my half-day workshop, Rest Harder™, has three seats left for tomorrow. 7 a.m. sharp. Bring a notebook. DM me to book.

Taking a moment for gratitude today. 🙏

Grateful for my family.

Grateful for my health.

Grateful for the fourteen incredible organizations that trusted me with their culture this year.

Grateful that I still have two openings for Q1.

Grateful for you, reading this.

Grateful if you'd forward it to your Head of People.

Gratitude is free. Culture transformation is very reasonably priced.

Just back from facilitating a leadership offsite at a lake lodge two hours outside Harbor City.

Three days. Twenty-two leaders. One mission: trust.

We did trust falls. Nineteen of twenty-two leaders were caught: an 86% Catch Rate, up from 71% last year.

The other three are doing well and have been incredibly gracious about it.

We've set a stretch target of 95% for next year and assigned it an owner.

We closed with a vulnerability circle that ran forty minutes over, which I'm counting as engagement.

Trust isn't a feeling. It's a KPI. 📈

A radical candor story.

Last week a junior colleague told me, kindly, that our Monday 7 a.m. Energy Check-In could be an email.

I could have been defensive.

Instead, I thanked her, and told her that's exactly the kind of courage we hire for.

Then I gave her some candor back: anyone with that much energy at 7 a.m. should be running the Energy Check-In.

She runs it now. We moved it to 6:45 to give her a head start. Attendance is up.

Feedback is a gift. So is a recurring calendar invite.

Return to office isn't a mandate. It's a gift.

The gift of hallway conversations.

The gift of serendipity at the coffee machine.

The gift of a 70-minute commute, which is really just a podcast with a view.

This month, one of my clients gave their whole team the gift of five days a week on-site.

A few people asked for a gift receipt.

That's okay. Not everyone is ready to receive. 🎁