Leadership Reads: Part 1 📚

I set a goal with myself to focus on reading at least 1 leadership (or leadership adjacent) book for the next 3 months… and reporting back here with some of my thoughts. 

Getting to read and sending cliff notes just for you on one of my favorite topics?! Say less.  

Of note: this is not an endorsement of any particular book or author, just me being the book nerd and enthusiastic sharer of resources I am.

The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game by C. Thi Nguyen

Let’s talk about heart.

This month's read has been The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game by philosopher C. Thi Nguyen. While not technicallyyyy a book specifically for leadership or business, I've certainly been finding some gems about honoring the heart of ‘the game’ (your work!) rather than following someone else's rules on how to do things ‘right.’

I was particularly inspired somewhere around Chapter 11, where I was reminded there is a vast difference between learning how to bake bread by watching your grandmother—with her intricate knowledge of things like types of flour, temperature of a certain oven, colors and textures to watch for, and other variables—versus learning how to bake bread from a standardized recipe you found online.

Not only will you have different tips and tricks that may or may not be included in the online recipe, but you get more of a sensory experience when you watch Grandma baking. It's visceral, it's more tangible, it's often more magical.

Why am I talking about bread? 

Because this is what we need to be thinking about when you consider the structures, systems, and models being “baked into” your practice. 

Whether we're talking about your client intake process, your leadership team structure, or how you write about practice policies, many owners find themselves in one of two camps: striving for a standardized approach or working from a vibey, culture-first approach. 

It's tempting, and in fact often industry standard, to make policies and systems incredibly straightforward and easy to follow—similar to the online recipe. That's kind of the whole point of a SOP, right? But while these are usually easy to follow, they often miss the heart and nuance of the work. 

And for the more vibey, culture-first approach, employees can get lost in the weeds without more explicit or clear directions. 

As C. Thi writes, “Rules will make policies consistent and easy-to-follow for everybody…. But Rules also charges a heavy price. Rules confines us to operating in the terrain where everybody can repeat a procedure consistently. When the terrain is more obvious, that's fine. But when it's more subtle, Rules will want to change what we target and count, to something that everyone can repeat with the same result…. We can't make exceptions based on our judgment, or shift around how we apply the rule…. We can't use our discretion to adapt to changing circumstances. Rules offers us the power of accessibility. What he asks us to sacrifice is adaptability.” (and heart)

Ideally, we blend the straightforward and the vibey together. 

We take the heart of your purpose, your vision, your magic, and we infuse it into systems and documents that actually work for (and make sense to!) the people they're designed for. It makes for easy directions and role clarity, while allowing for the actual humanity of you and your team to shine through. 

Sometimes this takes shape as a leadership team that’s less hierarchical, policy documents that are actually fun and easier to digest (ok maybe fun is a stretch, but more fun), and team interactions that have trust and ease baked in.

Now, let’s talk about metrics & values.

This tension between what's easy to follow or measure and what actually matters is exactly what C. Thi Nguyen is naming with his idea of "value capture." We have to value both the data and the process of collecting and understanding metrics, but we can’t let it mean everything in our practice.

When a messy, textured value (like "being a good clinician" or "running a good practice") gets replaced by a thin, quantified proxy (like a client retention percentage), something real gets lost, even as the metric gets easier to hit. Your clinician’s retention rates and other KPIs are important to keep the business afloat, yes, but their satisfaction and excitement about working for you is important too (and is often harder to measure).

The danger isn't the metric itself. Metrics are useful because they’re so easy. They let you compare, track progress, and make decisions at scale.

The danger is in forgetting that the metric was always a stand-in, not the thing itself.

In Chapter 25, C. Thi writes about a difference between the Captured—someone who only cares about ‘success’ as defined by public/cultural ideals—and the Compromiser—someone who keeps their own values while also adopting some public/cultural values out of necessity.

Basically, “I’ve internalized values rooted in capitalism (and white supremacy by proxy)” vs “I care about this because I have to.”

He writes, “It is easy to hit one clear target when it’s all you are about. It’s much harder to hit a target when you’re also trying to balance it against a whole host of other cares. If that assumption is true—that the Captured will tend to succeed over the Compromiser in terms of the metrics—then we will get the following horrifying result: There will be systematically greater social power available to those who are willing to forget about everything that isn’t measured in metrics and will instead optimize themselves entirely to fit what the metrics ask for. They won’t be wasting energy on distractions like beauty or community, the joys of pure, playful process—or anything else. They will have transformed their deepest values to fit the most public idea of success.”

The Captured person stops noticing the gap between why the work is important and what keeps everything afloat. Over time, they don't just optimize for the number, they start to feel like the number is the whole story. Their sense of what "good" even means narrows to fit whatever the dashboard rewards.

The Compromiser, by contrast, holds the tension on purpose. They still watch the numbers (because a practice that ignores its metrics doesn't survive long enough to serve anyone), but they refuse to let the numbers become the only language they think in. They keep room for things that resist quantification: whether a clinician feels trusted, whether the culture is one people want to stay in, whether the work still feels meaningful on a Tuesday afternoon in March. I call these heart KPIs, and they’re just as important as the regular KPIs.

They aren't distractions from the "real" business of running a practice. They're a huge part of why the business works at all.

This is why Nguyen's observation feels so uncomfortable, and so relevant to leadership. If the Captured really do tend to outperform the Compromisers on any given metric, because they aren't spending energy on anything the metric doesn't reward, then chasing pure KPI performance can result in cultivating the wrong kind of leader, or the wrong kind of culture, even while the numbers look great.

So the practical question for anyone running a practice isn't "how do we get better metrics." It's "how do we stay Compromisers on purpose."

That might mean deliberately protecting time and attention for things you can't put on a dashboard, like mentorship, autonomy, and a sense of purpose, even when doing so doesn't move this quarter's retention number. It might mean treating a dip in a KPI not as an automatic failure, but as a prompt to ask what value is getting squeezed out by the push to hit it. It might mean, sometimes, choosing the slower, harder-to-measure path, because you remember that the metric was only ever supposed to be a proxy for something bigger: clinicians who feel proud of where they work, and clients who can tell the difference.

Building a human-centered practice that's built to last means it has the infrastructure to stand and the heart to keep marching on. 

How are your systems and people holding up? You can check out my free Business Vitality Assessment at any time to get a bit more clarity on the health of your business. Or reach out to me for a free discovery call to talk shop and get support. 

Hey! I’m Charlie — Your Practice Partner.
I help human-centered group practices thrive. More about me.