I had a one on one with my VP of Finance today, and one of the items she needed help with was defining her tension for our governance meeting Wednesday.  It is our first formally facilitated meeting, and I asked her and the rest of my executive team to come to the meeting with 2-3 tensions to be processed.  The first tension she had was “procurement”.  I told her there’s never a tension that is “wrong”, and even if she didn’t know what to propose she can come to the meeting with it and as part of the process she could ask for input.  She understood that, but since this is our first governance meeting, she is nervous and wanted to be more prepared than that, so to put her mind at ease we decided to clarify it in our one on one. Continue reading “When is a Tension Too General?” →