Explore leadership strategies designed for the fast-paced December season. This episode breaks down practical ways to streamline meetings, foster cultural inclusion, and design joyful, sustainable holiday practices that strengthen team connection and performance.

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Seasonal Leadership Experiments: Efficiency, Culture, and Connection

I’m Melanie Parish. I’m one of the CO hosts of the Experimental Leader Podcast. I’m a coach and author, a content creator and a team coach, and it’s great to be here with you today.

Hi. I’m Mel Rutherford. I’m McMaster University’s first transgender department chair. I’m a co-host of the experimental leader podcast, and I’m happy to be here today.

Well, what are you thinking about this month?

Well, we’ve gotten to the end of our classes here on campus and going into the exam season, and then into a holiday break, and people have been talking about that sort of change in pace and change in tempo. Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a colleague who said, Well, for our December meetings, since everybody’s really tired and everybody’s really busy, let’s make sure we’ve got the agenda set. Let’s make sure we’ve communicated what the meeting is about, why we’re meeting, and what we’re hoping to accomplish during the meeting. Let’s just be very clear about what we want to get done, and then maybe we’ll save five minutes or 10 minutes, maybe it’ll be a shorter meeting. And I said, Those are all great ideas. Let’s do that all year long.

Well, it is funny how our time becomes a little precious in December, but our time is always precious. It’s the same time, whether it’s in December, January or March, I’ve been experimenting. So I was after I did Canadian Thanksgiving, and US Thanksgiving, because we have kids in the US. They come home for US Thanksgiving. I was feeling a little as I could turn into a martyr. And I come from a long line of martyrs around Christmas and holidays, and I really try to fight the martyr. And so I was thinking about our Christmas tree, and like, our kids are going to expect that we have a Christmas tree, we entertain a lot in December. It’s sort of like, like it’s the baseline, like people would notice if we just didn’t, I would feel grinchly if I didn’t put up the Christmas tree. And I’m also going to be gone in January. I’m going to be travelling, and I feel bad that you would have to put the tree away. And so I had this idea. I was like, Huh? What if I bought flowers and just decorated my tree with flowers? Then everything could go into the green bin in January, and there wouldn’t be this big thing to put away, but it would still be like, creative and interesting. And it really was a game-changer for me. It was a great experiment. I did notice, like, I posted a picture on Facebook, and people said, Well, what if the flowers die? And I was like, Yeah, I would learn something. Like, I feel like I’m in the middle of an experiment, and I’m, you know, we’re in a financial position where I can buy another pile of flowers next week. If the flowers really look horrible, I can refresh, and it felt really freeing to do something creative during the holidays and also something really beautiful. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time, and I don’t know if I executed it well, but I will learn from my experiments. So I am in the process of sort of looking at it every day and feeling the flowers. I realized I had some roses in my kitchen that were kind of at the end of their life, and so I stuck them in my food dehydrator and dehydrated them so that they were dry flowers. I don’t know, it was really fun, and it sort of relieved me of some of the stress. And you and I also had a conversation. I was like, Well, what if the kids care that we didn’t decorate everything? We have a Victorian home, which sometimes causes me pressure around decorating. And I think you said, Well, if the kids come home and want to decorate on the 19th, they can decorate. And. Anna. And that was also freeing, like it doesn’t have to all be my decision-making. They could decorate, or I doubt they will. So it was really interesting. And then, yeah, the other thing I’ve been thinking about is sort of how useful it can be to blur the boundaries between professional and personal in December, like around holiday times, and that could mean inviting someone to a holiday tradition that you know from your workplace that they wouldn’t normally take part in. Can ask somebody else about their holiday traditions and just open a more profound dialogue with a colleague. I love that we have people to our home in December, often in the summer, and other times too. But in December, it’s always good to buy a little extra cheese and crackers. You can always, you know, sort of slide someone in who’s a colleague or a friend. I had a team meeting this month that I was, you know, contracted to be their team coach, but they’d had kind of a rough year, and I realized that really taking care of them with a little holiday gathering was more useful to what the team needed than me asking them a lot of deep questions. So so I did that, and and I love the outcome of that, and the listening, sort of to my gut around what that team needed wasn’t the the only, the one thing I thought I had to offer, and I changed that up.

When you’re talking about your new approach to decorating the Christmas tree, I was noticing how much freedom you get by framing that as an experiment, because you don’t have to be right, and you don’t have to have all the solutions. And you, you know, you, you get to watch the outcome, and you get to try something different. If the outcome isn’t what you like to and just by going into that with an experimental mindset, you get to play and try and and and fail if it doesn’t work out the way.

Yeah, it’s really fine. It’s, and I often, when I’m talking about experimenting, talk about safe to fail. A Christmas tree is totally safe to fail. We could put up a Christmas tree, put the lights on, and never decorate it at all. So there’s no real pain in having the Christmas tree not be perfect. I think that’s important when we think about all experiments, that just because someone says, Well, what about this? It doesn’t mean it’s not a good experiment, as that thing might happen, and you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen when you embark on an experiment. And people rarely say When you don’t try something new, they never say, Well, what if this happens? Because sometimes when you’re staying with the status quo, there are bad outcomes as well.

Right? The other thing I was noticing, as you were talking about winter traditions and Christmas traditions, we’ve over the last few years, we’ve had people to our home who’ve never been to a Christmas party before, and found it fascinating just watching the process of decorating a Christmas tree and what are and what, what is the meaning of the gingerbread house, and how do you make one, and learning about the structural integrity of a gingerbread house, how to build one that doesn’t fall down. And, it’s been fun, you know, being able to share our traditions with our guests.

Well, and, and I will say like, you’ve had a lab that was very diverse with Muslim, Buddhist traditions in your lab, and we’ve asked them, Do they want a holiday party that’s more inclusive, or do they want a Christmas party? So we have that dialogue. So far, they’ve said, Oh no, this is the only Christmas party we go to. We want Christmas but at any moment, they could change, and it could be a total. Really different, a different party. We’ve also, because we have many friends who are Jewish, we’ve also celebrated your birthday, which is in December. Happy Birthday, and that’s a great way to say, you know, we want to see you in December. We’re celebrating a birthday. I just saw that you sent out an invite to colleagues, and you mentioned, you know, it’s a time that it is darkening, and we’d like to celebrate with you. You didn’t reference a religious holiday, which I think is really important, as it’s important to both be yourself and enjoy what you get from the holiday and to be culturally sensitive at the same time. I think that’s part of the leadership of this time of year, right?

And in my lab, we make lots of space for people to bring their cultures forward. We have a different snack every week, and we invite people to bring a snack that’s from from their heritage, and then talk about that, what that food meant to them when they were kids, and how they shared it with their parents and their grandparents, and what a lot of people come in with a food that they made, that they ate in childhood, but they’ve never made before, and they go home to, you know, their parents or their grandparents house to learn how to make that food for the first time. So that’s another way that we share our cultural heritage.

Yeah, it’s, I mean, and it it’s interesting because, as we are figuring out how we do, and I’m going to call it December, because there’s so many different traditions around December, but we’re teaching our children how to be with holidays, to be with cultural celebration, to be with cultural community, and how to do it in a way like I really try to do it in a way where there’s joy in my heart as I go through this time. I don’t want it to be out of my bones, because I’m exhausted and tired. So I really, I really think about that all the time as we’re going through the holidays. I have a massive spreadsheet that is part of my sense, making of the holidays because our children come home. We have three in university. Our children come home, and if we don’t have something to do, that is a little bit fun, we might all just go into our, you know, respective computers and watch Netflix alone, even though we’re all in the same house. So, so I do some pre-planning around you know, who do we want to see? What do we want to feel like? And then where do we rest, like? I also make sure that we’re not doing five things in a day. We’re doing one thing in a day, because I know rest is a part of this season too. Yeah.

And as the days get shorter, we learn more about what kinds of activities we enjoy doing, either inside or we have to bundle up to go out in the cold and the snow, which opens up a whole new season of sports and activities, whether you’re into skating or skiing, hiking or tobogganing. So it’s interesting to find the recreation and the relaxation that’s really seasonal, and it’s seasonal by virtue of the temperatures and the shortening of the days.

I always think that I’m not quite Canadian enough with all those winter activities, I can go for a good walk in the snow. But I think Canadians are actually really good at getting outside in the cold months and enjoying being outside. I think it makes the winter more enjoyable when you get outside. Some Yeah, so, yeah. What else do you have to say?

Well, I was just going to say, What? What have we learned? I’ve learned that there are things that you notice in December, and then I, you know, invite you to think if you’ve learned anything in December that you want to apply throughout the year, like the time efficiencies, being respectful of people’s time, being respectful of people being busy and tired. And I think making meetings efficient and certainly making it clear what the purpose of the meeting is, is. It’s something you should do all year long.

And I think with a leadership lens, you know, kindness and compassion toward people grappling with all the tasks that they have to add in in December is good leadership. You know, just some deep kindness around the holidays for people, just yeah and not trying to get your pound of flesh from your employees in December to let them give them some grace. I think that’s a good way to be at this time of year.

Go experiment.

Go experiment. And Happy Holidays from the Experimental Leader Podcast.

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