The Day I Struck the Word Mandate From My Vocabulary

I wrote a book about the things I got wrong first. It’s real now.

Years ago I was a brand new technology coordinator for a school district, back when the internet was still young enough to feel like a frontier, and I had an idea I loved. Every teacher would have a personal webpage. I built the training. I set the minimum standard for what each page had to include. I handed out deadlines.

I used the word mandate. Out loud. More than once. As if saying it harder would make it happen faster.

What I didn’t do was look at who was in front of me. Some of those teachers were a few years from retirement and had long since made their peace with letting technology pass them by. Others were spending every ounce they had teaching five-year-olds to read, which does not leave a lot over for learning to build a webpage. None of that slowed me down. I had a plan and a timeline, and I pressed.

The superintendent said it kindly, which somehow made it land harder. You are pulling a rubber band, he told me. Far and fast. A rubber band pulled that way snaps. Tug it a little at a time and it stretches, it accommodates, it will hold far more tension than you’d think. But only if you let it adjust to each new length before you ask for more.

That was the day I struck the word mandate from my vocabulary. I have not used it since.

I’ve been writing here for a while about what happens when leaders start managing how things look instead of reading what is actually in front of them. Those essays were not practice for something else. They were the book showing up in pieces, before I was willing to say the word book out loud.

So. Read the Terrain: Leadership Under Real Conditions. Coming this winter.

Eleven patterns. Passenger-seat leadership. The applause trap. The load-bearing leader. Each one is something you can already feel and have never had words for, which is the whole point of naming them. You cannot interrupt a pattern you cannot see.

There are no borrowed frameworks in it. No research citations, no expert I’m quoting to make the argument for me. Everything in it either happened to me or happened in front of me, and a fair amount of it is me getting it wrong first. There’s a chapter about the day I lost a job for saying the thing out loud. There’s a chapter about a hill climb in Last Chance Canyon, where I had two ways up and picked the harder one rather than admit in front of the group that I was out of my depth. (The Rover had opinions about that. So did the radio, which I ignored.)

If you are the calmest person in a meeting that is on fire and also the most alone in it, I wrote this for you. If everyone leans on you and nobody holds you steady, same.

Why I’m telling you before I’m ready

The whole book is my attempt to not pull the rubber band too tight, too fast, on people who are growing into their own leadership. Which would be a strange thing to write and then hand you as a finished, perfect object with a countdown clock attached.

So you get the middle. The proof copy that comes back with errors in it. The cover I’ve looked at so many times I can no longer tell if it’s good. That part is more useful to you than the polished announcement would be, and it’s more honest about how any of this actually gets made.

There’s a page now: laurakspencer.com/thebook

Sign up there and you’ll get the cover before it goes anywhere else, the release date the day I actually have one, and a shot at the early reader team. (That last one means a free copy in October and a small favor asked of you in November. I’ll explain when we get closer.)

That’s the whole ask. No preorder, no launch team energy. Just tell me you want to know.

A question for you

Where are you pulling the rubber band right now? Not whether you’re pulling. How fast.

Reply and tell me. I read all of them, and I’d bet money at least one of you names a pattern I missed.