About 15 years ago, when Ben and I worked together on the HomeServe-backed startup DAD, he introduced me and the rest of the team to a weekly highlights meeting.

We’d gather in the office (we had an office back then!) and go around the room, sharing the highlights of the week from each team. Someone would write them up, and we’d send them by email to the team at HomeServe, who acted as our board.

It was a great way to close out the week, share wins - sometimes losses - and ensure everyone at DAD knew what was going on.

After leaving DAD, I kept up the habit of reporting on weekly progress in personal projects by writing up my own highlights in a newsletter I sent to a handful of friends who were interested in such things. I never told them, but I thought of them as my “board”.

In every team I’ve led and worked with since, I’ve either introduced or adapted a weekly ritual to share highlights, updates, and progress (or lack thereof) both within the team and with appropriate stakeholders.

The format has changed over time. Sometimes it’s a face-to-face meeting followed by a written summary. More recently, it’s often a video call with the immediate team, recorded and edited into highlights for a wider audience to watch later.

Since Ben and I started working on Glad together, we’ve continued the tradition. For the past year or so, we’ve each written our own lists in a Notion page under the headings “What went well” and “Even better if” - inspired by the way Ben’s children’s school reports were structured.

Towards the end of last year, we realised that while it’s useful to be able to look back and see our weekly updates over time, we should really be sharing our progress with our stakeholders at Glad too: our community.

So we started our very own podcast: Glad Tidings: The Climate Cleanup Roundup.

You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Episode 4 is embedded above.

We’re not recording them weekly just yet - the goal is fortnightly. We’re both new to the world of podcasting, recording, editing, and everything that comes with it, so each episode takes a bit of time to produce. Over time, we may make them more frequent - we’ll see.

For now, though, I’d love your feedback on the episodes we’ve published so far.

Drop me a note at james@gladclimate.com if you have any feedback at all!