In a conversation on the Partnering Leadership podcast, Garry explained where the habit comes from. Marshall Goldsmith, the executive coach, built a practice called the Daily Questions. Garry teaches it at the University of San Diego. One of his own questions is simple:

"Did I do my best to learn today?"

He described coaching a CEO who wanted to learn more and exercise more but had no time for either. Garry's fix was practical... put your headphones on and listen to a book while you walk in the morning. Two questions answered with one habit.

The question works because of the first six words. "Did I do my best to..."

Active Questions Beat Passive Ones

Goldsmith picked up the idea from his daughter, Dr. Kelly Goldsmith, a behavioral scientist at the Kellogg School of Management. She pointed out the difference between two kinds of questions.

A passive question asks about your circumstances. "Were you happy today?" "Do you have clear goals?"

An active question asks about your effort. "Did you do your best to be happy today?" "Did you do your best to set clear goals today?"

The first version hands you an excuse on a plate. You weren't happy because your boss was a pain. You don't have clear goals because the strategy keeps changing. Every answer points outward.

The second version takes the excuse away. Your boss might still be a pain. The question is what YOU did about your own day. As Duke Corporate Education puts it, the active version shifts responsibility inward instead of blaming external circumstances.

Goldsmith's six starter questions, from his own site:

1. Did I do my best to set clear goals today?
2. Did I do my best to make progress towards my goals today?
3. Did I do my best to find meaning today?
4. Did I do my best to be happy today?
5. Did I do my best to build positive relationships today?
6. Did I do my best to be engaged today?

Does It Work?

Goldsmith tested it. According to The National's interview with him, more than 2,500 people answered the six active questions every day. After two weeks, 37% said they had improved on all six. 65% improved on at least four.

I'd treat those numbers with some care. They come from Goldsmith's own research, and people rated themselves. I'm not sure about this part: I couldn't find a peer-reviewed write-up of the study, so I don't know how it controlled for people who wanted to see improvement.

The broader science is on firmer ground. A 2016 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 138 studies with 19,951 participants and found monitoring your progress helps you reach your goals. The effect grew stronger when people wrote their progress down or reported it to someone else.

Written down. Reported to someone. Hold on to those two details.

The Phone Call

Here's the part of Goldsmith's practice most people skip.

For 27 years, he has had a friend call him every night and ask him his questions. By his own account in the same interview, he runs through 22 of them before bed and still rarely gets a perfect score.

A world-famous executive coach, a man who charges serious money to fix other people's behavior, needs a nightly phone call to keep his own habits honest. There's a lesson in the humility there.

He also says at least half of people quit within two weeks. His reason surprised me. They don't quit because it fails. They quit because it works, and working means facing the gap between the leader you think you are and the one who showed up today.

The gap is uncomfortable. Most of us would rather not look.

Why Leaders Need This More Than Anyone

My research found 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more types of bad boss. Ninety-nine point five.

Here's what bothers me about the number. Almost none of those bosses would describe themselves as bad. Ask them and they'll tell you about their open-door policy and their deadlines and their difficult team.

Passive questions protect bad bosses. "Was my team engaged today?" lets you blame the team. "Did I do my best to help my team stay engaged today?" puts your name on the answer.

I saw a thread trending on Reddit this week where people shared the worst ways they'd been fired. One person found out from a notice taped to a door. Somewhere, a manager went home after it and thought the day went fine. Nobody asked them a single question about effort.

How to Start

Don't start with 22 questions. You'll quit inside a week. Keep it short, and adapt the list to whatever you're working on. If I were starting from scratch tomorrow, mine would look like this:

• Did I do my best to listen more than I talked today?
• Did I do my best to say thank you to someone specific today?
• Did I do my best to learn something today?
• Did I do my best to be present at home tonight?

Score each one from 1 to 10 on a scrap of paper. The number matters less than the pattern. When one question sits at a 3 for a week, you know where your attention went, and it wasn't where you said it would go.

A few things worth knowing before you begin:

Write it down. The meta-analysis backs this up. Answering in your head turns into a vague "yeah, pretty good" every night.

Tell someone. You don't need a nightly phone call. A weekly check-in with a partner, a friend or a coach does plenty. Saying a low score out loud stings more than writing it, and the sting does the work.

Keep the questions about effort. The moment a question slips into outcomes... "Did the project ship?" "Was the meeting good?" ... you're back to grading the world instead of yourself.

Change the list. When a question stays at 9 or 10 for a month, the habit has stuck. Swap it for the next thing you want to work on.

Try It Tonight

In the Army we ran after-action reviews. The point was never blame. The point was to look at what we did, honestly, while it was fresh, so the next mission went better. Daily questions work the same way for a leader. Small. Fast. Every day.

So here's your assignment. Before bed tonight, pick three things you say matter to you as a leader. Turn each one into a question starting with "Did I do my best to..." Score yourself from 1 to 10. Write the numbers down.

Do it for two weeks. Then tell me you didn't learn something about yourself.

Did you do your best to lead well today?

Advita Patel made this point when Debra and I interviewed her for Corey-osity Unleashed. Her book, Decoding Confidence: The Seven Habits of Confident Leaders, doesn't promise to fly you above the clouds. It aims lower, and I think it aims better. Her goal is to stop you spiralling so far down, when life knocks you over, where the climb back takes years.

I think she's right. And I think most of us bought the wrong product.

The Private Jet Problem

Confidence books tend to sell a destination. Arrive there and you're confident forever. You walk into rooms and own them. You never doubt yourself again.

Nobody lives at this address. Not the CEO. Not the keynote speaker. Not the author of the book.

The jet version of confidence has a second flaw. It sets you up to feel like a failure the first time you wobble. You read the book, you felt great for a week, then a meeting went badly and the old voice came back. So now you have two problems. The bad meeting, and the proof you "failed" at confidence too.

Advita's definition, as she gave it to us on the podcast, is plainer. Confidence is how much trust you have in yourself to deal with whatever life throws at you. It isn't certainty. It isn't feeling happy all the time. It's trust in your own ability to cope.

She also rejects the idea of confidence as a personality trait. To her it's a skill, and you build skills with practice. In an interview with HR News she put it this way: "I don't believe we have a capability crisis but from what I see in my work, I know we have a confidence crisis." In the same piece she argues faking it might get you through one presentation, but people sense the gap between the persona and the person.

I agree. Your team spots a performance a mile off.

When the Pep Talk Backfires

Here's the part of the jet brochure I find most troubling.

In 2009, Joanne Wood and her colleagues at the University of Waterloo and the University of New Brunswick asked people to repeat the phrase "I'm a lovable person". People with high self-esteem felt a little better afterwards. People with low self-esteem felt worse. The researchers concluded unreasonably positive statements backfire for the people who need them most. The statement triggers the inner reply: "No, I'm not."

A later paper, titled On the failure to replicate past findings regarding positive affirmations and self-esteem, didn't reproduce the result. So hold this one loosely.

I'm not sure about this part: I couldn't read the full replication paper, so I don't know how closely it matched the original method.

Even so, the logic holds up for me. If you're at the bottom of a hole, somebody shouting "you're amazing!" from the top doesn't hand you a ladder. It makes the hole feel deeper.

The Real Danger Is the Spiral

If the jet isn't the goal, what is? Advita's answer is the floor. How far down do you fall, and how long do you stay there?

Psychologists have a name for the downward pull. It's rumination. Susan Nolen-Hoeksema and her colleagues, in their review Rethinking Rumination, describe it as repetitively and passively focusing on your distress, its causes and its consequences... without taking action. Their review links it to worse depression, more negative thinking, poorer problem solving, and weaker social support.

Read the list again. It describes a spiral. You replay the bad meeting. You feel worse. Feeling worse makes you worse at fixing the problem. You pull away from the people who'd help. You replay the meeting again.

Advita told us about her own confidence crash. The strangest detail? She didn't know it was a confidence crash. She thought it was a midlife issue. The problem had no name, so it had no fix. Naming it was her first step out.

The second step came from a friend. Advita described a Monday stuck on the M62 in the rain, ringing her friend for the usual weekly moan. Her friend held up a mirror. Was she going to keep ringing to complain, or take some control?

It's a blunt question. It's also the kindest question her friend had to offer.

Kindness Beats Hype

This is where the research gets useful.

In 2012, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen at UC Berkeley ran four experiments on self-compassion. They wanted to know whether being kind to yourself after a mistake makes you lazy, or makes you try harder.

In one experiment, students sat a hard vocabulary test. The average score was 4 out of 10. Then they got the chance to study for a second test for as long as they liked. Before studying, one group read a self-compassion message about how common it is to struggle with hard tests. Another group read a self-esteem message telling them they must be intelligent to have got into the university.

The self-compassion group studied for about five minutes on average. The self-esteem group studied for under four. More study time went with higher scores on the second test.

In every experiment, self-compassion beat doing nothing or a positive distraction. It usually beat the pep talk too. Kindness made people try harder.

Sustainable confidence works the same way. You don't tell yourself you're brilliant. You tell yourself you had a bad day, plenty of people have bad days, and here's what you'll do next.

Watch Your Sentences

Advita caught me out on this one during the interview.

I described myself as "not the sharpest crayon in the box." I've said it for years. I thought it sounded humble.

She challenged me on it. Her version: "You're not experienced in this area yet." Different sentence. Different future. The first one is a verdict. The second one is a to-do list.

She applies the same thinking to assessment. She won't use the word weakness. She talks about strengths and opportunities. It sounds like a small change of vocabulary. I think it changes whether people act on the feedback or hide from it.

A lot of confidence crashes start with a bad boss. My own research found 99.5% of survey respondents had experienced one or more types of bad boss. If you've spent years hearing a verdict from somebody else, you'll repeat it to yourself long after you've left the job. Swapping the sentence is how you stop doing their work for them.

What Sustainable Confidence Looks Like on a Wet Monday

Forget the jet. Here's what I'd put in your boots instead.

1. Name what's happening

Advita lost time because she called her crash the wrong thing. If your confidence has dropped, say so, out loud, to someone you trust. An unnamed problem stays unsolved.

2. Keep a mirror-holder close

Everyone needs cheerleaders. You also need the friend on the phone who asks whether you plan to keep complaining or do something about it. If everyone around you agrees with your misery, you're missing a role.

3. Rewrite one sentence

Pick the harshest thing you say about yourself. Rewrite it with "yet" on the end, or turn the verdict into a gap you plan to close.

4. Talk to yourself like a mate who failed a test

The Berkeley students who got a kind, honest message studied longer. You'd never tell a friend they're worthless after one bad result. Stop telling yourself.

5. Pick one habit, not seven

Advita's BELIEVE framework covers seven habits: Boldness, Empathy, Learning, Integrity, Empowerment, Vulnerability and Energy. She's clear you shouldn't try all seven at once. Pick one. Work on it. Move on when it sticks.

The Boots Get You Home

The jet looks great in the brochure. The boots get you home.

Real confidence doesn't mean you never fall. It means you trust yourself to climb out, and you've shortened the climb from years to days. It's quieter than the bookshop version. It's also the only version I've seen survive a wet Monday on the M62.

So here's my question for you. If you trusted yourself to handle whatever tomorrow throws at you, what's the one small step you'd take first thing in the morning?

Pavel Freidlin, Hadassah Littman-Ovadia and Ryan Niemiec tested the idea. In a 2017 study of 238 adults, they measured three ways of using character strengths: underuse, overuse and optimal use. Optimal use went with positive outcomes. Underuse and overuse both went with negative ones.

Too much of a good thing is still too much. I think positivity works the same way. Used well, it lifts a room. Overused, it turns into a gag order.

What Happens When People Fake It

Psychologists have a name for putting on a face you don't feel. They call it surface acting.

Ute Hülsheger and Anna Schewe pulled together three decades of research on emotional labour, 95 independent studies in all. Surface acting showed substantial links with impaired well-being and worse job attitudes, plus a small negative link with performance. Deep acting, where people work to feel the emotion rather than fake it, showed only weak links with poor well-being.

Think about what "keep smiling" asks of a stressed engineer. I wasn't lifting their mood. I was handing them a second job. Do the work, and also perform being fine while you do it.

The second job never shows up on a timesheet. It shows up in sick days, short tempers and resignation letters.

Feeling Bad About Feeling Bad

The damage goes deeper than the office.

A UC Berkeley team including Brett Ford and Iris Mauss tested the link between emotional acceptance and psychological health in more than 1,300 adults. They asked people how strongly they agreed with statements like "I tell myself I shouldn't be feeling the way I'm feeling." The people who didn't feel bad about feeling bad showed higher well-being.

In one part of the research, more than 200 people journaled about their toughest experiences for two weeks. Six months later, the ones who habitually avoided negative emotions reported more mood disorder symptoms.

Mauss's group came back to the theme in 2024. Their newer study found wanting to be happy didn't predict well-being. Being concerned about your level of happiness did... and it went with less satisfaction with life and more symptoms of depression.

Read those two findings side by side. Pressure to feel good makes people feel worse. And "stay positive" from the boss is pressure, whether you mean it to be or not.

Why Leaders Reach for It

I don't think most managers use forced positivity out of cruelty. I didn't. I used it because I was scared.

When a team member says "I'm not coping," the honest answer often starts with "I don't know how to fix this yet." Saying so feels like weakness. "Stay positive" feels like strength. It closes the conversation fast, and the leader gets to walk away feeling helpful.

There's a second reason. Many of us earned our promotions by being the calm one in the room. We learned to hold it together, and somewhere along the way we started asking everyone else to hold it together as well. What worked as a personal coping habit turned into a team rule nobody wrote down.

The trouble is, a team rule nobody wrote down is the hardest kind to challenge. Nobody gets to vote on it. People feel it in the silence after they raise a concern, and they adjust.

The Bad News Stops Coming

Here's the part which should worry any leader.

When positivity becomes the rule, the messenger becomes the problem. Raise a risk and you're "being negative." Say the date won't hold and you're "not a team player." People learn fast. They stop telling you.

Picture a project where every status report glows green, right up until the week it collapses. Nobody lied, exactly. They learned which answers the boss wanted to hear, and they gave them.

In my own research, 99.5% of people said they'd had one or more types of bad boss. I'd bet a fair few of those bosses thought they were being upbeat and supportive. From the other side of the desk, it felt like nobody was listening.

What I Do Instead

The fix isn't gloom. A leader who only talks about problems wears a team down too. The goal is honesty first, then hope.

Name it before you fix it

When someone brings you a problem, say what you hear. "This sounds stressful." "You're worried about the date." It takes ten seconds. It tells them the feeling is allowed in the room.

Ask for the bad news

Put it on the agenda. "What's worrying you this week?" Then thank people for the answer, even when it stings. Especially when it stings.

Swap "stay positive" for "what do we do next?"

Positivity without a plan is wallpaper. Hope comes with a next step. I wrote about the difference in I Confused Hope With Optimism for Years.

Go first

Tell your team when you're worried. Say it plainly, then say what you're doing about it. If the boss is allowed a bad day, everyone else is too.

Positivity Isn't the Enemy

I still believe in optimism. I still want teams walking out of hard meetings with energy and a plan. I haven't stopped looking on the bright side.

What changed is the order. I look at the problem first. I let people be worried, frustrated or tired out loud. Then we look for the bright side together, and it means something because we earned it.

Next time someone on your team tells you things aren't OK, don't reach for the silver lining. Ask one more question.

What would change on your team if people knew they were allowed to not be fine?

A team of researchers studied male CEOs in Denmark, using national data on all but the smallest Danish firms between 1996 and 2006. They tracked what happened to employee pay after a CEO had a child. Dahl, Dezső and Ross published the results in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2012.

Here's what they found. After a male CEO had a child, he generally paid his employees less generously. He also paid himself more. The researchers read this as a CEO wanting to set aside more resources for his own family.

The story wasn't all bleak. The birth of a daughter hurt wages less than the birth of a son, and a first daughter pushed wages up. Female employees came out better too, especially after the CEO's first child.

A second study points the same direction. Henrik Cronqvist and Frank Yu looked at 416 CEOs from S&P 500 companies. When the CEO had a daughter, the firm's corporate social responsibility rating ran 9.1% higher than the median firm. The rating covers things like diversity, community and employee relations. Cronqvist's explanation: having a daughter opens an executive's eyes to gender issues he wasn't seeing before.

So parenthood changes how leaders lead. Both studies agree on it. But look at how it changes them. Some of the change is empathy. Some of it is a man putting his own kids first and quietly taking a bit more for himself.

Having children didn't hand those CEOs a leadership upgrade. It handed them a new set of loyalties. What they did with those loyalties was up to them.

What Parenting Tried to Teach Me

I don't think becoming a dad made me a better leader overnight. I think it put me in a classroom I never signed up for, and some days I paid attention and some days I didn't.

There was a stretch in my career when I came home short with my wife and distracted with my kids. My body walked through the front door. My head stayed in the office, running the last meeting on a loop. I was a manager at work and a manager at home, and neither place got the best of me.

The lessons were all there. I missed plenty of them the first time around. Here are the ones I finally picked up.

Patience isn't waiting. It's watching.

A small child learning to tie a shoe is slow. Painfully slow. Every instinct says "let me do it." You'll get out the door faster. You'll also raise a kid who waits for you to tie his shoes.

Engineers work the same way. When a junior developer is stuck on a bug I'd fix in five minutes, taking over the keyboard feels efficient. It isn't. The five minutes I save cost them the whole lesson.

The patience parenting asks for isn't passive. You stand close enough to catch the fall and far enough away to let them try.

Behavior is information.

A toddler throwing a tantrum in the supermarket isn't a bad person. He's tired, hungry, or overwhelmed, and he has no words for it yet. The meltdown is the message.

Adults do this too. They're better at hiding it. The engineer who snaps in stand-up. The team lead who goes quiet for two weeks. The person who suddenly misses every deadline after years of hitting them. Something is going on. My job is to get curious before I get cross.

Parenting drilled a question into me I now use at work every week: what's going on for this person right now?

You're always teaching, even when you're not talking.

Kids ignore most of what you say and copy almost everything you do. If I told my kids to be kind and then snapped at a waiter, they learned to snap at waiters.

Teams are no different. They watch how you handle a missed deadline, a bad review, a crisis at 5pm on a Friday. You set the culture by your worst moments, not your best speeches.

Neither One Gets Easier

This is the part of James's point I think most people skip.

We talk about parenting as if you learn it once and then you're done. You aren't. The skills you need for a toddler are useless with a teenager. The skills you need for a teenager are useless with an adult child who's now raising a kid of their own. Every stage asks you to start over.

Leadership works the same way. Leading five engineers is a different job from leading fifty. Leading through growth is a different job from leading through layoffs. The day you think you've cracked it, the job changes on you.

Management researchers have a name for the good version of this. Jeffrey Greenhaus and Gary Powell called it work-family enrichment: the extent to which experiences in one role improve the quality of life in the other. Skills and perspective flow both ways. What you learn at home improves work. What you learn at work improves home.

Notice the word "extent." Enrichment isn't automatic. The Danish CEOs had the same raw material as every other parent. Some of them turned it into generosity toward women on their teams. Some of them turned it into a smaller pay rise for everybody else.

What Made the Difference for Me

Looking back, the biggest change didn't come when my kids were born. It came when I started noticing the overlap. When I caught myself handling a frustrated engineer the way I'd handle a frustrated eight-year-old... with curiosity, a calm voice, and zero condescension... and saw it work.

It came again when I became a grandad. I had a second shot at the patience I didn't always have the first time. Watching my grandson struggle with something, I've learned to fold my arms, bite my tongue and let him figure it out. Every time I manage it, I'm a better boss the next morning.

This matters because bad bosses are everywhere. In our research at Step It Up HR, 99.5% of respondents said they'd had one or more types of bad boss. I'd bet plenty of those bosses were parents. Parenthood didn't save their teams. Attention would have.

You Don't Need Kids to Learn This

I want to be careful here. I'm not saying parents make better leaders than people without children. The research doesn't say it, and I don't believe it. Plenty of great leaders never had kids. They learned patience from caring for an aging parent, coaching a youth soccer team, training a stubborn dog, or serving in a unit where nobody got left behind.

The lesson isn't "have children." The lesson is: every relationship where you're responsible for someone else's growth is a leadership classroom. Most of us walk through those classrooms without taking notes.

Take the Notes

Here's what I'd ask you to try this week.

1. Pick one moment at home where you showed patience. Write down what you did. Then ask where at work you're rushing in when you should stand back.
2. Next time someone on your team acts out, ask "what's going on for you right now?" Treat the behavior as information, not insubordination.
3. Watch what you model. For one week, notice how you react to bad news. Your team is watching too.
4. Check your loyalties. If life has given you new people to protect, ask whether you're protecting them at your team's expense.

James is right. Neither job gets easier. Both of them grow you, but only if you let them.

So here's my question for you. What has someone at home taught you about leading, and are you using it at work yet?

The word comes from Deb Dana, a clinical social worker in Maine whose work centers on complex trauma. Most of us know about triggers, the cues which send our nervous system into alarm. Dana named the opposite. She calls glimmers "micro-moments of safety, connection, regulation," according to this HuffPost piece on her work.

The idea of hers I keep coming back to is simple. The world isn't all glimmers, and it isn't all struggle. In her words, "It is both."

Both. I like the honesty in it. A glimmer doesn't pretend the hard thing has gone away. It sits right next to the hard thing and says "and also, this."

Ian Pettigrew, an executive coach who researches hope in leadership, takes the idea into work. His advice for the messy middle of any change is simple. Look for the small signs something is working. Spot them. Name them. Amplify them. He's clear it's a practical move, not a concept. You do it today, not after the next reorg.

Why Small Things Carry So Much Weight

I used to believe people needed big wins to stay motivated. Ship the product. Close the deal. Hit the number. Everything in between was waiting.

The research says I had it backwards.

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer at Harvard collected nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 people across seven companies. They wanted to know what made a good day at work. The answer wasn't recognition or bonuses. The most common trigger for people's best days was making progress on meaningful work... and the progress was often small. Amabile and Kramer wrote about it in The Power of Small Wins in HBR.

Here's the part I find uncomfortable. They also surveyed 669 managers and asked them to rank five motivators. Progress came in dead last. So the thing which lifts people most is the thing most managers overlook. I've been one of those managers.

The Messy Middle Is Where Hope Dies

Every hard stretch has a middle. The start has energy. The end has relief. The middle has neither.

I've led software teams through long projects where the finish line kept moving. You know the feeling. The backlog grows faster than it shrinks. The demo slips again. People stop joking in stand-ups. Nobody says the project is failing, but everyone wonders.

In those weeks, my instinct was to talk about the destination. "Once we launch, it'll be worth it." I thought I was giving people hope. I was giving them a distant promise and asking them to hold their breath until they got there.

What they needed was evidence. Proof, today, of movement.

How to Find Glimmers When Things Are Hard

Glimmers don't announce themselves. Hard times shrink your attention down to threats. You have to look on purpose. Here's what I do now.

Ask a different question

At the end of a rough week, I used to ask "what went wrong?" It's a useful question. It's also the only one most of us ask.

Now I add a second one. "What moved, even a little?" A bug nobody managed to reproduce finally showed up in the logs. A customer replied with one kind sentence. A new hire asked a sharp question in a meeting. None of these fix the project. All of them are glimmers.

Write them down

I keep three lines in a notebook at the end of each day. Three small things which went right. It takes two minutes. On bad weeks, it's harder to fill, which tells me something too.

This isn't a gratitude ritual for its own sake. It's a record. When the middle drags on, I flip back and see the movement my memory erased.

Name them out loud

A glimmer you keep to yourself helps you. A glimmer you name in front of the team helps everyone.

When someone fixes a small thing, say so. Be specific. Something like "the build went from 20 minutes to 12 because you chased down the cache issue" lands far harder than "great work, team." Specific praise tells people their effort changed something real. My wife Debra has spent her career on recognition, and she'd tell you the same thing: vague thanks evaporates, specific thanks sticks.

Amplify the ones which matter

Not every glimmer deserves a spotlight. Pick the ones tied to the goal. If the project is stuck on quality, celebrate the first week with zero escaped defects. If it's stuck on morale, celebrate the person who helped a struggling colleague without being asked.

Amplify means you give it more airtime than it would get on its own. Put it at the top of the update. Mention it to your boss. Let the person hear you told someone else.

A Warning About Fake Glimmers

This only works if the glimmers are real.

If the project is on fire and you stand up and celebrate the new font on the slide deck, people will see straight through you. They'll trust you less, not more. Pettigrew's research makes the point: hope needs trust underneath it. You don't get to skip the honest conversation about what's broken.

So say both. "We're three weeks behind, and here's the plan to close the gap. Also, the test suite passed clean for the first time in a month, and I want to thank the person who fixed it."

The hard truth and the glimmer, side by side. Dana's line again. It is both.

Why This Matters Beyond Work

I've come to think glimmers are how most of us get through hard seasons in life, not only in projects.

A good phone call with a friend. The first cool morning after a long heat wave. A grandchild who runs to the door when you arrive. None of these solve anything. They remind you the world still has good in it, and they give you enough fuel for one more day.

A cousin spent 48 hours crocheting an arm. Strangers by the hundred thousand stopped to look at it. Nobody's problems got solved. But for a few seconds, a lot of people felt a bit better about being human.

Your Turn

Here's my challenge for you this week.

Every evening, write down three glimmers. Small ones. At work or at home. Then, once this week, pick one and tell the person responsible, in specific words, what it meant.

What's one glimmer you've already walked past today?

I heard about a habit from Advita Patel, co-founder of A Leader Like Me, and my first reaction was to flinch.

Every six months she writes down everyone in her life. Family, friends, colleagues, the lot. Then she rates each one out of ten on energy. Do they give it to you, or take it from you?

My gut said: cold. Clinical. Who ranks their own mother?

Then I sat with it for a week and changed my mind.

You already rate people. You are terrible at it.

Here is the part I missed at first.

You rank people all day long. You do it with your stomach instead of a pen. A name pops up on your phone and something in your chest either lifts or sinks. You see a calendar invite and feel your jaw tighten before you read the agenda. You take the long route through the office to avoid one desk.

The scoring is already happening. It runs in the background, unexamined, and it drives your behaviour without ever telling you why.

Writing it down does not make you colder. It makes you honest. The audit brings a judgement you were already making into the light, where you get to look at it properly and ask whether it is fair.

Most of the time, it is not fair. Which is the point.

The people who drain you are not the ones you think

When I did this, the obvious names behaved as expected. The person I dread, scored low. The friend I would drive three hours for, scored high. No surprises there, and no value either.

The interesting scores were in the middle.

There is a whole category of relationship researchers call ambivalent ties. Not friends. Not enemies. Both at once. The colleague who champions you in one meeting and undercuts you in the next. The relative who is generous with money and brutal with opinions. You never know which version turns up.

Those relationships wreck you more than the openly hostile ones. Work from Julianne Holt-Lunstad and Bert Uchino found blood pressure rises more during contact with an ambivalent tie than with a supportive one, and the body starts reacting before the meeting even happens. More cardiovascular reactivity. More anxiety. More conflict.

Worse: when an ambivalent friend shows up to support you through something hard, their presence buffers nothing. Having them there measures out no better than having nobody there at all.

Read the sentence again. You spend a Tuesday evening pouring your problems out to someone, and your nervous system treats it as an empty room.

The openly difficult people get managed. You brace, you limit the exposure, you go home. The ambivalent ones slip past the guard because part of you likes them. They sit at a five or a six, and a six feels fine on paper. A six is what is quietly eating your week.

This is not about cutting people out

Here is where most people misread the exercise, and where I nearly binned it.

A list with scores looks like a hit list. Rate, rank, delete. Unfollow the fives, block the threes, build yourself a frictionless life of nines.

Advita's version is not a cull. It is a boundary-setting tool. You are deciding on dose, not on deletion.

Dose looks like this. The relative who sits at a four gets Sunday lunch twice a year instead of a standing invitation. You go with a plan and a finish time. The colleague at a five gets the meeting, not the after-work drink. The friend at a six gets your attention when you have some to spare, and not on the night before a big day.

Nobody gets a letter. Nobody gets told their number. You adjust the volume, and they never know the dial exists.

And some people stay at a four because life put them there. Your father in a hospital bed takes energy and gives none back. A four is not a verdict on his worth. It is an honest note about what the season costs you, so you feed yourself somewhere else while you carry it.

The number I did not want to look at

I will admit the bit of this exercise I dodged for two days.

Somewhere on your list is a person whose score exists because of you.

The relationship went flat and you told yourself it drifted. It did not drift. You stopped asking questions. You turned up drained and let them carry the conversation. You took the good bits and offered nothing back, and then you scored them a five for going quiet.

Be honest about which low scores you built.

Run the reverse version. If everyone on your list rated you this week, where would you land? Not on your best day. This week, with the deadlines and the short temper and the two cancellations.

I did not enjoy my answer.

The value in the audit is not the judgement of other people. It is the mirror. You see how thinly you spread yourself, how many people get the tired version of you, and how the ones you love end up last in the queue because they forgive you.

Why any of this matters more than it sounds

There is a temptation to file this under self-care fluff. Light a candle, curate your circle, feel lovely.

The evidence is heavier than fluff. The biggest review of the field, a meta-analysis of 148 studies covering 308,849 people by Holt-Lunstad, Smith and Layton, found people with strong social relationships had a 50% increased likelihood of survival compared with people whose connections were weak. The authors put the effect on par with smoking and above obesity.

Your relationships are not a lifestyle preference. They are a health input, sitting in the same league table as what you smoke and what you weigh.

You audit your finances. You audit your calories, your steps, your screen time. Somehow the one input with mortality data behind it gets no review at all.

How to run it without turning into a monster

Twenty minutes, twice a year. Here is the shape of it.

Write the list first, score it second

Names down the page. Everyone with regular access to you, work and home both. Do not think about numbers while you write, or you start editing the list to protect your own feelings.

Score on energy, not on affection

Ten means you leave the interaction fuller than you arrived. One means you need a lie down and a biscuit. Affection is a separate question. You love plenty of people who exhaust you.

Look for the middle, not the bottom

The ones and twos are already handled. Circle everything between four and seven. Those are your ambivalent ties, and your answer lives there.

Choose one adjustment per low score

Not a speech. One change. A shorter visit, a later reply, a meeting with an end time, a conversation you have been avoiding for a year.

Write your own name at the bottom

Score yourself as the people above would score you. Then do something about it.

The bit nobody says out loud

There is a reason this feels harsh.

We are taught relationships are unconditional, and putting a number on one feels like a betrayal of the whole idea. So we never measure, and instead we do the cowardly version: we fade. We reply slower. We stop suggesting dates. We let a friendship die of neglect and call it life getting busy.

The audit is kinder than the fade. Kinder to them, because you either fix the relationship or you set a shape you both survive. Kinder to you, because you stop bleeding energy into places you never chose.

Advita does it every six months. I have done it once, and the next one goes in the diary for spring.

Two questions before you close this. Who sits at a six in your life and takes your whole week? And whose six are you?

Fredrik Haren, the creativity researcher who sat down with Debra and me on Corey-osity Unleashed earlier this year, put it in a way I have not stopped chewing on since. Creativity is not an outward motion. It is an inward one. You are not expressing who you are. You are finding out who you are. And the thing standing in the doorway is your ego, judging and performing and bracing for failure before a single idea gets out.

He told us about a Norwegian rail company turning one of its most embarrassing mistakes into its most prestigious internal award. Think about what an organisation has to believe about itself to do something like this. Nobody hands out a trophy for a cock-up unless they have already accepted they are not perfect. Most companies have never made peace with being wrong. Neither had I.

The research is less flattering than I would like

I wanted the science to let me off the hook. It did not.

Jennifer Mueller, Shimul Melwani and Jack Goncalo ran a study published in Psychological Science in 2012 called The Bias Against Creativity. They primed some participants to feel uncertain, telling them a random lottery drawing might change their payout, then measured word associations. The primed group linked words such as "creative", "inventive" and "original" with negatives like "poison" and "rotten". The unprimed group linked the same creativity words with rainbows and cake. The researchers found the bias went further than dislike... it damaged people's ability to spot a creative idea in front of them.

Sit with the implication. Feeling unsure makes you allergic to novelty at the exact moment you need it. Every person in your meeting saying they want fresh thinking is telling the truth, and every person in your meeting under pressure is quietly filing fresh thinking under threat.

Your best move is the one blocking your better move

Merim Bilalic, Peter McLeod and Fernand Gobet did something cruel and brilliant to chess players. They built positions holding a familiar, decent solution and a less familiar, stronger one, then tracked where the players looked.

The eye-tracking results are the part I cannot shake. Players insisted they were searching the board for alternatives. Their eyes stayed glued to the squares around the move they already knew. With a familiar good solution sitting there, expert performance dropped to the level of players three standard deviations weaker. Experience turned into a blindfold.

I have been the expert in the chair, certain I was weighing all the options, looking straight at the thing I did last time.

Success narrows you

Here is the one I would tattoo on the inside of every promotion letter.

Pino Audia and Jack Goncalo studied 372 inventors in the hard disk drive industry and published the results in Management Science in 2007. The most successful inventors kept producing. More patents, bigger share of the research budget, all the outward signs of a creative career going well. But each new patent looked like the one before it. They drilled deeper into one narrow seam. The less successful inventors filed fewer patents, and those patents ranged wider.

Winning taught them what works, then taught them to keep doing it.

The authors name two remedies as collaboration with other inventors and organisational norms pushing exploration. I would say it plainer. Somebody has to be in the room who does not care about your track record.

What I do differently now

I am not cured. I am managed, like a bad knee.

I say the half-formed thing. Out loud, labelled as half-formed. "Here is a rough one, feel free to shoot it." The label costs me nothing and buys the idea a hearing. Nine in ten are rubbish. The tenth pays for the other nine.

I write the idea before I judge it. Two columns, minutes apart. Generating and evaluating are different jobs, and doing both at once means your inner critic eats your material while it is still raw.

I take the idea nap. Fredrik's term, and I use it. Stop working the problem. Go for a walk, wash up, stare out of the window. My best thinking has never once arrived while I was clenched at a desk. It turns up in the shower, which is the least dignified filing system in the world and the most reliable one I have.

I ask the newest person first. Not out of politeness. The newest person has not yet learned which of our sacred cows are electrified. Ask the veterans first and the room converges before the good stuff surfaces.

I sit still for five minutes. This was Fredrik's challenge to our listeners and I braced against it hard. Not meditation for wellness. Meditation to put a little distance between you and the voice narrating your competence all day. Five minutes. I manage it three days out of seven, on a good week. Those three days are noticeably better.

The uncomfortable question

I keep coming back to a version of the same question, and I will hand it to you.

What did you think of this week, decide against saying, and then watch somebody else say out loud two months later?

Not the ideas you fought for and lost. Those are fine. Losing an argument means you were in it.

I mean the ones never leaving your skull. The ones your ego quietly binned to protect a reputation nobody was attacking. Count them honestly, and you will find they outnumber every idea ever killed by a bad boss, a tight budget or a full calendar.

Mine did. I have made my peace with it as a standing weakness rather than a solved problem, which is why I still say the half-formed thing before I have the sense to stop myself.

Go say yours.

Ian Pettigrew talks about surface acting, and the phrase has stuck in my head for months. It comes from Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist who published The Managed Heart in 1983 after studying flight attendants. She coined the term "emotional labour" for work where your feelings are part of the product.

She split it in two.

Surface acting is pretending to feel what you do not feel. Face, voice, posture. The mask goes on and the real thing stays underneath, still running.

Deep acting is going further and talking yourself into the feeling, so the gap closes.

Hochschild studied cabin crew because their smile was on the price list. Forty years on, the smile is on everyone's price list. Not written into the contract, never mentioned in the interview, but there all the same. Be upbeat in the stand-up. Be relaxed about the deadline. Be fine about the reorg nobody explained.

Nobody applied for the second job. Everybody does it.

It has a bill, and the bill lands on the person

Here is the part leaders skip. Surface acting is not free. It is effort, spent on top of the work, and the research keeps finding the same bruise.

A study of 118 registered nurses measured surface acting against the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Surface acting correlated with emotional exhaustion at r = 0.361 for patient-facing work and r = 0.363 for the acting nurses did around each other, both at p < .001. Read the second number again. Faking it for colleagues hurt as much as faking it for patients.

The same study found the nurses planning to walk out of their current job scored higher on surface acting than the ones staying. The mask predicted the exit.

Think about what a nursing shift already asks of a person. Now add a full extra layer of performance, unpaid, invisible, running all day. No wonder people leave. They are not quitting the work. They are quitting the acting.

Your culture decides how much acting happens

Some emotional labour comes with the territory. A nurse holding it together in front of a frightened patient is doing skilled, decent work. A support agent staying calm with an angry caller is earning their money. Nobody sensible wants a workplace where every passing mood gets aired.

The question is different. It is about the acting nobody needs.

The acting in the team meeting where the plan is broken and everyone says the plan looks great. The acting in the one-to-one where "how are you doing?" has exactly one safe answer. The acting in the all-hands where the numbers are grim and the room performs optimism at a leadership team performing optimism right back.

None of it serves a customer. It serves a culture where honesty costs you something.

And the tell is easy to spot. Ask yourself what happened the last time somebody on your team said the unwelcome thing out loud. Did the room get quieter for a second and then move on? Did they get a reputation? Did they get managed?

Your people watched. They priced it. They adjusted.

What it costs the business

Gallup put global employee engagement at 20% in 2025, with 16% actively disengaged. Four in five people are showing up without being in it.

I do not believe four in five people are lazy. I have never met a workforce like it. What I have met is a lot of people doing a fine impression of engagement while the real thing drained away, because the culture rewarded the impression and punished the truth.

My own research found 99.5% of people surveyed have had one or more types of bad boss. Nearly everybody. Those bosses did not all shout. Most of them simply made honesty expensive, and their teams learned to perform instead. A bad boss does not need to be a monster to double your workload. They only need to make the truth risky.

The bit where I admit I did it

I have been the one performing.

I have sat in meetings with a knot in my stomach, nodding along to a decision I thought was wrong, and said nothing, because saying something looked costlier than the wrong decision. I have written about the day I was wrong in front of my boss's boss, and the reason the day stands out is how rare it felt to be exposed rather than polished.

I have also been the leader other people performed for. I know because of what surfaced in exit interviews. People carried stuff around for a year and handed it to me on the way out the door, when it was no use to either of us. I had not built a room where handing it over earlier was safe.

Nobody told me I was running a theatre. Nobody ever does.

Stop asking people to act

Four things, none of them expensive.

Go first. Say the hard thing about your own work before you ask for it. "I got the resourcing call wrong in March, and here is what I missed." Watch how fast the room changes temperature. You are not being vulnerable for a poster. You are showing the price of honesty in your team, and setting it low.

Make the safe answer boring. "How are you?" has one socially correct reply, so stop leading with it. Try "what is the most annoying part of your week?" or "what is the thing you have stopped bothering to raise?" Specific questions get specific answers. Vague ones get the mask.

Reward the messenger where people see it. Someone tells you your favourite project is a dud. Thank them in public, by name, and then change something. Gratitude without a change is one more piece of theatre, and your team reads it in a heartbeat.

Count the acting, not the smiles. A quiet, cheerful, agreeable team is not proof of health. Sometimes it is proof of a well-rehearsed cast. Go looking for disagreement in your last ten meetings. If you find none, you have your answer.

The real question

Every person on your team is doing hard work. Some days the work is more than enough on its own.

So ask the question honestly, and sit with the answer for a minute. How much of your team's energy goes into the job, and how much goes into looking fine while doing it?

You set the exchange rate. Nobody else.

Tom Gilovich and Vicki Medvec ran a series of studies on what people regret. Their paper on the temporal pattern of regret found a clean split. In the short term, people regret the things they did. Over a lifetime, they regret the things they did not do. When one group was asked about their biggest regrets across their whole lives, 84% reported more regret over their failures to act than over their actions.

Neal Roese and Amy Summerville later pulled together 11 studies covering 3,041 people, published as What We Regret Most... and Why. Education topped the list at 32.2% of all regrets. Career came second at 22.3%. Their explanation stuck with me. Regret is strongest where you believe you still had room to move. The more opportunity you had, the more it stings.

Read those two findings together and you get an uncomfortable piece of arithmetic. The stuff you avoid to protect yourself is the stuff you will be sore about at 70.

The failures you sign up for fade. The ones you dodge compound.

Why inaction feels so reasonable at the time

Inaction wears good clothes. It shows up as:

• Timing. "Next quarter is better." Next quarter has never once been better.
• Preparation. "I need one more certification first." You needed none of them.
• Realism. "Let us be honest about my odds." Honesty is rarely so one-sided.
• Team loyalty. "I would be leaving them in the lurch." They will cope. They always cope.

Every one of those sounds like judgement. Each is fear with a cover story.

I have used all four. I used team loyalty for two solid years, and I believed myself completely while I was saying it.

What it costs your team when you do it

This is where it stops being a private matter.

I have watched a talented engineer stay quiet in a design review because she was not sure enough. The system shipped with the flaw she spotted. Six months later we paid for it, and she carried the weight of having known.

I have watched a manager sit on a promotion case for a year because he wanted a stronger example first. His person left. The stronger example never arrived.

I have watched leaders refuse to give hard feedback because the moment never felt right. The moment is never right. Waiting for right is how someone gets fired over a problem nobody named out loud for eighteen months.

Every time you avoid the attempt, someone else absorbs the cost. Your silence does not evaporate. It lands on a person with less power than you.

When I work with leadership teams at Step It Up HR, the awareness piece always arrives before the action piece, and this is why. People need to see their own avoidance dressed up as prudence before they change anything.

My own research on bad bosses found 99.5% of survey respondents had experienced one or more types of bad boss. I would bet a large slice of those bosses were not cruel. They were absent at the moment where action was required. Cruelty is loud and rare. Avoidance is quiet and everywhere.

The reframe: pick which failure you want

I have stopped asking myself whether something will work. Terrible question. Nobody knows.

The question I use now is this one. If both roads end badly, which bad ending teaches me something?

The attempt teaches you something every time. You learn the pitch was weak, the timing was off, the audience was wrong, the idea needed six more months. All useful. All purchased with one bruise.

The avoidance teaches you nothing at all. You end up in the same place, older, holding a story about how the timing was not right.

One failure has a receipt. The other has an alibi.

Make the attempt smaller, not braver

People hear "try anyway" as an instruction to be courageous. Courage is a lousy strategy because it depends on how you feel on a Tuesday.

Shrink the attempt instead.

• Not "write the book" but "write 400 words nobody sees."
• Not "apply for the job" but "have one coffee with somebody doing it."
• Not "give the hard feedback" but "ask one honest question in your next one-on-one."
• Not "launch the product" but "show a sketch to five customers."

Each of those is small enough to survive and real enough to count as trying. Do a few of them and the fear loses its grip, not because you got braver but because the thing stopped being a cliff.

I finally wrote the book by writing badly on purpose for 20 minutes a day. Permission to be bad broke the logjam.

Two questions to sit with

Ask yourself what you have been calling patience for more than a year. Be specific. Name it out loud. If it has not moved in twelve months, it is not patience.

Then ask what the smallest visible version of it looks like this week. Not the full leap. The 400 words. The one coffee. The single honest question.

You are going to fail at some of this. You are failing at it right now, quietly, with nobody watching. At least pick the version with a receipt.

What have you been calling patience?

Asana surveyed more than 10,000 knowledge workers for its Anatomy of Work Index and found 60% of the working day goes on "work about work" rather than skilled work. Not the job. The scaffolding around the job. The status updates, the chasing, the hunting for the version of the file with the right numbers in it.

The breakdown is brutal. 103 hours a year in unnecessary meetings. 209 hours a year on duplicated work. Two hundred and nine hours doing something a coworker had already done, because nobody told anybody.

None of those hours felt wasted while I was inside them. Every one of them felt like work.

The interruptions are not weather

The standard defense goes like this: "I'd love to focus, but the day happens to me."

Microsoft's Work Trend Index special report Breaking Down the Infinite Workday, published in June 2025, measured what "the day happens to me" looks like in numbers. 275 interruptions a day from meetings, emails and chats. For the heaviest users, an interruption every two minutes of core working hours. 117 emails. 153 Teams messages. Meetings after 8pm up 16% year on year.

And the number I keep coming back to: 57% of meetings are ad hoc, with no calendar invite at all. Over half of the meetings eating your week were never planned by anyone. They happened because somebody felt uncertain and reached for a human being to feel better.

Weather is something you endure. This is not weather. Somebody built it. Often, it was me.

The busy fool

There is an old phrase for this, and it stings: the busy fool. The person with the fullest calendar and the emptiest results. Motion mistaken for progress.

I was one. The tell was my relationship with interruption. Deep down I welcomed it, because a ping gave me something urgent to do instead of something hard. Urgent work is easy. Somebody else defined it, somebody else will thank you for it, and it finishes inside an hour. Hard work is lonely, slow, and offers no applause until it ships.

So I chose the pings. Every day, over and over, and called it being responsive.

Four things hiding behind the word "busy"

When I look honestly at my worst years, "busy" was a cover story for four separate failures. None of them were workload.

1. I had not decided what mattered

A list of twenty priorities is a list of zero priorities. I kept everything alive because killing a project meant telling somebody no, and telling somebody no meant a hard conversation. Cheaper, in the short run, to stay slammed.

2. I over-collaborated

In Collaborative Overload, Cross, Rebele and Grant reported for Harvard Business Review back in 2016 on collaborative time growing by 50% or more. Ten years ago, before the chat tools got good at pestering us. I copied people in to spread responsibility. It spread confusion instead.

3. Nobody knew who decided

Half my meetings existed because two teams each believed the other owned a call. An unclear decision right generates meetings the way a leak generates buckets. You mop forever and never fix the pipe.

4. I would not say no

This one is the root of the other three. I said yes to protect a relationship, then resented the work, then did it late, then apologized, then said yes again. Saying yes felt generous. It was cowardice wearing a nice coat.

What changed it for me

No app fixed this. Three habits did.

I wrote down the three things. Every Monday morning, three outcomes for the week. Not tasks. Outcomes. If a request arrived and served none of the three, it went to a list I reviewed on Friday. Most of the list died of natural causes, unmourned.

I made saying no specific. "No" on its own sounds like rejection. "No, because I'm shipping X by Thursday, and I'd rather do one thing properly" sounds like a plan. People rarely argue with a plan. They argue with a shrug.

I killed my own meetings first. I cancelled the recurring ones I owned before I complained about anybody else's. Two of them nobody missed. One of them somebody thanked me for. The team noticed the direction of travel, and within a month they started killing theirs.

Your calendar is a memo to your team

This is where busyness stops being a personal quirk and becomes a leadership problem.

My research turned up a number I have never shaken. 99.5% of survey respondents said they have had one or more types of bad boss. Almost everyone. Not a rare pathology. The default experience of work.

Most of those bosses were not cruel. They were overloaded. An overloaded leader has no attention left, and attention is most of the job. You skip the one-on-one. You give feedback late, and by then it has gone sour. You approve things you have not read. You reply at 11pm and teach your team the hours are unlimited.

Your team reads your calendar as a values statement, because it is one. If your week says "I take every meeting and protect nothing," they learn to do the same. Busyness is contagious, and you are patient zero.

Overload deforming how people lead is the territory I work in over at Step It Up HR.

The test

Here is the one I use on myself, still, on a bad week.

At 6pm, name the thing you moved forward today. One thing. A decision made, a person unblocked, a piece of work finished and out the door.

If the honest answer is "I responded to a lot of stuff," you did not have a busy day. You had a disorganized one. The volume was real. The direction was missing.

The fix is not more hours. You have no more hours. The fix is deciding, out loud, what you are willing to be bad at.

So, what did you move forward today? And if you struggle to name it, which of those four failures was it... no priorities, too many people, no clear owner, or no spine to say no?

Pick the one. Fix the one. Your team is watching your calendar, whether or not you want them to.

Gallup reported in 2023 only about one in four US employees strongly agree their organization cares about their wellbeing. The figure hit 49% in the spring of 2020, when companies scrambled to look after people during the pandemic. Then it slid back down near where it started.

In other words, employers proved they knew how to show care. They stopped once the pressure was off.

The same Gallup piece found employees who feel their employer cares about their wellbeing are:

• 69% less likely to actively search for a new job
• 71% less likely to report burnout
• 5x more likely to trust their leadership

Five times the trust. From people believing you care.

What People With Cancer Tell Us About Work

Cancer and Careers commissioned a 2023 Harris Poll of 908 US adults diagnosed with cancer who were working or looking for work. A few findings stood out to me.

73% said work gives them a source of pride and accomplishment critical for recovery. Work isn't a distraction from getting better. For many people, it's part of getting better.

Among employed people who told their workplace about their diagnosis, 72% felt supported by the people they work with. Half said support from coworkers improved. And 29% said their loyalty to the company went up.

Read the last one again. A cancer diagnosis, one of the worst things to happen to a person, and nearly a third came out of it more loyal to their employer.

Loyalty like this doesn't come from a policy. It happens because a colleague sent a text. Because a manager said, "Take the time. Your job will be here." Because someone like Ben kept showing up.

The Reddit Thread Which Proved the Opposite

I noticed a thread trending on Reddit this week. A boss told staff to start work earlier, then sent the explanation as a ChatGPT-written message. Over 1,800 people piled into the comments.

The earlier start wasn't what made people angry. The message was. Handing the explanation to a machine told employees, "I don't care enough to have this conversation with you."

Ben did the opposite. He did something nobody asked for, for someone who gave him nothing in return. The Reddit boss skipped the one part of the job which needed a human.

One of those two gets remembered with gratitude. The other gets turned into a meme.

Small Acts, Big Signals

You don't need a grand gesture. James is big on this. His whole Confetti Culture approach, laid out in The Confetti Culture Playbook, is about small, frequent acts which tell people they matter.

During his own treatment, James wrote thank-you notes to his nurses every Friday. Nobody made him. He chose it.

Here's what "doing it when you don't have to" looks like in practice:

• Text the person who left your team last year. Ask how the new job is going. Want nothing back.
• Check in on a colleague in another department who's been going through something hard. It's not your department. Do it anyway.
• Write the reference nobody asked for. Post a LinkedIn recommendation for someone who did great work for you years ago.
• Remember the date. The anniversary of a loss, a surgery, a first day back. Put it in your calendar and send one line.
• Show up after the crisis ends. Everyone sends flowers in week one. Almost nobody checks in at month six.

Why This Matters for Bad Bosses

My research found 99.5% of survey respondents have had one or more types of bad boss. Helping leaders stop being one of them is why I built the Behavior Awareness Tool at Step It Up HR.

When I look at the stories behind those bad bosses, a pattern shows up. Most of them didn't break rules. They did the minimum. They met their obligations and not one inch more. They treated people as a line on a spreadsheet, not a human with a life outside the office.

The fix isn't a new policy. It's a new habit. Do something decent, today, for someone you owe nothing.

Who Are You When Nobody's Keeping Score?

Ben had no idea a hotel manager turned culture coach would tell his story on a podcast. He had no idea it would end up in a blog post. He did it because it was the right thing to do.

This is the test. Not what you do when your boss is watching. Not what you do when HR sends the reminder. What you do when there's no reason at all.

So here's my question for you. Think of one person you have zero obligation to... a former colleague, someone on another team, an old boss. What's one small thing you'll do for them this week?

Then go do it. Don't wait until you have to.

Look at what the numbers describe. The US Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness found about half of American adults report experiencing loneliness, with health risks as deadly as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day and a premature death risk raised by nearly 30 percent. In the same report, daily in-person time with friends fell from roughly 60 minutes to about 20 over two decades. For people aged 15 to 24, the drop was around 70 percent.

Twenty minutes a day. Spread across everyone you know.

Phones took some of those minutes. Fine. But if I gave you back the other 40 minutes tomorrow, what would you do with them? Most of us would fill them with something else, because we have no idea how to spend 40 minutes with another human being and come out the other side feeling closer.

Talking to people is a skill, and skills rust

Here is what nobody wants to hear. Conversation is a practiced ability, like kiting a wing or writing clean code. Stop doing it and you get worse at it. Not slowly. Fast.

I noticed this in myself during the years I worked mostly remote. My calendar was full of meetings, so I told myself I was talking to people all day. I was not. I was exchanging status. Nobody asked me anything a machine would struggle to answer. When I finally sat in a pub with someone and the small talk ran dry after four minutes, I felt the rust.

The rust shows up as a specific fear. You think the other person does not want to hear anything real from you. So you stay shallow, they stay shallow, and you both leave thinking the other one was not interested.

This is measurable. Nicholas Epley at Chicago Booth ran 12 experiments with more than 1,800 people, mostly pairs of strangers, comparing shallow conversations with deep ones. People expected the deep conversations to be awkward. They were wrong. Deeper talk felt better, less awkward than predicted, and participants preferred it once they had tried both. The barrier was a bad guess about how much the other person cared.

We are walking around with a broken model of each other. The phone did not put it there. The phone lets us avoid finding out we are wrong.

Where I see it at work

I spend my working life around leaders and engineering teams, and the same rust is everywhere.

A manager sits in a one to one and reads out a Jira board. Thirty minutes, zero human contact. Another one schedules a "check in" and spends it defending a decision nobody attacked. A third asks "how are you doing?" and visibly flinches when the answer is longer than "fine."

None of these people are villains. They were never taught the skill, nobody modeled it for them, and their own bosses did the same thing to them for years. My own research on bad bosses found 99.5 percent of respondents said they had experienced one or more types of bad boss. A large share of bad bossing is not malice. It is a person with authority who has never learned how to have an honest conversation with another adult.

Then we wonder why engagement sits where it sits. Step It Up HR points at Gallup's finding of only 21 percent of employees engaged at work. You will not fix a number like this one with a policy about phones in meetings.

The sandwich thread

Something small stuck with me this week. On Reddit, a post in r/MadeMeSmile described someone whose partner made them a sandwich when they were hungry. First partner ever to do it. The post pulled nearly 20,000 upvotes, and hundreds of the comments were people saying the same thing... first time for me too.

Hundreds of adults, publicly surprised by ordinary kindness.

Read the whole thread and you see the shape of the problem. Not screens. Expectations so low a sandwich lands as a revelation. Nobody in the comment thread needs to delete an app. They need a few people in their life who notice when they are hungry.

What I am doing about it

I am not going to pretend I have a program. I have a few things I keep practicing, badly, and they help.

Ask a second question. The first answer is packaging. "Busy, you know how it is." The second question is where a person lives. "Busy with what? Is it the good kind?"

Let silence sit. Four seconds of quiet feels like an hour and it is where the honest sentence comes from. I fill silence out of nerves, and every time I do, I step on something someone was about to say.

Say the specific thing. "You did good work" evaporates. "The way you handled the customer call on Tuesday, when you admitted we got it wrong, took guts" lands and stays.

Go first. Epley's work says people reciprocate. If I offer something real, I generally get something real back. If I offer weather, I get weather.

Book the hard time. Depth needs runway. Fifteen minutes between meetings produces status updates. Two hours in a car, a long walk, a kitchen at midnight... different species of conversation.

The uncomfortable bit

If phones were the whole story, the fix would be easy. Willpower, a drawer, done.

The real story asks more of you. It says you have lost practice at something humans are built for, and getting it back means being clumsy in front of other people for a while. Asking a question and having it land wrong. Saying something honest and watching someone shift in their seat. Being the one who goes first, with no guarantee anyone meets you there.

This is why we blame the phone. Blaming the phone costs nothing.

Put your phone down if you want to. I have no objection. But the silence waiting on the other side of the table is the actual work. Nobody gets through it with a better screen time setting.

So here is my question for you... when did you last ask someone a second question, and stay quiet long enough to hear the answer?

Earlier this year, Debra and I had Zach Mercurio on Corey-osity Unleashed (Season 2, Episode 6). Zach researches what he calls "mattering"... the experience of being significant to the people around you.

He put it plainly in his writing on mattering at work: "When people feel replaceable, they act replaceable. They won't show up. They won't commit." And the flip side: "When people feel irreplaceable, they act irreplaceable."

I've read a lot of leadership advice. Most of it blurs together. This one stuck, because I've watched it play out on both sides of the desk.

If someone feels like a number, they'll leave the moment a slightly better hourly rate shows up down the road. Why wouldn't they? You told them, in a hundred small ways, the relationship is a transaction. They're taking you at your word.

Replaceable People Don't Quit Loudly

The damage doesn't start with a resignation letter. It starts months earlier.

The engineer stops pointing out the flaw in the design, because nobody listened last time. The support rep follows the script exactly, even when the script is wrong for this customer. The team lead stops mentoring the new hire, because why invest in a place which doesn't invest in you?

None of these people are lazy. They've done the math. If I'm a cog, I'll behave like a cog. Cogs don't take initiative. Cogs don't raise their hand. Cogs do what the machine asks and nothing more.

Zach's article cites global surveys finding close to 43% of employees feel "invisible". Think about your own team. If the number holds, four people in every ten are sitting in your meetings feeling unseen.

And the trend isn't improving. Gallup's 2025 engagement data shows only 31% of US employees are engaged, down from 36% in 2020. Among Gen Z and younger millennials, the share who strongly agree "my supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person" fell from 54% in 2020 to 41% in 2025.

Your youngest workers, the ones you'll depend on for the next thirty years, feel less cared for every year.

It's Not About the Money

Leaders love to believe people leave for pay. It's a comforting story, because pay is a budget line, not a character flaw.

The data says otherwise. When MIT Sloan researchers analyzed 34 million online employee profiles and 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews, they found a toxic corporate culture predicted attrition 10.4 times better than compensation did. Workers feeling disrespected sat right at the heart of their definition of toxic.

I noticed a related story trending on Reddit this week. Fortune reported the number of Amazon workers on food stamps in the sampled states has nearly tripled since 2020, in a period of record revenue. Pay matters, of course. But read the comments on threads like those and the anger isn't only about wages. It's about what the gap says. You're a cost. You're interchangeable. We'll find another one of you.

My own research into bad bosses found 99.5% of survey respondents had experienced one or more types of bad boss. In my experience, a lot of bad bosses aren't cruel. They're indifferent. They treat people as fungible units of labor. Indifference is the fastest way to make someone feel replaceable.

"Toxic" People Who Feel Unseen

One moment from our conversation with Zach still rattles around in my head. He reframed "toxic" employees as people who feel unseen.

The easy response is to push back. Some people are difficult. Full stop.

But think about the difficult people you've managed over the years. The ones who argued in every meeting. The ones who went quiet and did the bare minimum. How many of them were acting out because they'd concluded nobody would notice if they vanished tomorrow?

More than most of us would like to admit.

Zach told a story on the episode about a journalist who asked her daughter a simple question: "When you feel you matter to me, what am I doing?" The answer wasn't a holiday or a gift. It was the quiet drive to school. Ordinary time, with attention.

Your team works the same way. They don't need a trophy. They need proof you see them.

The Three Things Irreplaceable People Feel

Zach breaks mattering into three experiences. I find this useful, because it turns a fuzzy idea into things you do on a Tuesday.

1. Noticed

People need to feel seen and heard. Not "great job, team" in a group email. Specific attention to them as an individual.

Try this: in your next one-on-one, ask about something they mentioned two weeks ago. Their kid's recital. The bug they were wrestling with. The fact you remembered says more than any recognition platform.

2. Affirmed

People need to know their particular strengths make a particular difference. Generic praise doesn't do it. Tell them what they did and why it mattered.

"Thanks for the report" is noise. "Your note about the billing edge case saved us from shipping a bug to 4,000 customers" tells someone they're not interchangeable. Nobody else caught it. They did.

3. Needed

People need to know the team would suffer without them. This is where "nobody is irreplaceable" does the most harm, because it's a direct attack on this one.

Ask for help. Seriously. Go to the quiet person on your team and say, "I'm stuck on this, and you're the one who understands it best. What would you do?" Watch what happens to their posture.

But Isn't Everyone Replaceable?

I know the objection. I've made it myself.

The business has to survive anyone leaving. Succession planning is responsible. Nobody should hold a company hostage.

All true. And none of it requires you to tell people they're disposable.

There's a difference between building a resilient organization and building a culture where people feel like spare parts. Document the processes. Cross-train the team. Plan for departures. Then turn around and treat every individual in front of you as the only person who brings what they bring.

Because they are. The role is replaceable. The person isn't. The next hire won't have the same judgment, the same relationships, the same instinct for which customer is about to churn. You'll get someone different. Perhaps someone good. But never the same.

Zach made another point on the episode which stays with me. Hurry and care don't coexist. Most managers aren't cold. They're rushed. And rushed managers skip the thirty seconds of attention which tells someone they matter.

Your Move This Week

Pick one person on your team who has gone quiet. Not the star. Not the loudest voice. The one you'd struggle to describe beyond their job title.

Then do three things before Friday:

1. Notice something specific about their work and tell them.
2. Affirm the difference it made, in concrete terms.
3. Ask for their help with something where their knowledge is the best on the team.

It'll take you ten minutes, total.

As Zach put it, "People add value because they feel valued." So here's the question worth sitting with: if someone on your team walked out tomorrow, would they believe you'd notice?

In 2017, researchers Ben Tappin and Ryan McKay asked 270 people to rate themselves and the average person on traits covering morality, agency, and sociability. Their finding, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, was blunt: "virtually all individuals irrationally inflated their moral qualities." The inflation was bigger for morality than for any other trait they measured. People overrate their own goodness more than they overrate their own competence or likability.

Read the next line twice. This inflated sense of moral superiority had no link to self-esteem. Confident people don't have it more than anxious people. Almost everyone carries it.

So when you tell yourself "I would never fudge those numbers," you say it with the same certainty as the person who did.

Your Predictions About Yourself Are Wrong. Your Predictions About Others Are Right.

Cornell psychologists Nicholas Epley and David Dunning tested this with real money and real flowers.

Before a campus charity drive, they asked students whether they would buy daffodils to support the American Cancer Society. According to the Cornell Chronicle's write-up of the study, more than eight out of ten students said they would buy. Those same students predicted 56 percent of their peers would buy.

The real number was 43 percent.

In a second experiment, students said they would donate roughly half of their $5 participation fee to charity. They guessed their peers would give about $1.80. When the moment came, the average donation was $1.53.

Look at what happened. The students were cynical and accurate about other people. They were generous and wrong about themselves. The full paper, Feeling "Holier Than Thou", found people ignore base rates when predicting their own behavior, but use those base rates when predicting everyone else's.

Your gut says you're the exception. The data says you're the average.

Pressure Is the Test. Everything Else Is a Rehearsal.

Values are easy on a quiet Tuesday. Nobody's integrity gets tested in the values workshop with the pastries and the sticky notes. It gets tested at 6pm on the last day of the quarter.

The most famous proof comes from 1973. John Darley and Daniel Batson sent students from Princeton Theological Seminary across campus to give a talk. Some were told they had plenty of time. Some were told to head over now. Some were told they were already late. On the way, each student passed a man slumped in a doorway, clearly in distress.

As Psychology Today summarizes the results, 63 percent of the students with time to spare stopped to help. Among the on-time group, 45 percent stopped. Among the students who thought they were late, 10 percent stopped.

Some of these students were on their way to give a talk about the Good Samaritan. The topic made no difference. Hurry did.

These weren't bad people. They were trainee ministers. They would have raised their hands in my imaginary room faster than anyone. And a ticking clock beat their values nine times out of ten.

The Workplace Adds Plenty of Clock

If a few minutes of hurry bends the behavior of seminary students, think about what a quarterly target does to a sales team.

The Ethics & Compliance Initiative runs one of the largest workplace ethics surveys in the world. Its 2023 Global Business Ethics Survey covered more than 70,000 employees in 42 countries. As NAVEX reports from the findings, 28 percent of respondents felt pressure to compromise standards. 65 percent had observed misconduct. Of the people who reported misconduct, 46 percent said they experienced retaliation.

Put those numbers next to each other. More than a quarter of workers feel pushed to bend the rules. Almost two thirds see rules bent. And nearly half of the people who speak up get punished for it.

Nobody in those organizations thinks of themselves as the villain. Every one of them would raise a hand.

What I Learned From Wearing a Uniform

The US Army gave me seven values: Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity, and Personal Courage. I memorized them. I recited them tired, cold, and hungry.

Reciting them was never the hard part. The Army knew it too, which is why it trains soldiers under stress instead of in a classroom. You don't learn how you'll behave under pressure by thinking about pressure. You learn it by meeting pressure, many times, and looking honestly at what you did.

I carried the lesson into civilian life, through banks and startups and engineering teams. The best leaders I worked with never claimed perfect integrity. They talked about the times they fell short. The worst leaders I worked with never admitted a single lapse. Those were the ones I trusted least.

My own research found 99.5 percent of people have had one or more types of bad boss. I promise you almost none of those bosses saw themselves in the number. They all believed in their own integrity. Their teams told a different story.

Stop Asking "Do I Have Integrity?"

The question is useless. Your brain has already answered "yes," and the research says your brain is biased.

Ask better questions instead.

Look at your record, not your intentions

Think of three decisions you made under real pressure in the last year. Write them down. Next to each, write the value you claim to hold. Measure the distance honestly. Epley and Dunning showed you predict other people well. So judge your past self the way you'd judge a colleague.

Decide before the pressure arrives

The seminary students had no plan for a stranger in a doorway. You know your pressure points. The end-of-quarter number. The client who wants a corner cut. The boss who wants the bad news softened. Write down your line now, while you're calm, and tell someone about it.

Slow down your hurry

In the Good Samaritan study, hurry decided who stopped. When you feel rushed on a decision with ethical weight, buy ten minutes. A short delay costs little. A compromised decision costs a lot more.

Make it safe to call you out

If 46 percent of reporters face retaliation, your people have learned to stay quiet. Ask your team to name a time you missed your own standard. Thank the first person who answers. Then change something. This is what builds the self-awareness I talk about in the Behavior Awareness Tool, because other people see your gaps long before you do.

The Hand Still Goes Up

I'll raise my hand in the room too. I want to believe I have integrity. You want to believe it about yourself.

The difference between a leader with integrity and a leader who only believes it lives in one habit. The first one keeps checking. The second one stopped checking a long time ago, because the answer felt obvious.

So here's my challenge for this week. Pick one decision you made under pressure. Ask one person you trust how it looked from where they stood. Then listen, without defending yourself.

What would you find out?

A team at Stanford led by Myra Cheng tested 11 leading AI models and found they affirm users' actions 50% more than humans do. Ask a chatbot whether you handled a conflict well, and it tends to tell you yes... even when a room full of people would tell you no.

The worst part sits in the second half of the study. In two preregistered experiments with 1,604 participants, people who talked to the flattering AI grew less willing to take steps to repair a conflict. They also grew more convinced they were in the right. And here's the part which should worry every one of us: those same people rated the flattering answers as higher quality, trusted the flattering model more, and wanted to use it again.

We like being agreed with. So we reward the thing which agrees with us. So it agrees with us more.

Anthropic's researchers found the roots of this back in 2023. Their paper on sycophancy showed both humans and preference models prefer convincingly written sycophantic responses over correct ones a non-negligible fraction of the time. The models learn from our ratings. Our ratings favor flattery. You see where this goes.

Even OpenAI Got Burned

In April 2025, OpenAI pushed an update to GPT-4o which made ChatGPT so eager to please, people started posting screenshots of it applauding bad and even dangerous ideas. Sam Altman rolled the update back within days.

OpenAI's own explanation reads like a management lesson. The company said it "focused too much on short-term feedback". In a follow-up, it admitted the update added a reward signal based on thumbs-up and thumbs-down data from users, and sycophancy "wasn't explicitly flagged as part of our internal hands-on testing".

Read those lines again and swap "model" for "manager."

A manager who optimizes for short-term approval. A manager who counts the thumbs-ups in the room. A manager who never tests for whether people tell them the truth.

I've worked for this manager. Odds are, so have you.

Yes-Men Didn't Start With AI

My research into bad bosses found 99.5% of survey respondents said they'd had one or more types of bad boss. When I dig into those stories, one pattern shows up again and again. The boss had stopped hearing the truth long before things went wrong.

Nobody decided to lie to them. People learned. The first person who raised a concern got a sigh. The second got cut off. By the third meeting, everyone had worked out the safest answer: "Looks great."

The boss walked out of every meeting feeling brilliant. The team walked out feeling unheard. And the gap between those two feelings grew every week until something broke.

An AI yes-man and a human yes-man share the same flaw. Both feel wonderful. Both leave you worse off. The only difference is the AI got there faster, because we trained it on our own weakness for praise.

Trade the Mirror for a Sparring Partner

I served in the US Army. Nobody there ever told me my bed corners looked brilliant when they didn't. The feedback was blunt, immediate, and aimed at getting me better. I didn't enjoy it. I improved because of it.

Later, as an engineer, the best code reviews I ever received were the ones where a colleague wrote "I don't follow this. Why?" beside a chunk I was proud of. Those reviews stung. They also caught bugs before customers did.

A mirror shows you what you want to see. A sparring partner shows you where your guard is down. Every leader needs more sparring partners, and every leader tends to collect mirrors instead.

How to Build Feedback Loops Which Push Back

Debra's frustration points at something bigger than one tool. Here's what I do, and what I encourage the leaders I work with to do.

1. Tell the AI What You Want

Stop asking "What do you think?" You'll get applause. Ask for the fight instead.

• "List the three weakest arguments in this draft."
• "Argue against my position as hard as you're able."
• "What would a skeptical reader stop believing at this paragraph?"

The flattery lives in the default settings. You have to ask for the critique on purpose. And when the AI still gushes, treat its praise as noise.

2. Ask People Better Questions

"Any feedback?" is the human version of the thumbs-up button. It invites "No, all good."

Try "What's one thing I did in this meeting which made it harder for you to speak up?" Specific questions give people permission to be honest. Vague questions give them permission to be polite.

3. Reward the First Person Who Disagrees

Your reaction to the first bit of bad news sets the price of every piece of bad news after it. Thank the person. Out loud. In front of others. Then act on what they said, or explain why you won't.

If people see honesty cost them nothing, you'll hear more of it.

4. Measure It Properly

Your own sense of how approachable you are is the least reliable data you own. I spent years building feedback tools for exactly this reason. Our Behaviour Awareness Tool exists because leaders deserve specific, actionable feedback on how their people experience them... not a warm glow and a pat on the back.

Anonymous, structured feedback gets past the "Looks great" reflex. It shows you the gap between the leader you think you are and the leader your team lives with.

5. Keep One Person Who Isn't Impressed by You

Everyone needs someone who knows them well enough to say "No, this isn't your best work." For me, it's Debra. She tells me when something I've written is dull. I don't always like hearing it. She's usually right.

Find your person. Protect the relationship. Never punish them for doing the job you need them to do.

Praise Feels Good. Truth Makes You Better.

AI will keep getting smarter. The pull toward flattery won't go away on its own, because it comes from us. We click the thumbs-up on the answer which makes us feel good. We promote the people who make us feel good. We stay in the meetings where everyone nods.

If your AI thinks everything you write is brilliant, be suspicious. If your team thinks every idea you have is brilliant, be more suspicious.

So here's my question for you this week. When did someone last tell you, to your face, you were wrong? If you have to think hard about the answer, the problem isn't them. It's the room you built.

Brené Brown drew the line years ago. In Dare to Lead she writes: "vulnerability without boundaries is confession, manipulation, or shock". Real vulnerability has a boundary around it, and a reason for existing, and the reason serves the team. Everything else is theatre with feelings as props.

So stop looking at the disclosure. Look at what surrounds it.

Four tells

One: the timing. Honest struggle arrives whenever it arrives, usually at a bad moment, usually awkwardly. Tactical struggle arrives forty seconds before a decision. If your boss opens up about his mental health during a budget disagreement, and never during a quiet Tuesday, you have your answer.

Two: the direction of the care. After real vulnerability, the room breathes out and gets on with the work. After the tactical version, the room starts looking after the leader. You find yourself reassuring the person who outranks you. Watch for a disclosure asking the team to carry the leader rather than helping the team carry the work.

Three: what follows. Genuine openness invites your openness back. Tactical openness closes the topic. Notice whether anyone pushes back in the ten minutes after. Silence is the product being sold.

Four: repetition. The same story, told the same way, to different audiences, always landing on the same request. Real pain evolves. A script does not.

One of these on its own proves nothing. Everyone times a confession badly now and then. Three of them in the same meeting is a pattern.

Why it works so well on decent people

Because decent people respond to distress. Your instinct to help someone who is hurting is one of the better things about you, and a tactical leader borrows it.

Add hierarchy on top. Challenging your boss on a spreadsheet is uncomfortable. Challenging your boss thirty seconds after he told you about his sick mother feels like cruelty. So you swallow the objection, and the objection is the thing the company needed from you.

This is psychological safety running backwards. The idea was to make it safe for the team to speak. The tactic makes it unsafe for the team to disagree, and it does so while wearing the uniform of safety. Nobody in the room names it, because naming it makes you the monster.

My own research into bad bosses found 99.5% of respondents had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Almost nobody escapes. And the ones I hear about most now are not the tyrants. Tyrants are legible. You know where you stand with someone who shouts. The soft operator leaves you doubting your own read on the room, which is a far more expensive kind of damage.

If you are on the receiving end

Separate the human being from the request. Both are real. Say so out loud.

"I am sorry things are rough at home. On the launch date, I still think we are two weeks short, and here is why."

Two sentences. The first is sincere, because you are not a monster. The second refuses the trade. You have declined to pay for a decision with sympathy, and you have done it without accusing anyone of anything.

Write things down afterwards. If a pattern exists, you will want the dates. Memory bends under this kind of pressure, and a manipulative leader relies on your uncertainty.

And check your own read with one colleague you trust. Not a gossip session. One question: "Did the meeting land oddly for you too?" If three people independently felt steamrollered by someone's sadness, it stopped being a coincidence.

If you suspect you are the one doing it

Good. Most people doing this have no idea. They learned somewhere along the way to share, it worked, and the brain files away whatever works.

Three questions before you open up at work:

Who does this serve? If the honest answer is "me, right now, in this argument", keep it in your pocket. Tell a friend. Tell your coach. Not your direct report ten minutes before a vote.

What happens after I say it? If the desired outcome is agreement, you are not being vulnerable. You are negotiating with your feelings as currency.

Would I share this if the decision had gone my way already? The cleanest test I know. Vulnerability offered from a winning position is usually genuine. Vulnerability deployed from a losing one is usually a tool.

There is a fourth, harder one. Ask your team, individually, whether they feel able to disagree with you. Then shut up and wait through the silence. The first answer will be polite. The second answer, thirty seconds later, is the real one.

The repair

If you recognize yourself in this, the fix is boring and it works. Go back to the person. Name the specific moment. "I brought up my divorce in the planning meeting, and I think it stopped you challenging me. The challenge was the useful bit. Give it to me now."

No speech about your growth journey. No apology tour. One sentence of ownership, then an invitation to the disagreement you dodged.

I have done the sheepish version of this conversation. It is horrible for about ninety seconds, then it is fine, and the team trusts you more afterwards than they did before the mistake. Ownership costs less than people fear.

The question worth sitting with

Vulnerability at work is still the right instinct. I am not arguing for the return of the stone-faced boss, and the stone-faced boss does plenty of damage of his own.

But openness earns trust only when the person hearing it stays free to say no.

So here is the one to sit with this week. Think of the last time a leader told you something personal in a work setting. What happened to your objection?

Advita Patel is a communications and confidence strategist and the author of work on this topic. I came across her framing of manipulative vulnerability while preparing for a podcast conversation, and it has been rattling around my head since.

Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman looked at 3,492 managers going through a development program and asked what separates the best listeners from everyone else. Their research killed off the three things most of us think of as listening: staying quiet while the other person talks, showing you are engaged with your face and the odd "mm-hmm", and repeating back what you heard almost word for word.

None of those three describe a good listener. They describe a person doing an impression of one.

Their write-up in Harvard Business Review makes the point sharper. Strong listening runs in two directions. The listener asks questions. The listener pushes back. The person doing the talking leaves the conversation holding more than they brought into it. Silence with eye contact leaves them holding the same load, plus the suspicion they wasted twenty minutes.

I find this uncomfortable, because silence with eye contact is the technique I was taught. Do not interrupt. Let them finish. Reflect back. All of it reasonable, all of it passive, and passive is where listening goes to die.

The phone in your hand does the talking for you

There is a word for checking your phone mid-conversation. Phubbing. Ugly word, accurate word.

A 2025 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology pulled together 52 studies covering 19,698 people to work out what phone-checking does to a relationship. The strongest single finding was conflict. Partner phubbing correlated with conflict at r = 0.573, which in this field is a big number. Relationship satisfaction dropped. Intimacy dropped. So did the sense of a partner being responsive.

Think about what those numbers describe. Not a row about the phone. A slow accumulation of moments where one person reached out and the other was elsewhere. The phone never gets named as the problem. It shows up later as "we argue a lot" and "he doesn't get me any more".

Work runs on the same fuel. Your team reads your split attention the way a spouse does. They do not file a complaint about it. They file it away.

Three ways to fake it

Researchers interviewed 41 employees and collected 81 stories about being listened to, or not, at work. The paper sorts the failures into three buckets, and I recognize myself in all three.

Rejection. You shut it down. No time, wrong forum, already decided. Brutal, at least honest, and the person knows where they stand.

Distracted listening. You are in the room and your attention is not. Laptop open. Phone face up. Eyes flicking to the door.

Superficial listening. This one is the killer. You listen beautifully. You ask good questions. You say the right things. Then nothing happens. No decision, no resource, no follow-up, no trace of the conversation anywhere in the world.

The third one does the most damage, because you have to raise your hopes first to have them dropped. The employees in the study felt heard when the listener did something afterwards: changed a decision, found a tool, removed an obstacle, came back a week later with a question about it. Feeling heard was rarely settled inside the conversation itself. It got settled by what came next.

The bill arrives at work

When I ran my survey on bad bosses, 99.5% of respondents said they have had at least one type of bad boss. Ask people what made those bosses bad and almost nobody leads with strategy or technical weakness. They talk about not being heard.

Gallup puts employee engagement at 21%. Four in five people show up and hold something back. We respond by buying another engagement platform, running another pulse survey, adding another question to the form. More listening machinery, less listening.

A survey is a receipt for attention you never paid.

Why leaders are worst at this

Here is my theory, and it comes from watching myself fail at it.

Leaders get paid for answers. Somebody brings a problem, you produce a solution, everyone treats the transaction as competence. Twenty years of reinforcement later, a person starts talking and your brain begins assembling the fix before the second sentence lands. You are not listening. You are waiting for enough raw material to perform with.

The tell is speed. If your reply arrives instantly, you were drafting it during their turn. A short silence before you answer is one of the few honest signals in the whole business.

There is a second trap underneath the first. The higher you climb, the less anyone corrects your listening. Nobody tells the boss "you missed my point". They rephrase, or they shrink the point until it fits your attention span, or they stop bringing points at all. Your listening gets worse and your feedback on it dries up at the same rate. Lovely.

I have watched good engineers go quiet in meetings for this exact reason. Not fear. Economics. Explaining something to a half-present manager costs more than staying silent, so they run the numbers and stop paying.

What I do now

None of this is complicated. All of it is awkward at first.

The phone leaves the room. Face down on the table is still a phone on the table. Both of us watch it. Put it in a drawer.

I ask a third question. The first question gets the headline. The second gets the detail. The third gets the truth. Most of us stop at one and start solving.

I say back the thing they did not say. "Sounds like you have stopped raising this in the team meeting." Sometimes wrong. Being wrong out loud invites a correction, and a correction is worth more than a nod.

I write one line afterwards. What they asked for, and by when. A notebook is a memory prosthesis and nobody has ever been insulted by one.

I close the loop inside a week. Even with a no. "I looked at the contractor budget, answer is no, here is why." A no with a reason beats silence with a smile every time.

The uncomfortable bit

I have been in leadership roles for decades. I am fluent in the impression of listening. Head tilt, eyebrow, thoughtful pause, "tell me more". I do it well enough for nobody to notice the difference.

The person on the other side of the table notices. Not in the moment. About four weeks later, when nothing has moved and they quietly decide to stop telling me things.

Listening ends with a change. No change, no listening. Only proximity.

Who in your life thinks you heard them last week? Are you sure you did anything about it?

The big table pulled a bigger crowd. More people stopped, more people tasted. Then they walked away. Three percent of the people who stopped at the 24-jam table bought a jar. Thirty percent bought at the six-jam table.

Ten times the conversion, from taking options away.

I don't think your career works exactly like a jam display. But your own head does. When everything is technically still on the table, the decision cost of any single move goes up, so you keep tasting and never buy. You call it research. You call it timing. Two years pass.

Clarity is a sentence, not a life plan

People hear "know what you want" and picture a five-year vision document with a mission statement stapled to it. Then they don't do it, because who has the energy.

Lower the bar. Clarity is one sentence you're willing to say out loud to a near-stranger without softening it afterwards.

A usable sentence has three things in it:

• A shape. The kind of work, not the job title. "Owning a product line" beats "senior leadership role."
• A boundary. What you're saying no to. This is the part everybody skips, and it's the part doing the work. "Not another turnaround" tells me more than three paragraphs of aspiration.
• A size. Team of eight or team of eighty. Startup or enterprise. These are different lives, not different flavours.

Mine, at one point, was: I want to lead engineering somewhere small enough to know everyone's name, and I'm done with commutes over an hour. Not poetry. But someone heard it, remembered it, and eleven months later sent me a message starting with "this made me think of you."

One message is the whole mechanism. Opportunity doesn't find you. A person finds you, because your sentence was short enough to survive in their memory.

The test for whether you're clear

Say it to three people this month. Not a network, not a post. Three humans, out loud, unhedged.

Then watch what you do afterwards. If you find yourself immediately adding "but I'm open to other things too," you aren't clear yet. You're doing the thing I did over coffee, hedging the sentence back into mush the second it leaves your mouth, so nobody holds you to it.

The hedge feels polite. It reads as uncertainty, and people don't refer uncertainty.

You're allowed to change your mind

The fear underneath all of this is commitment. Name a thing, and you're stuck with it.

You aren't. A heading is not a destination. Ships change heading all the time, and they still get somewhere, because at any given moment they're pointed at something. Drifting doesn't preserve your freedom. It hands your direction to whatever current happens to be running.

I've changed my sentence five times. Each version was wrong in some way. Each one got me further than the fog did, because a wrong specific beats a right vague every single time. A wrong specific gets corrected by reality within months. A right vague sits there for a decade, feeling wise.

Worth noting: clarity about yourself and clarity from your boss are two different problems, and most people are short of both. Gallup found only 50% of on-site workers strongly agree they know what's expected of them at work, down from 59% in 2020. If your manager never tells you what good looks like, you're doing this work without a map, on top of doing it without a compass. I write about the manager half of the problem over at Step It Up HR.

But the compass is yours. Nobody hands it over.

So what's your sentence?

Not the polished version. The one with a boundary in it, the one costing you something to say, the one where a part of you loses.

Write it down today. Say it to three people this month. Then stop worrying about whether opportunity is going to find you, because you've finally given it a description to work from.

Robert Greenleaf coined the phrase "servant leadership" in a 1970 essay called The Servant as Leader. His line still lands: "The servant-leader is servant first." Servant as a starting motive, not servant as a look.

Fifty-five years later we turned it into a workshop with a workbook.

The numbers agree with the room

Gallup found only 21% of US employees strongly agree they trust the leadership of their organization, down from a 2019 peak of 24%. Gallup calls it a decline worth taking seriously, and I agree.

The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer sharpens the point. As reported by Ragan, 75% of respondents said CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides, while only 44% said CEOs do it well. A 29-point gap. In the same study, 78% said they trust their employer to do the right thing... the highest score of any institution measured.

Read those two numbers together. People trust the company. They do not trust the person holding the microphone. The building is fine. The performance is the problem.

Then there is the one Gallup number every manager should have tattooed somewhere useful: managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement. Not the brand. Not the perks. The person sitting one chair up.

My own research points the same direction from the other end. When I surveyed people about their working lives, 99.5% said they had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Not sixty percent. Not eighty. Ninety-nine and a half.

Whatever we are doing on stage, it is not landing.

What service looks like on an ordinary Tuesday

Service is not a personality. It is a set of small, unphotogenic behaviors:

• You take a meeting off someone's calendar instead of adding one.
• You answer the question you were asked, not the one you prepared for.
• You go first when the news is bad, and you use plain words.
• You hand the credit away in public and keep the blame in private.
• You spend political capital on things your team will never hear about.
• You do the boring unblocking... the procurement form, the access request, the awkward escalation to another team's manager.

None of these make a good photograph. None of them fit on a slide. Every one of them shows up in how hard people work for you six months later.

Here is the test I use. If the thing you did would still be worth doing with nobody watching and no way to mention it later, it was service. If it stops making sense the moment the audience leaves, it was theater.

Why decent people drift into performance

Leaders do not wake up planning to fake it. The drift is structural.

Your team sees your service. Your boss sees your show. And your boss decides your next role.

So the incentive points one way. Polish the deck. Show up at the visible things. Talk about the work in rooms where the work is being scored. It is a rational response to how promotion works in most companies... and it hollows people out.

I have done this. I have chosen the deck over the one-to-one because the deck had a date on it and the one-to-one did not. The deck got seen. The person waited. Nobody wrote it down anywhere, but they remembered, and so do I.

The fix is not to stop doing the visible job. Somebody has to stand up and explain where the company is going. The fix is refusing to let the visible job become the whole job.

The Army version of this

I learned a version of this a long time before I ever ran a team. In the Army, in the field, the leaders eat last. Nobody puts it on a slide. Nobody gives a talk about it. You stand at the back of the line because the people doing the hard part get fed first, and the whole unit sees you standing there.

It is a small thing. It costs you ten minutes and a cold meal. And it settles a question every group of people is quietly asking about the person in charge... when it gets tight, whose comfort comes first?

Corporate life asks the same question. It rarely asks it out loud. It asks with who gets the good project, who gets protected in a reorg, who gets thrown under the bus in front of the board, and who gets to leave the office at a reasonable hour.

Your answers are already on record. Your team has been keeping the record for you.

Five questions to audit yourself

Answer these honestly. Nobody is grading you.

1. What did you do for your team last month nobody outside the team knows about? If you struggle to name one thing, you have been performing.

2. When did you last say "I don't know" in front of your team? Certainty is the cheapest costume in leadership. Everyone sees through it and nobody tells you.

3. Who got the credit for your team's best work last quarter? If the honest answer is you, fix it this week. Say the names out loud, in front of people who make decisions.

4. What did you kill? Leaders who serve their teams end things. Zombie projects eat the calendar of every person you claim to care about.

5. If your title vanished tomorrow, who would still ask you for help? The answer to this one is your real leadership score. Everything else is a job description.

The applause is a byproduct

I am not arguing against charisma. Some of the best leaders I have worked for were funny, warm, and good on their feet. The difference was never the stage presence. It was what happened after the room emptied.

Theater asks: how did I come across?

Service asks: is anybody less stuck than they were this morning?

You get to pick which question runs your week. Your team already knows which one you have been asking.

So here is mine for you. Who on your team is stuck right now... and how long has it been since you asked?

Gallup's research on burnout puts unmanageable workload third on its list of causes. Above it sit unfair treatment at work and, further down, unclear communication from managers, lack of manager support, and unreasonable time pressure. Four of those five are about the relationship between a person and their boss. One is about the size of the pile.

Gallup's Q4 2025 figures also show 31% of women and 23% of men reporting burnout at the top of the scale, meaning always or close to it. Those are not people with too much typing to do. Those are people carrying something they have no way to put down.

Here is the part I find hardest to argue with. A study of 241 emergency department staff during the pandemic separated two things we usually mash together: psychological safety, meaning you believe speaking up is safe, and feeling heard, meaning somebody did something after you spoke. The researchers found a one unit increase in feeling heard associated with a 42% reduction in perceived burnout.

Read the two halves of it again. Safety is the door. Being heard is the room behind it. Plenty of workplaces have a door with nothing behind it.

Why we swallow it

I have swallowed it for three reasons, and I suspect you have too.

The maths looks bad

Raising a concern costs you a fight now. The benefit arrives months later, invisible, in the form of a disaster nobody experienced. Nobody thanks you for the outage they never had. Your brain notices the asymmetry and votes for silence.

Somebody trained you

Most of us have a scar. You said the awkward thing in a room, and the temperature dropped. Or you flagged a risk and got labelled negative. One experience like this teaches faster than ten workshops on candour.

Our own research at Step It Up HR found 99.6% of survey respondents have had a bad boss at some point. Near enough all of us have been taught, by somebody with authority over our income, to keep our thoughts to ourselves.

You think seniority fixes it

I believed this one for years. Get senior enough and the fear goes away.

It does not. The stakes get bigger and the audience gets smarter. I have sat in rooms with a title on my badge and still felt my throat tighten. The difference now is I have learned to speak through it rather than wait for it to pass.

Speaking up is a skill, not a personality

The advice usually stops at "be brave", which helps nobody. Bravery is not a technique. Here is what has worked for me.

Say it early and small. The concern you raise in week one is a question. The same concern in week nine is an accusation. Early costs you almost nothing.

Bring the tradeoff, not the objection. "This will not work" starts a fight about who is right. "We deliver this by March if we drop the reporting screens, or we keep them and land eight weeks later" starts a conversation about what people want. Same information. Different room.

Ask instead of assert when you are unsure. "What am I missing on the testing window?" gives the other person a way to be right in public. Most of the time they answer their own objection halfway through.

Say it once, clearly, to the right person. Repeating yourself in the same meeting reads as a campaign. One clear statement, on the record, then let people decide. You are responsible for the saying, not for the outcome.

Write it down afterwards. Two lines in the notes. Not to build a case for later, but because a concern in writing survives the meeting and a concern in the air does not.

If you lead, the silence is yours

Here is the uncomfortable bit for anyone with people reporting to them.

A quiet team is not a team without problems. A quiet team is a team who has decided the cost of telling you exceeds the benefit. They ran the same sums I ran in the meeting, and you were a variable in them.

I was slow to accept this. My teams were quiet, and I read it as harmony. It was a bill going unpaid.

What changes it is not another poster about openness. It is what happens in the ninety seconds after somebody says something inconvenient.

• Do you explain, or do you ask a second question?
• Does the person find out what happened next, or does their concern vanish into your notebook?
• When you disagree and go ahead anyway, do you say so out loud, or do you let them guess?

Going ahead anyway is fine. People handle being overruled. What people struggle with is being processed. "I hear you" followed by nothing teaches your team the door opens onto a wall, and after two or three goes they stop trying the handle.

Ask directly and often: what are you not telling me? Then sit in the pause. The first answer is throat clearing. The second one is the real one.

The thing nobody says out loud

Speaking up will sometimes cost you. I would be lying to pretend otherwise. Some rooms punish honesty, and some bosses never change no matter how well you phrase it.

If you have raised the same thing three times, in good faith, in the right way, and nothing moves, you have your answer. The problem is no longer your silence. The problem is where you work. Burning yourself out to be heard by people with no intention of listening is a poor trade.

But most rooms are not like this. Most rooms are full of people doing the same private cost benefit sum, waiting for somebody else to go first. I have lost count of the times I said the awkward thing and three people found me afterwards to say they had been thinking it.

They were thinking it. They wanted somebody else to carry the risk of saying it.

The question

Think about the last meeting you left with something unsaid.

You spent energy carrying it out of the room. You spent more rehearsing it in the car. You will spend more still when the thing you predicted happens and you get to be quietly right about it.

Was staying quiet cheaper? Or did you pay for it in a currency you were not counting?

BetterUp put numbers on the upside. Their research on the value of belonging at work, covering 1,789 employees plus experiments with over 3,000 US workers, found workplace belonging leads to a 56% increase in job performance, a 50% reduction in turnover risk, and a 75% decrease in sick days.

Read the sick days one again. Three quarters. People stop calling in sick as often when they feel like they are part of something. Your wellbeing budget wishes it had those numbers.

Meanwhile Gallup's State of the Global Workplace reports global engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest since 2020, at an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity worldwide. Four out of five people show up and give you the minimum. We keep treating this as a motivation problem. Most of the time it is a belonging problem wearing a different badge.

Three Things I Watch Instead of the Dashboard

I stopped trusting the workforce slide years ago. Here is what I look at now, and none of it needs a survey tool.

1. Who Speaks in the First Ten Minutes

Not who speaks at all. Who speaks early, before the direction of the meeting is set. Late contributions are reactions. Early ones shape the outcome.

Sit in your own meeting and write down the first six voices. Do it for a month. If the same six names come up every time, you do not have a quiet team. You have a team where five other people learned it is safer to wait.

2. Who Gets the Interesting Work

Look at your last four high-visibility projects. Who led them. Then look at who got the reliable, invisible, someone-has-to-do-it work over the same period.

Managers hand the risky, career-making job to the person they feel easiest around. It is rarely deliberate. It is comfort, and comfort follows familiarity. Your allocation history is a more honest culture report than anything your engagement survey produces.

3. Who Comes Back

Watch what happens after maternity leave, after long-term sickness, after a project goes wrong in public. Do people return to the same standing they had before, or do they come back a rung lower with nobody willing to say so?

An organisation where you get one bad quarter and lose your place is not a place anyone belongs. It is a place people are auditioning.

Belonging Is Not the Same as Comfort

Here is where I part company with a lot of the writing on this.

Belonging does not mean everyone agrees with you. It does not mean nobody challenges your work. A team where nothing gets questioned is not warm, it is asleep.

Belonging means disagreement does not cost you your place. You argue hard about the architecture on Tuesday and you are still in the room on Wednesday. Your idea gets rejected without you getting rejected with it.

I have been in teams where I was torn apart in review and felt completely safe, and teams where everyone was pleasant to my face and I knew I was on my own. Politeness is not belonging. Sometimes politeness is how exclusion dresses for work.

Why This Sits With Managers, Not With HR

My own survey work turned up something I still find hard to sit with. 99.5% of respondents told me they have had one or more types of bad boss. Almost everyone. The exceptions barely exist.

Belonging lives or dies right there. Not in the policy. Not in the values poster. In whether your direct manager explains the in-joke, hands you the risky project, and lets you disagree without a price.

HR is able to build the frame. Nobody in HR is in your one-to-one on Thursday morning. You are. I have written more about the manager side of this over on Step It Up HR, because most of what gets sold as a culture problem is a hundred managers making small calls badly, on repeat, with no one ever telling them.

What I Would Do on Monday

Pick one person on your team who you find hardest to read. Not the one you clash with. The one you know least about after two years of sitting near them.

Ask them one real question and shut up for the answer. Not "how are things", which trains people to say fine. Something with an edge on it. "What do we do here as a team which you find pointless?" Then sit in the silence until they fill it.

You will learn more in four minutes about whether people belong in your team than your annual survey will tell you in four years.

Your representation numbers describe who you hired. Belonging describes who you get to keep, and what version of them turns up.

So which one is on your slide next quarter?

Research from WorkNest, covering more than 1,000 organisations, found 30% of employers reporting passive-aggressive behaviour as a live problem. Persistent negativity or damaging conduct came in at 59%. Employees undermining managers or colleagues, 35%.

The number stopping me cold was a different one. In the same research, 24% of employers said their managers rarely address toxic conduct at all in the first place.

So a quarter of the time, the behaviour gets seen and skipped.

On cost, the widely cited figure comes from CPP Global's 2008 Human Capital Report, which found US employees spending an average of 2.8 hours a week dealing with conflict. Roughly $359 billion in paid hours. Nearly three hours a week, per person, spent on friction rather than work.

Some of those hours are honest arguments, and honest arguments earn their keep. Most of the hours I have watched burn were not arguments. They were people managing around a decision nobody felt safe rejecting.

The blame reflex makes it worse

My first instinct was always to name it. Call it out. Be direct about the indirectness. "You said yes in the meeting and then did nothing, so what is going on?"

It feels strong. It lands like an accusation, because it is one.

Watch what happens next. The person denies it, and they are not even lying, since every individual piece of evidence has an innocent explanation. The delay was capacity. The email was clarity. The shrug was tiredness. You are left holding a pattern you cannot prove, and they are left knowing your response to hidden resistance is a confrontation.

The WorkNest research puts a hard edge on this. Only 6% of employers reported a permanent improvement in behaviour after challenging it. 45% saw people change for a while and then revert. And 19% ended up with a grievance filed against them for having raised it.

Six percent. One in sixteen. Whatever most of us are doing when we confront this stuff, it is not working.

Curiosity gets the objection out of hiding

The shift for me came from a simple reframe I keep coming back to, and it belongs to executive coach Grace Judson: address hidden resistance with curiosity instead of blame.

Blame asks "why are you being like this." Curiosity asks "what do you know about this decision I do not."

Second question gets answers. Here is roughly how I run it now.

Go one to one, and go soon

Never in the room. Never in the group chat. The whole reason the objection went underground is a fear of public cost, so raising it publicly proves the fear correct.

Describe the behaviour, not the motive

"The migration work has not started, and I want to understand the blockers." Not "you clearly have a problem with this plan." First version is a fact and invites a fact back. Second version is a diagnosis of their inner life, and you are not qualified to make it.

Ask the question I stole from coaching

"What is the worst thing about this for you?"

It is a strange question to say out loud. It works because it grants permission for a real answer. I have had people tell me the plan doubles their on-call load, or the deadline lands in the middle of their kid's exams, or they told the previous manager the same thing and got ignored.

Every one of those is useful. None of them were coming out in the meeting.

Shut up afterwards

Ask, then wait. The silence after a good question is uncomfortable and it is doing the work. I have talked over more honest answers than I want to admit.

Change something, or explain why not

This is the part most of us skip, and skipping it poisons the well for a year. If someone hands you a real objection, either act on it or tell them plainly why the decision stands anyway. "You are right about the on-call load. We are going ahead, and here is what I will do about it." People live with decisions going against them. What they will not do is hand you another objection after the first one vanished into a void.

The uncomfortable bit

I have been the passive-aggressive one.

There was a stretch in my career where I disagreed with a direction hard enough to lose sleep over it, and I said nothing useful in the room. What I did instead was slow. I asked for clarifications I did not need. I met the letter of every request and the spirit of none of them. I was, in the most polite way available, sandbagging.

I was not a difficult person. I was a person with an objection and a boss who had made saying it expensive. Every time I had gone direct, the answer had been a lecture about attitude. So I stopped going direct.

The behaviour was mine and I own it. The conditions were not. Both things are true, and if you lead people, the conditions are your department.

What to do on Monday

Look at your last three decisions where the room agreed fast. Faster than the decision deserved.

Pick one. Find the person whose agreement was thinnest and ask them, one to one, what the worst part of it is for them.

You will hear something you did not know. Then the real question shows up. Are you going to do anything with it?

Garry Ridge ran WD-40 Company for 25 years and built the idea into the place. His definition is worth reading slowly, because it is not the one most people repeat: a learning moment is "any outcome shared openly so all benefit".

Read the middle of it again. Shared openly. Not renamed. Not softened. Not filed away in a private one-to-one with your manager where nobody else will ever hear about it.

Ridge started small. A handful of people emailed around what went wrong. Then it grew to hundreds across the company. On his own site he describes those moments as "raw", and the messy decisions and failed strategies as the ones with the most impact. Raw. Not tidy. Not spun.

By the time he left, WD-40 was reporting engagement above 90%. I am not claiming a phrase did it. A practice did. The phrase was the label on the tin.

The version most companies run

Here is the version I keep bumping into.

Something goes wrong. The team lead says "no blame, this is a learning moment", everyone nods, and then... nothing. No write-up. No sharing. No change to the process. Six weeks later the same thing goes wrong again, and this time somebody's performance review picks up a new line about "attention to detail".

Renaming failure without changing what follows it is worse than saying nothing. Your team now has evidence you will say warm words and act cold. You have taught them the vocabulary is decorative. Next time they will hide the problem better and for longer, because they know how the story ends.

Silence about a broken thing is expensive. It is not free, and it is not neutral. Every hour a problem stays hidden is an hour nobody spends fixing it.

The test is who goes first

If you want to know whether a company means it, ignore the language and ask one question: who shared the last learning moment, and what rank were they?

If the answer is a junior engineer, you have a confession booth, not a culture. Junior people sharing failures upward is the oldest arrangement in work. Nothing new has happened.

If the answer is the person running the place, describing a decision of their own with a real cost attached, something different is going on. Ridge grew his version from three submissions to hundreds. Those first three set the price of entry. Somebody senior paid it first.

I have paid it. I once got something wrong in front of my boss's boss, in a room where being right was the whole currency. I have written about the day I was wrong in front of my boss's boss before. The useful part was not the being wrong. Everybody is wrong constantly. The useful part was doing it out loud, in front of people who outranked me, and surviving it in public where others saw.

There is the whole mechanism. Not softer words. Visible cost, paid by somebody with something to lose.

Why leaders skip it

Because it hurts.

Sharing your own failure in front of your team feels like handing out ammunition. Some part of your brain insists authority is a bucket with a hole in it, and every admission drains a little more.

The opposite happens. Teams already know when you got it wrong. They watched it. What they are working out is whether you know, and whether you will say so. Your silence does not preserve authority. It tells them you are either unaware or dishonest, and neither one earns much.

My wife Debra's research on bad bosses found 99.5% of respondents said they had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Ponder the number for a second. It is not a minority problem. Nearly everybody carries a bad-boss memory into work with them, which means your team arrives already expecting the warm words and the cold action. You are not starting from zero. You are starting from underneath it, working off somebody else's debt.

Slow cooker, not microwave

Another line of Ridge's I like: culture is a crockpot, not a microwave.

You will not get this in a quarter. You will not get it from an all-hands with a new phrase on the deck. The first time you invite people to share a failure openly, the room will go quiet and stay quiet, and you will feel like a fool standing there. Fine. Do it again next month. And the month after.

What shifts it is repetition plus consequence. Specifically: no consequence. Somebody shares a real failure, and nothing bad happens to them. Not a raised eyebrow. Not a note in their file. Not a sideways comment eight months later during promotion season. People are watching for the punishment with the patience of a cat at a mousehole, and one small punishment resets the whole thing to zero.

What to do on Monday

Skip the language change. Try these instead.

Go first, and go recent. Share one of yours from this quarter, not a charming story from three jobs ago about a decision nobody remembers. Old failures are safe failures. Safe failures teach nobody anything.

Say what it cost. "I got the hiring priority wrong and we ran short for two months" beats "I have made mistakes too". Vague admissions are a humble-sounding way of admitting nothing.

Share it wider than the incident. If only the three people in the room hear it, you have run a post-mortem, not a learning moment. The word "shared" is doing real work in Ridge's definition.

Separate the person from the process, out loud. Most failures come from a system with a hole in it, not from somebody being careless. Say which one you think it is, and say it in front of everybody, because they are all quietly wondering.

Watch the tail. The damage rarely lands in the meeting. It lands weeks later in a review, a promotion decision, a project assignment. Guard the tail, or the meeting was theatre.

The uncomfortable bit

If you have used the phrase for a year and no senior person has shared a failure of their own, you have not built a learning culture. You have built a nicer word for the same old blame, and your team clocked it long before you did.

The vocabulary was never the problem. Words are free, and free things do not change behavior. What changes behavior is somebody with power taking a visible hit and walking away intact, over and over, until the team believes the room is safe.

So here is the question I would sit with. When was the last time you shared a failure of your own, by name, with a number attached, in front of people who report to you?

If you have to think hard about the answer... you already know what your culture is.

The Chartered Management Institute, working with YouGov, surveyed over 4,500 UK workers and managers. Their findings landed with a thud. 82% of people stepping into management have had no formal management or leadership training at all. They call them accidental managers. Promoted for being good at the old job, popular, or standing nearby when the chair emptied.

Same research: only 27% of workers describe their manager as highly effective. Of the workers who do not rate their boss, half plan to leave within the year, and only a third feel motivated to do a good job.

My own survey work points the same direction. 99.5% of the people I asked said they have had one or more types of bad boss. Not a rounding error. A near-universal experience.

So we take someone with no training, hand them six humans and a spreadsheet, and then act surprised when they lead by reciting instructions.

They are not bad people. They were never shown how to boil water.

Telling, with a question mark on the end

Ask managers whether they coach their teams and almost all of them say yes.

Julia Milner and Trenton Milner studied this for Harvard Business Review. Their conclusion is blunt: managers tend to think they are coaching when they are telling their employees what to do.

I did this for years. I would lean back, do my thoughtful face, and say, "Have you considered approaching it the way I did in 2011?"

Reader, this is not a question. It is a recipe read aloud at volume.

Real coaching starts from a position of not knowing. Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular made the same case in The Leader as Coach: leaders are no longer expected to hold all the answers, and command-and-control has run out of road. The job shifted from dispensing to drawing out.

The hard bit is not the technique. The hard bit is admitting you have no idea, in front of someone who reports to you.

Three ingredients you already own

Basic cooking is a handful of moves. Heat, salt, timing. Basic coaching is smaller than people fear.

Ask one question before you give one answer. Not five questions. One. "What have you tried so far?" works in almost every situation, including the ones where you already know the answer. Especially those.

Then shut up for four seconds. Four seconds of silence feels like a fortnight. Most people fill it with the thing they were too nervous to say first. Everything worth hearing lives in second three.

Come back to it on Thursday. One follow-up turns a conversation into coaching. Without it, you had a chat. I set reminders, because I forget, and forgetting reads as indifference to the person waiting.

Three ingredients. No certification, no budget line, no workshop with flip charts.

The excuse I hear most

"I have no time for coaching."

I used to say it with a straight face, usually while re-explaining something for the fourth time to the same engineer.

Look at the arithmetic. Answering a question takes two minutes. Answering the same question every week for a year takes an hour and a half, plus a person who has quietly stopped thinking for themselves. Asking "what would you try first?" takes four minutes once, and then the question stops coming back.

Telling is fast food. Cheap, quick, and you eat again in an hour.

The other excuse is the fear of getting it wrong. Of asking a wooden question, or opening something you have no training to handle. Fair. I have sat in a one-to-one where an honest question landed on a subject far past my competence. Two things helped: saying "I have no idea how to help with this part" out loud, and knowing where the real support sits inside the company. Neither one required a qualification.

What burnt dinner costs

The same CMI research found 72% of workers with an effective manager felt valued and appreciated. Set it beside the third of workers who walked out of a job over a bad culture.

Nobody quits over a manager who asked good questions and listened badly. People quit over managers who never asked at all. The manager who fumbles a coaching conversation still signals something loud: I looked at you as a person with your own thinking.

Fumbling beats abstaining. Undercooked beats no dinner.

My wife Debra and I spend a lot of our working lives on this at Step It Up HR, and the pattern repeats in every room. Leaders arrive braced for a masterclass. They leave holding three questions and a promise to follow up. The small stuff is the whole meal.

Cook badly, and feed someone anyway

There is a version of you sitting in one-to-ones giving out answers nobody asked for, because the alternative feels like amateur hour.

It is amateur hour. Go anyway.

You will ask a clumsy question. Somebody will look at you sideways. You will find yourself in a silence with no idea where to put your hands. Then a person on your team will say a true thing out loud for the first time in months, and you will understand what the fuss is about.

I burned the chicken. I kept cooking.

Who on your team has been waiting for one real question from you, and what stops you asking it on Monday?

Gallup's global engagement indicator puts worldwide employee engagement at 20% in 2025. In the US it sits at 31%.

Same source, and this one should sting: only 31% of US employees say their company's mission or purpose makes them feel their job is important.

Read it again. Seven in ten people do not feel their work connects to the thing you spent an offsite writing.

Those pillars did not fail because the words were wrong. They failed because you were answering a question nobody in the building was asking.

What people are asking instead

My own research on bad bosses found 99.5% of survey respondents said they had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Not a rounding error. Effectively everybody.

When I dug into what made those bosses bad, almost none of it was strategic. Nobody said "my manager had an insufficiently ambitious five-year plan."

They said things like:

• I did not know if I was doing well.
• I asked for help and nothing happened.
• I found out about the reorganisation from a colleague.
• My workload went up and nobody acknowledged it.

Those are all Tuesday problems. Every one of them is answerable this week, by you, without a consultant and without a deck.

Hope has a shorter half-life than you think

I am not arguing against direction. Teams drifting with no sense of where they are going burn out too.

I am arguing about timescale.

Hope for today is specific and small. Hope for 2029 is abstract and cheap. When someone is underwater, an abstract promise reads as a dodge, because it is one.

The hospital example is worth sitting with. Picture telling a nurse coming off a fourteen-hour shift her hospital will, in three years, become a regional centre of excellence.

She does not need excellence. She needs to know whether next month's schedule is fixed and whether anyone senior has noticed what this month cost her.

Give her the second thing and she will listen to the first. Give her the first without the second and you have taught her you are not a serious person.

Why leaders keep doing it anyway

I think there are three reasons, and none of them flatter us.

The long term is safe. Nobody holds you to a 2029 number. They will hold you to a promise about next Friday. So the further out you aim, the less exposed you feel.

Big thinking feels like the job. Somewhere along the way we decided strategy is senior and operations is junior. So the more time you spend on the future, the more important you look. Meanwhile the person doing the actual work is drowning in a process you designed and never revisited.

Detail is embarrassing. Admitting you do not know why the approval step takes eleven days is humbling. Announcing a bold new direction is not. One of those makes you look competent. The other makes you competent.

I have hidden behind all three. The pattern is easy to spot in other people and almost invisible in yourself.

The test I use now

Before I talk about the future, I ask myself one question.

Have I earned the right to talk about next year?

You earn it by delivering something visible in the short term. Not a big thing. A real thing.

You fixed the schedule. You killed the report nobody read. You gave them the honest answer about the budget instead of the reassuring one. You went to bat for one person and they saw it.

Do it three or four times and your team will follow you anywhere, including into a three-year plan. Skip it, and your vision statement is noise with better typography.

Three things to do this week

Say the true thing about right now. Not the polished version. If it is hard, name it as hard. People forgive difficulty. They do not forgive being managed.

Ship one visible fix. Something your team has complained about twice. Remove it. Tell them you removed it and why. Small and real beats large and promised.

Ask one person what would make next week better. Then do it, or explain why you cannot. Both count. Silence does not.

None of these need budget approval. Which is rather the point. The reason they do not happen is not resources. It is attention.

What the long-term plan is for

Vision has a job. It is not the job most leaders give it.

A good long-term plan is a filter for your own decisions. It tells you which opportunities to refuse. It stops you chasing the shiny thing in Q3. It gives you a reason to say no.

It is internal work. For you and your leadership team.

The mistake is treating it as a communications product and pushing it down to people whose horizon is next Thursday. You are handing someone a telescope when they asked for a torch.

Keep the plan. Use it to make choices. Stop performing it at people.

The version I would give now

Rewind the town hall and I would cut it to five minutes.

Here is what is hard right now. Here is what I am doing about it this month. Here is what I do not yet know, and when I will come back with an answer. Here is the one direction we are heading, in a sentence, so you know I have not lost the plot.

Then sit down.

No pyramid. No pillars. No dead famous person.

A five-minute version with something real in it beats forty minutes of architecture. Your team will not remember your four pillars. They will remember whether the thing you promised in March showed up in April.

I write more about the gap between what leaders say and what teams experience over at Step It Up HR, and it comes up in almost every conversation I have on the Corey-osity Unleashed podcast.

So here is the question worth sitting with. If you asked your team today what you are going to fix for them this month, would a single one of them have an answer?

If not, put the roadmap down and go find out.

The World Health Organization put burn-out into ICD-11 in 2019. Read their announcement and one word jumps out: occupational. Burn-out is a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress with no successful management of it. WHO lists three dimensions: energy depletion, mental distance from the job, and reduced professional efficacy.

They also say something people skip over. Burn-out is not a medical condition. It sits in the chapter about factors influencing health status. It describes what the job did to the person, not what the person did to themselves.

Read the definition again. Chronic workplace stress. Not chronic snack shortage. Not a personal failure of resilience. The workplace is the subject of the sentence.

So why do so many responses target the worker?

46,336 people already answered this

William Fleming at the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre looked at data from 46,336 UK workers across 233 organisations. He tested eleven common individual-level wellbeing offerings: mindfulness, resilience training, stress management courses, relaxation classes, wellbeing apps. The lot.

He found no evidence of benefit. None. A few of the offerings showed slightly worse outcomes for participants, likely because the people already struggling were the ones signing up.

Fleming's own summary is blunt. Organisations have to change the workplace, not only the worker. The study went into the Industrial Relations Journal, and it deserves more airtime in HR meetings than it gets.

Sit with the size of it. Forty-six thousand people. Two hundred and thirty-three employers. The wellbeing app did nothing.

Gallup made a list, and every item is structural

Gallup's research on burnout names five root causes with the strongest correlation to burnout:

1. Unfair treatment at work
2. Unmanageable workload
3. Unclear communication from managers
4. Lack of manager support
5. Unreasonable time pressure

Go down the list and ask which one a fruit basket fixes. Which one a lunchtime meditation session fixes. Which one an app with a breathing exercise fixes.

Zero. Every single cause is a decision somebody made. Somebody set the deadline. Somebody stayed silent about priorities. Somebody promoted the person with no interest in listening. Somebody approved the headcount freeze while the roadmap grew.

Gallup also found employees who feel supported by their manager are around 70% less likely to hit burnout regularly. Manager support. Free. Available today. No procurement cycle needed.

Their numbers on how widespread this is should stop the conversation on its own: 31% of US women and 23% of US men report feeling burned out often or always. Close to a third of the workforce. No fruit basket moves a number of a size like this.

Why leaders reach for perks anyway

I get why the fruit shows up. Perks are easy to buy, easy to announce, and easy to measure. You have a line item, a launch email, and a photo for LinkedIn. Done by Thursday.

Fixing the structure is none of those things. It means telling a stakeholder no. It means admitting the roadmap needs six people and you have four. It means sitting down with a manager everybody quietly avoids and saying the hard thing out loud. It means changing how you run your own calendar, because your team copies your behaviour whatever the policy says.

There is a status trap in it too. Buying a benefit feels like leadership. It has a budget, a vendor, a rollout plan, and a slide. Saying no to a stakeholder feels like losing. So the calendar stays full, the headcount stays flat, and the yoga instructor gets booked for Wednesday.

A wellbeing budget is also a beautiful bit of cover. When somebody breaks, the org points at the app nobody opened and says support was available. The problem gets relocated into the employee. He should have used the resources. She should have set better boundaries.

The framing is convenient, and the Oxford data shows it does not survive contact with reality.

What helps instead

If you lead people, here is where the work sits.

Fix the load before you fix the mood. Count the work. Count the people. If those two numbers disagree, no amount of mindfulness closes the gap. Cut scope, hire, or move the date. Pick one and say it out loud.

Make priorities unambiguous. Unclear communication is on Gallup's list for a reason. If your team has five number-one priorities, they have none, and they will burn hours guessing which one you meant.

Deal with the manager everybody dreads. In my own research into bad bosses, 99.5% of respondents told me they have had one or more types of bad boss. One bad manager creates more burnout in a quarter than a wellbeing programme repairs in a year. Coach them or move them.

Watch what you model. Emails at 11pm from the boss are a policy, whatever the handbook says. So is answering Slack on holiday.

Ask a better question. Not "are you OK?" in a corridor, where the only allowed answer is yes. Try "what is on your plate right now, and what should come off it?" Then remove something. If nothing comes off, you have run a survey, not a conversation.

If you are the one burning out

Say the words to somebody with the authority to change your workload. Say them early, and be specific. "I am at capacity" gets nodded at. "These four things are due Friday, two of them will slip, tell me which two" gets a decision.

You are not weak for hitting a wall built by somebody else. And you are not obliged to fix a structural problem with personal effort. If you speak up with specifics and nothing moves, you have learned something important about the employer, not about yourself.

I wrote more about the boss side of this over at Step It Up HR, because the same failure keeps showing up under different names.

The test

Next time somebody proposes a wellbeing initiative, run one check. Ask which of Gallup's five root causes it touches. If the honest answer is none, it is a snack, not a solution. Snacks are fine. Call them snacks.

So what is your workplace treating as a perk problem when the real problem sits in a calendar, a headcount plan, or a management chain nobody wants to talk about?

Nick Bloom at Stanford ran a two year study with more than 1,600 workers at Trip.com, one of the world's largest travel agencies. Half went hybrid, half stayed in the office full time. The results were not subtle. Quit rates dropped 33% in six months for the flexible group. No measurable difference in performance, productivity, or innovation. No difference in promotion rates after two years. Managers had predicted a 2.6% productivity drop before the study. By the end, those same managers believed flexibility improved productivity by about 1%.

Trip.com worked out each departure cost them roughly $20,000 in hiring and training. A third fewer departures adds up to millions.

Then there is the University of Pittsburgh work on return to office mandates at S&P 500 firms. Their finding was blunt. Mandates did not improve financial performance or firm value. They did damage job satisfaction, work life balance scores, and ratings of senior management. The researchers concluded managers use mandates for power grabbing and for blaming employees when results go sideways.

Read it again. Academics do not normally write in those terms.

Gallup's hybrid work indicator fills in the rest. Around 52% of remote capable US employees work hybrid, 26% fully remote, 22% on site. Six in ten remote workers say they would be extremely likely to hunt for another job if flexibility disappeared. Fewer than one in ten prefer full time on site.

So the desk argument is settled, more or less. Which means we have been fighting over a solved problem while the real one sat in the corner untouched.

The office was never the point

I have worked in offices where I felt completely alone. Surrounded by forty people, headphones on, nobody speaking to anybody, everyone messaging each other from eight feet away. Nobody wrote a policy about it. Nobody measured it. The badge data looked wonderful.

I have also worked with people I never met in person for two years and would still take a bullet for. We knew each other's kids' names. We knew who was having a rough month. We knew who needed a nudge and who needed to be left alone until Thursday.

Presence and connection are different things. We keep pretending they are the same thing because presence is easy to count.

There is the whole problem in one line. Connection is hard to measure, so we measure attendance and call it culture. It is the streetlight fallacy dressed up in a lanyard.

What connection is made of

Strip away the location argument and ask a harder question. What makes someone feel part of something?

Being known. Not "hi how are you" known. Known as in your manager remembers your daughter had surgery last month and asks about it without being prompted. It takes attention, not proximity.

Being useful. People need to see how their work connects to something bigger than a ticket queue. Nobody gets it from sitting near the person whose work feeds into theirs. They get it from someone taking ten minutes to explain the chain.

Being safe. Safe enough to say "I don't understand this" in front of the whole team. Safe enough to say "I think we're building the wrong thing." It is a leadership behavior, not a floor plan.

Being trusted. Trust is the one every leader claims to give and few structure for. If your policy requires people in a building so you feel better about whether they are working, you have not given trust. You have given supervision and called it culture.

Notice how none of those four need a specific postcode.

The 11%

Buried in the Gallup data is the number I keep coming back to. Only 11% of employees work on teams where the hybrid policy was set collaboratively by the team itself. Where teams do build the policy together, Gallup reports the policy feels fair and collaboration improves.

Eleven percent. Which means in roughly nine cases out of ten, the decision about how a team works together gets made by someone who is not on the team.

I have sat on both sides of it. Handing a policy down is fast. It feels decisive. It also teaches everyone in earshot a lesson you did not intend to teach, which is: your judgment about your own work is not wanted here.

Ask a team to design their own rhythm and something different happens. They argue. They work out Priya needs Monday quiet and Sam needs Wednesday whiteboards. They land somewhere messier than a corporate standard and defend it fiercely, because it is theirs.

The policy is not the win. The act of deciding together is the win.

Intentional beats mandatory

I am not arguing for nobody ever meeting. Some things go badly over a video call. Hard feedback. Grief. The first week of a new hire's job. Genuine creative fights where you need to see faces.

Argue for those. Book those. Fly people in for those and spend real money on it.

What I object to is the substitution. Mandating three days a week and then filling those days with the same video calls everyone had at home, sitting in a room with headphones on, talking to people in another office. I have watched teams do exactly this. Commute an hour to attend Zoom. Nobody laughed, because it was not funny.

If you drag people in, owe them a reason. Structure the day. Make it worth the train fare. Otherwise you have imposed a cost and delivered nothing back.

The question worth asking

I run leadership work over at Step It Up HR, and this comes up in nearly every session. Someone asks what the right number of office days is. My answer disappoints them.

I do not know. Neither do you. Neither does the consultant selling the framework.

Here is a better question. When someone on your team has a terrible week, do they tell you? If the answer is no, adding a fourth mandatory day will not fix it. If the answer is yes, the number of days matters far less than you think.

The location debate survives because it is comfortable. It gives leaders something concrete to decide. Deciding where people sit is enormously easier than becoming the kind of leader people want to sit near.

Ruth was right. The future is not hybrid. Hybrid is a rota. The future is human, and humans have never been retained by a floor plan.

So before your next policy announcement, try this. Name the outcome you want. Say it in plain words, without the word "culture" in the sentence. Then ask whether a mandate delivers it, or whether you are reaching for the lever within arm's length because the right lever is further away and heavier.

What are you defending, the connection or the building?

They looked at dissertations and found authors from lower-ranked schools packed in more jargon than authors from prestigious ones. In startup pitch experiments, participants made to feel low status reached for jargon. Higher-status participants went for being understood instead. You will find the write-up in Columbia's own summary of the work.

Read the finding again, because it inverts the whole thing. The person filling the air with terminology is not the smartest person in the room. Statistically, they are the one who feels least secure in it.

It gets worse. A MyPerfectResume survey cited by the NeuroLeadership Institute found 33% of employees admitted using business jargon whose meaning they did not know. A third of the room is repeating sounds. And 86% have used popular jargon at some point, so nearly everyone is in on it.

We are all standing on a stack of books pretending to be taller.

Your team pays the bill

Here is where I stop finding it funny.

LinkedIn and Duolingo ran a global study on workplace jargon in 2023. Their State of Workplace Jargon report found 40% of workers have had a misunderstanding or made a mistake at work because they did not know what a piece of jargon meant, or used it wrong.

Four in ten. Real mistakes, real rework, real evenings lost, because a leader chose the impressive phrasing over the clear one.

The same report found 61% of professionals believe people with a better grasp of workplace jargon get ahead. Sit with the finding for a second. Your people think fluency in nonsense is a promotion criterion, and they are not entirely wrong, which is the depressing part.

And it sorts people. Hybrid and remote workers reported feeling left out because of jargon at a rate of 71%, against 54% for those in the office. Jargon is a door with a password on it. Whoever is furthest from the room gets locked out first.

The generational split tells you where this ends up. 60% of Gen Z and 65% of millennials want jargon reduced or gone. Only 23% of baby boomers agree. The people arriving in your workforce have already voted, and they voted against you.

What the research on bad bosses never says

My own survey work found 99.5% of respondents said they had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Ninety-nine point five percent. It is close to a universal human experience, like sunburn.

Not one of them said their boss failed them through insufficient command of strategic vocabulary.

They said their boss took credit. Their boss went missing when it got hard. Their boss changed the target and pretended it had always been there. Their boss never once said "good work" and meant it. Their boss made them feel stupid for asking a question.

Every failure on the list is a human failure. Every fix is a human fix. No model required.

The nine-year-old test

I have a simple rule now, and I use it on myself before I use it on anyone else.

Before I say something to my team, I ask whether I would be able to say it to my grandson and have him understand it. Not the topic. The instruction.

"We need to finish the thing we promised the customer, and I told them Friday, so Friday it is." A nine-year-old gets it.

"We need to converge on a delivery posture with our external partners." A nine-year-old asks what a posture is, and he is right to.

Try it in your next one-to-one. Say the plain version out loud. It will feel exposed, and it should. Plain words carry a commitment attached to them, and everyone in the room hears the commitment land. The exposure is the entire point. Leadership without exposure is theater.

Three things to do this week

Ban one phrase. Pick the worst one in your company. "Circle back". "Leverage". "Reach out". Kill it in your own mouth first, then in your written updates. Notice how much harder your sentences have to work.

End every meeting with the plain version. Before people stand up, say who is doing what, by when, in words a stranger would follow. If you struggle to produce those words, the meeting failed and you now know it.

Invite the question. Say out loud: "if I use a phrase and you do not know what I mean, stop me". Then thank the first person brave enough to do it, in front of everyone. You have made the room 33% more honest in one move.

The uncomfortable bit

If you strip the jargon out and there is nothing underneath, you find out this week rather than in three years.

Some leaders sense this. It is why they hold on so tight to the vocabulary. The language is not a tool for them, it is a costume, and the costume is load-bearing.

Take it off anyway. The people who follow you are not impressed by it. They are exhausted by it. They want to know what you want, why it matters, and whether you will stand behind them when it goes wrong.

Rocket science is hard because rockets are hard. Leading people is hard for a completely different reason. It asks you to be honest, consistent, and present, over and over, on days when you feel like doing none of it.

No amount of terminology makes any of it easier. It only makes it easier to hide.

So here is my question for you. If you had to explain your current strategy to a nine-year-old, in words he would repeat back correctly... would you know how?

She's blunt about how ridiculous it sounds. In her piece on empathizing with someone who's wrong she writes: "I know. Their behavior isn't reasonable ... from your perspective. But try to answer the question anyway."

The last bit is the whole trick. Answer it anyway. Not because they've earned the benefit of the doubt. Because you need better information, and you're not going to get it while you're busy diagnosing their character.

What I Found Out About the Guy With the Folded Arms

He'd been burned. Two years before I joined, he raised a concern about a data migration in a design review. Got told it was out of scope. Shipped anyway. It corrupted six weeks of customer records, and he spent the next three months of evenings unpicking it by hand. Nobody who made the call to ship was still at the company. He was.

So he wasn't obstructive. He was the only person in the room still paying the bill for being wrong.

Once I knew, everything changed. Not his behavior. Mine. I started giving him the edge cases before the meeting instead of during it. He stopped needing to ambush anyone. Same man, same personality, completely different meetings.

I hadn't fixed a difficult person. I'd stopped mistaking a situation for a person.

This Has a Name, and It's Older Than Your Career

Psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error. Lee Ross named it in 1977 in a paper with the wonderful title "The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings". The idea is simple and deeply annoying once you spot it in yourself.

When you do something stupid, you know why. Traffic was bad. You'd been up half the night with a sick kid. The brief changed on Friday and nobody told you.

When someone else does something stupid, you skip all of it and go straight to the person. They're lazy. They're difficult. They don't care.

Same behavior. Two completely different explanations. And you apply the generous one to yourself without noticing you're doing it.

Here's the part to worry about as a leader. You have less information about your people than they have about you. You see the output. You don't see the two-hour commute, the parent in hospital, the last boss who punished honesty. You see arms folded in a design review.

Why It Matters More When You're the Boss

Gallup estimates managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. Seventy percent. Not the perks. Not the mission statement. You.

So every time you label someone instead of understanding them, you're not making a private judgment. You're setting the weather for a person's working life.

And once you've labeled somebody, you stop collecting evidence. You've filed them. Everything they do afterwards gets read through the file. They're late because they're unreliable, never because daycare ran over. They pushed back because they're negative, never because they spotted something you missed.

My own research on bad bosses found 99.5% of people surveyed said they'd had one or more types of bad boss. Not "a rough patch with a manager." A bad boss. I don't think most of those bosses were monsters. I think most of them were people who filed their team early and never reopened the file.

The Bit Nobody Wants to Hear

This is not about being nice.

Asking why a reasonable person would act this way does not mean the behavior is fine. It doesn't mean you skip the hard conversation. Somebody rude in front of a client still needs telling. Somebody missing deadlines still has a problem to solve.

What changes is the problem you're solving. If you believe the problem is their character, your only lever is pressure ... push harder, escalate, performance-manage them out. If you believe the problem might be their situation, you suddenly have a dozen levers. Change the workload. Change the information flow. Change the deadline. Change yourself.

One of those approaches has a track record. The other is how you end up hiring a replacement in six months and watching the same thing happen all over again to the new person.

I've written before about how surviving a toxic workplace isn't a career plan. The flip side is true for leaders. Grinding people down until they quit isn't a management plan.

How to Run the Question for Real

Three steps. None of them take long.

Stop before you respond. Grace suggests three deep breaths. Sounds soft. Isn't. You're giving your slow brain a chance to catch up with your fast one, which has already decided the person is an idiot.

Ask the question and answer it. Properly, in your head, all the way through. "Why would a reasonable person fold their arms and pick this apart?" Come up with three answers. At least one of them will be uncomfortable, because at least one of them will involve you.

Go and check. This is the step people skip. The question isn't a guessing game you win alone at your desk. It's a prompt to go ask them. "You push hard on data integrity in these reviews. What have I not understood about why?"

Then shut up and listen. Listen in the way where you're prepared to be changed by the answer.

What It Costs You to Be Right

We skip all this because labeling people is fast and it feels good. "He's difficult, full stop" closes the loop. No further thought required. You get to be the reasonable one.

Curiosity is slower, and it costs you something. It costs you the certainty. Sometimes the answer is a reasonable person acted the way they did because their manager did something thoughtless. Horrible thing to find out about yourself on a Tuesday afternoon.

But you'd want to know. Wouldn't you?

There's someone on your team right now you've already filed. You know who. The name came to you two paragraphs ago.

Go and ask them the question this week.

Zenger Folkman looked at 2,801 managers rated by 13,048 of their direct reports. Under the managers ranked worst, 14% of people fell into the quiet quitting group, and only 20% were willing to give extra effort. Under the best managers, quiet quitting fell to 3% and willingness to go further hit 62%. Their write-up is here, and the title says the quiet part out loud: quiet quitting is about bad bosses, not bad employees.

Same labor market. Same generation. Same economy. Different boss. Three to four times the disengagement.

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace found global engagement dropped to 20% in 2025, down from a peak of 23%, and priced low engagement at roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity... 9% of global GDP.

Now the number worth sitting with. Manager engagement fell from 27% to 22% in a single year, the largest drop Gallup has tracked. Gallup lays most of the wider decline at the feet of disengaged managers rather than disengaged workers.

Disengagement rolls downhill. Your team caught it from someone.

A 2026 study in Frontiers in Psychology traced the mechanism with 363 employees at small and medium businesses. Authoritarian leadership drove job burnout. Burnout drove quiet quitting. And when people were pushed to work while sick, the effect got worse.

There's the chain. Boss behavior, then exhaustion, then withdrawal. Nobody in the sequence woke up one morning and chose to be lazy.

My own research says the same thing from the other end. 99.5% of the people I surveyed told me they had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Not a fifth. Not a third. Effectively everyone.

"Lazy Gen Z" is a story we tell to feel better

Blaming a generation is comfortable because it requires nothing from you. Generations arrive pre-blamed. You get to shake your head in a leadership meeting, everyone nods, and the calendar stays exactly as it was.

Here's the tell. If it were generational, disengagement would be spread evenly across every team in your building. It isn't. One team is fired up. The team two doors down is dead behind the eyes. Same age range, same pay bands, same free fruit.

The variable is not the birth year. The variable is who runs the one-on-ones.

Loud leadership sounds quiet from the inside

Nobody thinks of themselves as the bad boss. Nobody. Every one of the bosses in my 99.5% had their own reasons, their own pressure from above, their own story where they were the reasonable one.

I've been the one talking. I've walked out of a meeting satisfied with how well it went, when what I'd done was fill 45 minutes with my own voice and mistake the silence for agreement. Nobody pushed back. I read it as alignment. It was surrender.

Loud leadership isn't shouting. It's volume of any kind. Volume of urgency. Volume of detail. Volume of opinion. Volume of you.

Thomas Erikson's color model is a useful lens here, because people check out in different ways for different reasons.

• The Red boss, all speed and results, exhausts the Green people who need stability. They go quiet to protect themselves.
• The Blue boss, all detail and process, grinds down the Yellow people who came for the ideas. They stop bringing ideas.
• The Green boss, all harmony, avoids the hard conversation until the Reds decide nothing matters here.
• The Yellow boss, all energy and no follow-through, teaches everyone their commitments are weather.

Four different styles. Four ways to make someone stop trying. None of them feel like bullying from where you're standing.

The check-out is not a character flaw. It's a verdict.

When someone drops to the minimum, they've run a private cost-benefit calculation and the extra effort lost. Not because effort is beneath them. Because effort stopped paying.

They tried something and got a shrug. They flagged a problem and got a process. They stayed late and nobody noticed, or worse, somebody noticed and took the credit.

Withdrawal is the rational response to a place where extra costs you something and returns nothing. Your quiet quitter isn't broken. They're keeping score, and you're losing.

Assume you go first

Here is the provocative bit, and I mean it: assume you need to change first.

Not because you're the villain. Because you're the one with the leverage. You set the meeting length, the deadline, the tone of the reply at 9pm on a Sunday. They set none of it.

Three things to do this week.

Ask the six-word question. Sit down with each person and ask: what aren't you getting from me? Then shut your mouth. The first answer is polite. The second answer is the real one, and it arrives only if you stay quiet long enough to be uncomfortable.

Change the dial, not the volume. If your instinct is to push harder on someone who has checked out, you're proving their point. A Green person needs reassurance and a clear picture of what stays the same. A Yellow person needs room and an audience. Pushing the same style harder gets you more of the result you already hate.

Fix one thing in public. Take the smallest, most fixable complaint you hear, fix it inside a week, and say out loud where it came from. Nothing rebuilds discretionary effort faster than watching feedback turn into a visible change. Nothing kills it faster than a listening session with no consequences.

If you want structure around this rather than good intentions, the awareness work we do at Step It Up HR starts in the same place: awareness first, then acceptance, then action. The order matters. Most leaders skip to action because it feels productive, and they fix the wrong thing loudly.

The part nobody wants to hear

Some of your quiet quitters are gone already. Two years of being talked over doesn't undo itself because you ran one good one-on-one. Some of them will leave, and the honest thing is to help them leave well.

The rest are watching to see whether this is a phase.

So here's my question for you. If your best person went quiet tomorrow, would you know within a week... or would you find out three weeks later, the way you did last time?

Wild wolves do none of it. L. David Mech, a senior research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey who used the alpha language himself before dropping it, has spent decades watching real packs. He told Scientific American the captive setup produced "the animal equivalent of what might happen in a human prison," and not the way wolves live when left alone. A wild pack is a family. A breeding pair, plus their pups from the last two or three seasons, six to ten animals in total. Mech's multi-year study of one pack on Ellesmere Island, published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology in 1999, found no bloody duels for the top slot. Parents feed the young first when food runs short. Grown offspring leave to start families of their own instead of fighting dad for his job.

Mech's line about it is the one I keep coming back to: "What would be the value of calling a human father the alpha male? He's just the father of the family."

So the whole model, the one your boss built his personality on, is a description of animals under stress in a cage. Business Insider ran the same conclusion under the headline There's No Such Thing As an Alpha Male back in 2016. Nobody told the guy with the voice.

I got taught the voice, and I used it

I came up through the U.S. Army. The command voice is a real skill and it works exactly where it belongs, which is a place with mortal risk, no time, and a chain of people trained to move on the word. Nobody debates a fire order. Nobody workshops it.

I carried the voice into tech leadership, because it had worked before and because it felt like competence. Deep tone, flat certainty, an answer for everything. If someone asked me a question with no good answer, I gave a confident one anyway and worked out the truth later.

It bought me obedience. It never once bought me information.

Here is what nobody warns you about. A team reads certainty as a closed door. Ask a room full of engineers to challenge a decision you announced in your armour voice and you get a polite pause and five people looking at the table. They have all seen what happens to the first person who speaks. So they let you walk into the wall, and afterwards they tell each other in the kitchen they saw it coming three weeks out.

My survey work backs up how common this is. Of everyone who answered, 99.5% said they had lived under one or more types of bad boss. Not a rare defect. The default experience of working life, and most of those bosses thought of themselves as strong.

The three worst words a strong leader learns to say

The turn for me came in a meeting where I had no idea what the right call was. Old me would have picked one and sold it with the voice. Instead I said it out loud. "I don't know. Someone in this room knows more about this than I do."

The silence lasted about four seconds and felt like a month.

Then a quiet engineer who had said nothing in six weeks of meetings started talking. He had the shape of the answer. He had been sitting on it, because in the room I had built, offering it would have looked like a correction of the boss.

Nothing about my authority fell over. What fell over was the performance, and the performance had been costing me every good idea in the building.

Google spent years and millions arriving at the same place

This is not a soft preference of mine. Google ran a research project called Aristotle across its own teams to find what separates the high performers from the rest. It went in expecting the answer to be the mix of people. Star engineers, seniority, the right personality blend.

The answer was none of those. Google's own write-up of the work puts psychological safety at the top of the list, above dependability, structure, meaning and impact. Psychological safety means people take a risk in front of each other without fearing punishment for it. Speak up, disagree, admit an error, ask the question everyone thinks is dumb.

Who sets whether a team has it? The person with the most status in the room. You. Every time you meet an admission of doubt with a flicker of contempt, you teach eight people to stop bringing you information. Every time you go first with your own doubt, you buy a little more of it back.

The alpha act and psychological safety cannot occupy the same room. Pick one.

Vulnerability with boundaries, not a therapy session

The pushback I get is always the same. Nobody wants a leader who weeps in the all-hands.

Correct. Nobody does. Brené Brown, talking to organisational psychologist Adam Grant on the TED WorkLife podcast, put it in one sentence: "Vulnerability minus boundaries is not vulnerability." The test she offers is whether you are sharing to move the work and the relationship forward, or to offload something onto people who did not sign up to carry it.

In practice, useful vulnerability at work is narrow and specific:

• "I got this wrong last quarter, and here is what I misread."
• "I don't know. Who does?"
• "I'm out of my depth on the data side. Walk me through it."
• "I'm worried about this deadline, and I want to hear the case against my worry."

Notice how none of it is confessional. All of it is about the work. It hands the room permission to be honest, and it costs you nothing except the costume.

The people hiding what they already do

Watching Reddit last week, the loudest argument was not about whether AI output is any good. It was about admission. Dr. Dre said in a New York Times interview he uses AI in his production work, and added the part with teeth: plenty of other producers use it and do not want to admit it. His thread drew far more argument per upvote than any of the anti-AI posts around it.

The same shape shows up everywhere. People will hide a tool, a doubt, a gap in their knowledge, not because hiding helps the work, but because admitting looks weak in front of whoever holds the status. The instinct is expensive, and leaders install it.

Try this in your next meeting

Say "I don't know" once, out loud, where you mean it. Then shut up long enough for someone to fill the gap.

The wolves stopped being alphas the moment we watched them properly. Turned out they were somebody's parents, feeding the young first, and their pack held together by care rather than teeth.

If a real wolf would not perform the alpha act, what exactly are you performing it for?

Before the guessing started, Newton asked the tappers to predict their hit rate. They said about half, with estimates running from 10% up to 95%.

The listeners got 3 songs right out of 120. Two and a half percent.

Here is the part worth sitting with. The tappers were not stupid and the listeners were not deaf. Inside the tapper's skull, a full orchestra plays. Horns, drums, the words, the key change. Outside, the listener hears a finger going bump bump bump on a table.

The tapper hears music. The listener hears Morse code.

Economists gave this a name in 1989. The curse of knowledge, coined by Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber. Once you know a thing, you lose the ability to picture not knowing it.

Every leader I have worked with, myself included, taps at their team and wonders why nobody hums along.

Six weeks versus four minutes

Look again at my reorg meeting.

By the time I opened my mouth, I had lived inside the decision for a month and a half. I had already grieved the version we were not doing. I had already fought the objections... in my head, with an imaginary version of my team, and I won every round. Convenient.

My team walked into a room at 10am on a Tuesday. They got four minutes of conclusion with none of the road behind it.

They were not slow. They were new to it. I was the one behaving oddly, standing there expecting a room of people to arrive at a destination in four minutes after it took me six weeks of walking.

Worse, the silence felt like agreement. Silence is almost never agreement. Silence means people are still catching up, or they gave up catching up and decided to wait and see what happens.

I read the room wrong because I was reading my own head.

The receipts

This is not a quirk of one bad Tuesday. Gallup found only 22% of employees strongly agree the leaders in their organization have a clear direction, and only 41% strongly agree they know what their company stands for.

Read those numbers as a leadership scorecard, because they are one. Almost no organization sets out with an unclear direction. Every leadership team I have met believes they have said it. Loudly. Repeatedly. In a deck.

They have said it. They have not been heard. Those are different events, and only one of them shows up in the numbers.

Knowing about the bias will not save you

Here is the annoying bit.

The research says this bias resists the obvious fixes. Telling people about it does not shrink it. Asking them to think harder about the other person's view does not shrink it. Paying them does not shrink it either.

So reading this article will not fix your next all-hands. Sorry.

What works is mechanics. Habits with teeth, built into how you communicate, running whether you feel wise on the day or not. Here are the four I use.

1. Show the trail, not the conclusion

I now open with the wrong answers.

"Here are the three options I killed, and why." It costs ninety seconds and it hands the team the walk instead of the destination. People argue with a conclusion. People join a trail.

2. Say how long you sat with it

Out loud. "I have been turning this over since the second week of July."

It sounds like a small thing. It resets the clock in the room. It tells everyone their blankness is fair, and it gives them permission to need time as well.

3. Make them say it back

Not "any questions?" ... a dead phrase, and I have wasted years on it.

Try this instead: "Sanjay, tell me how you would explain this to your team on Monday."

It is uncomfortable the first few times. It is also the only reliable way to find out what landed, because the gap between my version and Sanjay's version is the exact size of the problem.

4. Treat the first telling as the announcement, not the understanding

The meeting where you announce something is not the meeting where people understand it. Those are two different meetings, sometimes weeks apart.

I write it in my calendar now. Announcement, then a follow-up, then a check-in with each lead. Same message, three shapes. It feels repetitive to me... which is the point. It feels new to them.

Jargon is tapping with extra steps

The same bias eats your onboarding.

You say "we'll run it past the CAB after the RFC lands" and you hear a clean sentence. Your new hire hears an adult in a cartoon going wah wah wah. They will not stop you, because stopping you means admitting they are lost in week two in front of people they want to impress.

I ran into this in the Army long before I ran into it in tech. Acronyms are a fence. Whoever is inside the fence stops noticing the fence exists.

So I ask new starters to keep a list of every word we use they do not know, and to send it to me at the end of week one. No shame in it, and no need to ask in front of anybody. Those lists have taught me more about our communication than any survey. It is also short-lived, because after about a month they stop noticing the fence too.

The bit I keep relearning

I have written before about not knowing being a superpower if you admit it, and about being the bottleneck while calling it leadership. This one sits in the same family.

The higher you go, the more you know, and the more expensive your knowing gets for everybody around you. Expertise buys you speed and charges you empathy. Nobody warns you about the invoice.

The good news is small. You do not need to know less. You need to remember what it felt like to not know, for about ninety seconds, before you open your mouth.

So think about the last big thing you announced. How long had you been living with it before your team heard the first word of it?

If the answer is weeks, and you gave them minutes, you were not communicating. You were tapping.

Gallup found only one in three US workers strongly agree they received recognition or praise for good work in the past seven days.

Flip it over. Two out of three people put in a full week of decent work and heard nothing about any of it.

I used to think I was the exception to this. I wasn't. I was generous with praise and terrible at making it stick. A hallway "nice work on the release" costs you four seconds and buys the other person about four seconds of feeling good. Then a Jira ticket lands and it's gone.

In my own research on bad bosses, 99.5% of respondents told me they'd had one or more types of bad boss. Almost nobody escapes. And when I dig into what made a boss bad, cruelty comes up far less often than absence. Nobody noticed. Nobody said anything. The work went into a hole and the hole never spoke back.

Written praise gets kept

Here's the difference between what I did and what Ruth does.

Nobody keeps a hallway compliment. People keep paper. People keep emails. I've watched someone pull a folded note out of a desk drawer from a manager they left eight years earlier.

Ask the next five people you work with whether they've kept something written from an old boss. At least one of them goes quiet, then goes and finds it.

Written praise survives the week it was written in. It survives reorgs, layoffs, a bad quarter, a new manager who doesn't know your history. On the worst day of somebody's year, it's still in the drawer.

Spoken praise has one more problem. It's deniable. If your only record of somebody's excellent year lives in your memory, then your memory is the promotion case. Memory is a terrible advocate. It compresses ten months into "solid" and forgets the Tuesday night the migration went sideways and one person stayed to fix it.

Writing forces you to be specific

This is the part I underrated for years.

Saying "great job this week" out loud is easy because it's empty. Writing "great job this week" down looks pathetic on the page, and you know it as you type it. The page shames you into detail.

So you go looking. What did they do? Which day? What happened next? And in going looking, you find out whether you were paying attention at all.

Specific praise proves you watched. Generic praise proves the opposite. Everyone on the receiving end knows the difference within one line.

Gallup's research on where memorable recognition comes from puts the direct manager at 28% and a senior leader or CEO at 24%. So write it, send it to the person, and copy their skip-level. You've turned a private note into two of the top sources of recognition at once, for the cost of one extra name in the To field.

The business argument, for anyone who needs one

I'd rather do this because it's decent. But some of you report to someone who wants a number.

Gallup and Workhuman found well-recognized employees were 45% less likely to have turned over two years later. The same research found people who strongly agree they get valuable feedback from the people they work with are five times as likely to be engaged.

Work out what one unplanned resignation costs you in recruitment fees, notice periods, ramp-up time, and the six months of half-speed while somebody new learns your codebase. Then set it against seven minutes on a Friday afternoon.

Why we don't do it

Three excuses, and I've used all three.

"No time." Seven minutes. One person a week, or your whole team once a week. If seven minutes a week is beyond your calendar, your calendar is the article you should be reading instead.

"It'll look soft." This one ran me for years and I was wrong about it. Vague praise looks soft. Detailed, evidenced praise reads like a performance review written by someone who was awake. Nobody has ever read a specific written commendation and thought less of the sender.

"It's not fair to the others." Fairness means looking at everybody, not praising everybody identically for unequal work. If you're worried one person gets noticed more, the fix is to look harder at the quiet ones, not to stop writing. Silence isn't neutral. Silence lands hardest on the people who never self-promote.

How to write one

Rules I'd give myself if I got those years back.

Name the person, the thing, and the effect. Not "you've been great lately". Try "you rewrote the import script on Tuesday after the vendor changed the schema with no notice, and the release went out on time because of it."

Date it. A dated note is evidence. An undated note is a mood.

Attach no ask. Praise with a request stapled to the bottom is a request. Send the ask on Monday.

Send it to them, copy their skip-level. Praise up the chain does work the person cannot do for themselves.

Weekly beats annual. Nobody remembers what they did in March by the time your appraisal cycle wheezes into November. Recognition delayed nine months isn't recognition, it's archaeology.

Never template it. The instant your team spots a mail merge, every note you've ever sent gets retroactively downgraded. One real paragraph beats a beautiful system.

Write it for the drawer. Assume they'll read it again in three years, on a bad day, in a different job. Write the version worth keeping.

What I'd do differently

I gave people a good decade of encouragement and left almost no trace of it. Somewhere out there are engineers who did outstanding work for me and hold nothing they'd show their next boss, or their kids, or themselves at 2am when the imposter voice starts up.

My fault, and mine to own. It's fixable for you.

Ruth calls hers love letters. Call yours whatever gets you past the flinch... a note, a Friday email, a receipt for good work. The label doesn't matter. The paper trail does.

So: who on your team has been doing good work for a year, and has nothing in writing to prove it? Write to them first, before Friday.

William Fleming at Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre studied 46,336 workers across 233 UK organizations, published in the Industrial Relations Journal in 2024. He looked at the whole shelf of individual wellbeing offerings. Mindfulness. Resilience training. Stress management. Relaxation classes. Wellbeing apps.

Across multiple measures of subjective wellbeing, people who took part were no better off than the people who did not. Not slightly better. No detectable benefit.

Fleming's conclusion is the line I keep coming back to: organizations have to change the workplace and not only the worker.

Then there is the American version, and it is a proper randomised trial rather than a survey. Zirui Song and Katherine Baicker ran a workplace wellness program across 160 worksites of a large warehouse retailer, published in JAMA in 2019. 32,974 employees. Eighteen months. Registered dietitians delivering eight modules on nutrition, exercise and stress.

After eighteen months, two self-reported behaviors improved. More people said they exercised regularly. More people said they were managing their weight. Good.

And then the list of things with no significant effect: 27 other self-reported health outcomes, 10 clinical markers including cholesterol, blood pressure and body mass index, 38 measures of medical spending and use, and all 3 employment outcomes. Absenteeism. Job tenure. Job performance.

Eighteen months, thirty-three thousand people, and the needle did not move on whether work was working.

What burns people out is the work

Gallup has been consistent on the causes for years. Their research on preventing burnout names five drivers: unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workload, unclear communication from a manager, lack of manager support, and unreasonable time pressure.

Read those five again. Every single one is a management decision. Not a hydration decision. Not a breathing-exercise decision.

Two numbers from the same body of work stopped me cold. Employees who feel treated unfairly are 2.3 times more likely to hit a high level of burnout. And employees who strongly agree their manager has their back are about 70% less likely to be burned out regularly.

Seventy percent. From a manager. Not from an app.

No amount of fruit competes with a boss who covers for you when the deadline slips.

Why the perk feels so good to the person buying it

I want to be fair to the people who order the fruit, because I have been one of them.

A perk is visible. Structural change is not. Nobody walks past a reduced sprint scope and says "oh, lovely, they care." Nobody photographs a deadline you moved. The work of protecting a team is mostly invisible, mostly uncomfortable, and mostly happens in conversations where you tell someone senior to you the word "no."

There is also a quieter reason. A perk puts the burden of recovery back on the person doing the burning. Take the mindfulness course. Use the app. Book the resilience session. The message underneath, whether anyone means it or not, is you are struggling with this workload and other people are coping, so here are some tools to help you cope too.

Fleming's data says the tools do not work. And the person on the receiving end already knew.

I have watched good engineers finish a stress webinar at 4pm and go straight back to a queue nobody had touched. They are not confused about what happened. They read it exactly right. The company would rather teach them to tolerate the conditions than change the conditions.

What I did instead, and what it cost me

I stopped buying things and started cutting things.

The first move was a list. Everything the team had been asked to deliver in the quarter, on one page, with the honest cost of each item next to it. Not the optimistic cost. The real one, with the on-call load and the legacy migration and the two hiring loops nobody had counted as work.

Then I took it to my boss and drew a line through 40% of it.

Did not go well. First meeting was awful. I got asked why the team was slower than last year, which was a fair question with an ugly answer: last year we were burning through reserves we no longer had. Two people had left. One of them was the person who knew the payments code.

Second meeting went better, because I brought the same page back with the customer impact of each cut written next to it. Turned out three of the items had no customer waiting on them at all. They were somebody's old idea, still on a roadmap slide, still generating status updates.

Here is what changed over the next quarter. Nobody left. Stand-up got noisy again, in the good way. The quiet engineer started arguing with me about database indexes, and I was thrilled about it.

Here is what did not change. My reputation with two people above me. I was the guy who pushed back. There is a cost to protecting a team, and the cost lands on you, not on them. Anyone telling you the two are aligned has never had to do it.

The test I use now

When somebody proposes a wellbeing initiative, I ask one question: does this change what we ask of people, or does it help them absorb what we already ask of them?

Absorbing is the fruit bowl. Changing is the hard one.

Changing looks like fewer priorities per quarter. Recovery time after a launch, on the calendar, protected. On-call rotations with enough people in them. Managers with small enough teams to know when somebody has gone quiet. Deadlines set with the people doing the work, not for them. Permission to stop something without a post-mortem into whose fault it was.

None of it fits on a laminated card.

By all means keep the fruit. Fruit is nice. I ate the apple, and it was a decent apple. Only stop pretending the apple is the strategy.

If your people are burning out and your answer arrives in a wicker bowl, you are not treating the problem. You are documenting your response to it.

So here is the question worth sitting with. Look at the last three things your organization did for wellbeing. How many of them changed the work? And if the answer is none, who in the building has the authority to change it... and what would it cost them to try?

The WHO classifies burn-out as an "occupational phenomenon" rather than a medical condition. Their words. It sits in the chapter about factors influencing health status, and they define it as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress which has not been successfully managed.

Read the end of the sentence again. Not stress which the employee failed to cope with. Stress which has not been managed... by the workplace.

The three dimensions they list are "feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion", mental distance and cynicism about the job, and "reduced professional efficacy". Every symptom sits inside the person. Every cause sits outside them.

Four of the five biggest causes belong to the boss

Gallup studied nearly 7,500 full-time employees and found 23 percent reported burnout at the top end of the scale, always or close to it, with another 44 percent feeling it sometimes. Two thirds of the workforce, on a spectrum from singed to charred.

Then they listed the top five causes:

1. Unfair treatment at work
2. Unmanageable workload
3. Lack of role clarity
4. Lack of communication and support from the manager
5. Unreasonable time pressure

Look at the list as a manager. Number one is yours. Number two is yours. Numbers three, four and five are yours. Not one of them says "insufficient resilience" or "poor personal boundaries" or "did no yoga".

Gallup also found burned out employees are 2.6 times as likely to be hunting for another job, 63 percent more likely to take a sick day, and 23 percent more likely to end up in the emergency room. The bill arrives whether you look at it or not.

Jennifer Moss made the same argument in Harvard Business Review: burnout is about your workplace, not your people. Free fruit and a mindfulness app do nothing about an unmanageable workload. They tell the fourth person the problem is their breathing.

The interview question I ask now

"Why is this role open?"

Then, whatever the answer, I ask the follow-up. "And the person before them?" And then, "and the one before them?"

Three questions. Watch what happens in the pause after the third one. A healthy company answers with dates and names and a shrug, because people move on and nothing sinister happened. A chair with a history produces a different sound... a small laugh, a glance at the other interviewer, and a sentence beginning "to be fair, it's been an intense couple of years."

There is your answer. Take the job with your eyes open or leave it, but stop letting them hand you a warm seat and call it an opportunity.

I handed someone a broken seat once

I hate writing this bit.

I once had a role on my team which chewed through two good people. Both left within a year. I ran the same routine everybody runs. First one wasn't organised enough. Second one struggled with ambiguity. I wrote a slightly better job description, I told myself I would support the next person properly, and I hired again.

I changed the person three times. I never changed the job.

The work was the problem. One human sat between four teams with no authority over any of them, an on-call rota, and a stakeholder who treated every request as an emergency. I knew all of it. I had normalised all of it, because I had been carrying half of it myself before the role existed.

My research into bad bosses found 99.5 percent of survey respondents reported one or more types of bad boss in their working life. I used to read the number as a fact about other managers.

If you are already in the chair

Five things, in order.

Write the job down. Not the description. The real list. Every meeting, every rota, every "quick favour" nobody counts. Put a time cost next to each line. The page is the evidence, and evidence beats the feeling of being unable to cope.

Name the pattern once, in writing. "I'm the fourth person in this role in four years. What changed after the last three?" Send it. Their reply tells you everything about the next two years of your life.

Set one boundary and hold it in public. One. A hard stop, a protected morning, a rota you come off. Held visibly, so the team sees it hold. Private boundaries get quietly renegotiated at 6pm on a Thursday.

Give it a date. Ninety days. If nothing structural has shifted by then, the answer is not more effort. Write the date in your calendar now, while you still have the judgement to set it.

Find the person before you. LinkedIn works fine. Buy them a coffee and ask what broke them. Most people will tell you, because nobody ever asked them at the time.

If you are the boss, count the chairs

Open your HR system. Sort every role by how many people have held it in five years.

Any seat with three names in it is not a hiring problem. It's a design fault, and it belongs to you.

Then go and read the exit interviews for those three. Not the summary. The actual words. And ask what changed after each one... which, in my experience, is a short and embarrassing list.

The fourth person is walking through your door on Monday, full of energy, ready to prove they are made of stronger stuff.

What are you sending them into?

Roland Butcher was the first Black man to play Test cricket for England. He made his Test debut in 1981 against the West Indies, in Barbados, the island where he was born. He went on to coach, and he tells the whole story in his memoir, Breaking Barriers: Barbados to England and Back.

On feedback he is blunt. Do not rush it. Choose your moment.

Debra Corey pulled five leadership lessons out of Roland's story for HRZone, and the second one lands hardest:

"If they're angry, embarrassed, or still processing the situation, your message won't land, no matter how well-intentioned it is."

A batsman walking off after a bad dismissal is not receiving coaching. He is replaying the ball. Every coach with any mileage knows to let the man get his pads off first.

Somewhere along the way we forgot this in offices. We built an entire vocabulary around the opposite. Feedback in the moment. Real-time coaching. Radical Candor. All of it pointing one direction... sooner.

Over a third of feedback makes performance worse

I used to treat "feedback is good" as settled science. It is not.

In 1996, Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi published a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin covering 607 effect sizes and 23,663 observations. Their finding: feedback improved performance on average, and over one third of feedback interventions decreased performance.

Read the number twice. One in three. Not neutral. Worse.

Their explanation is the useful part. Feedback moves where a person's attention sits. When attention lands on the task, people learn. When attention lands on the self, people defend. Kluger and DeNisi found effectiveness drops as attention climbs the hierarchy toward the self and away from the work.

Now picture someone who has taken production down in front of their whole team. Where is their attention already? Entirely on themselves. On their competence, their standing, whether they still belong here.

You arrive with task feedback. It gets received as a verdict on them, because self is the only channel open.

The timing did the damage. Not the words.

Why "in the moment" became gospel

The short version: immediate correction works beautifully on tight mechanical loops. Adjusting a grip. Fixing a pronunciation. Correcting a keyboard shortcut. Low stakes, no audience, no identity attached. Most of the early research on knowledge of results grew up in exactly those conditions.

Then somebody generalized it to human beings under pressure, in front of their peers, doing work tied to who they think they are. Different animal entirely.

Watch the same advice at different stakes. "Tell them straight away" is fine when a colleague has misspelled a column header. The same instinct turns corrosive when a colleague has shipped a bug to fifty thousand users.

Waiting is not going soft

I want to kill this objection early, because I hear it every single time.

Waiting is not avoidance. Waiting is not protecting feelings. Waiting is not letting the problem slide.

My own survey work on bad bosses turned up a number I still find hard to sit with. 99.5% of respondents said they had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Almost nobody escapes. And the bosses in those stories were rarely the ones who waited. They were the ones who unloaded in the moment and called it honesty.

A manager who says "I tell people things straight away, they always know where they stand" is describing a self-soothing habit dressed up as a virtue.

Delayed feedback with a hard message inside it is still a hard message. The difference is it arrives at a person capable of hearing it.

The other person who needs to cool down is you

Here is the bit nobody puts on the leadership slide.

When something breaks badly, you are not neutral either. Your quarter is affected. Your name is on the delivery. Your boss has already messaged you. You are angry, or embarrassed, or scared, and you are about to walk into a conversation carrying all three while telling yourself you are being objective.

You are not. I never was.

Give yourself the night as well. Not for them. For you. The version of me who waits until morning asks better questions, and asks fewer of the ones designed to make me feel better.

What I do instead

Three things. None of them complicated.

In the moment, work the problem, never the person. During an outage I want the site back. What do we know? What do we try next? Who needs telling? No evaluation, no tone, no raised eyebrow. Fix the thing.

Say the follow-up out loud before you leave. Something like: "Let's sit down tomorrow and pull this apart properly." Naming it kills the dread spiral. Without it, people go home and invent a far worse conversation than the one you are planning.

Give it a night, and no more than a few days. Sleep resets a surprising amount. Two weeks does not... two weeks turns the conversation into an ambush, and by then everyone else has moved on and the person wonders why you sat on it. My rule of thumb sits around 24 hours. Long enough for the heat to drop, short enough for the memory to stay sharp.

Then open on the task every time. "Walk me through what you were seeing at 4:15." Never "what went wrong with you."

The one exception

Safety. If someone is about to hurt themselves or somebody else, or torch something irreversible, you speak now and sort out the feelings afterwards.

Everything else waits.

The question worth asking yourself

Roland Butcher spent a career learning when to speak to a player and when to let him walk to the pavilion in peace. Debra and I talked to him about it on Corey-osity Unleashed, and the lesson has stuck with me longer than most.

So next time you feel the itch, ask one thing before you open your mouth.

Am I speaking now because it helps them... or because holding it for one more day feels uncomfortable to me?

Answer honestly. It will change your calendar more than any feedback framework ever has.

Gallup and Workhuman tracked nearly 3,500 employees from 2022 to 2024. Well-recognised employees were 45% less likely to have left after two years. Strong result. Recognition works.

Now the uncomfortable half of the same study. Only 22% of employees say they get the right amount of recognition. More than half, 55%, either receive none at all or receive recognition failing every quality measure Gallup tested. So the majority of what passes for appreciation in offices right now is landing somewhere between useless and insulting.

Then there is the research on public league tables. A 2024 study in Accounting, Organizations and Society looked at peer-to-peer recognition systems and found something worth pinning to your wall. Leaderboards ranking people by recognition received reduced helpful behaviour. Leaderboards ranking people by recognition given increased it. Same tool. Opposite outcomes. The difference is whether you turned appreciation into a competition.

And underneath all of it sits the oldest finding in the field. Deci, Koestner and Ryan pulled together 128 experiments in Psychological Bulletin in 1999 and showed tangible rewards tied to doing a task reliably reduce the underlying motivation to do it. Pay someone for what they were doing out of interest and their interest goes down.

Bolt a prize onto good work and you have quietly reframed the work as something nobody would do without a prize.

None of this argues for saying nothing. It argues for the thing being real. Recognition is a claim about reality... you saw a person do a thing and the thing mattered. Get the claim wrong and you have not given a gift. You have made a statement about your own inattention, in writing, to somebody who was there.

Four ways it goes wrong

Generic praise. "Great job everyone." A thank you with no object attached is a thank you to nobody. Worse, it flattens the person who worked three weekends into the same sentence as the person who watched.

Recognising the presenter, not the builder. The person who demoed the feature gets the applause. The two engineers who rebuilt the data layer at 2am get nothing, because you never saw them do it. Do this twice and your quiet people stop trying.

Praise where money belonged. Nothing curdles faster than a certificate handed to someone underpaid for eighteen months. Appreciation is not currency. Using it as currency reads as a con, because it is one.

The monthly ritual. Employee of the Month is a scheme where you announce eleven losers to celebrate one winner, every month, forever. The award drifts to whoever has not had a turn. Everyone learns the rotation. The trophy becomes a joke passed around the office like a bad Secret Santa.

The rule of three

Real appreciation has three components. Miss one and the whole thing collapses.

Specific. Name the thing. Not "great work on the release" but "you spotted the race condition in the payment retry before it hit production, and you did it on a Friday." Specificity proves you were watching. Nothing else does.

Timely. Within days. Praise arriving at a quarterly review has no emotional connection to the work. It has become admin.

Attributed to effort you witnessed yourself. If you did not see it, ask the people who did. In my experience the best source of recognition intelligence is a quiet ten minutes with your team leads asking one question: who saved us this month and how?

Notice what is missing from the list. Money. Certificates. A gong at the all-hands. Those are delivery mechanisms, and the delivery mechanism matters far less than whether the content is true and precise.

Where I got this wrong

At Curve I ended up running seven cross-functional teams, up to 43 people including managers. Early on I did the thing every well-meaning leader does. I praised the visible.

Demo day heroes. The person presenting to stakeholders. The engineer who fixed the production incident at midnight, loudly, in the incident channel where I happened to be reading.

Meanwhile someone had spent six weeks writing tests nobody asked for, and those tests are the reason we had 30% fewer incidents by the end of the year. I found out months later. From somebody else. In passing.

I had been running an appreciation system optimised for whoever stood nearest to me. My quiet people were being taught to be louder or be invisible, and the ones with too much integrity to grandstand were slowly filing me under "does not notice."

What fixed it was boring. I asked my managers, every month, to bring me two names and what the person had done. Then I wrote to those people directly, with detail, without an audience. No budget. No programme. No platform vendor.

The first month, two of my managers struggled to name anyone. Not because their teams had done nothing. Because nobody had asked them to look before. Once looking became part of the month, the names arrived without effort, and the quality of what my managers knew about their own people went up sharply. The recognition was the visible output. The attention underneath it was the real change.

This is not a soft problem

Gallup estimates managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement scores across business units. Not the perks. Not the mission statement. You.

When Debra and I researched Bad Bosses Ruin Lives, 99.5% of respondents told us they had experienced one or more of the ten types of bad boss. Near universal. And a decent share of those bad bosses were not monsters. They were pleasant people whose appreciation was so hollow it read as contempt.

Getting recognition wrong is not a failure of niceness. It is a failure of attention. And attention is the whole job.

Try this on Monday

Pick one person. Write three sentences about a specific thing they did in the last fortnight, why it mattered to the business, and what would have happened without them. Send it to them. Copy nobody.

Then work out how long it took you to think of the example.

If it took you more than a minute, you have found your real problem, and it is not your recognition programme.

More on building this into how you lead at Step It Up HR.

MIT Sloan Management Review analyzed 1.4 million Glassdoor reviews across 500-plus large employers and found toxic culture is 10.4 times more likely to contribute to attrition than compensation. Ten times. Pay is the thing leaders argue about in budget meetings. Culture is the thing driving people out of the door, and it barely gets a slide.

Then there is the health side, which nobody wants on the agenda. Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer estimates workplace stress contributes to around 120,000 deaths a year in the United States and up to 190 billion dollars in healthcare costs. His research puts job insecurity at a 50 percent increase in the odds of reporting poor health. Long hours raise mortality risk by close to 20 percent. Work-family conflict and a sense of unfairness at work do as much damage as the hours do.

Read the last one again. Unfairness at work harms you as much as overwork does. Your body keeps score on the politics.

My own research says the same thing from the other end. When I surveyed people about bad bosses, 99.5 percent said they had experienced one or more types. Not a minority complaint. Near enough everyone.

And engagement numbers show where all of this lands. Step It Up HR points at the Gallup finding of only 21 percent of employees engaged at work. Four out of five people are turning up and holding something back.

What survival costs you, quietly

The bill arrives late, which is why people miss it.

You get smaller. Not in title, in appetite. The ambitious thing you would have pitched two years ago never leaves your notebook, because you learned what happens to ambitious things around here.

Your standards drift. Once you accept a boss shouting at someone in a stand-up, you have set a new baseline, and you carry the baseline with you into your next job and into how you treat your own team.

Your home life pays rent on it. My wife knew the state of my job before I said a word. She read it in how long I sat in the car on the drive.

And here is the cruelest part. The longer you last, the more people tell you how resilient you are. Resilience becomes the trap. You get praised for absorbing a cost the organization should never have created.

Three questions before you decide anything

Leaving is not always available. Mortgages exist. Visas exist. Sick parents exist. So before anyone tells you to be brave and hand in your notice, answer three questions honestly.

Is it the person, or is it the plumbing?

A bad manager sitting inside a decent organization is a survivable problem with an expiry date. Bad managers move on, get promoted sideways, or get found out. A bad manager whose behavior gets rewarded by the people above them is a different animal. Look up two levels. If the person making your life hard is the model of success in the place, the plumbing is the problem, and the plumbing will outlast you.

Is there a clock on it?

Reorganizations end. Projects ship. A specific, dated, visible end point changes what you are doing from suffering into waiting. If you find no clock, and you have not found one for a year, stop hoping for one to appear.

What is the price outside work?

Sleep. Temper. The people at home. Anything you used to enjoy on a Sunday. If the job has started eating those, the arithmetic has already been done for you.

How to survive on purpose, with an exit in sight

If you are staying for now, stay deliberately. There is a real difference between waiting and drifting.

Write things down. Dates, decisions, who asked for what. Not to build a case for war... to protect your memory. Toxic places rewrite history, and after a while you will start doubting your own version of events.

Protect one piece of real work. Find something with an outcome you would be proud to name in an interview and defend the time for it. Skills rot fast in an environment where nothing ships.

Keep two people close. One inside, who sees what you see, so you have a witness. One outside, who remembers the version of you before this job. Fifteen minutes in a stairwell with someone honest does more for your head than any wellbeing app on the intranet.

Build the money buffer. Choice is expensive. Every month of expenses you save is a month of options. This is the least romantic advice in the piece and the most useful.

Set a date. An actual one, in the calendar. "If nothing changes by the first of March, I start applying." A date turns endurance into a plan.

The part managers need to hear

If you run a team, none of the above is about your people being fragile. It is about what your environment costs to inhabit.

Your engineers are spending energy on weather-reading. Every hour of it is an hour not spent on your product. You will see it in the quiet ones going quieter, in the risks nobody flags until launch day, in the resignation you never saw coming from someone who told you last month everything was fine.

They were surviving. You mistook it for engagement.

Go and find out what your car park looks like from their side.

The honest answer

So, are you able to survive a toxic workplace? Yes. People do it for years. I did.

The better question is what surviving turns you into, and how long you are willing to fund it out of your own health.

I stayed too long in mine. What finally moved me was not a big dramatic moment. It was noticing I had stopped saying interesting things out loud.

What have you stopped saying out loud?

Four researchers published a study in the Academy of Management Journal with a title I love: Faking It With the Boss's Jokes?. They looked at leaders who joke around a lot. The finding is not what those leaders want to hear.

The more a leader jokes, the more the team fakes. Quality made no difference. Volume did. Every joke lands as a small demand... react correctly, now.

The researchers call the response surface acting. You paste on a feeling you don't have. Across three studies, including a field experiment and a multi-wave study of real teams, more surface acting meant more emotional exhaustion and less job satisfaction.

It hit hardest with people who read the power gap as real. Anyone who believes the boss outranks them in a way worth protecting. Which is to say, it hits your quietest people hardest, and they're the ones least likely to tell you.

Think about what this means. Your good mood is not free. Somebody in the room is paying for it.

I've been the one faking

More than once.

I've stood in front of a team and said we were in good shape when I knew we weren't. I told myself I was protecting them. Nothing was signed yet. Saying the hard thing out loud would spread worry with no useful action attached to it.

Here's what happened. They knew anyway.

People aren't stupid. They watch how long you stare at your phone. They notice which meetings vanished from your calendar and which ones appeared. They hear the sentence you started and abandoned. By the time I opened my mouth, the room had already assembled ninety percent of the story, and my reassurance did one thing. It told them I'd lie to their faces when it suited me.

I didn't buy calm. I spent trust.

The worst part is how cheap the transaction felt in the moment. Nobody argued. Nobody rolled their eyes. The meeting ended on time. From where I stood it looked like it worked.

It never works. It only postpones the bill.

Trust is the thing you're spending

Gallup measures this. Only 21% of US employees strongly agree they trust the leadership of their organization, down from a peak of 24% in 2019.

Read the number again. Four in five people show up to work each day for leaders they don't trust.

My own research turned up something worse. 99.5% of the people I surveyed said they've had one or more types of bad boss. Not a rounding error. Near total.

The gap between those numbers and the story leaders tell about themselves is exactly where inauthenticity lives. Nobody thinks they're the bad boss. Everybody has had one. Do the arithmetic on who's kidding themselves.

Gallup also found something useful for anyone who wants to fix it. When employees strongly agree they've had a chance to give honest feedback about changes at work, they're 7.4 times as likely to have confidence in their leaders. Honest feedback flowing upward. Not a poster in the kitchen with the word VALUES on it.

Authentic is not the same as unfiltered

Somewhere along the way authentic leadership got confused with saying whatever crosses your mind.

Your team doesn't need your unprocessed panic at nine on a Monday morning. Dumping fear on people who have no power to fix it isn't honesty. It's offloading. You feel lighter, they feel heavier, and you get to call it transparency.

The line I use is simple. Say the true thing, at the size the person is able to hold, with what you plan to do about it attached.

"I'm worried about the Q3 number, I'm meeting finance on Thursday, I'll tell you what I learn on Friday" is honest.

"I've no idea if any of us still work here in October" is a feeling with no handle on it.

One gives people something to hold. The other gives them your anxiety and a weekend to sit with it.

What honesty sounds like on a Tuesday

Three things, none of which need budget approval.

Stop performing certainty you don't have

The performance is the tell. Real confidence has edges on it. Fake confidence is smooth all the way round, and smooth is what people distrust.

"I don't know yet" is a complete sentence. "I was wrong about this in March, here's what I learned" buys more credibility than a year of steady nodding. I wrote about the wider version of this in The Leader Who Always Has the Answer Is Lying to You.

Count your own jokes

Not to stop being funny. To notice who's laughing.

Watch the timing. Genuine laughter arrives before you finish the line. Performed laughter arrives after, and it arrives together, because everyone is watching everyone else for the cue. Once you see the difference you'll never stop seeing it.

Then ask the harder question. If the room fakes laughter for you, what else does the room fake for you? Agreement in planning, most likely. Estimates, definitely. The status of a project two weeks before it slips.

Ask for the thing nobody wants to say

Not "any concerns?" at the end of a meeting when everyone's coats are on. Nobody answers it.

Ask one person, alone, a specific question. "What's the bit of this plan you think I'm wrong about?" Then shut up long enough for the silence to get uncomfortable, because the real answer lives on the other side of the discomfort.

The first few times, you'll get nothing. You're withdrawing from an account you haven't paid into. Keep asking. What you do with the first honest answer decides whether you ever get a second one.

The smell test

Here's the thing about inauthenticity. You're the only person in the building who doesn't notice it.

Everyone else has a nose. They picked up the mismatch between your words and your face weeks ago, filed it away, and adjusted how much of themselves they bring to work. They didn't tell you, because telling you is the risky option and they've all met the person who got tagged as a culture problem for not laughing.

This is the loneliness nobody warns you about. I've written before about how leaders get lonely, especially the good ones. A good part of the loneliness is self-inflicted. You built a room where the honest signal costs too much to send, and then you wondered why nobody tells you anything.

Work I've done with Step It Up HR keeps landing on the same place. The fix is never a values workshop. It's one leader deciding to stop performing, in one conversation, this week.

So here's my question for you. When you told your team last week everything was fine...

Did they believe you? Or were they simply being kind?

Years after my corridor moment, I read Herminia Ibarra's The Authenticity Paradox in Harvard Business Review, and winced my way through it.

She splits leaders into two groups. Chameleons try styles the way you try new clothes, adapting to whatever the room wants. They rise fast and risk looking hollow. True-to-selfers hold their line no matter what the room needs. They keep their integrity and stall out, sticking with comfortable behavior long past the point where it fits the job.

I had been a bad chameleon: doing the costume without the conviction. Worst of both.

Her cases stung too. One leader, Cynthia, ran on radical transparency, then found the same openness gutted her authority in a bigger role. Her line stuck with me: being authentic does not mean you get held up to the light so people see right through you.

The trait you copy is rarely the trait you need

Here is the deeper problem with borrowing a style off someone you admire. You copy what you noticed. What you noticed is usually what got them promoted, not what made them good.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has been banging this drum for years: organizations mistake confidence for competence, and reward the person who performs leadership over the person who does it. He also argues, in When Authentic Leadership Backfires, the opposite of what most of us assume. Adjusting your behavior to fit the situation tends to make you seem more trustworthy, not less.

So the loud, decisive boss I copied? The loudness was never the engine. Underneath the performance he was doing three quiet things I failed to see at 26: he made a call within a day, he told people the reasoning, and he took the blame in public. None of those need volume. All of them need spine.

I copied the volume.

My research says most of us live with the results

I ran a survey on bad bosses. 99.5% of respondents told me they have had one or more types of bad boss. Not a rounding artifact. Near enough everybody.

Sit with the arithmetic for a second. Almost nobody escapes. And most of those bad bosses were not villains. They were people running a borrowed playbook badly, in a context where it never fit, with nobody willing to tell them.

The costs show up in the engagement numbers. My partners at Step It Up HR point at the latest Gallup figure: 21% of employees engaged at work. Four out of five people are switched off, and a fair chunk of the reason wears a lanyard and holds a one-to-one with them every fortnight.

The Army handed me a playbook once

I learned my first leadership system in the US Army. Clear chain of command. Clear orders. Say it once, say it loud, expect it done. For eighteen-year-olds carrying heavy things in the rain, the system works. It is tested, and it saves lives.

I brought a watered-down version of it into a software company at 3pm on a Friday, aimed at a senior engineer with twenty years on the tools and a strong view about my architecture. The system did not work. She did not need orders. She needed me to stop talking and ask her what she saw.

Two good playbooks. Wrong room.

Write your own. In an actual notebook.

Ibarra's answer to all this is what she calls outsight: you get the perspective by doing, not by sitting still and introspecting. Try the behavior, watch the result, keep the evidence.

Mine takes the form of a notebook. Physical one, because typing lets me pretend I am thinking.

The method is simple:

• One page per rule. Write the rule in your own words, not the author's.
• Note where it came from. A book, a boss, a disaster of your own making.
• Log what happened when you used it. Date, situation, outcome. Two lines.
• Cross out what fails. Twice failed, gone. No sentiment.
• Review it every quarter. Ten minutes. Most rules survive. Some quietly stopped being true a year ago.

Over time the notebook stops being a collection of other people's ideas and turns into a record of your own behavior under pressure. Nobody else has your version, because nobody else ran your experiments.

A few pages from mine

Say the number. "Soon" and "high priority" are noise. Give the date, the cost, or the risk percentage, and let people argue with something solid.

Ask twice. The first answer is the polite one. The second answer, after you sit through the silence, is the true one. I learned this from a QA lead who told me a release was "fine" and then, forty seconds later, told me what was broken.

Bad news goes up before it goes sideways. My team learned they never got punished for early bad news. They got punished for late bad news. One rule bought me more visibility than any dashboard I ever built.

Silence is a tool, not a weapon. Borrowed this from a boss who used it well, then watched a different boss use the same silence to make people squirm. Same behavior, opposite intent. Context decides everything.

Do the impression check. If I hear myself sounding like someone else, I stop and say the plain version instead.

Five rules. None invented from scratch. Every one of them earned a page by surviving contact with a real team.

Steal freely, copy nothing

None of this argues against reading. Read all of it. Take Ibarra's outsight, take Radical Candor, take whatever your own bad boss taught you by counterexample.

Take the parts. Leave the costume.

The leaders I trust most have all done the same thing: assembled something odd and specific out of borrowed pieces, tested against their own teams, and revised when it stopped working. Their playbooks look nothing like each other. Not one of them came off a shelf.

So, what is on page one of yours? And when did you last cross something out?

The Courageous Cultures research, run with the University of Northern Colorado Social Research Lab across 1,860 participants, found half of employees believe an idea they share will not be taken seriously. Forty-nine percent said nobody asks them for ideas on any regular basis. Forty percent said they do not feel confident sharing one.

Read those numbers again. Half your workforce has done the sums and decided speaking is a losing bet.

And when the silence hardens into something worse, people leave. MIT Sloan Management Review analysed millions of employee reviews during the Great Resignation and found a toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more likely to drive attrition than pay. Ten times. Not ten percent. Salary is noise next to how it feels to work somewhere.

So yes. Silence is expensive. Nobody serious argues otherwise.

The door has a price tag on it too

Here is where the advice falls over.

"Get out" assumes an exit you own. Try it on some real people.

The engineer whose right to stay in the country is stapled to their employment contract. Leaving is not a career move for them, it is an immigration event.

The single parent with a mortgage and no second income in the house. Three months of runway does not exist. One missed payment does.

The American with a chronic condition whose insurance runs through payroll. Their spouse's chemotherapy is a line item on their job.

The person caring for a parent, working the one role with hours flexible enough to make it work.

The fifty-eight year old who has watched what the market does to fifty-eight year olds.

Every one of those people knows their workplace is unsafe. They worked it out long before any of us posted about it. Telling them to walk is not courage, it is a bill they are unable to pay, delivered as advice.

There is a second cost people forget. Speaking up rarely ends with a clean exit. It ends with eleven more months in the same building, with the same manager, now holding a grudge and your next review. The project you wanted gets handed to someone else. The reference you need gets quietly downgraded. Leaving takes months even when you decide today, and every one of those months happens under the roof of the person you crossed.

I have been the person with savings. I have also been the person without. The difference in how brave I felt had almost nothing to do with my character and almost everything to do with my bank balance. Anyone who tells you otherwise has been lucky for a long time and mistaken the luck for virtue.

What I say to people who are stuck

If you are in a place where honesty gets punished and the exit is priced beyond you, throwing your hands up is not the only option. Here is what I have seen work.

Pick one fight, not all of them

Broken places offer you twenty things to object to. Object to twenty things and you become the difficult one, which is exactly the label they need to dismiss you. Pick the single issue where you have evidence, where the damage is measurable, and where a fix is realistic. Fight it properly.

Write things down on the day they happen

Not a dossier. A dated note in a personal file, in your own words, off company systems. Memory blurs under stress and blurred memory is worthless in a grievance, a reference dispute, or a tribunal. Five lines and a date beats a brilliant recollection twelve months late.

Find one person, not a movement

You do not need a coalition. You need one colleague who sees what you see, so the thing in your head stops feeling like a private malfunction. Isolation is what makes bad places feel inevitable. One witness breaks it.

Build the runway before you need it

Money first. Then the CV, then the network you have neglected, then two conversations a month with people outside the building. The goal is turning "get out" from a slogan into a date. A person with four months of savings and a live network speaks differently in meetings, and everyone in the room hears it.

Protect the body while you plan

Sleep and exercise sound trivial against structural rot. They are the fuel for every other item on this list. Burnout takes the decision out of your hands and makes it for you, on worse terms.

None of this is a substitute for a decent employer. It is a bridge to one.

And if you are the boss, this is on you

I ran a survey about bad bosses. Of everyone who answered, 99.5% said they had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Not a rounding error. Near enough everyone.

Meanwhile Gallup keeps finding only around 21% of employees are engaged at work. Four in five people are turning up and holding back, and we treat it as weather rather than as a result of decisions we made.

So when your team goes quiet, skip the theory about their confidence. Ask what happened to the last person who spoke.

Someone raised a risk in a review and got a reputation. Someone flagged a date slip and got told to be more of a team player. Everyone else watched, learned, and priced it in. Your silence is not a personality trait of your staff. It is a policy they inferred from your behaviour.

Fixing it is unglamorous work. Ask directly and often, because half your people have never been asked. Thank the messenger in public, especially when the message is inconvenient. Then show the change the message produced, because people believe outcomes and ignore posters.

The version of the advice I believe

Silence will cost you. Say the true thing when you have the standing, the evidence, and the runway to survive saying it.

And when the money is not there yet, stop treating your caution as cowardice. Build the exit like an engineer builds anything else. Slowly, deliberately, and with a working plan.

I wrote before about the day I was wrong in front of my boss's boss and about why quitting is not the problem. Both come back to the same place. Voice is a function of safety, and safety is mostly built by whoever holds the power in the room.

So which one are you today... the person doing the arithmetic, or the person everyone is doing it about?

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025 assessed rising leaders and found only 19% showed strong delegation ability. Eight in ten people heading into management lack the one skill their new job depends on. In the same research, 71% of leaders reported significantly higher stress since stepping into their role, and close to one in six reported burnout. Stressed and burnt-out leaders were 3.5 times more likely to leave.

Read those together and the story writes itself. We promote people for personal output, hand them a team, teach them nothing about letting go, and then act surprised when they grind themselves down doing three jobs at once.

The upside is measurable too. Gallup studied 143 Inc. 500 CEOs and found the ones with high Delegator talent posted an average three-year growth rate of 1,751%, some 112 percentage points ahead of CEOs with low delegation talent. They generated $8 million in revenue against $6 million, and created 21 jobs in three years against 17. Only one in four of the entrepreneurs Gallup studied had high delegation talent in the first place.

So the rare skill is also the profitable one. We are all sitting on the same lever and refusing to pull it.

Eleven captains

Roland Butcher became England's first Black Test cricketer in 1981, a Barbadian kid who moved to Britain at thirteen and ended up opening a door nobody had opened before. He has a question I keep stealing: how many captains does your team have?

The traditional answer is one. One captain, ten followers, orders flowing downhill. Roland's answer is eleven. On a cricket field the ball arrives faster than instruction travels. If the fielder waits to be told, the moment is gone. A side of eleven decision-makers beats a side of one decision-maker and ten people looking over their shoulder, every single time.

Software is the same, and so is every other job with any pace in it. The decision needs making at the point of contact, by the person with the freshest information. Every time you route a choice back through yourself, you swap fresh information for stale information and add a queue on top.

I ran my teams with one captain for years. I was proud of my grip on the detail. What I had built was ten people trained to wait.

Six signs you are the bottleneck

None of this shows up on a dashboard. It shows up in small, deniable ways.

Work waits for your calendar. If your diary is the critical path for a project, you are the constraint, whatever your job title says.

Your team asks permission for things they know how to do. They know the answer. They ask anyway, because the last three times they moved without you, you rewrote it.

You are the only one who knows the whole picture. You call it context. It is a single point of failure with a pension plan.

Holidays feel dangerous. A healthy team runs fine for two weeks without you. If yours cannot, you have documented the problem yourself.

Your best people go quiet. Strong people do not fight a bottleneck. They stop suggesting things, do their narrow slice well, and start reading job adverts on the train home.

You are exhausted and the team is bored. Two symptoms, one disease. You hold all the interesting work, and interesting work is how people grow.

I ticked every box on this list, and told myself I was working hard for my team.

What changed for me

Nothing about this is complicated. It is uncomfortable, which is a different problem, and the discomfort is the whole cost.

I named the decisions and gave them away in writing. Not "you're empowered", which means nothing. A real list: hiring calls, architecture within a service, spending under a number, customer commitments. Each one got a name next to it. Mine got shorter every quarter.

I answered questions with questions. "What do you think we should do?" It felt evasive at first. It is the opposite. People arrived with a problem and left with a decision they owned.

I let people be wrong in ways I would not have chosen. This is the hard one. Someone picks the approach you rejected in your head, and you let it run, because the cost of the detour is smaller than the cost of a team who never learns to choose. About half those detours turned out better than my plan. The other half taught them more than my correction would have.

I stopped rewriting other people's work in silence. Nothing kills initiative faster than finding your work quietly replaced overnight.

I measured how long people wait for me. One number, tracked honestly. Blocked days per week. Watching it drop was the first time I felt good about leadership without feeling essential.

The strange part is what happened to my own week. The work I had no time for, strategy, hiring, teaching, the slow relationship-building with people outside my function, turned out to be the work I was hired to do. I had been too busy doing everyone else's job to notice I was skipping my own.

The thing nobody says out loud

Letting go is a grief.

Being needed feels like being valued, and giving it away feels like disappearing. I have watched capable leaders choose exhaustion over the feeling for years on end. I did it myself, and I have written about the same reflex from other angles, in Don't Hoard the Power, Let People Decide and From Doing Everything to Enabling Others. It keeps coming back because it is never solved once.

Your worth as a leader is not the volume of decisions running through you. It is the quality of decisions being made without you.

So here is the question I ask myself now, and I will hand it to you. If you vanished for two weeks tomorrow, no phone, no laptop... what stops? Write the list. Then work out how many of those things stopped because your team lacks skill, and how many stopped because you never let go of the wheel.

The first list is a training problem. The second one is you.

Executives now spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from under 10 hours in the 1960s, according to Harvard Business Review's 2017 research. Twenty three hours. Over half a working week, gone, before a single one to one.

Then there's the cost of interrupting the people doing the work. Paul Graham wrote about this back in 2009 in Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule. Managers slice the day into hour blocks. Makers need half days. Drop one status call into an engineer's afternoon and you don't spend an hour of their time, you spend the afternoon. I ran engineering teams for years and watched it happen weekly. The meeting cost 30 minutes. The recovery cost three hours.

So the average leader burns half the week on meetings and, at the same time, shreds the schedules of the people building the thing. Then wonders why there's no time left for the human part of the job.

The human part is the job

This is where I lose patience with the whole framing. Leading isn't a side quest bolted onto a management role. It's the role.

Gallup found managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. Not the perks. Not the mission statement on the wall. The manager. Same company, same pay, same free fruit, wildly different teams, and the difference walks in wearing your name badge.

The same Gallup work found companies miss on managerial talent in 82% of hiring decisions, and about one in ten people hold high natural talent to manage. Read those two together. Most managers were promoted for shipping something, then handed a job nobody trained them for, then told to fit it around the shipping.

My own research says the rest out loud. When I surveyed people about their working lives, 99.5% said they've had one or more types of bad boss. Not half. Not most. Effectively everybody. Those bad bosses weren't cartoon villains twirling moustaches. Most of them were decent people who ran out of time and let the human part slide until sliding became the habit.

What I learned in the Army about time

I served in the US Army. Whatever else the military gets wrong, it never pretended leadership was an optional extra to squeeze in after the paperwork.

Nobody told a sergeant to lead his people once the real work finished. Looking after those people was the real work. You ate after them. You checked their feet and their kit and their heads. The tasks got done through the people, not around them.

Then I moved into tech and found rooms full of leaders who'd inverted it. People became the interruption. The spreadsheet became the mission. I did it myself for a while, hunched over a laptop at 10pm, proud of how much I was carrying, blind to the fact my team had stopped asking me things because I clearly had no room for them.

Being unreachable is not a badge. It's a resignation letter you forgot to hand in.

What leading looks like on a calendar

Leading isn't mystical. It shows up as appointments. Here's what mine looks like when I'm doing the job properly.

One to ones nobody moves

Thirty minutes, every week, per person. Not a status report, they have Slack for status. Ask what's blocking them, what they want next, what they'd change about how you run things. When something urgent lands on the day, move the urgent thing. Cancel a one to one twice in a row and you've taught your team exactly where they rank.

Two hours a week with nothing in them

Book it. Defend it. This is where you notice the quiet person going quiet, the two teams duplicating work, the deadline nobody believes in. Leaders who fill every slot lose the ability to see. Thinking time looks like idleness on a calendar and pays for itself the first time you spot a bad plan in week one instead of week nine.

Walking the floor, or its remote cousin

Ten minutes of unscheduled contact. In person, wander over. Remote, ring somebody with no agenda and ask how it's going. The information you need most rarely arrives in a report.

A ruthless cull of the rest

Go through your recurring meetings. For each one ask: what breaks if this stops? Kill everything with a weak answer. Halve the length of the survivors. Delegate the chair of anything you're attending out of habit.

I cut my own recurring load by about a third one quarter, and not one person asked for the meetings back.

The uncomfortable test

Ask yourself one question, and answer it honestly.

If your team was interviewed tomorrow and asked "does your boss have time for you?", what would they say?

Not what you hope. What they'd say.

Your view of your availability is worthless here. You know about the door you left open, the message you meant to answer, the meeting you skipped for them once in March. They know how it feels to need five minutes and see your week is a solid wall of blue.

Nobody is coming to give you the time

There's the whole point. No calendar fairy is arriving to clear your Thursday. The work will keep expanding to swallow whatever room you leave it.

So take the hours by force. Book them like they matter, because the humans depending on you matter more than the deck you're polishing.

Leading isn't what you do with the time left over. Where you spend the hours is where you lead.

Open your calendar for next week. Which meeting are you killing first?

Your people trust the company more than they trust almost anything else in their lives. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found 78% of respondents trust their employer to do the right thing, the highest score of any institution in the study. Eighty-one percent said their employer is responsible for bridging divides.

Then the same study found 75% of people believe CEOs are obligated to help bridge those divides, and only 44% think their CEO does it well. A twenty-nine point gap between what people want from the top and what they get.

Gallup adds the detail. In its 2025 workplace research, 29% of employees said they lack clear, honest or consistent communication from leaders, and only 32% feel strongly connected to their organization's mission or purpose.

Read those numbers together. Your people have already decided to trust you. They handed you the benefit of the doubt before you walked in the room. And then a third of them tell a survey company they have no idea what you mean.

The deck did the talking. The deck is bad at talking.

My own research points the same direction. When we surveyed people about their bosses, 99.5% said they had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Not a handful of horror stories... nearly everyone. Most of those bosses were not villains. They were people who never let anyone see them think.

I have watched what the wall costs in engineering organizations specifically. A team with no read on the leader's real thinking builds for the safest possible interpretation of the roadmap. They gold-plate. They pad estimates. They hedge the architecture against a strategy nobody ever explained out loud, and two quarters later you sit in a review wondering why the simple thing took so long.

The slides were clear. The intent never was. Ambiguity at the top turns into rework at the bottom, and rework shows up in the budget with your name on it.

The overcorrection is worse

Now the warning, because leaders love a pendulum.

The answer here is not a staged moment of vulnerability. It is not the leadership offsite where you announce you are going to be more open from now on, then cry on cue at the next all-hands.

Research from Danbee Chon at the University of South Florida, published in the Academy of Management Journal in September 2025, found leaders who changed their behavior quickly were seen as less authentic, even when employees had asked for the change. Chon's teams ran three studies, including one drawing on responses from 2,000 employees reacting to leadership action plans written by real executives. The effect was strongest when the change was hard. As Chon put it, people believe true change takes time.

Think about what this means. Your team will punish the sudden performance of openness harder than they punished the slides. The slides were boring. The performance is insulting, because it asks them to pretend along with you.

Performed authenticity is a new deck with worse graphics.

What showing up as a person looks like on a Tuesday

None of this requires a personality transplant. It requires five habits, and none of them are comfortable.

Answer the question asked. Not the adjacent question you prepared for. If someone asks about layoffs and you talk about strategy, everyone hears the swerve, and the swerve costs you more than the bad news would have.

Say the number you do not want to say. Revenue missed. The launch slipped six weeks. Two people quit last month and here is why. Your team already knows. Saying it out loud costs you nothing you still had.

Say "I don't know," then give a date. "I don't know, and I will tell you on the 15th whether I know by then." Uncertainty is survivable. Being managed is not.

Cut the deck to three slides. If you need forty slides, you do not have a message, you have a document. Send the document the night before. Use the room for the part which needs a human being in it.

Stay in the room afterward. The real all-hands starts when the projector goes off. The questions people would never ask into a microphone get asked at the edge of the stage, one at a time, quietly.

The test I use

Before any talk I give now, I ask myself one thing. If the projector died right now, would I still have something worth saying?

If the answer is no, the talk was never mine. It belonged to whoever built the template.

The deck was supposed to help you explain. Somewhere along the way it turned into a wall, and you built it yourself, one approved bullet at a time. Your people do not want the wall taken down slowly and dramatically over a quarter. They want you to walk around it and finish the sentence you started.

I write more about this kind of leadership over at Step It Up HR, including a self-assessment tool for leaders willing to find out how they land.

So here is the question worth sitting with. The last time your team heard something true from you, was it on a slide... or was it after the slides were done?

Dacher Keltner at Berkeley has spent decades on this. His work found people given power in experiments lean harder on stereotypes and pay less attention to what makes other people individuals. They judge other people's attitudes, interests, and needs less accurately. In his summary of the research, Keltner puts it bluntly: people with power start behaving like patients with damage to the brain's orbitofrontal lobes, the region tied to empathy and socially appropriate behaviour.

Read the last sentence again. The promotion did to your empathy roughly what a head injury would.

Keltner calls it the power paradox. The skills you needed to earn the promotion, reading a room, feeling what other people feel, taking someone else's perspective, are the same skills the promotion quietly erodes. You get the job by being good with people, and the job makes you worse with people.

Nobody hands you a warning about this on your first day as a manager. They hand you a headcount budget.

The Number Nobody Wants Printed

My own research turned up a figure I have stopped apologising for. 99.5% of survey respondents said they had experienced one or more types of bad boss.

Not 60%. Not "a worrying number." Effectively everyone.

Set it next to engagement data. Gallup's latest finding, which we wrote about over at Step It Up HR, puts employee engagement at 21%. Four out of five people show up and give you the minimum viable version of themselves.

Those two numbers are the same number viewed from opposite ends. People do not withhold effort because they are lazy. They withhold effort because somewhere above them sits a person on a small raised platform behind glass, issuing decisions about work they no longer understand, and there is no percentage in caring more than the person in charge.

What Stepping Off The Platform Looks Like

Here is why Garry's line has weight rather than being a decent bit of stand-up. He built a company on the idea.

At WD-40 they do not have failures. Garry's phrase: "We don't make mistakes, we have learning moments." Say it out loud in most companies and watch the eye-rolling start. Then look at what it produced. Reported by i4cp, WD-40's engagement scores sat above 90% year after year. 98% of their people said they love telling others where they work. 99% said their opinions and values fit the place. 97% said they were clear on the company's goals.

Compare 21% engagement to 90%-plus and tell me culture is a soft topic.

Garry also said the thing most executives never admit: "Micromanagement is not scalable." A leader who has been royalized has to approve everything, because approval is the last proof of the crown. A leader who steps off the platform gives people freedom and direction, then goes and does the work only they are able to do.

He even invented an alter ego for the other path. He called it the soul-sucking CEO, and he used it to teach people exactly what to avoid. He was, by his own account, describing an earlier version of himself. Nobody arrives de-royalized. You get there by noticing.

How To Tell You Have Been Crowned

Nobody sends a memo. The signs are quiet.

• Meetings soften when you walk in. The conversation was livelier thirty seconds before you arrived.
• Nobody interrupts you any more. Everyone used to.
• You hear only good news, and you have started to find this reassuring.
• Your last unscheduled conversation with someone two levels down was months ago.
• You say "my team" far more often than "our".
• Your ideas suddenly seem better than they were before the promotion. Miraculous, is it not.
• You have begun explaining decisions instead of making them with people.

Any two of those and you are already up on the platform. The glass is the part you never notice from the inside, because from up there it looks like a window.

What To Do About It Monday

None of this is fixed by a values poster. Values on a wall are decoration. Behaviour is the operating system.

Sit somewhere else. Round tables have no head seat for a reason. If your building has a canteen, eat in it. Corporate royalty does not belong in a separate dining room.

Ask a question you do not know the answer to. Then say nothing for ten full seconds. The silence will feel like an eternity to you and like permission to them.

Say "I got this wrong" in public, with specifics. Not a humble-brag about working too hard. A real error, named, with what you learned. A team copies whatever the leader models, and a leader who never admits error trains a team who never surfaces one.

Ask to be marked. Ask the people who work for you what you should stop doing. Write it down in front of them. Then change one thing and tell them which one, so they learn the asking was real.

Watch your own deference budget. Track, for one week, how much airtime you take in meetings. Most leaders guess low by half.

The Point Of The Joke

The Queen line lands because it drags the highest status human being in Britain back into her own body. Same plumbing as the rest of us. Same three in the morning worries. Same capacity to be wrong.

Every organisational chart is a fiction we agree to for the sake of getting things done. Useful fiction. Somebody has to decide, somebody has to be accountable, and pretending otherwise gives you a committee where a decision should be. The failure is not the hierarchy. The failure is believing the hierarchy describes human worth.

Garry proved you keep the accountability and drop the royalty, and the numbers get better, not worse. Four out of five workplaces have not caught up.

So here is the question I keep asking myself, and I do not always like the answer.

If your team held a private meeting tomorrow about what it is like to work for you, and you were handed the transcript with no names attached... would you recognise the person they are describing?

My experience turns out to be the normal one. Research by YouGov and the Chartered Management Institute, covering 4,500 UK workers and managers, found 82% of people who step into management have had no formal management or leadership training. They call them accidental managers. The same research found 28% of employees had left a business because of a bad relationship with their manager, and 33% were less motivated at work because of poor management.

My own survey work points the same direction. 99.5% of respondents told me they had suffered one or more types of bad boss. Not a rounding error. Near enough everyone.

So the supply chain for management wisdom is broken at the source. Organisations promote their best engineer, their best nurse, their best salesperson, and then leave them alone with a title and a calendar full of meetings.

The training won't arrive, so the shelf has to do the work

If formal training isn't coming, informal training has to fill the hole. And most of us are sitting on a pile of it.

You have read things. You have survived things. Somewhere on your shelf sits a book which rearranged how you think about work. Where is it right now? Behind you. Spine outward. Doing nothing for anybody.

I know why it's still there. I left mine there for years.

Hoarding looks a lot like modesty

Nobody says out loud, "I am hoarding leadership wisdom." What we say is softer and more reasonable.

"I don't want to come across preachy."

"They'll think I'm criticising their work."

"Handing someone a book is a bit much, isn't it?"

Underneath one or two of those sits something less comfortable. If I give away what took me a decade to learn, what do I have left? The knowledge feels like an edge. Passing it on feels like filing down my own advantage.

I have felt exactly this pull. I was wrong about it. What took a decade to learn does not transfer in an afternoon. Handing over the book doesn't hand over the scar tissue. All it does is shorten someone else's road by a year or two, which is the whole point of having walked it first.

There's a second reason, and it's quieter. Giving someone the book you underlined means letting them see what you didn't know. Your notes are a record of your gaps. A clean copy protects your reputation. A battered copy admits you needed help.

Admit it anyway.

The number I keep coming back to

LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report contains a finding I find hard to shake. Only 15% of employees say their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months. Down five percentage points from the year before.

In the same report, 84% of employees agree learning adds purpose to their work, and career progress ranks as their number one motivation to learn.

Read those two together. People want the growth. Their managers are handing over less of it, not more. The gap is widening while everyone talks about upskilling.

A used paperback costs less than a round of coffees. It won't fix a broken organisation. It will absolutely fix one Tuesday afternoon for one person who is stuck.

What sharing looks like in practice

Sharing a book is not a ceremony. Skip the inscription. Skip the all-hands announcement of a company reading list, because company reading lists go to a shared drive and die there.

Here's the whole method.

1. Notice someone wrestling with a problem you have wrestled with. Not a hypothetical problem. The one they mentioned on Thursday, with a sigh, at the end of a one-to-one.
2. Name it back to them in their own words. They need to know you heard it before they'll take anything from you.
3. Say the sentence. "I have a book on this. It helped me when I was where you are. Want it?"
4. Hand over your copy. Yours. The battered one. Not an Amazon link.
5. Two weeks later, ask one question about it. One. "Did the bit about feedback land for you?" Then shut up and listen.

Step four does the heavy lifting, and step five turns a gift into a relationship.

The notes are the real gift

A clean copy says: here is some information.

Your copy says: here is where I struggled.

The underlining shows what landed. The word "rubbish" scrawled beside a paragraph shows you read critically instead of obediently. The folded corner on page 112 marks the exact spot where something broke open for you.

You are handing over a map with your own footprints on it. Including the wrong turns.

And there's a bonus nobody warns you about. Once your notes are out in the world, the conversations change. People argue with you about page 112. They come back with a different reading. Two of my strongest working relationships started with someone telling me I had underlined the wrong sentence.

Some of them won't read it

True. Some won't. A few will put it on a shelf and let it go quietly white and square again.

Fine.

The offer is the message. What you're telling them is: I see you struggling, I struggled too, and I don't think you should struggle alone. The paper is a delivery mechanism for the sentence. Even unread, the sentence lands.

Losing the book is fine, too. If a book comes back to me, something has gone wrong. Books are supposed to keep moving.

Where I'm putting my own effort

I spend a good chunk of my working life on the far end of this problem now, over at Step It Up HR, helping organisations build leaders on purpose rather than by accident. Formal programmes have their place, and I run them.

But the programme reaches twelve people twice a year. Your shelf reaches whoever sits next to you, on the day they need it. Don't wait for the budget cycle.

Start with one

Pick one person on your team. Pick one book off your shelf. Do the five steps this week.

Then look at the rest of the shelf and ask yourself the honest question: which of these has done nothing for a single human being in three years?

Who needs it more than your shelf does?

Jessica Pryce-Jones worked out in her book Happiness at Work an average of around 90,000 hours spent at work in a lifetime. Roughly a third of your waking life. Ten years, give or take, of being awake and at work.

Now hold the "living for the weekend" idea next to it. You are saying ten years of your life are a toll you pay for the rest of it.

Nobody would sign such a contract if it arrived on paper. We sign it by default, one Monday at a time.

And the arithmetic gets worse, because Gallup measured what those hours feel like. Global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, with managers taking the steepest fall of any group. Gallup prices low engagement at about $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP.

Four out of five people are switched off at work. We built an entire global economy on people counting down to Friday.

The weekend is not magic. The weekend has autonomy.

Here is the part I find genuinely useful.

Richard Ryan, Jessey Bernstein and Kirk Warren Brown studied 74 working adults and found the "weekend effect" is real. Better mood, more vitality, fewer aches and pains, from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. It held across every job type they looked at, from laborers to lawyers. Published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology in 2010.

Then they asked why. The answer was not "Saturday is a special day". The answer was autonomy, competence and connection. On the weekend people choose their own activities, feel good at what they are doing, and spend time with people they love. On workdays those three go missing, replaced by external control, time pressure and demands.

Read the finding again, because it changes the whole argument. The weekend is not the cure. Autonomy is the cure. The weekend is where most people are allowed to have some.

So the goal is not more weekend. The goal is dragging autonomy, mastery and human connection back across the border into Tuesday.

Where the deadness comes from

My own survey research found 99.5% of respondents have had one or more types of bad boss. Almost every working person alive.

I am not going to pretend the whole Monday-to-Friday problem is your manager's fault. Some of it is the work itself, some of it is the mortgage, some of it is a season of life you have to grind through.

But sit with the mechanics of a bad boss. Micromanagement removes autonomy. Blame removes competence. Politics remove connection. It is the exact three-item list from the weekend effect study, taken away one at a time, by one person, for eight hours a day.

If somebody engineered a machine to make Monday feel like dying, it would look a lot like an average middle manager under pressure.

This is not "quit and follow your bliss"

Someone always hears this and reads it as advice to hand in your notice and go find work you love. No. Most people have bills, dependents and a market with opinions of its own. Telling a 45 year old with two kids to chase a calling is not advice, it is a luxury item.

What I am arguing for is smaller and available now. You do not need a new employer to get an hour of self-directed time on a Wednesday. You do not need a new title to finish one thing a week you are proud of. You do not need permission to walk outside at two in the afternoon.

Start with the week you already have. If a year of small rebellions still leaves you counting down every Tuesday, then the job is the problem, and you will know it with evidence rather than a feeling.

Small rebellions I run on myself

I stopped waiting for a job to hand me a better week. Here is what has worked for me and for teams I have run. None of it needs permission from HR.

Make something every week

Not manage. Make. Write the thing, build the prototype, fix the ugly script, draw the diagram nobody asked for.

Competence was one of the three missing pieces. You get it back by finishing something small with your own hands. I put one making block in my calendar every week and defend it like a doctor's appointment.

Kill one recurring meeting

Every month, look at your recurring meetings and cancel one. Ask yourself what breaks. Usually nothing breaks.

Each dead meeting hands you back an hour of self-directed time. Autonomy, bought at the price of one awkward Slack message.

Break the shape of one day

Wednesday afternoon walk. Coffee with the person two desks over who does the work you half understand. Lunch outside the building with your phone in your pocket.

Monotony is a rhythm, and rhythms break with one deliberate change. The point is not the walk. The point is proving the week bends when you push on it.

Say no once a week, out loud

If you never say no, every hour you own belongs to whoever asks loudest. One no per week is a small habit with a big payoff. It reminds you and everybody around you where your edges sit.

Put something you want in the middle of the week

Gig on a Wednesday. Class on a Thursday. Anything good deliberately placed where the week sags.

Front-loading all your joy into Saturday is how you end up with five grey days and two frantic ones.

If you run a team, you own more of this than you think

Your people are having a week designed by you. Meeting load, decision rights, whether they are trusted to work unsupervised, whether anybody notices what they finished. You set all of it.

Three questions worth asking yourself before next Monday:

• How many hours this week does each person control outright?
• Does everyone on the team finish at least one visible thing a week, or do they only attend?
• When did you last say out loud what someone is getting better at?

Autonomy, competence, connection. The research names them. Your calendar either delivers them or it does not.

I have written more about this side of the work over at Step It Up HR, where most of what I do involves helping leaders stop accidentally building the machine described above.

The bit worth remembering

Nobody gets those 90,000 hours back. There is no bonus round at the end where they refund the Tuesdays.

Living for the weekend is a strategy for surviving a life you did not choose. It works, in the way holding your breath works. Then one day you notice a decade went by in five-day increments and the only part you remember is Saturday.

Break something in the pattern this week. Cancel the meeting. Take the walk. Finish one thing you are proud of by Thursday.

So what is one small rebellion you would run on your own week, starting Monday?

Peter Cappelli at Wharton puts it bluntly. The research evidence gives no support to the idea of layoffs improving firm performance. He said so in Knowledge at Wharton's look at what layoffs cost companies, and he has been saying it for years.

Wayne Cascio spent decades on the same question, tracking S&P 500 firms through downsizing cycles. His conclusion, recognised with a major research award, is blunt in a different way: firms with big layoffs generally fail to beat the firms who found another route. Their share prices tend to lag afterwards, not lead.

My favourite finding in the Wharton piece comes from Zeynep Ton at MIT. She studied retail stores cutting staff to protect payroll targets. Those stores were cutting their own profits. Fewer people on the floor meant shelves went unstocked, queues got longer, and customers spent less. The savings were real. The lost revenue was bigger. The stores kept doing it anyway, because payroll sits in a monthly report and lost sales hide.

Here is the pattern. The saving is visible and immediate. The damage is invisible and delayed. Anyone reviewing the decision at the ninety day mark sees only the good half.

The bill goes to the people who stay

Here is the part leaders skip.

Leadership IQ surveyed 4,172 people who kept their jobs through a layoff, across 318 companies who had cut within the previous six months. The survivors' answers are ugly:

• 74% said their own productivity had gone down
• 77% saw more errors and mistakes at work
• 81% said the service customers received had got worse
• 87% said they were less likely to recommend the place to anyone

Read the first one again. Three quarters of the people you kept, the ones you decided the business needed most, tell you they are producing less than before. You removed a slice of your cost base and degraded the rest.

Nobody is surprised by this once they hear it. Everyone is surprised by it while planning the cut.

The survivors are not sulking. They are doing three jobs, watching the door, and updating their CVs in the evening. Step It Up HR points at Gallup's finding of 21% employee engagement worldwide as a baseline problem. Now picture what happens to the number in an office where half the desks emptied in March.

There is one bright spot in the Leadership IQ data, and it is worth taking seriously. People who rated their manager highly on visibility, approachability and candour were 72% less likely to report a productivity drop. The cut hurts. A manager who stays in the room, tells the truth, and takes the questions absorbs a lot of the damage. A manager who goes quiet after the announcement doubles it.

Then you hire them back

Years ago I wrote ten things worth knowing when you get made redundant. One of the points was about staying professional on the way out, because companies frequently cut too deep, work out what they broke, and come looking for the same people again... this time as contractors.

I have watched it happen more than once. Cut in Q1. Panic in Q3. Rehire the same skills at contractor rates, with none of the institutional memory, on a six month ramp. The finance team books a saving in one year and an overspend in the next, and the two numbers never meet on the same page.

Add the pieces up. Severance. Notice pay. Recruitment fees when you rehire. Ramp-up time on the new people. The projects stalled while everyone processed the news. The quiet resignations of your best engineers, who read the announcement as a signal and went looking. The knowledge walking out with a twelve year veteran, none of which was ever written down.

Not one of those lands in the business case.

Cutting with a thesis, not a percentage

I want to be fair here, because I have run budgets and I know what a genuine cash crunch feels like. Sometimes an organisation is too big for the work in front of it. Sometimes a product line has ended. Cutting is then the honest answer.

The difference is between a cut with a thesis and a cut with a percentage.

A cut with a thesis sounds like this: we are leaving this market, so the twenty people serving it need new roles or an exit. Here is the evidence. Here is what we stop doing. Here is who owns the decision.

A cut with a percentage sounds like this: every department finds eight percent by Friday.

The first one is strategy. The second one is arithmetic dressed up as strategy, and it guarantees the same outcome every time. Every leader protects their favourites, gives up their most junior and least political people, and quietly reduces nothing about the workload. The work does not shrink by eight percent. Only the hands do.

Cascio's alternative, what he calls responsible restructuring, starts from a different question. Instead of asking who to remove, ask what to stop doing. Kill a product. Kill a report nobody reads. Kill the two week approval chain. Reduce hours across a team who would rather share the pain than lose colleagues. Move people sideways into the roles you are trying to fill anyway.

Some of those options are harder than a layoff. All of them leave you with a business still holding its knowledge in June.

Questions worth asking before you sign

If someone hands you a number and a deadline, ask these before you sign anything:

What work stops? If the answer is "nothing, we will absorb it", you are planning a burnout, not a saving.

What did we try first? Contract spend, travel, tooling, the office nobody uses, the project everyone knows will fail. If people are the first lever, people were the lazy lever.

What does this cost in twelve months? Rehire fees, contractor rates, lost revenue, voluntary turnover. Put a number on it, even a rough one. Make somebody defend it.

Who is telling the survivors the truth? Name the person. Give them the real reasons. The 72% finding above lives or dies on this one.

Would I do this to my own team? If your division carries the least pain in a company-wide cut, everyone notices. You pay for it in trust, and trust is the budget line you rebuild slowest.

The scissors are not the strategy

Reaching for the scissors when things get tight is a reflex, not a plan. Every business hits a hard quarter. The leaders I respect treat a cut as the last option after a list of harder ones, not the first option because it fits on a slide.

If you are staring at a spreadsheet right now with a percentage written at the top, do one thing before you start moving names around. Work out what your company will lose along with the salaries, write it down, and show it to the person who gave you the number.

If nobody wants to see the page... you have learned something about your leadership, and it has nothing to do with the budget.

Gallup's research on manager habits puts numbers on this. In their write-up of a great manager's most important habit, 80% of employees who received meaningful feedback in the past week are fully engaged.

Now the other side of the coin. Only 16% said their last conversation with their manager was extremely meaningful.

Sit with those two numbers together. The single strongest lever a manager holds is a decent weekly conversation, and five out of six of us are failing to have one.

Gallup also found short and frequent beats long and rare. Fifteen to thirty minutes every week outperforms an hour every month. The habit matters more than the duration.

And here's the one which stung me most. Only 10% of employees get asked how they like to be recognized. We hand out praise in the format we enjoy receiving it, then wonder why it lands flat.

The first three times you ask, you get nothing

Prepare yourself for this, because most managers quit at the second attempt.

Ask one: "Nah, all good."

Ask two: "Nope, you're fine."

Ask three: a pause, then "Nothing springs to mind."

Ask four is where it turns. You get something small and safe. "A bit more notice when priorities shift, I guess." It sounds trivial. Treat it as though the building is on fire. Fix it inside the week and tell them you fixed it.

Do it once and you've bought yourself the real answers.

Your team has been reading your reaction to bad news since the day you took the job. They already know whether honesty is expensive around you. One question won't overwrite years of evidence. Repetition plus visible action will.

Five rules for asking it well

Ask it last, never first

Open with the question and you'll get a reflex. Ask it after twenty minutes of ordinary conversation, once the guard has dropped, and you'll get thought.

Count to ten in silence

The urge to rescue the moment is brutal. Resist it. Silence is the sound of somebody deciding whether to trust you. Fill the gap and you've answered your own question for them.

Write the answer down in front of them

Pen, paper, visible. The gesture says this counts. A nod says the opposite.

Fix one thing inside a week

Not all of it. One thing. Speed beats completeness, because speed is the proof.

Close the loop out loud

"You said you weren't getting enough context on the roadmap. Here's what I changed." Unclosed loops teach people the question was theater.

It costs you your ego, and the price is fair

The answers sting.

"You interrupt me in design reviews."

"You give the interesting work to whoever asks loudest."

"I find out about decisions affecting my team from other people."

Every instinct screams to explain the context, the constraints, the reasons. Swallow it. The moment you explain why they're wrong, you've taught them to stop talking, and no amount of asking wins the ground back.

Say thank you. Ask one clarifying question. Write it down. Leave the defending for later, or for never.

I've eaten this particular meal more than once. A senior engineer once told me my "open door" was worthless because I visibly flinched every time somebody walked through it. He was right. I had no idea. Nobody in eighteen months had said a word.

The question works upward too

Ask your own boss the same six words.

I've done it, and the first reaction is nearly always a startled laugh. Bosses hear complaints. Bosses rarely hear a direct request for the specific thing they are failing to supply. The laugh is the sound of somebody realizing nobody has ever put it to them plainly.

Two useful things follow. You get what you need, which beats resenting the absence of it in silence. And you show your manager the move by performing it on them, which spreads faster than any training slide about feedback culture.

Try it sideways as well. Ask the peer whose team keeps colliding with yours. "What aren't you getting from me?" turns a turf argument into a supply problem in about four seconds, because the question hands the other person the position of the one being served.

Nobody stays defensive while being asked what they need.

Why this beats anything on your org chart

My research for the book found 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more types of bad bosses. Near enough everyone.

Almost none of those bad bosses woke up planning it. They drifted. They stopped hearing anything true, and the silence read as approval. A manager surrounded by nodding heads believes the nodding.

The question is a smoke alarm. It won't stop every fire, and it tells you early while the fire is still small enough to put out with a cup of water. Skip it, and the first news you get arrives through an exit interview you weren't invited to.

I've written a fair bit more about how ordinary managers turn into bad bosses over at Step It Up HR.

Try it this week

Pick your next one-on-one. Do the normal thirty minutes. At minute twenty-five, ask the six words and then say nothing at all.

You'll hate the silence. Sit in it anyway.

So, what would your team tell you they aren't getting from you... and how long has it been since anyone felt safe enough to say it out loud?

There is a reason the book fades. Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros at the University of Amsterdam replicated Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve and published the results in PLOS ONE in 2015. Their savings scores tracked the original almost exactly. After one hour, roughly half the material was gone. After a day, retention sat near 30 percent. After 31 days, about 4 percent.

Four percent. Of deliberately memorized material, by a subject working hard at it.

Now think about a 300-page business book skimmed on a train with one eye on your inbox. Whatever you believe you absorbed, the number is smaller.

So the question stops being "which book should I read next?" and becomes "what survives the month?"

The rule: three gems. No more. No less.

Here is the rule I use now. Every leadership book earns its place on my shelf by giving me three gems. Three specific, usable ideas I write down and put into practice. Three, not thirty.

The number matters in both directions.

Fewer than three and the book has not earned the hours. One decent idea wrapped in 280 pages of anecdote is a blog post wearing a hardback costume. Plenty of business books are exactly this. Take the one idea, thank the author, move on.

More than three and you are lying to yourself. I have watched people leave a book with seventeen highlighted passages and a fresh identity. Two weeks later, nothing in their week has changed. Highlighting feels like progress. It is decoration.

Three forces a choice. Choosing is where the learning lives. When you sit down to pick your three, you have to rank ideas against each other, weigh them against your own situation, and reject good material because better material exists. The choosing sticks. Passive reading does not.

How to pull the gems out

I keep this stupidly simple.

Write them by hand, on one card

One index card per book. Title at the top, date, three lines. My whole leadership library compresses into a small stack of cards. When I want the thinking from a book I read four years ago, I read the card, not the book.

Phrase each gem as an action, not a concept

"Psychological safety matters" is a concept. It changes nothing on Monday. "Ask the quietest person in the room for their view before I give mine" is a gem. It has a time, a place, and a behavior attached.

Unable to picture yourself doing it this week? Rewrite it until you are... or admit it is not a gem.

Use one gem within seven days

Pick one of the three and put it into your next week. Deliberately. In a real meeting, with real people. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is the only step doing any work.

Roediger and Karpicke showed in their 2006 study, Test-Enhanced Learning, how retrieval beats restudying for long-term retention. Students who tested themselves outperformed students who read the material again, even though rereading felt more productive at the time. Rereading your highlights is the weaker option. Pulling the idea out of your head and using it is the stronger one.

Your team is your retention test.

Say the gem out loud to someone

Teach it, badly, to a colleague over coffee. Explaining an idea exposes the parts you never understood. Every gem I have kept for years is one I taught to somebody else inside two weeks.

What this does to your reading

The rule changed how I read, and how much I read.

I abandon books faster. If 80 pages produce nothing worth writing on a card, the book is not for me at this point in my life. No guilt, no finishing out of duty. Somebody else needs it more.

I reread far less. My cards carry the load.

I read outside leadership more. Once you hunt for three usable ideas rather than comprehensive coverage, history, biography and even fiction start out-yielding the airport business shelf. Some of my best gems came from books with no management content whatsoever.

And I stopped confusing volume with growth. Nobody has ever become a better boss by reading forty books. People become better bosses by changing three behaviors and holding them.

Do it as a team

The version I like best is collective.

Each person on the team reads whatever they want. Once a month, one of them stands up for five minutes and gives their three gems from the last book. Not a summary. Not a slide deck. Three ideas and how they used one.

Five minutes. Three ideas. Then back to work.

Do this for a year and the team has traded three dozen usable ideas, every one filtered by somebody who applied it in real life. Set the value of those against the leadership training budget you spent last year, then set the costs side by side.

The cards go on a wall. New starters read the wall and inherit years of thinking in ten minutes.

The uncomfortable bit

If you look back over the last five leadership books you read and you struggle to name three gems from any of them, the problem is not your memory. It is the reading habit. You were consuming, not learning, and the industry is happy to keep selling into the gap.

I am not against leadership books. I write about this stuff constantly and read plenty of them, and I make my living helping bosses get better at Step It Up HR. My argument is with the ritual of reading as a substitute for changing.

A book you read and forgot cost you eight hours. A book you mined for three gems and applied one of them pays you back for years.

Start tonight

Take the book on your bedside table. Open a blank card. Write the title, the date, and three lines you would defend to a skeptical colleague.

If you struggle to reach three, you have learned something about the book. If you fly past three, you have learned something about your own judgement, and it is time to pick the best ones.

Then choose one, and use it before Friday.

What three gems would you write down from the last book you finished?

Resume Now surveyed 1,018 US adults in December 2025. Thirty-nine percent said they had cried at work. Another 21% said they came close without tipping over. Add those together and you get six in ten people who have sat at a desk fighting their own face.

The top driver wasn't workload. It was uncertainty. Fifty-two percent said they worry about losing their job with no clear reason given. People aren't crying because the sprint is hard. They're crying because nobody will tell them where they stand.

Then there's the part I find harder to sit with. A study of 600 US professionals by resume.io found 87% of the people who cried at work hid it. Over half hid it completely from every colleague. Researchers have a name for it now: cry masking. Performing composure while the wheels come off.

Gen Z reported the highest rate, close to 39% in six months, against 17% of Gen X. Read it as young people being fragile if you like. I read it as young people being slightly more honest on a survey form.

The eleven minutes after

Here's the thing about the moment itself. It arrives with no warning, in a one-to-one about a delivery date, and you have about a second to decide who you are.

What I do, and what I've watched good leaders do:

Stop talking. Whatever point you were making has stopped mattering. The agenda is dead. Let it be dead.

Don't hand over tissues as a hint. Tissues on the table, fine. Tissues pushed across the desk with a look means "wrap this up." People read it instantly.

Don't fix it. Your instinct will be to solve, reassure, or explain why it isn't as bad as it feels. All three land as "please stop." Sit with it. Silence is doing work even when it feels like doing nothing.

Don't outsource them. "Have you thought about the Employee Assistance Programme?" in the first thirty seconds is a door being closed politely. Signposting help is fine, later, once they know you heard them first.

Give back control. One question does most of the heavy lifting: "Do you want to keep going, or pick this up tomorrow?" They choose. Not you.

Then let it go, forever. Never bring it up in a performance conversation. Never mention it to their next manager. Never use it as evidence of anything, ever. The moment you trade on someone's worst ten minutes, you've told every person they talk to what you are.

The hiding is the real diagnosis

Look again at the 87%.

The crying isn't the culture problem. People cry at work for reasons with nothing to do with work. Sick parents. Divorce. Two hours of sleep. A dog put down last Tuesday. Grief has no respect for your calendar.

The culture problem is the hiding. Nine in ten people going to the trouble of concealing an ordinary human response, from people they see forty hours a week, because being seen as it happens costs more than the pain of holding it in.

Ask what those people believe. They believe tears will be recorded. Filed under "not ready for the next level." Repeated at a calibration meeting where they aren't in the room. And they believe it because for a lot of them it happened, or they watched it happen to somebody else.

Amy Edmondson has spent decades on this. Her research on psychological safety, laid out in The Fearless Organization, comes down to whether people believe they will be punished or humiliated for speaking up. Tears are speech. Involuntary speech, at maximum volume, with no way to walk it back. If your people won't risk it in front of you, sit with what else they've decided against telling you.

Nobody hides their tears from someone who has earned trust. So the hiding rate in your building is a scoreboard, and you don't get to see it.

Culture lives in small rooms

Big culture gestures are performed for an audience: the all-hands, the offsite, the values workshop with the sticky notes. They're all rehearsed, and everybody knows it.

Real culture gets set in rooms with two people in them and no witnesses. A redundancy delivered by someone who stays in the chair afterward instead of handing over to HR and leaving. A manager saying "I got this wrong" out loud to a junior engineer. Someone crying, and nobody in the room treating it as an incident.

Those moments cost nothing and they're worth more than the entire perks budget. They're also the ones leaders dodge hardest, because they're uncomfortable, unscripted, and there's no slide deck to hide behind.

The uncomfortable part is where the whole thing gets decided. If you want to know what I mean by leaders getting the human moments right, most of my work with Step It Up HR starts exactly there.

The test you're already taking

You don't get to opt in. Someone on your team is running the experiment on you right now, watching how you handle the small stuff, deciding in advance whether they'd let you see them at their worst.

So ask yourself an honest question. Not "do we have a good culture," which every leader answers yes to. Ask this instead:

If somebody on my team broke down in front of me tomorrow, would they feel safer afterwards or more exposed?

You already know the answer. And so do they.

Pew Research Center found 63% of workers who quit a job in 2021 named "no opportunities for advancement" as a reason for leaving. At least a third called it a major reason. Same share as low pay. People walk out of the building over a rung.

Now look at the people holding the ladder. LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report found only 15% of employees said their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months, down five points from the year before. Only 36% of organizations run career development well enough to earn the label "champion".

Read those two findings side by side. Most people leave over growth. Most managers never open the subject. Then everyone acts shocked at the exit interview.

If your growth depends on a system with those odds, your growth is a lottery ticket.

Sideways is a real move, not a consolation prize

Here is the part nobody explains at your first job.

Xin Jin and Michael Waldman published a study in the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization on lateral moves inside firms. Workers moved sideways in one period turned out more likely to be promoted afterwards, with stronger wage growth than peers who stayed put. Their evidence came from linked employer-employee data on senior management roles in large US companies.

Sideways is not a detour from the promotion. Sideways is often the thing causing the promotion.

The mechanism is obvious once you say it out loud. Every sideways move buys you a new set of problems, a new set of colleagues, and a new set of skills. Three moves later you hold something rare: you understand how four parts of the business fit together. Nobody climbing one leg of the ladder ever learns it.

I got my biggest lift from a move with no title attached at all. I took on a mess nobody wanted, in an area I knew nothing about, and spent six months feeling like the dumbest person in the room. The stuff I learned in those six months paid me back for a decade.

My scribble, in hindsight

Every good thing in my working life arrived from a sideways step.

The Army taught me how people behave under pressure. Writing software taught me how systems break at the seams. Leading teams taught me how much of "technical" failure is human failure wearing a hard hat. Writing and speaking about bad bosses came from all three, and none of it appeared on any career framework I was ever shown.

At the time, each move looked like a wobble. My CV looked untidy next to people with one clean vertical line. I felt behind.

I was not behind. I was collecting.

Playground rules

A playground has no single top. It has bars, ropes, tunnels, and a dozen routes across. Here is how to build one where you work.

1. Chase skills, not titles

Write down the four or five things you want to be good at in five years. Not the job you want. The abilities. Then check every opportunity against the list. "Head of Something" tells you nothing. "The person who fixes broken supply chains" tells you everything.

2. Borrow the work before you ask for the job

Want to know whether product management suits you? Go help the product team for two hours a week. Nobody has to approve a career change. People approve small favors all the time. Do the borrowed work well and the formal move becomes a formality.

3. Keep a file of things you have done

Not a CV. A running list, updated monthly, of the problems you solved and the messes you cleaned up. It takes ten minutes. When a sideways door opens, you will have your evidence ready instead of scrambling to remember last February.

4. Ask the question most people avoid

Lee Woollsey puts three words at the heart of every one-to-one: "What aren't you getting from me?" Turn it around and ask your own boss the same thing about your growth. Most managers have never been asked. The awkward silence you get is information all by itself.

5. Move toward people, not org boxes

The best thing you learn from a job is often a person. Pick your next move by who you will sit next to. I have learned more from two bosses and one stubborn colleague than from every training course combined.

6. Treat a step down as a legal move

Reskilling looks like a demotion on a ladder. On a playground it is a rope you grab to reach a different bar. Some of the strongest leaders I know spent a year as a beginner in their forties.

Managers, you are selling a ladder you do not own

If you lead people, this next bit is on you.

You promise progression at interview. You then spend the year with no rungs to hand out, because headcount got frozen, or the org chart got flattened, or your own boss went quiet. So you say "next year" and hope nobody counts the years.

Stop selling a thing outside your control. Start handing out what sits inside it: the interesting problem, the introduction, the secondment, the two hours a week with another team, the project with a skill attached rather than a title. You own all of those. None of them needs a budget line.

My research on bad bosses found 99.5% of respondents had suffered one or more types of bad boss. Almost nobody escapes. A large slice of the damage comes from managers who make promises about progression with no authority behind them. Broken promises breed cynicism faster than honest limits ever will.

Try honesty instead. "I have no rung for you this year. Here are three things I will get you, starting Monday." People forgive a shortage of promotions. They do not forgive being strung along.

The scribble is the point

Your career is not a ladder in a building owned by a company with a five-year plan and a quarterly reorg. It is yours. It goes with you when the building changes hands.

So stop asking how to reach the next rung. Start asking what you want to be able to do, and which sideways step gets you closer.

The tidy vertical CV impresses nobody worth impressing. The person who has been around the whole playground, who understands four parts of the business and knows people in all of them, never runs out of options.

What sideways move have you been talking yourself out of?

His multi-year study on Ellesmere Island, published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology in 1999, found something else entirely. Wild packs are families. A breeding pair and their offspring. No one fights for the top spot because there is no top spot to win. There are parents, and there are kids.

Mech then spent decades trying to undo his own work. He asked his publisher to stop printing the book, and in 2022 they finally did. On his own site he writes: "The concept of the alpha wolf is well ingrained in the popular wolf literature, at least partly because of my book." He recommends dropping alpha for plainer words. Breeding male. Breeding female. Male parent. Female parent.

He put it sharper to Scientific American: "What would be the value of calling a human father the alpha male?" A wolf father is a father. Nothing more.

So the whole model rests on captive animals. Strangers, forced together, fighting over scarce resources, with no way out.

Sound familiar?

Your office is the enclosure

Here is the uncomfortable bit. If your workplace behaves like a dominance hierarchy, the wolves are not the explanation. The cage is.

Put strangers in a pen. Make the rewards scarce. Remove the exit. Reward whoever grabs the most. You get precisely the behavior those researchers recorded in the 1940s. Not nature. Captivity.

Every organization I have walked into where "alpha" was a compliment had the same wiring underneath. Forced ranking. One promotion shared between eight people. Bonus pools sized so somebody has to lose for somebody else to win. Leaders who treat information as currency and hand it out in slivers.

The behavior is not a personality problem. It is a design problem. You built the pen, then blamed the animals inside it.

We keep promoting the wrong signal

The alpha myth survives because it flatters the people doing the promoting.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has spent years on why the wrong people reach the top. His answer is blunt. We mistake confidence for competence. As King's College London summarizes his work, organizations should "stop interpreting displays of overconfidence, narcissism, psychopathy, and charisma as a sign of leadership potential."

Read the list again. Overconfidence. Narcissism. Psychopathy. Charisma. Every one of those traits shows up in a forty-minute interview. Patience does not. Neither does the willingness to sit with a struggling engineer at 4pm on a Friday. So we hire the signal we spot, then act surprised at what we get.

And what do we get?

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace research says global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, down from 21% the year before. Manager engagement sits at 22%, a nine-point drop since 2022. Gallup prices low engagement at around $10 trillion in lost productivity, roughly 9% of global GDP.

Ten trillion dollars, burned by people convinced they are apex predators.

My own survey work found 99.5% of respondents have suffered one or more types of bad boss. Not 60%. Not 80%. Effectively everyone. We have normalized something we all hate.

What parents do instead

Strip the alpha language away and look at what wild wolf parents do.

They feed the young first. They teach by doing, over and over, until the skill sticks. They take the dangerous end of the hunt themselves. And when the yearlings are ready, they let them go.

Wild packs break up. Young wolves disperse and start families of their own. Nobody calls it disloyalty. Nobody counts it as a failure of retention.

Compare this with the manager who hoards talent, blocks internal moves, and treats a resignation as a personal insult. Compare it with the leader who takes the safe end of every hunt and sends the team into the risk.

The best boss I ever had treated my leaving as a win. He had been getting me ready for it the whole time and never once pretended otherwise. Years later I still hear his questions in my head when I face a hard call. Nobody remembers the loudest person in the room. Everybody remembers the one who made them better.

Four things to do on Monday

Drop the word. Alpha, beta, sigma, whatever the internet invented last week. The language is borrowed from a retracted study. Using it marks you as someone who stopped reading in 1974.

Audit the pen, not the people. Where do your structures force people to compete over something artificially scarce? Ranking curves. Single-winner bonus pools. One headcount for two deserving candidates. Fix the scarcity and watch how quickly the snarling stops.

Promote for what you want more of. If your last three promotions went to the three loudest voices, you have told everyone else exactly what the game is. They heard you.

Ask the question. Kul Mahay, who came up through policing before moving into leadership work, argues the real measure of a leader is one question: do my people trust me? Not "do they fear me" or "do they defer to me." Trust. Ask it out loud, then sit through the silence while people work out whether honesty is safe.

The pack was never the point

Mech has spent his later career correcting a mistake he made in 1970. He wrote the book, he got the science wrong, and he has spent the rest of his career saying so in public. He got his own bestseller pulled from print.

Set this against your average alpha in the corner office, unable to admit a wrong call in a Tuesday standup.

The real lesson from wolves was never about dominance. It was about a family unit where the adults hunt for the young, teach them everything they know, and celebrate the day they leave.

Which one are you running... a family, or a cage?

The research backs this up more than I expected when I went looking. A meta-analysis of 76 fMRI studies found nine separate regions of the brain light up under uncertainty, spanning both emotional and cognitive pathways. When those regions fire together, people get brain fog, slower decisions, and worse recall. Your team isn't imagining the fatigue. It's neurological, and it's real. (Forbes, via Paula Davis's research on leadership practices for uncertainty)

Extended exposure makes it worse. People start scanning for safety signals: does leadership have a plan, are they telling us the truth, is the information even accurate. When the answer feels like no, anxiety builds until it turns into exhaustion. Not a morale problem you fix with a pizza party. A leadership gap you fix by showing up differently.

There's a flip side worth naming too. Researchers studying positive emotion have found it "broadens and builds" cognitive and emotional resources, expanding how many possibilities show up for a person and strengthening long-term resilience. Uncertainty narrows people. A leader's steadiness widens them back out. This is the whole job, right there, in one sentence.

What the Army Taught Me

Nobody in the Army ever promised me a quiet mission. The plan you walk in with is a starting position, not a guarantee. You train for the moment the map stops matching the terrain, because it always does eventually. Every plan I ever saw survived first contact for about ten minutes.

The leaders who fell apart in the field weren't facing the worst conditions. They were the ones who needed certainty before they'd act. They'd freeze, waiting for a clean picture nobody was ever going to hand them. Meanwhile the leaders who held it together weren't smarter or braver than anyone else. They'd accepted, ahead of time: fog was the job. Not an obstacle to the job. The job itself.

I carried this lesson into every company I've run or helped run since leaving the service. Software doesn't come with dust storms, but it has its own version: the outage nobody predicted, the acquisition rewriting the org chart overnight, the market moving faster than your roadmap. Same fog. Different terrain. Same choice for the leader standing in it: freeze, or move with imperfect information and adjust as you go.

What Leading Through It Looks Like

Satya Nadella put it plainly: leaders have to get comfortable not having all the answers. I'd go further. People don't want a leader who pretends to know everything. They want one who stays grounded, honest, and willing to act without full information. (Forbes, "The 2026 Leadership Playbook")

I use a simple framework now, one I picked up from watching leaders who handle ambiguity well: say what you know, say what you don't know yet, and say what you're optimizing for. Three sentences. No pretending. No false confidence. It sounds almost too simple to matter, and yet most leaders skip the middle sentence entirely. Admitting what you don't know feels like weakness right up until you watch how much trust it earns you.

There's a name for the underlying skill too. A leadership research team at Cutlefish calls it "facing uncertainty": the ability to balance gravitating toward the most uncertain parts of a situation against the pull of chasing easy, familiar wins instead. Most of us default to the easy wins. It feels like progress at the time. Usually it's a way of dodging the one problem worth solving. (Cutlefish, "How Capable Leaders Navigate")

I've watched the opposite work too. Alan Mulally, turning Ford around during its worst years, ran on one principle: you cannot manage a secret. Surface a problem the moment you see it, even the ugly ones, especially the ugly ones. Waiting for a good moment to deliver bad news only extends how long everyone stays in the dark, and darkness is where anxiety grows fastest.

Researchers who study workplace wellbeing describe another piece of this puzzle: "mattering." People need to feel valued through recognition, and they need to know their work adds real value. Under prolonged uncertainty, both of those signals get harder to send and harder to receive. A leader who keeps sending them anyway, especially when the news is mixed, is doing the real work of leadership. Everything else is administration.

Try This Instead

Stop asking your team, or yourself, when things will settle. Ask a better question: what does steady leadership look like while nothing settles?

For me it comes down to a handful of habits, none of them complicated:

• Say the three sentences out loud. What we know. What we don't. What we're optimizing for. Repeat weekly if you have to.
• Move on partial information. Waiting for complete data is how good opportunities die on the vine. You'll be wrong sometimes. Adjust and keep going.
• Surface bad news early. A team absorbs a hard truth today far more easily than a surprise next month.
• Watch for exhaustion, not only for morale. If people seem foggy or slow to decide, uncertainty is taxing their brains, not their effort.
• Send recognition anyway. Tell people what they did well and why it mattered, especially when the bigger picture is murky. It costs you two minutes and holds a team together for weeks.

None of these habits made my time in uniform easy, and they don't make leading a company easy either. What they do is give people something steady to hold onto when everything else is moving. None of this makes the fog lift. It isn't supposed to. The goal was never comfort. The goal is to keep your team moving alongside you while the ground keeps shifting underneath all of you.

The Real Question

So next time you catch yourself wondering when things will calm down, flip the question. Ask what you'd do differently this week if you fully accepted they won't.

Then go do it. Today, not after the fog lifts. It isn't lifting.

Sources: - StudyFinds: Average Person Spends Sundays Terrified - Kickresume: Work Week Stress Starts on Sunday - Harvard Business Review: When It's OK to Trust Your Gut on a Big Decision

Richie McCaw captained the All Blacks in 110 test matches. He won 97 of them. A win rate of 89 percent, over eleven years, for the hardest job in world rugby. Read the numbers here.

Eleven years. One captain. Ninety-seven wins.

Now think about the last company you watched struggle. I'd bet money it didn't have one captain for eleven years. It had four VPs in three years, a reorg every time a new exec wanted to leave a mark, and a team never given the chance to figure out who they even were.

Stability Isn't Boring. It's the Whole Point.

Nobody puts "leadership stability" on a slide at the all-hands. It doesn't sound bold. It doesn't sound like a growth story you'd tell an investor. Stability sounds like the opposite of ambition.

But watch what McCaw did with those eleven years. He didn't coast. He didn't sit on a winning formula and protect his job. He kept the team accountable to a standard growing harder every season. Stability wasn't the absence of pressure. It was the platform letting the team absorb pressure without falling apart.

Here's the part leaders miss when they treat reorgs like a reset button. A new leader doesn't inherit trust. They have to build it from zero, on a team who watched the last person say "trust me" and then walk out the door. And here's the part missing from every reorg announcement: each "clean slate" moment costs months. New leaders spend their first quarter learning names, learning history, learning which fires are real and which are theater. The team spends the same quarter deciding whether this one is worth being honest with. Nobody is shipping much of anything during those months, no matter what the org chart says on paper.

The Army Taught Me This the Hard Way

I served in the US Army, where leadership rotates by design. Officers move commands every couple of years. It is built into the system on purpose, so nobody gets too comfortable and units stay adaptable. It works, mostly, because the Army also builds enormous structure around every rotation: standard operating procedures, a chain of command outliving any one officer, and NCOs who carry institutional memory the incoming leader does not have yet.

Most companies borrow the rotation without borrowing any of the structure holding it up. They swap the leader and expect the team to absorb the disruption on will alone, with no handoff process, no institutional memory keeper, and no shared standard the new leader is required to honor. This is not agility. This is asking a team to rebuild the plane while flying it, every eighteen months, indefinitely.

The Real Cost of Revolving-Door Leadership

Gallup tracked 2.7 million employees across more than 100,000 teams and found managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in team engagement scores. The research is here. Not the product. Not the mission statement on the wall. Not the free snacks. The manager.

If you swap out the manager every eighteen months, you're not resetting anything. You're resetting the 70 percent moving the needle, over and over, and asking the team to somehow keep performing while the ground shifts under them every single time.

I have written before: 99.5 percent of people surveyed have had at least one bad boss in their career. Read the stat again slowly. It's not "some people had a rough manager once." It's nearly everyone, at least once. And a huge chunk of it isn't about one cruel person. It's about the churn itself. A team never gets far enough into a relationship with a leader to know if the leader is even good, because the org chart changes before anyone finds out.

I've Sat On Both Sides of This

I have worked for leaders who lasted eighteen months and leaders who lasted years. The difference wasn't subtle.

Under the leaders who stuck around, I stopped performing for them and started working. I told them when a plan was wrong. I brought problems in early instead of hiding them until they were unfixable. It only happens once you've watched someone respond to bad news enough times to know they won't torch you for bringing it. Trust like this isn't built in a single good meeting. It's built across dozens of small moments where someone had the chance to punish honesty and chose not to. You cannot compress this timeline. You give it time, or you don't get it at all.

Under the churn, none of the trust ever had time to build. Every new leader arrived with their own theory of what was broken, usually built from a thirty-day tour of the org rather than actual history with the team. Half of every transition got burned re-explaining context the last three leaders already had. The team wasn't underperforming. The team was constantly re-onboarding its own leadership.

I remember sitting in a room listening to a brand-new VP explain, with total confidence, why our roadmap was wrong. He wasn't a fool. He was smart, and he cared, and everything he said would have been useful feedback in month four. In week two, it was noise dressed up as insight, because he hadn't earned the context to know what he was looking at yet. The team nodded along and kept doing what it already knew worked, quietly, until he moved on to the next thing catching his eye. This is not leadership. This is a team learning to manage its own management, and doing this instead of the actual job.

What Stability Requires

This isn't a case for never changing leaders. Bad leaders should go. Teams who have genuinely outgrown their leader need a change, and staying put out of loyalty to a title is its own kind of failure. I have written before about knowing when it's time to leave a role, and the same logic applies to leadership seats.

The case is against churn for its own sake. Against the belief a new leader every rotation cycle signals momentum. Against treating leadership tenure like a box to check on someone's growth plan instead of a commitment to the people who report to the leader.

If you are the one making these calls, ask yourself a harder question before your next reorg: is this change serving the team, or is it serving the leader's résumé? McCaw didn't get moved around to broaden his experience. He stayed because staying was what the team needed, and the results prove it.

The Question Worth Sitting With

If your organization changes captains as often as it changes quarters, stop calling it agility. Call it what Gallup's data says it is: a direct hit to the 70 percent of engagement deciding whether your team performs.

Who on your team has never had the chance to trust a leader long enough to find out if the leader was worth trusting? What would change if they got the chance?

Researchers John Kotter and Leonard Schlesinger mapped out six responses leaders reach for when they meet resistance, ranked from lightest to heaviest: education, participation, support, negotiation, manipulation, and coercion. Their advice is to start light and only escalate when a lighter method genuinely won't work.

Coercion, meaning "do this or else," sits at the bottom of the list for a reason. It's the fastest method and the one with the highest cost to culture and trust. It's also, in my experience, the one most leaders reach for first. Announcing a mandate takes an afternoon. Sitting through a room full of hard questions takes a lot longer, and it means admitting you don't have every answer yet. Most leaders would rather look certain than be honest.

What the Numbers Say

I didn't want to write this off my own gut feeling alone, so I went looking for the research. It confirms the pattern.

Roughly 70% of change management initiatives fail to hit their goals, according to widely cited Harvard Business Review research. And when researchers ask employees why they resist change, the top reason isn't laziness or fear of the unknown. It's lack of trust in leadership, cited by 41% of employees.

The gap between how leaders see themselves and how their teams experience them is enormous. 74% of leaders believe they actively involve employees in shaping change, but only 42% of employees agree. This gap is where trust goes to die.

This tracks with something else I found in my own research on bad bosses: 99.5% of the people I surveyed said they'd worked for one or more bad bosses in their career. Almost nobody makes it through a career without one. Steamrolling is one of the most common ways a boss earns this label. Not shouting. Not cruelty. Refusing to slow down long enough to bring people with you.

Standing At the Back

The alternative isn't weakness. It's a different kind of courage, and it's harder than announcing a mandate from a podium.

I wrote about this on Step It Up HR in a piece called "Standing at the back: 5 ways to truly empower your people." The core idea is simple. The leader's job during change isn't to be first through the door. It's to be the last one out of the room, making sure everyone else got through first.

This means sitting with someone's objection instead of overriding it. It means answering "why" more than once, even when you've already explained it three times and you're tired of explaining it. It means accepting a plan you built alone will always be weaker than one your team helped shape, even if shaping it takes longer than you wanted.

None of this is soft. It's slower, and it's uncomfortable, and it asks more of you as a leader than a big speech ever will. A mandate takes an afternoon to write. A real conversation with someone who thinks you're wrong takes patience you have to choose to have.

Years after the reorg I got wrong, I ran a similar change the opposite way. Same kind of restructuring, same kind of nervous team, different approach entirely. I sat down with every person affected before I finalized a single decision. I told them what I didn't know yet, not only what I did. Some of what came back changed the plan. A lot of it made people feel heard, which turned out to matter as much as the plan itself. The change still hurt for some people. Nobody felt ambushed by it. This difference alone kept the team together through it, and most of them are still there years later.

Cowardice Wears a Confident Voice

The thing about steamrolling is it never looks like cowardice from the front of the room. It looks like conviction. It looks like a leader who knows what they want and isn't going to let anyone slow them down.

From the back of the room, it looks like someone who never asked if they were right.

Real leadership doesn't need the room to fall silent when you speak. It needs the room to trust you enough to speak up when they disagree, and it needs you to listen when they do. This is the whole job. Not driving the train through the station. Making sure the people on it chose to get there.

If you're leading a change right now and you're tempted to reach for the "get on board or get left behind" line, stop and ask yourself the harder question first: have you asked anyone what they think, or have you told them what to do and called it leadership?

Here's a stat which stopped me cold: 82% of workers entering management positions in the UK have had no formal management or leadership training, according to a Chartered Management Institute and YouGov study. CMI calls them "accidental managers." People handed a title and a headcount, with no instruction on what to do next.

It's not only a UK problem. Research from the Center for Creative Leadership found 60% of new managers never received training when they stepped into their first leadership role.

So four out of five of us walk into management the way I did: with a whiteboard, a headcount, and a guess. And the guess almost everybody makes is the same one I made. Management is task allocation. Assign the work, track the work, chase the work. Keep the board full.

It isn't. Task allocation is a symptom of the job. It isn't the job.

The real job

I've read a lot of leadership research since my first whiteboard, and one piece keeps coming back to me: John Cutler's essay on trust and organisational reality. His argument rearranged how I think about the role. Without trust, no process, no dashboard, no reporting structure will ever tell you what's going on with your team. People optimise for the metric you're watching instead of telling you the truth, because telling you the truth doesn't feel safe when trust isn't there.

Trust comes first. Before clarity, before development, before any of the mechanics of "management." If your people don't trust you, nothing else you build on top of it holds.

Then comes clarity. David Wertheimer wrote a guide to accountability built on a point I now wish someone had printed for me on day one: accountability isn't about demanding longer hours. It's about defining, in writing, what you expect and what your team should expect from you in return. Most of the "performance problems" I dealt with early in my career weren't performance problems. They were clarity problems. I hadn't said what I needed. I'd assumed the whiteboard said it for me.

Then, and only then, development. Once someone trusts you and knows what's expected, your job is to grow them past the point where they need you standing over a whiteboard at all.

Trust. Clarity. Development. None of those three things live in a task list.

The moment it clicked

I remember the conversation which turned this from theory into something I felt in my chest. One of my team members sat across from me during a one-on-one and told me she didn't know what "good" looked like in her role. Not because she wasn't capable. Because I'd never told her. I'd been so busy keeping the board full I never sat down and said, "here's what success looks like from where I sit."

I fixed it the following week. Wrote down what I expected from her role, in plain language, and asked her to push back on anything feeling wrong. She did. We adjusted it together. Within a month her confidence and her output both changed. Not because I'd assigned her more tasks. Because I'd finally given her clarity, and clarity is a form of respect.

The conversation cost me twenty minutes and a willingness to admit I'd been doing part of my job wrong for a year. Cheapest fix I've ever made as a leader.

Three questions instead of a whiteboard

Since then I've replaced most of the whiteboard mentality with three questions I ask myself about every person on my team, on a regular cycle rather than only during a crisis:

Do they trust me? Not "do they like me." Do they believe I'll tell them the truth, back them in front of others, and not punish them for surfacing a problem early. If the answer is uncertain, everything else on this list is built on sand.

Do they know what "good" looks like? In writing, in their own words, checked back with me at least once a quarter. Not a job description written by HR three years ago. A living answer to "what does success in this role look like right now."

Are they better at their job than they were six months ago? Not busier. Better. If someone has been doing the same tasks the same way for a year and calling it progress, it's on me, not them.

None of these three questions show up on a task board. All three take longer to answer honestly than checking a box does. This is exactly why so many managers skip them.

Standing at the back

I wrote about a related idea over on Step It Up HR: the best thing a leader does for their people is often to step back and let them own the work, rather than standing over the whiteboard checking every box themselves. Trust and clarity are what make it possible. You stop being the person who assigns and tracks every task, and you start being the person who removes obstacles and grows people. Standing at the back isn't disengagement. It's the whole point.

Where the whiteboard leads if you get it wrong

I've written before about a piece of research I keep coming back to: 99.5% of people I surveyed said they'd worked for at least one bad boss. Not a rare event. Nearly universal. And in every story people told me about a bad boss, the complaint was never "they didn't assign me enough tasks." It was "I didn't know where I stood," or "I never felt like they trusted me," or "nobody ever helped me get better at this job." Every one of those is a trust, clarity, or development failure. Not a task allocation failure.

If four out of five new managers get no training, and the training we do get focuses on process rather than people, it's no wonder so many of us default to the whiteboard. It's the only model most of us have seen. It's visible, it's measurable, and it feels like progress. Trust and clarity and development are slower, harder to measure, and much easier to skip when the week gets busy.

What I'd tell the version of me standing at the whiteboard

Stop counting boxes. Ask your people if they trust you, and if the answer makes you uncomfortable, start there. Write down what "good" looks like for every person on your team and check it still holds every quarter. Then spend your energy making people better at their jobs than they were when they started working for you.

None of it fits on a whiteboard. All of it is the real job.

If you manage people, when's the last time you asked one of them what "good" looks like from where they sit? If you don't have a quick answer, it's likely worth twenty minutes of your week.

The numbers back this up. Trinity Solutions' research on micromanagement found 85% of employees said micromanagement damaged their morale, and 69% said it made them think about leaving their job entirely. Not a productivity gain. A slow leak in your team's willingness to try.

It doesn't stop at morale, either. Gallup's research on workplace autonomy found employees with real control over their work are 43% less likely to burn out. Control isn't a nice-to-have wrapped in HR language. It's the difference between an engaged team and an exhausted one.

Let Them Own the Wobble Too

Here's the part people skip. Ownership isn't only ownership of the good outcomes. If you hand someone a decision when it's going well, and swoop in to "help" the moment it wobbles, they will notice the pattern fast. They'll stop taking real risks and start guessing at decisions they think you'll approve of. Back to square one, with extra steps and less trust.

Letting someone own a call means letting them own it when the result is a bit messier than yours would have been. Within reason, and I'll come back to where the reason runs out. The small stuff, the recoverable stuff, the stuff people learn judgment from? Let it stay theirs. Wins and wobbles both.

I wrote a longer version of this idea on Step It Up HR: "When we step forward, people often step back. When we step back, people often step up." This single line holds the whole mechanism. Every time you step in to smooth something over, you teach someone to wait for you next time instead of trusting their own read of the situation.

How to Disagree Without Taking It Back

Disagreeing openly and taking a decision back are two different acts, and it's easy to blur them if you aren't paying attention to your own words. "I'd have gone a different way, and it's your call" is disagreement plus ownership. "I'd have gone a different way, so let's do it this way instead" is a decision dressed up as a conversation.

Say the disagreement once, plainly, without repeating it three more times in the next meeting to make sure they understood your concern. Then stop talking about it. If you keep circling back, you haven't handed over the decision. You've handed over a probation period, and everyone in the room knows the difference even if nobody names it out loud.

The people I've worked with who are best at this share one habit: they write their objection down, say it once, and then go quiet. Not sulky quiet. Genuinely done-talking quiet. It's a small discipline, and it's the whole difference between a leader people trust with hard calls and a leader people learn to route around.

Where the Line Sits

None of this means disappear and hope for the best. I'm not talking about handing someone a decision they aren't remotely ready for, or staying silent while something genuinely dangerous unfolds. Letting someone own a call and abandoning them to one are different things entirely.

The line, as I see it: disagree openly if you disagree, make sure people have what they need to decide well, then let the outcome belong to them. Step in only when the risk crosses from "recoverable mistake" into "real harm," to the business, a customer, or a person. This line sits farther out than most managers think. Most decisions we hover over never come close to it. They fail one test only: they don't match how we'd have done it ourselves.

The Bad Boss Pattern

I've spent years researching bad bosses, and one number stands out from this work: 99.5% of the people I surveyed had worked for at least one bad boss. What strikes me, going back through those stories, is how rarely the complaint is a manager who stood back too far. Almost every one of them is a manager who couldn't let go. The over-checker. The rewrite-your-email guy. The one who says "your decision" and means "your decision, as long as it's mine."

Employees notice the gap between the words and the behavior faster than managers ever expect. Say "I trust your judgment" and then question every choice, and people stop hearing the words. They only track the behavior.

What I'm Trying to Do Differently

I haven't fully cracked this myself. I still catch myself rewriting a sentence in a document already fine, only different from how I'd phrase it. The difference now is I notice it happening, and more often than not, I close the document instead of hitting save.

The test I use: would I rather be right, or would I rather they learn? Most days, honestly, the cost of letting someone's slightly different decision play out is close to nothing. The cost of teaching them to check with me first, forever, is enormous. It doesn't show up on this week's numbers. It shows up a year from now, in whether your team runs fine without you standing over every decision, or grinds to a halt the day you take a holiday.

Disagree when you disagree. Say so, out loud, without softening it into nothing. Then hand the decision over and mean it.

Where's your own line between guiding someone and quietly taking the decision back from them?

I'm skeptical of leadership research most days, so I went looking for something solid before writing this. Google ran a two-year study called Project Aristotle, analyzing 180 of its own teams to figure out what separated the best ones from the rest. It wasn't who was smartest. It wasn't who had the most experience.

The single biggest factor was psychological safety: whether team members felt able to take a risk, admit a mistake, or say "I don't know" without getting punished for it.

Here's the part matters for this post: psychological safety on a team starts with the leader. If I show up every day wearing the mask, performing certainty I don't have, I'm teaching my team admitting uncertainty is dangerous. They learn the lesson fast. Then they stop bringing me the hard truths, the early warnings, the "I think this is going to break" conversations able to save us weeks.

Brené Brown has spent years making a related argument from a different angle: vulnerability isn't the opposite of strength, it's where trust and new ideas come from. I resisted this idea for a long time because it sounded soft. It isn't. It's a discipline. Admitting what you don't know, in front of people who report to you, takes more control than performing false confidence.

The Cost I Didn't See Coming

The rewrite project I mentioned? We didn't hit the original deadline. We hit a real one, together, because the team started telling me things three weeks earlier than they would have if I'd kept performing.

Before the meeting where I told the truth, I had engineers who suspected the architecture wouldn't scale and said nothing, since I'd never given them a reason to think I wanted to hear it. After the meeting, the same engineer who told me my plan was fiction became the person who caught our next three problems before they turned into fires.

Here's the cost of the mask: it isn't people thinking less of you for wearing it. It's people no longer giving you the information you need to lead well. You end up flying blind, surrounded by people who see the fog and choose not to mention it.

Taking the Mask Off Without Losing the Room

Dropping the mask doesn't mean showing up unprepared or turning every meeting into group therapy. There's a difference between vulnerability and dumping your anxiety on your team. I learned this distinction the hard way too, by overcorrecting and turning a status update into a confession booth. Nobody needs it either.

What worked for me was narrow and specific: name the exact thing I don't know, and ask for help with it. Not "everything is falling apart," but "I don't have a plan to hit the deadline, and I need your read on where we're stuck." It's honest without being chaotic. It gives people something to act on instead of only something to worry about.

I've built this into how I coach leaders now through Step It Up HR and the BAT framework at Step Up To BAT, since self-awareness only helps if you're willing to act on what it shows you. Knowing you're wearing a mask and keeping it on anyway isn't progress. It's only a more informed performance.

Three Small Habits Replacing the Mask for Me

Name the gap, not the panic. Instead of "I'm worried about everything," say "here's the one piece I don't have an answer for yet." Specific gaps invite help. Vague dread invites nothing but worry.

Ask before you announce. When I don't know the way forward, I bring the open question to two or three people on the team before I bring a decision to everyone. Half the time, they already had the answer I was pretending to search for on my own.

Say the hard number out loud. Late deadline, budget cut, a feature not working the way we hoped. Say the actual number or fact, not a softened version of it. Softening it to protect your own image costs the team more time than the discomfort of hearing it straight ever will.

None of these habits require you to fall apart in front of your team. They require you to stop pretending you're the only one on the team who isn't supposed to have doubts.

Where This Leaves You

If you're leading a team right now and something is broken, ask yourself honestly: have you told them, or have you told them the version keeping you looking steady?

The people on your team already know when something is wrong. The only question is whether you'll be the one who says it first, or the last one to admit it.

What's one thing you're not telling your team right now they likely already suspect?

Their research studied 49,495 business units and 1.2 million employees and found only about two in ten managers instinctively coach rather than boss. The rest default to directing tasks instead of developing people, even when they'd describe themselves as supportive leaders.

The performance gap this creates is not small. Gallup found managers trained in coaching and people development see up to 18% higher engagement among their teams, a rise of 20% to 28% in other manager performance metrics, and 21% to 28% less turnover on their teams. Employees who get daily feedback from a manager are three times more likely to be engaged than those who hear from their manager once a year. Employees whose manager involves them in setting goals are nearly four times more likely to be engaged than employees left out of it.

None of these numbers measure a personality trait. They measure a behavior, and behavior follows the mental model you're operating from. Boss thinks control. Coach thinks development. Those two mental models produce different daily choices, and different daily choices compound into wildly different outcomes over a year.

What Changes When You Say "Coach" Instead

The words we use for a role tend to set the boundaries of what we think the role allows.

When I thought of myself as a manager, my job was to remove obstacles, assign work, and keep the team on schedule. Useful things, all of them, and not enough on their own. When I started thinking of myself as a coach, my job expanded to include the harder, slower work: figuring out what each person on my team wanted to get better at, and building their week around it instead of only around my deadlines.

Coaching changes how you run a one-on-one. A boss opens with status updates. A coach opens with "what's the hardest part of your week been." Coaching changes how you give feedback. A boss corrects the outcome. A coach asks what the person noticed about their own process, and lets them find the fix before offering one. Coaching changes how you handle a mistake. A boss assigns blame and moves on. A coach treats the mistake as the most useful data the team will get all quarter.

None of this is soft. Gallup's own numbers on stress show managers experience 27% higher stress than individual contributors, and coaching a struggling employee through a real problem takes more energy than issuing a directive. Coaching is the harder job wearing the softer name.

The Part I Got Wrong for Years

Early in my career I thought coaching meant being gentle. I confused the word with being nice, with avoiding hard conversations, with letting standards slide so nobody felt bad.

I had it backward. The best coach I ever had in the Army held a much higher bar than any boss I'd worked under, and he held it by asking harder questions, not by softening them. He never told me the answer when I was capable of finding it myself. This was uncomfortable in the moment and valuable for years afterward. Coaching isn't the absence of a standard. It's a different route to reaching one, built on questions instead of orders.

I carried this lesson into every leadership role since, through engineering teams and into HR work, and I still catch myself slipping back into "manager mode" when I'm tired or under pressure. The pull toward directing instead of developing never fully goes away. You get faster, over time, at noticing when you've slipped back into it.

It Spreads Past the One-on-One

Once I started noticing the manager-versus-coach split in myself, I started noticing it everywhere else in the organizations I worked in.

Job postings still describe "managing a team of five" as though headcount were the achievement. Performance review templates still ask "did this person meet their objectives" instead of "did this person grow." Promotion criteria still reward whoever kept the most projects on schedule, rather than whoever built the most capable people underneath them. The language of control runs through the whole system, not only through individual leaders trying their best inside it.

This matters because leaders don't operate in a vacuum. A manager trying to coach inside a system built to reward control gets pulled backward constantly. I've watched genuinely coaching-minded leaders revert to boss behavior the moment a deadline got tight, not because they forgot their principles, but because every incentive around them pointed toward control right then. Changing your own language is the starting point. Changing what your organization measures and rewards is the part sustaining it.

I saw this play out clearly during my own move from engineering leadership into HR-focused work. Engineering had spent years measuring velocity and deadlines. Fixing how leaders showed up for their people meant fixing what got measured first, not only what got said in a one-on-one.

Try the Swap for a Week

You don't need a title change to test this. You need a week of noticing your own language.

Count how many times you tell someone what to do versus how many times you ask them what they think should happen next. Notice whether your one-on-ones open with your priorities or theirs. Watch what happens to a mistake on your team: does it become a lesson the person owns, or a correction you hand down.

The word on your business card likely says "manager." Nobody is stopping you from acting like a coach anyway. My own team member noticed the shift in me before I'd noticed it in myself, and this is usually how you'll know it's working too. Not because you announced a new leadership philosophy, but because someone on your team quietly starts trusting you with harder problems than they used to bring you.

What would change on your team this week if you asked one more question before giving one more instruction?

There's real research behind why the loud version keeps winning. Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a business psychology professor at Columbia, put it bluntly in a McKinsey Talks Talent interview: the typical high-EQ manager is "probably quite boring, quite bland, and predictable." They make rational decisions, don't crave the spotlight, and put the team first. Meanwhile the bombastic, low-EQ boss creates chaos and gets remembered as a force of nature.

We built organizations rewarding the force of nature and quietly sidelining the person doing the real work of leadership.

The 99.5% problem

I've done my own research on this, not only read someone else's. When I surveyed people about their history with bosses, 99.5% said they'd had at least one bad one. Not "a difficult one." A bad one. Not a rounding error. Nearly everybody.

Sit with this number for a second. Nearly every person you know has been managed badly at some point, badly enough to remember it and say so on a survey. And yet the leadership style producing this outcome is still the one getting promoted fastest, funded first, and taught in more MBA programs than the alternative.

Not an accident. A system optimizing for the wrong signal.

What people are asking for

I keep hearing employees today want more money, more flexibility, more perks. Sure, they'll take those. But when Gallup asked people what they need from leaders, the top answer wasn't compensation. It was hope. According to Gallup's research covered by HR Dive, employees look for four things from leaders above everything else: hope, trust, compassion, and stability. Hope came out on top. Trust was defined plainly, as honesty, respect, and integrity.

None of it requires a bigger budget. It requires a leader who shows up, tells the truth, and treats the people in front of them like adults with something to offer. The whole job description of people-first leadership. It shouldn't be radical. It's the bare minimum, dressed up as a bold move because so few leaders do it.

Why it still feels like rebellion

Every time I choose to sit down with someone instead of sending a directive, I feel the old military instinct pushing back. Tell them what to do. It's faster. And it is faster, in the short run, the same way skipping a workout is faster than doing one. You save the ten minutes today and pay for it for months.

People-first leadership feels like rebellion because it asks you to give up the fastest, most visible version of authority in exchange for a slower, less visible kind of trust. Nobody claps when you spend an extra fifteen minutes making sure someone understood the assignment instead of nodding along. Nobody writes a case study about the crisis which never happened because you built enough trust for your team to flag the problem before it became one.

I've written before about how this plays out with bad bosses over on Step It Up HR. The pattern is always the same. The command-and-control leader gets credit for the fires they put out. The people-first leader rarely gets credit for the fires which never started.

I'm keeping the rebellion going

I'm not interested in being the leader who's fun to tell stories about at the bar. I'd rather be the one whose team stuck around, spoke up, and did their best work because they trusted the person asking them to.

If it still counts as rebellious in 2026, fine. I'll take it. Somebody has to be the boring, predictable, people-first leader in the room, the one still there answering for their decisions long after the loud ones moved on to their next audience.

Nearly everyone has had a bad boss. Almost nobody names hope and trust as luxuries. So why do we still treat decent leadership like the exception instead of the standard?

I wasn't thinking about OpenAI while doing it. But the contrast stuck with me later, when the funding headline crossed my feed. OpenAI's round closed at an $840 billion valuation in February 2026, backed by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank. It took Apple over four decades to reach a comparable number. OpenAI got there in about a decade.

I run a small HR tool. It isn't going to be worth $840 billion. It's never going to sit in the same sentence as Amazon or Nvidia. And I've made peace with it, because I don't think we're playing the same game.

What $840 Billion Buys

Money at this scale buys compute. It buys the ability to train bigger models, hire the best researchers on the planet, and outlast anyone trying to compete on raw capability. It's an extraordinary bet on an extraordinary technology.

What it doesn't automatically buy is trust. And trust is where I spend most of my working life.

The afternoon of the launch, between bug fixes, I sat on a call with the client about something with nothing to do with features. Links. Specifically, the ugly, suspicious-looking tracking links our emails sent out, the kind making people hesitate before clicking anything, even when they know the sender.

So we talked about moving to a branded domain so the links would read as ours, not as some anonymous tracking service. We talked about sending from a proper address instead of a generic "noreply." We talked about putting together a one-page whitelist guide so the client's IT team had everything needed to keep our emails out of spam folders.

None of it is glamorous work. None of it will ever raise $110 billion in a single round. But every one of these small decisions served one goal: getting a person to trust an email enough to click it, answer honestly, and believe their answers would go somewhere meaningful.

My Version of Scale

I'm not against AI, and I'm not pretending my tool competes with what OpenAI builds. Such a claim would be ridiculous. What I'm pushing back on is the idea of bigger being automatically better, and the only companies worth watching being the ones chasing trillion-dollar valuations.

There's a version of scale with nothing to do with headcount or funding rounds. It's the twelve people who got unstuck within the hour instead of giving up and closing the tab. It's the manager who reads a BAT report and finally understands why their best engineer keeps threatening to quit. It's a tool feeling less like a product and more like someone paying attention.

You don't get this kind of trust by throwing more GPUs at a problem. You get it by fixing the bug at midnight because you know real people are on the other end of it, waiting.

The Real Work Is Invisible

Here's what nobody tells you about building something small and human-centered: most of the effort goes into things your customers will never notice, because you did them well enough there was nothing left to notice.

A branded link not looking like spam. A sender address not screaming "automated system." A bug fixed in twenty minutes instead of two days. Individually, none of these are impressive. Collectively, they're the difference between a tool people use and one they quietly stop opening.

I used to think impact meant reach. The more people you touch, the more you matter. I don't believe it anymore. I've watched founders chase scale for its own sake and end up with a product nobody trusts, because trust doesn't scale the way infrastructure does. You add more servers overnight. You don't add more trust overnight. It gets built one honest interaction at a time, and destroyed the same way, one bad experience at a time.

The Same Choice Shows Up in Your Career

I see the same pattern outside business, in how people think about their own careers.

Most career advice pushes you toward the bigger number. Bigger title, bigger team, bigger salary, bigger name on your badge. Nobody hands out advice sounding like "stay small and get excellent at something twelve people will notice." It doesn't sound ambitious enough to say out loud.

But I've spent years studying bad bosses, and one figure sticks with me. In my own research, 99.5% of survey respondents said they'd worked for one or more bad bosses. Almost everyone. And in nearly every story people told me, the bad boss wasn't chasing depth. They were chasing scale, a bigger team, a bigger budget, a promotion, without doing the unglamorous work of earning trust from the people already reporting to them.

The leaders I've admired most did the opposite. They stayed close enough to notice when someone on their team was stuck, and they fixed it before it became a resignation letter. They weren't always the ones with the biggest title in the room. They were the ones people trusted enough to follow into a harder conversation.

It's the career version of what I'm doing with this tool. Depth over reach. Trust over headcount. The instinct to notice twelve people struggling, rather than waiting for a report to tell you a thousand people churned.

Why I'm Not Chasing the Big Number

I'm not building a small tool for lack of ambition. I'm building it small because depth beats scale for this kind of problem. Helping a manager understand their team, or helping an employee feel heard by a survey they believe in, isn't a problem solved by getting bigger. It's solved by staying close enough to the work to notice when twelve people are stuck, and caring enough to fix it before breakfast.

Things might change one day. The tool might grow past the point where I personally know what's breaking at midnight. But right now, being small isn't a limitation I'm working around. It's the whole point.

If you're building something right now, in whatever field you're in, ask yourself honestly: are you chasing a bigger number, or are you chasing something a smaller number of people would trust? These aren't always the same question, and I'd argue the second one is harder to answer honestly.

I know which one I'm choosing. What about you?

The Center for Creative Leadership studied nearly 300 leaders over two and a half years and found teams with high psychological safety reported better performance and less interpersonal conflict. They also found something less comfortable: 62% of senior leadership teams showed major disagreement among their own members about whether psychological safety even existed there. The boss thinks it's fine. Half the room doesn't.

What the Army Got Right

The Army has a tool I still use, mentally, decades later: the After Action Review. You run an operation, then sit in a circle and answer four questions. What was supposed to happen. What happened in reality. Why was there a difference. What are we going to do about it next time.

Nobody gets fired in an AAR. It's the whole point. Rank comes off for twenty minutes. The private who spotted the problem gets to say so to the officer who caused it, and the officer has to sit there and listen. It's not comfortable. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be useful.

Compare it to the corporate postmortem, if your company even runs one. Half the meeting is spent making sure nobody's name ends up in the notes. The other half is spent softening language so legal doesn't flinch. By the time it's over, you've protected everyone's feelings and learned nothing.

Harvard Business Review's research on psychological safety backs this up directly: leaders who reframe a screwup as a shared learning problem instead of an individual competency test get better results. Instead of "how did this happen," try "thanks for catching it, how do we fix it." Same mistake. Completely different team six months later.

Reward the Reckless, Sometimes

I'm not saying give a bonus to the guy who torched the production database because he "wanted to see what would happen." Reckless isn't the same as careless. There's a difference between someone who took a calculated swing and missed, and someone who ignored the guardrails because rules are for other people.

The reckless I mean is the one who tried the idea nobody approved because getting approval would have taken three weeks and the market wouldn't wait. The one who pitched the client something unconventional because the safe pitch was going to lose anyway. The one who said the uncomfortable thing in the meeting because staying quiet felt like the coward's move.

I wrote about this from the other direction on Step It Up HR: 4 Ways to Turn Mistakes into Learning Moments. The short version: how you react to the first mistake decides whether anyone brings you the second one.

Silicon Valley likes to slap "fail fast" on a poster and call it culture. Then someone falls short, and the poster comes down along with their badge. A slogan isn't a system. The Army's AAR is a system, because it happens every single time, win or lose, with no exceptions for rank or ego.

Steal the Army's Playbook

You don't need a uniform to run this. You need four questions and the discipline to ask them every time, not just when something blows up big enough to notice.

What was supposed to happen. Say the plan out loud before anyone starts arguing about the outcome. Half of workplace blame comes from people quietly disagreeing about what the goal even was.

What happened in reality. Facts only. No blame, no credit, just the sequence of events everyone can agree on. This is the step most meetings skip straight past.

Why was there a difference. Not "who." Why. The moment someone's name enters this sentence, people stop talking and start defending.

What are we doing differently next time. One or two concrete changes, not ten. A list of ten fixes means nobody does any of them.

Run it in fifteen minutes, right after the thing happens, while the details are still fresh. Not three weeks later in a retro nobody prepared for.

The Question That Matters

Next time someone on your team takes a swing and misses, watch what you do in the first sixty seconds. Do you reach for blame, or do you reach for the four Army questions? What was supposed to happen. What happened in reality. Why. What now.

That's the whole leadership job, right there. Not avoiding the crash. Deciding what happens after it.

I think about the field I picked that day every time I watch a manager reach for a write-up form instead of a conversation. The pilot who cracks up on landing and gets back in the harness the next weekend becomes a better pilot than the one who never flew in weather. The employee who takes the swing and misses, and gets an honest AAR instead of a paper trail, becomes the person you want running point on the next hard problem. The one who gets buried in blame just learns to stop swinging.

So. Who on your team took a real risk this year, and how did you treat them when it didn't work out?

LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report found only 15% of employees said their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months. Down five points from the year before.

I don't think most of those managers stopped caring. I think they got busy, and busy managers default to whatever development topic is easiest to deliver: the one already sitting in their own head. Building a career plan with someone requires listening first. Running your favorite workshop requires nothing but a slide deck you already own.

Easy wins over useful, every time we let it.

It shows up on the receiving end too. eLearning Industry reports less than a third of employees, 29%, are satisfied with the learning and development opportunities offered to them for career progression. Not the training itself. The development chosen on their behalf. When leaders pick topics from their own comfort zone instead of a real conversation, the gap between what's offered and what's needed keeps widening, one well-intentioned workshop at a time.

Ego Dressed Up as Generosity

The uncomfortable part of this isn't the busyness. It's the ego hiding underneath it.

Teaching what you love feels like generosity because you're giving away something real. But look closer and half the time you're asking the room to admire what you know. You get to be the expert again. You get the nodding heads. You get to relive the version of yourself who first fell for the topic.

Your team walks out having learned something adjacent to useful, and you walk out having felt important. Everyone's satisfied enough nobody asks whether the hour was worth it.

I've done this more than once. I'd guess most leaders reading this have too.

It Isn't Only Training Sessions

Once I started noticing this pattern in myself, I saw it everywhere else too.

The book recommendation you hand a struggling manager. Was it chosen because it fixes the exact gap they're facing, or because it's the book which changed your own career and you've been waiting years for someone to hand it to?

The career advice you give a junior engineer who wants to move into architecture. Are you describing the path fitting their strengths, or the path you took, rebuilt as the only correct route because it worked for you?

The feedback you give in a performance review. Is it about the skill this person needs to grow, or the skill you happen to value most because it's the one you're strongest in?

I once spent a year pushing an engineer on my team toward public speaking. I loved presenting. I thought it was the fastest route to visibility and influence, and I said so, often. What she wanted was deeper ownership of a system nobody else understood well enough to touch. I was coaching her toward my own strengths instead of her goals, dressed up as mentorship.

She told me this, eventually, in a one-on-one I still remember for how uncomfortable it was. She was right. I'd mistaken my enthusiasm for her interest.

Stepping back from the training room, the same test applies everywhere a leader hands something down: a book, a skill, a piece of advice, a stretch assignment. Ask whether it answers a gap the other person named, or a story the leader wants to keep telling about themselves.

What I Do Differently Now

A few things changed for me after the canceled architecture session:

I ask before I plan. "What's the thing you wish someone had taught you this quarter?" is a five-minute conversation and it will wreck your carefully prepared curriculum in the best way.

I watch the one-on-ones, not the roadmap. Skill gaps showing up as hesitation, avoidance, or a repeated stumble in a 1:1 are almost always more urgent than the topic I'd pick for myself.

I let go of the topics I'm best at. If I'm the most qualified person in the building to teach something, it's often a sign I should find someone else to teach it, or find out whether the team needs it at all.

I treat "I don't know what they need yet" as an acceptable answer. Better to ask a second round of questions than to fill the gap with a topic chosen to flatter me.

None of this makes for a tidier training calendar. It makes for a team getting what it needs instead of what I most wanted to give.

The Real Job

Leadership development isn't a stage for the leader. It's a service for the people in the room. If a session, a book recommendation, or a piece of coaching says more about what you enjoy than about what your team is stuck on, it's worth asking who the hour was for.

What's the last thing you taught your team because you loved it, not because they needed it?

There's a book, The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace by Gary Chapman and Paul White, and it names what I stumbled into the hard way. People don't all receive appreciation the same way. Some want words, said out loud, to their face. Some want it public. Some want it private. Some don't want words at all, they want you to notice the extra hours and give them something tangible: time off, a task lifted off their plate, help.

I was running one language, loud and proud, on a team fluent in five.

Here's why it matters more than a warm feeling. 79% of employees who quit their jobs cite lack of appreciation as their primary reason for leaving, per O.C. Tanner's research. Organizations with strong recognition practices see 31% lower voluntary turnover, per Bersin by Deloitte. Employees who don't feel adequately recognized are twice as likely to say they'll quit within the year.

I read these numbers now and think about my engineer. She didn't resign over one awkward all-hands shoutout. I know how easily things would have gone the other way if I'd kept repeating it, meeting after meeting, to someone experiencing it as pressure instead of praise.

Why I Defaulted to Public Praise

Here's the uncomfortable part. I didn't praise people publicly because I'd thought carefully about what they needed. I did it because it was easy, and because it made me look good. Public recognition doubles as a leadership performance. Everyone in the room sees the leader who "notices things." One sentence, one meeting, credit handed to three people at once.

Workhuman's research found 85% of employees prefer some form of public recognition, and I leaned on this stat as cover for years. Averages hide people, though. This 15% isn't a rounding error. It's the engineer who fixes your ugliest bugs and dreads the meeting where you thank her for it.

I never asked my team how they wanted to be thanked. I assumed my style was everyone's style. It wasn't laziness exactly, more a failure of imagination. I couldn't picture appreciation working any other way than the way it worked on me, because I'm loud, and public praise has always landed fine on me.

The Five Ways People Want to Be Thanked

Once I went looking, the research backed up what my engineer had told me directly. Chapman and White surveyed over 100,000 workers and found people cluster into five distinct preferences, according to research summarized by Niagara Institute:

• Words of affirmation (45% pick this as their top preference): a specific, spoken acknowledgment of what someone did well.
• Quality time: your undivided attention, a conversation where you're listening rather than waiting to talk.
• Acts of service (22% primary, another 15% secondary): help with the workload itself. Taking something off someone's plate reads as gratitude louder than any speech.
• Tangible gifts (only 6% primary, and the least valued language 70% of the time): a small physical marker showing you were paying attention.
• Appropriate physical touch: a handshake, a fist bump, in the right workplace context.

Notice what's missing from this list: volume. Nowhere does it say "in front of as many people as possible." This was my invention, not the research's.

What I Changed

After the conversation with my engineer, I did something simple. I asked. Not a survey, not a form, a direct question in one-on-ones: "When you do something well, how do you want me to acknowledge it?"

The answers surprised me. One person wanted a two-line email, sent the same day, cc'd to nobody. Another wanted me to protect an afternoon for deep work as the thank you, no words needed. One person genuinely wanted the public shoutout, the bigger the room the better. My engineer wanted a quiet word, the two of us, before she went home.

None of this took more effort than what I was already doing. It took attention. I had to remember which language went with which person, the same way you'd remember someone takes their coffee black. This is the whole fix.

I started asking this question in every onboarding conversation now, right alongside the standard stuff about working hours and tools access. "How do you want to be recognized when you do good work?" gets written down next to someone's timezone and their preferred communication channel. It goes stale if you never revisit it, so I ask again around the six-month mark, since people's preferences shift as they settle into a role or move into a new one. A quiet junior engineer who dreaded the spotlight in year one sometimes wants the spotlight by year three, once she trusts the room.

Why This Sticks With Me

I build feedback tools for a living now, and I think about this conversation more than any customer interview I've run. The gap isn't a lack of caring. Most managers want to appreciate their people. The gap is this: managers, like I did, assume their own preference is universal, then wonder why recognition programs feel hollow to half the team.

A good feedback culture doesn't hand every employee the same trophy. It asks each person what lands for them, then delivers it, consistently, without needing a quarterly survey to remind you. This is part of why I built the Behavioural Awareness Tool at StepUp2Bat the way I did: leadership evaluation only means something if it captures how specific people experience your behavior, not an average across the whole team. Appreciation works the same way. The averages tell you what to expect from a crowd. They tell you nothing about the one person in the room who needs something different from what everyone else does.

Your Turn

If you lead people, you're already giving appreciation in some form. The question worth sitting with is whether you're giving it in your language or theirs.

Ask one person this week how they want to be thanked when they do good work. Then do it their way, not yours. It costs you nothing, and it might be the difference between someone staying five more years or updating their resume tonight.

What's your appreciation style, and does it match how you thank the people who work for you?

A University of Sussex study of 610 leaders across 18 industries found humble leaders gain more influence than the loud, self-promoting kind, not less. Researcher Dr. Elsa Chan put it plainly: humble leaders take an alternative route, building trust and mentoring others, and this route carries them further than dominance ever does.

Read it again. Humility isn't the soft option here. It's the one with better odds.

Compare it against the leaders who talk over every meeting and take credit for every win. Early on, they might look like they're winning. Watch five years out and the humble ones are still standing, while the loud ones wonder why nobody wants to work for them anymore.

I served with officers on both sides of this line. The ones who barked orders and never asked a question got obeyed, for a while. The ones who walked the perimeter, asked the junior soldiers what they saw, and admitted when a plan needed changing, got followed. Obedience and loyalty aren't the same thing, and only one of them holds up when things go wrong.

Attention Is the Whole Job

Wharton's research on vigilant leadership makes a point I wish someone told me years earlier: most of us miss important signals not for lack of intelligence, but because we carry limited attention, competing priorities, and no curiosity left after a long day.

The Wharton piece points to Charles Schwab spotting robo-advisors early and building around them, while Honeywell watched Nest build the smart thermostat market and did nothing about it. Same information, available to both companies. One paid attention. One didn't.

This gap, paying attention or not, decides more outcomes than talent does. I've watched it play out on missions and in boardrooms both. The people who ask "what am I not seeing here" outperform the people who assume they already know the answer.

Attention isn't a personality trait, either. It's a decision, made over and over, to keep your eyes open when the easier move is to assume everything's fine. Most leadership disasters were visible for months before they became disasters. Somebody saw a warning sign. Somebody decided it wasn't their job to say anything.

Paychecks Aren't the Point. Presence Is.

Here's something uncomfortable to say out loud: most leadership failures aren't failures of strategy. They're failures of noticing. The employee who quietly checked out three months before they resigned. The project which slipped a week at a time until it sat a month behind schedule. The teammate who stopped asking questions in meetings because nobody answered the last five.

None of these show up on a dashboard right away. They show up when somebody in the room pays attention.

My own research puts a number on this: 99.5% of people I surveyed said they'd worked for one or more types of bad boss. Not the occasional rough manager. Nearly everyone, everywhere, at some point. Ask why, and the answer is rarely cruelty. It's absence. A boss who stopped noticing.

I Learned This the Hard Way, Twice

The Army taught me the gear-check version of this lesson. Corporate life taught me the harder version.

Years later, running a team an ocean away from where I grew up, I missed something obvious for months. One of my best engineers started shipping less, saying less in stand-up, closing his laptop the second a meeting ended. I told myself he sat in a slow patch. Everybody hits a slow patch.

He wasn't in a slow patch. He was already gone in every way except his resignation letter, and I only found out why once he'd handed it in: a reorg six months earlier had quietly stripped the parts of the job he liked, and nobody, including me, sat him down and asked him about it.

I didn't lack the skill to fix it. I lacked the attention to see it needed fixing. This is a humbling thing to admit about yourself in public, and I'm doing it anyway because pretending leaders don't miss things helps nobody.

Three Habits Stronger Than Talent

None of this requires a rare gift. It requires repetition.

• Lay your gear out the same way every night. Whatever your version of gear is, a calendar, a checklist, a set of morning questions, keep the ritual the same so you notice the day it's off.
• Ask the second question. The first answer in a meeting is rarely the real one. Stay in the conversation one beat longer.
• Notice the tired voice on the call. Skills stop mattering the moment somebody checks out. Presence catches it before a resignation letter does.

None of these habits are complicated. None of them are quick, either. They cost you attention every single day, forever, with no finish line. Here's the trade. Attention paid daily, in exchange for a team which doesn't fall apart quietly while you're busy congratulating yourself on strategy.

You Don't Need to Be Special. You Need to Show Up.

Any dumbass handles this job well, given enough attention. I mean it as encouragement, not an insult. You don't need a rare gift to lead people. You need to pay attention, admit when you're wrong, and keep doing the small things long after they stop feeling new.

The engineer I lost taught me more about leadership than any course I ever sat through, and I'd rather have learned it from a book. I didn't get this choice. You still do.

So here's my question for you: what's the one thing on your team right now you'd notice, if you were paying attention?

This isn't only my story. Managers are 36% more likely to report burnout than the people who work for them, and 24% more likely to consider quitting in the next six months, according to Forbes' coverage of DDI's 2024 leadership research. We're not the exception to workplace exhaustion. We're often the worst-affected group in the building, and we're the ones everyone else looks to for stability.

Here's why this matters. Gallup has found managers account for around 70% of the variance in team engagement. Your team's experience of work runs through you. When you're depleted, this depletion doesn't stay contained to your calendar. It leaks into every one-on-one, every piece of feedback you don't give, every signal you're too tired to catch.

I've done my own research here. In a survey I ran on bad bosses, 99.5% of respondents said they'd had one or more bad managers in their career. Almost everyone. Digging into what made a boss "bad" showed something surprising: it was rarely cruelty. It was absence. Managers who were technically present but functionally checked out. Burnt-out leaders who weren't cruel on purpose, they simply had nothing left to give.

Here's the uncomfortable link. Most bad bosses aren't villains. They're burnt-out people who ran out of the capacity good leadership requires, and nobody, including them, noticed in time.

The gap between what your team feels and what you hear

Here's the part every manager reading this should worry about. Only 42% of burnt-out employees tell their manager they're struggling, and among those who do speak up, 42% say their manager does nothing about it afterward. Two different studies, same number, and it tells you everything about how quiet this problem stays.

Your team isn't going to hand you a burnout report. Most won't say a word, and the ones who do are watching closely to see if it changes anything. If you're too burnt out yourself to respond well, their silence gets confirmed. They learn not to bother next time.

I know this pattern because I lived on both sides of it. I've been the manager too drained to respond well to a struggling employee, and earlier in my career I was the employee who decided speaking up again wasn't worth it. Neither version of me was a bad person. Both versions of me were simply too depleted to do the job properly.

The signs I missed, looking back

Nobody sends a warning email before they burn out. It shows up in small things, and I missed every one of them because I was too busy running on the same fumes.

My one-on-ones got shorter and I told myself it was efficiency. My feedback got vaguer because specific, honest feedback takes energy I didn't have, and generic praise takes none. I stopped asking follow-up questions in standups, because a follow-up question means you're tracking someone's work closely enough to notice a gap, and I wasn't tracking anything closely anymore. I said "sounds good" to updates I hadn't fully processed.

I wrote about this exact failure mode on Step It Up HR: the barriers stopping leaders from giving real feedback are rarely about skill. They're about capacity. A burnt-out manager doesn't lack the training to give good feedback. They lack the reserves to do it consistently, week after week, when they're already running a deficit.

If you want a gut check, look at your last five one-on-ones. Were they conversations, or status updates you let happen to you? This gap is smaller than it sounds, and it's exactly where I lost a year without noticing.

What changed things

I wish I had a tidy three-step fix. I don't. What changed things for me was smaller and less impressive: I started treating my own state as data, not as a character flaw to push through.

Every Monday I began asking myself one honest question before asking it of anyone else: am I present this week, or am I only physically in the room? When the answer was "only in the room," I said so out loud to my own manager, and I lowered what I expected from myself in one-on-ones this week rather than faking full attention I didn't have.

This single habit did more for my team than any leadership book on my shelf. Not because it solved my burnout. It didn't, not immediately. But it meant I stopped mistaking my exhaustion for their stability. I stopped assuming quiet meant fine.

There's a piece of research I keep coming back to here: manager training is one of the few interventions reliably cutting active disengagement, in some studies by roughly half. Not perks. Not a wellness app. Unglamorous training in how to notice and respond to what's happening in your team, delivered to people who are themselves running on empty.

Check yourself before you check your team

If you manage people and you're exhausted right now, here's the honest version of advice nobody wants to give: your burnout isn't a personal problem to quietly push through while still doing right by your team. It stands between you and seeing them.

You don't need this fixed before you lead well again. You need to admit, to yourself first, whether you're present or only present in the room. This admission is the whole thing. It's the difference between the version of me who missed it for months, and the version who eventually didn't.

So before your next one-on-one, ask yourself the question you'd ask your team. Are you here? If the honest answer is no, this isn't a failure. It's the first accurate read you've had in a while. What are you going to do with it?

This is not only my opinion dressed up as insight. Gallup has tracked this for two decades, across millions of work units, using its Q12 engagement survey. The finding: managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in employee engagement between the best and worst teams in an organization. Not pay. Not perks. Not the mission statement on the wall. Who is running the room.

And it is getting worse, not better. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found manager engagement dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, and this drop is driving most of the recent decline in employee engagement worldwide. The people with the titles are checking out. Somebody still has to run the room.

There's a psychologist named Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic who has spent his career studying who gets promoted into leadership and why. His research, published through McKinsey, found something uncomfortable: we routinely select leaders based on confidence rather than competence. We mistake the person who talks the most in the meeting for the person who should run it. His conclusion, which I have watched play out in three different companies: leaders need to make other people better. This is the job description. Everything else on the org chart is paperwork.

The seven people nobody called leaders

Back to Curve. We had 43 people across seven teams by the time I left, and the promotion path I built was not "wait for a vacancy and hope your manager notices you." It was: find the engineer already answering questions in Slack nobody assigned to them, already pulling a junior teammate aside to explain a design decision without being asked, already the person a struggling teammate went to instead of their actual manager.

Those seven people were leading before they had the word for it. Giving them the title did not change what they did day to day. It changed who had to listen to them.

This is the honest version of what a promotion is supposed to do. It should catch up to reality, not create it.

99.5% of us have worked for a title with no influence

I wrote a book called Bad Bosses Ruin Lives because the numbers are brutal. My own research found 99.5% of the people I surveyed have had one or more bad bosses in their career. Almost everyone who has ever held a job has sat across from someone with real authority over their paycheck and no real ability to lead them anywhere worth going.

You don't need cruelty to end up on this list. A boss who hovers over every decision, who cannot delegate, who needs to be the smartest person in every room, does plenty of damage without raising their voice once. The title gave them the authority to do this damage. It did not give them the skill to avoid it.

Flip it around and the math gets more hopeful. If titles were the same thing as leadership, this 99.5% figure would mean 99.5% of managers are failing at the job description. What's failing is the assumption pairing the title with the job description in the first place.

How to build influence without waiting for the title

If you are the person already doing the work described above and nobody has noticed yet, here is what I would tell the version of me at Curve who was still figuring this out:

Stop waiting for permission to help people think through a hard problem. Nobody promotes potential. They promote a pattern they have already watched you repeat.

Say the hard thing in the room, not after the meeting. Influence gets built in the moment people remember, not in the hallway conversation where you soften it afterward.

Make somebody else better at their job this week. Not your job. Theirs. This is the whole McKinsey finding in one sentence, and it costs nothing but attention.

And if you already have the title and you are reading this feeling uneasy, ask yourself who on your team would follow you into a hard 4pm decision without being told to. If the honest answer is nobody, the title was never the point. It was only the paperwork, waiting for the real thing to show up.

Who taught you the most about leadership without ever having the title for it?

Gallup has studied this for years, and its conclusion is blunt: most managers aren't coaching at all. In one analysis spanning 49,495 business units and 1.2 million employees across 22 organizations and 45 countries, Gallup found only about two in ten managers intuitively know how to engage people, develop their strengths, and set clear expectations. Only 26% of employees say the feedback they receive helps them do better work.

Sit with this number for a moment. Three out of four people are getting feedback which doesn't help them improve. This isn't a coaching gap. It's a coaching absence.

When organizations train managers to coach instead of boss, the numbers move. Manager performance improves 20 to 28%, and their teams see engagement gains of up to 18%, effects which hold up more than a year later. This isn't a soft skill nice-to-have. It's among the highest-leverage things a manager learns to do.

Why "Best Version of Themselves" Is Harder Than It Sounds

Here's the trap: "help someone become their best self" sounds like a fridge magnet phrase until you try to live it. It requires knowing who someone already is before you help them become more of it. Fixing a mistake doesn't require any of it. You point out an error without knowing a single thing about the person who made it.

Coaching does require it. You need to know what someone is genuinely trying to build, not only what they got wrong this week. You need to tell the difference between someone quiet in a meeting because they're still forming a thought and someone quiet because they've stopped believing anyone listens. Those two people look identical from the outside. They need completely different responses from a manager.

This is the part of coaching which takes real time, and it's exactly the part which gets skipped when a manager drowns in status updates and calendar Tetris. Knowing someone has no shortcut.

What I Changed

Once I noticed the pattern, I changed how I ran one-on-ones. I stopped opening with "what's blocking you" and started opening with "what are you trying to get better at." Small change. Different conversation entirely.

"What's blocking you" gets you a status report. "What are you trying to get better at" gets you a person. It tells you what someone is genuinely optimizing for, and once you know it, you coach toward this goal instead of clearing whatever sits in front of them this week.

I also stopped treating every mistake as an opportunity to fix something. Some mistakes are only mistakes. The question worth asking isn't "how do I stop this from happening again." It's "does this person already know what went wrong, or do they need help seeing it." Half the time, they already know. My job in the moment isn't pointing it out. It's asking what they'd do differently next time, then stepping out of the way.

The Part I'm Still Working On

I won't pretend I've got this fully sorted. The instinct to fix things fast runs deep, especially under deadline pressure, and I still catch myself sliding back into old habits. The difference now is I notice faster. I ask myself: am I helping this person become more of who they already are, or am I trying to make my own week easier by closing a gap I spotted?

Those two things look similar from a distance. They aren't the same job.

Ted Lasso is a sitcom character, written to deliver a line like this cleanly, in one take, with a full writers' room behind him. Real coaching runs messier and slower, and nobody hands you a clean line to deliver at the end of the scene. The underlying question, though, is worth carrying into every one-on-one: not "what's wrong with this person," but "what is this person becoming, and how do I help them get there faster."

If you manage people, sit with the same question this week. Are you fixing them, or are you helping them become more of who they already are? Those two jobs feel almost identical day to day. Over a year, they build completely different teams.

A Wharton Executive Education analysis cites a study of more than 7,000 employees: workers who felt a low level of empowerment sat at the 24th percentile of engagement. Workers who felt genuinely empowered sat at the 79th percentile. Not a small gap. The difference between a team showing up and a team showing up early.

The same piece references Zenger Folkman research showing only 4% of employees are willing to increase effort when empowerment is low, against 67% when it's high. Sixty-three points of discretionary effort, sitting on the table, unclaimed, because a leader wouldn't let go of the steering wheel.

I read this figure twice. Sixty-three points. The entire margin between a mediocre team and a team people fight to get onto.

The same analysis cites Gallup research showing businesses with highly engaged teams outperform peers by nearly 150% in earnings per share. Leaders who hoard decisions aren't running a tight ship. They're running a slower one, and paying for it in a currency nobody puts on the org chart.

Handing Over the Keys, Not the Advice

Here's where most delegation guidance goes soft. Leaders say "empower your team" and then keep every decision carrying real risk. Real handover means giving someone a decision where the outcome touches a customer, a deadline, or money, then staying quiet while they make it.

Uncomfortable on purpose. If it were comfortable, it wouldn't be a real handover. You'd be delegating the decisions you didn't want anyway.

I started doing this deliberately a few years back. Instead of answering "what do you think," I started answering with "what do you want to do, and why." First few times, my engineer looked at me like I'd stopped doing my job. In a sense I had. My job wasn't to hold every answer anymore. It was to hold the space where someone else's answer would grow.

Letting Them Fail Is the Point, Not the Risk

The part everyone skips over: sometimes the decision goes wrong. The junior calls it, and it doesn't hold up. Here's where a leader's nerve gets tested, not their generosity.

Garry Ridge, the longtime CEO who built WD-40's culture around what he calls "learning moments" instead of failures, has spent years making the case: reframing the language changes the behavior. Call it a failure and people hide it. Call it a learning moment and people bring it to you the next morning, already halfway to the fix.

I've watched a mistake handled two different ways on two different teams. On one, the leader asked "who approved this?" On the other, the leader asked "what did we learn, and what do we change?" Only one of those teams kept making decisions after this. The other one went quiet, and quiet teams stop growing leaders. They stop growing, period.

It Isn't Only a Work Habit

I noticed the same pattern at home before I noticed it at work, if I'm honest with myself. Watching my grandson wrestle with a decision, a puzzle, a choice about which way to build something, I'd catch myself stepping in with the answer before he'd even asked for it. Faster for me. Cheaper for him, in the one way it truly counts. Every time I did it, I handed him a solved problem instead of a solvable one.

Kids and junior engineers aren't the same, but the mechanism holding both back is identical: an adult in the room unwilling to tolerate watching someone else struggle for thirty extra seconds. Struggle isn't the enemy. Rescue too early is. I've had to catch myself with my grandson the same way I caught myself with this engineer, biting back the answer long enough to ask "what do you think you should try?"

The Real Cost of Hoarding

Keep every decision and you're not protecting the outcome. You're protecting your own comfort at the outcome's expense. And you're quietly telling your best people their judgment doesn't count until it matches yours, a strange message to send someone you hired for their judgment in the first place.

I think about this engineer often. He's a lead now, at a different company, making decisions nobody runs past anyone. I'd like to say I saw this coming the day my colleague called me out. I didn't. I stopped answering so fast, and space opened up where his judgment used to have nowhere to go.

Where to Start Monday Morning

No program required here. One decision this week you'd normally make, handed to someone else instead, with the outcome genuinely uncertain. Then sit with your hands still while they make it.

If it goes well, say so plainly and move to the next one. If it goes sideways, ask what they learned before you ask what went wrong. The order of those two questions tells your team everything about whether decisions are safe to make around you.

Whose decision are you still making which shouldn't be yours anymore?

She built an entire framework out of this discovery, now known as psychological safety, and found teams and organizations with higher psychological safety have better performance, lower burnout, and, in medicine, even lower patient mortality, as she's written about extensively. A survey question as simple as "would a mistake be held against me here" turned out to predict how honestly a team reported problems, and how fast they fixed them.

The teams hiding their off-days weren't safer. They were quieter about the same amount of failure, and slower to learn from it.

Not All Bad Days Are Created Equal

Edmondson's later work, in her book Right Kind of Wrong, draws a distinction I wish I'd had language for earlier in my career. She sorts failure into three types.

Basic failures: a preventable mistake in familiar territory, usually with one clear cause. You skipped the checklist. You didn't test the edge case. These get fixed with process, not forgiven with a shrug.

Complex failures: several small things going wrong together in a familiar setting. No single villain. A deploy fails because of a timing issue, a stale cache, and an on-call engineer heads-down on something else. These need a real post-mortem, not a scapegoat.

Intelligent failures: the ones which happen when you're doing something genuinely new. You tried an approach nobody on the team had tried before, it didn't work, and you learned something real. These aren't failures to prevent. They're the cost of doing anything worth doing.

My Friday deploy was a complex failure. Config drift between staging and production, a monitoring gap which delayed the alert, and a rollback script which hadn't been tested in three months. No single person screwed up. Three unrelated weaknesses lined up on the same afternoon.

Once I saw it this way, the write-up stopped being a confession and started being a map. Fix the config drift. Close the monitoring gap. Test the rollback script monthly. None of it happens if the instinct is to bury the day instead of studying it.

What I Do With a Bad Day Now

I stopped treating off-days as things to survive and started treating them as data with a deadline. Here's the version of it I use:

Write it down within 24 hours, while it still stings. The emotional charge fades fast, and with it goes most of the honesty. The clean, polished version you'd write a week later leaves out the parts which matter most.

Sort the type before you assign blame. Was it preventable with a checklist (basic)? Several things stacking up (complex)? Or a real swing at something new which didn't land (intelligent)? Each one gets a different response, and treating an intelligent failure like a basic one is how you kill the exact behavior you want more of: people trying things.

Share it wider than feels comfortable. My manager forwarding my mistake to leadership felt exposing in the moment. It's also the single biggest reason I stopped hiding problems since. Admit a mistake and get praised for the admission instead of punished for the mistake, and you'll do it again. Bury it in a private message with a manager who's annoyed, and you won't.

Ask what would have caught it sooner, not who should have caught it. "Who missed this" gets you a defensive team. "What would have caught this three steps earlier" gets you a better system.

I wrote a longer version of this for leaders specifically at Step It Up HR, because the pattern doesn't stop at engineering. It shows up in every team where the boss's reaction to a mistake decides whether the next one gets reported or hidden.

The Off-Days Are the Curriculum

I've had better weeks since the Friday of the outage. Launches which went out clean, projects which landed ahead of schedule, teams which hit numbers I was proud of. I couldn't tell you much about most of them now. They went the way they were supposed to go, a fine thing to have happen, but they didn't teach me anything I didn't already know.

The outage taught me about config drift, about monitoring gaps, about what happens to a team's honesty when the response to a mistake is curiosity instead of blame. Six years later I still use the rollback checklist which came out of the outage.

If you're sitting on a bad day right now, the kind you'd rather not mention in standup, don't bury it. Sort it. Was it something you should have caught, something which stacked up on you, or something you tried because you were reaching for real growth? Write down which one it was and what it's telling you.

Your worst Tuesday might be teaching you more than your last five good weeks combined. Go find out what it's trying to say.

Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report puts global employee engagement at 20%, down from a peak of 23% in 2022-2023. Gallup pins the cost of this disengagement at roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity worldwide, about 9% of global GDP. Ken Corey's own company, Step It Up HR, cites the same 21% figure. Numbers like these get repeated in keynotes and LinkedIn posts because they're big, they're scary, and they make a good slide.

Here's the number which should scare you more. In research I conducted, 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more bad bosses. Not "a difficult manager." Not "someone with a different style." A bad boss. Almost everyone who has ever held a job has been on the receiving end of bad leadership.

Now put those two facts next to each other. Eight in ten people are checked out at work, and virtually everyone has been mistreated, mismanaged, or ignored by someone above them at some point. This combination doesn't stay in the building when the shift ends. You carry it home. And somebody's waiting for you there.

The Research Backs Up What Every Kid Already Knows

There's a body of academic work on what psychologists call work-family spillover and crossover. One study, published in Family Stress and Parental Responses to Children's Negative Emotions, found parents' own stress and dissatisfaction directly shaped how supportive they were when their kids came to them upset. Higher marital dissatisfaction meant less support for a child's negative emotions. And it wasn't limited to the stressed parent. When one partner reported job dissatisfaction, their spouse also became less supportive with the kids. One person's bad day at the office rippled through the entire house.

Read it again. It's not only your own patience running thin when your job grinds you down. It's your partner's too. The stress crosses over. Nobody else in the house had a bad day at the job, but everybody pays for it.

I didn't need a peer-reviewed study to know this. I needed to watch my grandson's face change when I walked in still holding a bad meeting in my shoulders. Kids don't need the research. They ARE the research. They're running a live experiment on your nervous system every single day, and they're smart enough to know what the data says.

What You're Teaching Them Without Saying a Word

Here's the uncomfortable part. Your kid is building an entire model of what a career should feel like by watching you. If work leaves you snapping at small things, distracted at dinner, or numb on the couch by 7pm, this is not neutral information. This is the lesson. You are teaching a small, watchful person this is what adulthood costs: you trade your best hours and your best self to an employer, and whatever's left over goes to the people you love most.

I don't think most bad bosses set out to hurt anyone's kids. I don't think most disengaged employees are trying to model burnout for the next generation. Nobody clocks in thinking "today I will teach my child ambition equals exhaustion." But intent has never been the point. Impact is. And the impact is a kid who grows up associating a paycheck with a parent who wasn't fully there.

I've watched this pattern in leadership development work for years. The managers who are hardest on themselves, who carry every piece of criticism home and turn it over all night, raise kids who worry about their own performance before they've even had a first job. The managers who model boundaries, who say plainly, "I had a rough day, give me twenty minutes before I'm good company," raise kids who understand work is one part of life, not the whole of it.

Naming It Is the First Move

You won't fix a spillover you refuse to admit is happening. The single most useful thing I've found, both in my own house and in the leaders I've coached, is to say the quiet part out loud. Not to your boss. To your kid.

"I had a hard day. I'm not mad at you. Give me a few minutes and I'll be better company." This sentence does more work than an hour of forced cheerfulness at the dinner table. It tells a child the truth: adults have bad days, bad days are not their fault, and there is a version of you on the other side of twenty minutes who is fully present. This is a completely different lesson than silence, snapping, or the thousand-yard stare at a phone.

The second move is harder. At some point you have to ask whether the job itself is the problem. If you're bringing home a bad boss's fingerprints every single night, this is not a "manage your stress better" problem. This is a "get out" problem. I've written before about how innovation dies when leaders punish mistakes instead of learning from them. The same logic applies at home. If an environment keeps producing the same bad outcome no matter how well you cope, the environment needs to change, not your coping.

There's a middle move too, one people skip because it feels small: build a hard line between the drive home and the front door. Some leaders I've coached use the last five minutes of a commute to name out loud, to nobody but themselves, what happened during the day and what they're setting down before they walk in. It sounds a little silly the first time. It works. A body which has processed the day, even briefly, walks through a door differently than a body still bracing for the next email.

The Question Worth Asking Tonight

Before you walk in the door tonight, ask yourself one question: who is about to open this door? The version your job made, or the version your family deserves?

You don't get to choose whether your kid is watching. This part is guaranteed. The only thing you control is what they see.

The data backs up what your gut already tells you. Only 21% of employees strongly agree their performance management system motivates them to do better work, according to SelectSoftwareReviews' 2026 performance management statistics roundup. Half of managers, roughly 50%, admit they see no value in the process they are required to run. And 95% of HR leaders, the people who own the system, say they are not satisfied with it either.

Read those numbers again. The people who built the process do not believe in it. The people who run it do not believe in it. The people who receive it do not believe in it. And yet almost every company still runs one, once a year, on schedule, like a fire drill nobody expects to work.

Part of the problem is timing. Nearly 62% of employees say they have been blindsided by at least one evaluation, and 75% of millennials report leaving a review unsure whether they are doing well at all. This is not feedback. This is a surprise wrapped in a form.

What I Learned Running Appraisals

When I ran teams, I filled in the forms because the company required it. But I never once believed the form was where the real work of managing a person happened. The real work happened in the hallway conversation after a rough client call. It happened when someone stayed late to fix a bug and I told them the next morning it mattered. It happened in the ten minutes before a stand-up when someone admitted they were stuck on something and needed a second pair of eyes.

None of these moments fit inside an annual form. By the time appraisal season rolled around, half of what mattered had already faded, for both of us. I would flip through old notes trying to reconstruct a year of work into three tidy paragraphs, and I knew even while writing it: I was missing more than I was capturing.

I have also sat in the other chair, waiting for my own review, rehearsing the version of the year I hoped my boss remembered. This is a strange way to spend an hour. You are not being evaluated on your work. You are being evaluated on your manager's memory of your work, filtered through whatever they happened to notice in the six weeks before the deadline.

This is not a performance management system. This is a recency bias generator with a PDF template attached to it.

Companies Killed It And Never Looked Back

I am not the first person to notice this, and some large companies have already run the experiment of dropping the annual review entirely.

Adobe replaced its formal annual review with ongoing "check-ins," regular conversations between managers and employees about expectations and recent work. The result, according to reporting compiled by Lighthouse's research on companies eliminating performance reviews: Adobe saved roughly 80,000 hours of manager time a year and saw voluntary turnover drop by 30%.

GE moved to frequent, informal "touchpoints" tied to real priorities instead of a once-a-year form, and reported a fivefold increase in productivity over twelve months.

Deloitte moved to weekly check-ins between team leads and their people. No annual scorecard, only short, regular conversations about priorities and course correction.

Notice what all three have in common. None of them stopped giving feedback. They stopped pretending feedback batched once a year would still mean something to the person receiving it.

Why We Keep Doing It Anyway

If the annual review is this unpopular and this ineffective, why does almost every company still run one?

Because it is easier to audit than it is to coach. A form in a folder proves to legal and HR: "a conversation happened." It is documentation, not development. It exists to protect the company, not to grow the person sitting across the table.

Real coaching does not fit this same mold. Real coaching happens in the moment, close to the event, while the details are still sharp and the lesson still lands. Wait six months and tell someone about a mistake they barely remember making, and you have not coached them. You have filed paperwork about them.

There is also a simpler reason: the annual review is safe for the person giving it. A once-a-year conversation, scripted and formal, keeps distance between manager and employee. Weekly check-ins require the manager to show up, every week, with something honest to say. Not every manager wants this kind of exposure.

What To Do Instead

You do not need an enterprise HR platform to fix this. You need a habit.

Give feedback within days, not months. If something went well or went wrong, say so this week. The lesson only has value while the memory is fresh, for both sides of the conversation.

Make it a conversation, not a document. Talk first. Write down only what you need to remember the conversation happened, not to perform thoroughness for an audit trail nobody will ever read.

Separate development from compensation. Pay decisions are free to stay on an annual cycle if your payroll system demands it, but growth conversations should never wait for payroll's calendar.

Ask before you tell. Start check-ins with "what's on your mind" instead of "here's my assessment." You will learn more about how someone is doing, and they will trust the conversation more because it did not start with a verdict.

Keep a running note, not a year-end reconstruction. A single line jotted down after a good week or a hard one beats trying to remember twelve months of work in a single sitting. Future you, writing the year-end summary, will thank present you.

I wrote more about the specific reasons leaders avoid giving real-time feedback, and how to push past them, over on Step It Up HR. If the annual review has ever left you blindsided, or left one of your people blindsided, it is worth your time.

The Question Worth Asking

Next time your company schedules appraisal season, ask yourself one question: when was the last time a form changed how you worked, versus the last time a five-minute conversation did?

If you already know the answer, you already know what needs to go.

Kill the annual appraisal before it kills whatever trust is left between your managers and their teams. Replace it with something smaller, more frequent, and honest enough to matter.

Research backs this up more bluntly than I expected. A 2025 survey of 2,000 UK workers by Mental Health First Aid England found 45% of employees don't feel safe raising mistakes or flagging risks to their employer. Not "don't want to." Don't feel safe. Nearly half your workforce sits on information you need, and silence still feels safer to them than honesty.

Not a training problem. A leadership problem, and it starts with how the last mistake in the room got handled.

Google already ran this experiment for you

Google spent years studying what separates its highest-performing teams from the rest, in a project internally called Project Aristotle. Of the five dynamics identified as driving team effectiveness, psychological safety is listed first, ahead of dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact.

Psychological safety, in Google's own words, comes down to a team member's sense of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk. Speaking up when something's wrong. Admitting you broke something. Proposing an idea which might flop in front of the whole room.

None of this happens in a culture where the last person who made a mistake got quietly sidelined. People notice. They watch what happened to the last person who admitted fault, and calibrate their own honesty against it.

I've spent a lot of my career studying bad bosses, and my own research found 99.5% of people surveyed have had at least one. Punishing mistakes instead of learning from them is one of the fastest ways to earn a spot on this list.

What "celebrate failure" looks like in practice

I want to be direct about something, because "celebrate failure" gets treated like a poster in a break room and nothing more. It doesn't mean throwing a party every single time someone screws up. It doesn't mean removing consequences for negligence or repeated carelessness. It means something narrower and harder to pull off.

Separate the mistake from the person. The engineer who skipped the test wasn't lazy. He'd inherited a habit from a codebase where the same test flaked constantly and everyone had learned to ignore it. Fix the system, not only the individual.

Make the retelling safe. If someone has to defend themselves the moment they open their mouth, they'll give you the version protecting them, not the true one. You need the true one, every time.

Ask what the mistake taught the team, out loud, in front of the team. Private feedback fixes one person's understanding. A blameless, public review fixes the system everyone else is still standing in.

Watch what gets rewarded. If your top performer never takes a risk because they only ship the safe stuff, and your most promising experimenter gets quietly passed over because a swing didn't land, you've told your whole team what you value, no matter what the values poster says on the wall.

Ask the second question before the first one. The first question after a mistake is almost always "who did this." Ask "what did we learn" first instead, out loud, before anyone gets near blame. Order changes everything about how safe the room feels.

What the Army taught me about mistakes

I served in the Army before ever leading a team in an office, and the difference in how mistakes got handled stuck with me. In training, an after-action review pulls apart everything going wrong, by name, in front of the whole unit, within hours of it happening. Nobody treats it as an attack. It's how you get better before a mistake matters more than it did in a drill.

Business culture, by contrast, tends to bury the mistake and hope nobody brings it up again at the next performance review. We call this politeness. It's closer to cowardice, and it costs teams far more than a bruised ego ever would.

An after-action review works because everyone in the room already agrees on the goal: get better before it counts for real. Bring this same agreement into a design review, a sprint retro, or a product launch post-mortem, and the tone in the room changes almost immediately. People stop protecting themselves and start protecting the mission instead.

The teams which innovate are the teams which fail out loud

Here's the part taking me the longest to believe: the teams I've watched ship the most interesting work aren't the teams with the fewest mistakes. They're the teams where mistakes surface fast, get discussed honestly, and get treated as data instead of evidence in a trial.

Few mistakes usually means few attempts. Few attempts means little learning. Little learning means you're standing still while a competitor with a messier, more honest process walks past you.

I wrote before about why nobody trained me to lead and how much of leadership involves undoing bad habits inherited from bad bosses. This is one of the biggest ones. For years I assumed a clean track record meant a strong team. Usually it means a scared one, quietly hiding its worst weeks from you.

This whiteboard stayed up because the team wanted it there. Nobody erased it out of shame. Eventually someone wiped it clean because the habit it represented had already changed, not because the memory was uncomfortable.

Ask yourself this

Think about the last mistake someone on your team told you about. What happened next? Did they get thanked for surfacing it fast, or did the room go quiet? The answer tells you more about your culture than any values statement ever will.

If you want a team which innovates, you don't need a bigger budget or a new framework. You need to make it safe for someone to say "I broke it" out loud, and mean it when you say thank you for telling me.

Mercurio's research, covered by Atlassian, found 30% of the workforce report feeling invisible at work, and 39% say they don't have a single person there who cares about them as a person. Half the time a high performer quits, the manager had no idea it was coming.

None of this is an accident. It's the direct result of thousands of small transactional exchanges. Check-in emails mentioning only deadlines. One-on-ones reduced to status updates with a calendar invite attached. Calls arriving only when something's on fire.

Mercurio draws a clean line: if the exchange might have been an email, it's transactional. If it required real human connection, it's relational. Most leaders default to transactional. It's faster and feels productive. But every transactional interaction is a small withdrawal from an account most leaders never deposit into.

I've written before about how 99.5% of people report having had a bad boss at some point in their career. It's not about a handful of terrible managers. It's about a system where "management" quietly became synonymous with "the person who calls when you've messed up." Fix this association and you fix a lot more than turnover.

My Own Phone Call Test

I failed this test once, early in my leadership career. A guy on my team, sharp, reliable, never a problem, missed two check-ins in a row. I called him. He was apologizing before I said a word. Right then I realized every call he'd ever gotten from me had been about a problem. I'd trained him to expect one every single time the phone rang.

I changed my approach after this day. Not with a script or a formal program. With a habit: call people sometimes for no reason at all. Ask how a kid's soccer season is going. Tell someone the extra effort on a project got noticed and mattered. Small moves. They add up faster than any all-hands meeting ever will.

What Relational Leadership Looks Like in Practice

None of this requires a new leadership framework or a training budget. It requires discipline, applied consistently:

• Call without an agenda. Not every check-in needs a deliverable attached to it.
• Ask before you tell. Lead with "how are you doing," not "here's what I need from you."
• Notice out loud, and soon. If someone went above and beyond, say so the same week. Not at the annual review, months after the moment has faded.
• Sit with bad news for a beat. When someone tells you something is wrong, resist the pull toward an immediate fix. Let them feel heard first.
• Track your own ratio. Count your last ten interactions with a direct report. If nine were transactional, the tenth won't undo the pattern.

Managing outcomes still matters. None of this argues against accountability or hard conversations about performance. It argues against building the entire relationship out of outcomes and nothing else.

The 99.5% Problem Starts Small

When I dug into the research behind the 99.5% bad-boss figure, the stories weren't mostly about screaming managers or public humiliation. They were quieter, and worse for it. A manager who only reached out during a crisis. A manager whose name on caller ID meant something had already gone wrong. A manager who never once called to say "good job" without adding a "but" right after it.

Bad leadership rarely announces itself with a single dramatic incident. It accumulates one transactional phone call at a time, until an employee's nervous system learns to associate their boss's name with danger. By the time a manager notices the damage, the employee has usually already decided to leave. They haven't told anyone yet, not out loud.

Why Leaders Skip This Step

Here's the honest part. Most leaders know this at some level and still don't do it. Calling someone with no agenda feels awkward the first few times. There's a fear it will land as fake, or worse, the employee will assume something's wrong precisely because the call is unusual. This fear is real, and it's also exactly the proof the pattern needs breaking. The awkwardness fades after a few genuine calls. The alternative, staying transactional forever, guarantees the fear never goes away for the person on the other end.

This is also why blind spots like this survive so long. A leader rarely finds out their calls trigger dread, because nobody tells their boss "your calls scare me." It takes a deliberate mechanism to surface it. Part of why I built the BAT framework at Step Up To BAT around structured feedback from direct reports and peers is exactly this problem. Leaders are unable to self-diagnose a pattern they're not inside of. Someone else has to name it, and most workplaces have no process for this to happen safely.

Run the Test on Yourself

Here's the uncomfortable homework. Think of three people on your team. Picture calling each of them right now, with no reason given. Be honest about what you think they'd feel in the half-second before they answer.

If the honest answer is dread, the fix isn't complicated. It won't come from a new policy or a leadership offsite. It comes from the next ten phone calls you make. Make one of them about nothing but the person on the other end.

I think about the officers who called for no reason but to check on me more often than I think about the ones who only called with orders. Twenty years on, it's still the difference I remember most. Which one do you want your team remembering about you in twenty years?

I went looking for data because I didn't want this to be my own sob story. Turns out it isn't. 26% of managers have never received any management training at all. Not a workshop. Not a course. Nothing. And that's the generous read, because plenty of the "training" that does exist is a slide deck and a certificate that changes nothing about how someone behaves under pressure.

My own research backs this up in a different way. In the work I've done on workplace culture, 99.5% of people I surveyed said they'd had one or more bad bosses in their career. Read that again. Not "some people." Nearly everyone. If leadership were being taught properly at scale, that number would not exist.

Companies know this is a problem. They don't fix it. Plenty of organizations will tell you developing leaders is an urgent priority, and then you look at what they do about it and the gap between the talk and the action is enormous. Everyone agrees the house is on fire. Almost nobody is holding a hose.

I've sat in the planning meetings where this gets discussed. Someone puts up a slide about "investing in our people." Everyone nods. Then budget season arrives and the leadership program is the first line item cut, because it's easier to defer developing humans than it is to defer a product launch. The launch has a deadline. The manager who's quietly failing their team does not, at least not one anyone tracks on a dashboard. So the damage compounds, quietly, for years, one bad one-on-one at a time.

The Moment I Stopped Waiting

I remember the exact point where I stopped expecting the company to fix this for me. I'd had a conversation with someone on my team that went badly. Not because I was cruel. Because I was clumsy. I said the right things in the wrong order and watched someone shut down in front of me.

I went home that night and thought about every boss I'd ever had who'd made me feel small, and every one who'd made me feel like I mattered. The gap between those two groups had nothing to do with intelligence or credentials. It was entirely about whether they'd bothered to think about the person in front of them, not the task.

That was when I decided I wasn't going to wait for a training budget or an HR calendar to teach me how to lead. I was going to become, deliberately, the leader I'd wished I'd had. Not a perfect one. One who was paying attention.

Waiting for L&D Is a Losing Bet

Here's the uncomfortable part. If you're waiting for your company's Learning and Development team to hand you the skills to lead well, you might be waiting a long time. L&D departments are underfunded, under-resourced, and usually built for compliance training, not for the harder, slower work of shaping how a person treats other humans under pressure.

That's not a knock on the people who work in L&D. Most of them know the gap exists too. It's a structural problem. Nobody's incentivized to fix how managers behave day to day, because it's messy and hard to measure and it doesn't show up on a quarterly slide.

Which means the job falls to you. Not because it's fair. Because nobody else is going to do it.

Be the Leader You Wish You'd Had

This is not complicated advice, but it is uncomfortable advice, because it means doing the work yourself instead of blaming the system.

Think back to the best boss you ever had. Not the one with the most impressive title. The one who made you want to do good work. What did they do, specifically? I'd bet money it wasn't a framework or a certification. It was small things. They remembered what you told them last week. They gave you feedback in private and credit in public. They asked questions instead of assuming they already knew the answer.

None of that requires a training budget. It requires deciding, deliberately, that you're going to act like the leader you wanted, instead of copying the leader you got stuck with.

I've had bosses who taught me exactly what not to do, and I'm grateful for them in a strange way, because they were unmistakable. There's no ambiguity when someone makes you feel two inches tall in a meeting. You remember it. Use it. Every bad boss you've survived is a free lesson in what to never become.

I keep a mental list of these. Not a formal one, nothing written down, only moments I've filed away. The manager who read out my mistake in front of the whole team instead of pulling me aside. The one who took credit for a decision I made and then vanished when it went sideways. I don't think about these people with anger anymore. I think about them as data. Every one of them handed me a rule for free: don't do that to somebody else. That's a cheaper education than any leadership course I've ever paid for, and in some ways it's stuck harder, because I felt it instead of reading it off a slide.

What I'd Tell the Younger Version of Me

If I went back and talked to the person standing in front of those soldiers for the first time, or the newly promoted manager who didn't know what he didn't know, I'd tell him this: nobody is coming to save you from your own leadership gaps. The training isn't showing up. The mentor isn't going to be assigned to you. You have to build the muscle yourself, on the job, one uncomfortable conversation at a time.

Development is everyone's job. Not HR's alone. Not your manager's alone. Yours too.

So here's the question I'd leave you with. Think about the leader you wish you'd had at your worst job. What's stopping you from being that person for someone else, starting this week?

I am one of many leaders stuck in this pattern. Gallup studied entrepreneurs and found only one in four have high levels of what they call Delegator talent. The other three in four are stuck doing exactly what I was doing: holding on.

And it costs real money. Gallup's data shows CEOs with strong delegation skills posted three-year growth rates 112 percentage points higher than low-delegation CEOs, and generated a third more revenue on average, roughly 8 million dollars versus 6 million. Letting go is not soft. It is one of the highest-leverage moves a leader has available.

Why We Hold On Anyway

If letting go pays off, why do so many leaders refuse to do it?

Because delegation feels like losing something. Founders in particular treat the business like their own creation, and handing off a piece of it feels like handing off a piece of themselves. There is a quiet, persistent belief nobody else will care as much or do the work as well. There is a fear explaining the task will take longer than doing it. And there is an identity problem underneath it all: if I am not the one solving the hardest problem in the room, who am I?

None of this is about the task. It is about control, and about what you think your value is built on.

I built my sense of worth on being the person who handled anything. Useful trait in a crisis. Poor operating system for building a team.

The Cost Nobody Puts on the P&L

While I was busy being indispensable, I was also, without meaning to, training my team to wait on me.

This is the quiet damage of a leader who cannot let go: it starts to look like control from the outside even when it does not feel this way from the inside. Control has a well-documented price tag. A Trinity Solutions survey, cited in Harry Chambers' book My Way or the Highway, found 79 percent of employees have experienced micromanagement at work, 85 percent said it hurt their morale, and 71 percent said it interfered with doing their job.

My own research found 99.5 percent of survey respondents have had one or more bad bosses in their career. A leader who cannot delegate does not need to be cruel to end up on this list. Hovering is enough on its own.

Trust is not a soft metric either. Paul Zak's research for Harvard Business Review found people at high-trust companies report 74 percent less stress, 106 percent more energy at work, and 50 percent higher productivity than people at low-trust companies. Every task I kept for myself instead of handing off was a small withdrawal from this account.

What Changed It For Me

There was no lightning bolt moment. There was a slow, uncomfortable realization: the team I built was unable to function without me in the room, and the failure was mine, not theirs.

The shift started small. I stopped answering questions I had already answered once. I pointed people back to the decision, the document, the person who owned it. It felt cold at first. It was not cold. It was respect. It said: you have this.

I started letting people finish work at 80 percent of how I would have done it, and I let it ship at 80 percent. Not because 80 percent was good enough forever, but because the alternative, me redoing everything to reach 100, meant nobody on my team ever got the chance to reach 100 on their own.

I also started asking a different question before I stepped in. Not "will this go faster if I do it myself" but "what does this person need in order to do this without me next time." One question changed how I ran meetings, how I gave feedback, and how much sleep I got.

Where to Start If This Sounds Like You

You do not fix a pattern like this overnight. Start smaller than feels comfortable.

Pick one task you have held onto for the wrong reasons, not because you are the only person capable of it, but because letting go feels uncomfortable. Hand it off completely. No check-ins, no rewriting the output after the fact. Let the result be theirs, good or imperfect.

Notice the moment you feel the urge to jump in. This urge is data. It tells you where your control habit lives, not where your team truly needs you.

And ask people directly what they need from you to do their job without you. Most leaders assume they already know. Most are wrong.

This is close to the framework I teach in my leadership workshops: awareness of the pattern, acceptance it is yours to fix, action to change it. Awareness without action changes nothing. I know because I sat in the awareness stage for years before I did anything about it.

Enabling Is the Job

Somewhere along the way I stopped defining leadership as being the best doer in the room and started defining it as building people who did not need me in the room at all.

A hard trade for anyone whose identity was built on being needed. It was hard for me. A team only performing when you are watching is not a team. It is an extension of you, and it stops the moment you step away, get promoted, get sick, or retire.

The leaders I respect most now are not the ones with an answer for every question in the room. They are the ones whose teams keep performing when they are on vacation, because they spent years building people instead of building dependence.

I still notice the urge to jump in and fix things. Old habits do not disappear, they get quieter. The difference now is I catch the urge, and I ask myself who else on my team might grow by handling this instead of me.

Where in your own work are you still the bottleneck because letting go feels like losing something? What would it cost to find out you were wrong?

In a review of leadership effectiveness data covering 50,000 leaders, researchers found that out of the people who scored low on likeability, only 27 individuals also ranked high on leadership effectiveness, as detailed in this breakdown of the study. Read that again. Being unlikeable and being effective can coexist, but it's rare, and it's not the point.

The real finding underneath that stat isn't "be a jerk and you'll be respected." It's that likeability and effectiveness are not the same axis, and leaders who optimize for one at the expense of the other usually end up bad at both. You can be warm and clear at the same time. What you can't do is trade clarity for approval and expect the trade to be free.

I've written before about how 99.5% of people I surveyed had experienced at least one type of bad boss. A huge chunk of those bad-boss stories aren't about tyrants. They're about managers who avoided the hard conversation, who let a problem fester because addressing it felt uncomfortable, who prioritized the relationship over the truth. That's not a nice boss. That's an absent one wearing a nice boss's face.

What Being Real Actually Looks Like

Being real doesn't mean being harsh. It means the version of you your team sees in a one-on-one is the same version that shows up in the all-hands. It means when someone asks "how am I doing," you tell them the actual answer, not the answer that keeps the meeting comfortable.

I had to relearn this the hard way. There was someone on my team years ago who was likeable, funny, great in meetings, and quietly missing every deadline. I let it slide for months because I liked working with them and didn't want to be the person who made things awkward. By the time I finally had the honest conversation, the problem had compounded into something much bigger than a missed deadline. It became a trust problem, and trust problems take far longer to fix than performance ones.

If I'd been real with them in month one instead of month six, it would have been a fifteen-minute conversation. Instead it took a quarter and nearly cost us the relationship entirely.

The Test I Use Now

Before I say anything to someone on my team, I ask myself one question: am I saying this because it's true and useful, or because it's what they want to hear? If it's the second one, I stop and rewrite it.

That single check has changed how I lead more than any framework or leadership book. It's not about volume or bluntness for its own sake. Some of the most real conversations I've had were quiet ones. What makes them real is that nothing in them was shaped to protect my own comfort.

Popularity is a byproduct of good leadership sometimes. It's never the goal. The moment it becomes the goal, you start editing the truth to fit the reaction you want, and your team stops getting the real you. They get a performance instead.

Where This Leaves You

If you're a manager reading this and you can feel a specific face in your mind right now... someone you've been going soft on because you like them, or because confrontation feels risky... that's your answer. That's the conversation you're overdue to have.

Being liked fades the moment you leave the room. Being real is the only thing that built anything that lasted. Which one have you been optimizing for this week?

Thomas Erikson's book Surrounded by Idiots maps human behaviour into four colour types. Red: decisive, results-driven, impatient. Yellow: enthusiastic, social, big-picture. Blue: analytical, precise, detail-obsessed. Green: patient, caring, the best listener in the room.

Most leaders skew Red or Yellow. They talk first and think of questions later. They fill silence because silence feels like failure. In their experience, silence means the meeting has stalled and someone needs to rescue it.

Green is different.

Green personalities listen first. They ask open questions. They wait. They let the other person reach the end of a thought before forming any response. They don't perform attention... they pay it.

Erikson makes one observation I keep returning to: if you're unsure how to read someone, go Green. Shut up. Ask a question. Then hear the answer.

He says this works with every personality type. Reds respect it because you're not filling their time with noise. Yellows love it because it gives them space to think out loud. Blues need it because they're always three steps ahead and they want someone keeping up. Greens light up when they find a leader who genuinely listens.

I am not a natural Green. Ask anyone who has worked with me. I'm a talker. I have opinions. I am entirely willing to share them. But going Green deliberately... treating it as a skill rather than a personality trait... turned out to be one of the most effective shifts I've made as a leader.

The Numbers Are Damning

This is not a soft topic.

Research from 2025 shows 86% of employees feel they are not heard fairly or equally at work. 63% say their voice has been ignored by their employer or manager at some point. Meanwhile, 64% of HR professionals name active listening as the top leadership skill they look for... and only 2% of the population has mastered it.

Two percent.

The people doing this well are nearly invisible because the skill looks like nothing from the outside. They're sitting there, asking questions, letting you talk. They don't appear to be doing anything. What they're doing is building more trust per minute than any speech or strategy delivers.

Managers trained in active listening see 30% higher employee satisfaction. Teams led by strong listeners have 20% lower turnover. 79% of employees who feel heard report higher motivation.

These aren't philosophical numbers. They show up in retention, in output quality, in how often your team brings problems to you before those problems become crises.

What Going Green Looks Like in Practice

Going Green is not passive. It's not nodding along while composing your response.

It's three specific things.

Ask open questions. Not "is everything okay?" but "what's getting in your way this week?" Not "do you agree?" but "what am I missing?" The phrasing matters. Closed questions give people permission to say "fine" and move on. Open questions require them to think and respond.

Tolerate silence. When you ask a question and the room goes quiet, resist the urge to fill it. The person is thinking. Let them. The silence belongs to them, not yours to rescue. Leaders who tolerate no silence almost always answer their own questions, which means they never learn anything from the conversation.

Reflect back before responding. Before offering your view, repeat what you heard. "So if I understood you correctly, the problem is..." This does two things. It shows the person they were heard... which is rarer than it should be. And it forces you to process what was said before reacting. You'd be surprised how often repeating something back changes what you want to say next.

None of this is complicated. All of it requires discipline. The instinct to respond fast, to look decisive, to fill space with answers... it's wired into most leaders. Going Green means fighting the instinct.

What I Had to Unlearn

For years, I thought quick answers were what made me useful.

They made me a crutch.

When I answered everything fast, my team stopped working through problems before bringing them to me. Why develop the muscle yourself when I would hand over the answer in five minutes?

Worse, I was often answering the wrong question.

There's a phrase I've heard from coaches and therapists: the presenting issue is rarely the real issue. In leadership, I've found this to be true more often than I'd like to admit. People come to you with the question they feel safe asking... not the one they need answered.

The question "should we rebuild this module?" was sometimes a signal of burnout dressed up as a technical debate. The question "what do you think about my career path?" was sometimes someone telling me they were about to start looking.

When you answer quickly, you address the surface question and miss the one underneath.

I noticed this when I deliberately slowed down. Not because anyone told me to... but because someone I respected sat through an entire one-on-one saying almost nothing, and I came out with my thinking reorganised. They had asked three questions. I'd done all the talking.

It was the most useful conversation I'd had in months.

The Rebellious Act

Going Green as a leader is a rebellion against the image of leadership.

Leaders are supposed to have answers. They're supposed to project confidence, forward motion, clarity. Sitting quietly and asking questions looks like uncertainty. Like you don't know what to do.

Most of the time, you do know. Going Green isn't about pretending otherwise. It's about making space for your team to get there themselves... because a team working through problems is more capable than a team waiting for your answers.

The leaders I've respected most in my career were the ones who made me feel heard. Not the ones with the best answers... the ones who asked the best questions. Not the ones who filled every room with noise, but the ones who made room for mine.

Going Green is the move most leaders never make because it feels like weakness. In practice, it builds more trust than almost anything else you will do.

Try This Week

Pick one meeting where you'd normally lead. Set one rule: don't offer an answer until you've asked at least two questions.

See what comes up.

Erikson is right... going Green works regardless of who's in the room. What changes is what people bring to you when they trust you're going to listen. And eventually, what they're willing to work out themselves before they even need you.

The most effective thing a leader says is sometimes nothing.

Research from LinkedIn shows diverse decision-making teams deliver 60% better results. Sixty percent. Not a small number. Not a rounding error. The gap between a product team shipping the right thing and one shipping the wrong thing.

Yet most hiring processes are designed to filter out people who feel different, not people who perform differently.

I spent years in the Army. The best teams I worked with were not teams of identical people. They were teams with wildly different skills, backgrounds, and personalities, held together by common purpose. Build a unit with purpose at its center and they cover each other's weaknesses. Build one around who you'd grab a beer with and you get a group of friends making the same mistakes.

Business teams work exactly the same way. A room full of people who all think alike doesn't produce better decisions. It produces faster decisions with less resistance and more shared blind spots.

Only 34% of employees are engaged at work. Many organizations spend enormous energy keeping disengaged people productive. The culture fit filter doesn't create engaged, committed teams. It creates comfortable ones.

No Measurable Standard Means No Accountability

There's no objective measure for culture fit. When a hiring criterion has no measurable standard, it defaults to gut feeling. And gut feelings have biases baked in.

Research on unconscious bias in hiring shows unstructured interviews are weak predictors of future job performance. Yet culture fit gets judged in unstructured conversations, where the interviewer runs on instinct.

Instinct tells you to hire the person who feels familiar.

Anthony Park was a software engineer who didn't fit the Silicon Valley stereotype. He was "buttoned-up" and didn't match the casual, hoodie-wearing culture at Netflix. They hired him anyway, based on what he demonstrated he was capable of doing. He built a Netflix app to prove his skills. He became VP of Engineering.

How many people like Anthony Park have been turned away at the "culture fit" stage? We don't have numbers on the candidates who didn't get the callback. Nobody tracks the talent lost to this filter. But it's there, working quietly in every hiring process where "culture fit" goes undefined.

Culture Add Is the Better Question

Instead of asking "Does this person fit our culture?" ask "What does this person add to our culture?"

Culture ADD means hiring people who share your values but bring skills, perspectives, and experiences you don't already have. Your existing culture grows stronger, not bigger.

Values are worth screening for. Integrity. Accountability. Honesty. Whatever yours are. Those matter. But personality, background, communication style... those differences are features, not problems.

The best hire I ever made was someone who disagreed with me in the interview. Not rudely. Not pointlessly. She had a clear view contradicting mine and said so, directly. I hired her on the spot. She was right about the thing we'd disagreed on. And about six other things afterward.

She was not a culture fit. She was a culture improvement.

What Values Screening Actually Looks Like

The shift from culture fit to culture add requires you to get specific about what your values are. Not the polished version on your careers page. The real ones, the ones you'd actually hold a new hire to.

Here's an example. If "accountability" is one of your values, define what it looks like in practice:

• Do people flag problems early or hide them until deadline?
• Do managers take ownership when projects miss, or do they point at the team?
• Is "I made a mistake" welcomed or punished?

With definitions like these, you screen for accountability in the interview with behavioral questions. "Tell me about a time you made a significant mistake at work. What happened?" The answer tells you far more about values alignment than whether they feel like someone you'd invite to dinner.

Culture add doesn't mean hiring anyone regardless of fit. It means being precise about what fit means, and making sure you're measuring the right things.

The Practical Fix

Stop using "culture fit" as a rejection reason. It tells you nothing and it protects biases you'd rather not admit.

Replace it with specific questions:

• Does this person share our stated values?
• Do they have skills our team is missing?
• Have they worked in high-accountability environments before?
• Do they communicate clearly under pressure?

Those questions have answers you compare across candidates. "Culture fit" doesn't.

If someone in your hiring process says "I don't think they're a culture fit," press them. What did the candidate say or do? If they struggle to answer, the bias is doing the talking.

Require interviewers to document specific concerns against specific criteria. If someone cannot name a specific behavior or answer to back up a rejection, the rejection doesn't stand.

The Real Cost

A team of identical thinkers isn't cohesive. It's fragile. One shared blind spot and the whole team goes down together.

Real cohesion comes from shared purpose and mutual respect. Not shared taste in pubs.

And the people filtered out? Many of them are exactly who you needed. The one who would've spotted the flaw in your roadmap. The one who'd have pushed back on the decision everyone else was nodding along with.

Next time you're in a hiring room and someone says "culture fit," ask them what they mean. Don't let it pass. The answer tells you a lot about your hiring process... and a lot about who's been quietly filtered out.

Ken works with organizations on leadership and getting the best from their people. Find out more at Step It Up HR.

Research from the University of Queensland puts the average number of distinct careers at three to seven before retirement. Not jobs. Careers. The average person changes jobs roughly every two years and nine months. Over a 45-year working life, this adds up to around 16 different jobs.

Sixteen.

CVWizard's 2025 data found 66% of Gen Z workers planned to switch jobs within the year. Not careers ... jobs. And the number was even higher among Gen Z women at 71%.

This isn't failure. This isn't lack of commitment. This is how careers work now. And if we're honest about it, how they've always worked.

The ladder was never real. It was a story companies told employees to make them feel stable, and a story employees told themselves to feel in control. The spaghetti was always there underneath.

The Real Cost of Ladder Thinking

When people believe their careers should go in a straight line, any deviation feels like failure.

I've coached engineers who felt genuine shame about moving into management, as if going sideways meant giving up. I've spoken with managers stuck in roles they hated because leaving their industry felt like starting over. I've met people in their forties who'd never tried anything new because they were afraid of falling off a rung they'd spent twenty years climbing.

The ladder doesn't free you. It traps you.

It creates a permanent state of behind-ness. If you're not on the next rung yet, you're late. If you spent a few years in a different direction, you're off track. If you tried something and it didn't work, you've wasted time.

None of this is true. It is, though, exhausting to believe.

There's also a quieter cost nobody talks about: the skills you never build because you were focused on moving up instead of moving around. The relationships you never make because you stayed inside one industry. The perspective you never gain because you only ever saw one type of problem.

The ladder keeps you narrow. The spaghetti makes you broad.

Why the Messy Path Wins

The more varied your path, the more resilient you tend to be. Not because variation is inherently good, but because every sideways move adds a new set of skills, contexts, and perspectives to your toolkit.

My time in the Army taught me how to lead under pressure, how to give and receive direct feedback without ego, and how to function in high-stakes environments with incomplete information. None of it showed up on my resume in an obvious way. All of it transferred to every role I've held since.

My move from fintech to HR consulting looked strange from the outside. What do engineering teams have to do with employee experience? As it turns out: everything. The hardest problems in software aren't technical. They're human. I spent fifteen years solving them from the engineering side. Now I solve them from the people side. Writing a book about bad bosses wasn't a departure from my career in tech. It was the logical result of spending fifteen years watching management go wrong in organizations built on code.

The context from one world makes you sharper in the next. You don't get it by staying in your lane.

The best leaders I know have careers like mine ... messy, multi-industry, full of moves no one predicted. They're not better leaders despite the wandering. They're better because of it.

How to Stop Thinking in Ladders

This isn't an argument for changing jobs every six months. Spaghetti isn't chaos. It's a tangled path getting you somewhere interesting.

Here's how I think about it:

Follow the problem, not the industry. The question I've always asked: where is the hardest, most interesting version of this problem? If the answer is in a different sector, go to a different sector. The skills transfer. The industry label doesn't define you.

Value the adjacent move. A sideways step into a role teaching you something new is worth more than a promotion into a role teaching you nothing. Rank and title are the ladder model's currency. You don't have to trade in it.

Stop measuring by comparison. The ladder model is inherently competitive ... who's ahead, who's behind, who got there first. The spaghetti model makes comparison nearly meaningless. Your path is yours. Stop checking where other people's pasta landed.

Own the story. Every pivot, every change, every unexpected move builds a narrative. The narrative isn't "I had no plan." The narrative is "I followed what was interesting and ended up with experience most people don't have." Own it.

Know what you're running toward, not away from. A career change driven by curiosity is a healthy thing. A career change driven by fear of honest self-assessment is a different thing. Know the difference.

The Plan Is Overrated

I'm not saying skip planning altogether. I'm saying don't confuse a plan with a script.

A plan gives you direction. A script demands you follow it regardless of what you learn along the way. The first is useful. The second is limiting.

The best thing I ever did for my career was stay curious about problems well outside what I was supposed to be working on. Curiosity took me to an Army base. To a research lab. To a fintech startup. To an HR company. To writing a book. To building something new.

I don't know where the path leads next. I'm genuinely looking forward to finding out.

Your career isn't supposed to be a ladder you climb toward a destination someone else defined. It's a plate of spaghetti ... tangled, surprising, and much better when you stop trying to make it go straight.

What's the most unexpected move you've ever made in your career?

Psychologist Charles Snyder spent decades studying what separates people who reach their goals from people who do not. His hope theory identified three components:

1. A clear goal — you know what you are working toward
2. Pathways thinking — you identify multiple routes to get there
3. Agency thinking — you believe you have what it takes to walk those routes

None of these are passive. All three require you to show up and do something.

Optimism asks nothing of you. Hope asks everything.

The Leader Who "Stayed Positive"

Early in my career, I worked under a leader who was unshakeably optimistic. Nothing rattled him. He never doubted the team out loud. He had a gift for walking into a room of anxious people and walking out with everyone feeling better.

For a while, I thought this was the gold standard of leadership.

Then I watched projects drift. Decisions get delayed. Problems sit longer than they needed to sit. And when I finally named one of those problems directly, the answer was something like: "Trust the process. We will figure it out."

We did not figure it out. Because "figuring it out" requires an actual plan, and we did not have one.

What we had was optimism. It felt like leadership. It was not.

Why This Confuses So Many Leaders

Optimism feels like hope because they produce similar emotions. Both feel forward-looking. Both reduce anxiety in the short term. Both make people feel better in a difficult moment.

The difference shows up later. And by then, you have already spent the emotional capital.

When you project optimism without a plan, you are asking your people to wait. You are telling them the cavalry is coming without explaining when, from where, or who called them. Over time, people learn to read the pattern. They stop bringing you their real problems. They stop believing in the "we will figure it out."

They disengage. And they do it quietly.

Pettigrew's research surfaces something uncomfortable here: leaders who have broken trust through repeated optimism-without-follow-through lose their ability to inspire hope. You cannot repair this with tactics. The pre-condition for hope in a team is trust, and once it is gone, no amount of positivity fills the gap.

The Difference in Practice

Here is how I think about it now.

When I hear someone say "I hope things turn around," I ask one question: What are you doing about it?

If the answer is "nothing yet" or "I'm waiting to see," this is not hope. This is a wish. A wish is fine as an emotion. It is not a strategy.

Hope requires:

1. A destination. Not "things get better" but "by September, we have re-engaged three of the five stakeholders we lost." Specific. Measurable. Worth orienting around.

2. Multiple routes. Not one plan, because one plan fails when the first obstacle appears. Two or three possible paths mean when route A closes, you shift to route B without collapsing.

3. Belief in your own capability. This is the part people skip. You need genuine conviction you are able to make the moves the plan requires. Not confidence for its own sake... but evidence-based belief rooted in what you have done before.

Hope Is Learnable

One of the findings from Snyder's research is worth sitting with: hope is not a personality trait. It is a skill.

Some people seem naturally hopeful. But the research shows even they feel hopeless in specific situations — when the goal is unclear, when no path is visible, when they do not trust their own ability to execute.

And people who are not naturally hopeful learn to build it. Deliberately. Systematically.

This matters for how you develop your team. If someone on your team is struggling, telling them to "stay positive" is optimism-advice. It works on optimism's logic: if you believe hard enough, things will be fine.

Hope-advice sounds different. It sounds like: "Let's get clear on what success looks like here. What routes do you see? What would make you more confident you are able to pull this off?"

One gives a feeling. The other builds a structure.

What This Has Changed for Me

I am not a naturally pessimistic person. If anything, I lean toward optimism by default. So shifting toward hope required real effort on my part.

It meant being more honest in difficult moments. Not "it'll work out" but "here is what I think the path looks like, and here is what I am doing about it."

It meant admitting when I did not have a plan — and saying so directly instead of papering it over with positivity.

It meant asking harder questions of myself and my teams before making promises. Do we know what success looks like? Do we know how to get there? Do I believe we are able to do it?

The uncomfortable truth: sometimes the answer to all three is no. And in those moments, optimism is a trap. It keeps you in a comfortable feeling while the situation deteriorates around you.

Hope forces you to look at the gap honestly and then decide what to do about it.

The Question Worth Asking Yourself

Think about something you are hoping for right now. A career move. A team challenge. A project you care about.

Now ask yourself:

• Do you know specifically what success looks like?
• Do you have more than one path to get there?
• Do you genuinely believe you are able to execute?

If you answered yes to all three, you are hoping. You have a real, forward-facing orientation to the future.

If you hesitated on any of them... you might be optimistic. Which is not worthless. But it is not going to get you where you are trying to go.

Hope is not a softer version of a plan. It is the willingness to hold the belief AND do the work. And it is something any of us is able to build, step by deliberate step.

Start with the destination. Then find the paths. Then find the evidence you are equipped to walk them.

This is what hope looks like when it is doing its job.

A global study analyzing perfectionism and burnout across 43 research papers found a strong link between perfectionistic concerns and workplace burnout. Not perfectionism as a trait in isolation, but perfectionism paired with the fear of not measuring up.

The perfectionist's internal standard is always slightly out of reach. Every win is temporary. Every mistake lingers. They're not tired from the work. They're exhausted from the running commentary in their head telling them it isn't good enough.

And they look productive from the outside. Output is high. Quality is high. No visible warning sign appears until the collapse. People around them see competence. The perfectionist feels like someone drowning in slow motion.

The High Achiever

High achievers operate in a constant state of heightened arousal. Their nervous system is wired to perform.

Research on high performer burnout shows they consistently work longer hours than peers, invest more emotional energy, and assume responsibility without requesting support. They internalize both success and failure more deeply than colleagues.

They're also the last ones to signal a problem. Admitting struggle feels like a threat to the identity they've built. If your entire reputation is "I handle anything," saying "I'm struggling" feels like career suicide.

So they don't say it. They push harder instead.

The result? What researchers call "success fatigue," a point where continued achievement feels meaningless and the reward system stops firing. The high achiever becomes cynical, disengaged, or simply disappears.

The People-Pleaser

People-pleasers are in an impossible position. Their psychological need is to avoid conflict and keep everyone satisfied. Their work response is to take on more, smooth over problems, and absorb other people's stress.

A 2024 study published in MDPI identified people-pleasing at work as a consistent predictor of emotional exhaustion and burnout, with individuals "consistently neglecting personal needs to meet external demands."

The people-pleaser doesn't burn out because they're weak. They burn out because they're so focused on everyone else's needs they never notice their own tank running dry.

The Mask of Competence

What these three types share: they're excellent at hiding it.

Not because they're dishonest. Because they genuinely believe they should be able to handle more. The perfectionist thinks: "I'll get through this project, then I'll rest." The high achiever thinks: "This is what I signed up for." The people-pleaser thinks: "Everyone else is struggling more than me."

None of these are true. All of them feel true.

Research on perfectionism and high-functioning achievers notes these individuals often "struggle alone, believing their value is tied to their output." The moment they stop producing, they fear they become nothing.

So they keep the mask on. They keep pushing.

Until one day they don't.

Organizations Pour Fuel on the Fire

Most organizations unknowingly reward the exact behaviors driving burnout.

The perfectionist who redoes their presentation at 11pm gets praised for quality. The high achiever who takes on three extra projects gets promoted. The people-pleaser who stays late to help colleagues gets called a "team player."

All of this is positive reinforcement for behavior slowly destroying them.

Look at who gets pulled into the priority project every time. Who gets the stretch assignments? It's the same person. The reliable one. The capable one. And nobody asks whether they have capacity, because experience shows they never say no.

Until they do. Permanently.

The Alison Butler Consulting research on high achievers describes this dynamic clearly: organizations "over-rely on top performers to compensate for team gaps" and assume visible resilience equals internal wellbeing. By the time anyone notices something is wrong, the damage is already significant.

Then organizations wonder why their best person resigned without warning. Or fell apart publicly. Or got sick.

The system built to reward strength also destroys it.

The Warning Signs Nobody Sees

Standard burnout warning signs like missed deadlines, irritability, and declining output show up late or not at all in these three types.

Perfectionists deliver on time while running on empty. High achievers maintain output until they stop completely. People-pleasers keep smiling through a quiet breakdown.

The visible signal, when it arrives, is dramatic. A sudden resignation. A health crisis. A complete personality change. Everyone says "I had no idea."

The signs were there. They were the wrong signs.

Real warning signs look like this:

• The perfectionist who stops taking on new challenges, protecting what's left of themselves
• The high achiever who becomes cynical about projects they once loved
• The people-pleaser who quietly withdraws from social moments at work
• The person who was always first to volunteer... who stopped

None of these look like a crisis. All of them are.

If You Manage People

Stop assuming the capable ones are fine.

The person most likely to be in trouble is the person you never worry about. Check in on your high performers with the same care you give your struggling team members. Ask direct questions: "Are you taking on too much?" "What are you saying no to?" "When did you last properly disconnect?"

Don't accept "I'm fine" as an answer. Push once. Create space where admitting struggle is genuinely acceptable, not theoretical.

Watch for the wrong warning signs. Pay attention to the person who used to be enthusiastic and now seems quietly absent. The one who does everything asked of them but seems to have gone somewhere else in their head.

Teams perform better when people feel safe admitting they're struggling. And the people most reluctant to admit struggle are often the people you need most.

If You Recognize Yourself Here

Your capacity to push through is not infinite. You know this intellectually. Most people in your position haven't internalized it yet.

The Army taught me to push through pain. Corporate life rewarded me for it. It took years to understand the difference between resilience and running yourself into the ground.

Resilience means recovering. Not enduring forever.

The strongest people I know have all had a moment, sometimes several moments, where they had to admit they were running on fumes. Not as failure. As information.

If you're the perfectionist, the high achiever, or the people-pleaser reading this: the thing you're most proud of, your capacity, your drive, your reliability, is also your biggest risk.

The strength keeping you going is also what makes it so hard to stop.

What would it take for you to admit you need a break? And more importantly, what's stopping you?

Gallup has studied management selection across thousands of organizations. Their finding: companies fail to select the right person for management roles 82% of the time.

Eighty-two percent. Nearly every single time.

When Gallup asked U.S. managers why they got the job, the two most common answers were: success in a previous non-managerial role, and tenure. Neither tells you anything about management ability.

Gallup estimates only 1 in 10 people have the natural talent to manage well. Think about the management chain in your organization right now. Statistically, most of those people shouldn't be there. Not because they're bad people, but because nobody checked whether they wanted the job or were built for it.

And the financial cost is real. Organizations who select and develop talented managers achieve approximately 147% higher earnings per share compared to their competitors. Getting this wrong isn't a culture problem. It's a business problem.

The Cost Is Double

Here's what companies don't talk about enough. When you promote your best engineer to manager, you don't gain a new manager. You lose your best engineer.

Those aren't separate events. They're the same transaction.

The work this person was doing... the architectural decisions, the mentorship through code review, the debugging nobody else wanted to touch... now sits unassigned. Or gets distributed across people who aren't as good at it. Or falls to the newly-promoted manager, who's now trying to do two jobs and doing neither well.

Meanwhile, your new manager is learning leadership the hard way: through trial and error, on your team, on your watch. The people they manage are the test subjects.

Some grow into it. Many don't. And many leave entirely because managing people turned out to be nothing like what they signed up for when they chose a career in engineering.

You got rid of a great engineer and created both a mediocre manager and a retention problem. All in one decision.

The System Only Has One Track

The root of this is structural. Most organizations offer one progression path: individual contributor to manager.

Want more money? Become a manager. Want more prestige? Become a manager. Want to be seen as a leader? Become a manager.

For someone who loves coding, loves solving hard problems, loves building systems... this is a terrible deal. But they often take it anyway. Because it's the only deal on the table.

And then they're miserable. Or mediocre. Or both. And they start looking elsewhere.

The Fix Is a Second Track

The organizations getting this right offer two paths upward.

The IC track goes from senior engineer to staff engineer to principal engineer to distinguished engineer. Each level brings more scope, more autonomy, more influence, and more pay... without requiring you to manage people.

The management track is separate and intentional. It's for people who genuinely want to lead teams, who get energy from developing other people, who are willing to trade keyboard time for conversation time.

You recruit for these tracks deliberately. You don't assume your top performer wants to manage.

Some companies get this wrong by offering parallel tracks where they aren't equal. The IC track tops out at a lower salary band or a title with less prestige. Engineers see through this immediately. A "Staff Engineer" who earns less and gets less visibility than a middle manager is going to take the management path even when they don't want it.

If you're going to offer two tracks, they need to be genuinely equivalent. Same pay bands. Same access to senior leadership. Same signal to the organization: this person is valued.

How to Know If Someone Should Manage

Before promoting anyone into a management role, ask them directly: do you want to manage people?

Not whether they'd like a promotion. Not whether they want more money. Whether they want to spend their days on one-on-ones, performance conversations, hiring decisions, and team dynamics.

Watch for someone who already does these things without being asked. The engineer who mentors new hires on their own initiative. The one who runs meetings well, who notices when a teammate is struggling, who cares about the team's output more than their own velocity. Those signals matter.

Technical excellence is not one of those signals. It's the most common reason we promote people into management. It's almost completely irrelevant to whether they'll succeed there.

What to Do If You're Already There

If you've been promoted into management and you hate it, you're not failing. You're in the wrong role. Different problem entirely.

Name it. Tell your manager. Ask whether there's a path back to technical work at a senior level. Some organizations will say yes. Some won't. Staying in a role you're miserable at, pretending to be fine, helps nobody... least of all the team depending on you.

For those making these decisions: before you promote your best engineer, sit down with them and ask what they want. Not what they think you want to hear. What they want.

The answer might surprise you.

Garry Ridge called his employees "tribe members" and his managers "coaches." Not marketing language. A statement about how he saw people... as part of something meaningful, not as resources to be deployed. At WD-40, around 97% of employees said their coach respected them. The number doesn't come from a policy. It comes from leaders who genuinely give a damn.

I've been lucky enough to work for people like this. The leaders who remembered what you told them three months ago about something personal. Who sent you home early when you needed it. Who fought for your raise even when you didn't ask. Not softness... genuine investment in another person.

Service Is Not Servility

I once worked with a leader who described himself as a servant leader. He never challenged anyone. Every idea was a good idea. Every complaint was met with "you're right, I'll look into it." His team liked him enormously for about six months. Then they started running over him. Deadlines became suggestions. Standards became opinions. His best performer left because there was no one holding the work to any bar worth hitting.

He wasn't a servant leader. He was a people-pleaser who'd found an ideology to justify avoiding discomfort.

Service means giving your people what they need. Sometimes what they need is a hard conversation. Sometimes it's someone refusing to let them produce work below their own standard. Sometimes it's being told: this is not acceptable, and I know you're better than this.

Servility is giving people what they want in the moment, at the cost of what they need in the long run. It feels kind. It isn't.

Spine of Steel: The Part People Miss

Here's where most "servant leaders" fall apart.

The spine of steel means making the hard calls. It means having the conversation you've been putting off for two months because you knew it would be uncomfortable. It means telling someone they're underperforming, and telling them directly, not burying it in HR euphemisms. It means letting someone go when you've run out of road, doing it with dignity, but without flinching.

Genuine care for someone includes telling them the truth. If someone on my team was not performing and I kept covering for them, saying everything was fine, letting them coast... I wasn't caring for them. I was protecting myself from an uncomfortable conversation. Not servant leadership. Conflict avoidance wearing a servant leadership mask.

In the Army, I learned this firsthand. The NCOs I respected most cared about their soldiers deeply. They also held them to standards with no room for negotiation. Because they understood what was at stake when standards slipped. You don't go easy on people when doing so puts them or others at risk. You care for them by holding the line.

Leadership in business isn't life or death the way military service is. But the principle holds. When you tolerate poor performance, you're not being kind to the underperformer... you're being unfair to everyone else on the team who meets the standard. Culture is defined by what you accept.

The Accountability Paradox

Here's something I didn't expect when I started thinking about servant leadership seriously: true servant leaders often have higher expectations than traditional command-and-control managers.

Because they care about the work. Because they care about the people doing the work. Because they know letting someone drift along in mediocrity isn't respect... it's neglect.

A boss who doesn't challenge you doesn't think much of your potential. The servant leader who pushes you, who holds you to a high bar, who refuses to let you settle... believes you're capable of more. And they're willing to do the uncomfortable work of proving it.

Garry Ridge built WD-40's culture around "learning moments" instead of mistakes. No one was punished for getting something wrong. But no one was allowed to repeat the same mistake without addressing why. Accountability inside a culture of psychological safety. Both things, together. Not one instead of the other.

What It Looks Like in Practice

I spent years leading engineering teams. Servant leadership in a tech context looks something like this:

You clear the obstacles between your team and the work. You fight the internal politics so they don't have to. You make sure they have what they need before they have to ask. You give them credit when things go well.

You also tell them when their code is not good enough. You make the call to pause a feature and fix the foundation, even when the business is screaming for delivery. You address the person who's brilliant at their craft but toxic to the team, and you do it before the team breaks.

There was a period where I had a senior engineer who was technically excellent and interpersonally combustible. Every standup was a reminder of who was right and who wasn't. Other engineers started going quiet rather than risk the grenades. I cared about him as a person. I also had to make clear the behavior had to change, and give him a real timeline. It did change. But not because I avoided the conversation. Because I had it.

The heart of gold shapes how you do all of it. Their dignity matters. Their growth matters. The spine of steel means you follow through, even when it's painful.

The Margarita Party Myth

The myth of the soft servant leader persists because it's appealing. Leadership without bravery. Leadership where everyone likes you all the time. Where no one is ever uncomfortable, including you.

Not how it works. The best servant leaders I've met are often the most demanding. Not in a punishing way... in an "I believe you're capable of more" way. They've earned the right to demand more because they've shown they're in it for their people, not for themselves.

The margarita party version of servant leadership gives you temporary popularity and long-term dysfunction. The real version is harder. It requires you to genuinely care about someone enough to tell them something they don't want to hear.

Heart of gold. Spine of steel. Worth asking yourself which one you're more comfortable with... and whether you're doing enough of the other.

The results are almost absurd in their clarity. By the time he stepped down in 2022, 98% of WD-40 employees said they loved telling people where they worked. 99% said their values aligned with the company's. 93% said the organisation encouraged them to keep growing. Revenue doubled on his watch.

None of this came from a new product line. None of it came from a clever strategy. It came from a leader who refused to stop learning.

We Don't Make Mistakes. We Have Learning Moments.

One of Ridge's most-repeated lines: WD-40 doesn't have failures. It has "learning moments."

This sounds like HR spin. It isn't.

When you rename failure as learning, you change what people do with it. They don't hide it. They don't deflect it. They bring it forward, examine it, and move on. The fear of being wrong starts to shrink. People take risks they'd never take in a culture of blame.

I've worked in companies where mistakes got buried. Where the instinct after something went wrong was to manage the story, not learn the lesson. I've watched this culture eat itself. Good people leave. Bad habits compound. Leaders start believing their own narratives.

The School of Dumbassery is the antidote to all of it.

The Army Taught Me This. I Let It Go.

In the Army, training never stopped. You finished basic and more training followed. You got promoted and training came with it. You reached a level where you were supposed to know things, and training kept coming anyway. Skills faded without use. Situations changed. Complacency got people hurt.

Nobody told you at any point you were done. Because in the Army, "done" is a liability.

I took this into my civilian career and then, somewhere in my thirties, I let it go. I got senior enough for learning to become self-directed, optional, and easy to skip. I got busy enough to stop reading properly. I got confident enough to stop asking the dumb questions in meetings.

I was "experienced." Which, looking back, meant I'd stopped growing.

The Symptoms of Graduation

You don't announce when you've graduated. It happens quietly, and the signs are subtle.

You stop asking questions in meetings where you're supposed to be the expert. You start finding new ideas annoying instead of interesting. You give feedback based on how things were done before, not what the situation needs now. You surround yourself with people who confirm what you already think.

Go deeper and the pattern gets worse. You start interpreting pushback as disloyalty. You mistake seniority for insight. You build a mental model of how leadership works, and when reality doesn't match the model, you assume reality is wrong.

The most insidious part: your team adapts to you. They stop bringing you the hard problems. They tell you what works, edit out what doesn't, and you end up living in a carefully curated version of reality where everything seems fine. Until it isn't.

The leaders I've watched do the most damage had all graduated. They were senior enough for the feedback loop to close. Nobody brought them hard truths because it didn't feel safe. They stopped seeking hard truths because they felt they already knew them. And they took entire teams down with them, often without any awareness of what was happening.

The Danger of Feeling Like You've Arrived

Here's what I've noticed about leaders who've graduated: they stop being curious.

Curiosity drives the good questions, the deep listening, the willingness to sit with uncertainty. And you lose it quietly. Nobody announces it. You notice, eventually, you haven't changed your mind about anything in a long time.

If your leadership model looks identical to five years ago, pause there.

Ridge, at 66, still teaches leadership at the University of San Diego. He runs workshops, writes books, goes on podcasts. Not to explain what he already knows. To keep testing what he thinks he knows.

What Staying Enrolled Looks Like

It doesn't need to be formal. Most of it isn't.

It looks like asking the youngest person in the room what they're seeing you aren't. It looks like reviewing a decision from six months ago, without flinching, and asking what you'd do differently. It looks like reading something you disagree with and sitting in the discomfort instead of dismissing it.

It looks like being wrong in public and not collapsing. Being willing to hear feedback you didn't ask for. Accepting someone changed your mind and saying so out loud, rather than quietly adjusting and pretending you were always thinking this way.

None of this is natural. The whole professional culture rewards appearing competent. We get promoted for having answers. We build reputations on being the person people come to when they're stuck. Admitting ignorance feels like stepping backwards.

It isn't. It's the only way forward.

The School of Dumbassery isn't a place. It's a stance. Garry Ridge wore it as a badge of honour and built one of the most engaged workforces on the planet to prove it works.

The Only Graduation Worth Pursuing

There is one graduation worth pursuing in leadership: the moment you stop caring about appearing competent and start caring about becoming it.

From there, you stay in class. And if you're doing it right, you keep finding out how much more there is to learn.

What's the last thing you read, or heard, or experienced, genuinely changing how you think about leadership? If you're struggling to answer, it might be time to re-enrol.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review put a number on something I've suspected for years: 95% of people believe they are self-aware. The real figure? Only 10-15% genuinely are.

Sit with this for a moment. Nine out of ten leaders walking into work today believe they understand how they come across to their team. How they show up in pressure situations. How their words land. Most of them are wrong.

This isn't about intelligence. It isn't about good intentions. The leaders I've worked with who had the least self-awareness were often among the smartest people in the room. The gap between perceived and real self-awareness doesn't discriminate by seniority, gender, industry, or how many leadership books you've read.

It's a human problem. And in leaders, it becomes everyone else's problem.

The Numbers Don't Lie

A study by MRG assessed approximately 40,000 leaders globally using 360-degree feedback. Their finding: leaders average 7.6 blind spots. More than a third of their leadership behaviours are areas where self-perception diverges wildly from how others experience them.

Seven blind spots. In one leader. Running a team. Making decisions about people's careers.

The MRG research also tells us what leaders most commonly overestimate: their ability to delegate, their tactical adaptability, and their independence in decision-making. In plain English, leaders think they're empowering their teams when they're micromanaging. They think they're flexible when they're rigid. They think they're making bold decisions when they're stalling.

These are not minor misalignments. These are the exact things teams need from their leaders.

What Blind Spots Cost

The consequences of leadership blind spots are not abstract. They land on real people.

A study in the South African Journal of Business Management found leaders with low self-awareness consistently exhibit behaviours linked to toxic and destructive leadership. Not occasionally. Consistently.

I've seen this play out firsthand. I once worked with a CTO who believed, sincerely, he ran a psychologically safe team. His people told me something different in private conversations. They were terrified to raise problems with him because he had a pattern of shooting the messenger. He had no idea. His intentions were good. His impact was corrosive. The gap between the two had never been named to his face.

This makes low self-awareness so damaging. It's invisible to the person causing the harm. The leader gets to keep the self-image of someone doing good work while their team quietly suffers.

I've seen high performers leave jobs they loved because of a leader who didn't know themselves. Not because of pay. Not because of the work. Because they ran out of ways to manage upward around someone who had no idea how they were showing up.

This gap kills teams. Not bad strategy. Not tight budgets. The gap between who a leader thinks they are and who they are.

What "Looking in the Mirror" Means

Let me be clear about what I'm not saying.

I'm not asking you to spend forty minutes journaling about your feelings before your morning standup. I'm not asking you to complete a personality test and announce to your team you're an INTJ.

What I'm asking is simpler and harder.

It starts with three questions. Sit with each one. Don't answer quickly.

"How do people experience me... not how I intend them to?"

Intentions are yours. Impact belongs to the person on the receiving end. These are not the same thing. A leader who says "I was being direct" while their report walks away humiliated has confused the two. Your intentions might be excellent. Your impact might not be.

"What do people not tell me, and why?"

If your team brings you only good news, it's a sign. If nobody pushes back on your ideas in meetings, it's a sign. If people fall suspiciously quiet when you enter the room, it's a sign. What you are NOT hearing is at least as important as what you are.

"What patterns do I keep repeating with the same poor results?"

Every leader has them. The same type of relationship keeps breaking down. The same conversation goes sideways every time. The same kind of hire doesn't work out. If the pattern keeps repeating, the common element is you.

These questions aren't comfortable. That's the point.

The Leaders Who Do This Work

Here's what I notice about the leaders I genuinely respect.

They're not the ones with the most self-confidence. They're the ones who hold their self-perceptions lightly. They ask for feedback and mean it. They notice when they've made an impact they didn't intend, and they address it rather than justify it.

One of the best engineering leaders I've ever met would ask her team a single question at the end of difficult projects: "What did I do to make your job harder?" Not "how do I improve" with its safe, vague responses. Not a survey with a score.

Specifically. Concretely. What did I do to make your job harder?

The answers she got were direct. They weren't comfortable. And her team would walk through fire for her, because they knew she was genuinely trying to see what they saw.

That's what looking in the mirror looks like in practice.

Where to Start

You don't need a 360-degree feedback programme. You don't need an executive coach (though both help). You need to start noticing the gaps between what you intended and what happened.

After your next difficult conversation, ask yourself: "How did it land? Not how I wanted it to land... how did it land?"

After your next meeting, notice who didn't speak. Notice what topics made the room uncomfortable. Notice whether people are performing engagement or genuinely contributing.

After your next decision, ask someone you trust to tell you one thing they were thinking but didn't say.

Small observations. Repeated consistently. Over time, they build a picture.

The leaders who skip this work don't usually fail loudly. They fail slowly... through the gradual departure of their best people, the growing distance between them and their team, the creeping sense something is off but nobody will say what it is.

The mirror is uncomfortable. It's also the cheapest investment you'll ever make in your leadership.

What's one thing you've discovered about yourself as a leader... and wish you'd seen sooner?

"Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?"

I read it one morning over coffee and sat with it longer than I expected. The honest answer wasn't comfortable. I'm not sure I do.

Not a small thing to admit.

The First Identity: Soldier

When I joined the Army, I was handed an identity along with the uniform.

Soldier. The word didn't describe what I did. It described what I was. Everything else followed: how I dressed, how I spoke, how I stood, what time I woke up. The Army is efficient at replacing the person you were with the person they need you to be.

I don't say it as a complaint. I learned more about leadership, discipline, and accountability in uniform than I did in any boardroom. The Army made me better at almost everything.

But it also replaced me.

The kid who showed up to basic training had interests, half-formed opinions, quirks. He liked fixing things. He read more than he let on. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and was oddly comfortable with not knowing.

The soldier who came out the other end was more capable. More disciplined. And significantly less able to answer the question: "Who are you, when you're not this?"

Nobody asks it while you're in. The structure holds. There's always a next thing: a next posting, a next mission, a next assignment. Identity by assignment is surprisingly comfortable when the assignments keep coming.

The discomfort comes when they stop.

The Second Identity: Tech Leader

I moved into tech after the Army, and the pattern repeated.

This time the identity arrived differently. Not through a uniform. Through a title. Developer. Manager. Director. VP. CTO.

Each title brought its own expectations about who I should be. How I should communicate in meetings. What I should read. What opinions were acceptable. How decisive I should appear. What I should care about.

I got good at it. The tech world rewards people who perform the role convincingly. If you show up as "the CTO" long enough, nobody questions whether there's a person underneath the function.

The problem is you start to forget there is one.

I spent years optimizing for the role. Filling my evenings with the right conferences, the right blogs, the right conversations at the right dinners. I built a version of myself the industry expected. I spoke the right language, had the right opinions, prioritized the right things.

It worked. By every visible measure, it worked.

Then one day I sat down and tried to think about what I'd do with a week off. Truly off. No agenda. No one to perform for.

No answer came.

Not because I was too busy. Because I'd stopped being anyone outside the role.

When Burnout Strips the Label Off

The burnout conversation usually focuses on overwork. Too many hours, too many demands, too little sleep. Those things are real.

But there's a more interesting pattern underneath. Burnout is sometimes what strips the label off and forces you to see there's nothing behind it.

When the role you've been performing for years starts to break down under pressure, there's nothing to fall back on. You've outsourced your sense of self to something temporary: an employer, a function, a title. And all three are more fragile than they look.

A genuinely terrifying place to find yourself.

I've talked to people in leadership who hit this wall and describe it the same way every time: "I don't know who I am outside of this." They say it like a confession. Like it's embarrassing.

It's not embarrassing. It's almost universal, if you've been doing this long enough and seriously enough.

The world is extremely efficient at telling you who to be. Career paths. Performance reviews. LinkedIn bios. Family expectations. The stories we tell about "success." These are all external scripts, handed to us so early and so consistently, we start to mistake them for ourselves.

Thomas Oppong wrote about this in Personal Growth on Medium: "We forget who we are after school systems, career paths, expectations, and gurus tell us what success looks like." He's right. Most of us don't notice it happening until the structure collapses and we're standing in the rubble wondering where we went.

The Questions Worth Asking

I started with simple ones.

What did I do for fun before I had a career to build? Not "what would be good for my brand." What I'd do if nobody was watching and there was no professional upside.

What did I read before I started reading things to make me better at my job?

What problems did I find interesting before "interesting" had to mean "commercially viable"?

What kind of conversations did I seek out before networking had a name?

None of these are questions the career teaches you to ask. The career teaches you to ask different ones: what's the next step, who do I need to know, what do I need to achieve. All forward-facing. All external.

The Bukowski question points backward. Not to wallow, but to find something.

What's Still There When You Look

The good news: what was there before doesn't disappear. It waits.

When I started asking honestly, I found a few things there long before the Army, long before any job title.

A genuine curiosity about how things work. Not strategic curiosity, not the performed curiosity of someone trying to look intellectually engaged at a conference. The kind where you pull something apart at midnight because you need to understand it, for no reason other than needing to understand it.

A preference for making things. Writing, building, solving problems with a visible output. Not managing. Not optimizing. Making.

An interest in people deeper than their usefulness to a project. What motivates them. What they're scared of. What they need from the people above them to do their best work. I've been drawn to this my whole life. The career gave it a professional frame. But the interest was there at nineteen, long before anyone would pay me for it.

Those things were there when I was seventeen. They were there before any title told me what they were worth.

They're still there now. The career didn't create them. It gave them a context to operate in, and then gradually convinced me the context mattered more than the things themselves.

You Don't Go Back. You Carry It Forward.

This isn't an argument for abandoning your career or pretending your professional experience didn't shape you. It did. It should have.

The Army made me better. The years in tech made me better. The failures especially made me better.

But there's a difference between being shaped by your experience and being replaced by it.

The work now, for me, is integration. Taking what was there before the labels and bringing it into what I'm building now. A company connecting leadership to real human feedback. Writing about things nobody says out loud in leadership culture. Speaking honestly about what good management requires.

Those things feel more like me than any title I've ever held.

The Bukowski question isn't nostalgic. It's not asking you to go back to who you were at twenty. It's asking you to recognize which parts of yourself you've quietly left behind and to decide whether you want them back.

Some of what you shed along the way was worth shedding. Some of it wasn't.

The work is knowing the difference.

So here's what I'd ask you to sit with this week. Outside your job title, outside the expectations of your role, outside the performance of whatever version of "professional" you've been building for years... who are you?

What were you interested in before your career told you what to be interested in?

I'm still working out my own answers. I'd guess you are too.

Research compiled by Apollo Technical shows the average worker changes jobs 12 times over a career. The average age for a major career change is 39. A survey by GO Banking Rates found 57% of workers were planning a significant career change.

Thirty-nine. Old identity gets heavy somewhere in mid-career. The things you've been avoiding start looking less terrifying. The walls you built start feeling more like cages.

Roland Butcher Said He'd Never Coach

Roland Butcher was the first Black cricketer to play for England. A man of strong opinions. One of them: he would never coach.

He'd watched coaches. He thought he had nothing in common with what they did. He was a doer, not a teacher. In the game, not beside it.

Then came the end of his playing career. An offer arrived.

He took it. Not because he'd changed his mind, but because he needed to find out.

What he found surprised him. Coaching wasn't what he'd imagined. It wasn't about having all the answers. It was about asking the right questions. It was about watching someone else find something in themselves they didn't know was there.

It became his next great chapter. The thing he'd sworn off turned out to be the thing he was built for.

My Own "Never"

I spent years in tech. I led engineering teams, ran delivery programs, managed complex systems. The work was clear. Build the thing. Ship it. Measure it.

Writing about people, leadership, and workplace culture? It felt like someone else's job.

I had a version of the engineer's snobbery. The "soft stuff" wasn't rigorous. Anyone with an opinion and a LinkedIn account was doing it. Why add to the noise?

But the questions I kept returning to weren't technical ones. They were people questions. Why do some teams thrive and others grind themselves into the ground? Why do talented engineers leave good companies for reasons having nothing to do with the work itself? Why do leaders who seem capable on paper make such consistent, predictable mistakes with the people around them?

I kept coming back to those questions. I kept having opinions about them. And eventually, my "never" cracked.

I started writing. Then speaking. Then building things around it.

The work I'd dismissed turned out to be the work I'd been preparing for my whole career.

How to Test a "Never"

The advice I'd give anyone eyeing something they've sworn off: don't make a leap. Make a small experiment.

Roland didn't retire and immediately set up a coaching business. He took one opportunity and paid attention to how it felt.

I didn't walk away from engineering and declare myself a writer. I wrote one post. Then another.

The small experiment separates fear from reality. It gives you data instead of your imagined version of what the thing is like. And it lets you change your mind without losing face, because nobody needs to know you tried it.

A few questions worth sitting with:

What's on your "never" list with no basis in actual experience?

What "never" is protecting a version of yourself you've outgrown?

What would you try if being wrong about it had no consequences?

The Thing Calling You

The thing you're most afraid of being might be the most honest version of you.

Not every "never" turns into a calling. Some of them are "nevers" for good reason, and the small experiment confirms it. Worth knowing.

But the ones built on pride, or a bad experience, or a story you told yourself long ago... those deserve a second look.

Roland Butcher built his second chapter coaching the sport he'd played. I built mine writing about the work I'd done. Neither path was obvious from where we stood. It only made sense looking back.

What are you swearing off right now that might be your next chapter?

According to Gallup's 2024 data, 48% of employees worldwide report feeling burned out at work. Not occasionally stressed. Burned out. The global productivity cost of this is $438 billion every year.

Research compiled by Meditopia found 76% of employees experience burnout at some point. Sixty-three percent of burned-out employees are significantly more likely to take sick days. Fifty-two percent are actively job hunting.

And yet only 21% of employees believe their employer genuinely cares about their mental health.

There's a reason for this disconnect. We are losing people at industrial scale and then making them invisible. The two things are connected.

A study published in the National Library of Medicine found every single study participant experiencing burnout avoided seeking formal help due to stigma. One hundred percent. They knew they needed support. They didn't ask for it, because the message from the organisation was clear: struggling means weakness.

Where do people learn this? From watching what happens to the Sarahs.

The Hidden Cost Nobody Accounts For

When you banish a burnout victim, you lose them twice.

First, the practical loss. Their institutional knowledge, their relationships, their skills. The productivity gap. Replacement costs. These get buried in HR dashboards and recruitment line items, rarely linked back to the culture decision to run people until they break.

Second, the invisible loss: every person watching.

When a colleague disappears after burning out, everyone in the building gets a message. The message is: if this happens to you, you're on your own. You'll be quietly disappeared. Your years of service won't protect you. Your team will not speak your name.

So people hide. They push through when they should stop. They don't mention the three AM anxiety spirals or the Sunday evening dread. They cover for each other because everyone is terrified of becoming the next cautionary tale.

This is how burnout spreads. Not because people are fragile. Because the culture made it more dangerous to admit struggling than to quietly deteriorate.

You've built a system where the rational choice for a burned-out person is to hide it. Then leadership acts surprised the numbers are so high.

I've Been Guilty of This

I'm not writing from some clean moral position.

I've sat in meetings where someone's name came up and let the subject change without pushing back. I've approved "we wish them well" emails. I've chosen not to dig too hard into why someone left, partly because I didn't want to hear what it would tell me about the culture I helped create.

The Harry Potter Effect works because it removes discomfort immediately. Today's problem goes away. The desk gets cleared. Life moves on.

What I didn't account for at the time was the long-term cost compounding quietly in the background. Teams watching colleagues disappear without explanation don't grow more loyal. They grow more paranoid. They start wondering: what won't I be told? What will they say about me if I crack?

The silence doesn't protect the organisation. It erodes it.

The Asymmetry That Tells You Everything

When someone leaves a company for a great new opportunity, we celebrate them. LinkedIn posts. Farewell lunches. "We're so proud of you." The departure gets acknowledged because it reflects well on the place.

When someone burns out, none of this happens. The departure is treated as a failure to be quietly buried. Even though, in most cases, the circumstances surrounding the burnout reflect far more on the organisation than on the individual.

This asymmetry tells you what a company values.

How to Break the Pattern

You don't need to overhaul everything. Three things.

Name it honestly. When someone leaves because of burnout, say so. Not in a way exposing them or causing harm. In a way acknowledging: this person worked hard, the pressure exceeded what any person was built to sustain, and we owe it to ourselves to understand what happened here. With the person's permission, be honest internally about what led to the departure.

Debrief like you mean it. Every burnout is data. Who was the manager? What did the workload pattern look like over the six months before the departure? Were warning signs raised and ignored? The post-mortem you'd do for a failed product launch... do it for a failed people situation too. Then act on what you find.

Don't erase them. Check in on people who leave burned out. Six weeks later. Three months later. Let them know the door isn't permanently closed. Treat their departure with basic human dignity. Sometimes the person who burned out in your company heals and comes back stronger, in a better role, with more clarity about what they need. This only happens if you didn't treat them like a liability to be managed on the way out.

None of this requires a revolution. It requires choosing discomfort over denial. It requires being the kind of leader who names the thing everyone else is pretending not to see.

The Question Worth Sitting With

If Sarah's burnout happened on your watch, and you're honest with yourself about the role the organisation played... what would you do differently?

If your answer is nothing... the Harry Potter Effect is alive and well in your culture.

You don't have to say Voldemort's name. But you do have to stop pretending he isn't there.

The Conversation describes moral injury as "the deep emotional and psychological distress when someone feels they've betrayed... or been forced to betray... their core values." Psychiatrist Christophe Dejours calls it the constant expenditure of "emotional and cognitive energy" workers spend on workplace moral dilemmas.

This is different from stress. It's different from overwork. You feel guilty. You feel ashamed. You feel like you sold something you didn't have the right to sell.

What It Looks Like at Work

Moral injury doesn't always announce itself. It creeps in through small requests adding up over time.

• Your manager tells you to mislead a client about timelines.
• Leadership asks you to cut corners on safety because delivery dates matter more.
• You watch a high performer get pushed out for speaking up.
• You're directed to write a glowing reference for someone you know shouldn't be managing people.
• The company announces layoffs while your CEO collects a bonus larger than your team's combined salary.

Each situation creates a gap between what you believe is right and what you're being asked to do. Cross it enough times, and it leaves a mark.

The injury shows up first as guilt and anger. Then shame. Then something worse: emotional numbing. Dejours documented how people slowly stop feeling the suffering of others... and eventually stop feeling their own. They learn to dissociate from what their conscience is telling them. Over time, their character changes.

Research on healthcare workers found one of the most tragic endpoints: workplace suicide. France and Japan recognize work-related suicide as a public issue. Most nations... and most companies... don't.

Why Leaders Create It (Often Without Knowing)

Here's what makes moral injury so insidious: most leaders who create it don't see themselves as doing anything wrong.

They're under pressure. They're chasing targets. They make a pragmatic call and move on. They tell themselves everyone does this. It's business. Grow up.

They don't see the damage left behind because the damage is invisible on a spreadsheet.

Their people feel it, though.

Harvard Business Review documented the pattern: employees are increasingly unwilling to make moral compromises, and companies have wildly underestimated the impact.

When someone in authority forces you into a high-stakes situation requiring action against your values... a betrayal has occurred. Not of you as an employee. Of the unspoken contract you believed existed when you took the job.

The contract says: "If I work hard and with integrity, I'll be treated with fairness and respect."

Companies break it more often than they admit.

The Cost Nobody Measures

iHire's 2025 Toxic Workplace Trends Report found 53.7% of employees have quit a job because of a toxic workplace. Even more striking: 58.9% would take a pay cut to escape a toxic employer.

Those are massive numbers. And "toxic workplace" covers a lot of ground... but at its core, many of those toxic experiences come down to being asked to compromise who you are, repeatedly, without acknowledgment.

A study published in Scientific Reports found 76.61% of healthcare workers reported feeling betrayed by their organization. More than three quarters of people in a field built around "do no harm."

If an industry with an explicit ethical mission produces betrayal at this scale... what are you producing in yours?

The organizational cost isn't only attrition. It's the walking wounded who stay. The people who've emotionally checked out, who've stopped caring, who've traded their conscience for a paycheck. You're still paying them. You're not getting their full humanity. And you won't, not in this job.

What You Do About It

If you're a leader, start by asking yourself honestly: when did you last ask someone on your team to do something they weren't comfortable with? What happened to the discomfort? Did it get resolved... or suppressed?

A few things worth doing right now:

Name it. When someone raises an ethical concern, take it seriously. Not as a complaint to manage... as information about your culture. They're taking a risk to tell you something important. Respond to it like it matters.

Stop rewarding silence. If your culture treats compliance as professionalism and concern-raising as trouble-making, you're training people to swallow their values. You'll pay for it eventually... in attrition, in disengagement, in the erosion of the people you most want to keep.

Track the exits. When people leave, especially the good ones, find out why. Not with a meaningless HR survey... with a real conversation. Moral injury rarely shows up in exit data, but it appears in what people say when someone takes the time to listen.

Look at your decisions. Not whether they were technically legal or financially sensible. Ask: "Did this require someone to act against their values?" If yes, did you acknowledge it? Did you give people room to push back? Or did you make the call and move on?

If you're an employee sitting with moral injury, I won't tell you staying is always wrong. Sometimes you fight from inside. Sometimes you build support before leaving. But if you've been swallowing your values for so long you've forgotten what they feel like... pay attention to it. Your integrity matters more than your job title, and the longer you ignore the signal, the harder it gets to hear it.

The Harder Question

Here's what I'd push every leader to sit with: Are your people leaving work a little more intact than they arrived, or a little less?

If it's the latter, you're not running a business. You're running a slow-motion extraction operation on the people who trust you with their time, their effort, and their conscience.

Moral injury is real. It's common. And it's entirely preventable... if leaders choose to look.

Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich found 95% of people believe they're self-aware. The number who meet the criteria? Around 10 to 15%. The rest are operating with blind spots they're not naming.

John Blakey is an executive coach and the author of Force for Good, a book about purpose-driven leadership. After years of working with CEOs, he landed on three leadership archetypes... three flavors of dysfunction. He calls them the Zealot, the Martyr, and the Pied Piper.

I've been all three.

The Framework

Blakey's model works across three dimensions of leadership:

• Up: Your connection to purpose. Why you lead. What you stand for.
• In: Your inner resilience. How you sustain yourself.
• Out: Your followership. Whether people are with you.

Each archetype hits two out of three and misses the third. The one you miss is your blind spot.

The Zealot

Zealots score high on "up" and "in." They have purpose. They have grit. They believe deeply in what they're doing and they have the stamina to pursue it relentlessly.

The "out" dimension is empty.

Blakey describes the Zealot as someone with "the passion and determination to pursue their calling, but they risk looking over their shoulders and finding nobody is following them because the intensity of their zeal is off-putting."

I was a Zealot early in my software career. I had strong opinions about architecture, about quality, about the right way to build things. I expressed those opinions loudly and often. I thought my conviction was leadership.

It wasn't. It was performance.

The people around me didn't follow my lead. They waited for me to stop talking. I'd leave a technical discussion feeling energized, like I'd done good work, while the room quietly decided to do something else entirely once I walked out.

Here's what nobody told me: being right about the work and being effective as a leader are two separate skills. The Zealot collapses them into one. You pour everything into your conviction and assume people will come along for the ride. Some do, briefly. Most find ways around you.

The Zealot's blind spot disguises itself as commitment. You're not wrong about the work. You're wrong about how you're showing up for the people doing it alongside you.

The Martyr

The Martyr scores high on "up" and "out." They have purpose, and people follow them for it. Teams love working for Martyrs because Martyrs genuinely care. They show up. They sacrifice. They take the calls no one else wants and they absorb the problems no one else is solving.

And then they burn out.

Blakey says Martyrs "serve the purpose and others with admirable diligence and loyalty but overlook their own needs."

When I moved into management, this was me. I said yes to everything. I absorbed the problems my team brought me because I thought absorbing them was my job. I worked weekends not because my company demanded it, but because I believed it was what good leaders did. I modeled exhausted, selfless service and called it dedication.

My team did follow me. They trusted me. They told me things they wouldn't tell anyone else. And when I eventually crashed... and I did crash, badly... the team felt every bit of it.

What I hadn't understood was that sustainability is not separate from leadership. It is leadership. Every time I stayed late unnecessarily, every time I said yes when I needed to say no, I was teaching my team how leaders behave. I was modeling a pattern I'd never want any of them to follow.

The Martyr's blind spot arrives wrapped in virtue. You're not neglecting people. You're neglecting yourself, which feels noble right up until the moment it becomes a crisis that takes everyone down with you.

The Pied Piper

The Pied Piper scores high on "in" and "out." They have personal resilience and people genuinely follow them. Teams want to be around them. They sustain their energy without burning out and they build real loyalty without trying hard.

But the "up" dimension is missing. There's no clear purpose underneath the charisma.

Blakey puts it plainly: Pied Pipers "lead their teams fantastically well and have no problem maintaining resilience... still, they lack a clear connection with their purpose."

I've seen Pied Pipers in the C-suite. Leaders who are personally magnetic, who run great meetings and build fiercely loyal teams. Their people would walk through walls for them. The trouble is the walls don't lead anywhere meaningful. The team works hard and moves fast in a direction nobody chose deliberately.

The Pied Piper's blind spot is the trickiest to name because all the leading indicators look fine. Engagement is high. People are energized. Retention is good. Nothing feels wrong until someone asks: what exactly are we doing this for?

At Step It Up HR, we work with organizations where the culture feels strong on the surface but the leadership lacks directional clarity. The Pied Piper type often shows up here. The problem isn't effort. It's not even talent. It's absence of a real why beneath the energy.

Which One Are You Right Now?

Be honest with yourself.

If your team respects your conviction but doesn't always follow your lead... you're likely a Zealot. The fix isn't less passion. It's more listening. Turn down the intensity in technical discussions and watch whether people actually engage or whether they go quiet and wait.

If people love working for you and you're running on empty... you're likely a Martyr. Your team is watching how you treat yourself. What you model, they learn. Start there.

If your team is loyal and energized but you'd struggle to explain the deeper "why" behind your current work... you're likely a Pied Piper. Purpose isn't a philosophical luxury. It's the thing driving your best decisions, including the hard ones. Without it, you're leading on borrowed time.

None of these archetypes is permanent. Naming your blind spot is most of the work.

The leaders who create the most damage are rarely the ones who don't care. They're the ones who care in the wrong direction... Zealots burning people with their certainty, Martyrs modeling unsustainability, Pied Pipers building loyal teams around an empty center.

A Question Worth Sitting With

Which dimension is weakest for you right now?

Not historically. Not in theory. Right now, in your current role, with your current team.

Is it "up"? Do you know why you lead?

Is it "in"? Are you taking care of the person doing the leading?

Is it "out"? Are people genuinely with you, or are they politely waiting?

Pick one. Work on it this week. You don't need to fix all three at once. You do need to start somewhere.

John Blakey's Force for Good is published by Kogan Page.

I was once skeptical about the return on investment of good management. Now I run Step It Up HR because I saw, firsthand, how much a manager's behavior shapes everything around them. Good managers don't keep teams together by accident. They're the reason people stay, grow, and bring their best work.

The Data Worth Knowing

According to Stack Overflow's research on engineering management, many engineers who move into management miss the deep technical focus of individual contributor work. The loss of flow state is real. I felt it.

But the engineers who thrive in management are generally those who found a new kind of flow state in the people work... the coaching conversations, the team design, the mentoring. The transition works when you stop mourning the loss of one kind of satisfaction and start genuinely seeking the other.

The research also shows engineering managers of real quality are rare. Most technical leaders get promoted because of coding ability, not people skills. This creates a persistent gap: technically excellent people leading with approaches not serving their teams.

I was one of those people, early on. Learning to lead differently was harder work than learning any new programming language. But it was worth it.

To the Reluctant Technical Leaders

If you're where I was... head down, good at your work, quietly dreading the conversation about whether you want to "go into management"... here's what I wish someone had told me.

Management is not for everyone, and choosing to stay in an individual contributor role is completely legitimate. Some of the best engineers I know are senior ICs who've made a deliberate choice not to manage, and their teams and organizations are better for it.

But if the resistance you feel is based on the belief people are too messy, too unpredictable, too soft... then your resistance is based on a misunderstanding.

People are everything code is not. They surprise you. They grow in ways you didn't expect. They bring insight from directions you never anticipated. The work of leading people well is harder, messier, and more rewarding than anything you'll build in a terminal window.

I used to say people are squishy. Now I'd say people are the whole point.

So if you're on the fence: give it a proper try. Not six months of reluctant compliance, wondering when you'll get back to the "real work." A genuine attempt, where you show up curious and committed, and see whether it turns out to be the thing you were made for.

It was, for me.

According to Gallup's 2024 workplace research, 48% of employees report feeling burned out at work. Not occasionally stressed. Burned out. Forty-eight percent.

Seventy-six percent say they experience burnout at least sometimes. Not a mental health crisis hiding in the corner. The majority of the workforce running on empty.

The Mental Health UK Burnout Report 2025 surveyed over 4,400 adults and found 91% experienced high pressure at work at some point during the year. Twenty-one percent needed time off because of stress-related mental health issues.

Here's what strikes me most: 52% of burned-out employees are actively looking for new jobs. The companies grinding their people down aren't getting more from them. They're losing them.

The cost sits at $438 billion in lost global productivity. And those numbers don't account for the personal cost. The ruined weekends. The missed dinners. The relationships worn down by someone who gave everything to a job and had nothing left for the people at home.

What Real Success Looks Like

I want to suggest a different measure.

Real success is leaving work with enough energy left to be present for the rest of your life.

If you're dragging yourself home every night, staring at nothing over dinner, and spending your weekends recovering from your week, something is broken. Your manager might praise you. You might be hitting targets. From the outside you look like a high performer. But if you're running on fumes, it won't hold. Nobody runs hard on empty for years without paying a price.

The exhaustion-equals-effort idea is outdated. The best engineers I've worked with weren't the ones burning midnight oil every night. They were the ones solving problems efficiently and going home. The best leaders weren't the ones always available. They were the ones energized enough to think clearly when it mattered.

There's a version of career success built for longevity. It doesn't look impressive in the short term. You leave at reasonable hours. You take your lunch. You say no to things regularly. But five years in, you're still sharp, still curious, still enjoying the work. Your colleague who glorified exhaustion burned out two years ago and is somewhere else trying to recover.

The Energy Test

Here's a simple test I've used on myself and shared with teams.

At the end of a typical workday, ask: do I have something left?

Not a full tank. Nobody finishes a productive day at 100%. But something. Enough to go for a walk. Enough to be interested in what your partner is saying. Enough to read a few pages before sleep. Enough to feel like a person and not a wrung-out rag.

If the answer is consistently no, something has to change. Either the workload is too heavy, the work itself is wrong for you, or you're spending energy on low-value work. Often it's all three.

The trap is normalizing it. When everyone around you is also depleted, depletion feels normal. When your whole team celebrates crushing themselves, stopping feels like betrayal. When your industry glorifies sacrifice, protecting your energy feels selfish.

It isn't. Protecting your energy is protecting your performance.

What Changed For Me

When I moved into leadership roles, I started paying attention to how my energy levels affected my decisions. Tired-me was a worse decision-maker. I was more reactive, less curious, quicker to dismiss ideas. I'd shortcut things I shouldn't have.

Rested-me asked better questions. I thought more carefully before reacting. I listened more. The quality of my leadership went up when my workload dropped to something sustainable.

I also stopped feeling vaguely guilty about leaving at a reasonable hour. For years I'd felt like I was cheating somehow. The shift was recognizing I wasn't paid to be present as many hours as possible. I was paid to deliver good work. And good work comes from a clear head.

How to Shift Your Definition of a Good Day

This isn't about working less. Some periods demand intensity. Launch weeks, incident response, tight deadlines are real. The problem isn't going hard occasionally. The problem is treating a sprint pace as the permanent baseline.

A few things worth trying:

Track your energy, not your hours. At the end of each day for two weeks, note your energy level out of ten. Then look at the pattern. Which days left you depleted? Which tasks drained you fastest? The data shows you where the problem is.

Stop using exhaustion as proof. If you catch yourself saying "I've been working so hard" as evidence of doing well, question it. Hard work matters. But sustained hard work without recovery isn't performance, it's damage.

Protect recovery time like you protect meeting time. If you wouldn't cancel a meeting with your boss at 5pm, don't cancel your walk, your dinner, or your sleep. Recovery isn't optional. It's what makes tomorrow's work possible.

Look at what you're delivering. If you're working 60-hour weeks and the output matches what you'd expect from 40, the extra hours are eating your efficiency, not adding to it. Tired brains churn. They don't produce.

Reframe your measure of a good day. A good day isn't one where you worked the most hours or left the most exhausted. It's one where you did good work and left with something in the tank. Start measuring by output and energy, not by hours logged.

The goal isn't balance in some abstract sense. It's leaving work each day with something left over. For your family, your health, your curiosity, your life outside a screen.

Success isn't how tired you are. It's what you built and who you still are at the end of it.

What would change if you started treating energy as the real metric of a good day?

Research from Everymind at Work found A-Grade achievers are four times more likely to develop mental illness than average performers. Four times. The people organizations rely on most are the ones most likely to break under the weight of it.

The American Psychological Association found socially prescribed perfectionism increased 33% over 28 years. Thomas Curran at the London School of Economics says these pressures are growing faster than we realize, and perfectionism "alienates us from other people in pursuit of higher standards." We're not creating high achievers. We're creating a generation of people who feel they have no choice but to be perfect.

The Three Types Who Fall First

In my experience, burnout hits hardest in three groups. You might recognize yourself in one of them.

The Perfectionist

This person sets standards nobody else even attempts. They hold themselves to an impossible bar, and they almost always clear it... until they don't. Perfectionists live in constant friction between where they are and where they think they should be. Every small gap is energy drain. Every misstep triggers a private spiral of self-criticism.

The perfectionist's curse is they're often right about the standards. The work IS better when they're involved. So the organization keeps asking, and they keep saying yes, and the gap between the standard and the capacity keeps widening.

The People Pleaser

This person cannot stand letting anyone down. Every request gets a yes. Every problem becomes their problem. They carry other people's needs quietly, without complaint, because complaining feels like failure.

Research published in MDPI connects this pattern directly to burnout and identity loss: the sense of not knowing who you are outside of your usefulness to others. People pleasers often reach a breaking point not with anger or collapse, but with a quiet, frightening numbness. They stop caring. And for someone who used to care about everything, the absence of caring is a warning sign.

The High Achiever

This is the person measuring their worth in output. More projects, more results, more proof they belong at the table. They're not doing it for praise. They're doing it because stopping feels dangerous.

Research points to CEOs facing double the depression risk of the general population... not despite their success, but because of the weight it carries. These are people who, by any external measure, have everything. And they're exhausted in a way they don't know how to name.

Why They Don't Ask for Help

Here's the part making this so hard to fix.

Strong people don't ask for help. Not because they're proud... because they genuinely believe they're supposed to manage it alone. Asking for help feels like admitting weakness. And weakness, in their world, is not an option.

One study found 33% of high achievers delay seeking treatment due to stigma. The people who need support most are the ones least likely to reach for it.

I've seen this up close. I've been this person.

In the Army, you learn early: showing struggle is a liability. You push through. You don't mention the headaches or the sleep issues or the fact your temper is shorter than it used to be. You perform competence because competence is the only currency worth anything.

The identity follows you into the corporate world. You carry it into every meeting, every performance review, every conversation with your team. You perform strength even when you're running on empty. And unlike the Army, there's no deployment end date, no rotation home. It keeps going.

What Organizations Get Wrong

We make this worse. Not with malice... with celebration.

We praise the person who never takes a day off. We promote the one who's always available at midnight. We write "goes above and beyond" in performance reviews as if exceeding your own physical limits is a skill worth rewarding.

And the high achievers read the room. They learn what wins. So they keep doing it.

The problem with systems built around heroic individuals is heroes burn out. And when they do, organizations are shocked. As if the system didn't build the person who broke in it.

The Warning Signs Nobody Talks About

Burnout doesn't announce itself. It creeps in through the back door.

Watch for these:

• Increased irritability at things never bothering you before
• Sleep problems... too much or not enough
• Physical symptoms: back pain, headaches, getting sick more often
• A growing distance from work you used to care about
• The feeling your best effort produces your worst results
• Cynicism creeping into conversations where it wasn't before

The problem is strong people explain these away. "I'm tired." "It's a busy period." "I'll recover over the holidays."

They won't. Not without changing something.

What I've Learned

Recovery isn't a checklist.

What has to change is the story you're telling yourself about strength. Strength is not the absence of struggle. Strength is knowing when you're depleted and doing something about it before your body makes the decision for you.

The best leaders I've worked with are not the ones who never struggled. They're the ones who recognized the struggle early and stayed honest about it. With their teams, with their families, with themselves.

If you manage people... look at your best ones. The ones who always deliver, who never complain, who take on more than their share. They're not fine simply because they're not telling you otherwise. Ask directly. Create the kind of relationship where "I'm overwhelmed" is a sentence they feel safe saying.

If you are one of these people... give yourself permission to be human. Your value to the people around you is not your output. It's you.

The strongest people I know learned it the hard way.

You don't have to.

There's also research worth knowing. Studies on post-traumatic growth show meaningful positive change after adversity is not automatic... and not common. Researchers found genuine measurable growth in roughly 5 to 25 percent of people following serious setbacks. The rest absorb the hit and either keep moving or get stuck.

The "for me" question doesn't guarantee you're in the growing quarter. But staying in the "to me" story almost certainly keeps you out of it.

Saying "this happened for me" might feel like accepting blame for something outside your control. It isn't. It's refusing to let circumstances you didn't choose determine who you become.

There's a difference between fault and responsibility. You're not always at fault for what happens to you. You are always responsible for what you do with it.

How to Use the Question

Don't apply this in the moment. When you've been blindsided fresh, you're too reactive. Give it time. Hours sometimes. Often days.

When you have enough distance, ask honestly:

What did this show me about myself I wasn't seeing? The promotion I missed showed me I'd been playing a narrower game than I thought. The deal falling apart showed me the assumptions I'd been making about the relationship. What's yours showing you?

What did this force me to build? The cancelled project teaching you to pivot. The bad manager showing you exactly what not to do with your own people. The redundancy making you finally start something of your own. You wouldn't choose these experiences. They often install the most durable capabilities.

Where did my assumptions fail? The sharpest lessons live in blind spots... places where you were so confident you stopped asking questions. Setbacks are often the only force making you look there.

The question doesn't make the pain disappear. It gives the pain a direction.

The Longer Game

The people who default to "for me" end up in different places than the people who default to "to me."

Not because life treats them more gently. Not because they hit fewer walls. The walls are the same walls.

The difference is in what they bring out of each one.

I'm not making a mystical argument. I don't believe the universe is personally arranging your education. I'm making a practical one. When something hard happens, you choose what role it plays in your story. You decide whether it's evidence the world is against you... or data you work with.

Over time, this compounds. The person asking "for me" accumulates insight, capability, and resilience at a faster rate. Not because they're smarter or luckier. Because they're extracting value from every experience, including the hard ones... especially the hard ones.

Both options sit in the same moment. Even when everything is genuinely unfair. Even when you're right about every grievance.

One of them keeps you stuck. One of them moves you.

The practice isn't easy. It gets easier every time you choose it.

What question do you reach for when things go sideways?

I first encountered this framing through the work of James Ferguson, who developed it from his own experience with serious illness. His perspective on leadership and gratitude is worth your time.

Research from the Global Leadership Wellbeing Survey found 46% of leaders don't consistently think about how they want to "show up" when they arrive at work. Nearly half of all leaders walk through the door on autopilot.

Without a reference point, you won't spot the drift. You won't notice the moment impatient became your default setting, or when you stopped asking questions and started issuing directives. You won't catch the shift from leader to traffic cop.

Your "normal" is supposed to be your compass. Without calibrating it, it's useless.

Your Stress Is Contagious

Here's why this goes beyond your own health.

The same GLWS research highlights something I find genuinely unsettling: watching someone get stressed raises cortisol levels in the people witnessing it. This happens even among strangers. In a team where relationships are closer and stakes higher, the effect is amplified significantly.

You are a transmission vector for your own stress.

If you run at a stress level you now consider "normal," your team soaks it in every day. Your impatience in the stand-up. Your short replies on Slack. The way you sigh when someone brings up a problem. They read all of it. They absorb all of it.

Research cited by Most Loved Workplace shows managers typically experience worse wellbeing than the people they manage. Think about it. The people responsible for setting the emotional tone in a team are, on average, the most stressed people in it.

If they don't know their own normal... they have no idea what they're passing on.

What a Baseline Looks Like

In the Army, we ran preventive maintenance before every mission. You checked your equipment against its known baseline: fuel levels, tire pressure, radio frequencies, weapon function. Not because you expected failure. Because you needed to know what "working correctly" looked like, so you'd spot any deviation.

Leaders need the same discipline.

Your personal baseline is specific to you. It might include:

• Sleep. Not aspirational sleep. The number of hours you function well on.
• Physical signals. Where does tension live in your body when you're stressed? Shoulders? Jaw? Gut?
• Cognitive markers. Do you normally process complex decisions quickly? If you're rereading the same email three times, it's a signal worth noticing.
• Social energy. Do you normally enjoy conversations with your team? If you've started dreading them, you've drifted.

Most leaders resist doing this because it feels self-indulgent. Checking in on your own emotional state while a product launch is burning seems like exactly the wrong priority. But this gets the causality backwards. The more you know yourself, the faster you read situations. The faster you read situations, the better your decisions. Your self-awareness isn't separate from your performance. It IS your performance.

None of this requires a meditation app or a wellness coach. It requires paying attention.

How to Find It Again

If you've been running hot long enough to genuinely lose the baseline, create conditions to rediscover it.

Protect recovery time. Not "free time" filling with admin. Actual recovery: walking, sleeping properly, doing something with nothing to do with work.

Build deliberate checkpoints. Before I start my day, I ask myself three things: What's my energy level right now, honestly? What's on my mind besides work? How do I want to show up in the next three hours?

These take ninety seconds. They force me to check my instruments before walking into the day.

I didn't do this for most of my career. I thought situational awareness was for the battlefield, not the boardroom. I was wrong. The skill is identical. Know your baseline. Notice the deviation. Respond before it becomes a crisis.

The Two-Week Signal

There's a useful marker from Most Loved Workplace research: if any of these signals persist for two consecutive weeks, stop treating it as a bad patch. At two weeks, it's a systems problem.

The calendar is too dense. Priorities are unclear. The role has grown beyond what one person reasonably holds. Or you've been here before, recovered, and rebuilt the same conditions without noticing.

This is where knowing your normal pays off beyond the personal. If you've been tracking, you know when the drift started. You know roughly how long it's been building. That's data. Data beats gut feel every time, including your own gut feel about yourself.

Two weeks of signals is your body and mind telling you something structural needs to change. Listen.

Spotting It in Your Team

Once you know your own baseline, you get better at spotting deviation in others.

The signals mirror yours. Behavioral drift: someone who normally speaks up in meetings goes quiet. Cognitive slowdown: a sharp thinker starts second-guessing obvious decisions. Emotional detachment: the person who used to care about outcomes now wants to get through the day.

These aren't character flaws. They're warnings.

The best leaders I've worked with notice change before it becomes a problem. They don't wait for someone to break. They see the small shift, create space for a conversation, and ask before it becomes a crisis.

All of it starts with knowing your own normal well enough to recognize when something is off.

One Thing

Pick three personal baseline markers. Write them down.

What does your body feel like on a good day? What's your normal sleep? What's your default mood when things are going well?

Check them once a week.

No app. No framework. No keynote required.

Know your normal. Then watch for the gap. Your team's wellbeing depends on you doing it, whether you want to carry the responsibility or not.

Sound familiar? 91% of people reported high or extreme stress in the past year, according to the Burnout Report 2025. Most of them have taken holidays. The holidays didn't fix it.

The problem is we've been treating burnout like tiredness. It isn't.

Burnout Is Not Tiredness

Tiredness goes away when you sleep. Burnout doesn't work like that.

The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational syndrome, not a personal failing. It has three components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. You stop caring. You stop feeling effective. You start going through the motions.

Research from the Association for Psychological Science shows burnout causes measurable structural changes in the brain. The prefrontal cortex, which handles decision-making and emotional regulation, thins under sustained stress. Your amygdala, the threat-detection centre, enlarges. You're not tired. Your brain has physically changed in response to conditions that never let up.

Sleep fixes tiredness. Sunshine doesn't rebuild a prefrontal cortex.

55% of U.S. employees currently experience burnout, and 82% are at risk. These people aren't skipping holidays. They're taking holidays and coming back to the same broken system.

The Holiday Illusion

I understand the appeal. I've believed in it myself.

You tell yourself you need to get away. And a holiday does help... temporarily. Your cortisol drops. You sleep better. You laugh more. You're reminded life exists outside of Slack.

Then you land back home. Your phone reconnects. The notifications start. By the time you're through customs, you're back in it.

A Deloitte survey found 77% of professionals have experienced burnout at their current job, with more than one occurrence for over half. Not one episode. Multiple. These are people who took time off between each one. The time off didn't prevent the next one.

Because the fire isn't inside you. It's in the building.

Where Burnout Comes From

New research shows burnout stems equally from two sources. 50% from workload factors. And 50% from people factors: culture, relationships, sense of belonging.

The Burnout Report 2025 found 47% of respondents cited heavy workloads and unpaid tasks as their primary stress trigger. A management problem, not a personal one.

The belonging numbers are harder to ignore. Employees who lack a sense of belonging burn out at a 78% rate. Those who feel connected to their team and organization burn out at 55%. A 23-percentage-point gap. Not fixed by a spa weekend. Fixed by building a culture where people feel they matter.

Fewer than half of employers have redesigned work with employee wellbeing in mind. Meanwhile, 72% of workers face high workplace stress, a six-year high.

We're in the middle of a burnout epidemic, and most organizations are still handing out long-weekend vouchers as the answer.

Why Organizations Keep Getting This Wrong

There's a pattern I've seen throughout my career. Something breaks. Someone suggests addressing the cause. Leadership nods... then offers a symptom fix.

Burnout breaks people. The symptom fix is time off, employee assistance programs, mental health days. All good things. None of them address why people are burning out.

The cause is usually one or more of these:

• Workloads designed for a team of eight, now carried by five
• A culture where busy is confused with valuable
• Managers who don't have the skills to have real conversations
• A lack of autonomy, meaning, or genuine recognition
• A gap between the organization's stated values and the daily reality

None of those disappear while you're in Tenerife.

Research backs this up. The single most effective intervention for burnout isn't time off. It's manager training. Basic training on how to manage people cuts disengagement by half. Not a holiday. A conversation. A skill. A different kind of leadership.

What Organizations Need to Change

This isn't a list of things you fix individually. If your organization expects you to solve your burnout through self-care and better sleep habits, they've fundamentally misunderstood what burnout is.

What needs to change at the organizational level:

Review workloads, regularly. Not once a year at a performance review. Managers need to know what's on people's plates week to week. When workloads are unsustainable, the answer isn't encouraging people to manage their time better. It's reducing the work or adding the people.

Train managers to have real conversations. Not performance reviews. Real ones. "How are you doing? Not workwise... you." Most managers were never taught how. It's not a personality trait. It's a skill.

Build belonging into the work itself. Belonging doesn't come from team-building days. It comes from being heard, being included in decisions, knowing your work matters. If people burn out at 78% when they don't feel they belong, belonging needs to be a design criterion.

Stop rewarding burnout signals. The people who stay latest, skip lunches, and answer emails at 11pm are being trained by what you applaud. When leaders celebrate overwork, they set the temperature for the whole team.

What To Do Right Now

If you're burnt out, take the holiday. Rest. You need it and you deserve it.

But come back knowing this: the holiday isn't the fix. Use the distance to see your situation more clearly. What's the real cause? Is it workload? A manager who doesn't support you? A culture where you're invisible? Work that's stopped having any meaning?

Name the cause. Then decide what to do about it... whether that's having the hard conversation with your manager, setting boundaries and enforcing them, or acknowledging this job or this organization is not fixable from inside.

If you're a manager, ask yourself one question: if someone on my team was burning out right now, would I know? If the answer is no, start there. Not with a policy. With a conversation.

Burnout doesn't get fixed in a week. It gets fixed when we stop treating it as a personal failure and start treating it as the systemic problem it is.

The holiday won't do it. Leadership might.

Research from Elevate Leadership found a striking gap: 92% of CEOs believe their organization is empathetic. Only 72% of employees agree.

Twenty points between what leaders think they're doing and what people experience.

The gap doesn't come from leaders being bad people. It comes from walking in the wrong shoes... their own.

And 58% of CEOs say they find it difficult to demonstrate empathy in practice. Not because they don't care. Because the "shoes" model gives them nothing to work with. You cannot replicate someone else's inner experience. You don't have access to it.

What Riding Shotgun Means

When you ride shotgun with someone, you're not driving. You're not navigating. You're in the car, in real time, as a witness to their journey. You see what they see. You feel the turns. You notice when they're driving tense or when they suddenly relax.

You're present. You're paying attention. And... you're in their car, not yours.

This is what genuine empathy looks like in practice. Not: "I know what this is like." But: "Tell me what this is like for you. I'm here. I'm listening. I won't rewrite your story with my experience."

It requires something most leaders find uncomfortable: park your own interpretation and sit in uncertainty.

The old-fashioned "shoes" approach is active. You're doing something... simulating, projecting, imagining. Riding shotgun is receptive. You're making space. You're waiting. You're witnessing.

What Changes When You Ride Shotgun

In practice, the difference shows up in small ways.

You stop finishing sentences. When you think you know someone's experience, you fill in gaps. When you're riding shotgun, you ask questions instead.

You stop comparing. Saying "I had the same problem once" sounds supportive. It isn't. It shifts the conversation to your experience. Riding shotgun means staying in theirs.

You stop solving prematurely. The urge to fix is strong in leadership. We're trained to diagnose and act. Sitting in someone's car means staying with discomfort long enough to understand the real problem... not the surface one.

You believe them. The hardest one. When someone tells you something disproportionate to the situation, riding shotgun means accepting their experience as real. You don't have to agree. You do have to believe they're feeling what they say they're feeling.

A Story I Think About a Lot

Early in my career, I managed an engineer I'll call Tom. Skilled, quiet, and increasingly withdrawn. He'd miss standup. Give one-word answers in 1:1s. Stop volunteering for anything.

I thought I understood why. Tom was underpaid relative to the market, and I'd been underpaid too at a similar stage. I knew how demoralizing it was... watching your rent go up while your salary stayed flat. It erodes motivation in a specific way.

So I went to bat for his salary. Got him a significant increase. Tom stayed withdrawn. I was puzzled.

I'd walked in his shoes and been completely wrong.

Months later, we had a real conversation... one where I stopped offering solutions and started asking questions. What I learned had nothing to do with money. Tom had requested a specific project assignment six months earlier. He'd been passed over without explanation. He'd taken it as a sign his technical judgment wasn't trusted by leadership.

The salary increase hadn't touched the actual wound. I'd been treating the wrong problem entirely.

I'd been so confident I knew the answer, I hadn't asked the question.

Two Types of Empathy

Most leadership writing collapses empathy into one thing. It isn't.

Cognitive empathy is understanding how someone thinks and feels. Emotional empathy is feeling what they feel. The "walk in their shoes" metaphor pushes toward emotional empathy... but it's a counterfeit version. You're not feeling what they feel. You're feeling what you'd feel in your version of their situation.

Riding shotgun is closer to cognitive empathy. You're not trying to become them. You're trying to understand them, on their terms, without taking over.

According to Chief Executive, 87% of CEOs believe financial performance ties directly to workplace empathy. Nearly nine out of ten top executives think empathy moves the bottom line... and yet the gap between how leaders show up and how employees experience it stays wide.

Cognitive empathy is learnable. Emotional empathy is partly neurological. Cognitive empathy is a skill: listening to someone's story without overwriting it with yours.

Three Questions for Riding Shotgun

If you want to practice, three questions will take you further than any empathy framework.

What does this feel like for you? Not "what happened"... what does it feel like. Emotions are data.

What would help most right now? Not what would help you in this situation. What would help them, right now. Listen carefully to the answer.

Have I got it right? After reflecting back what you've heard, check. The adjustment is where real understanding lives.

These aren't magic. They require you to slow down, stop solving, and trust understanding comes before fixing.

The Point

The "walk a mile in their shoes" metaphor isn't entirely wrong. It's easy to misuse. It gives permission to substitute your experience for someone else's without realizing you've done it.

Riding shotgun is harder. It asks you to give up the driver's seat. To be present without being in control. To listen without knowing where you're going.

People don't need you to have been where they are. They need you to be where they are, right now, with them.

Next time someone on your team seems unreachable, resist the urge to walk in their shoes. Ride shotgun instead.

According to a recent survey, 61% of workers want to switch careers. More than half of UK employees have already made one major career change. Generation Z workers will likely hold 16-17 jobs over 5-7 years.

The ladder model doesn't fit these lives. It never did.

And yet people still feel guilty about it. They apologize for the "gaps" on their resume. They downplay the pivot from sales to software, or from military service to management. They treat their non-linear path as a liability when it's anything but.

What the Army Taught Me About Careers

The Army doesn't do career plans. It does mission objectives.

You get a mission. You figure out how to accomplish it with what you have. You adapt when the situation changes, because the situation always changes. You lead people through uncertainty, not toward a predetermined destination. And when the mission shifts, you don't mourn the old plan ... you pick up the new one.

The mindset didn't fit neatly into civilian corporate culture when I first crossed over. Hiring managers wanted to see a straight line. They wanted to know where I saw myself in five years. The Army had taught me to care about the mission and the people, not career positioning. Nobody in my unit asked what my five-year plan was. They asked what I was going to do today to make the team better.

So I learned to translate. To take those leadership instincts and package them in language hiring managers recognized. And somewhere in the translation, I realized the spaghetti wasn't a problem. It was the product.

Every deployment, every assignment, every lateral move the Army put me through had given me something the straight-path candidates sitting across the table from me didn't have: proof I'd done hard things in conditions I didn't choose.

The Spaghetti Advantage

Here's what a non-linear career gives you:

Pattern recognition across domains. When you've worked in multiple fields, you see connections other people miss. You notice the leadership problem you're solving in a tech company is the same one you saw in a logistics unit fifteen years ago. This cross-domain vision is rare. Most people inside one industry for twenty years see the trees. You see the forest. And when you see the forest, you ask better questions, spot the patterns earlier, and avoid the mistakes everyone else keeps repeating.

Resilience. People who've only ever walked a straight path struggle when it bends. People who've navigated three or four major pivots know disruption isn't the end of the story. It's usually the beginning of a better one. You've already proved it to yourself.

A wider identity. If your entire identity is tied to one job title or one industry, you're fragile. A title change feels like an identity crisis. Spaghetti people have a stronger sense of who they are underneath the resume, because they've had to build it.

Adaptability. The modern job market rewards it. Over 70% of companies now use skills-based hiring rather than hiring for experience alone. Your ability to learn and apply matters more than a clean resume narrative.

How to Tell the Spaghetti Story

Here's what people with non-linear careers get wrong: they apologize for the story instead of telling it.

"I know my background is a bit all over the place..." is a terrible way to introduce yourself. It signals shame before anyone asked for it.

The spaghetti career becomes a problem when you can't explain the thread running through it. Not a ladder, not a straight line ... a thread. A set of values or skills or obsessions you've carried from one thing to the next.

For me, the thread is leadership. Every role I've had, every company I've built, every book I've written comes back to the same question: how do you get a group of people to do hard things together without making them miserable? The thread runs from my first platoon to my latest startup.

Find your thread. Once you have it, the spaghetti stops looking like chaos and starts looking like a career with depth.

The Real Cost of the 10-Year Plan

The plan isn't neutral. It has a cost.

When you're committed to a plan, you say no to anything not fitting it. You turn down the unexpected opportunity because it's "off track." You stay in a role making you miserable because leaving would mean admitting the plan failed.

Only 46% of workers feel supported in their career development, according to a 2023 Gartner survey. Part of the reason is people are trying to shoehorn their actual working lives into a framework not built for them.

The plan becomes a cage.

What I'd Tell Myself at 18

I wouldn't tell myself to plan better. I'd tell myself to stay curious, say yes more often, and stop treating detours as failures.

Every "wrong turn" in my career taught me something the straight path wouldn't have. The Army gave me leadership skills no MBA program teaches. The tech work gave me systems thinking. The writing and speaking gave me a way to share what I'd learned. Each piece fed the next.

Ruth Wooderson puts it this way: screw the 10-year plan. Careers aren't ladders, they're spaghetti. I've stolen the framing completely, because it's the most honest description I've ever heard.

Your Turn

If your career looks messy right now, good. It means you've been paying attention to life instead of a spreadsheet.

The question isn't "does this fit my plan?" The question is: does this make you better at something worth caring about?

Follow the curiosity. Take the pivot. Tell the true story.

The spaghetti is the point.

The Woolley research is clear. Teams where a few people dominated conversation had less collective intelligence than groups where everyone took turns. You are not only failing to hear good ideas when you dominate the room. You are actively suppressing the intelligence of the team. You are making the group dumber by being in it.

A hard thing to sit with, if you built your career on being smart.

Fewer than one in four employees are engaged at work, according to Gallup. One major driver of disengagement is feeling unheard. When your team learns meetings are a performance of your conclusions, they stop bringing their best thinking. They arrive with nothing and leave with nothing. The cost is yours alone.

Three Things I Changed

After the Marcus incident, I changed how I ran meetings.

First, I stopped sharing my position at the start. I had a position, but I stopped opening with it. Instead I opened with the question. "We need to solve X. What are you seeing?" This felt uncomfortable for about a week. Then it started surfacing things I had not thought of.

Second, I started tracking who had not spoken. Not to call people out. To notice when the room's intelligence was being wasted. If someone had been in the room for forty minutes and said nothing, either they had nothing to say... unlikely... or the conditions were wrong for them to say it. My job was to fix those conditions.

Third, I got genuinely curious about being wrong. Not performatively curious. Not "great point, I will factor it in" while privately dismissing it. Genuinely curious. The Marcus incident helped. I had been completely wrong about something I was confident about. Once it happens once, you look for the next Marcus. You want to find them before the system goes down.

The Smartest Leaders I Have Known

Every leader I genuinely respect shares one quality: they think the people around them are interesting.

Not useful. Not subordinates. Not resources. Interesting.

They walk into rooms expecting to learn something. They treat disagreement as information. They know their own thinking has blind spots, and they treat other people as what fills those blind spots.

This is not soft. It is not about feelings or psychological safety as a buzzword. It is an intelligence strategy. You are running a group decision-making system, and the inputs to it are the perspectives of your team. Throttling those inputs to run your own conclusions through the group is expensive waterfall design.

The best teams I have been part of were not the ones with the smartest individuals. They were the ones where the least senior person in the room felt their idea would be heard. Where the quiet engineer would stop a project cold if they had seen something in the logs. Where the room corrected you.

The Question Worth Asking

Think about the last important meeting you ran.

Who talked the most?

If the answer is you, think about what you did not hear. Think about who had something to say and did not say it. Think about the Marcus in the room... who watched you build your recommendation and said nothing, because the room had been trained your recommendation was the destination.

The smartest person in the room is the room. Not a feel-good platitude. A design principle. The question is whether you are building conditions for the room's intelligence to operate, or whether you are shorting it out every time you speak.

Worth sitting with.

According to the Mental Health UK Burnout Report 2026, 91% of UK workers experience high or extreme stress annually. One in three regularly works unpaid overtime. Twenty percent took time off due to poor mental health caused by stress. Only 27% feel mental health is genuinely prioritised by their employer.

In the US, Eagle Hill Consulting found 55% of employees are currently experiencing burnout. Gen Z hits peak burnout at 25. Not at the end of a long career. At 25.

We're not working harder and achieving more. We're working harder and breaking down earlier.

Here's the part worth sitting with: if exhaustion were a reliable signal of success, we'd expect those exhausted workers to be the most effective, most satisfied, most impactful. They're not. Burned-out employees are disengaged, unproductive, and leaving. It costs US employers an estimated $5 million per year for every 1,000 employees... and most of it never shows as absence. People show up. They're not really there.

Exhaustion isn't producing results. It's producing wreckage.

Where I Changed My Mind

I spent years in the US Army before moving into tech. One of the things the Army teaches you is readiness. You don't measure a unit's effectiveness by how tired it is after a mission. You measure it by whether it completed the mission, and whether it's ready for the next one.

Exhaustion compromising readiness for what comes next is a liability. Not a badge.

I carried the readiness principle into my career. For a while, it stuck. But somewhere along the way, tech culture overrode it. The always-on mentality, the late standups, the Slack messages at midnight, the pride in pulling an all-nighter before a launch. I slipped back into the exhaustion-as-success trap without even noticing.

It took a few conversations with people who had clearly defined what success meant for them to shake me loose. One of them put it simply: "I measure a good day by whether I could do it again tomorrow." It landed.

Think about what's in those words. Not "did I stay late enough." Not "did I sacrifice something." Not "did anyone see how hard I worked." The measure is sustainability. Are you able to show up and do it again?

By my own standards at the time, the answer was often no.

Three Signs Your Success Metric Is Wrong

1. You talk about tiredness like it's a competition.

"I'm so tired." "I've been flat out." "I barely slept." If this is your regular vocabulary, and you say it with a hint of pride, your metric is off. Tiredness isn't currency. It's feedback.

2. You feel guilty leaving work with energy.

If finishing at a reasonable hour and still feeling capable makes you anxious... like you should have done more... something is broken. The guilt isn't wisdom. It's a conditioned response to a warped standard. A person who leaves work with energy and got the right things done had a better day than someone who stayed two hours longer out of obligation.

3. Your recovery time keeps growing.

If you need a full weekend to recover from a week of work, and it still doesn't feel like enough, your pace isn't sustainable. Two years ago you felt okay by Saturday. Now it takes until Sunday. Next year it'll take longer. Not high performance. A slow drain.

What Real Success Looks Like

I'm not arguing for coasting. I'm arguing for a better definition.

Real success means you completed what mattered today. You made decisions you're confident in. You treated people well. And you have enough left to show up the same way tomorrow.

It's not about working fewer hours, necessarily. It's about measuring the right things. Did you do quality work? Did you move things forward? Are you able to repeat it tomorrow, next week, next year?

The BBC covered this shift in a piece on the end of rise-and-grind culture: people are re-prioritising what they want from work. Not because they're lazy. Because they've done the maths and the trade isn't worth it.

I see the same thing on Reddit right now. Threads about exhaustion, return-to-office friction, and "is anyone else completely done" type posts are generating enormous engagement. Nobody argues back. People are recognising themselves.

The conversation is shifting. The question is whether you'll shift with it, or keep running a race with no finish line.

What I Changed

A few practical things shifted for me.

I started ending my day with a short review: what did I finish, what needs to carry forward, what was the quality like? It replaced the old exhaustion-check as the measure of a good day. The question shifted from "am I tired enough" to "did I do what mattered."

I stopped responding to late-night messages unless something was on fire. Most things aren't. The culture of instant response trains people to expect it, and then you're trapped. Breaking the habit took a few weeks. Nobody fired me.

I also got deliberate about my own energy... not as a soft concept, but as a practical resource. My best thinking happens in the mornings. I protect this time. No meetings, no email until I've done the work worth doing. Not a luxury. Logistics.

And I started saying, out loud, when things were too much. Not as complaint. As information. "This pace isn't sustainable" is data, not weakness. Leaders who pretend otherwise are lying to themselves and to their teams.

The Question Worth Asking

At the end of today, ask yourself this: do I have something left?

Not so you feel guilty if you're tired. Tired sometimes is fine. Tired always is not.

If your honest answer is "I've been running on empty for months," it's not dedication. It's a system running without maintenance. Worth stopping to ask what you're building, and whether the pace you're keeping is getting you there faster, or getting you there more damaged.

Success should leave you ready for what comes next. Not relieved it's over.

Research from the University of Queensland found around 25% of workers report difficulty sleeping on Sunday nights because of work-related worry. One in four people, lying awake, dreading what morning brings.

The number should be zero. It isn't.

The Dread Is Data

Your body is trying to give you information. The question is whether you're willing to listen.

When the Sunday squeeze shows up, it's usually pointing at one of a few things:

A specific person. Sometimes the dread isn't about the work at all. It's about a colleague, a manager, or a dynamic you'll have to deal with when Monday hits. Your nervous system knows what your rational mind is still making excuses for. If thinking about a specific name tightens your chest, pay attention to what your body is registering.

The workload. If you're mentally scrolling through tasks at 10pm on a Sunday, your brain is telling you something's out of control. Not "a bit much." Out of control. People don't mentally rehearse a workweek unless the structure around them is genuinely broken.

A values mismatch. This one is trickier to identify. Sometimes the dread is vague. You're unable to point to a specific person or problem. Everything seems "fine" on paper. Except your stomach disagrees. Formless dread is often the feeling of spending your days in work misaligned with who you are. When what you're asked to do contradicts what you stand for, your body keeps score even when your mind refuses to.

The key thing to understand: your Sunday night feeling isn't a mental health problem to manage. It's a diagnostic signal giving you an honest readout. Treat it like one.

If You're a Leader, It Gets More Complicated

Here's what makes this test especially important for anyone in a leadership role.

When leaders experience anxiety, it spreads. Research on emotional contagion shows stress radiates through a workplace, and it travels fastest from the people at the top. If you're a manager walking into Monday carrying Sunday's dread, your team will feel it... even if you never say a word.

Think about the best leader you've worked for. Did they walk in every Monday looking like they were marching to their own execution? No. They had energy, presence, a sense of forward motion. It was contagious.

Now think about the worst. Did they bring in Sunday's weight? Did you feel it before they'd even opened their mouth?

If you lead people and you're dreading Monday, you owe it to them to ask why. Not to hide the feeling. To investigate it honestly.

Are you in the right role? Are you in the right culture? Are you carrying a workload no one person should be carrying? These aren't rhetorical questions. They deserve honest answers.

When a leader suffers in silence and pushes through, the team suffers too. The mask slips. The dread spreads. Your job isn't to project confidence at all costs. It's to fix what's broken.

When Sunday Feels OK

I want to say something about the flip side of this, because it matters.

I've had stretches of my career where Sunday night felt fine. Not ecstatic, not euphoric, but genuinely OK. Calm. Ready.

Those stretches shared a few things in common: - The work was hard, but I believed in it - The people around me were honest, and I was honest with them - I knew what I was responsible for and had the tools to do it - The culture didn't ask me to leave my values at the door

The feeling of Sunday-night-OK is worth aiming for. Not perfection. Not a dream job. Something more fundamental: doing work worth doing, with people worth working alongside. When you find yourself in a stretch like this, notice it. Name it. Don't take it for granted.

What to Do With the Signal

If your Sunday nights are tight, resist the urge to rush to solutions. Diagnose first.

Sit with the feeling and ask: what, specifically, is feeding this? Write it down if you need to. Is it a person? A meeting you're dreading? A structural problem nobody wants to name? A decision you've been putting off?

Once you've named it, you have options. Some problems are fixable from where you stand. A conversation you've been avoiding, a boundary you've let slip, a workload you've never pushed back on... these are areas where you have real room to move.

Some problems aren't fixable from inside. If the culture is genuinely broken, if the values on the wall have nothing to do with how decisions get made, if the person making your Sundays miserable has no interest in changing... you won't solve it by working harder or waiting it out. What's left is to stop pretending it's fine.

It sounds harsh. But pretending costs you more in the long run. And your body is going to keep sending the signal whether you listen or not.

The Sunday test doesn't care about your rationalizations. It only registers what's true.

Start Using It

I've gotten better at running this test regularly. Not only when something feels off, but as a habit. Every Sunday evening, a quick check-in: how does my stomach feel about tomorrow?

When it's OK, I take a moment to notice. To appreciate the situation I'm in and the people I'm working with.

When it's not OK, I don't let myself brush it off. I ask why. I write something down. I commit to addressing one thing in the coming week.

Your gut has been paying attention to your work life a lot longer than your conscious mind. It remembers patterns. The moments when things didn't sit right. The broken promises. The culture on days when no one was performing for visitors.

It's not dramatic to take it seriously. It's practical.

What does your stomach say right now?

Research from Kapable Club found 87% of professionals globally have had at least one toxic boss. My own research found 99.5% of survey respondents reported experiencing one or more types of bad boss behavior. Not an occasional problem. The standard experience for most working people.

And yet, 40% of employees stay silent about toxic leaders out of fear. NDAs bind more than a third of U.S. workers, restricting them from discussing workplace abuse or toxic leadership. We've built legal and cultural infrastructure specifically designed to keep the silence in place.

The toxic boss is Voldemort. We've all signed a magical contract not to name them.

What the Silence Is Costing

Toxic culture is 10 times more likely to drive attrition than pay dissatisfaction. Not three times. Ten times. A bigger pay packet does almost nothing to fix what's making people leave.

57% of workers have left a job because of their boss. Not the commute. Not the work itself. The boss.

Bad bosses cost U.S. businesses an estimated $360 billion annually in lost productivity, turnover, and healthcare expenses. The GDP of medium-sized nations. Vanished. Every year.

The personal cost goes further. 72% of employees with a toxic boss report daily stress. 53% have nightmares about their manager. 41% have sought therapy because of a boss. These are not mild inconveniences. These are genuine injuries being absorbed quietly by people who feel they have no other option.

Why They Keep Rising

The most frustrating thing about toxic bosses isn't their existence. It's the promotion cycles.

Research from McKinsey and Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic at Columbia University points to the same root cause: we mistake confidence for competence. The traits getting people noticed and promoted... loud, charismatic, self-assured, magnetic... are the opposite of what makes someone a good leader. Empathy, self-awareness, humility, listening skills. Those traits don't read well in a promotion meeting. They don't fill a room.

So the narcissist gets the job. The bully gets the next one. They rise not despite their behavior, but partly because of it. Chamorro-Premuzic's research found we're actively selecting for dysfunctional leadership traits, mistaking charisma for capability and confidence for strategic vision.

And because no one says anything meaningful in exit interviews, hiring managers at the next company have nothing to work with. The pattern repeats.

The silence doesn't protect you. It protects them.

The Myth of the One Bad Apple

I've spoken to hundreds of people about their leadership experiences. When I dug into the data behind my BAT (Bad Apple Test) framework at StepUp2Bat, the same pattern appeared again and again. People think their toxic boss is unusual. An exception. A one-off.

Wrong.

99.5% of respondents had experienced bad boss behavior. Not one type. Multiple types. The micromanager who second-guesses every decision. The credit-taker who presents your work as their own. The intimidator who makes people afraid to speak. The invisible manager leaving you without direction or support. These behaviors are not rare. They're unnamed.

And unnamed, they're invisible. Invisible, they're untreated. Untreated, they multiply.

We've built a culture around minimizing bad boss behavior. "She's the way she is." "He means well." "Learn to work with people like him." We pathologize the employee and protect the boss. Every time we do, we make it easier for the next toxic boss to get away with the same behavior.

A 99.5% Problem Needs a Name

One thing worth sitting with: if 99.5% of people have experienced bad boss behavior, who are the toxic bosses being produced by? Not some alien system. By organizations failing to name the behavior, confront it, and stop promoting the people doing it.

The Voldemort silence is not neutral. It's a mechanism. It doesn't protect anyone but the person with the power to harm. The employees stay quiet because speaking feels dangerous. HR stays quiet because raising it creates conflict. Leadership stays quiet because challenging a peer is uncomfortable. And the toxic boss moves from role to role, organization to organization, gathering a trail of broken teams and traumatized employees behind them — none of whom ever said anything on the record.

The next person coming in sees a spotless reference. They're walking in blind.

What Naming Looks Like

I'm not suggesting a LinkedIn rant with your old boss tagged. Noise. Helps no one.

Here's what naming looks like in practice.

Write an honest exit interview. Most exit interviews are useless because HR asks generic questions and employees say nothing real. Break the pattern. If the reason you're leaving is your manager, say so specifically. What behaviors? What patterns? Give the organization something to work with, even if you believe they won't act on it.

Be honest in reference checks. Not vindictive. Honest. When someone calls to ask what it's like working with a former boss and you experienced something specific and problematic, say it. Protect the person asking by giving them real information. You're not obligated to perform enthusiasm you don't feel.

Use structured feedback tools. StepUp2Bat exists for this reason. Anonymous, structured, upward feedback gives organizations the signal they need to see patterns they're currently missing. If your team has access to tools like this, use them honestly. Don't game them. Don't soften them. Say what's true.

Have the conversation with colleagues still there. Not gossip. Not venting. A direct: "I want to share what my experience was, because it might matter for you." One honest conversation gives someone else permission to name what they're experiencing.

None of this is comfortable. All of it matters.

The Person Who Comes After You

The next person hired into the role you left is working for the same boss. Having the same experience. Worse... the silence you maintained gave the toxic boss one more year of impunity. One more year of evidence saying their behavior is acceptable and consequence-free.

Your silence is a gift to the person doing the harm. Your honesty is a gift to the person coming next.

I know it's not simple. Jobs, references, legal agreements, fear of reputational blowback. Real constraints. You need to protect yourself. Where the legal risk is low, where the relationship allows it, where the damage from continued silence is certain... say something.

Not for revenge. Not for your own satisfaction. For the person walking in after you, who deserves to know what they're walking into.

Your Voldemort doesn't deserve the silence.

Name them.

Gallup research found companies fail to choose the right management talent 82% of the time. Not 20%. Not 40%. Eighty-two percent. Not occasional bad luck... a systematic failure built into how we think about promotions.

The person best at a job is not automatically the person who should lead others doing it. These are different skills. Entirely different.

What Performance Measures and What It Misses

Performance metrics measure outputs. Lines of code written. Revenue generated. Projects delivered on time. Real, valuable things.

But once you're a manager, your job changes completely. You don't ship anymore. Your team ships. Your role is making other people productive, not yourself.

The skills required are nearly the opposite of what made you stand out as an individual contributor:

• You need to slow down when your instinct is to speed up.
• You need to explain your thinking when you'd rather move on.
• You need to stay calm when everything is going sideways.
• You need to care about someone's development more than the sprint goal.

None of those show up in a performance review. None of them earn a promotion. So most people never develop them... until suddenly they're expected to demonstrate them every single day.

What Emotional Maturity Is and Isn't

People hear "emotional maturity" and think it means being calm, or nice, or sensitive. It doesn't mean any of those things... or not only those things.

Emotional maturity is the ability to understand what you're feeling, decide how to respond, and keep your reactions proportional to what's happening around you.

An emotionally mature leader: - Takes accountability without getting defensive - Gives feedback aimed at growth, not at venting frustration - Handles pressure without spreading it to their team - Disagrees with people without making them feel attacked - Asks questions without already knowing the answer

This isn't soft. It's extraordinarily difficult. It requires a level of self-awareness most high performers never had to build, because technical brilliance doesn't require it.

Research on leadership performance shows 90% of top organisational performers are high in emotional intelligence. Only 20% of bottom performers are. Performance at the individual level still requires some EQ. Leadership at scale requires a great deal more of it.

The Brilliant Jerk Problem

Tech has a specific version of this. The Brilliant Jerk.

You know the type. Immaculate code. Green metrics. Fast problem-solving. And interpersonal behavior so appalling you'd fire anyone else for it. They dismiss colleagues in meetings. They argue past the point of reason. They make junior engineers feel small.

Organisations tolerate this because the output is high. The implicit message: we'll accept behavior we'd otherwise not tolerate, as long as you keep shipping.

This is a catastrophic mistake. The damage a Brilliant Jerk does to trust, psychological safety, and the retention of the people they work with takes years to repair. When organisations promote a Brilliant Jerk into leadership, they scale the damage.

71% of employers say they'd hire someone with higher EQ over higher IQ. Yet promotion decisions still go to the top producer, the highest biller, the person with the biggest number.

The disconnect is real. We measure performance because it's straightforward to measure. Emotional maturity is harder to quantify, so we pretend it doesn't matter... right up until the exit interviews start.

The Peter Principle Hasn't Gone Anywhere

Laurence Peter described it in 1969: employees get promoted until they reach a level of incompetence. Fifty-plus years later, it's still how most organisations operate.

What he didn't say explicitly, but what I've watched happen repeatedly, is the incompetence is almost never technical. The best engineer doesn't become a bad manager because they forgot how to code. They become a bad manager because they never developed the emotional maturity to do the job.

They don't know how to have an uncomfortable conversation without making it worse. They reward people most like themselves and leave others behind. They make decisions based on their own preferences rather than their team's needs. They don't know how to handle the loneliness of leadership, so they make it everyone else's problem.

I've seen it enough times to know it's not bad luck. It's what happens when you promote for the wrong thing.

What I Look For Now

I look for different things when considering someone for a leadership role. Performance still matters. But here's what else I watch:

How do they handle being wrong? Not in a public forum where they perform grace, but in the moment, in a meeting, when someone challenges them unprepared. Do they adapt or dig in?

How do junior people behave around them? Are they open, energised, comfortable? Or quiet and careful? People lower in the hierarchy always know more about someone's true character than peers and managers do.

What do they do under pressure? When the project is going badly and the deadline is real, do they rise... or do they dump their anxiety onto the people around them?

Do they talk about their team? When asked how a project went, does this person say "I delivered X" or "we delivered X and here's what the team did"?

How do they respond to feedback? Do they treat it as data, or as an attack?

None of these require a psychometric assessment. They require watching someone in a hard moment. Most organisations never bother.

Build the Right Track

Part of the issue sits with how we've structured career progression. In most organisations, the only way to earn more and be taken seriously is to move into management. Individual contributor tracks exist on paper. The status and compensation don't follow.

So highly skilled people who'd be brilliant contributors for another decade get pushed into leadership roles they don't want and aren't built for. Some adapt. Many don't. And the organisations lose both: a great individual contributor who's now a mediocre manager, and a team who deserved better leadership.

The answer isn't to stop promoting people. The answer is to promote the right things. Build a genuine technical track with real progression. Assess leadership candidates on leadership criteria. Make emotional maturity a first-class requirement, not an afterthought on a competency framework nobody reads.

And when you're looking at a promotion, for yourself or someone else, ask honestly: are you promoting this person because they'd be a great leader? Or because they've been a great performer and you don't know what else to do with them?

Those are different questions. Most organisations only ask the first one, and call it the second.

Performance Gets You Noticed. Emotional Maturity Determines Whether You Should Lead.

Before your next promotion decision, sit with this:

Has this person done the work of understanding how they affect the people around them? Do they lead themselves well before leading others?

If the answer is no, the promotion won't fix it. It'll make it worse.

And if you're the one being considered for promotion... ask yourself the same question. Your technical record got you into the room. But it's not what will make you worth following.

Here is a number worth sitting with. Gallup studied millions of workers and found 70% of the variance in a team's engagement comes down to the manager. Not the perks. Not the mission statement on the wall. The manager.

I ran my own research for the book I wrote with Step It Up HR, and the number I found was harder to swallow. 99.5% of the people we surveyed said they had worked for one or more types of bad boss. Almost everyone. Sit with the size of it. The boss is not a footnote in someone's working life. The boss is the working life.

So if the manager decides most of it, the question is not "are you a great manager." The question is "are you the right manager for the person in front of you, today."

Why we cling to one style

If adapting works so well, why does almost no one do it? Because one style feels safe. You find a mode early on, it wins you a few points, and you wear it like a uniform. Direct people get praised for being decisive. Delegators get praised for trusting their teams. The praise locks the habit in.

Then the world hands you a person the habit does not fit, and pride keeps you in the rut. Switching styles feels like admitting the old one was wrong. It was not wrong. It was wrong for now. A surgeon does not use one instrument for every cut, and no one calls the surgeon inconsistent. We give leaders a pass on this we would give no one else.

There is a cost to the comfort. Every time you lead from habit instead of need, someone on your team pays for it in confusion, in fear, or in a slow drift toward the door.

Four people, four approaches

Decades ago Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard put a name to this. They called it situational leadership. The idea is simple. There is no single best style. You match your style to where the person stands... how skilled they are, and how motivated.

They sketched four modes:

• Direct. New person, still learning. They need clear instructions, not a coaching question.
• Coach. Getting their feet under them, but wobbling. They need guidance and a reason to care.
• Support. Skilled, but flat or demotivated. They do not need you to teach. They need you to back them.
• Delegate. Skilled and driven. Get out of their way and let them run.

Read the list again and notice the trap. Most of us have one favorite mode. The natural director barks at the senior engineer who needed backing. The natural delegator throws the brand-new hire in the deep end and wonders why she drowns. The style was fine. The match was wrong.

My own worst habit

My default is delegate. I love handing someone a hard problem and watching them grow. With the right person it is the best feeling in the work.

With the wrong person, at the wrong time, it is abandonment dressed up as trust.

I once handed a big piece of work to someone new, told her I trusted her, and stepped back to give her room. I thought I was being a good boss. She read it as me not caring whether she sank. She spent three weeks afraid to ask for help, because I had made "figure it out" the whole job. When she finally told me, I felt sick. I had not given her freedom. I had given her a cliff.

She did not need my favorite mode. She needed direction, then coaching, then support, and only later the freedom I had thrown at her on day one. The failure was not hers. It was mine, for leading the way I like instead of the way she needed.

How to get less one-note

Becoming adaptive is not a personality transplant. It is a habit. A few things have helped me.

Name your default out loud. Mine is delegate. Once you know your favorite tool, you feel the pull toward it... and you start to notice when the moment calls for a different one.

Ask, do not assume. The fastest way to find the right mode is the question Lee Woollsey puts at the heart of a good one-on-one... "What aren't you getting from me?" The answer tells you whether to direct, coach, support, or back off.

Read skill and will separately. Before you pick a mode, look at two dials. How able is this person at this task, right now. How motivated. A skilled but flat person needs something different from a keen but green one.

Change as they change. The person who needed direction in March needs delegation by September. If your mode never moves, you are not leading them. You are leading a snapshot of who they used to be.

Drop the word "great"

I have stopped chasing great. Great is a statue. Great is the marble hero on the pedestal, fixed in one heroic pose forever, useless the moment the situation shifts.

Adaptive is alive. Adaptive reads the room, the person, the week, and picks the tool the moment is asking for. It is humbler work. No one writes legends about the boss who quietly gave one person space and another person structure on the same Tuesday. The people on the receiving end remember, though. They remember being led the way they needed, not the way you preferred.

So here is the question I leave you with. What is your favorite tool... and who on your team is paying the price because you reach for it every single time?

MIT Sloan dug into how leaders behave when things get murky, and the numbers are grim. In their research, 32% of leaders said they felt paralyzed by uncertainty at the exact moment action was needed. Another 42% admitted they postponed decisions because making them felt uncomfortable.

Read it again. Nearly half of leaders stall not for lack of information, but because deciding feels bad.

I've been this leader. I've sat on a call telling myself I needed "more clarity" before I committed, when the honest truth was I didn't want to be wrong. The clarity was never coming. I was hiding.

Stop predicting. Start sensing.

The old model of leadership was prediction. Build the five-year plan. Map the roadmap. Forecast the market. Control the outcome.

This model is broken, and it has been for a while.

The Center for Creative Leadership, which has spent nearly six decades studying how leaders operate, describes the trap perfectly. Leaders get "trapped in endless urgency, reacting to one challenge or crisis after another, without the space or skills to move beyond reactivity." Firefighting becomes the whole identity.

The fix isn't a better forecast. You will not forecast your way out of a world full of surprises. The fix is to swap prediction for sensing. Stop trying to know what happens in 2029. Get sharp at reading what is happening right now, and adjust fast.

A compass beats a map when the terrain keeps changing. A map tells you what someone else saw, once, a while ago. A compass tells you which way you're pointed right now, wherever you happen to be standing. When the ground shifts under you weekly, you want the compass.

In practice this means shorter horizons. Set a goal you genuinely see... three months out, not three years. Far enough to give your team something solid to stand on, close enough to change course before you've wasted a year building the wrong thing.

Treat your decisions as experiments

One trick from the MIT work has stuck with me. They suggest you drop gambling language and pick up scientific language. Don't call it a bet. Call it a hypothesis.

It sounds like a word game. It isn't.

When you "place a bet," being wrong means you lost. It's final, it's personal, it stings. So you avoid it. You stall. You wait for the 42%-of-leaders feeling to pass.

When you "run an experiment," being wrong means you learned something. You expected it. The whole point was to find out. A failed experiment isn't a loss, it's data you didn't have yesterday.

Same decision. Completely different relationship with being wrong. And your relationship with being wrong is the thing deciding whether you act or freeze.

Say "I don't know" out loud

Here's the part scaring people most. Leading through chaos means admitting, in front of your team, you don't have the answer.

Most bosses would rather chew glass.

I get why. We've been sold a story where leadership means certainty, where the boss is the one with the plan, and showing doubt is showing weakness. So leaders fake it. They project false confidence, they bluff, and their teams smell it instantly.

My own research into bad bosses turned up a number I keep coming back to: 99.5% of people said they'd suffered under one or more types of bad boss. Not 60%. Not 80%. Practically everyone. And a huge share of bad behaviour is frightened people clamping down, pretending to know things they don't, because they think the job demands it.

It doesn't.

The strongest thing I ever did as a leader was tell a room full of clever people, "I genuinely don't know how this plays out. Here's what I'm watching. Here's what would change my mind. What are you seeing I'm not?" The relief in the room was physical. Suddenly it was a shared problem, not a performance, and the sharpest ideas came from people who'd been quietly sitting on them while I postured.

Admitting the limits of what you know doesn't cost you authority. It buys you trust. And trust is the one thing moving fast when everything else is uncertain.

Your team feels the chaos through you

There's a reason the calm captain matters. Your team doesn't experience the storm directly. They experience it through you.

When you go silent, they fill the gap with the worst story they dream up. Silence isn't neutral. A vacuum of information always gets filled, and people default to fear. The cure is almost embarrassingly simple: communicate more often, even with nothing new to report. "No update yet, still working it, here's where my head is" beats radio silence every single time.

Use "we" language, not "I" language. Not because it tests well, but because it's true. You're in the boat together. The job isn't to pretend the sea is calm. The job is to be the steady hand on the wheel while everyone watches the waves.

Resilience is reps, not a personality

The lie about resilience is the idea some people simply have it. They're born tough, born calm, built for the storm. The rest of us aren't.

Rubbish.

Resilience is a muscle, and muscles grow under load. Every time you make a decision without full information and survive it, you get a little stronger. Every time you say "I don't know" and the sky doesn't fall, the next time gets easier. Every short-horizon goal you hit while the long-term stays foggy proves to you you function in the fog.

You don't build it by waiting for calm. You build it by leading through the noise, on purpose, before you feel ready.

So stop asking when the chaos will end. It won't. This isn't pessimism, it's freedom. The moment you stop waiting for the bus never coming, you get all your energy back to spend on the one thing ever in your control: how you steer.

What decision have you been postponing while you wait for a clarity never coming?

One in three UK workers want to completely change careers, according to research from Employment Hero in 2025. One in three. Sit with the number.

Now look around your office. Most of those people are in the same seat they sat in last year. The wanting is everywhere. The moving is rare.

The space between "I want out" and "I walked out" is where stuck lives. And stuck is not a fact about your situation. It is a story you tell yourself. I have invested too much to switch now. I am too old. I do not have the right background. My degree says one thing, so my life has to say the same thing.

I believed every version of those. They were lies. Comfortable lies, the kind you wear like an old coat.

The ladder was always a lie

Someone handed us a single metaphor for work: the career ladder. One company. One rung at a time. Straight up. Fall off and you have failed.

The trouble is the ladder never matched real life.

The average American holds 12 jobs across a working life. Roughly half of the people who change employers also switch occupations entirely, according to Pew Research. The straight climb up one pole was never how most of us lived. We kept the picture anyway, then felt like frauds for not fitting it.

A lattice fits better. You grow sideways. You grow at angles. Sometimes you step down a level to reach a branch you want. The lattice has no single top, so there is no single way to fall off it.

Staying put has a price too

We treat the leap as the only risky move. We weigh the downside of changing and ignore the downside of standing still.

The slow erosion of curiosity. The Sunday-night dread. The version of you who keeps shrinking to fit a role you outgrew three years ago. Staying still feels safe because the bill arrives quietly, in instalments. A leap arrives all at once, so we fear it more. Both options cost you something. One cost you notice. The other you do not... until the total is enormous and you wonder where the years went.

The "too late" myth

The loudest lie of all is the clock. You are too old, you missed your window, reinvention is a young person's game.

I did not write my first book or stand on my first keynote stage as a fresh graduate. I did it after decades of shipping code and managing teams. The grey hair was the point. Nobody wants leadership advice from someone who has never led. Nobody trusts a book about bad bosses written by a person who has never survived one, hired around one, or quietly become one for an afternoon and hated themselves for it.

Your years are not a sunk cost. They are the credibility no one hands you and no one fakes. The 22-year-old has energy. You have evidence. Stop apologising for what makes your next move believable.

What carries over

The biggest fear about changing direction is the belief you start again from zero. You do not.

Skills compound. They follow you. The Army taught me how people behave under pressure, and who a person truly is when things go wrong. Engineering taught me systems thinking, how one small change ripples through everything downstream. Leading 43 engineers taught me why so many managers fail the people beneath them.

Every one of those feeds what I do now.

My whole second act exists because of one number I found in my own research: 99.5% of the people I surveyed said they had suffered one or more types of bad boss. 99.5%. The engineer in me refused to look away from a figure like this. The manager in me had watched it happen, team after team. The writer in me had to say something about it. Three careers, all pointing at one book.

You are not throwing away your past when you change. You are bringing it with you as raw material.

How you start without blowing up your life

You do not quit on Monday and panic by Friday. You run a small experiment.

• Have one conversation with someone doing the work you are curious about. Ask what their average Tuesday looks like, not their highlight reel.
• Build one tiny side project in the new direction. An evening, a weekend. See whether the work itself holds your attention.
• Write one thing in public about a problem you find interesting. See who shows up.
• Find someone one step ahead of you on the path and buy them a coffee. Most people love being asked how they got where they are.
• Name your through-line. What is the thread running under all your jobs so far? Mine was always people and systems, long before I had the words for it.

None of those steps need anyone's permission. None of them burn the house down. Each one turns "stuck" from a wall into a door you have not opened yet.

The day you stop believing the story

Claude Silver did not map a route from smoothies to leading thousands of people. She followed the work, the people, and her own curiosity, one branch at a time. The title with "heart" in it did not exist until she grew into it.

Your next chapter likely has no name yet either.

So here is my question for you. What is the story you have been telling yourself about why you are stuck... and what changes on the day you stop believing it?

Researcher Zach Mercurio was studying custodians at a university when one of them explained her Monday morning routine. "I'm cleaning this bathroom so these kids don't get sick," she said.

Not "I'm cleaning because it's my job." Not "I'm cleaning because my boss told me to." She connected the mop in her hand to the health of students she'd never meet. Two words separated her from every disengaged worker on the planet.

So... (these kids don't get sick.)

The Two-Word Reframe

Mercurio calls this the "so..." mentality. People who experience deep meaning at work do something different from the rest of us. They add two words to every task.

I'm writing this report... so my team has the clarity to move forward.

I'm reviewing this code... so our customers don't hit a wall at 2am.

I'm running this meeting... so 12 people don't waste their Tuesday morning.

These aren't affirmations. They're not motivational posters. They're a cognitive habit. And they separate people who show up from people who show up with intention.

The famous NASA janitor story makes the same point. When President Kennedy asked a custodian what he was doing, the man replied: "I'm helping put a man on the moon." He didn't see a broom. He saw a mission.

Most of us lose this somewhere between our first week and our first reorganisation.

The Epidemic Nobody Talks About

Here's the uncomfortable truth about modern work: 75% of workers feel overlooked. Thirty percent report feeling invisible at work. And global employee engagement hit its lowest point since 2020, costing the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity.

We've spent over a billion dollars on engagement programmes. Surveys. Platforms. Dashboards. And engagement keeps falling.

Mercurio's research suggests we've been solving the wrong problem. The issue isn't engagement. It's significance. People don't need another pizza party or employee-of-the-month certificate. They need to feel like they matter.

And the gap between "my work matters" and "I matter at work" turns out to be enormous. You might love teaching but feel invisible in your school. You might believe in your product but feel replaceable to your company. The work has meaning. The worker doesn't feel meaningful. Those are two different problems, and we keep treating them as one.

You Had a Purpose. Then Work Happened.

Think back to your first week at a job you loved. You knew why you were there. You understood how your work connected to something bigger.

Then six months passed. The meetings piled up. The to-do list grew. And somewhere along the way, the "so..." disappeared. The task became the point. You stopped connecting your daily grind to human impact and started connecting it to... your next meeting.

I've watched it happen to myself. I've built software for decades, and the moments where I felt most alive at work weren't the promotions or the launches. They were the moments someone told me my work changed how their team operated. Or when I saw a customer use something I'd built and it saved them hours of misery.

When those connections dried up, so did my energy.

This is what Mercurio calls "anti-mattering." Research from Gordon Flett at York University shows feeling insignificant at work triggers withdrawal, gossip, and quiet quitting. Not because people are lazy. Because people are desperate to matter and nobody is helping them make the connection.

The response to anti-mattering is telling. People either withdraw their contributions entirely or they engage in what Mercurio calls "acts of desperation." Gossip. Complaining. Stirring drama. We treat these as character problems. They're symptoms of an environment where people feel invisible.

In my own experience building Step It Up HR, I've seen this play out in every organisation I've worked with. The teams with the highest engagement don't have better perks or fancier offices. They have leaders who connect daily work to human outcomes.

Small Moments Beat Grand Gestures

Mercurio asked thousands of workers across 22 industries when they most felt they mattered at work. The answers weren't about bonuses, promotions, or awards.

It was a supervisor remembering their name.

It was someone naming what they did well in a meeting.

It was a three-minute check-in about something personal.

One leader Mercurio studied managed 27 people. Every Friday, she wrote down something personal about each team member in a notebook. Every Monday morning, she scheduled three-minute check-ins to follow up. "How did your daughter's recital go?" "Did your mum's surgery go well?"

The result? Exceptional engagement and loyalty from every person on her team.

Think about the effort involved. A notebook. Three minutes per person. No app. No platform. No annual survey with a 47-page report.

The custodian had a supervisor who once handed her the dictionary definition of her role: a person who has responsibility for or looks after something. He told her everyone in the building depended on her. She never forgot it.

One employee Mercurio interviewed put it bluntly: "Don't give me a free sandwich or certificate. Remember my name."

These aren't leadership programmes. They're not frameworks. They're moments where someone bothered to connect the dots for another human being.

The 99.5% Connection

My own research found 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more types of bad bosses. And the through line in most of those stories isn't cruelty or incompetence. It's invisibility. The boss who never noticed you. The leader who never connected your work to anything beyond the spreadsheet.

Gallup puts the cost of this at $10 trillion per year. Each percentage point of engagement loss represents approximately 21 million fewer engaged employees globally. And manager engagement itself dropped five points in a single year, meaning the people responsible for making others feel significant don't feel significant themselves.

It's a spiral. And it starts with two words nobody is saying.

Mercurio's framework for fixing this is deceptively simple. He calls it N.A.N.:

Noticed. See people. Not their output. Them.

Affirmed. Tell people what makes their contribution unique. "Good job" is not affirmation. "The way you handled the client's concern showed real patience" is.

Needed. Show people how the team would suffer without them. Not in a manipulative way. In a truthful way.

Your "So..." Exercise

Here's something I'd encourage you to try this week. Write down your five biggest tasks. Next to each one, add "so..." and complete the sentence with a human outcome.

I'm preparing this presentation... so 40 people walk away with one idea they'll use tomorrow.

I'm fixing this bug... so a teacher in Wolverhampton doesn't lose her lesson plan at 8am.

I'm answering these emails... so three people go home tonight feeling heard.

If you lead a team, ask each person to do the same exercise. You might be surprised how many of them struggle to finish the sentence. And the ones who struggle are the ones closest to checking out.

If you're struggling yourself, you're not broken. You've been doing the work without the connection. The "so..." fell away and nobody helped you find it again.

The custodian didn't need a leadership development programme to find purpose. She needed someone to help her see the line between the mop and the students.

Your team needs the same. And it costs nothing. No budget approval. No vendor selection. No six-month rollout.

Notice someone. Affirm them. Show them they're needed.

Two words. "So..."

Zach Mercurio drew this distinction when I interviewed him on my podcast, and it hit me hard. He put it simply: you will never be able to care FOR anything... a plant, a pet, or a person... if you don't take time to understand it.

Caring about is a sentiment you hold from a distance. It lives in your head. It costs nothing. You do it while scrolling through emails or driving to work.

Caring for requires presence. It requires slowing down. It requires asking the second question after someone says "I'm fine."

And Mercurio keeps coming back to the same point: hurry and care don't live in the same room.

You have to pick one.

The Numbers Should Worry You

Mercurio's research paints a brutal picture. Only 39% of employees strongly agree someone at work cares about them as a person. Thirty percent say they feel invisible at work. And a leader's behaviour accounts for nearly 50% of whether their people feel they matter.

Think about those numbers. Half of the "mattering" experience is down to you. Not the company culture. Not HR policy. Not the Christmas party budget. You. The person who walks past or the person who stops.

When I ran my own research for Step It Up HR, 99.5% of people said they'd had at least one type of bad boss. And the most common complaint wasn't about workload or pay. It was about not being seen. Not being heard. Not mattering.

Meanwhile, 93% of workers who feel valued report feeling motivated to do their best work. The gap between those two numbers is where leadership lives or dies.

The Three-Minute Interaction

Mercurio tells this story about a custodian named Jane who'd worked at the same place for more than twenty years. She did her job. She showed up. But she never felt like she mattered.

Then a supervisor sat down with her and showed her the dictionary definition of "custodian." Not cleaner. Not janitor. Custodian. Someone entrusted with the care and protection of something valuable.

Three minutes. All it took to transform how she saw her own work. Twenty years of feeling invisible, undone by one person who slowed down enough to notice her.

This is what caring for looks like. Not a big programme. Not a town hall speech about values. One person. Three minutes. Paying attention.

Why We Don't Slow Down

I know the objections because I've used every one of them.

"I've got too many direct reports." "There's too much on my plate." "I don't have time for this kind of conversation."

But look at what you're choosing instead. You're choosing the meeting going nowhere. The status update nobody reads. The email chain going three levels deep because nobody picked up the phone.

Mercurio talks about "liminal space"... the moments between the scheduled stuff. The walk from one meeting room to the next. The two minutes before a call starts. The time you spend in the lift. Those moments are where mattering happens. Or doesn't.

Most of us fill those gaps with our phones. We check notifications. We scan headlines. We tell ourselves we're being productive.

We're not. We're avoiding the thing requiring more courage than any spreadsheet: looking someone in the eye and saying, "How are you doing? And I mean it."

The One-on-One Test

Here's a question Mercurio asks: if your one-on-one is the first meeting you cancel when things get busy, you have a mattering problem.

Because what signal does this send? It tells your team member they're less important than whatever fire you're fighting today. It says, "You matter... when it's convenient."

People read those signals with precision. They notice when you check your phone during their update. They notice when you cut their time short. They notice when you're physically present but mentally already in the next room.

And when people don't feel like they matter, they respond in one of two ways. They withdraw... quiet quitting, silence, eventually leaving. Or they act out... complaining, blaming, gossip. Both are natural responses to feeling invisible.

What Slowing Down Looks Like In Practice

I'm not going to pretend I've cracked this. I still catch myself rushing past moments worth stopping for. But I've started doing a few things helping me stay present.

I write one thing down about each person I work with every week. Something I noticed. Something they said. Something I want to follow up on. It takes thirty seconds. It changes the next conversation entirely because I'm starting from where they are, not from my agenda.

I stopped checking my phone in the two minutes before meetings start. Those are the moments when someone says something real, if you're available for it.

I ask the second question. When someone says "I'm fine," I follow up. "Fine how? What's on your mind today?" The truth lives after the first answer, never in it.

I treat one-on-ones as the last meeting I'd cancel, not the first. If I'm going to drop something from my calendar, it won't be the time I've set aside for an actual human being.

The Dinner Table Test

Mercurio says something staying with me: every person you lead goes home and talks about you at their dinner table. They're not discussing your quarterly results or your project timeline. They're talking about how you made them feel.

This is your legacy. Not what you delivered. How you treated people while you were delivering it.

And you don't get to choose this legacy in a workshop or a team offsite. You choose it in the corridor. In the two minutes before a call. In the moment you notice someone is tired and you either keep walking or stop.

Hurry and care don't live in the same room. The question is which room you're going to spend your time in.

A 2026 Radical Candor report found nobody taught 70% of people to give or receive feedback before they became managers. Seven out of ten. We hand people a title, a team, and zero tools for the hardest part of the job: telling someone the truth.

So they default to silence. And they call it empathy.

Kim Scott nailed it when she named the most common leadership failure "ruinous empathy." You care so much about someone's feelings you withhold the direct feedback they need. You smile through a one-on-one when you should be saying, "This isn't working." You give a glowing review when you should be flagging a pattern.

The person walks away thinking everything's fine. Months later, they're blindsided by a PIP or a layoff or a reputation they never knew they had. And you're the one who let it happen.

It's not empathy. It's abandonment with a smile.

The Numbers Are Brutal

This isn't a soft problem. The research is damning.

Gallup's 2025 Workplace Report found global employee engagement dropped to 21%, matching the lowest point during the pandemic. The cost? $438 billion in lost productivity worldwide.

And here's the part every manager needs to hear: 70% of the variance in team engagement comes directly from the manager. Not the CEO. Not the culture deck on the wall. Not the mission statement nobody reads. You.

Gallup also found employees who received strengths feedback had turnover rates 14.9% lower than those who received none. Teams whose managers gave meaningful feedback showed 12.5% greater productivity. The data is clear: feedback works. Silence kills.

The Radical Candor report adds another layer. 54% of employees rarely or never receive feedback from their managers. 60% are afraid to speak up at work. And 62% say the feedback they do get is too vague to act on.

We don't have an empathy gap in leadership. We have a courage gap.

I Know Because I've Been the Coward

Early in my career, I had a team member. Brilliant engineer. Wrote elegant code. And treated junior developers like they were beneath him. I watched it happen for months. I told myself, "He'll grow out of it." I told myself, "The work is too good to risk upsetting him." I told myself all the stories cowards tell.

What I didn't tell him was the truth: his behavior was poisoning the team. Two junior developers left within six months. I lost great people because I didn't have the spine to have one uncomfortable conversation.

When I finally said something, he was shocked. Not angry. Shocked. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" he asked.

Good question. I didn't have an answer then. I do now. I was scared. Not of his reaction. Of my own discomfort. I chose my comfort over his career development. And I'll carry my share of the blame for those two engineers who walked out the door.

Your Team Wants the Truth (Even When It Stings)

Debra Corey wrote about six barriers stopping leaders from giving feedback on Step It Up HR. Fear of damaging relationships. Lack of confidence in delivery. Time pressure. Past failed attempts. The feeling nothing changed last time. Sound familiar?

But here's what struck me: 92% of people believe constructive feedback, when delivered well, improves performance. Ninety-two percent. Your team wants the truth. They're waiting for it. They're begging for it with every disengaged shrug and quiet exit interview.

I wrote before about how if you're not willing to lose popularity, don't call yourself a leader. This is what I meant. Leadership requires you to say things people don't want to hear. Not to be cruel. To be caring enough to be honest.

The 99.5% stat from my research into bad bosses tells you everything. 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more types of bad bosses. And the most common type isn't the screamer or the micromanager. It's the one who fails to act. The one who lets problems fester. The one with all the empathy in the world and none of the courage to use it.

What Courage Looks Like (It's Smaller Than You Think)

Courage doesn't mean confrontation. It doesn't mean marching into someone's office and dropping truth bombs. It means small, consistent honesty.

It means saying "I noticed something in the meeting today, and I want to talk about it" instead of waiting six months for the annual review.

It means asking your team member, "What aren't you getting from me?" and sitting with the answer, even when it stings.

It means choosing clarity over comfort. Every single time.

The Radical Candor framework puts it simply: care personally while challenging directly. Both parts matter. Drop the caring and you're a bully. Drop the challenge and you're an enabler. You need both. And the second one is where most of us fail.

I've written about authenticity as a weapon before. Honest feedback is authenticity in action. It's showing up as a real human being who respects someone enough to tell them what nobody else will.

The Feedback You Owe Someone Right Now

Think about your team for a second. Right now. Is there someone whose work has slipped and you've been "giving them space"? Someone whose attitude in meetings has shifted and you've been hoping it resolves itself? Someone who keeps making the same mistake because nobody told them it was a mistake?

Every day you stay silent, you're making a choice. You're choosing your comfort over their development. You're choosing a peaceful inbox over a growing team. You're choosing to be liked instead of choosing to lead.

Start With One Conversation

You don't need to overhaul your leadership style overnight. You need to have one honest conversation this week.

Pick the person you've been avoiding. The conversation you've been putting off. The feedback you've been softening until it's meaningless.

Then say the thing. With kindness. With directness. With the understanding it will feel terrible in the moment and transformative over time.

Your team doesn't need more empathy from you. They need you to be brave enough to tell them the truth. And brave enough to hear it back.

The cruelest thing a manager does isn't giving hard feedback. It's withholding it and pretending they care.

Time spent socialising in person has dropped by roughly two-thirds across all age groups since 2003 according to the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness. Two-thirds. Gone.

We tell ourselves we're as connected as ever. We just text more. We DM. We send memes. And the Surgeon General's report tells us the health impact of all this lonely connectedness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Social isolation raises premature mortality by 29%. Chronic loneliness in older adults raises dementia risk by about 50%.

We are smoking ourselves to death and calling it social media.

Why putting the phone down doesn't work

Now back to the couple at the cafe. They did the thing the wellness articles told them to do. Phones away. Be present.

And they failed. Not because they didn't try. Because nobody taught them what comes after the phone is down.

Putting your phone down is the easy part. It's the equivalent of buying running shoes. The hard part is the run. The hard part is asking a real question and waiting for a real answer. The hard part is noticing your wife is tired today and asking about it. The hard part is letting someone finish a sentence without thinking about your reply.

That's the muscle that's atrophied. And no app deletes that.

What I'm trying to do about it

I'm not here to lecture you. I'm in this with you. So here's what I've been trying, and it's harder than it sounds.

Ask one extra question. When someone tells me something... how their week went, what their kid did, why they're frustrated... I make myself ask one more question instead of moving on or making it about me. One. "What was that like?" or "Why do you think they did that?" It costs nothing. It changes everything.

Wait three seconds. When someone stops talking, I count to three before I open my mouth. Most of the time, they aren't done. They were breathing. The pause is where the real thing comes out, and we usually trample it.

Watch the face, not the screen. I have a habit of glancing at my phone when there's a lull. I'm trying to stop. The lull is the part where connection happens. The phone is the lullaby putting that part to sleep.

Pick up the phone... and call. Texting is cheap. A phone call is expensive. So when I want to reach my brother, I call. He picks up half the time. The other half, he calls back. Either way, we end up on the line, and something real happens that a thread of text never produces.

What this means for leaders

If you run a team, this matters double. Your people aren't just lonely at home. They're lonely at work too. Mercurio's research suggests only about 39% of people strongly agree that someone at work cares about them as a person. That's not an HR problem. That's a leadership problem.

You can't fix it with a wellbeing app. You can't fix it with another Slack channel. You can fix it by walking up to one person on your team this week, asking how they are, and waiting for the second answer... the real one, the one that comes after the polite "I'm fine."

That's it. That's the whole thing. And it's terrifying, because if you can't do it, you'll find out fast that your connection muscle is gone too.

The point

The phone is not making you lonely.

You stopped practicing how to be with another human, and the phone was just there to fill the silence you didn't know what to do with.

If you delete every app on your phone tomorrow, you will still be lonely. Not because phones don't matter... they do, they helped get us here... but because the muscle is still gone. You have to rebuild it. You have to do reps.

The reps are uncomfortable. They look like awkward small talk with the cashier. Long silences with your spouse. Sitting on the porch with your dad without filling the air. Listening to your teenager tell you about something you don't care about, because they care about it, and the caring is the whole point.

I'm trying. I'm 64 and I'm trying, and some days I still reach for my phone in the middle of a conversation like a smoker reaching for a cigarette. The habit is deep. The skill is rusty. The work is real.

But here's what I know: nobody on their deathbed says they wish they'd spent more time on their phone. They say they wish they'd spent more time with the people in the room.

So put the phone down. And then... and this is the part nobody tells you... figure out what to say next.

That's where life is.