I started tearing up within a few seconds.

It was ten minutes of a World Cup match this summer. I don’t remember who was playing. I don’t remember if a goal was scored.

All I remember was the wave of emotion.

It was mesmerizing to watch the fans cheer on their countrymen. The singing, the chanting, the ferocity of pride. I couldn’t help but be swept away.

Only when I stepped away to grab a glass of water did I pause to reflect.

What was I doing? A middle-aged woman who isn’t a fan of the game or from the countries represented. What was causing such a swell in my heart?

It was something that I had felt before. At town gatherings. In places of worship. At company meetings rallying the team.

The feeling of being seen, valued, and worthy as a group. The power of unity.

That is the magic of shared purpose.

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Having a goal isn’t enough. People need to feel it.

The people happiest in their jobs feel connected — to the people they work with and to what binds them together.

It’s not the money.

It’s not the industry.

It’s not a title or a logo.

It’s a commitment to something bigger than their individual goals. A sense that you matter in the greater scheme of things. A vision of what could be if everyone pulls their weight.

This is what distinguishes workplaces where people sign in from those where they show up. They might both require hard work and long hours, but one burns you down while the other lights you up.

Places that demand you sign in attract people who are checking boxes and going through motions. Places that inspire you to show up attract people ready to engage, solve problems, and get dirty doing so.

I have worked in both environments.

In one company — a big, prestigious brand, the people who clocked in never wanted to put in more than what was necessary. They drew bright lines around what they were responsible for and stayed away from everything else. It wasn’t just that they stuck to their job description, it was that they didn’t want to be there, and weren’t going to spend a minute longer on anything that could keep them at work longer than absolutely necessary.

Contrast that with another company—a small, bootstrapped startup. We had little funding and never enough people to do the work. And yet teammates proactively volunteered to help each other. They shared ideas, and they shared the workload.

Both organizations had ambitious goals but where one had a mission that it posted on walls, the other had one people lived and breathed every day. One had money. The other had heart. One had people who needed to be there. The other had people who chose to be there.

In the second one, the team was inspired by the mission. It meant something to them beyond the paycheck. They were there to achieve something great and they knew they could only get there together. Their collective ambition made them willing to go harder and travel farther to get there.

Meanwhile, in the first organization, I’m sure there were also people who cared about the mission. But too many had lost their motivation. Even with annual goals and quarterly targets, being an employee at this company felt like being stuck on a piece of driftwood out at sea. You could try to swim or push forward, but what was the point? The organization felt like it was without direction and without a destination.

Shared purpose requires direction and goals, but those alone are insufficient. Shared purpose is only truly achieved when your team feels a connection to your organization and its work that feels visceral and valuable to their life experience.

Shared purpose works only when it aligns with personal values.

For most workers, the first and most critical question about work is what’s in it for them? How will it pay the bills, develop their skills, and propel their career forward?

My first full-time job was the first and last time I followed those principles. Choosing prestige and a path defined by others led me to serious health issues that took me two years to fully recover from.

When you go after something you don’t actually want, it takes triple the effort. You don’t just work hard doing the work. You have to work against your resistance as well. And the part that most people forget is that you also have to work to pretend that you want it. It’s no wonder I was completely depleted, physically, mentally and emotionally.

From that moment forward, I decided to carve a career path using a different lens.

I focused first and foremost on finding people with whom I shared common values. Things like how we viewed ambition, what created a healthy business, how priorities are set, and how we treated people.

What I didn’t realize was that I was filtering for what would become the foundation of shared purpose. Shared values are what enable people in an organization with the same goal to have a common approach. It means that what matters to them personally overlaps with what matters professionally. That’s the depth of alignment needed for complex businesses with big ambitions. Anything less means falling short of their full potential.

As a leader, this cuts both ways. Your values are what the right people will be filtering for when they decide whether to join you.

Shared purpose is the foundation of accountability and resilience.

Too many organizations suffer from a passing-the-buck culture: It’s not my problem. Someone else should solve it.

It’s not how great teams work.

At the startup, no one hesitated to contribute to what I call black-hole projects — ones that consume infinite energy and don’t sit in any one department. If it was important to the organization, it was important to them.

When people actually care, they aren’t nitpicky about who is doing the work. They are more concerned that the work gets done and that it gets done well. People feel pride in their work and a desire to show up with their colleagues because they trust each other to carry the burden together.

In an organization with a strong sense of shared purpose, people celebrate each other’s progress. They are willing to stick their necks out to give each other feedback. They know that each of them needs to be growing, contributing, and getting something out of the experience. Everyone is so talented that if they aren’t getting enough from the experience, they will leave, which would hurt the whole organization’s ability to reach its goals.

It’s not the fear that drives them. It’s the sense of possibility. And it’s the collective ambition to realize it. That’s what makes them resilient and able to sustain the difficult moments.

In a world where the pace of change and the level of uncertainty is only growing, this is what will separate the organizations that attract and retain the best talent from those that fizzle out.

Take Action.

Creating shared purpose is a full-contact sport. It’s not an overnight project. But there are some essential elements.

Start with what matters to you.

Your personal values are your compass. The purpose your team feels will be shaped by what you model, reward, and tolerate, whether you name it or not. When you don’t know what guides you, you won’t be able to build it into your team on purpose.

If you’re not sure where to start, use these questions to guide you:

1. Priorities - How do you determine what matters most?

2. Focus & Investment - How do you think about where to invest your time, money and attention?

3. People - How do you treat people, when and why?

4. Problem Solving - How do you identify issues? How do you address them?

You don’t have to answer all of the questions at once, but they can form the basis for your personal value system.

Get crystal clear on your mission and why.

A great litmus test is could a 6th grader explain it. If they can’t, it’s too complicated, too long, or just not clear. When it’s simple and clear, your team will be able to digest it and live it. Anything more complicated leads to misunderstanding and ultimately, misalignment.

As someone who loves context and caveats, this is not my forte. I have had to rely upon colleagues who challenge me to cut, to edit, to find the core essence and let go of the rest. Because when you can’t be crisp, you can’t be clear.

Don’t assume everyone is aligned.

Take the time to survey your team on the core parts of your business. Do they have the same definition for your target customer? Do they understand how your business functions and where the sticking points are?

I recently ran an organization through a Strategic Planning process. The leadership team had been at odds with each other for months, several were ready to quit. Once I surveyed them and their individual assessments of the operations, the source of the friction became clear.

Everyone was talking past each other. When one person talked about risk, they were referring to revenue. Meanwhile, another was concerned about brand. Everyone was bought into the mission, but no one shared the same picture of what was actually happening and what needed to change.

Shared purpose isn’t just about the direction you’re heading in, it’s about how you get there as well. Just like the World Cup teams, even if you know you have to get the ball into the goal, if you aren’t running the same play, it’ll just be a mess of players on the field. That’s what was happening to this leadership team.

The solution was to take the time to align on a common understanding of how they operated and why. If you’re facing the same challenge, don’t treat it as a deficiency. Use it as an opportunity to involve the leadership team, the Board, and other key stakeholders, including members of your team.

Weave it into how you operate.

Once you have sufficient alignment, then it’s time to weave it into your day-to-day operations and culture.

How do you embody it as a leader?
Do you mention it in your team meetings?
Is it part of your annual strategic planning and goal-setting process?
Would everyone on your team be able to name it?
Do you reward people for perpetuating it?

The most important question is: Do people feel it?

When people feel it, that’s when you know it’s fully integrated. You can’t manufacture the feeling. The trust, the emotion, the meaning. It only happens when the people in the organization live it.

I didn’t know a single player on that field. I still felt it.

Think back to the version of you at an inflection point in your career. The one still figuring out what mattered, choosing between the prestigious path and the one that fit.

What kind of place would that person have wanted to walk into? Where would they have signed in, and where would they have shown up?

You get to build that place now.

Someone out there is looking for it.

May you lead without limits,

Kathy

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“Mom, are you angry with me?” my daughter asked as she came out of her taekwondo class.

I was completely caught off guard. I wasn’t angry at all. I was distracted because I needed to use the bathroom. I wasn’t upset; I was trying to hold it together for the seven minutes it would take to get home.

I had no idea that my jaw was set. I looked distracted. I was rigid with focus and discomfort.

I can’t tell you how many times this happens at work.

Leaders think they are being focused. But really, they are showing anger and unintentionally worrying their teams. And it’s all because they are preoccupied with something else and don’t even realize how they come across.

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A leader doesn’t just set the direction; they set the tone.

Anyone who likes to host parties knows that they are responsible not just for the date and the location. They are the source of the ambiance, the feeling that guests have when they walk into the room.

It’s in the details, the music, the scent, the food, the lighting. But it’s also in the emotion and the energy of the people in the room.

Unsurprisingly, if the host is agitated or anxious, it permeates everything.

That’s why great hosts don’t just emphasize the physical elements; they take the time to show up as they want and make their guests feel how they want them to feel.

Leaders are the hosts of their workplaces.

When a leader is off-kilter, it’s unsurprising if their team feels it. Even if someone on their team is level-headed and stays calm, the leader’s energy and perspective will permeate, distract, and even drain that person and those around them.

The cues you give aren’t always visible to you.

Most of us, unless we are trained actors or models, aren’t aware of the subtle cues we give.

Narrowed eyes. A furrowed brow. A stiff stance. These can all suggest that something isn’t right. That you are worried or disappointed. Perhaps you are simply uncomfortable, like I was, but your team doesn’t know that.

It’s human nature to assume that when someone engages with you and shows signs of discomfort, you are the cause. That’s exactly the calculus your team is making every day.

But it’s not what is actually happening.

Too many leaders are living in another reality. A past meeting that didn’t go well. A future conversation they are dreading. A budget they are still trying to negotiate. It might have nothing to do with work at all, like I was with my daughter.

Sadly, it’s rare for a leader to be fully present, even if they want to be. It’s even rarer for a leader to notice the signals they are giving off.

When a leader is relaxed, joking, and smiling, their team assumes that all is well in their work and their relationship with them. When someone isn’t worrying about what their leader thinks, they’re more likely to reveal what is actually happening, share concerns, ask for help, and be creative.

Risk-taking is less risky when a boss feels more ready to receive and support their thoughts.

What sets the tone for your team.

If you’re trying to create the conditions for your team to be fully engaged, the first and most important condition is you.

Even if the rest of the industry or company is going to pot, you are the person who can most influence how your team is feeling. I’m not saying you can manage your team’s feelings. Just that you can either be a source of productive conditions or a source of negative ones.

If you want to be a productive source, how do you do that when so many of the signals are things you might not even be aware of?

Like hosting a party, below are the ones that I’ve found mattered most in my career as a follower and as a leader, and how I calibrated them intentionally instead of letting them sneak up on me and sabotage my ability to lead.

1. Attention - Am I fully with the present conversation, topic, and person?

2. Pace - How do I feel about our speed, and what do I want the team to do?

3. Facial expressions - Do I know what my mouth, eyes, and brow are doing? Are they communicating what I actually want to convey?

4. Physical posture - Am I open or closed? Tight or loose? Upright, hunched?

5. Tone - What is the pitch, the emphasis, and tenor of my voice?

6. Language - The words I use.

The order above matters.

For example, I put language last because people overemphasize it. Being eloquent is great, but it’s not what people remember most.

My style is rather casual, but I’m often remembered for being diplomatic or having gravitas. It’s not my words that do that. It’s that I’m fully attentive and have taken the time to proactively tune the rest. Once your facial expressions, posture, and tone are in a good place, choosing your words naturally becomes the next focus.

I once worked for a leader who was regularly distressed and would speak loudly, turn red with agitation, and use clipped, staccato sentences. He wasn’t always annoyed with his team, but that’s what he conveyed. Whatever was causing him distress, he passed directly to his team.

When he wanted more innovation, he got more caution. When he pushed everyone to move faster, they panicked and made more mistakes. When he asked for better documentation, people wasted hours trying to perfect capturing systems that didn’t actually matter because they didn’t want to face his ire.

He regularly stood with his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed. He rarely smiled, and he was often on his phone during meetings. It signaled deep disrespect and meant he missed much of what his team tried to share.

He had no idea what he was signaling. Most of us don’t. That’s the work.

Choosing the emotional temperature you want to convey.

As a leader, your team looks to you to understand how to react. Your team can be in a steady state flow, intensely fixing a critical problem, wildly testing as part of a wave of innovation, or calmly recovering from a big launch. You need to choose.

When you both anticipate where they should be emotionally and convey your energy in alignment, that’s how a team works best.

A great team doesn’t lack friction, but it also isn’t constantly stressed or split between what the leader is signaling and how the team needs to respond.

I was often highly conscious of the team’s emotional needs when things weren’t going well, but I would forget to pause when things were going well.

After a layoff or other cost-cutting measure, I took time to compose myself and be highly intentional about how I showed up in meetings and conversations. From what conversations were happening to when they took place to the words I used, I choreographed it all.

But when things were going well, I wasn’t always conscious that perhaps my team needed more acknowledgment, more pacing, or critical feedback that wasn’t all positive. When the numbers were going up and to the right, I overlooked those elements and took for granted that a simply positive demeanor might not best serve my team.

The most painful example of this was when our sales were growing rapidly. But our sales playbook and process weren’t in great shape. We were benefiting from a star seller carrying the numbers and an untapped market that didn’t require rigor to capture. It was smooth sailing on the outside, but underneath was a mess that would rear its head six months later once the initial honeymoon period passed.

Instead of having the hard conversations and lowering the mood, I wanted the team to persist in the high of the moment and avoided the harder work of asking key members of the team to dissect our process and build it from the ground up.

It would have required more time, budget, and new tools and processes. Naming it might have killed the high we were all basking in. I should have, but I didn’t.

Take action.

If you want to improve how you are setting the emotional temperature for your team, start with what your team needs emotionally.

Maybe it’s acknowledgment, or it’s recalibration, or perhaps a motivated push. Whatever it is, it might vary by person or sub-team. Get specific. Without goals, you are just winging it and likely to make the wrong call.

Be present in every interaction. This is perhaps one of the highest-ROI actions and yet the hardest to execute. If you’re like the leaders I coach, you are juggling a multitude of important things.

The only solution is to give yourself permission to be human and not keep all the balls in the air all the time. You don’t have to drop them; you have to put them down in order to give each the attention they need.

Give yourself time to transition between meetings and put away your distractions. When you are focused on the person or people in front of you, they can feel it. And what you’re signaling is far more likely to land.

Lastly, assess your actual behaviors. Until you truly see yourself in action, you won’t know what to adjust.

I once worked with an incredible technology leader who people often felt came across as robotic. Even though he was saying the right words, something about his gestures and tone made it feel not genuine. When I asked him more about his approach, he revealed he was an introvert and struggled with human interaction.

His solution wasn’t to shy away. It was to practice. He recorded himself multiple times and practiced his speaking in front of a mirror. He learned the importance of smiling, pausing, and relaxing his body while keeping an upright posture.

Even though he wasn’t the most charismatic leader, he more than made up for it with his analytical and strategic thinking, his care for his people, and his ability to set his team’s emotional tone; he created some of the strongest teams I’d ever worked with.

Borrow this leader’s playbook. Record yourself, practice in front of a mirror. Note what you’re signaling, not just what you’re saying. Study the features, postures, inflections, and words of other leaders whom you find effective. Practice one element for a week or two. And ask for feedback. You won’t know how it’s going unless someone tells you.

If you’d like to get even more formal feedback, consider working with a coach or ask HR for support. You don’t have to do this alone.

Setting the emotional temperature isn’t just about performance. The most skilled leaders do it in a way that’s real and relatable. That doesn’t mean sharing everything you feel. We are all a bundle of emotions and thoughts. Filter them to what the team needs while fully embodying the emotion because you feel it, too.

Choose just one of the actions above and try it out. And if you’re open to it, tell your team you want to improve in this area and would love their feedback.

It’s amazing what happens when we share vulnerably what we’re working on and how we might stumble. We show our teams not only that we are committed to growing as leaders for their benefit, but we also give them permission to do the same.

You’re already setting the temperature. Now you can do so intentionally.

May you lead without limits,
Kathy

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Reading about this is the easy part. Watching yourself is harder, and most leaders won’t do it alone.

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Our first session is Friday, October 23rd at 11am ET. And if temperature setting isn’t where you need help, bring what’s top of mind for you.

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My client was starting to think the issue was him.

Maybe he wasn’t seeing clearly. Maybe his boss thought he was focused on the wrong target. Or worse, maybe he was becoming an annoying, squeaky wheel, the kind people roll their eyes at, just not to your face.

The silence, intentional or not, had become a verdict.

They’re not ignoring you, they’re not here.

Senior leaders live six months to a year ahead. It’s the job. Setting direction requires it.

It can be hard to see into the future and still relate to what is happening in the present. Sarah Connor in Terminator 2 was put into a mental institution because of it.

Leaders don’t get locked up for it, but they often struggle with the same issue. Sometimes without even knowing it.

Even as executives work through scenarios, review trends, and hypothesize outcomes, they don’t get a pass on the day-to-day. That’s also part of the job. The problem is when they confuse the future and the present.

Too many executives overestimate their context-switching abilities and underestimate the negative impacts of the cost. They think they are simply juggling multiple realities, but really they can only hold one at a time. They miss the present while contemplating the future. And they color the future with their present concerns.

Your boss isn’t withholding a decision. They’re in a different year, and the version of them in the room is only partially listening.

The truth, from inside the other chair.

When I went into future-planning mode, I would become completely immersed. Strategic planning can be all-consuming, especially if you want to be thorough and collaborate as an executive team.

I would all but ignore my current operations, relying upon my deputies to lead. Unless it was an emergency, I didn’t have time.

Things I would have normally caught and properly addressed festered or ballooned. Underperforming employees didn’t get the feedback they needed. A large client who needed nurturing almost churned.

The one that stung the most? Deferring a deep assessment of our revenue engine. I knew it was important, but we were hitting targets. Had I dug deeper, sooner, I would have realized we had one star, but the rest of the team was floundering. We didn’t have a repeatable sale. Our business relied on one person to keep showing up.

I only realized the issue well into the next year, the one where we were supposed to grow exponentially. Instead, we had to rebuild from the ground up.

The worst part wasn’t the miss. It was the team members who had raised flags, more than once. But I pushed them aside while I lived in a hypothetical, rosy future.

I thought I was being the futurist leader when I was actually distracted and disconnected.

I wasn’t deftly juggling two realities. I could hold only one at a time, and by dropping one, I dropped the other. My team didn’t just suffer the delay alongside me; they saw a leader who they were no longer sure they could trust.

Why the gap costs more than delay.

The cost of the disconnect starts with perspective, but it can quickly grow into confusion and ultimately distrust. It’s the kind of team stress with no release valve: the team can see the gap growing, but their leader doesn’t even know it exists.

If you’re working with a leader like this, you know what it feels like. You bring up topics that should register with weight, and you get a cursory nod. You push for a controversial change with emotion, and you are told things are OK, now’s not the time.

The reaction is real, but it’s not correlated to what you said. It’s connected to another time and place, one that you have no context for, and no idea how it’s changing the conversation.

It means decisions are delayed, poorly executed, or just outright ignored. Some never needed prioritizing, but if you’re a senior, trusted leader bringing up the same topics more than once, it’s demoralizing to feel unheard.

A path forward with more clarity and coherence.

I’m always a fan of simply saying the thing. Every leader I know who has done this has built a stronger relationship, not a weaker one.

When my client raised his concerns for the fourth time, he did it with a question. “Am I not seeing something clearly? Why does it feel like this issue is a high priority for me, but not the leadership team?” It had taken five months, but his boss finally ran it up the chain and got it resolved.

The result wasn’t just closure, but confidence. He had proven something to his boss that acquiescence would have never conveyed.

Here are four actions that can help your boss move past indecision or a non-answer.

1. Ask what time zone they’re in. Plainly. “Are you in planning mode right now? When do you come out?” Most people never ask, and most leaders will answer.

2. Timestamp your asks. Lead with the horizon before the content — “this is a this-quarter decision” or “this is a next-year question.” Route yourself into the reality they’re standing in.

3. Raise the pattern, not the issue. “I’ve brought this up before. I want to understand whether it’s not landing or it’s not a priority.” Never assume. Name your fear not because you want sympathy, but because you seek understanding. Sharing that it feels like insubordination, or like admitting you’ve been keeping score gives your boss permission to tell you what is actually true.

4. Bring both horizons before you’re asked. Map the short-term and long-term implications yourself. You stop being the person raising a present-tense problem and become the person thinking in their time frame.

The gap was never about you, but you can help close it.

This is your reminder that your boss’s actions aren’t always about you or what you did or said, especially when they are in future mode.

They won’t always remember to share their context. And you don’t have to wait to ask.

The gap wasn’t caused by you. But you can help your boss see it and close it together.

May you lead without limits,

Kathy

P.S. If you know of a leader who needs this reminder, please consider sending it to them. And if you enjoyed this post, consider giving it a ❤️. It’ll help me reach more leaders — thank you!

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“Why am I the only one naming the problems? Doesn’t everyone else see it? We’re wasting time!”

One of my clients, Malcolm, a talented EVP and division leader, is frustrated beyond measure.

He thought he was joining an ambitious, smart group of leaders, ready to accelerate the business.

His due diligence didn’t surface that underneath their buttoned-up exterior was a fear of upsetting others that resulted in endless meetings to hash and rehash issues. Critical blockers left unaddressed. Solutions unexplored because no one had the guts to raise the alarm.

I helped build a room like that.

Sadly, it’s a familiar situation that exists in many organizations. The lost time and energy are the most immediate impacts, but that’s only the start.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. In fact, I feel ashamed that I unwittingly helped perpetuate it in some of the companies I led.

I didn’t understand the damage I was causing until I learned of Kim Scott’s Radical Candor framework nearly 10 years ago.

It was the first time someone put such insightful words to my experience of balancing empathy and directness.

As someone who spent much of my early life living with someone who leaned towards obnoxious aggression, I defaulted to deep empathy. The fear and pain caused by this person in my life left deep scars. Speaking up more often led to demeaning shouting matches and tears rather than any productive outcome. I vowed never to make anyone feel that way.

But I wasn’t conscious of how a proclivity towards caring for someone else’s feelings could lead to ruinous empathy. It doesn’t just hurt an organization’s overall effectiveness, but also the relationships within it.

I learned this the hard way in one of my roles as a division lead. Working in a matrixed structure, I had a product partner who wasn’t developing the solutions we needed to drive commercial success. Our conversations were always friendly and congenial, but I only hinted at what I really wanted: faster feature delivery for partners and improved KPIs.

After 3 months, nothing changed.

My team, frustrated with my approach, asked me why I wasn’t pushing harder. My response was always, “He just needs time. He’ll get there when he gets there. We’ll be OK.”

I ended up being right and wrong.

The part of the business that depended on my collaboration with this particular product partner floundered, but another part of my business grew by leaps and bounds, masking the issue. My product partner never delivered the KPI results we needed, and no one but my team felt the miss.

Just because I got lucky didn't mean I had the right approach.

It took me a long time to realize it, but my miss wasn’t really about financial targets. It cost me the kind of relationship I value, one based on trust and mutual respect.

When I decided, consciously or not, to avoid telling him exactly what I was seeing and concerned about, I chose not to trust that he could handle that truth. I chose not to trust that he could address the issue. I chose to stay on the safe side of the relationship at the cost of both of our learning and growth as leaders.

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It was past midnight. Again.

We were somewhere in a weeks-long stretch of 2:30 a.m. finishes, the kind of hours that blur together until you stop counting them.

And every night, without fail, my boss would look over as we were wrapping up and say the same thing.

“Come on. I’ll share a cab.”

He didn’t have to. He was tired too. He probably would have rather had a quiet ride alone.

But he never left without me. Not once.

It said: I see you. We are in this together.

And I never forgot it.

Around the same time, two jobs earlier, I had the opposite experience.

I was in investment banking, heading to a client meeting with one of the largest technology companies in the world. I’d been up all night preparing. Really, all week.

I stumbled under a duffel bag stuffed with somewhere between forty and sixty presentation books, so bleary-eyed I could barely walk in my suit and heels.

Not one person offered to help.

These weren’t unkind people. They weren’t trying to make a statement.

The absence made one anyway.

It said: rank has its privileges. And you don’t have them yet.

I don’t carry resentments, but I felt that one deeply. Maybe it was the fatigue, or just feeling alone.

The impression never left me. I promised myself I would lead differently.

The imprints we make unintentionally sometimes last longer than the ones we make intentionally.

We spend a lot of energy on the formal moments of leadership. The produced all-hands. The values statement. The message from the top that took three rounds of revisions to get right.

Those moments matter, but they don’t build culture.

Culture is built in the cab ride home. In who picks up the duffel bag. In what you do with your calendar, your attention, and your energy when you think no one is paying particular attention.

Your team is always paying attention.

Not in a surveillance way. Not consciously, necessarily. But the daily choices you make about pace, presence, boundaries, and care are teaching your people something. Every day. Whether you intend them to or not.

The question is whether you know what you’re teaching.

I taught something I would never have said out loud.

I was a COO at a company in startup mode. One of the things on my plate was a conference we were hosting, and I owned it.

It wasn’t landing. Our CEO kept telling me the pieces weren’t coming together, and privately I agreed with him, though for a different reason. I didn’t think the direction was focused enough on the business or on the outcomes we needed.

I had a team. Any one of them could have helped me build a better structure.

I didn’t ask.

Instead I held it. More hours. More iterations. More rounds of asking for feedback on work that had already been reworked twice.

I told myself I was protecting them. They were stretched. They weren’t ready for something this visible.

And there was enough truth in that to let me believe it.

Underneath it was something I couldn’t see at the time. I was afraid to ask them to stretch. And I was more afraid of what would happen if they could.

Because if my team could carry more than I believed, and carry it better than I could, then my role would have to change.

That’s the fear that kept me holding the bag. It was safer to believe I was the one who had to do it all than to find out I wasn’t.

It took me years to hear the reframe. I didn’t have to shift. I got the chance to.

But that shift asks for something harder than more hours. It asks for strategic thinking, honest reflection, and a look at reality that’s easier to avoid.

The overwork was how I avoided it. It just looked like commitment.

And what I modeled to my team, without meaning to, was overthinking. Rumination. A leader who wouldn’t set down a load that was crushing her.

Your habits may be doing more harm than you realize.

Recently, I was on a video call with a senior executive, a potential client. Thoughtful, experienced, someone who cared about his work and his people.

His eyes kept drifting. Typing. Reading something.

He could follow the thread well enough. Our conversation was loose, the topic manageable.

What I felt was unmistakable. Something else mattered more than our conversation, than me.

I’m not telling this as a criticism. I’m telling it because I understand exactly how it happens.

Leaders today are inundated. Dashboard updates, Slack pings, email stacking up, texts arriving underneath all of it. The demands are real and relentless. Over time, without intention, presence becomes a casualty of keeping up.

Team conversations are among the most expensive things we do. They cost you time. They cost the other person time. And they’re one of the richest chances we get to exchange something harder to measure than information: trust, connection, the sense that this person sees me.

When you’re half there, you think you’re juggling, maybe even helping. You’re actually sending a message: what you’re saying doesn’t warrant my full attention.

It’s not what you mean. But your team receives it either way.

The antidote is intention.

A few months ago, I was facilitating a strategic planning session. The leadership team had fractured since the process started. This was high stakes. A lot was riding on the next few hours.

I wasn’t anxious, exactly. But I knew my energy would set the tone in that room before I said a word.

So on the drive over, I put on a specific song, one I knew would make me feel connected to the people I was about to work with and to the meaning of the work itself.

I did this because I know what happens when I don’t. I walk in running on competence, and people can feel the difference.

By the time I parked, my eyes had welled up. It wasn’t manufactured. It was real.

And it changed what I could do in that room. I could be open and pointed at the same time. I could redirect people when the conversation drifted, and it didn’t land as correction, because they could feel I was with them. I could keep drawing each person back in.

That mattered, because the goal of that session was never a set of answers everyone agreed on. It was to rebuild trust in the process, and every person in the room believing their input counted.

I could do that because I was already connected when I walked in. My job was to make those threads visible as the conversation went.

That’s what intention looks like. Quiet. Often invisible. The choices you make before you walk through the door.

The harder question too many leaders leave unanswered.

Most leaders I work with aren’t sleepwalking on purpose. They’re moving fast. And when you’re moving fast, the small gestures go first. The eye contact. The follow-through. The moment of connection before the meeting starts.

The harder question is whether you know how you’re landing. Most of us have never checked.

A 360 can surface some of it. An open conversation with your team can surface more. Both require trust, and if that trust isn’t fully there yet, start by paying attention on your own.

Notice what your daily choices are teaching. Ask yourself whether the culture you think you’re building matches the one you’re modeling.

When there’s a gap, it almost always lives in the small moments.

Your Turn

This week, pick one conversation. One meeting. One moment where you’d normally be half-present.

Show up fully instead. See what it opens.

And if you’re ready for the harder version: ask someone you trust on your team what they notice. What habits land. Where they feel the gap.

That conversation, uncomfortable as it is, is itself a message. It says: I’m paying attention to how I’m showing up for you.

The leaders who shaped you weren’t performing when they shaped you. They were doing the ordinary thing in the ordinary moment, and you never forgot it.

You’re doing the same for someone right now.

May you lead without limits,

If this was useful, tap the ❤️ so more leaders can find it.

And if someone came to mind while you were reading, send it to them.

Share

I write this to reach leaders who need the reminder to check how they’re showing up, and you sharing it is how that reach happens.

It’s 8pm and the dinner delivery has just arrived. The CEO and CFO start to inhale the food without even looking at it, as they push forward on day 3 of drafting end-of-year goals for the business.

Meanwhile, the rest of the exec team is at home, wondering what is being cooked up, when the next round of “emergency” inputs are needed, and whether what gets shared resembles anything practical.

The CEO and CFO are wearing their hero capes with pride, thinking they are bearing the heavy lifting on behalf of the leadership team.

But really, they are simply trading the short-term facade of speed and efficiency for mid-term misalignment and rework, and long-term distrust and execution risk from disillusioned team members that were never brought along.

Sound familiar?

I’ve sat on both sides of the experience. And neither wins.

It took me years to reconcile how early narrow conversations that feel expeditious can actually create friction that is hard to undo and later slows down the business in ways that are truly painful.

But there is another way. It’s counterintuitive and has a delayed payoff, but it’s the only way to drive to the outcomes that really matter: an aligned team that feels real ownership over their goals and is ready to attack them with all their energy.

The Core Problem

What leaders who optimize for efficiency and accuracy often miss is the relational cost and the downstream execution cost of going too fast too early.

Moving fast and keeping things tight feels efficient in the moment—but creates wasted cycles later when people have to make sense of decisions they weren’t part of and don’t feel bought in. These are the costs that are harder to see when you’re rushing to get things started:

Four Specific Friction Points

1. Timeline and steps unclear — Finance and CEO work in a black box sounds efficient, but it’s really just an opaque black box. Without a clear path for how other people get brought in by function and by level, everyone either resigns themselves to the sidelines (slowly starting to check out) or their anxiety starts to grow as they wonder what’s really happening behind closed doors. You don’t need to have it mapped out day-by-day, but even a weekly or monthly view, along with key deliverables, will help everyone anticipate what they need to budget time for and what they can expect.

2. Decision authority and responsibility muddled — A leader who’s used to calling all the shots and having full authority may feel it’s not necessary to specify who decides what, who makes trades, and why. But when people don’t know what they control versus what gets funneled up the chain, they start to get stressed. Conversations also quickly become personal negotiations between leaders if they don’t have a reference point on how to engage. Relationships don’t just get tested; they can often be pushed into zones where they are hard to repair.

3. Communication blackouts — When executives are in the thick of planning, they often forget to message their teams. I know I did, and it’s understandable. The work is intense, and the stakes feel high. But information vacuums create uncertainty, which leads to fear. This builds distrust and can hurt team productivity as people start to guess or assume the worst might be happening.

4. Unstated hypotheses and assumptions — One of the biggest misses in goal setting is when leaders have preconceived notions and don’t share them upfront. It’s easy to blow past this step when you’ve been thinking about the details 24x7 for weeks. But when you unveil everything as a finished product, it feels like a black box, which is harder to understand and even harder to accept. People need time to digest, disagree, and contribute their best thinking. When you rush through these steps, you don’t get the benefit of their inputs, and you delay or hurt their ability to become fully bought into the path forward. It also means you didn’t pressure-test your foundation, soliciting input or data points that could augment the current strategy or even indicate a better path forward. That means you run a higher risk of pushing forward without a complete picture in addition to poor team buy-in.

The Shift: Transparency as the Solution

All of these issues can be addressed by committing to planning out your process and sharing it in advance. Specify the process, roles, responsibilities, and key themes upfront. Make assumptions and hypotheses visible so people can weigh in, prepare their input, and actually understand the thinking. This builds trust and gets better thinking from across the organization.

And don’t over-engineer your approach. The best ones are clear, simple, and acknowledge that you won’t get everything right. Committing to getting feedback, learning, and making adjustments is just one more way to build trust.

Last but not least, time-bound all of this work. It’s easy to get into rabbit holes and add more details, more decision-points, more, more, more. But your initial instincts that guided you to keep this process efficient and not overtake the core work of running the business were correct. You just needed to make sure you weren’t anchoring towards speed above all else.

Why Start Now (July)

It may feel early, but outlining the process now means that when you get to the real goal-setting work in Q4, you’ve already laid the groundwork. You’ve alerted your team, set expectations about what happens when, and created a path for inclusion. This requires more upfront work but generates far more leverage, speed, alignment, and execution later.

Your Turn

The goal-setting process doesn’t have to be a bureaucratic waste of time. It can be a moment to reinforce a culture of inclusion, transparency and of strong decision-making.

The payoff: People who actually want to execute because they were brought along. Better alignment. Faster execution. And teams that trust the process because they were part of building it.

What’s one thing you can start outlining now so that your team gets the benefit later as you set your goals for 2027? I’d love to hear about it in the Comments.

And if this post resonated, give it a like or even better, share it with a friend who needs the reminder to get started now.

May you lead without limits,

My clients are high performers. Ambitious. Proven. They have succeeded over and over again.

So they come to me already moving fast, and they want to move faster.

One client is months into a stalled job search. Another is staring at negative feedback she can’t make sense of, much less address. The thread running through all of them is the same: the dread that creeps in when you keep spending effort and stop seeing progress.

They expect me to tell them to push harder. Longer hours. More on the plate. It’s what has always worked for them, and it’s what their instinct screams when things slow down.

I rarely suggest any of it.

Instead, I tell them to pause. To breathe. To move their bodies. Getting out of our minds and into our bodies has a way of loosening the grip that fear and old habits have on us.

And then I ask the question that makes them go quiet:

What gives you joy?

What makes you laugh? What could you do and lose all track of time?

Most of them freeze. Not because the answer is hard, but because the question feels so out of place. So unrelated to work.

That’s exactly where the work is.

This is a hard time to be a worker, and even harder to be a leader.

With an always-on culture, there is always something to worry about. Some new threat to the business, some risk to your financial health, some stealth competitor, or just the dark and scary unknown.

The data backs up the mood. Globally, employee engagement fell to 20% last year, its lowest level since 2020, costing the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace: 2026).

When times get harder, the highest-performing leaders tend to double down. Push harder. Demand more, of themselves first and then of their teams. There is nothing wrong with asking for more when more is required.

But too often we forget the power of joy. Of the things that make us feel lighter and filled with energy instead of dread.

Today I want to explore the path less taken to keeping yourself and your team on course when things feel dark.

Classic management guidance isn’t bad, but it isn’t enough.

Most leadership advice says you stick to the basics when sentiment is down:

• Be clear about the why behind the goals. Purpose unifies a team and keeps people motivated.

• Delineate roles and decision authority. Autonomy gives people a sense of control and speeds up the work.

• Recognize great work publicly and regularly. People who are seen and valued feel more secure.

• Give and receive feedback with respect, timeliness, and specificity. When everyone knows where they stand and how they can improve, they worry less and deliver more.

These are all good practices, and they should be part of your core playbook. But sometimes they aren’t enough.

Why?

Because sometimes the work itself isn’t what motivates someone. And no amount of positive reinforcement, or even a healthy culture, can mask the insidious risk of working in a deeply uncertain environment.

Even if you lead well, there are sociopolitical and macroeconomic forces that can disrupt your business and how your team works. Tariffs, wars, supply chain breakdowns, inflation, fuel prices. They aren’t in your control, even when you build contingency plans. And even if you mitigate some of them, your clients and partners may not be able to.

It sounds grim. Perhaps it is.

So take a page from the Stoics and the Epicureans.

The Stoics believed worry is unnecessary. If you can’t control something, let it go. If you can control it, then do something about it. Either way, worry takes you nowhere.

If you can’t control macroeconomic change, stop wringing your hands over it. You can control your response, so do some prudent, anticipatory scenario planning, and then let it go.

That’s a great way to handle uncertainty. But I’ve found the human mind is an unwieldy thing. Even when you try to manage it, it squirms away. Doing the prep work is one thing. Actually letting it go is another.

This is where a dose of Epicurean philosophy keeps you on track. The Epicureans believed in the pursuit of pleasure as the highest good. They’re often misread as seeking reckless indulgence, but it’s really about making reasonable choices that increase your enjoyment and reduce your pain.

If you’re hungry, eat. If you’re tired, sleep. This isn’t about answering every craving, especially the destructive ones like abusing substances or overspending. It’s about meeting your essential needs and making yourself more comfortable.

So what happens when you marry the Stoic view with the Epicurean one?

You find a path that lowers the stress for you and your team, and gives you permission to put some joy back into your work and your life.

Permission to be less focused, on purpose.

When my clients hit a wall, they are universally surprised by what I suggest. I almost never tell them to work harder. I ask them what lights them up.

For one client, it was building a transformative children’s product. For another, it was more time with his nearly grown children. For another, it was exploring new hobbies with no need to achieve anything at all.

The activity didn’t matter. It was how it made them feel that made the difference.

For me, it’s painting and drawing. Playing games. Exploring new places. Dancing. Music. When I’m doing any of those things, I lose all track of space and time. I’m lost in the joy of it.

Here’s why these things belong woven into your days and weeks, not saved for some someday: our best work, our most creative thinking, our greatest ability to lead and collaborate, all of it comes when we are relaxed. I’m not saying fear and anger can’t produce results too. But they come with side effects you don’t want. Migraines. Fatigue. Fraying relationships. A low hum of malaise.

It’s far better to feel upbeat and ready to engage. And that only happens when you give yourself permission to spend time on the things that get you there.

It’s counterintuitive. Taking time away from your core work to loosen up and exercise different muscles can feel like you are purposefully avoiding your work. Or that you aren’t committed to your goals. But it’s actually the opposite if you’re doing it intentionally and with time bounds.

My client who was struggling with the job search felt like he would be abandoning his responsibilities to his partner and family if he took time to build out his children’s product idea. I gave him permission to time-block parts of his week for it.

Why? Because it was the one thing that made him feel better. And when he felt better, he was able to persist in his search. Even more important, he was able to show up to networking conversations and interviews with energy and enthusiasm, something he couldn’t fake. Without a positive attitude, no amount of outreach and applications was going to land him opportunities.

The pursuit of his side project idea wasn’t a distraction. It was his fuel.

When you allow yourself time to insert joyful activities into your routine, you build the capacity to sustain your energy, your resolve, and your strategic thinking when the pressure is on.

Know what lights up your team, and protect it.

Once you know how to re-energize yourself, learn what does the same for your people. Make time to hear how they’d spend their time if they had no constraints.

Then, when you can, don’t just ask. Have them share it. Make it a team activity.

Putting joy into the work isn’t only a mental break from the grind. It’s how your people come to feel fully seen. When someone gets to share their love for something, it lets everyone else share in their happiness.

The antidote to fear is joy. And just like fear, joy is contagious.

This doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. A golf outing hosted by the fanatic on your team is lovely, but if that’s not in the cards, have them tell the story of how they got into the sport. A five-minute mini-lesson on Zoom. That’s it.

It sounds basic, maybe even reckless, to spend what little time you have on something unrelated to work. But giving your people the floor to share what matters to them will do more for them than any KPI review. And their teammates will feel the shift too.

Your greatest asset is your team.

The only way to truly maximize their contribution is to maximize their energy and their engagement. Using something outside of work to do it? That’s the quiet advantage the wisest leaders already rely on.

It’s time for you to use it too. For yourself, and for your team.

Your Turn

What lights you up? I’d love to hear about it in the comments. And I’d love to know how you make room in your days for those moments. If you’ve found a way to bring more joy into your team’s work, share that too. Other leaders would be grateful for it.

Leave a comment

May you lead without limits,

“I don’t know why I bother. Everything I share with him comes back with a thousand redlines. It doesn’t even resemble my work anymore. Even an email — he has an opinion about everything. And nothing is good enough.”

As the EVP listened during the skip-level meeting, she struggled with what to do.

One of her most senior leaders was struggling. The VP was one of the most promising hires on her team. But his team was stifled by his approach — constant redoing of work, checking in at every step. Some had already left. Those who remained were fearful and deflated.

She hired him because he was so well respected in the industry. Everyone agreed, he wasn’t just brilliant, he was the future.

None of the interviews and reference checks revealed what would happen after he came on board. He wouldn’t just bring his acumen; he would also bring a set of standards and corresponding behaviors that were unsustainable, for him and for his team.

What made him dramatically successful as an individual contributor had become just as dramatic a limitation to his ability to lead.

The EVP didn’t have an answer yet. Neither, it turned out, did the VP.

That question — what to do — is what brought her to me.

The ego trap

It’s natural to connect your identity with your achievements. And early in your career, it is what helps you get ahead.

For me, early on, it was essential that I held on to every success because I needed evidence to build my confidence and my courage. It didn’t feel like feeding my ego because my insecurities felt so much more dangerous — they were the bigger risk to my career. I needed to stop questioning myself in order to take on bigger assignments, greater challenges, and responsibilities that required new skills.

Without achievement, I would have been left floundering in the uncertainty and the stress of whether I would hit my targets, get recognized, and have more opportunities for growth.

When we start to see measurable progress, our brains register it as evidence that we can do the work and succeed. Over time, it builds our confidence. This is essential to our ability to seek out more complex work, higher-stakes mandates, and greater scope and responsibility. Our prior successes give us the evidence that we can do more, be more.

The challenge is when we start to conflate our successes with our identity — who we are and our self-worth. When we believe that we are only worthy because of our successes and that only we can succeed, that is when we have created our own cage.

Leadership is fundamentally about directing and mobilizing more than ourselves toward a goal. You simply cannot do that well if you believe that only you can do the work.

For the VP, it showed up as control — the thousand redlines, the constant corrections, the work that was never good enough.

But the ego trap doesn’t always look like the VP’s story. Sometimes it doesn’t look like control at all. Sometimes it looks like responsibility. It looks like the person staying latest, carrying the most, never letting anything drop — not because they believe they’re the best, but because they’re afraid of what it means if they’re not there to catch it.

That was my version.

The quieter version

I thought I was done with conflating my success with my identity after becoming an executive at a publicly traded company and leading a team of over 250 people. But no.

When I returned to a smaller startup, where I doubled down on the mission and attached my identity to the organization’s success, my ego reared its head again, and all the old narratives came back.

I wasn’t micromanaging my team. I was doing something that felt more virtuous — I was filling gaps. There was work that needed doing and no one with the bandwidth or expertise to do it. So I did it.

I told myself: this is temporary. This is what leaders do in early-stage companies. This is ownership.

What I didn’t say out loud — not to my CEO, not to my board, not really to myself: we need to hire someone with expertise I don’t have. And we need to hire someone to increase our capacity.

Those were structural problems. I was trying to solve them with personal effort.

The result? I overextended myself, I lost my focus, and my self confidence, again.

I ultimately reduced my scope of work (with some persistent and kind nudging from my CEO). I won’t lie, it felt like a tremendous blow. But it was the change I needed.

The question I’ve sat with since: why did it take my CEO nudging me to reduce my scope before I named that out loud?

I think I know the answer. Saying ‘I can’t fill these gaps alone’ felt like admitting I should have seen it sooner. Should have hired better. Should have built capacity before we hit the wall. The reluctance to name the structural problem was its own ego trap — not arrogance, but the story that needing help meant I had already failed.

That is the version of this trap that I almost never see written about. And it’s the one I encounter most often in the senior leaders I coach.

The limitations you don’t see

The cage starts off small. It’s all about you.

When you let your ego’s narrative that only you can do the work, you start to overwhelm yourself. When only you are the solution, then you have to do all of the work.

It starts with later nights, some weekends. It grows into rumination in bed, a racing mind when you wake up in the middle of the night. It means distraction from your personal relationships and interactions.

But then it also starts to distract you in your work meetings. Instead of focusing on the topic at hand, you’re thinking about the projects you need to finish — the ones that only you can do. But these aren’t the worst of it.

The most negative impact shows up in how your team starts to read you.

Your constant corrections and insertions get interpreted as, “I don’t trust you.” And the truth is, you don’t.

It becomes unsafe to speak up or share a thought because you’ve proven that your default is to correct, nitpick, or simply take over the work.

People stop trying or showing proactive effort. What’s the point? It ultimately won’t matter because you’ll critique the work, commandeer it,or micromanage the task until the person wants to give up.

Your team starts to simply wait for you to initiate, to think, to drive the work. You become your own worst enemy. Instead of having your team become owners, they become deferrers — waiting for you to initiate everything.

If your version looks more like mine — overreach rather than control — the limitations are less visible but equally damaging. Your team may trust you. They may even feel protected by you. But they’re not growing, because you’re carrying what should be theirs. And you’re not growing, because you’re too busy plugging holes to lead.

And that vicious cycle reinforces your ego’s narrative, “there is no one else, only you.”

Whether you arrived there through control, overreach, or by not naming the structural constraints, the destination is the same.

You burn yourself out telling yourself that “you’re being thorough,”“keeping high standards,” or “shouldering the burden for the team .” And your team stagnates, loses their ability to grow and lead, because it’s never safe to take a risk or attempt something where they might fail.

The impact is longlasting

The immediate signs are bad, but they are overshadowed by the long-term impact.

Even worse than not developing your team is losing your best talent. The most capable people want to grow. They won’t sit still while you hold them back. They will leave. Why stay when they will never be trusted?

The most devastating part? You never discover what you are capable of as a leader because your ego is making you too attached to being a doer.

When you let your ego lead, you limit your true potential. If only you can do the work, then your hours, energy, and intellect create the limit of your power.

You cannot take on bigger roles, more scope, and greater responsibility because you haven’t developed anyone around you to take over your current tasks.

Over time, you aren’t just limiting your growth; you might even be shrinking your power by depleting yourself completely.

You are exhausted, mentally and physically, because you won’t allow yourself to rest. Or because the structure genuinely can’t support the work without you — and you haven’t yet named that as the organizational problem it actually is.

When it all sits on your shoulders, how can you rest?

None of this is comfortable to sit with. I know, because I sat with it for longer than I’d like to admit.

The path forward (not a fix — an unlearning)

If you want to aim for bigger roles, more scope ,and more impact, the shift you need doesn’t start with doing more.

It starts with doing less.

Putting down the list of to-do’s, and pausing to reflect: What do you want to become?

Do you want to be the person who delegates and spends their time on the things that only they can do?

Do you want to be a leader who develops people into their potential?

Do you want to be the person whom people trust and know that you trust them?

Are you willing to be the person who doesn’t get the credit because your greatest work is invisible — it’s in the culture you build, the leaders you develop?

If you want the above, your path forward isn’t filled with more. It’s actually about being willing to be OK with less:

Not being the hero at every turn.

Not knowing every detail of every project.

Not controlling every outcome.

Being willing to name the structural gaps you’ve been filling with personal effort — and asking for what the work actually requires.

Being needed less and no longer the go-to person.

The way to shift your mindset and your behaviors isn’t by adding more. It’s about taking things off your plate to make space for reflection and unlearning.

The step too many leaders miss

If you choose this path, be aware that it will take time to resist old habits and recurring narratives. These are long-held beliefs that served you well.

To let go of all of these stories, you have to be willing to grieve and go through all the stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and finally acceptance.

These are not small feelings, and they do not pass without causing some waves in their wake.

Denial is the resistance to reality that feels like a way to contain the situation, but really is just a way to delay the inevitable. Reality is like gravity. You can fight it, but you already know who will win.

When I was struggling to lead all the functions I had chosen to take on, I kept pushing back on my CEO. My ego blocked my ability to see what was evident to everyone else. Denial is your ego’s first tactic. It masks what it doesn’t want you to see and justifies what it wants you to do.

Only when I broke down one evening after yet another fight with my husband about my working hours and level of stress did I start to acknowledge the truth. I was in way over my head.

And that’s when my ego moved into anger.

Anger can brew loudly, with explosiveness, or softly, with venom. In both cases, it will drain you and leave you feeling empty and without any energy left for critical thinking or resolve.

For me, anger showed up with a victim mentality. Instead of owning my part in not addressing the structural gap and instead, adopting an unhealthy hero’s mindset, I chose to defend my choices and blame everyone and everything around me.

Only when I started to take responsibility did I shift into depression, or what I’d like to call despair.

Depression showed up for me in the form of moping and retreat. My realization and role rescoping announcement came while I was on vacation at a family reunion. Instead of taking part and enjoying the festivities, I was busy nursing my wounds and feeling sorry for myself. I felt shame, guilt, and a continued sense of being wronged. I’d like to say I moved out of this phase with clarity and a renewed sense of purpose, but I didn’t. If I’m honest, it took me weeks, if not months, to truly move through the depression phase.

Bargaining showed up late for me — after I thought I was through it all. I assumed that once I’d settled into the reduced scope, my ego had made peace with reality. But no, I found myself looking for ways to insert myself into other parts of the business. My ego wasn’t done. It was just regrouping.

Bargaining is one last Hail Mary from your ego, trying once more to push against reality and what you actually need. The negotiation is just a way to delay the final step.

I only stopped negotiating when my body flat-out refused to do more. I was so exhausted and frayed. I needed rest, deep rest.

Acceptance is when you can finally move forward. It might not feel relaxed, but most people feel some release from the tension when you reach this state. You’re no longer fighting against gravity, you’re starting to work with it.

When I finally reached the stage of acceptance, I felt like a deflated balloon. I was finally ready to take on less to focus on my health, my family, and to work my way back towards more sustainable and strategic leadership.

What I didn’t realize when I was going through it was that you might have to go through this cycle over and over again. Different situations, different people will trigger different narratives, requiring you to recommit to this path and to grieve again and again.

I was 15 years into my leadership career when I was reminded: Your ego will not let go of its attachment to your success narratives without a fight. And that it will try to regain its control whenever it sees a chance.

Choose your path

If you’re feeling the burden of “only I can do the work” or have someone on your team who is struggling through it, the good news is that you (or they) can overcome these default tendencies.

It will not happen overnight, and it will require time and persistence. And the more practice you invest, the easier it will get. The cycles, when they return (notice I said “when” and not “if”), will get shorter and less stressful.

The key is to start with a strategic pause to reflect and ask yourself, “What do you want to become?”

The ego that got you here wants you to think letting go means failure. It doesn’t. It means evolution.

What I found on the other side wasn’t ease. It was clarity — and the first real sense in years that I was leading instead of just surviving.

YOUR TURN

I’d love to know which old habits no longer serve you and what you did to break free. Share them in the comments below. I read each one, and I know others will benefit, too.

Leave a comment

And if this post resonated with you, please consider sharing it with another leader who needs a reminder that their challenges are not unique and that they can get to the other side. I’ll be cheering them on.

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May you lead without limits,

P.S. My First Retreat — A Career without Limits

I’ve been planning something special for the fall. Many of you have reached out asking for more help in shaping your career. You might already be looking for your next adventure at your current company or another, or perhaps you haven’t yet started but would like to take a strategic pause with support.

If this is you, come and join me for my first-ever (and maybe my only) retreat on November 12-15 in Lancaster, PA. It will be a relaxing long weekend of fun, reflection, and nourishment. Spaces are limited, and as a subscriber, I’m letting you know first. Learn more here.

Each post contains the full recording of our conversation, my reflections, and a timestamped summary of the entire conversation at the very bottom of the post. Many thanks to my guest !

I’ll be honest — I walked into this conversation with a small amount of unconscious bias.

When I hear “retired Major General,” my movie-brain goes straight to the caricature. Rigid. Top-down. Command and control. The kind of leader who barks orders and expects silence in return. That’s the story Hollywood has been selling for decades, and most of us have absorbed it without questioning it much.

96% of American adults have never served in the military. So we fill the gap with Patton. With the archetype of the general who was a “true badass” — Robert’s words — for a particular moment in time, but whose methods would crater any modern organization.

Then I spent 40 minutes talking to Robert Mixon, Jr.

Within the first few minutes, he said something that stopped me: “I think I’ve made 99.5% of all the leadership mistakes you can make.”

He said it matter-of-factly. No performance, no setup. Just the plain truth from a man who commanded a division of thousands of soldiers, ran a manufacturing company as president, led a nonprofit, and has been coaching leaders for over a decade. He wasn’t building to a lesson. He was just telling you who he is.

That’s when I understood. Robert doesn’t represent the caricature of military leadership. He dismantles it — not by arguing against it, but simply by how he shows up.

All anybody has to do is spend two minutes with him, and they can feel it.

Chaos isn’t the exception. It’s the condition.

Robert’s framework for all-in adaptive leadership starts with an honest diagnosis of where we are right now.

He defines chaos as “raging uncertainty — where we don’t know what we don’t know.”

That phrase stuck with me. Because most of us have a vague sense that things feel hard right now. Economically. Organizationally. In ways that are hard to name.

Raging uncertainty is the language. It’s not a temporary disruption we’re waiting to resolve. It’s the water we’re swimming in.

And here’s the thing Robert and I landed on that I talk about all the time: we are all, on some level, preschoolers on the inside.

We want to know what’s for dinner. What time we’re supposed to be on the call. What the schedule looks like.

Kids respond well to preschool precisely because there’s structure — circle time, then weather, then recess, then snacks.

As adults, we’ve layered sophistication over the same basic need. We want certainty. And when it disappears, we struggle.

I recognize this in myself. When I’m anxious, I start talking faster. I fill the airspace. And all I’m doing, as a leader, is making everyone around me more anxious, too.

The leader’s job isn’t to pretend certainty exists. It’s to create enough of a container — a direction, a shared sense of purpose, a set of values that hold — so that people can function without it.

That’s what Robert calls setting the azimuth.

The Big Six — and what each one actually means in practice

Robert has distilled his leadership thinking into what he calls the Big Six principles of all-in adaptive leadership. He’s clear that these aren’t original to him. He learned them from watching great leaders, studying under people like General Colin Powell, and getting them wrong himself before he got them right.

I want to give each one the space it deserves — because these are not just principles to agree with. They’re practices to build.

1. Set the azimuth.

An azimuth is a military term for a direction of travel — a compass bearing that keeps you oriented even when the terrain changes. Robert uses it to mean your organizational true north: mission, intent, values, and the specific behaviors that bring those values to life.

Here’s what makes this different from the version most organizations do: it has to be built with the team, not handed down to them.

Robert walked us through what this looks like in practice. You sit down together and ask: Who are we? What do we do? Why do we do it? You work through mission and intent and values collectively. You define what your values actually mean in behavior — because if you don’t define them, people make up their own definitions, and those definitions are usually not right.

The azimuth also has to be measurable — which is where I think this approach really stands out and can have a lasting impact.

Robert reminded us all: “that which is measured gets done.” He learned this as a cavalry officer and as a manufacturing president.

Vague aspirations don’t hold. But when you can show progress, people see the mission isn’t just words.

And then you sustain it. Not announce it and forget about it. You persist and make it last.

2. Listen.

Robert’s mom told him: God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. His mom is 93. He says he still hasn’t fully delivered on her advice, but he’s working on it.

Stephen Covey said: “Listen with the intent to understand, not to reply.” Robert’s honest that 99% of us do the latter.

But there is a better way.

The practical tool he uses — and teaches — is the two-second rule. Before you respond to anyone speaking to you, wait two seconds. Just two.

The reasons are better than you’d expect.

First: the person may not be done. Interrupting is a signal of disrespect, whether you intend it or not.

Second: you give yourself time to actually think before you speak, instead of just blurting.

Third: and this one is the most powerful — when you give people a chance to finish and then wait before responding, they feel regarded. They feel like what they said mattered. That feeling, built over time, creates trust.

Robert says if you practice the two-second rule consistently for 21 days and audit yourself on it daily, you’ll watch people’s behavior change. Not because you gave them feedback. Because yours changed.

I added two more reasons:

One: if you’re having an emotional reaction to what someone said, the pause gives you a chance to catch it before it lands on the other person.

And two: when we rush, we signal anxiety. People feel that energy and mirror it back. The pause is not just a listening tool. It’s a regulation tool.

3. Trust and develop your people.

You cannot scale what you won’t release. Leaders who hoard decisions create teams that wait to be told what to do — and in a world of raging uncertainty, that is a dangerous dynamic.

Robert frames this simply: you have to trust people if you want them to grow. And developing them is not optional. It is the work.

4. Do the right thing when no one is looking.

Before anyone else. Make sure you are leading by example.

This is where Robert starts when he works with leaders who feel overwhelmed. Not with the frameworks. With the personal mission statement.

Two or three sentences: Who am I? What do I do? Why do I do it? Write it. Write the values and operating principles that follow from it. What can people expect from me? What do I expect from them? Sign it. Date it. Share it with your team.

Now you have put a marker in the ground that you can be held to — and that you can hold yourself to. Robert calls these “daily audits.” Are you walking the talk? Not sometimes. Habitually. Not episodically.

What I find so powerful about this is that it mirrors what I work on with my clients in the ME Work — the inner operating system that makes everything else possible. When you haven’t taken care of yourself, you are not able to focus on the people around. you.

Robert arrived at the same place through the military, through boardrooms, through coaching: The first person you have to lead is you.

5. When in charge, take charge.

This is the one that sounds like the caricature — but turns out to be its opposite.

When Robert says “take charge,” he does not mean be loud, rigid, or directive. He means: be the calm.

Embody what he calls tactical patience. Be the one who says, “We may not know all the answers, but we have an azimuth, we have each other, and we are going to get through this together.”

And then — critically — underwrite mistakes. Not punish them. Learn from them. That distinction is the difference between a team that takes initiative and a team that pretends to.

6. Balance the personal and professional.

Most people hear “balance” and think: how many hours am I on Zoom? Am I the last one to leave the office?

Robert reframes it entirely. You cannot manage time — it is finite. What you can do is take more ownership of how you show up within it. The way you do that is by sustaining your four levels of energy: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

Think of them as battery levels. If they’re depleted, you’re running the five previous principles on fumes. If they’re protected and restored, you have something real to give.

This isn’t soft. It’s structural. A depleted leader creates a depleted team.

The two questions that define your culture

One of the most clarifying moments in the conversation came when Robert posed a simple scenario.

Something goes wrong in your organization. It happens daily — that’s the world we’re in. The boss turns to someone on the team and asks a question.

Option one: “What were you thinking?”

Option two: “What did we learn here?”

Feel the difference. Not just in tone. In what each question creates.

The first is a verdict dressed up as a question. It signals blame. It tells your team that mistakes are dangerous. And in a world of raging uncertainty, if your team believes mistakes are dangerous, they will stop making decisions. They will wait. They will cover themselves.

The second is an invitation. It signals learning. It tells your team that their judgment is trusted, even when it falls short. It builds what Robert calls a culture of commitment — where people are genuinely all in because they belong, they matter, and their stumbles are treated as part of the work.

Robert calls this the difference between “sins of commission” and “sins of omission.”

Mistakes made while genuinely trying to do the right thing within the mission and values are supposed to happen. They are not a crisis. They are the necessary data and the signals you need to lead well.

Toxicity lives in the blame game, he said. Not sure if you believe him? Just look around you. In the organizations with the greatest distrust, the greatest fear — fear of blame is likely one of the core reasons.

Respect is specific, not aspirational

Here’s where the conversation got practical in a way that surprised me.

We started talking about how you actually bring values to life — not just post them on a wall and call it culture. Robert pushed on the word “respect.” Most organizations say they value it. But what does it look like?

He walked us through a workshop where a team sat with that question in silence. Then the ideas starting coming out. They weren’t bad, but none of them were measurable — all of them were subjective and required context to assess.

Robert went back to “that which is measured gets done,” and he challenged the team, “What if we just do things on time?”

The room shifted.

That’s a behavior that isn’t up for interpretation. It’s measurable. And every person on that team had felt the disrespect of the opposite — meetings that ran long with no agenda, colleagues who arrived late without acknowledgment, time treated as an abundant resource when it is the one thing no one can get back.

Robert told us he estimates he’s lost roughly 8,000 hours of his life in meetings with no agenda, no clear start, no clear end. Just stories about trout fishing and nothing that had anything to do with why people were in the room.

Being on time is not a small act of professionalism. It’s a statement. It says: I value your time. I follow through on commitments. I show up the way I said I would.

The question he left us with: what behavior in your organization, if your team committed to it and sustained it for 21 days, would actually shift the culture?

That’s not rhetorical. It’s where to start.

Managing up when the culture isn’t there yet

Not everyone listening leads from the top. And not everyone at the top is creating the conditions Robert describes.

So I asked him directly: what do you do when you see the need but you’re not the one setting the tone for the whole organization?

His answer was one of my favorites in the entire conversation.

Don’t walk into your boss’s office and tell her she’s doing it wrong. Even if she is. Especially if she is. You will raise her defenses, and you will lose before you’ve started.

Instead, ask for a pilot. In your own team. For 90 days. Give your boss regular updates — what Robert calls a “back brief” — showing what you’re learning and what value it’s creating. Let her see results without feeling threatened by critique.

Evidence is more powerful than argument. Always.

If you can create a pocket of culture within your own sphere of influence, people notice. They want what you have. The culture spreads not because someone mandated it, but because someone made it visible, and real and worth wanting.

What I took away

I asked Robert at the end what he wanted people to walk away with.

He said: “Leading effectively through chaos is hard work. It’s adult work. But it’s doable if you’re committed to the journey.”

No promise that it gets easy. No guarantee that the frameworks fix everything. Just the honest invitation to commit to the work — of leading yourself, and then of leading others — with intention and consistency.

I left this conversation thinking about my own preschooler tendencies. The moments when raging uncertainty has made me want certainty so badly that I’ve defaulted to control, to speed, to telling instead of asking. The moments I’ve broken the two-second rule. The times I’ve asked “What were you thinking?” instead of “What did we learn here?”

I also left thinking about what it means to carry 33 years of service and still introduce yourself by saying: I’ve made almost every mistake there is. That posture — that refusal to perform authority — is exactly what I mean when I write about leading from the inside out. It’s the ME Work made visible. It’s what genuine credibility looks like.

Robert didn’t just talk about a different kind of leadership. He was a living example of it for 40 minutes.

All anybody has to do is spend two minutes with him, and they can feel it.

If you can spare the time, watch the video. You won’t regret it. Before the Substack Live, I was feeling tired (a terrible night sleep) and behind on my day. But in our 15 min right before the Live started, talking with Robert, I just felt myself light up.

That’s what real leadership looks like. It isn’t about the title, or the authority. It’s about being able to see someone fully and to help them see themselves just as completely. It is a gift. And conversations with gifted leaders like Robert remind me of the importance of simple actions done with great strategic intent and care.

That’s the “all in leadership” that Robert teaches, and it’s exactly what the world needs more of right now.

About Robert Mixon Jr.

Robert is a retired U.S. Army Major General, former corporate executive, and founder of Level 5 Associates. He is the author of We’re All In and The Power of Being All In, both of which include tools you can start using today. The first chapter of each book is available as a free download at level5associates.com.

He writes All In Adaptive Leadership Insights on Substack, where he publishes practical leadership tools multiple times each week. Go find him.

If you enjoyed this post, consider giving it ❤️ to help more people find it on Substack. And consider sharing it with a leader you know who is navigating tough times — this might be exactly what they needed to help them lead calmly through the chaos of our times.

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May you lead without limits,

Your Timestamped Guide to the Conversation

Timestamp — What We Covered

00:00 — Welcome and introductions — Robert’s background across military, corporate, and nonprofit leadership

03:28 — Robert’s origin story: “I’ve made 99.5% of all the leadership mistakes you can make”

05:01 — Defining chaos as raging uncertainty — and why humans crave certainty at every age

07:23 — Introduction to All-In Adaptive Leadership and the Big Six principles

07:38 — Principle 1: Set the azimuth — true north, mission, values, behaviors defined collectively

07:53 — Principle 2: Listen — the two-ear, one-mouth rule and the gap between what we know and what we practice

08:50 — Principles 3–6 overview: trust and develop, lead yourself first, when in charge take charge, balance personal and professional

09:41 — Reframing “work-life balance” as energy management across four levels

11:01 — Where to start when the Big Six feel overwhelming — begin with a personal mission statement1

2:07 — Vulnerability as a leadership strength, not a weakness

14:02 — Learning the Big Six from General Colin Powell

14:51 — The two-second rule for listening — and why it changes team behavior within 21 days

16:06 — Kathy adds: the two-second rule as an emotional regulation tool, not just a listening tool

17:10 — “Fire, ready, aim” — why speed without pause is a bad technique in leadership and in life

18:00 — What it looks and feels like to be the calm in the chaos

20:28 — The fix-it trap: when problem-solving becomes the wrong default

21:36 — The fairy tale of the all-knowing leader and why directive leadership is largely ineffective

22:52 — Building buy-in through collective problem definition — getting people part of the solution

23:21 — Belonging as a fundamental human need and what it takes to create it at work

24:03 — Sins of commission vs. sins of omission — underwriting mistakes vs. the blame game

24:34 — The two questions that define your culture: “What were you thinking?” vs. “What did we learn here?”

25:31 — The five levels of culture and why levels one and two leave people feeling like they don’t belong

27:44 — Respect as a leadership value — and what behaviors actually bring it to life

29:57 — The 8,000 wasted hours and why meeting discipline is an act of respect

31:20 — How the two-second rule and meeting discipline together can shift an organizational culture

32:02 — Building accountability through shared, written, signed commitments

34:00 — The azimuth-setting process in practice — how to build it collectively with your team

34:16 — Managing up when the culture isn’t there yet — the 90-day pilot program approach

36:43 — “Evidence is more powerful than critique”

37:27 — Closing reflections: it’s adult work, it’s doable, it requires commitment to the journey

38:53 — Kathy’s reflection: busting the military leadership caricature

39:24 — Robert’s response: the misidentification of military leadership and what it actually looks like

A while back, I wrote a piece about the uncomfortable topics you should share with your direct reports during onboarding.

It’s unusual to dive into fears, risks, and disappointments at the outset. But those honeymoon, sunshine-filled days are exactly when you both should talk about the prospect of dark times.

Beyond the topics themselves, what I was really getting at is that while a relationship is still forming and still positive, that’s the best time to talk about the tough topics that will only get more awkward and difficult over time.

When the inevitable challenges arise, and they will, the fear that you and your direct report will be feeling will cloud your judgment. It’ll create suspicion and doubt. It will erode trust when you need it most.

What I didn’t share in that piece is how you can guide your people to more productive behaviors and how to work with you (a la your user manual).

In a world dominated by one-line tweets and abbreviated text messages, if I were leading a team today, I’d opt to write a letter to share my thoughts.

Here’s what I’d say. Please feel free to borrow.

A letter to my team

Dear team,

I’m writing to you because I want our working relationship to be as strong as possible, not just because it will help us achieve our mission and goals, but because I believe that one of the greatest gifts of work is the people you meet and the relationships you build.

Your talents and efforts will help us achieve our goals, but that’s small potatoes. I value you more than simply as a body in a seat.

What matters as much and perhaps more is how your energy, personality, and wisdom will enrich the experience of everyone on this team, including mine. You being here will make this journey more enjoyable and more memorable.

That said, I also recognize that we each have roles to fill, and that even if things are working well now, that may change in the future.

Whether it’s market dynamics, your interests, or my behaviors, the nature of work is that things change and not always positively.

Preparing for tough times can go a long way toward ensuring we do what’s best for the organization and preserve our relationship, which I hope lasts long beyond our time working together.

My mandate as a leader isn’t just to hit our short-term goals — annual targets and the like — it’s to create an organization that delivers on its promises, functions well, and has a long-term, sustainable future.

I hired you not just because you met the criteria in the job description, but because you possessed these critical attributes:

• A deep desire to grow and develop your skills and your career

• An alignment with the mission of our organization that goes beyond your functional role

• A belief that working together, we can accomplish more than if we were working apart

With all this in mind, I wanted to share with you what I wish my bosses had shared with me when we first started working together.

1. Your potential is infinite, but only if you manage it. If you see work in other areas you are interested in, ask about them. If there is a project you want to be assigned to, tell me. If you want to develop into a different role, say it. Help me help you.

2. Help me focus. My time is far more limited than my role demands. I care about you and your work, and I don’t think about either enough. I need you to make it easy for me to focus on what matters. Weekly, brief summaries of progress and obstacles, preparing for our 1:1s with a structured agenda, and creating dashboards that are easy for me to review are just some examples. Not sure, send a draft to me and let’s workshop it together.

3. Debate openly and often. Your thinking elevates the team's thinking. We will only arrive at the best answers if we can openly discuss and debate our ideas. Please know that even if I don’t agree with you, I value diverse insights, shared thoughtfully far more than I will ever value groupthink.

4. Know the why. Experimentation and exploration are valuable, but only if there is a hypothesis we are testing. If you aren’t sure about the why, ask until you get a clear answer. Always be willing to cut work that lacks a clear purpose.

5. Feedback is a gift. If something isn’t going well in our work together, tell me. Nothing will be gained by waiting. If it’s something I wasn’t aware of, give me a chance to own it. If it’s something I don’t agree with, you deserve to know. Feelings can fester, frustrate, and distract. Don’t let them.

6. When it’s time to go. Let’s talk it out and let’s plan it out. We don’t have to be dramatic, and we don’t have to have it hurt our working relationship. The best organizations have succession plans. Ideally, we’re planning together through the end and beyond.

My career was built on relationships: colleagues, bosses, clients, and partners. It is and was the way of the world. If you agree, then invite you to discuss any of the above points with me at any time.

Our journey together will not last forever. Let’s make the most of the experience and set ourselves up for far more than our shared tenure.

With respect and appreciation,

Not vaguely uncomfortable. Not mildly skeptical. Scared. The kind of scared where you watch everyone else jump in and you tell yourself you’re being thoughtful when really you’re just standing at the edge.

Here’s what made that strange: I am not someone who usually hangs back from technology.

I built some of the first websites on the internet. I walked the halls of Sand Hill Road, helping Silicon Valley’s most ambitious technology innovators bring their ideas to the financial markets. I was part of the team that helped launch one of the first video streaming platforms: Hulu. I remember when all of that felt like science fiction.

And yet. In 2023, when people I respect were already years deep into AI, I was still watching from the door.

I’ve been sitting with why that was. And a conversation I had with Kristi Pihl gave me language for something I think I already knew. (Watch the full conversation here).

Kristi is a Northwestern-trained mechanical engineer who has been building AI systems since 2017. Her work earned a TIME Best Invention in AI in 2019. She has spent two decades as a strategic tech advisor inside some of the most complex organizations in the world. She knows this technology from the inside.

And when we talked, she spent almost no time on the technology itself.

She kept coming back to this: AI is a mirror. It is a language-based model designed to reflect back what you give it. Which means if you approach it with fear, with defensiveness, with a need to look capable before you actually are... that is exactly what gets amplified.

She called it an accelerant. Not just an amplifier.

“If you’re already going to make the wrong turn,” she said, “you’re just going to make it faster.”

I’ve been thinking about that in the context of my own 2023 self. Because the fear I felt wasn’t really about the technology. It was about what the technology might reveal. About gaps I hadn’t named yet. About a version of my thinking that might not look as sharp under a microscope. About being exposed as a novice, undeserving of my title or my authority.

The fear was mine. AI just had the potential to show it to me faster.

Your C-suite is probably not afraid of AI.

They’ve done the work. They’ve committed budget, assembled a task force, chosen a platform. They have a plan and they are executing it.

But I want to ask you something.

When the board asked about your AI strategy, did you answer from clarity or from pressure? Did you build the plan because you knew what your organization needed, or because the alternative felt like falling behind? Was it a decision from your best thinking, or a decision from FOMO dressed up as strategy?

Kristi sees hundreds of organizations from her vantage point as an advisor and investor, and there’s a clear pattern: almost every organization she encounters right now believes they are behind. Behind their competitors. Behind the market. Behind some imaginary benchmark set by a press release from a tech CEO whose actual numbers, she noted, do not hold up to scrutiny.

The pressure is real. Boards are breathing down necks. Middle managers are automating workflows before anyone has asked whether those workflows were actually the problem. Everyone is running. And running faster, she reminded me, in the wrong direction is worse than running slowly in the right one.

Here’s the thing: neuroscience and psychology are aligned on this. Decisions made out of fear are rarely good ones. The bear chasing you in your mind doesn’t actually exist. The tiger is not in the room. What is in the room is a manufactured sense of urgency, a FOMO cycle fed by headlines, and a leadership team that has not yet had the harder conversation underneath the AI conversation.

The harder conversation is about what AI cannot fix.

It cannot fix a product that doesn’t fit its market. It cannot fix a pricing model that isn’t resonating. It cannot fix teams that have stopped communicating honestly with each other. It cannot fix a culture where people are overtaxed, understaffed, and quietly disengaged.

What AI will do is accelerate all of those things. Amplify them. Make them more visible, faster, at a greater scale.

This is where I keep coming back to the work I do with senior leaders. Not the AI strategy. The ME Work underneath it.

Because the leaders I coach who are quietly questioning their AI choices are rarely questioning the tools. They’re questioning whether their organizations are actually ready to use them well. And that question almost always leads somewhere more personal: do my teams trust each other enough to have the conversations that would tell us the truth? Are we making this decision from our best thinking, or from our fear of looking like we don’t have the answers?

Kristi described it this way: the leaders who use AI well already have the native judgment to evaluate it. They can tell when it’s being sycophantic. They can sense when it’s pulling from a random source instead of settled science. They have the critical thinking to know when to trust the output and when to push back.

That judgment takes time to build. It takes reps. And here’s the existential problem: if we automate the work that builds that judgment before the next generation has developed it, we don’t just lose the output. We lose the succession pipeline. We raise leaders who have offloaded their thinking before they ever owned it.

You can offload a task. You cannot offload understanding.

So what do you actually do with this?

There’s no skipping the hard part. Because the hard part is the point.

The first thing is to slow down enough to ask an honest question: what is the real problem we are trying to solve? Not “how do we implement AI?” but “what decisions are we making poorly, and why?” Not “how do we use these tools?” but “do we have the culture, the trust, the communication norms that would let us use any tool well?”

The second is to look at your leadership team with fresh eyes. Not at their AI literacy. At their judgment. At whether they are having the real conversations or the performative ones. At whether fear is running the room or curiosity is.

Kristi’s advice for getting grounded was simple: go talk to someone you trust who has no skin in the game. Not your board. Not your investors. Not the vendor selling you the platform. The colleague from ten years ago who always told you the truth. The mentor who is two levels ahead and has no incentive to flatter you. Your nine-year-old, who, as Kristi reminded me, is considerably more skeptical of AI than most executives.

Make your world smaller for a moment. The real signal is usually there, in the people who knew you before you had something to prove.

I am no longer scared of AI.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I am still fearful of the existential questions. But the day-to-day business implementations. I’m over that. AI is simply part of the evolution of business building.

What helped was not a course, a certification, or a deployment plan. What helped was getting honest about what I was actually afraid of. And then doing the work to address that, not the technology.

The fear was a signal. It was pointing somewhere real. The moment I stopped trying to bypass it and started getting curious about it, things shifted.

Your organization’s relationship with AI is telling you something about your organization. The question worth asking is not whether you’re ahead or behind. It’s whether you’re actually listening.

If this conversation sparked something, I’d love to hear what you’re navigating. Hit reply or share in the comments and tell me what the real conversation underneath your AI strategy actually is. The best ones always start there.

And if you are interested in understanding how to think about AI through the lens of a long-term strategist, not just a short-term tactician, subscribe to Kristi’s Substack — Systems & Spines and follow her on LinkedIn — trust me, you’ll be happy you did.

May you lead without limits,

I came across a post he wrote in the Journal of Free Black Thought last year about what actually creates inclusion — not the slogans, not the frameworks with pretty acronyms, but the conditions under which real people genuinely contribute. And I thought: this person has done the work.

So I invited him to a Substack Live conversation. And I am so glad he agreed.

You can watch the entire conversation above or read the highlights below — the ideas I wish I had as a leader, and what I think every leader needs today. I’ve tried to organize them into themes, but if you want the full energy of the conversation, you need to hear Amri live.

Belonging vs. Mattering: Why the Difference Changes Everything

I’ve been in rooms — many of them — where someone was technically included. They were invited to the meeting. Their name was on the email. But their actual thinking, their particular expertise, the thing only they could bring? It was either overlooked or quietly ignored.

That’s belonging without mattering. And it turns out they are not the same thing.

Amri introduced me to a framework from researcher Zach Mercurio called NAN: Noticed, Affirmed, Needed.

• Noticed — Do you actually see the people around you? Do you notice what they’re working on, what they’re wrestling with, what they just accomplished?

• Affirmed — Can you articulate what someone brings to the table? Not a generic compliment. Can you specifically name their value?

• Needed — Do they know that without their particular contribution, the work is diminished?

The puzzle piece analogy is useful here: belonging is about whether the piece fits the puzzle. Mattering is about whether the puzzle needs that particular piece in order to be whole.

When you confuse the two, something goes wrong. I shared a story from my own time as a CEO. I remember sitting with my leadership team setting priorities, which every organization has to do.

The problem was never the priorities. The problem was how we communicated them.

We would, without quite meaning to, create a hierarchy of importance inside the company. Engineering was the most critical function right now — and somehow “most critical” became “most valued.” Everyone else could feel themselves shrinking. The sales team. The operations team. The people who were keeping things running.

That’s what Amri calls “anti-mattering.” And once it kicks in, the research is pretty clear about what happens: discretionary effort drops. Creativity drops. The willingness to ask good questions, share difficult observations, take risks — all of it goes down. People shift into survival mode. And survival mode is not the mode in which your next innovation gets built.

The Ubuntu Principle: Why Mattering Is Always Reciprocal

One of the things I appreciate most about Amri’s thinking is that he doesn’t let you stay comfortable in a top-down view of leadership. Mattering, he argues, is not something leaders dispense from above. It’s a reciprocal model.

He invoked Ubuntu: I am because you are. It’s the idea from post-apartheid South Africa, from Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, that identity and value are not solo projects. They’re built in relationship. You cannot separate yourself from your organization and think you’ll build something great alone.

What this means practically is this: when you make people feel like they matter less, you are not just being unkind. You are making a strategic error. You are diminishing the part of your network that might hold the ideas you don’t yet know you need. You are cutting the “weak ties” — the people just outside your inner circle — who are, as Amri pointed out and the organizational network research backs up, often the source of the most surprising and valuable insight.

He told a story that made this vivid. A colleague of his at a major pharma company — a brilliant mind who had been quietly building an internal AI capability on the side, mapping who in the organization had machine learning skills and who was just beginning to explore them — was being ignored by his manager. The manager didn’t understand what he was building. Didn’t see its value. Eventually, his manager put him on a performance improvement plan.

Amri’s colleague left. Went to a competitor. And became one of the leading AI architects in the Cambridge biotech ecosystem.

His company lost him because no one could see what he brought.

The story is about more than a bad manager. It’s about a system that wasn’t designed to notice the right things. And systems, Amri reminds us, create behavior. Structure creates culture. If your incentive structures reward individual output over collective contribution, you shouldn’t be surprised when people optimize for themselves.

The “DEI-Allergic” Leader — and Why This Conversation Is for You Too

Amri and I deliberately named this conversation, “Mattering for the DEI-Allergic.” And yes, it didn’t land for everyone.

Some people were frustrated by the framing. I understand that. I want to address it directly, because the frustration itself is instructive.

The allergy, Amri argued, was never to the underlying principles. Nobody looks at a room full of people who are contributing brilliantly, being genuinely seen for what they bring, and says: I want less of that.

The allergy was to the way the conversation was framed — often as a moral debt to be paid, with slogans in place of substance, centering group identities and grievance above all else, and with equity defined so broadly it became operationally meaningless.

Amri was clear: he wouldn’t have put DEI on the cover of his book if it hadn’t been in vogue at the time. He would have called it inclusion. Because that’s what he actually believes in — creating the conditions for people to thrive, and for organizations to generate what he calls “thick value”: the return on intangibles that don’t show up on your P&L but absolutely show up in your valuation, your ability to retain talent, and your capacity to build anything new.

Mattering is a different entry point into the same territory. It doesn’t ask anyone to take a political position. It asks: Does this person know what they bring? Do they know we need it? Are we building the systems that let that show up?

That’s not soft. That’s strategic.

The Structural Reality: How Leaders Actually Create (or Destroy) Mattering

Here’s what I will hold onto going forward: mattering is not a feeling you inspire with a good speech. Mattering is a condition you build — or fail to build — through the decisions you make every day.

Amri put it simply. Structure is a set of behaviors that creates a different tenor or condition for others to mirror. When your direct reports see you notice the person two levels below you and write them a specific, handwritten note about something they did well — that becomes a norm. Norms become rituals. Rituals become culture.

He made the point about senior leaders writing personal notes — not email, not Slack, but actual notes, four or five a week, to people outside their direct report line. When they see something, they write it down. Then they send it. He calculated: if you do that two or three times a week, times 52 weeks — you’ve touched over 100 people with a specific, genuine act of recognition.

That’s structure. Most people wouldn’t call it that. But it is.

I shared some of my own limitations here, and I want to be honest about it. When I was a CEO, I wanted to create the conditions where people genuinely mattered. I didn’t always have the language for it, but that was the intent. And then the sales pipeline would fall behind, or the marketing campaign would stall, or we’d be in the middle of building out an entirely new evaluation system, and the intention would get crowded out.

Looking back, I don’t think it was entirely an intentionality problem. It was partly a knowledge problem — I didn’t have the specific, concrete tools that Amri gave me in this conversation. And partly it was a capacity problem. I couldn’t do everything.

So I asked him: What does the overwhelmed leader actually do? And he said, without hesitation: One thing. Consistently.

Pick one behavior. Do it every week. Let it become a habit. Ask your direct reports to do the same. Let the habit become structure.

It’s not complicated. But you do have to commit.

The Ask as an Act of Mattering

I love this one. I first learned about it as a trust-building exercise from David Brooks in his book, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. It still blows my mind.

Asking someone for help — genuinely asking, not assigning, not delegating, but saying “I’ve been wrestling with this, what do you think?” — is itself an act of mattering.

Amri connected this to Marshall Goldsmith’s Feed Forward practice: instead of giving feedback on what happened, you ask for input on what you’re thinking through. There’s no evaluation involved. Just: here’s a direction I’m considering, what do you see?

It works, Amri said, because it gives people the opportunity to add value without judgment. And when people add value, they feel like they matter. And they do because their input adds to your thinking. It’s a loop. A good one.

The same logic explains why research indicates that employee volunteering is the only employee benefit outside of healthcare that truly makes a difference in employee engagement. Once you understand mattering, it’s obvious.

Volunteering is one of the cleanest expressions of mattering that exists: you contribute based on your choice, you see the direct impact, and you do it as a whole person, not a job title, and if you do it with your colleagues, you’re seeing the power of collective work. Of course, it moves the needle on engagement more than free lunches or office massages. It’s the one benefit that is entirely focused on people mattering.

Timestamp Guide

If you’d like to go straight to a specific section of the conversation, here’s where to find it:

00:00 — 04:00 | Opening: Introductions and frames the “DEI-allergic” framing
04:00 — 15:15 | Amri’s background: Topeka, Morehouse, epidemiology, Atlanta, Cook Ross, and how he got into this work
15:20 — 19:30 | The mattering construct: where it comes from, how it differs from belonging
19:30 — 23:00 | Noticed, Affirmed, Needed — the NAN framework
23:00 — 28:00 | Ubuntu and interdependence; how anti-mattering cascades through an organization
28:00 — 36:00 | Layoffs, weak ties, and the story of the AI genius who was lost
36:00 — 41:30 | Incentive structures: what happens when rewards don’t align with mattering
41:30 — 45:00 | The “DEI-allergic” framing unpacked; what the allergy is really about
45:00 — 49:00 | Volunteering research; asking for help as an act of mattering
49:00 — 53:00 | What the overwhelmed leader does: one thing, consistently
53:00 — 58:34 | Closing: Amri’s resources and where to find him

Stay Connected with Amri Johnson

If this conversation sparked something for you, Amri’s thinking goes much deeper than one hour could cover.

On Substack: Find him at Reconstructing Inclusion.

On LinkedIn: Amri Johnson

His book: Reconstructing Inclusion: Making DEI Accessible, Actionable, and Sustainable — worth your time if you want the full framework, not just the highlights.

His company: Inclusion Wins, at inclusionwins.com. He runs a course on building the mattering habit — practical, structured, something you can start immediately. If you’re a leader who wants specific tools, not just concepts, it’s a good place to start.

I met Amri on Substack. This was his first live. I will not forget it — and I hope you won’t either.

And if our conversation landed for you, consider sharing it with a friend or giving it a ❤️. That will help more people access these valuable insights.

Share

May you lead without limits,

“Mom, can you just stop?!”

I hear this about once every two days as I unskillfully parent my two teenagers.

What’s worse? Hearing it from my son is actually a win.

I see him so rarely, the few words he shares, no matter the meaning, feel like the first drops of rain on a dry, hot day.

Last month, instead of continuing to trial-and-error my way through these last years before they fly the nest, I finally decided to educate myself.

I belatedly followed a good friend’s recommendation and read Dr. Lisa Damour’s book “The Emotional Lives of Teenagers: Raising Connected, Capable, and Compassionate Adolescents.” It was eye-opening.

I realized the psychology of teenagers mimics much of what I experienced as an employee and leader of organizations undergoing fast-paced, significant change.

I’m not a psychologist or therapist, nor do I want to equate your teenage children with your employees, but I couldn’t help but see the similarities between the transformation of a teenager and what people experience in an organization undergoing change.

I wish I had known this earlier in my career.

How adults in a changing organization are similar to teenagers

Dr. Darmour describes the teenage years as a time of tremendous change. Hormones, body growth, and massive brain changes. They’re incredibly difficult to experience, and even harder to make sense of.

When my kids dismiss me or look as if their arms are not coordinated with their legs, I remind myself that it’s because of all that change. Their bodies are growing so fast, it’s not all in sync. It’s also their first time experiencing it; they don’t have a manual to follow and guide them through it.

It’s honestly very similar in organizations.

When an organization undergoes change, many of its people do, too. They are trying not only to make sense of the broader changes but also of what they mean for them individually.

In many ways, the employees are reconstructing their sense of identity in the workplace, not dissimilar to how a teenager grows into an adult, figuring out how to use their longer limbs and making sense of their new mental abilities. (Dr. Damour notes that by the end of adolescence, around age 24, an individual’s brain has been “overhauled and upgraded,” and is “faster, more powerful, and more efficient than before.")

Any leader who has guided an organization through change (restructuring functions and roles, implementing new systems and processes, or merging and divesting) knows the tremendous upheaval it causes for people — emotionally, cognitively, and practically in their day-to-day.

The “mom, please stop” process of separation-individuation is critical to adolescents developing their own sense of identity. People whose roles or daily activities are changing have to do the same. Unsurprisingly, even though they are already adults, the change can make them irritable and prone to behaviors that are hard to understand.

What I wish I had known earlier

The entire book is worth a read. Dr. Damour writes in a non-jargony, highly relatable fashion. Her stories bring every concept to life. I can’t do them justice, and I won’t regurgitate her work.

Instead, I’ll highlight the concepts that felt most immediately useful and compelling for me, and that I wish I had known as a leader.

Externalization: It’s not about you

I had never heard this term before, but the visual is very illuminating: it’s when a person comes by and literally “dumps” their burdens on you — their complaints, their worries, their frustrations, their sadness.

It’s hard to tell what they're doing when it’s happening. As an empath, I often get completely consumed by the other person’s emotions. It can be helpful at times, but too often, it’s a distraction that I’m not even aware of. And even if you’re not an empath, you can be completely derailed by what someone shares.

For teenagers, this is often a strategy to offload their struggles. By sharing them with you, they are freeing themselves of the weight.

The same can happen at work. Importantly, you need to be careful that you don’t take on the burden unless it’s actually something you should be responsible for handling. I’m not saying you abandon the “see something, say something” motto. Or you stop supporting your team when they need you.

You just need to be careful about being swept away by someone else’s emotions without first understanding why they are sharing with you.

Not every conversation is a cry for help

In the same vein as externalization, high-agency people too often jump right to problem-solving. I know because I’m one of them.

For teenagers, as they are finding their own agency, they don’t always want or need us to jump in. They are sharing to connect.

Adults in the workplace do this, too. Before you jump in to offer advice or direction, check in with the person to find out what type of support they are hoping for.

Sometimes, they just need a listening ear. As a leader, this can be a relief. You can sit back and simply be present to what they are sharing. In fact, the act of listening actively might be the greatest gift you can give an employee or colleague. We often talk about the desire to be seen and heard. This is that moment.

And if you’re a leader committed to your team’s development, it’s essential that you resist the urge to jump in and instead pause to assess the strategic next step. You will never develop the next generation of leaders if you don’t let them lead (and occasionally, stumble).

Your job is not to make your employees happy

Of all the concepts, this was the one I wish someone had told me years ago the most.

When I was a high school student, I was known for being relentless and overly demanding. One of my nicknames was “warden.” I won’t even name the others.

As I rose in my professional career, I overcorrected. I wanted to be the empathetic leader who prioritized people and their needs above all else. That was neither a sustainable target nor the right one.

I went from demanding work at all hours of the day, 7 days a week, to letting my team off the hook for missed outcomes and contorting myself and others unsustainably to accommodate team members who were not pulling their weight.

A leader needs to balance the needs of individuals with the needs of the organization. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. It’s a constant recalibration. Anyone who tells you otherwise either hasn’t been a leader or is lying.

The challenge is gauging what your team needs. One of the markers I chose was happiness. I thought that if I could ensure employee happiness, I could retain top talent and accelerate business growth.

But the problem with happiness as a KPI is that you can’t control how someone will react. Happiness is driven by so many factors, many of which the company and the leader don’t control. Trying to hit it, I became distracted by every shift in employee temperament and lost focus on my strategic priorities for the business.

Dr. Damour’s guidance about teenagers was illuminating. Instead of assessing their emotional health through a lens of happiness and comfort, view it through the lens of whether they can self-regulate their emotions.

What that means is that if something highly disappointing happens, it’s actually a good sign that the adolescent feels upset and may even feel upset for some time. The key is whether their reaction feels in keeping with the scale of what happened and the impact it has on them.

Translated into the workplace, leaders would do well not to spend too much time overcompensating for decisions or situations that might leave employees feeling discouraged, irritated, or worse. Instead of trying to mitigate how they might feel, which you can’t control, it’s far more effective to focus on setting them up for success going forward.

For example, if you’ve made a difficult downsizing decision, it’s not helpful to dwell on the disappointment and fear your team might feel as a result. You can be empathetic in your tone, but nothing you do will change the impact of your decisions. Worrying about your team’s reaction, something I used to do, is usually time wasted. Instead, make sure you give them the information they need going forward: updated goals, helpful context, and any operational changes to their work.

People need to be able to express themselves productively

In contrast to overindexing on employee happiness, a far more productive goal is to create an environment where people feel their voices matter and that they have the skills to communicate effectively.

It parallels perfectly what Dr. Damour shares: one of the healthiest goals as a parent is to create an environment where your teens feel they can speak up and be heard.

Employees need this more than ever at work. And leaders need it too. The cost of silence is missed ideas, lowered trust, and increased stress.

You don’t want employees to bottle up their reactions or gossip about them. The key is to help your team understand how to communicate their thoughts effectively. This can be accomplished through establishing norms, training everyone on approaches that work, and then modeling these behaviors.

Importantly, you also need to give your team the room to miss the mark. When you combine teaching with practice (and the space to make mistakes), you’ve created a workplace where people become skilled at navigating difficult conversations, sharing their thoughts, and listening well.

Organizations that invest in these practices will be talent magnets, innovate with agility, and energize their people rather than drain them. It’s what I sought to create in every organization I led, and it’s the goal my clients aspire to today. And it’s possible if you take the time to understand what creates the conditions for a healthy, resilient team.

Your turn

Dr. Damour gave me so much more confidence in navigating this period with my kids. We only have a few more years together. I want to make them count, and I want them to leave with positive memories of how I showed up and not negative ones of how I fumbled our interactions.

Her guidance has become part of my playbook as I coach executives leading through tremendous workplace change. For that, I’m deeply grateful.

What's the concept you wish someone had handed you earlier — in leadership, or in life? I'd love to hear it in the comments.

Leave a comment

SAVE-THE-DATE

Substack LIVE: “Mattering” for the DEI-Allergic

April 27th, 3pm ET / 9pm CET

I’ll be joined by , a veteran DEI leader and expert. He’s the founder & Inclusion Strategist of Inclusion Wins and author of Reconstructing Inclusion on Substack. He’s an instructor, a keynoter, and an all-around incredible leader in the world of real DEI. Join us to learn more about what I mean.

🙏 Thank you for being a part of the Lead without Limits community.

If you found this post useful, I’d really appreciate it if you could give it a ❤️ or share it with another leader who you think could benefit.

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The more we create conversation around the hard topics in leadership, the greater the opportunity we all have to create stronger organizations and more leaders equipped to lead well.

May you lead without limits,

Steve was the guest of honor.

If you don’t know him (and I confess, I didn’t), Steve is a four-man bobsled gold medalist from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and Olympic Hall of Famer. He’s also the co-founder and former CEO of Classroom Champions (which has served over 5 million students across North America), a board member, and today, is an executive coach working with CEOs and their teams.

When we were introduced, I remember looking up — and up.

6’2”. Former Olympian. Clearly fit. And me, 5’ 3” with plenty of gumption but not an athletic bone in my body, wondering what point of connection we could possibly have.

I did what I tell all my clients to do — be warm, be curious, and be bold. Instead of slipping into silence and darting away, I started peppering him with questions.

One conversation led to another. I didn’t expect how open he would be. How honest. How much he was willing to share about what winning actually costs — and what it costs you when the winning stops.

I was thrilled when he agreed to do a Substack Live together last week. What came out of that conversation is wisdom and guidance that all leaders need, especially now.

Transforming ambition into mental strength: goal persistence

Most of us think about goals as destinations.
Make VP. Hit the number. Get the gold medal.

Steve thinks about them differently — as a system for mental health.

The organization he founded, Classroom Champions, discovered it by accident. They were running a social-emotional learning program in a Florida school district, teaching kids perseverance and goal-setting.

The end-of-year results came back showing 3x improvement in mental health scores compared to other programs. They never set out to improve mental health, but what they taught was helping kids internalize what it felt like to make progress on something that matters.

Turns out a longitudinal study had demonstrated that people with high levels of goal persistence and positive reappraisal have materially less anxiety and depression.

The problem? In sports, goals are obvious. Go faster. Land more shots. But in life and in leadership?

“I want to be a good leader. Okay — what does that mean? And what does that mean to me? And what does that mean to my company and my culture?”

The intricacies are different, Steve shared. These questions led him to become an executive coach, to help leaders make sense of them and not be overtaken by them.

This way of relating to goals was not something I was taught. I’m highly goal-oriented, but I grew up with an all-or-nothing approach. Either go in at all costs or don’t set a target at all for fear of missing it.

It took me years of trial and error and personal reflection to arrive at what Steve’s team teaches at scale: set goals intentionally and build a path towards them that allows for setbacks and pivots, all the while tracking your progress. Through it all, develop the ability to maintain your focus, your motivation, and your commitment to healthy behaviors.

Rather than narrowly viewing goals and the path to them as the end-all be-all, and instead seeing them as a way to build mental fitness. It’s incredibly powerful.

It is how I set goals today, and it’s how I coach my clients, but I didn’t have a name for it. Now I do.

The fuel that gets you there, but then burns you down

And what if you don’t struggle with setting thoughtful goals or with motivation? Maybe the issue isn’t where you are going, but how you do it and what happens when you get there.

Not strong enough. Not fast enough. The team isn’t performing enough. The product isn’t polished enough. This deficiency mindset becomes the engine. It wakes you up. It keeps you moving. It actually works — right up until it doesn’t.

“Then when you actually do the thing,” Steve said, “you never practiced good enough. You never practiced satisfied. And just like anything else in life — if you don’t practice it, how in the world are you going to be good at it?”

The gold medal comes. The IPO closes. The promotion happens. And the person who got you there, the one who ran on jet fuel their whole career, has never once practiced what it feels like to be done.

So they aren’t able to navigate the “done state”.

I recognized myself in this. I’ve been one of those people. The early years of my career: nothing at work was enough. Not what I planned. Not what the team gave. Not what I built. And the cost of that fuel? I didn’t even know I was paying it until the tank ran dry again and again.

If I’m honest, I still struggle with this at times.

If I am tired or feeling overwhelmed, my inner judge takes over, and instead of letting me rest, I feel propelled forward. Sometimes it masquerades as excitement and drive, but when it starts to affect my health (sleep, nutrition, exercise, meditation time), I know it’s a sign to recalibrate.

Hearing Steve talk about this reiterated for me how important it is to stay present to what is happening for me. And to start asking the question: “what’s fueling me this moment?”

If it’s jet fuel, it might be time to stop.

Delusional forgiveness and the art of moving forward

I have to recalibrate a lot. It’s humbling to admit it. But it’s the truth. I’m still learning how to practice good enough.

Steve developed a concept to help him. It came after a difficult period of depression, nine years after winning gold.

Acknowledge it. Learn from it. Move. That’s it.

I always go back to the example of how we celebrate toddlers who stumble, fall, and pick themselves back up as they learn how to walk and run. Somewhere along the way to adulthood, we get it stuck in our heads that it isn’t OK to make mistakes. And yet mistakes are essential to both the learning process and to achieving success.

When we demand perfection, we set ourselves up to procrastinate, be difficult to collaborate with, and feel downtrodden and disappointed when we inevitably miss the mark on our way to finding the answer.

This happened to me in my last job. When I became overwhelmed, I became hypervigilant. I wanted details on everything and asked for 3x as much work on every project as was actually necessary. I drove myself and my entire team crazy. Overthinking and overwhelm became my new normal.

Only when I paused and began to assess which work was actually high risk and couldn’t afford to fail did I realize that most of the work just needed to move forward, even if there would be missteps. Those were just part of the learning process.

Put more simply, delusional forgiveness is just another form of unconditional love. The ability to value yourself as worthy just as you are.

It’s what I practice now, and it’s how I choose to see the mistakes I've made before. I think it’s what’s allowing me to make this my most creative and energizing season of life and work, even though I’m older, slower, and much more creaky.

A new definition of hope that every team needs

Not a wish. Not a prayer. An operating principle. A choice made repeatedly, even when the circumstances are hard.

Steve contrasted this with James Clear’s Atomic Habits approach. He has great respect for Clear — but pushes back on the idea that systems matter more than goals.

“A journey without a destination is wandering. And if all you have is systems and habits but no goal for those habits to fulfill, you’re going to wind up on a treadmill to nowhere.”

I hadn’t thought about it that way. I agree with Steve. Systems alone won’t get you there. Success with meaning comes only when you have the full equation:

That’s the root of what’s made every moment in my career feel great. Hope is the belief you can make it happen. Reframing hope as a reflection of your thoughtful choices (setting goals well, creating strong systems, taking action) transforms what can sometimes feel like an amorphous platitude into a strategic and essential tool.

In a moment when uncertainty looms larger than ever, with geopolitical changes by the hour and increasing AI pressure (existential and immediate), people need hope in order to move forward. Teams need it more than ever in order to stay coherent and aligned. You can only do that as a leader if you create it for yourself first.

Fireproof, not fixed

The last concept Steve shared is the one I keep returning to.

“The fire is going to come. The question is: how do you help yourself be in a position so that when it comes, you are fireproof.”

For Steve, after his own depression, standing five steps from a light rail in Calgary, making the right choice: fireproofing became a daily commitment.

Exercise. Sleep. Clean eating. Guarding the mental habits that led him toward that edge. His phone is set to black and white most of the day. He reads at night with a red filter so he can process the world without getting hijacked by it.

He has ADHD, compounded by concussions from years of bobsled. He’s buried two teammates who took their own lives. He served on the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee Board during the Larry Nassar gymnastics scandal, sitting in a room where he had formal power, watching it be powerless to stop the abuse.

Those experiences, especially the last one, forced him to hold authority and helplessness at the same time. The dichotomy was impossible to reconcile, and it taught him something profound about what we can and cannot control. It gave him permission to stop burning himself down over what sits outside of his agency and to focus on what he can control.

His framework: goals, awareness, control, decisions. Practice it until it’s automatic. So when the temperature rises, and it will, you already know what to do.

Subscribe now

What I’m taking away

I asked Steve what he sees in the people who make it versus those who don’t, whether in the Olympic arena or the C-suite boardroom.

That’s not a performance principle. That’s a life principle.

And it’s ME Work — the internal operating system that makes everything else downstream possible. When we are clear about our internal motivations and how we make decisions, that’s when we can lead others well.

For me, it’s all about how I juggle the different priorities that drive me forward: my business, my creative pursuits, my family, my community, and my health.

And it’s hard.

Right now, it means going to bed earlier and missing time with my family in the evenings. But I know (and they know) that improving my sleep is how I will show up better for all of us.

The short-term pain of missing a movie night is worth it if I want to show up the next day ready for our morning routine, patient when there’s a hiccup in the schedule, and fully present for more emotionally charged conversations, which happen a lot more when there are two teens in the house.

I loved this conversation with Steve. Much of what he shared was a new framing for what I’ve discovered, honed, and use. But it was also a reminder that if you’re committed to growing and improving, the process is never-ending, and that’s a good thing. It means you’ll always have something to learn and to hone.

If this conversation sparked something for you, I’d love to hear what landed most. Drop it in the comments below.

Leave a comment

And if you want more from Steve, follow him at SteveMessler.substack.com (his newsletter is launching soon) or find him on his website SteveMesler.net

Thanks for joining me this week,

Conversation Timestamp Guide

00:00 — Welcome and introduction Kathy introduces Steve Mesler: Olympic gold medalist, co-founder of Classroom Champions, former CEO, board member, and executive coach.

04:30 — Goal persistence explained Steve defines goal persistence and how Classroom Champions accidentally discovered its link to mental health outcomes through a Florida school district study.

08:00 — Goal clarity as the foundation Why you need goal clarity before you can have goal persistence — and why it’s harder in life than in sport.

09:30 — Framing fear as excitement Steve’s technique for reframing internal states: nervous, afraid, and excited feel identical in the body. You choose what to call it.

11:30 — Steve’s path to bobsled From national champion track athlete to being banned from the University of Florida’s training room — and the couch in Gainesville where a new path began.

15:30 — The Stockdale Paradox and becoming a new person How Steve applied Good to Great’s Stockdale Paradox to decide he was done getting injured — and didn’t miss a single race in 10 years.

18:30 — Jet fuel: the high achiever’s toxic engine The concept of running on “not good enough” and what happens when the achievement finally arrives — and you’ve never practiced satisfaction.

25:00 — After the gold: what happens when the goal is gone Post-pinnacle disorientation — in sport, business, and life. Why people who sell their company are often not happy.

30:00 — Steve’s depression and the moment that changed everything Nine years after winning gold: the weight of buried teammates, the gymnastics scandal, a flat organization, new fatherhood — and the light rail in Calgary.

33:00 — “My brain was broken, just like my hamstring” How Steve found a way to frame depression as an injury — and eventually as a gift.

36:00 — Delusional forgiveness The practice of learning from failure without staying trapped in it — and why it’s essential for forward momentum.

37:30 — Hope as an operating principle Dr. Quintana Adolfo’s definition of hope: “My actions today will make my tomorrow better.” And why Steve believes leaders who can instill this are done with the hard part.

40:00 — Goals vs. systems: pushing back on Atomic Habits Why Steve believes a journey without a destination is just wandering — and what the neuroscience of dopamine and serotonin has to do with it.

42:00 — How to get comfortable spending most of your day uncomfortable Clarity on the goal makes discomfort manageable. Steve’s example: protecting his four-year-old son.

44:30 — The Big Five goals framework Career, wealth, relationships, lifestyle, health — and why the goals you haven’t examined in relationships and health are quietly shaping your work decisions every day.

46:30 — The daughter who calls her dad Steve’s long-term relationship goal with his 8-year-old: being one of her first calls when she gets her heart broken at 25 — and how that goal shapes how he parents today.

47:30 — Leading through layoffs and AI disruption How leaders under board pressure can still foster hope in their teams — and why assumptions about what your people are actually afraid of are almost always wrong.

51:00 — Caring for yourself during restructuring You have to put your own mask on first. Exercise, sleep, nutrition — these aren’t soft. They’re how you make better decisions when the pressure peaks.

56:00 — Fireproof, not fixed The practice of building your system before the crisis hits — so that when the fire comes, you don’t burn down.

01:00:00 — Close: “This too shall pass” Steve’s final word on navigating hard seasons: the high passes and the low passes. What matters is staying clear, staying intentional, and trusting the practice.

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It was his company, his idea, the source of his energy for nearly a decade. But he no longer wanted to be there.

To be honest, he’d known for some time. Maybe more than a year ago.

But there was no succession plan. No one he felt safe enough to confess to. The business was not robust enough. The Board wouldn’t trust anyone else to lead. His fellow leaders would panic if he left.

So he stayed silent, while his apathy slowly seeped into his work.

Decisions that he could have made within hours were now taking days. Issues that had previously felt minor began to grow in scale and complexity. The rhythms and demands of the business started to feel like a ball and chain, dragging him down slowly and steadily each day.

His colleagues, the other leaders on the team, felt something was off, but they rationalized it: it’s just a passing down cycle. He’ll snap out of it.

They did what too many organizations and leaders do, but later wish they hadn’t: They waited.

Is this happening in your organization?

It happened in several of mine. I saw it happen to other leaders as I stood by the sidelines, trying to avoid the issue.

Eventually, it even happened to me. I was the leader who wanted to go, but didn’t know how. I let it drag on for months.

Just as my boss, the CEO, was rationalizing the decision to wait, I was doing the same. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. I didn’t want to be without income — that felt irresponsible. There was always one more meeting, one more project, one more client conversation I couldn't walk away from.

And yet, if I’m really honest, the core of what I was unwilling to confront was shame, guilt, and fear. Shame that maybe I couldn’t cut it. Guilt that I would be leaving my team behind to fend for themselves. And fear of the unknown, and whether it was actually OK to leave.

It’s easy with 20-20 hindsight to be critical. But when you’re in it, it’s a completely different experience.

You either don’t even know it’s happening.

Or you’re so wrapped up trying to avoid the issue, you forget that you have a choice.

You always have a choice.

Losing a leader, especially one with a long tenure, doesn’t just feel scary, it’s downright horrifying.

The reasons aren’t far-fetched. They’re rather logical.

If you’re brave enough to even contemplate the issue, the litany of questions to deter you from taking action is never-ending and impossible to answer:

What will people on the team think?
How will we replace their years of knowledge?
How will customers respond? Will they get spooked?
Could we have done something different to retain them?
Will the rest of the leadership team stick around for who’s next?
What if we can’t find a better replacement?

The uncertainty is too anxiety-inducing to face.
So instead, we avoid it.

We make excuses — Now isn’t the right time. They just need more support.

We justify — They wouldn’t push us out. We need to give them a little longer.

We deny the truth — The risks aren’t that bad. We can’t create a feasible mitigation plan.

We let our fears drive our path forward and let our leadership judgment slip out the back door.

It’s a terrible path, but it often feels like the easier one to take.

What starts easy turns hard… fast.

A leader who no longer wants the job is one of the most dangerous people you can keep on a team.

Even if they don’t want to hurt the company. In fact, the ones who still want to help are the most lethal. The ones who still want to do right but have not yet acknowledged that they no longer want in.

Those are the ones that wreak the most havoc.

Why?

Because what they are doing is insidious, not conscious, and wrapped in the veneer of good intentions.

The ones who are openly difficult, negative, and malicious make it obvious that they are a threat. You might still take too long to remove them, but at least it’s all out in the open.

The ones who are still parroting the mission and goals (but are questioning the strategy), show up looking prepared (but are only going through the motions), take on just enough work (but nothing extra or more risky) — those are the ones to worry about.

They hurt your progress and your team through small, seemingly innocuous acts:

• Confusing the team through small misdirections — “Don’t follow what was said in that last email. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

• Creating mini-fissures through gossip — “Did you hear what [so-and-so] said after the meeting? I don’t think they are on board, but don’t talk to them about it.”

• Blocking progress with small comments — “I’m not sure why we are bothering. It hasn’t worked in the past.”

They will subtly add doubt to a discussion. They will delay key decisions. They will think smaller. They will focus on risks more than opportunities. They will shift your overall ethos from growth and innovation to steadiness and risk mitigation.

Your team will feel the pain, but won’t necessarily understand where it’s coming from and why. They will just start to feel the organization stagnate or stumble more. Work will become more arduous and progress more elusive.

And the leader who is struggling? They won’t even know they are doing it.

Because they are in denial just as much as you are.

Facing reality: motivation is what unlocks skills and knowledge.

Obligation is not the same as motivation.

That’s what leaders who no longer feel connected to a business confuse. They think their loyalty and commitment can hide their lack of energy for the mission and the work.

But they aren’t interchangeable. And one can’t mask the other.

“Have-to” thinking may yield some short-term results, but it will not unlock someone’s full potential. It will simply burn them out.

Even if a leader is the smartest person in the room and knows where all the bodies are buried, they won’t be powerful or even productive if they are no longer feeling motivated.

I like to think of our skills and knowledge as sitting in a metal canister. They may be valuable, but no one can see them or access them until you open the canister.

The opening only happens when you feel motivation. It comes from within and can’t be manufactured.

Sometimes, you can adjust the conditions to make it easier to create the opening for someone:

• Finding something adjacent and connected that matters to them can be a motivator (e.g. money, or the ability to learn)

• Adjusting the role and responsibilities to make them fit their current lifestyle needs and interests (e.g. going remote, or scoping down or up)

• Adding support structures and systems can make the job easier to navigate (e.g. a chief of staff, a coach, or AI agents)

But sometimes, those adjustments aren’t enough. They just don't feel as connected to the work anymore.

No amount of external work will solve that. And if they can’t see it, it’s your job as a leader to address it.

Because the alternative is too costly. It isn’t just lost time, it’s losing the momentum, the focus, and ultimately, the trust of your team.

Your turn.

Have you ever worked alongside a leader who was ready to go, but didn’t know it? Or maybe you were the leader, and it took you a minute to realize it was time?

I’d love to hear what helped you and the organization transition through that time — and what didn’t. If you’re willing to share, please add a Comment. I’d love to hear from you.

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If this post resonated, or made you pause and consider your own motivation level or that of your fellow leaders, please consider giving it a ❤️ and sharing it with a friend or colleague who would also benefit. Thank you!

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Mark your calendar for my next Substack Live.

This Friday, I’m talking with Olympic Gold Medalist and now a CEO Performance Coach — . Join us as he shares his key learnings from the training room to the board room. (Event Link)

As always, thank you for joining me each week as I dive into what it takes to lead without limits.

Yesterday morning, my paternal grandmother passed away.

I called her Nai Nai.

She was 101, and after months of fearing what was beyond, she told my father the hour before she passed, she “was going home.”

As I thought about my post this week, it became obvious: I’d share the lessons I learned from my grandmother, both what to emulate and what to avoid.

Her life was nothing notable for most people, and yet, it has always felt extraordinary to me, filled with courageous moves and perseverance almost to a fault.

I’m sad, and I need time to grieve. But grief is a funny business. It shows up differently for everyone. For me, the best way to honor my grandmother and process my feelings is to translate what I learned from her into leadership lessons I value and will continue to carry forward.

But before I share the lessons, let me give you some more context about my grandmother’s life.

From idyllic to turbulent, growing up without guarantees.

My grandmother grew up in China. I think it was in Jiangsu province on the eastern coast. (I wish I had more details, but thank you in advance for not judging.)

Nai Nai grew up in a well-to-do family. They had servants, cooks, and people who took care of my grandmother’s and the family’s needs. My grandmother started life sheltered. But all around her, the world was shifting. It was a time of significant social and political change.

Imperial China was ending. Women were no longer binding their feet, and they were starting to work outside the home. The Nationalists, Communists, and the Japanese were all battling for control. One of the few memories she shared with me was hiding in bomb shelters, and a deep distrust of Japanese people, all fostered in her early life.

As a young adult, she worked for the Nationalist government, and when its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, fled China before the Communists took over, she left, too. Her older sister was a leader in her local Communist Party outpost, and convinced the rest of the family to stay.

So, in a path that would be mirrored in the future, Nai Nai left her family and all her possessions behind and fled to Taipei, Taiwan, uncertain of the future, but convinced she could no longer stay in the home of her ancestors.

When I think about her decision, I can’t imagine what she might have felt. To go against her family and make an independent choice had to be hard, if not impossible. Daughters didn’t do that. And to go to a foreign land, with little to no money, and not know if you will see your family ever again? I know people around the world still grapple with this. And I am so fortunate that I can’t imagine it.

Leaving the workplace to work at home.

In Taipei, my grandmother met my grandfather, my Ye Ye, who also worked in the Nationalist government. The married and had 3 boys; my father is the eldest.

In Chinese culture, at the time, boys were considered princes, never to lift a finger, always to be prized.

Caring for 3 boys and my grandfather would have been a lot. But that wasn’t the family Nai Nai was responsible for.

My grandfather, unlike my grandmother, didn’t come to Taipei alone. He brought his grandmother and was joined later by his elder and younger sister and their families. This meant my grandmother was responsible for caring for all of them — alone.

Nai Nai left the workforce to become a full-time caregiver for a household that grew to 8. She did the daily shopping, prepping, cooking, cleaning, washing, and mending.

The long days of physical toil were brutal. Her hands were washed raw, her body ached daily. Her feet became deformed from wearing dress shoes that warped them as she trekked to complete her chores. She became humpbacked over time, and her spine never recovered.

But none of the physical labor compared to the emotional stress of being treated like a servant by her husband’s family members. It may have been the 1950s, but they held on to cultural norms of the past. The daughter-in-law was there to serve their needs, and they would make sure she did so.

Elite schools and American dreams.

My father and my uncles, with a few challenges, excelled at school. They were the picture of what Chinese families valued. And when it came time to figure out what came after college and their required military service, each left, one by one, for America.

And they never returned, at least not to live.

My grandparents came for a stint to stay with my family during the 1980s. While their time in Texas with us was fine, they could not tolerate the cold when we moved to New Jersey. Coupled with feeling trapped in suburban streets (they missed the city) and a community in which they couldn’t communicate (they couldn’t speak or read much English), they packed up and returned to Taiwan.

We missed them. I was fortunate. I had spent almost every summer of my life with them until elementary school. These were such formative travels that Mandarin felt like my first language, not English, even though I was born in the U.S.

My memories of my grandparents were of doting, caring people who spoiled me and loved me dearly. As I got older, they, along with my Mandarin, faded from my day-to-day life. They became foreign, a hazy concept — people I knew, but not really.

The struggles and peace in the final seasons of life.

I went back a few more times, once in high school and then in adulthood, but my visits were few and far between. Life had gotten full and trips to Asia were costly and time-consuming. I valued my grandparents, but I struggled to make time for them.

In 2002, my Ye Ye passed away from cancer. Nai Nai entered a new season of life. She was alone for nearly two decades, with brief visits from my father and his brothers. She was happy, I think. She filled her time as she liked and had a home health aide in her later years to help with household chores and personal care needs. In her senior years, she was finally the one being cared for, no longer the caregiver.

In 2020, my father relocated from China to live with Nai Nai as the pandemic raged. He was an anchor for her through those years, even if they struggled at times, each with strong opinions often held tightly. My mother joined them in 2023 for 6 months of the year, adding not just additional support but an emotional buffer to the people dynamics in my grandmother’s tiny apartment.

And in 2024, my family along with my uncles’ gathered for our first ever family reunion on my father’s side to celebrate my grandmother’s 100th birthday.

It was my kids’ first time meeting their great-grandmother (or Zhu Nai Nai as they call her) in person. But she wasn’t new to them. For several years prior, we had been doing weekly Saturday morning Skype calls to say hello. My kids don’t speak Chinese (I failed on that front), and so it was more of a brief 15-min nodding of heads with some light, poor translation from me. But I’d like to think it ingrained a few values that mattered in my children: honoring seniors, staying connected, and building in routines with meaning, to name a few.

My grandmother glowed during that visit. She was celebrated, doted upon, and the center of attention. She felt loved. I think it was a highlight of her life, seeing the family she built around her.

In the past year, my grandmother’s health started to decline. Her cancer returned and spread. Her once clear memory became fuzzy. Her fears started to guide her behavior, raising her suspicions, eroding sleep, and increasing her demands of others. Many of the qualities that enabled her to survive trying times started to impede her ability to gracefully enter the final stages of life. Stubbornness and relentlessness didn’t allow her to accept that the end might be near.

I am grateful that once she started hospice care at home with pain relief, Nai Nai suffered less. I’m also in awe of my parents who have put aside years of their own comfort and retirement dreams to care for her. It may have been Chinese cultural duty, but it was their personal commitment and love that made them stay in spite of, at times, truly difficult conditions.

Nai Nai was still talking throughout the night, even in her last few nights. It’s as if her mind still had things to accomplish, tasks that needed attention. But as her body guided her to rest, I think she finally realized in her final hour with my father, she had accomplished so much and was leaving behind a tremendous legacy.

My Grandmother’s Lessons

When I think about my grandmother, I don’t simply feel love or reverence. I feel a deep connection to what I learned from my grandmother’s journey and her behaviors. They aren’t all DO’s. There are some DON’Ts, too — because we can learn just as much from what doesn’t work as what does.

1. Focus on what matters and keep moving forward

Self-pity isn’t productive; action is. My grandmother had to make many difficult decisions in her life. She prioritized survival, her family's well-being, and, finally, her own happiness, choosing what mattered most in each season of life. And once she made a decision, she didn’t look back. She focused on moving forward.

Leadership Lesson
Priorities shift over time. The leaders who succeed are the ones who recognize the change and adjust their focus. They don’t waste energy ruminating; instead, they preserve their ability to navigate what lies ahead.

What’s one priority you need to re-evaluate? Stop avoiding the task. Schedule time to make a decision and move forward.

2. You don’t have to be alone

Even when all of her kids were across the globe, her only one of her grandchildren could speak so-so Mandarin (me), and gradually all of her friends passed away, Nai Nai didn’t choose to be alone. She sought out and found a few remaining family members in China (a maternal uncle and a maternal cousin). She welcomed thoughtful neighbors and community groups who periodically checked in on her. They brought small treats and made small talk. She didn’t push them away. She chose to get the support she needed.

Leadership Lesson
Leadership can be lonely. The weight of responsibility, the difficult decisions, and the confidential nature of the work. But you don’t have to go it alone. Trusted colleagues are there to support, and you can always bring in outside help: a coach, a therapist, a mentor, or all three.

Do you feel alone? Make a commitment to connect with someone you trust. If you don’t have one, source one. But don’t wait. Make this a priority for next quarter.

3. Take care of yourself when you can

Nai Nai couldn’t prioritize all her health needs when she was in the throes of taking care of 8 people. She was in survival mode. But as she got older and the weight of caregiving disappeared after my Ye Ye passed, she put herself first. Your health should always come first, but as a working parent leader, I know that it’s easier said than done at times. So do what you can, when you can.

Leadership Lesson
It’s never too late to take care of yourself. And if you don’t, no one else can help you.

What is one thing you could do to improve your health (mental or physical)? Start there. A doctor’s appointment. A 15 min workout. A 5-min stretch session. Don’t make it hard. Make it small and doable.

4. Enjoy what you can, when you can

Nai Nai has always loved food. She was a great cook and had a bit of a sweet tooth. In those early years in Taiwan, she and Ye Ye had to forego so much. So later in life, she was quick to ask for sticky rice with red bean or a pastry. She chose to savor what gave her joy. I’m convinced it was one of the reasons she lived so long — she enjoyed living.

What do you love about your work? What can you do to inject more of it into your day? Delegation, rescoping, and hiring additional talent. Be creative and be committed to making room for what lights you up. Do the same for your top talent and you’ll create a workplace that no one wants to leave.

5. Know when to let go

Nai Nai did this well earlier in her life and less so later in life. When she left China, she didn’t know she’d never see her mother again and wouldn’t be able to reconnect with any family until 30+ years later. But she knew to let go so that she could build a new life. When she was in her final year, she struggled to let go. She was so scared of death and beyond that she wouldn’t sleep, which added to her discomfort and stress.

Leadership Lesson
You can’t move forward if you can’t move on. Give yourself and your team the ability to move forward — let it go.

What are you holding on to that you should let go? A business idea, a team member, a decision that didn’t work out. Create a ceremony, journal your reservations, or talk to your coach or therapist.

6. You’re stronger than you think

Nai Nai faced terrible hardships throughout her life. They were made more stark because she was surrounded by comfort in her early years. But she made it through all of it. She had tremendous self-confidence and a belief that she could overcome anything.

Leadership Lesson
There will come a time when you don’t feel you’re equipped to do what it takes. Perhaps you’re behind on goals, or you’ve made a series of decisions that didn’t pan out. It’s easy to draw negative conclusions and to get demotivated. Your team needs you to stay strong.

Do you have anything making you feel down? If you need a moment for a pity party — do it. But then get back to it. Remind yourself of all you’ve accomplished and how you’ve navigated challenges in the past. You can do it again.

7. Don’t avoid change, embrace it

When I realized I wouldn’t be able to visit Nai Nai with my kids for several years, I asked my parents to buy her a computer and teach her to use Skype. She was 86. She didn’t complain. She didn’t resist. She didn’t worry about what was going to happen. She just learned how to take a video call with her granddaughter and her great-grandchildren. She wasn’t tech-savvy, and she didn’t need to be. She focused on the purpose of the tech and opened her mind to the possibility it was worth trying.

Leadership Lesson
AI, robotics, virtual reality, and more — there will always be a new technology out there. If you stay focused on your customer and team needs and stop worrying about constant change, you’ll choose wisely, learn what you need to learn, and invest in what your organization needs.

What are you overthinking? Can you take a simpler approach? Break the problem down and move forward with it in small chunks. Don’t let your fear decide what you do. That’s how the worst decisions are made.

Your Turn

My Nai Nai wasn’t perfect. No leader is. But she modeled essential leadership qualities that I emulated as I grew and evolved as a leader. And she was a grounding force when I faced adversity.

“Nai Nai survived. Nai Nai made it happen. I can, too.”

Too often, we think of leaders as people with big titles who lead large organizations. But as I get older, I realize that we have model leaders all around us, in our personal lives and in our community as much as in our professional ones.

Who have you looked up to as a role model leader? What did they help you realize and learn? I’d love to hear more in the Comments.

And if this post resonated with you today, please consider giving it a ❤️ and sharing it with someone who matters to you to help more readers find it and benefit from my Nai Nai's wisdom. May she rest in peace.

Thank you for joining me this week.

May you lead without limits,

I’ve never met a team that didn’t have issues with conflict.

It could be a leader who talks over everyone in a conversation. Or a long-tenured, senior expert who inspires enough fear in everyone to manipulate every decision. Or it’s isolated to two people who interact like oil and water, and disrupt every meeting.

Perhaps this resonates? If you’re being honest, I’m guessing you can name a few issues on your team.

Conflict isn’t in itself bad. As a leader, you know that.

But you also know that some types of conflict on your team don’t feel like the kind that is like medicine and will lead to good outcomes.

Too often, leaders want to jump to the solution. But unless you know the root of the issue, you risk addressing the wrong problem.

My recommendation is to start with a diagnosis.

How a night out with friends can help you diagnose the source of your team’s conflict.

I find that an analogy can sometimes help you achieve a helpful emotional distance from a problem.

If you’re like most leaders struggling with conflict on your team, you will literally feel your blood pressure rise as you think about the different issues and how they are hurting your organization and your goals.

So bear with me as I take us through one such analogy that has helped me:

Most of us have grown up with a group of friends. High school, college, and those roaring twenties. For many, these groups aren’t just a source of emotional support; they’re a source of fun activities.

When I think back, one of the things I loved doing with my friends was going to a party — a dance party.

But the process of going to a party wasn’t always easy.

• We sometimes had trouble choosing a party

• Some friends didn’t want to go to the party we chose as a group

• When we got there, some might not know the dance moves

• Even if you know the moves, you aren’t dancing in sync

• And if you wanted to switch partners, good luck. It was often difficult and a risky move. You might end up not clicking with anyone else

The point of a night of dancing with friends is simply to let loose, enjoy the music, and each other’s company. Everything above is the opposite — tension-filled, angst-inducing, and fun-zapping.

And it all maps well to team conflict:

• Can’t choose a party —> Lack of shared vision and goals

• Don’t want to go to the same party —> Misalignment of personal and organizational goals

• Don’t know the moves —> Unskillful interpersonal engagement

• Are not in sync —> Lack of behavioral norms and expectations

• Switching partners is awkward — Individual differences get in the way

These are the 5 ways most teams sink their performance even before they get started. Even if it is only a subset of the group that is the cause, their negative interactions contaminate the entire group.

To help you diagnose what’s happening in your team, let’s go a little deeper into each one.

The 5 Sources of Team Conflict

I outline the five sources I’ve found most common through my leadership and coaching experience. In addition to signals, I share one path to help you move forward. Each person and situation is different, but these have proven to work over and over again.

1. Lack of Shared Vision & Goals

When the team doesn’t know where they’re headed and why, it’s hard to be in alignment day-to-day.

Signals

• Your team is struggling to know what to prioritize

• They fight over one area being more important than another

• When you ask one person to name company goals, they answer differently from another teammate

One Path Forward

Take the time to clarify where you’re headed and why. Use scenarios to help make them clear — for yourself and your team. Everything sounds great until you start to apply it to real-world scenarios.

Start with a document to organize your thoughts. Chances are, you already have your goals written down. Add scenarios and examples. Then, the key is to incorporate conversation into your process. When people have a chance to engage live, that’s when you’ll learn if the direction you’re setting will hold up.

2. Misalignment of Personal & Organizational Goals

Sometimes, your team knows what the organization’s goals are, but they don’t align with their individual goals. Maybe someone wants to work less, but the organization needs people who are willing to push harder. Or the person wants more growth, but the organization is in steady-state or even downsizing.

Signals

• They consistently push a particular approach, regardless of context, complexity or relative importance (e.g. faster, slower, bigger, etc)

• They seem disengaged in the work and/or irritable

• They are argumentative beyond productive dissent and criticism

One Path Forward

Document your observations. Check with others what they have observed without asking leading questions. If you see a pattern, approach HR and discuss a path forward.

More likely than not, it means having a conversation with the person 1:1. Don’t hide your concerns, and don’t assume why they are behaving the way they are. Be curious and ask. And offer them the opportunity to share that they may not be aligned with the organization.

Even someone who is senior, long-tenured, or historically well-aligned can shift. And that’s OK. What you need to do is help them communicate openly about the shift, if they have shifted, and to align on what to do next. And if something else is the root issue, having this conversation will help as well because it’ll get at the root of a set of behaviors that is disruptive to the team.

3. Unskillful Interpersonal Engagement

Sadly, most professionals don’t get training on how to collaborate productively. Even if someone is a seasoned, experienced leader, it does not mean they are skillful in interpersonal engagement. Perhaps they didn’t need to be in prior roles, or others compensated around them.

Signals

• They struggle to listen actively and instead, speak over others or take up all the air space

• They avoid difficult conversations, either deprioritizing them or delegating it to other people

• When they engage, others leave the conversation deeply frustrated not simply based on what they discussed, but moreso how they choose to approach the topic (e.g. heavy handed, unclear communication, accusatory tone, etc)

One Path Forward

Given the person direct, and clear feedback where you outline their observed behaviors and the negative impact. Consider getting them a leadership or communications coach or sending them to training that will directly address their specific challenges.

Whatever you do, don’t wait. The longer you let their behavior persist, the more you are indicating to them and those around them that their behavior is acceptable. That is a surefire way to lose top talent.

If you find that it isn’t just one person, but a group of individuals who are challenged (possibly in different ways), then group coaching, 1:1 coaching, and/or group training may be necessary. The reality is that each person needs to up level, but they also need to be aware of how they may be triggering each other. No one exists in a vacuum; don’t treat the issue as if it can be easily quarantined.

4. Lack of Behavioral Norms & Expectations

Sometimes, your people aren’t being unskillful; they keep bumping into each other because they don’t know how to get in sync. (Imagine a group of people doing a line dance, but in completely different directions — it’s a mess!)

Signals

• People are talking past each other because they are at different stages of a process (e.g. one person is brainstorming, while another trying to plan)

• There aren’t clear roles and responsibilities and so people stepping on each other’s toes

• Critiques are becoming personal, and cliques are forming; meetings are starting to feel like a middle school lunchroom

One Path Forward

Draft a Code of Conduct and outline the behaviors you expect from the team. Invite discussion and conversation around the draft, including soliciting edits and additions. You’re not operating a democracy, but getting input is a helpful way to make sure you aren’t missing anything or misstating an idea. It’s also a way to build buy-in from your team.

One concept to include is “disagreeing and committing.” This allows everyone to commit to decisions even if they expressed dissent, and it ensures cohesion when the team starts to execute. It’s helpful for day-to-day operations. It’s also essential to align on the Code of Conduct (because, let’s be honest, not everyone will agree to every point) and move forward.

5. Individual Differences Get in the Way

Even when you have common standards of behavior and the same “dance steps” shared across a team, each person will still have their own style: of thinking, of communicating, of processing, and of disagreeing.

Having differences across the team is usually a great thing. The only time you need to address it is if it starts to impede progress and create unproductive tension.

Signals

• Someone becomes immovable in demanding that collaboration proceed a certain way, and always in that way

• Two people have different communication styles and are not hearing each other when they speak, and struggle to find a way to reach the other person

• Team members are starting to gossip about another teammate and their different approach to a body of work, but they aren’t approaching that team member

One Path Forward

The key to this issue is to address it early and before it develops into a pattern or theme. You don’t want anyone to become a target of ridicule or avoided because their reputation precedes them. This is true of the most junior person on the team or the most senior.

Don’t wait to dive into this one. It might feel more risky because it requires delving into a particular person’s style, but that doesn’t make it less worth addressing. It makes it even more powerful. Because of your intervention, that person may have a far more productive career future because you helped them get the feedback they critically need.

Your Turn

If you’re like most leaders, unproductive interpersonal conflict is just one of many issues on you long list of to-do’s.

It truly might not be one of the most urgent and critical things to solve, but it’s probably also costing you and your team more than you realize — not just in lost productivity at work, but in sleepless nights or at least more irritated commutes and dinner times.

If you’re not sure where it stands, talk to your team. Or just pause to observe what’s happening in your team’s interactions. What might realize may surprise you. It might not be an issue that is simply caused by your team’s lack of skillfulness or style differences.

The source might even be you. This your invitation to assess the situation before a truly negative outcome emerges.

If this piece was helpful to you, I’d deeply appreciate your sharing it with another leader.

I write each week about the topics I knew made a differentce for my teams and the businesses I led, but felt challenged by as a leader. With my newfound 20-20 perspective, I want to help more leaders make better decisions and build stronger organizations.

When you’re a leader of leaders, it’s that much more important to invest in your people and how they interact. If you’ve found ways to diagnose (and address) the type of team conflict that derails, I’d love to hear it in the Comments. I read and respond to every one.

And if you have a minute to give the post a ❤️, you’ll help more people find it on Substack.

Thank you for joining me and 2,000 other leaders on the journey to lead without limits,

It’s time for your weekly virtual team meeting.
You’re 2 min late as usual, and rushing in from another conversation.

The agenda is set. It should be routine, and you’re hoping the team brings a bit more energy today.

They’ve been dragging. It’s been intense, but there is a lot more to get done. You need everyone to show up and show up strong.

As you open the meeting and dive into initiatives, everyone seems to be paying attention, but when you ask if there are questions or alternative ideas, no one adds anything. The few that speak up only add “everything looks good.”

You push back on one person’s ideas, and she hesitates as if wanting to respond, but then acquiesces. You don’t notice it, but a few people’s eyes dart down, and it looks like they are typing. You chalk it up to note-taking.

You think you’re having one meeting. But there are actually two in motion: the one you see and the one you don’t.

Right alongside your meeting.
Everyone in your team is in it, but you.

Why?

Because they don’t trust you.

What’s even worse?

You have no idea.

You’re not alone. Most leaders have no idea when they’ve eroded trust and removed the conditions for psychological safety.

And to be honest, some don’t care.
This post isn’t for them.

This post is for the leaders who do care.

The ones who want to create an environment where their team can be successful and enjoy the ride. The ones for whom it isn’t just about the results, it’s also about relationships.

The good news is that you can do something about it — if you know what to look for.

But let’s start with why psychological safety matters.

Lack of psychological safety will sink your team’s results.

The research is clear:

When people are scared, they are less able to process complex ideas, less creative, and less likely to be happy.

In short, they’re less likely to perform well and less likely to enjoy the work. All the things leaders try to avoid when creating a productive workplace.

In the example above, it means fewer ideas, less dissent and debate, and more side conversations and gossip, which further erodes trust and creates more cognitive and emotional load — load that no one can afford.

So what does psychological safety even mean?

Let’s start with what it isn’t.

It doesn’t come from constant praise. It doesn’t mean giving people a pass every time they make a mistake. It doesn’t result from avoiding critique and hard conversations.

As defined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the term:

“Psychological safety is a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”

Even if your organization has high standards and is not tolerant of underperformance, you can create an environment that has a healthy level of psychological safety. Because at its core, psychological safety is about how you relate to each other — not technical skills or performance outcomes.

The leaders who create the conditions for psychological safety well understand this. They hold their teams accountable for performance while also creating ample room for interpersonal risk-taking.

But not every leader chooses to invest in psychological safety.

Why highly successful leaders don’t prioritize psychological safety.

There are many reasons why psychological safety doesn’t show up in leaders’ top priorities. I can’t cover them all, but I will highlight of what I’ve found to be the most common.

1. Creating psychological safety is not a prerequisite for success.

The old adage that you learn far more from failure than from success is an apt description of why so many leaders are blind to psychological safety.

Many leaders rise because they were in the right place at the right time. I’m not saying they didn’t earn the raise or the promotion. But sometimes they don’t encounter the diversity of situations and build the skills necessary to be an extraordinary, well-rounded leader.

When you are making great progress, even if it requires significant effort, you may not be aware of all of the elements that contributed to the foundation for your success.

It’s the gift and the curse of fast or smooth success, despite the research I cited above.

2. Overemphasis on outcomes over output.

Many organizations and leaders put too much focus on results only. It’s true that if you don’t achieve your goals, all the processes and activities you put in place may feel less relevant.

This can mean skipping over the behaviors and relational norms that help your team achieve those results in the first place and sustain them.

3. Some leaders were “raised” in work environments where psychological safety wasn’t part of the culture.

So they perpetuate what they know best.

Whether it be walking on eggshells with a facade of “politeness and niceness” or a rough and tumble, “survival of the fittest” model or something else altogether that stifles connection and smoothers direct conversation, some leaders just don’t know what they don’t know.

Regardless of the reason, once you realize the psychological safety is something that could help your team improve how it works, know that you can develop your ability to gauge whether your team is lacking in psychological safety.

Here’s how:

The signs are obvious only after you start to see them.

Like so many things in life, once you start to see them, you won’t be able to stop.

1. You receive little critical feedback

2. Your team doesn’t offer dissenting views

3. You are always right if there is a debate between you and your team

4. Your employee survey results are negative, but you don’t know why.

5. You don’t meet 1:1 with your direct reports (your EA or Chief of Staff is always present)

6. You don’t create time 1:1 or in group meetings to receive feedback.

7. Your team only shares examples of when things go well

8. You don’t know much about what matters to your team outside of work

9. Your team doesn’t know much about you and what matters to you outside of work

10. You get subtle suggestions from your team or colleagues to be more positive or to give your team time.

11. You feel like you’re carrying all the load for the team

There may be other signals as well, but this list should give you a good start. If you are experiencing 2-3 of these, it’s time to dig deeper.

How do you know it’s actually an issue?

You won’t know for sure until your team tells you.

But you likely have a sense that something is wrong. Your team is more quiet than outspoken. They say “yes” much more than they say “no.” You sense that the team’s work could be better, and they could be more engaged, more energized.

The only way to find out is to hear it from your team. Here are some ways to find out:

1. Talk with your team either as a group or 1:1 — Share your concerns and ask if they are seeing an issue. This requires finesse and judgement on when and how you broach the subject. But don’t overthink it and don’t delay.

2. Talk with trusted colleagues — Your team doesn’t work in a silo. Ask cross-functional partners what they are hearing and experiencing. Sometimes, you just need a different perspective.

3. Be patient. Slow down and make space — Don’t wait to start the conversation, but also don’t expect all the answers to come pouring out. It took time create fear, and it will take time to eradicate it. The surest way to kill this process is to add more pressure to it.

4. Be vulnerable — Share more about your thoughts that might feel counterintuitive or surprising. Do it concisely so that you don’t suck up more air space. Model what it means to put yourself out there. If your team sees it, they are more likely to mirror it.

5. Hire an outside coach or consultant —Sometimes you need a third-party perspective and voice. Your team may not be ready to open up to you, but they may be willing to reveal what is happening to someone outside your team. Just make sure you are clear about ground rules from the get-go: what will be kept confidential, what will be shared, and how you all will move forward.

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Creating psychological safety is a marathon, not a sprint.

Similar to long-term health strategies, it takes time to see results from attempts to build psychological safety. People need time to build trust and new habits.

You’re helping your team shift their assumptions: from speaking up will result in a bad outcome to seeing that it will result in better performance individually and as a team.

These are not small shifts. They require practice, observing outcomes, and internalizing both. It could take weeks, it could take months.

The key is to keep dialogue open, continue to reiterate why it matters, and to recognize and reward the change in behaviors you want. The only way people will believe the shift is real is if they experience the benefits and witness evidence that demonstrates that what you say is true. And this needs to happen consistently and regularly.

Your turn.

I’d love to hear more about what has worked for you to create psychological safety in your team. How did you know something wasn’t working? What did you to change the dynamics? What felt obvious and what didn’t?

When you share your experiences, you help everyone in the Lead without Limits community grow. And you help more leaders create the kind of organizations we all want to work in.

Thank you for joining me this week. If this post resonated, the kindest thing you can do is share it with someone who needs it and give it a ❤️ so that more leaders can find it on Substack.

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And in case you enjoyed my Substack Live with Tom Hardin, I’m so excited to announce that his book Wired on Wall Street is now available for purchase. I got my copy last week.

May you lead without limits,

On the face of it, it was a dream team.

Senior, proven leaders with decades of experience.

They were transforming a company, shifting it into growth mode and making it transaction-ready.

They showed up to meetings on time. They came to a decision quickly. They were aligned on the next steps, and people shifted into action seamlessly.

And yet when it came to their collaboration, something seemed off. They contemplated few ideas. Very little was debated, especially highly strategic decisions. When there was dissent, it was about minor topics like the formatting of a deck or the timing of a meeting.

They were going through the motions of execution well, but their results were mediocre, and they weren’t improving.

When the leader came to me to help him and his team achieve higher performance, he had no idea what was brewing under the surface.

After the first few sessions, it was clear to me — this was a team that deeply feared conflict, with their leader and with each other.

What felt like safety was costing much more than each person realized. Without conflict, they were missing out on better ideas, smarter solutions.

Even worse, they were creating a culture that drained everyone’s energy walking on eggshells. Left unaddressed, the team would fall apart.

The good news? It wasn’t too late to fix.

Conflict isn’t a sign of risk. Misunderstanding it is.

Conflict gets a bad rap. It’s associated with wars and physical violence. It’s something culturally we teach people to fear and avoid.

And yet conflict can support problem solving, creativity, and innovation. Technological advancements, scientific discoveries, and creative endeavors often require productive friction to source diverse ideas, debate merits, experiment and test, and overcome setbacks.

So why does conflict trip us up?

Because not all types of conflict1 are productive, and most teams don’t take the time to identify which one needs addressing:

• Task conflict (disagreements about what to do or how to think about a problem) can lead to better decisions, more creative solutions, and higher quality outcomes — when managed well.

• Process conflict (disagreements about how work gets done, roles, resource allocation) is correlated with a decline in team respect and trust, as well as reduced team productivity and viability.

• Relationship conflict (interpersonal friction, feelings of dislike or disrespect) is almost always detrimental. It erodes trust, increases stress, and hurts performance.

The teams that navigate conflict well are the ones that understand the difference between each category and know how and when to address each.

The ones that struggle can’t distinguish between them and allow a task or process conflict to transform into a relationship conflict.

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Where to start and why.

• Build awareness and a common language around these different types of conflict. With a shared understanding and common language, it’s much easier to get alignment on why this matters and make the changes necessary.

• Take the time to discuss openly how conflict is impacting your team. Invite the team to share examples of where the team isn’t able to focus or execute well together because conflict is distracting or stalling progress.

• Commit as a team to improving how you navigate conflict. This needs to be a group commitment because conflict can arise at any time and with any configuration of people. Any efforts to effect change will be lessened if only a subset of the team is ready to engage.

• Learn how to identify the different types of conflict. Use specific examples and discuss them. Only when you get into particular examples will everyone develop the muscles to identify them as they emerge.

• Discuss how to navigate each type of conflict more effectively. This will be specific to each team, but will generally center around roles, responsibilities, goals, constraints, and acceptable norms. One of the most important elements is clarifying who the decision-maker is and how that gets determined for each situation.

• Make it safe to call out when you’re starting to drift from one type of conflict to another and to pause before continuing. The pause gives everyone engaged a chance to step back, away from the fray, calm their emotions and get some perspective. Are you slipping into relationship conflict when the real issue is process? Is someone getting caught up in a process element when another person is focused on task? Just the act of pausing can help everyone get back on track.

This might feel like a lot to work through to just get started, but when you are dealing with group dynamics and trying to correct unhealthy norms, you need to be thoughtful about how you set the foundation.

As you set up your guidelines, don’t worry about creating hard and fast rules. Just start with a few scenarios and create guidelines organically. The key is to get started and open up the conversation. Simply acknowledging that there is an opportunity to improve can help the team create more productive habits.

Your turn.

Most teams in my experience spend 90% or more of their time focused on the “what” of their work. Few take the time to step back and align on what I call “meta topics” on “how” they do their work, like conflict management. These conversations require thoughtfulness and a pausing of the work that feels uncomfortable.

But it’s exactly these types of topics that, when left unaddressed, can become a terrible distraction at best and a highly destructive force at worst.

I’d love to hear if you have spent time on your team talking about the “how”. And if conflict management is one of the topics you’ve addressed.

If you haven’t, may this post be your invitation to start the conversation. I’d love to hear what emerges.

If you found this post helpful, I’d greatly appreciate your sharing it with others who you think would find it useful.

And if there are other topics you’d like me to cover around team dynamics, please reply and let me know. I read every message, even if I can’t respond to them all.

May you lead without limits,

We started this Substack Live with technical difficulties, a fitting metaphor for our theme: disruption to reinvention.

Sometimes things break. Sometimes they break badly. And sometimes, how we respond defines everything that comes next.

My guest, , knows this intimately.

Fourteen years ago, Ron was a managing director at Barclays, building the Asian equity desk in the U.S., living the life he’d planned since college. He was an avid cyclist and triathlete, a husband, and father to three daughters. Then, on a seemingly ordinary Saturday after Thanksgiving, a driver fell asleep at the wheel and changed everything.

Ron woke up from a coma weeks later, paralyzed from the waist down, unable to speak, being told by his neurosurgeon that he would never walk again.

What struck me most when I first met Ron at our Wharton alumni networking group wasn’t his wheelchair. It was his warmth. Here was someone I’d expected to be one of the “sharks” from my Wall Street days, and instead I found someone profoundly human, funny, and present. Someone who had taken unimaginable disruption and somehow found a way forward.

This conversation isn’t about inspiration porn or making lemonade from lemons (Ron hates that phrase, by the way).

It’s about the messy, difficult, year-and-a-half-long process of accepting a new reality. It’s about finding purpose when your planned path disappears. And it’s about discovering that you’re far more powerful than you think—while also learning to accept what simply is.

For leaders navigating any form of disruption (career transitions, health challenges, market upheavals, or personal reinvention), Ron’s story offers something rare: honest wisdom about resilience that doesn’t minimize the pain.

The Weight of “Why Me?”

When Ron came home after five months in hospitals and rehab, his house looked the same. But his study had become his bedroom because he could never climb the stairs to his actual bedroom again. He threw himself into physical recovery with the same intensity he’d brought to Wall Street, but the results weren’t coming. He wasn’t getting back to what he was.

For a year and a half, Ron kept asking, “Why me? Why me? Why me?”

Then his wife, Betsy, who had been “incredibly patient,” finally said: “Enough. Shit happens to people and it happened to you, but you’ve got a family. You’ve got three daughters. They’re growing up. They need you to be a father. I need you to be a husband.”

That moment became Ron’s inflection point.

“All right, I’m just going to run with it,” he told himself. “This isn’t the life I planned. That’s not the life I ever pictured. But it is the life I have. And it’s not over. And there are still things for me to do.”

Notice what Ron says:

“I don’t know that I ever fully accept it, but I did own it.”

There’s profound wisdom in that distinction. Acceptance and ownership aren’t the same thing. You can own your reality, take full responsibility for what comes next, without accepting that it’s okay or fair or what you wanted.

Ownership is about agency.
Acceptance can sometimes feel like surrender.

Your Action:
If you’re in the middle of a disruption that feels unfair or overwhelming, give yourself permission to separate acceptance from ownership.

You don’t have to be okay with what happened.
You don’t have to like it.
But you can still own what you do next.

Ask yourself: What would ownership look like for me right now, even if I’m not ready to accept this?

When the Path You Planned Disappears

Ron had wanted a career on Wall Street since college. He lived it, breathed it, thrived in it.

He was the most senior person on the Asian equity desk at Lehman Brothers when it went under in 2008, already a massive disruption. He navigated that, landing at Barclays with even more responsibility, building out their U.S. sales team for Asian equities, including Japan.

Then the accident. And in 2012, long before work-from-home was standard, Ron realized: “I can’t do this.”

If there had been remote work options, he says, “everything would have been different.”

He could have managed the 2 a.m. calls to Asia. But the daily routine—getting into the office before 7 a.m., traveling to Boston every other week, the whole physical infrastructure of that life—was impossible now.

“Just like my whole routine, everything takes so much longer.”

The career he’d built for decades was gone.

But Ron didn’t stay stuck in that loss. Instead, he found himself exposed to a different problem: the home care system.

When he needed caregivers himself, he was shocked by the limited options. Either expensive agencies that gave you no choice in who showed up, or finding someone on your own, with no way to properly vet them.

“All these marketplace companies were forming, connecting buyers and providers online,” Ron remembered. “And we thought, well, why can’t we do something similar?”

That became Lean On We, a business that has now helped over 2,000 families in the greater New York area get better, more affordable care.

Ron couldn’t go back to Wall Street, but he found a way to have “a big impact on people in a more visceral way than I had previously.”

Your Action:
When your planned path disappears, look for the problems only you can see from your new vantage point.
Ron’s accident gave him lived experience with a broken system.

Your disruption—whatever it is—has likely exposed you to challenges, needs, or opportunities that others can’t see.

What problem are you now uniquely positioned to solve?

The Power of People Who Still See You

One detail from Ron’s story stuck with me: his network didn’t disappear when his mobility did.

In fact, they didn’t just support him, they helped him carve out a new path.

A former client who became president of a liberal arts school in Illinois invited Ron to be their commencement speaker.

Ron’s initial reaction? “I don’t know. I don’t know if I could do that. That’s a lot of work.”
But then he told himself: “If you don’t do it, you’re going to regret it.”

He went. His whole family came. Nearly 2,000 people heard him speak about living forward. “It was such an empowering experience,” he said.

A close childhood friend kept encouraging him to write and speak more:
“People want to hear from you. People are curious. People don’t know what life is like for somebody who’s paralyzed... You’re a manifestation that life isn’t over. And hearing from someone like you can make them think differently about their own challenges.”

These weren’t empty platitudes. These were people who still saw Ron—not as someone broken or diminished, but as someone with something valuable to offer.

They invited him to try something new. They pointed him in different directions. They believed in him when he was still figuring out how to believe in himself.

“I realized that I found writing meaningful,” Ron said, “sharing what I’m going through, partially for myself and partially because I could see that it had an impact on others as well.”

Now Ron is a keynote speaker, has built a growing newsletter, and is in the process of writing his first book. All because the people he impacted in his career and life needed him… in a new way.

Your Action:
Inventory your network not for what people can do for you, but for who still sees you clearly.

Who invites you to stretch?
Who points you toward new possibilities?
Who believes you have value to offer even when you’re not sure yourself?

Reach out to one of those people this week and tell them what their belief in you has meant.

Grit Without Delusion: The G.O.L.D. Standard

Ron has distilled his framework for resilience into something he calls “The New Gold Standard”—a nod both to his last name and his Wall Street career. It stands for:

• Grit

• Opportunity

• Learning

• Drive

The model came from what he’s learned since 2012 — since he took ownership of his new life. But what makes Ron’s approach different from typical resilience narratives is his refusal to traffic in false hope.

A couple of years ago, he tried an exoskeleton called ReWalk. Everyone was excited: “You’re going to be able to walk! You’re going to be able to do this and do that!”

But it hurt his shoulder, and more fundamentally, it wasn’t practical. Even in the best case, all it could do was let him walk in a park. “It wouldn’t have changed my life. I couldn’t get in this thing and get in the car and drive somewhere.”

It was like many of the other developments in spinal cord injury research that Ron has monitored. Yes, there have been exciting breakthroughs. But many of them help people with quadriplegia first—those without use of their hands and arms.

“Here I am watching with bated breath these developments, and then it’s a little bit like a mirage. I’m happy for these people who are going to be able to get this, but it’s not going to happen to me.”

There’s internal conflict in that: being genuinely happy for others while accepting that the help isn’t coming for you yet. “I’m disappointed, but I’m happy for people. And I’m just hoping that the next shoe will drop.”

This is the paradox Ron lives:
“I don’t think I have limiting beliefs. But I’m also realistic enough to know that some things aren’t possible.”

I’m consistently in awe of what Ron chooses to accomplish:

He’s run five marathons in a hand cycle.
He drives with hand controls—left thumb for gas, left hand for brake.
Getting into his car requires taking off one wheel, flipping the chair, taking off the other wheel, lifting the body over himself onto the passenger seat. “And that’s before I even leave the driveway.”

When I see Ron at our networking events, he always says, “I got it, I got it” even when I or others offer help. He does. But I also witness how much harder everything is.

Ron doesn’t deny the hard. He has simply figured out a way to live with it and through it.

Your Action:
Practice Ron’s paradox.

Challenge one limiting belief you hold about yourself or your situation:
What would you attempt if you truly believed you were “so much more powerful than you think”?

Simultaneously, identify one area where you’ve been holding onto false hope or unrealistic expectations:
What would change if you accepted that particular reality while still maintaining your agency everywhere else?

What Ron Would Tell His Younger Self

Near the end of our conversation, I asked Ron what he would tell his younger self. His answer surprised me:

“You are much more powerful than you think you are. The clichés that people have—some of them I think are terrible—but the idea that if you really put your mind to it, you can do a lot, you can do so much more than you think, that kind of cliché is true.”

Then he said something that I surprised me:

“I’m much more driven and much more purposeful now than I ever was. And I feel if I had been able to take this drive that I have now—that I so urgently need because I just need to work so much harder to get things done—if I had been able to bring that to bear earlier, I could have done different things.”

Read that again.

Ron is more driven now—in a wheelchair, navigating a world built for people who can walk—than he was as a high-performing managing director on Wall Street.

Why? Because necessity revealed capacity he didn’t know he had.

Most of us won’t access that level of drive until we’re forced to. But what if we didn’t wait? What if we took seriously the idea that we’re capable of far more than we currently believe?

Ron also clarified which clichés he hates. When people tell him he’s “taken sour lemons and made sweet lemonade,” he bristles:

“Really? Did I? I’m still in this wheelchair, by the way. That sour lemon still exists. I’m getting whatever juice I can out of it.”

Those platitudes, he says, “are meant to make people feel better, that this guy’s all right. You don’t have to worry about him. He’s got his act together.”

But he doesn’t need us to feel better. He needs us to understand that resilience isn’t about making everything okay. It’s about fortitude and perseverance in the face of things that remain decidedly not okay.

Your Action:
Don’t wait for a crisis to discover your full capacity.
Identify one area where you’ve been playing smaller than necessary—not because you lack ability, but because you haven’t urgently needed to show up bigger.

What would change if you brought Ron’s level of purposeful drive to that area starting now?

Moving Forward

Ron is working on a memoir. He’s focused on speaking, particularly to financial services audiences, the world he came from. He wants to share his perspective with young analysts and associates, with financial advisors who create wealth and independence for their clients but might not fully appreciate the importance of their work, and with leaders who want to create cultures where their people can reach their full potential.

“These are the sorts of messages that I can bestow on others,” he says.

He’s also continuing to build Lean On We, helping families navigate one of the most difficult transitions in life: caring for aging parents or managing their own care needs.

And he keeps showing up. At networking events. In the New York City Marathon (five times in a hand cycle). On Substack (Ron’s Ramblings) and LinkedIn. Doing the work.

When I watch Ron arrive at our gatherings, transferring from his car, navigating spaces designed for standing people, serving himself food while everyone else towers above him, I see someone living the truth he discovered:

• You’re more powerful than you think

• Your life isn’t over when your plan disappears

• Ownership matters more than acceptance

The world has a habit of telling people in wheelchairs that their lives are tragic, diminished, over. Ron’s existence is a quiet rebellion against that narrative.

Not because everything is fine—it’s not.

But because he decided that even in a life he never planned, never wanted, never asked for, there are still things for him to do.

And he’s doing them.

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Conversation Timestamps

[00:00 - 07:11] Introduction & The Accident

• Technical difficulties set the stage for our theme: disruption to reinvention

• Ron’s background: Managing Director at Barclays, building Asian equity desk

• The cycling accident: “She falls asleep, crosses the center line, and heads right at my buddy Zach and me”

• Waking up from a coma weeks later, paralyzed, unable to speak

• Ron’s reflection on showing his wheelchair on video calls

[07:11 - 16:27] The Lehman Brothers Collapse & Career Before the Accident

• Ron’s experience during Lehman’s collapse in 2008

• The cash advance story: trusting his instincts when talking points didn’t match reality

• His role selling Asian equities to U.S. institutions during Asia’s growth period

• What it meant to be on the equity desk covering China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan

• 50-mile cycling rides and physical fitness before the accident

[16:27 - 24:00] The Hospital, Rehab & Coming Home

• Two months in ICU, three months at Kessler Rehab

• The mental challenge of rehab: “No longer about healing you... it’s about teaching you how to live that life as a paraplegic”

• Coming home to a house that looked the same but wasn’t: the study became his bedroom

• The year and a half of asking “Why me?”

• Betsy’s intervention: “Enough. Shit happens to people and it happened to you, but you’ve got a family”

• Ron’s inflection point: “I don’t know that I ever fully accept it, but I did own it”

[24:00 - 30:00] The Birth of Lean On We

• Realizing he couldn’t return to his Wall Street career (pre-remote work era)

• Being exposed to the broken home care system as a patient

• The two inadequate options: expensive agencies with no choice, or DIY with no vetting

• Creating Lean On We as a marketplace connecting families with caregivers

• Helping over 2,000 families in the greater New York area

• The caregiver shortage crisis and immigration issues

• Empowering caregivers through direct relationships

[30:00 - 37:06] Global Perspective & Human Connection

• Ron’s memories of working with people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore

• The story of Jimmy Lai: from immigrant to billionaire to imprisoned activist

• “A guy who’s a billionaire could walk away and chose to be a symbol of everything that American values are supposed to be”

• Ron’s attempt to convince his family to move to Hong Kong

• The importance of building relationships across cultures

[37:06 - 44:56] Finding Purpose Through Writing & Speaking

• The TEDx talk opportunity

• Being invited to give a commencement speech at a liberal arts college in Illinois

• A childhood friend encouraging him to share his story more widely

• People’s misconceptions about life in a wheelchair

• The power of showing what’s possible: “If this guy in a wheelchair can do things, that is a mindset shift”

• Processing the word “inspiring”: “I’m just trying to live my life the best way I can”

• Ron’s relationship with technology and social media: bringing out the good in connectivity

[44:56 - 51:34] The New Gold Standard & What’s Next

• Ron’s framework: Grit, Opportunity, Learning, Drive

• Five New York City marathons in a hand cycle

• Working on a memoir and other books

• Focus on speaking to financial services audiences

• The importance of financial advisors’ work: “creating some sort of independence so people can go and live their dream”

• What Ron would tell his younger self: “You are much more powerful than you think you are”

• Being more driven now than ever before

• The clichés Ron hates: “You’ve taken your sour lemons and made sweet lemonade”

[51:34 - 57:50] Limiting Beliefs vs. Reality

• “I don’t think I have limiting beliefs. But I’m also realistic enough to know that some things aren’t possible”

• The exoskeleton experiment that didn’t work out

• Watching spinal cord injury research with hope and disappointment

• The mirage of breakthroughs that help others first

• Accepting what is while hoping for what might be

• The pairing of power and acceptance

• How to connect with Ron: LinkedIn, Substack (Ron’s Ramblings), rongold.live, and Lean On We

If Ron’s story resonates with you, you can find him on LinkedIn, read his Substack “Ron’s Ramblings,” visit his website at rongold.live, or learn more about Lean On We. And if you know financial services organizations looking for a speaker who brings real perspective on resilience, reinvention, and what actually matters, Ron is your person.

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May you lead without limits,