I wasn't thinking about OpenAI while doing it. But the contrast stuck with me later, when the funding headline crossed my feed. OpenAI's round closed at an $840 billion valuation in February 2026, backed by Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank. It took Apple over four decades to reach a comparable number. OpenAI got there in about a decade.

I run a small HR tool. It isn't going to be worth $840 billion. It's never going to sit in the same sentence as Amazon or Nvidia. And I've made peace with it, because I don't think we're playing the same game.

What $840 Billion Buys

Money at this scale buys compute. It buys the ability to train bigger models, hire the best researchers on the planet, and outlast anyone trying to compete on raw capability. It's an extraordinary bet on an extraordinary technology.

What it doesn't automatically buy is trust. And trust is where I spend most of my working life.

The afternoon of the launch, between bug fixes, I sat on a call with the client about something with nothing to do with features. Links. Specifically, the ugly, suspicious-looking tracking links our emails sent out, the kind making people hesitate before clicking anything, even when they know the sender.

So we talked about moving to a branded domain so the links would read as ours, not as some anonymous tracking service. We talked about sending from a proper address instead of a generic "noreply." We talked about putting together a one-page whitelist guide so the client's IT team had everything needed to keep our emails out of spam folders.

None of it is glamorous work. None of it will ever raise $110 billion in a single round. But every one of these small decisions served one goal: getting a person to trust an email enough to click it, answer honestly, and believe their answers would go somewhere meaningful.

My Version of Scale

I'm not against AI, and I'm not pretending my tool competes with what OpenAI builds. Such a claim would be ridiculous. What I'm pushing back on is the idea of bigger being automatically better, and the only companies worth watching being the ones chasing trillion-dollar valuations.

There's a version of scale with nothing to do with headcount or funding rounds. It's the twelve people who got unstuck within the hour instead of giving up and closing the tab. It's the manager who reads a BAT report and finally understands why their best engineer keeps threatening to quit. It's a tool feeling less like a product and more like someone paying attention.

You don't get this kind of trust by throwing more GPUs at a problem. You get it by fixing the bug at midnight because you know real people are on the other end of it, waiting.

The Real Work Is Invisible

Here's what nobody tells you about building something small and human-centered: most of the effort goes into things your customers will never notice, because you did them well enough there was nothing left to notice.

A branded link not looking like spam. A sender address not screaming "automated system." A bug fixed in twenty minutes instead of two days. Individually, none of these are impressive. Collectively, they're the difference between a tool people use and one they quietly stop opening.

I used to think impact meant reach. The more people you touch, the more you matter. I don't believe it anymore. I've watched founders chase scale for its own sake and end up with a product nobody trusts, because trust doesn't scale the way infrastructure does. You add more servers overnight. You don't add more trust overnight. It gets built one honest interaction at a time, and destroyed the same way, one bad experience at a time.

The Same Choice Shows Up in Your Career

I see the same pattern outside business, in how people think about their own careers.

Most career advice pushes you toward the bigger number. Bigger title, bigger team, bigger salary, bigger name on your badge. Nobody hands out advice sounding like "stay small and get excellent at something twelve people will notice." It doesn't sound ambitious enough to say out loud.

But I've spent years studying bad bosses, and one figure sticks with me. In my own research, 99.5% of survey respondents said they'd worked for one or more bad bosses. Almost everyone. And in nearly every story people told me, the bad boss wasn't chasing depth. They were chasing scale, a bigger team, a bigger budget, a promotion, without doing the unglamorous work of earning trust from the people already reporting to them.

The leaders I've admired most did the opposite. They stayed close enough to notice when someone on their team was stuck, and they fixed it before it became a resignation letter. They weren't always the ones with the biggest title in the room. They were the ones people trusted enough to follow into a harder conversation.

It's the career version of what I'm doing with this tool. Depth over reach. Trust over headcount. The instinct to notice twelve people struggling, rather than waiting for a report to tell you a thousand people churned.

Why I'm Not Chasing the Big Number

I'm not building a small tool for lack of ambition. I'm building it small because depth beats scale for this kind of problem. Helping a manager understand their team, or helping an employee feel heard by a survey they believe in, isn't a problem solved by getting bigger. It's solved by staying close enough to the work to notice when twelve people are stuck, and caring enough to fix it before breakfast.

Things might change one day. The tool might grow past the point where I personally know what's breaking at midnight. But right now, being small isn't a limitation I'm working around. It's the whole point.

If you're building something right now, in whatever field you're in, ask yourself honestly: are you chasing a bigger number, or are you chasing something a smaller number of people would trust? These aren't always the same question, and I'd argue the second one is harder to answer honestly.

I know which one I'm choosing. What about you?

The Center for Creative Leadership studied nearly 300 leaders over two and a half years and found teams with high psychological safety reported better performance and less interpersonal conflict. They also found something less comfortable: 62% of senior leadership teams showed major disagreement among their own members about whether psychological safety even existed there. The boss thinks it's fine. Half the room doesn't.

What the Army Got Right

The Army has a tool I still use, mentally, decades later: the After Action Review. You run an operation, then sit in a circle and answer four questions. What was supposed to happen. What happened in reality. Why was there a difference. What are we going to do about it next time.

Nobody gets fired in an AAR. It's the whole point. Rank comes off for twenty minutes. The private who spotted the problem gets to say so to the officer who caused it, and the officer has to sit there and listen. It's not comfortable. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be useful.

Compare it to the corporate postmortem, if your company even runs one. Half the meeting is spent making sure nobody's name ends up in the notes. The other half is spent softening language so legal doesn't flinch. By the time it's over, you've protected everyone's feelings and learned nothing.

Harvard Business Review's research on psychological safety backs this up directly: leaders who reframe a screwup as a shared learning problem instead of an individual competency test get better results. Instead of "how did this happen," try "thanks for catching it, how do we fix it." Same mistake. Completely different team six months later.

Reward the Reckless, Sometimes

I'm not saying give a bonus to the guy who torched the production database because he "wanted to see what would happen." Reckless isn't the same as careless. There's a difference between someone who took a calculated swing and missed, and someone who ignored the guardrails because rules are for other people.

The reckless I mean is the one who tried the idea nobody approved because getting approval would have taken three weeks and the market wouldn't wait. The one who pitched the client something unconventional because the safe pitch was going to lose anyway. The one who said the uncomfortable thing in the meeting because staying quiet felt like the coward's move.

I wrote about this from the other direction on Step It Up HR: 4 Ways to Turn Mistakes into Learning Moments. The short version: how you react to the first mistake decides whether anyone brings you the second one.

Silicon Valley likes to slap "fail fast" on a poster and call it culture. Then someone falls short, and the poster comes down along with their badge. A slogan isn't a system. The Army's AAR is a system, because it happens every single time, win or lose, with no exceptions for rank or ego.

Steal the Army's Playbook

You don't need a uniform to run this. You need four questions and the discipline to ask them every time, not just when something blows up big enough to notice.

What was supposed to happen. Say the plan out loud before anyone starts arguing about the outcome. Half of workplace blame comes from people quietly disagreeing about what the goal even was.

What happened in reality. Facts only. No blame, no credit, just the sequence of events everyone can agree on. This is the step most meetings skip straight past.

Why was there a difference. Not "who." Why. The moment someone's name enters this sentence, people stop talking and start defending.

What are we doing differently next time. One or two concrete changes, not ten. A list of ten fixes means nobody does any of them.

Run it in fifteen minutes, right after the thing happens, while the details are still fresh. Not three weeks later in a retro nobody prepared for.

The Question That Matters

Next time someone on your team takes a swing and misses, watch what you do in the first sixty seconds. Do you reach for blame, or do you reach for the four Army questions? What was supposed to happen. What happened in reality. Why. What now.

That's the whole leadership job, right there. Not avoiding the crash. Deciding what happens after it.

I think about the field I picked that day every time I watch a manager reach for a write-up form instead of a conversation. The pilot who cracks up on landing and gets back in the harness the next weekend becomes a better pilot than the one who never flew in weather. The employee who takes the swing and misses, and gets an honest AAR instead of a paper trail, becomes the person you want running point on the next hard problem. The one who gets buried in blame just learns to stop swinging.

So. Who on your team took a real risk this year, and how did you treat them when it didn't work out?

LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report found only 15% of employees said their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months. Down five points from the year before.

I don't think most of those managers stopped caring. I think they got busy, and busy managers default to whatever development topic is easiest to deliver: the one already sitting in their own head. Building a career plan with someone requires listening first. Running your favorite workshop requires nothing but a slide deck you already own.

Easy wins over useful, every time we let it.

It shows up on the receiving end too. eLearning Industry reports less than a third of employees, 29%, are satisfied with the learning and development opportunities offered to them for career progression. Not the training itself. The development chosen on their behalf. When leaders pick topics from their own comfort zone instead of a real conversation, the gap between what's offered and what's needed keeps widening, one well-intentioned workshop at a time.

Ego Dressed Up as Generosity

The uncomfortable part of this isn't the busyness. It's the ego hiding underneath it.

Teaching what you love feels like generosity because you're giving away something real. But look closer and half the time you're asking the room to admire what you know. You get to be the expert again. You get the nodding heads. You get to relive the version of yourself who first fell for the topic.

Your team walks out having learned something adjacent to useful, and you walk out having felt important. Everyone's satisfied enough nobody asks whether the hour was worth it.

I've done this more than once. I'd guess most leaders reading this have too.

It Isn't Only Training Sessions

Once I started noticing this pattern in myself, I saw it everywhere else too.

The book recommendation you hand a struggling manager. Was it chosen because it fixes the exact gap they're facing, or because it's the book which changed your own career and you've been waiting years for someone to hand it to?

The career advice you give a junior engineer who wants to move into architecture. Are you describing the path fitting their strengths, or the path you took, rebuilt as the only correct route because it worked for you?

The feedback you give in a performance review. Is it about the skill this person needs to grow, or the skill you happen to value most because it's the one you're strongest in?

I once spent a year pushing an engineer on my team toward public speaking. I loved presenting. I thought it was the fastest route to visibility and influence, and I said so, often. What she wanted was deeper ownership of a system nobody else understood well enough to touch. I was coaching her toward my own strengths instead of her goals, dressed up as mentorship.

She told me this, eventually, in a one-on-one I still remember for how uncomfortable it was. She was right. I'd mistaken my enthusiasm for her interest.

Stepping back from the training room, the same test applies everywhere a leader hands something down: a book, a skill, a piece of advice, a stretch assignment. Ask whether it answers a gap the other person named, or a story the leader wants to keep telling about themselves.

What I Do Differently Now

A few things changed for me after the canceled architecture session:

I ask before I plan. "What's the thing you wish someone had taught you this quarter?" is a five-minute conversation and it will wreck your carefully prepared curriculum in the best way.

I watch the one-on-ones, not the roadmap. Skill gaps showing up as hesitation, avoidance, or a repeated stumble in a 1:1 are almost always more urgent than the topic I'd pick for myself.

I let go of the topics I'm best at. If I'm the most qualified person in the building to teach something, it's often a sign I should find someone else to teach it, or find out whether the team needs it at all.

I treat "I don't know what they need yet" as an acceptable answer. Better to ask a second round of questions than to fill the gap with a topic chosen to flatter me.

None of this makes for a tidier training calendar. It makes for a team getting what it needs instead of what I most wanted to give.

The Real Job

Leadership development isn't a stage for the leader. It's a service for the people in the room. If a session, a book recommendation, or a piece of coaching says more about what you enjoy than about what your team is stuck on, it's worth asking who the hour was for.

What's the last thing you taught your team because you loved it, not because they needed it?

There's a book, The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace by Gary Chapman and Paul White, and it names what I stumbled into the hard way. People don't all receive appreciation the same way. Some want words, said out loud, to their face. Some want it public. Some want it private. Some don't want words at all, they want you to notice the extra hours and give them something tangible: time off, a task lifted off their plate, help.

I was running one language, loud and proud, on a team fluent in five.

Here's why it matters more than a warm feeling. 79% of employees who quit their jobs cite lack of appreciation as their primary reason for leaving, per O.C. Tanner's research. Organizations with strong recognition practices see 31% lower voluntary turnover, per Bersin by Deloitte. Employees who don't feel adequately recognized are twice as likely to say they'll quit within the year.

I read these numbers now and think about my engineer. She didn't resign over one awkward all-hands shoutout. I know how easily things would have gone the other way if I'd kept repeating it, meeting after meeting, to someone experiencing it as pressure instead of praise.

Why I Defaulted to Public Praise

Here's the uncomfortable part. I didn't praise people publicly because I'd thought carefully about what they needed. I did it because it was easy, and because it made me look good. Public recognition doubles as a leadership performance. Everyone in the room sees the leader who "notices things." One sentence, one meeting, credit handed to three people at once.

Workhuman's research found 85% of employees prefer some form of public recognition, and I leaned on this stat as cover for years. Averages hide people, though. This 15% isn't a rounding error. It's the engineer who fixes your ugliest bugs and dreads the meeting where you thank her for it.

I never asked my team how they wanted to be thanked. I assumed my style was everyone's style. It wasn't laziness exactly, more a failure of imagination. I couldn't picture appreciation working any other way than the way it worked on me, because I'm loud, and public praise has always landed fine on me.

The Five Ways People Want to Be Thanked

Once I went looking, the research backed up what my engineer had told me directly. Chapman and White surveyed over 100,000 workers and found people cluster into five distinct preferences, according to research summarized by Niagara Institute:

• Words of affirmation (45% pick this as their top preference): a specific, spoken acknowledgment of what someone did well.
• Quality time: your undivided attention, a conversation where you're listening rather than waiting to talk.
• Acts of service (22% primary, another 15% secondary): help with the workload itself. Taking something off someone's plate reads as gratitude louder than any speech.
• Tangible gifts (only 6% primary, and the least valued language 70% of the time): a small physical marker showing you were paying attention.
• Appropriate physical touch: a handshake, a fist bump, in the right workplace context.

Notice what's missing from this list: volume. Nowhere does it say "in front of as many people as possible." This was my invention, not the research's.

What I Changed

After the conversation with my engineer, I did something simple. I asked. Not a survey, not a form, a direct question in one-on-ones: "When you do something well, how do you want me to acknowledge it?"

The answers surprised me. One person wanted a two-line email, sent the same day, cc'd to nobody. Another wanted me to protect an afternoon for deep work as the thank you, no words needed. One person genuinely wanted the public shoutout, the bigger the room the better. My engineer wanted a quiet word, the two of us, before she went home.

None of this took more effort than what I was already doing. It took attention. I had to remember which language went with which person, the same way you'd remember someone takes their coffee black. This is the whole fix.

I started asking this question in every onboarding conversation now, right alongside the standard stuff about working hours and tools access. "How do you want to be recognized when you do good work?" gets written down next to someone's timezone and their preferred communication channel. It goes stale if you never revisit it, so I ask again around the six-month mark, since people's preferences shift as they settle into a role or move into a new one. A quiet junior engineer who dreaded the spotlight in year one sometimes wants the spotlight by year three, once she trusts the room.

Why This Sticks With Me

I build feedback tools for a living now, and I think about this conversation more than any customer interview I've run. The gap isn't a lack of caring. Most managers want to appreciate their people. The gap is this: managers, like I did, assume their own preference is universal, then wonder why recognition programs feel hollow to half the team.

A good feedback culture doesn't hand every employee the same trophy. It asks each person what lands for them, then delivers it, consistently, without needing a quarterly survey to remind you. This is part of why I built the Behavioural Awareness Tool at StepUp2Bat the way I did: leadership evaluation only means something if it captures how specific people experience your behavior, not an average across the whole team. Appreciation works the same way. The averages tell you what to expect from a crowd. They tell you nothing about the one person in the room who needs something different from what everyone else does.

Your Turn

If you lead people, you're already giving appreciation in some form. The question worth sitting with is whether you're giving it in your language or theirs.

Ask one person this week how they want to be thanked when they do good work. Then do it their way, not yours. It costs you nothing, and it might be the difference between someone staying five more years or updating their resume tonight.

What's your appreciation style, and does it match how you thank the people who work for you?

A University of Sussex study of 610 leaders across 18 industries found humble leaders gain more influence than the loud, self-promoting kind, not less. Researcher Dr. Elsa Chan put it plainly: humble leaders take an alternative route, building trust and mentoring others, and this route carries them further than dominance ever does.

Read it again. Humility isn't the soft option here. It's the one with better odds.

Compare it against the leaders who talk over every meeting and take credit for every win. Early on, they might look like they're winning. Watch five years out and the humble ones are still standing, while the loud ones wonder why nobody wants to work for them anymore.

I served with officers on both sides of this line. The ones who barked orders and never asked a question got obeyed, for a while. The ones who walked the perimeter, asked the junior soldiers what they saw, and admitted when a plan needed changing, got followed. Obedience and loyalty aren't the same thing, and only one of them holds up when things go wrong.

Attention Is the Whole Job

Wharton's research on vigilant leadership makes a point I wish someone told me years earlier: most of us miss important signals not for lack of intelligence, but because we carry limited attention, competing priorities, and no curiosity left after a long day.

The Wharton piece points to Charles Schwab spotting robo-advisors early and building around them, while Honeywell watched Nest build the smart thermostat market and did nothing about it. Same information, available to both companies. One paid attention. One didn't.

This gap, paying attention or not, decides more outcomes than talent does. I've watched it play out on missions and in boardrooms both. The people who ask "what am I not seeing here" outperform the people who assume they already know the answer.

Attention isn't a personality trait, either. It's a decision, made over and over, to keep your eyes open when the easier move is to assume everything's fine. Most leadership disasters were visible for months before they became disasters. Somebody saw a warning sign. Somebody decided it wasn't their job to say anything.

Paychecks Aren't the Point. Presence Is.

Here's something uncomfortable to say out loud: most leadership failures aren't failures of strategy. They're failures of noticing. The employee who quietly checked out three months before they resigned. The project which slipped a week at a time until it sat a month behind schedule. The teammate who stopped asking questions in meetings because nobody answered the last five.

None of these show up on a dashboard right away. They show up when somebody in the room pays attention.

My own research puts a number on this: 99.5% of people I surveyed said they'd worked for one or more types of bad boss. Not the occasional rough manager. Nearly everyone, everywhere, at some point. Ask why, and the answer is rarely cruelty. It's absence. A boss who stopped noticing.

I Learned This the Hard Way, Twice

The Army taught me the gear-check version of this lesson. Corporate life taught me the harder version.

Years later, running a team an ocean away from where I grew up, I missed something obvious for months. One of my best engineers started shipping less, saying less in stand-up, closing his laptop the second a meeting ended. I told myself he sat in a slow patch. Everybody hits a slow patch.

He wasn't in a slow patch. He was already gone in every way except his resignation letter, and I only found out why once he'd handed it in: a reorg six months earlier had quietly stripped the parts of the job he liked, and nobody, including me, sat him down and asked him about it.

I didn't lack the skill to fix it. I lacked the attention to see it needed fixing. This is a humbling thing to admit about yourself in public, and I'm doing it anyway because pretending leaders don't miss things helps nobody.

Three Habits Stronger Than Talent

None of this requires a rare gift. It requires repetition.

• Lay your gear out the same way every night. Whatever your version of gear is, a calendar, a checklist, a set of morning questions, keep the ritual the same so you notice the day it's off.
• Ask the second question. The first answer in a meeting is rarely the real one. Stay in the conversation one beat longer.
• Notice the tired voice on the call. Skills stop mattering the moment somebody checks out. Presence catches it before a resignation letter does.

None of these habits are complicated. None of them are quick, either. They cost you attention every single day, forever, with no finish line. Here's the trade. Attention paid daily, in exchange for a team which doesn't fall apart quietly while you're busy congratulating yourself on strategy.

You Don't Need to Be Special. You Need to Show Up.

Any dumbass handles this job well, given enough attention. I mean it as encouragement, not an insult. You don't need a rare gift to lead people. You need to pay attention, admit when you're wrong, and keep doing the small things long after they stop feeling new.

The engineer I lost taught me more about leadership than any course I ever sat through, and I'd rather have learned it from a book. I didn't get this choice. You still do.

So here's my question for you: what's the one thing on your team right now you'd notice, if you were paying attention?

This isn't only my story. Managers are 36% more likely to report burnout than the people who work for them, and 24% more likely to consider quitting in the next six months, according to Forbes' coverage of DDI's 2024 leadership research. We're not the exception to workplace exhaustion. We're often the worst-affected group in the building, and we're the ones everyone else looks to for stability.

Here's why this matters. Gallup has found managers account for around 70% of the variance in team engagement. Your team's experience of work runs through you. When you're depleted, this depletion doesn't stay contained to your calendar. It leaks into every one-on-one, every piece of feedback you don't give, every signal you're too tired to catch.

I've done my own research here. In a survey I ran on bad bosses, 99.5% of respondents said they'd had one or more bad managers in their career. Almost everyone. Digging into what made a boss "bad" showed something surprising: it was rarely cruelty. It was absence. Managers who were technically present but functionally checked out. Burnt-out leaders who weren't cruel on purpose, they simply had nothing left to give.

Here's the uncomfortable link. Most bad bosses aren't villains. They're burnt-out people who ran out of the capacity good leadership requires, and nobody, including them, noticed in time.

The gap between what your team feels and what you hear

Here's the part every manager reading this should worry about. Only 42% of burnt-out employees tell their manager they're struggling, and among those who do speak up, 42% say their manager does nothing about it afterward. Two different studies, same number, and it tells you everything about how quiet this problem stays.

Your team isn't going to hand you a burnout report. Most won't say a word, and the ones who do are watching closely to see if it changes anything. If you're too burnt out yourself to respond well, their silence gets confirmed. They learn not to bother next time.

I know this pattern because I lived on both sides of it. I've been the manager too drained to respond well to a struggling employee, and earlier in my career I was the employee who decided speaking up again wasn't worth it. Neither version of me was a bad person. Both versions of me were simply too depleted to do the job properly.

The signs I missed, looking back

Nobody sends a warning email before they burn out. It shows up in small things, and I missed every one of them because I was too busy running on the same fumes.

My one-on-ones got shorter and I told myself it was efficiency. My feedback got vaguer because specific, honest feedback takes energy I didn't have, and generic praise takes none. I stopped asking follow-up questions in standups, because a follow-up question means you're tracking someone's work closely enough to notice a gap, and I wasn't tracking anything closely anymore. I said "sounds good" to updates I hadn't fully processed.

I wrote about this exact failure mode on Step It Up HR: the barriers stopping leaders from giving real feedback are rarely about skill. They're about capacity. A burnt-out manager doesn't lack the training to give good feedback. They lack the reserves to do it consistently, week after week, when they're already running a deficit.

If you want a gut check, look at your last five one-on-ones. Were they conversations, or status updates you let happen to you? This gap is smaller than it sounds, and it's exactly where I lost a year without noticing.

What changed things

I wish I had a tidy three-step fix. I don't. What changed things for me was smaller and less impressive: I started treating my own state as data, not as a character flaw to push through.

Every Monday I began asking myself one honest question before asking it of anyone else: am I present this week, or am I only physically in the room? When the answer was "only in the room," I said so out loud to my own manager, and I lowered what I expected from myself in one-on-ones this week rather than faking full attention I didn't have.

This single habit did more for my team than any leadership book on my shelf. Not because it solved my burnout. It didn't, not immediately. But it meant I stopped mistaking my exhaustion for their stability. I stopped assuming quiet meant fine.

There's a piece of research I keep coming back to here: manager training is one of the few interventions reliably cutting active disengagement, in some studies by roughly half. Not perks. Not a wellness app. Unglamorous training in how to notice and respond to what's happening in your team, delivered to people who are themselves running on empty.

Check yourself before you check your team

If you manage people and you're exhausted right now, here's the honest version of advice nobody wants to give: your burnout isn't a personal problem to quietly push through while still doing right by your team. It stands between you and seeing them.

You don't need this fixed before you lead well again. You need to admit, to yourself first, whether you're present or only present in the room. This admission is the whole thing. It's the difference between the version of me who missed it for months, and the version who eventually didn't.

So before your next one-on-one, ask yourself the question you'd ask your team. Are you here? If the honest answer is no, this isn't a failure. It's the first accurate read you've had in a while. What are you going to do with it?

This is not only my opinion dressed up as insight. Gallup has tracked this for two decades, across millions of work units, using its Q12 engagement survey. The finding: managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in employee engagement between the best and worst teams in an organization. Not pay. Not perks. Not the mission statement on the wall. Who is running the room.

And it is getting worse, not better. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found manager engagement dropped from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, and this drop is driving most of the recent decline in employee engagement worldwide. The people with the titles are checking out. Somebody still has to run the room.

There's a psychologist named Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic who has spent his career studying who gets promoted into leadership and why. His research, published through McKinsey, found something uncomfortable: we routinely select leaders based on confidence rather than competence. We mistake the person who talks the most in the meeting for the person who should run it. His conclusion, which I have watched play out in three different companies: leaders need to make other people better. This is the job description. Everything else on the org chart is paperwork.

The seven people nobody called leaders

Back to Curve. We had 43 people across seven teams by the time I left, and the promotion path I built was not "wait for a vacancy and hope your manager notices you." It was: find the engineer already answering questions in Slack nobody assigned to them, already pulling a junior teammate aside to explain a design decision without being asked, already the person a struggling teammate went to instead of their actual manager.

Those seven people were leading before they had the word for it. Giving them the title did not change what they did day to day. It changed who had to listen to them.

This is the honest version of what a promotion is supposed to do. It should catch up to reality, not create it.

99.5% of us have worked for a title with no influence

I wrote a book called Bad Bosses Ruin Lives because the numbers are brutal. My own research found 99.5% of the people I surveyed have had one or more bad bosses in their career. Almost everyone who has ever held a job has sat across from someone with real authority over their paycheck and no real ability to lead them anywhere worth going.

You don't need cruelty to end up on this list. A boss who hovers over every decision, who cannot delegate, who needs to be the smartest person in every room, does plenty of damage without raising their voice once. The title gave them the authority to do this damage. It did not give them the skill to avoid it.

Flip it around and the math gets more hopeful. If titles were the same thing as leadership, this 99.5% figure would mean 99.5% of managers are failing at the job description. What's failing is the assumption pairing the title with the job description in the first place.

How to build influence without waiting for the title

If you are the person already doing the work described above and nobody has noticed yet, here is what I would tell the version of me at Curve who was still figuring this out:

Stop waiting for permission to help people think through a hard problem. Nobody promotes potential. They promote a pattern they have already watched you repeat.

Say the hard thing in the room, not after the meeting. Influence gets built in the moment people remember, not in the hallway conversation where you soften it afterward.

Make somebody else better at their job this week. Not your job. Theirs. This is the whole McKinsey finding in one sentence, and it costs nothing but attention.

And if you already have the title and you are reading this feeling uneasy, ask yourself who on your team would follow you into a hard 4pm decision without being told to. If the honest answer is nobody, the title was never the point. It was only the paperwork, waiting for the real thing to show up.

Who taught you the most about leadership without ever having the title for it?

Gallup has studied this for years, and its conclusion is blunt: most managers aren't coaching at all. In one analysis spanning 49,495 business units and 1.2 million employees across 22 organizations and 45 countries, Gallup found only about two in ten managers intuitively know how to engage people, develop their strengths, and set clear expectations. Only 26% of employees say the feedback they receive helps them do better work.

Sit with this number for a moment. Three out of four people are getting feedback which doesn't help them improve. This isn't a coaching gap. It's a coaching absence.

When organizations train managers to coach instead of boss, the numbers move. Manager performance improves 20 to 28%, and their teams see engagement gains of up to 18%, effects which hold up more than a year later. This isn't a soft skill nice-to-have. It's among the highest-leverage things a manager learns to do.

Why "Best Version of Themselves" Is Harder Than It Sounds

Here's the trap: "help someone become their best self" sounds like a fridge magnet phrase until you try to live it. It requires knowing who someone already is before you help them become more of it. Fixing a mistake doesn't require any of it. You point out an error without knowing a single thing about the person who made it.

Coaching does require it. You need to know what someone is genuinely trying to build, not only what they got wrong this week. You need to tell the difference between someone quiet in a meeting because they're still forming a thought and someone quiet because they've stopped believing anyone listens. Those two people look identical from the outside. They need completely different responses from a manager.

This is the part of coaching which takes real time, and it's exactly the part which gets skipped when a manager drowns in status updates and calendar Tetris. Knowing someone has no shortcut.

What I Changed

Once I noticed the pattern, I changed how I ran one-on-ones. I stopped opening with "what's blocking you" and started opening with "what are you trying to get better at." Small change. Different conversation entirely.

"What's blocking you" gets you a status report. "What are you trying to get better at" gets you a person. It tells you what someone is genuinely optimizing for, and once you know it, you coach toward this goal instead of clearing whatever sits in front of them this week.

I also stopped treating every mistake as an opportunity to fix something. Some mistakes are only mistakes. The question worth asking isn't "how do I stop this from happening again." It's "does this person already know what went wrong, or do they need help seeing it." Half the time, they already know. My job in the moment isn't pointing it out. It's asking what they'd do differently next time, then stepping out of the way.

The Part I'm Still Working On

I won't pretend I've got this fully sorted. The instinct to fix things fast runs deep, especially under deadline pressure, and I still catch myself sliding back into old habits. The difference now is I notice faster. I ask myself: am I helping this person become more of who they already are, or am I trying to make my own week easier by closing a gap I spotted?

Those two things look similar from a distance. They aren't the same job.

Ted Lasso is a sitcom character, written to deliver a line like this cleanly, in one take, with a full writers' room behind him. Real coaching runs messier and slower, and nobody hands you a clean line to deliver at the end of the scene. The underlying question, though, is worth carrying into every one-on-one: not "what's wrong with this person," but "what is this person becoming, and how do I help them get there faster."

If you manage people, sit with the same question this week. Are you fixing them, or are you helping them become more of who they already are? Those two jobs feel almost identical day to day. Over a year, they build completely different teams.

A Wharton Executive Education analysis cites a study of more than 7,000 employees: workers who felt a low level of empowerment sat at the 24th percentile of engagement. Workers who felt genuinely empowered sat at the 79th percentile. Not a small gap. The difference between a team showing up and a team showing up early.

The same piece references Zenger Folkman research showing only 4% of employees are willing to increase effort when empowerment is low, against 67% when it's high. Sixty-three points of discretionary effort, sitting on the table, unclaimed, because a leader wouldn't let go of the steering wheel.

I read this figure twice. Sixty-three points. The entire margin between a mediocre team and a team people fight to get onto.

The same analysis cites Gallup research showing businesses with highly engaged teams outperform peers by nearly 150% in earnings per share. Leaders who hoard decisions aren't running a tight ship. They're running a slower one, and paying for it in a currency nobody puts on the org chart.

Handing Over the Keys, Not the Advice

Here's where most delegation guidance goes soft. Leaders say "empower your team" and then keep every decision carrying real risk. Real handover means giving someone a decision where the outcome touches a customer, a deadline, or money, then staying quiet while they make it.

Uncomfortable on purpose. If it were comfortable, it wouldn't be a real handover. You'd be delegating the decisions you didn't want anyway.

I started doing this deliberately a few years back. Instead of answering "what do you think," I started answering with "what do you want to do, and why." First few times, my engineer looked at me like I'd stopped doing my job. In a sense I had. My job wasn't to hold every answer anymore. It was to hold the space where someone else's answer would grow.

Letting Them Fail Is the Point, Not the Risk

The part everyone skips over: sometimes the decision goes wrong. The junior calls it, and it doesn't hold up. Here's where a leader's nerve gets tested, not their generosity.

Garry Ridge, the longtime CEO who built WD-40's culture around what he calls "learning moments" instead of failures, has spent years making the case: reframing the language changes the behavior. Call it a failure and people hide it. Call it a learning moment and people bring it to you the next morning, already halfway to the fix.

I've watched a mistake handled two different ways on two different teams. On one, the leader asked "who approved this?" On the other, the leader asked "what did we learn, and what do we change?" Only one of those teams kept making decisions after this. The other one went quiet, and quiet teams stop growing leaders. They stop growing, period.

It Isn't Only a Work Habit

I noticed the same pattern at home before I noticed it at work, if I'm honest with myself. Watching my grandson wrestle with a decision, a puzzle, a choice about which way to build something, I'd catch myself stepping in with the answer before he'd even asked for it. Faster for me. Cheaper for him, in the one way it truly counts. Every time I did it, I handed him a solved problem instead of a solvable one.

Kids and junior engineers aren't the same, but the mechanism holding both back is identical: an adult in the room unwilling to tolerate watching someone else struggle for thirty extra seconds. Struggle isn't the enemy. Rescue too early is. I've had to catch myself with my grandson the same way I caught myself with this engineer, biting back the answer long enough to ask "what do you think you should try?"

The Real Cost of Hoarding

Keep every decision and you're not protecting the outcome. You're protecting your own comfort at the outcome's expense. And you're quietly telling your best people their judgment doesn't count until it matches yours, a strange message to send someone you hired for their judgment in the first place.

I think about this engineer often. He's a lead now, at a different company, making decisions nobody runs past anyone. I'd like to say I saw this coming the day my colleague called me out. I didn't. I stopped answering so fast, and space opened up where his judgment used to have nowhere to go.

Where to Start Monday Morning

No program required here. One decision this week you'd normally make, handed to someone else instead, with the outcome genuinely uncertain. Then sit with your hands still while they make it.

If it goes well, say so plainly and move to the next one. If it goes sideways, ask what they learned before you ask what went wrong. The order of those two questions tells your team everything about whether decisions are safe to make around you.

Whose decision are you still making which shouldn't be yours anymore?

She built an entire framework out of this discovery, now known as psychological safety, and found teams and organizations with higher psychological safety have better performance, lower burnout, and, in medicine, even lower patient mortality, as she's written about extensively. A survey question as simple as "would a mistake be held against me here" turned out to predict how honestly a team reported problems, and how fast they fixed them.

The teams hiding their off-days weren't safer. They were quieter about the same amount of failure, and slower to learn from it.

Not All Bad Days Are Created Equal

Edmondson's later work, in her book Right Kind of Wrong, draws a distinction I wish I'd had language for earlier in my career. She sorts failure into three types.

Basic failures: a preventable mistake in familiar territory, usually with one clear cause. You skipped the checklist. You didn't test the edge case. These get fixed with process, not forgiven with a shrug.

Complex failures: several small things going wrong together in a familiar setting. No single villain. A deploy fails because of a timing issue, a stale cache, and an on-call engineer heads-down on something else. These need a real post-mortem, not a scapegoat.

Intelligent failures: the ones which happen when you're doing something genuinely new. You tried an approach nobody on the team had tried before, it didn't work, and you learned something real. These aren't failures to prevent. They're the cost of doing anything worth doing.

My Friday deploy was a complex failure. Config drift between staging and production, a monitoring gap which delayed the alert, and a rollback script which hadn't been tested in three months. No single person screwed up. Three unrelated weaknesses lined up on the same afternoon.

Once I saw it this way, the write-up stopped being a confession and started being a map. Fix the config drift. Close the monitoring gap. Test the rollback script monthly. None of it happens if the instinct is to bury the day instead of studying it.

What I Do With a Bad Day Now

I stopped treating off-days as things to survive and started treating them as data with a deadline. Here's the version of it I use:

Write it down within 24 hours, while it still stings. The emotional charge fades fast, and with it goes most of the honesty. The clean, polished version you'd write a week later leaves out the parts which matter most.

Sort the type before you assign blame. Was it preventable with a checklist (basic)? Several things stacking up (complex)? Or a real swing at something new which didn't land (intelligent)? Each one gets a different response, and treating an intelligent failure like a basic one is how you kill the exact behavior you want more of: people trying things.

Share it wider than feels comfortable. My manager forwarding my mistake to leadership felt exposing in the moment. It's also the single biggest reason I stopped hiding problems since. Admit a mistake and get praised for the admission instead of punished for the mistake, and you'll do it again. Bury it in a private message with a manager who's annoyed, and you won't.

Ask what would have caught it sooner, not who should have caught it. "Who missed this" gets you a defensive team. "What would have caught this three steps earlier" gets you a better system.

I wrote a longer version of this for leaders specifically at Step It Up HR, because the pattern doesn't stop at engineering. It shows up in every team where the boss's reaction to a mistake decides whether the next one gets reported or hidden.

The Off-Days Are the Curriculum

I've had better weeks since the Friday of the outage. Launches which went out clean, projects which landed ahead of schedule, teams which hit numbers I was proud of. I couldn't tell you much about most of them now. They went the way they were supposed to go, a fine thing to have happen, but they didn't teach me anything I didn't already know.

The outage taught me about config drift, about monitoring gaps, about what happens to a team's honesty when the response to a mistake is curiosity instead of blame. Six years later I still use the rollback checklist which came out of the outage.

If you're sitting on a bad day right now, the kind you'd rather not mention in standup, don't bury it. Sort it. Was it something you should have caught, something which stacked up on you, or something you tried because you were reaching for real growth? Write down which one it was and what it's telling you.

Your worst Tuesday might be teaching you more than your last five good weeks combined. Go find out what it's trying to say.

Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report puts global employee engagement at 20%, down from a peak of 23% in 2022-2023. Gallup pins the cost of this disengagement at roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity worldwide, about 9% of global GDP. Ken Corey's own company, Step It Up HR, cites the same 21% figure. Numbers like these get repeated in keynotes and LinkedIn posts because they're big, they're scary, and they make a good slide.

Here's the number which should scare you more. In research I conducted, 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more bad bosses. Not "a difficult manager." Not "someone with a different style." A bad boss. Almost everyone who has ever held a job has been on the receiving end of bad leadership.

Now put those two facts next to each other. Eight in ten people are checked out at work, and virtually everyone has been mistreated, mismanaged, or ignored by someone above them at some point. This combination doesn't stay in the building when the shift ends. You carry it home. And somebody's waiting for you there.

The Research Backs Up What Every Kid Already Knows

There's a body of academic work on what psychologists call work-family spillover and crossover. One study, published in Family Stress and Parental Responses to Children's Negative Emotions, found parents' own stress and dissatisfaction directly shaped how supportive they were when their kids came to them upset. Higher marital dissatisfaction meant less support for a child's negative emotions. And it wasn't limited to the stressed parent. When one partner reported job dissatisfaction, their spouse also became less supportive with the kids. One person's bad day at the office rippled through the entire house.

Read it again. It's not only your own patience running thin when your job grinds you down. It's your partner's too. The stress crosses over. Nobody else in the house had a bad day at the job, but everybody pays for it.

I didn't need a peer-reviewed study to know this. I needed to watch my grandson's face change when I walked in still holding a bad meeting in my shoulders. Kids don't need the research. They ARE the research. They're running a live experiment on your nervous system every single day, and they're smart enough to know what the data says.

What You're Teaching Them Without Saying a Word

Here's the uncomfortable part. Your kid is building an entire model of what a career should feel like by watching you. If work leaves you snapping at small things, distracted at dinner, or numb on the couch by 7pm, this is not neutral information. This is the lesson. You are teaching a small, watchful person this is what adulthood costs: you trade your best hours and your best self to an employer, and whatever's left over goes to the people you love most.

I don't think most bad bosses set out to hurt anyone's kids. I don't think most disengaged employees are trying to model burnout for the next generation. Nobody clocks in thinking "today I will teach my child ambition equals exhaustion." But intent has never been the point. Impact is. And the impact is a kid who grows up associating a paycheck with a parent who wasn't fully there.

I've watched this pattern in leadership development work for years. The managers who are hardest on themselves, who carry every piece of criticism home and turn it over all night, raise kids who worry about their own performance before they've even had a first job. The managers who model boundaries, who say plainly, "I had a rough day, give me twenty minutes before I'm good company," raise kids who understand work is one part of life, not the whole of it.

Naming It Is the First Move

You won't fix a spillover you refuse to admit is happening. The single most useful thing I've found, both in my own house and in the leaders I've coached, is to say the quiet part out loud. Not to your boss. To your kid.

"I had a hard day. I'm not mad at you. Give me a few minutes and I'll be better company." This sentence does more work than an hour of forced cheerfulness at the dinner table. It tells a child the truth: adults have bad days, bad days are not their fault, and there is a version of you on the other side of twenty minutes who is fully present. This is a completely different lesson than silence, snapping, or the thousand-yard stare at a phone.

The second move is harder. At some point you have to ask whether the job itself is the problem. If you're bringing home a bad boss's fingerprints every single night, this is not a "manage your stress better" problem. This is a "get out" problem. I've written before about how innovation dies when leaders punish mistakes instead of learning from them. The same logic applies at home. If an environment keeps producing the same bad outcome no matter how well you cope, the environment needs to change, not your coping.

There's a middle move too, one people skip because it feels small: build a hard line between the drive home and the front door. Some leaders I've coached use the last five minutes of a commute to name out loud, to nobody but themselves, what happened during the day and what they're setting down before they walk in. It sounds a little silly the first time. It works. A body which has processed the day, even briefly, walks through a door differently than a body still bracing for the next email.

The Question Worth Asking Tonight

Before you walk in the door tonight, ask yourself one question: who is about to open this door? The version your job made, or the version your family deserves?

You don't get to choose whether your kid is watching. This part is guaranteed. The only thing you control is what they see.

The data backs up what your gut already tells you. Only 21% of employees strongly agree their performance management system motivates them to do better work, according to SelectSoftwareReviews' 2026 performance management statistics roundup. Half of managers, roughly 50%, admit they see no value in the process they are required to run. And 95% of HR leaders, the people who own the system, say they are not satisfied with it either.

Read those numbers again. The people who built the process do not believe in it. The people who run it do not believe in it. The people who receive it do not believe in it. And yet almost every company still runs one, once a year, on schedule, like a fire drill nobody expects to work.

Part of the problem is timing. Nearly 62% of employees say they have been blindsided by at least one evaluation, and 75% of millennials report leaving a review unsure whether they are doing well at all. This is not feedback. This is a surprise wrapped in a form.

What I Learned Running Appraisals

When I ran teams, I filled in the forms because the company required it. But I never once believed the form was where the real work of managing a person happened. The real work happened in the hallway conversation after a rough client call. It happened when someone stayed late to fix a bug and I told them the next morning it mattered. It happened in the ten minutes before a stand-up when someone admitted they were stuck on something and needed a second pair of eyes.

None of these moments fit inside an annual form. By the time appraisal season rolled around, half of what mattered had already faded, for both of us. I would flip through old notes trying to reconstruct a year of work into three tidy paragraphs, and I knew even while writing it: I was missing more than I was capturing.

I have also sat in the other chair, waiting for my own review, rehearsing the version of the year I hoped my boss remembered. This is a strange way to spend an hour. You are not being evaluated on your work. You are being evaluated on your manager's memory of your work, filtered through whatever they happened to notice in the six weeks before the deadline.

This is not a performance management system. This is a recency bias generator with a PDF template attached to it.

Companies Killed It And Never Looked Back

I am not the first person to notice this, and some large companies have already run the experiment of dropping the annual review entirely.

Adobe replaced its formal annual review with ongoing "check-ins," regular conversations between managers and employees about expectations and recent work. The result, according to reporting compiled by Lighthouse's research on companies eliminating performance reviews: Adobe saved roughly 80,000 hours of manager time a year and saw voluntary turnover drop by 30%.

GE moved to frequent, informal "touchpoints" tied to real priorities instead of a once-a-year form, and reported a fivefold increase in productivity over twelve months.

Deloitte moved to weekly check-ins between team leads and their people. No annual scorecard, only short, regular conversations about priorities and course correction.

Notice what all three have in common. None of them stopped giving feedback. They stopped pretending feedback batched once a year would still mean something to the person receiving it.

Why We Keep Doing It Anyway

If the annual review is this unpopular and this ineffective, why does almost every company still run one?

Because it is easier to audit than it is to coach. A form in a folder proves to legal and HR: "a conversation happened." It is documentation, not development. It exists to protect the company, not to grow the person sitting across the table.

Real coaching does not fit this same mold. Real coaching happens in the moment, close to the event, while the details are still sharp and the lesson still lands. Wait six months and tell someone about a mistake they barely remember making, and you have not coached them. You have filed paperwork about them.

There is also a simpler reason: the annual review is safe for the person giving it. A once-a-year conversation, scripted and formal, keeps distance between manager and employee. Weekly check-ins require the manager to show up, every week, with something honest to say. Not every manager wants this kind of exposure.

What To Do Instead

You do not need an enterprise HR platform to fix this. You need a habit.

Give feedback within days, not months. If something went well or went wrong, say so this week. The lesson only has value while the memory is fresh, for both sides of the conversation.

Make it a conversation, not a document. Talk first. Write down only what you need to remember the conversation happened, not to perform thoroughness for an audit trail nobody will ever read.

Separate development from compensation. Pay decisions are free to stay on an annual cycle if your payroll system demands it, but growth conversations should never wait for payroll's calendar.

Ask before you tell. Start check-ins with "what's on your mind" instead of "here's my assessment." You will learn more about how someone is doing, and they will trust the conversation more because it did not start with a verdict.

Keep a running note, not a year-end reconstruction. A single line jotted down after a good week or a hard one beats trying to remember twelve months of work in a single sitting. Future you, writing the year-end summary, will thank present you.

I wrote more about the specific reasons leaders avoid giving real-time feedback, and how to push past them, over on Step It Up HR. If the annual review has ever left you blindsided, or left one of your people blindsided, it is worth your time.

The Question Worth Asking

Next time your company schedules appraisal season, ask yourself one question: when was the last time a form changed how you worked, versus the last time a five-minute conversation did?

If you already know the answer, you already know what needs to go.

Kill the annual appraisal before it kills whatever trust is left between your managers and their teams. Replace it with something smaller, more frequent, and honest enough to matter.

Research backs this up more bluntly than I expected. A 2025 survey of 2,000 UK workers by Mental Health First Aid England found 45% of employees don't feel safe raising mistakes or flagging risks to their employer. Not "don't want to." Don't feel safe. Nearly half your workforce sits on information you need, and silence still feels safer to them than honesty.

Not a training problem. A leadership problem, and it starts with how the last mistake in the room got handled.

Google already ran this experiment for you

Google spent years studying what separates its highest-performing teams from the rest, in a project internally called Project Aristotle. Of the five dynamics identified as driving team effectiveness, psychological safety is listed first, ahead of dependability, structure and clarity, meaning, and impact.

Psychological safety, in Google's own words, comes down to a team member's sense of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk. Speaking up when something's wrong. Admitting you broke something. Proposing an idea which might flop in front of the whole room.

None of this happens in a culture where the last person who made a mistake got quietly sidelined. People notice. They watch what happened to the last person who admitted fault, and calibrate their own honesty against it.

I've spent a lot of my career studying bad bosses, and my own research found 99.5% of people surveyed have had at least one. Punishing mistakes instead of learning from them is one of the fastest ways to earn a spot on this list.

What "celebrate failure" looks like in practice

I want to be direct about something, because "celebrate failure" gets treated like a poster in a break room and nothing more. It doesn't mean throwing a party every single time someone screws up. It doesn't mean removing consequences for negligence or repeated carelessness. It means something narrower and harder to pull off.

Separate the mistake from the person. The engineer who skipped the test wasn't lazy. He'd inherited a habit from a codebase where the same test flaked constantly and everyone had learned to ignore it. Fix the system, not only the individual.

Make the retelling safe. If someone has to defend themselves the moment they open their mouth, they'll give you the version protecting them, not the true one. You need the true one, every time.

Ask what the mistake taught the team, out loud, in front of the team. Private feedback fixes one person's understanding. A blameless, public review fixes the system everyone else is still standing in.

Watch what gets rewarded. If your top performer never takes a risk because they only ship the safe stuff, and your most promising experimenter gets quietly passed over because a swing didn't land, you've told your whole team what you value, no matter what the values poster says on the wall.

Ask the second question before the first one. The first question after a mistake is almost always "who did this." Ask "what did we learn" first instead, out loud, before anyone gets near blame. Order changes everything about how safe the room feels.

What the Army taught me about mistakes

I served in the Army before ever leading a team in an office, and the difference in how mistakes got handled stuck with me. In training, an after-action review pulls apart everything going wrong, by name, in front of the whole unit, within hours of it happening. Nobody treats it as an attack. It's how you get better before a mistake matters more than it did in a drill.

Business culture, by contrast, tends to bury the mistake and hope nobody brings it up again at the next performance review. We call this politeness. It's closer to cowardice, and it costs teams far more than a bruised ego ever would.

An after-action review works because everyone in the room already agrees on the goal: get better before it counts for real. Bring this same agreement into a design review, a sprint retro, or a product launch post-mortem, and the tone in the room changes almost immediately. People stop protecting themselves and start protecting the mission instead.

The teams which innovate are the teams which fail out loud

Here's the part taking me the longest to believe: the teams I've watched ship the most interesting work aren't the teams with the fewest mistakes. They're the teams where mistakes surface fast, get discussed honestly, and get treated as data instead of evidence in a trial.

Few mistakes usually means few attempts. Few attempts means little learning. Little learning means you're standing still while a competitor with a messier, more honest process walks past you.

I wrote before about why nobody trained me to lead and how much of leadership involves undoing bad habits inherited from bad bosses. This is one of the biggest ones. For years I assumed a clean track record meant a strong team. Usually it means a scared one, quietly hiding its worst weeks from you.

This whiteboard stayed up because the team wanted it there. Nobody erased it out of shame. Eventually someone wiped it clean because the habit it represented had already changed, not because the memory was uncomfortable.

Ask yourself this

Think about the last mistake someone on your team told you about. What happened next? Did they get thanked for surfacing it fast, or did the room go quiet? The answer tells you more about your culture than any values statement ever will.

If you want a team which innovates, you don't need a bigger budget or a new framework. You need to make it safe for someone to say "I broke it" out loud, and mean it when you say thank you for telling me.

Mercurio's research, covered by Atlassian, found 30% of the workforce report feeling invisible at work, and 39% say they don't have a single person there who cares about them as a person. Half the time a high performer quits, the manager had no idea it was coming.

None of this is an accident. It's the direct result of thousands of small transactional exchanges. Check-in emails mentioning only deadlines. One-on-ones reduced to status updates with a calendar invite attached. Calls arriving only when something's on fire.

Mercurio draws a clean line: if the exchange might have been an email, it's transactional. If it required real human connection, it's relational. Most leaders default to transactional. It's faster and feels productive. But every transactional interaction is a small withdrawal from an account most leaders never deposit into.

I've written before about how 99.5% of people report having had a bad boss at some point in their career. It's not about a handful of terrible managers. It's about a system where "management" quietly became synonymous with "the person who calls when you've messed up." Fix this association and you fix a lot more than turnover.

My Own Phone Call Test

I failed this test once, early in my leadership career. A guy on my team, sharp, reliable, never a problem, missed two check-ins in a row. I called him. He was apologizing before I said a word. Right then I realized every call he'd ever gotten from me had been about a problem. I'd trained him to expect one every single time the phone rang.

I changed my approach after this day. Not with a script or a formal program. With a habit: call people sometimes for no reason at all. Ask how a kid's soccer season is going. Tell someone the extra effort on a project got noticed and mattered. Small moves. They add up faster than any all-hands meeting ever will.

What Relational Leadership Looks Like in Practice

None of this requires a new leadership framework or a training budget. It requires discipline, applied consistently:

• Call without an agenda. Not every check-in needs a deliverable attached to it.
• Ask before you tell. Lead with "how are you doing," not "here's what I need from you."
• Notice out loud, and soon. If someone went above and beyond, say so the same week. Not at the annual review, months after the moment has faded.
• Sit with bad news for a beat. When someone tells you something is wrong, resist the pull toward an immediate fix. Let them feel heard first.
• Track your own ratio. Count your last ten interactions with a direct report. If nine were transactional, the tenth won't undo the pattern.

Managing outcomes still matters. None of this argues against accountability or hard conversations about performance. It argues against building the entire relationship out of outcomes and nothing else.

The 99.5% Problem Starts Small

When I dug into the research behind the 99.5% bad-boss figure, the stories weren't mostly about screaming managers or public humiliation. They were quieter, and worse for it. A manager who only reached out during a crisis. A manager whose name on caller ID meant something had already gone wrong. A manager who never once called to say "good job" without adding a "but" right after it.

Bad leadership rarely announces itself with a single dramatic incident. It accumulates one transactional phone call at a time, until an employee's nervous system learns to associate their boss's name with danger. By the time a manager notices the damage, the employee has usually already decided to leave. They haven't told anyone yet, not out loud.

Why Leaders Skip This Step

Here's the honest part. Most leaders know this at some level and still don't do it. Calling someone with no agenda feels awkward the first few times. There's a fear it will land as fake, or worse, the employee will assume something's wrong precisely because the call is unusual. This fear is real, and it's also exactly the proof the pattern needs breaking. The awkwardness fades after a few genuine calls. The alternative, staying transactional forever, guarantees the fear never goes away for the person on the other end.

This is also why blind spots like this survive so long. A leader rarely finds out their calls trigger dread, because nobody tells their boss "your calls scare me." It takes a deliberate mechanism to surface it. Part of why I built the BAT framework at Step Up To BAT around structured feedback from direct reports and peers is exactly this problem. Leaders are unable to self-diagnose a pattern they're not inside of. Someone else has to name it, and most workplaces have no process for this to happen safely.

Run the Test on Yourself

Here's the uncomfortable homework. Think of three people on your team. Picture calling each of them right now, with no reason given. Be honest about what you think they'd feel in the half-second before they answer.

If the honest answer is dread, the fix isn't complicated. It won't come from a new policy or a leadership offsite. It comes from the next ten phone calls you make. Make one of them about nothing but the person on the other end.

I think about the officers who called for no reason but to check on me more often than I think about the ones who only called with orders. Twenty years on, it's still the difference I remember most. Which one do you want your team remembering about you in twenty years?

I went looking for data because I didn't want this to be my own sob story. Turns out it isn't. 26% of managers have never received any management training at all. Not a workshop. Not a course. Nothing. And that's the generous read, because plenty of the "training" that does exist is a slide deck and a certificate that changes nothing about how someone behaves under pressure.

My own research backs this up in a different way. In the work I've done on workplace culture, 99.5% of people I surveyed said they'd had one or more bad bosses in their career. Read that again. Not "some people." Nearly everyone. If leadership were being taught properly at scale, that number would not exist.

Companies know this is a problem. They don't fix it. Plenty of organizations will tell you developing leaders is an urgent priority, and then you look at what they do about it and the gap between the talk and the action is enormous. Everyone agrees the house is on fire. Almost nobody is holding a hose.

I've sat in the planning meetings where this gets discussed. Someone puts up a slide about "investing in our people." Everyone nods. Then budget season arrives and the leadership program is the first line item cut, because it's easier to defer developing humans than it is to defer a product launch. The launch has a deadline. The manager who's quietly failing their team does not, at least not one anyone tracks on a dashboard. So the damage compounds, quietly, for years, one bad one-on-one at a time.

The Moment I Stopped Waiting

I remember the exact point where I stopped expecting the company to fix this for me. I'd had a conversation with someone on my team that went badly. Not because I was cruel. Because I was clumsy. I said the right things in the wrong order and watched someone shut down in front of me.

I went home that night and thought about every boss I'd ever had who'd made me feel small, and every one who'd made me feel like I mattered. The gap between those two groups had nothing to do with intelligence or credentials. It was entirely about whether they'd bothered to think about the person in front of them, not the task.

That was when I decided I wasn't going to wait for a training budget or an HR calendar to teach me how to lead. I was going to become, deliberately, the leader I'd wished I'd had. Not a perfect one. One who was paying attention.

Waiting for L&D Is a Losing Bet

Here's the uncomfortable part. If you're waiting for your company's Learning and Development team to hand you the skills to lead well, you might be waiting a long time. L&D departments are underfunded, under-resourced, and usually built for compliance training, not for the harder, slower work of shaping how a person treats other humans under pressure.

That's not a knock on the people who work in L&D. Most of them know the gap exists too. It's a structural problem. Nobody's incentivized to fix how managers behave day to day, because it's messy and hard to measure and it doesn't show up on a quarterly slide.

Which means the job falls to you. Not because it's fair. Because nobody else is going to do it.

Be the Leader You Wish You'd Had

This is not complicated advice, but it is uncomfortable advice, because it means doing the work yourself instead of blaming the system.

Think back to the best boss you ever had. Not the one with the most impressive title. The one who made you want to do good work. What did they do, specifically? I'd bet money it wasn't a framework or a certification. It was small things. They remembered what you told them last week. They gave you feedback in private and credit in public. They asked questions instead of assuming they already knew the answer.

None of that requires a training budget. It requires deciding, deliberately, that you're going to act like the leader you wanted, instead of copying the leader you got stuck with.

I've had bosses who taught me exactly what not to do, and I'm grateful for them in a strange way, because they were unmistakable. There's no ambiguity when someone makes you feel two inches tall in a meeting. You remember it. Use it. Every bad boss you've survived is a free lesson in what to never become.

I keep a mental list of these. Not a formal one, nothing written down, only moments I've filed away. The manager who read out my mistake in front of the whole team instead of pulling me aside. The one who took credit for a decision I made and then vanished when it went sideways. I don't think about these people with anger anymore. I think about them as data. Every one of them handed me a rule for free: don't do that to somebody else. That's a cheaper education than any leadership course I've ever paid for, and in some ways it's stuck harder, because I felt it instead of reading it off a slide.

What I'd Tell the Younger Version of Me

If I went back and talked to the person standing in front of those soldiers for the first time, or the newly promoted manager who didn't know what he didn't know, I'd tell him this: nobody is coming to save you from your own leadership gaps. The training isn't showing up. The mentor isn't going to be assigned to you. You have to build the muscle yourself, on the job, one uncomfortable conversation at a time.

Development is everyone's job. Not HR's alone. Not your manager's alone. Yours too.

So here's the question I'd leave you with. Think about the leader you wish you'd had at your worst job. What's stopping you from being that person for someone else, starting this week?

I am one of many leaders stuck in this pattern. Gallup studied entrepreneurs and found only one in four have high levels of what they call Delegator talent. The other three in four are stuck doing exactly what I was doing: holding on.

And it costs real money. Gallup's data shows CEOs with strong delegation skills posted three-year growth rates 112 percentage points higher than low-delegation CEOs, and generated a third more revenue on average, roughly 8 million dollars versus 6 million. Letting go is not soft. It is one of the highest-leverage moves a leader has available.

Why We Hold On Anyway

If letting go pays off, why do so many leaders refuse to do it?

Because delegation feels like losing something. Founders in particular treat the business like their own creation, and handing off a piece of it feels like handing off a piece of themselves. There is a quiet, persistent belief nobody else will care as much or do the work as well. There is a fear explaining the task will take longer than doing it. And there is an identity problem underneath it all: if I am not the one solving the hardest problem in the room, who am I?

None of this is about the task. It is about control, and about what you think your value is built on.

I built my sense of worth on being the person who handled anything. Useful trait in a crisis. Poor operating system for building a team.

The Cost Nobody Puts on the P&L

While I was busy being indispensable, I was also, without meaning to, training my team to wait on me.

This is the quiet damage of a leader who cannot let go: it starts to look like control from the outside even when it does not feel this way from the inside. Control has a well-documented price tag. A Trinity Solutions survey, cited in Harry Chambers' book My Way or the Highway, found 79 percent of employees have experienced micromanagement at work, 85 percent said it hurt their morale, and 71 percent said it interfered with doing their job.

My own research found 99.5 percent of survey respondents have had one or more bad bosses in their career. A leader who cannot delegate does not need to be cruel to end up on this list. Hovering is enough on its own.

Trust is not a soft metric either. Paul Zak's research for Harvard Business Review found people at high-trust companies report 74 percent less stress, 106 percent more energy at work, and 50 percent higher productivity than people at low-trust companies. Every task I kept for myself instead of handing off was a small withdrawal from this account.

What Changed It For Me

There was no lightning bolt moment. There was a slow, uncomfortable realization: the team I built was unable to function without me in the room, and the failure was mine, not theirs.

The shift started small. I stopped answering questions I had already answered once. I pointed people back to the decision, the document, the person who owned it. It felt cold at first. It was not cold. It was respect. It said: you have this.

I started letting people finish work at 80 percent of how I would have done it, and I let it ship at 80 percent. Not because 80 percent was good enough forever, but because the alternative, me redoing everything to reach 100, meant nobody on my team ever got the chance to reach 100 on their own.

I also started asking a different question before I stepped in. Not "will this go faster if I do it myself" but "what does this person need in order to do this without me next time." One question changed how I ran meetings, how I gave feedback, and how much sleep I got.

Where to Start If This Sounds Like You

You do not fix a pattern like this overnight. Start smaller than feels comfortable.

Pick one task you have held onto for the wrong reasons, not because you are the only person capable of it, but because letting go feels uncomfortable. Hand it off completely. No check-ins, no rewriting the output after the fact. Let the result be theirs, good or imperfect.

Notice the moment you feel the urge to jump in. This urge is data. It tells you where your control habit lives, not where your team truly needs you.

And ask people directly what they need from you to do their job without you. Most leaders assume they already know. Most are wrong.

This is close to the framework I teach in my leadership workshops: awareness of the pattern, acceptance it is yours to fix, action to change it. Awareness without action changes nothing. I know because I sat in the awareness stage for years before I did anything about it.

Enabling Is the Job

Somewhere along the way I stopped defining leadership as being the best doer in the room and started defining it as building people who did not need me in the room at all.

A hard trade for anyone whose identity was built on being needed. It was hard for me. A team only performing when you are watching is not a team. It is an extension of you, and it stops the moment you step away, get promoted, get sick, or retire.

The leaders I respect most now are not the ones with an answer for every question in the room. They are the ones whose teams keep performing when they are on vacation, because they spent years building people instead of building dependence.

I still notice the urge to jump in and fix things. Old habits do not disappear, they get quieter. The difference now is I catch the urge, and I ask myself who else on my team might grow by handling this instead of me.

Where in your own work are you still the bottleneck because letting go feels like losing something? What would it cost to find out you were wrong?

In a review of leadership effectiveness data covering 50,000 leaders, researchers found that out of the people who scored low on likeability, only 27 individuals also ranked high on leadership effectiveness, as detailed in this breakdown of the study. Read that again. Being unlikeable and being effective can coexist, but it's rare, and it's not the point.

The real finding underneath that stat isn't "be a jerk and you'll be respected." It's that likeability and effectiveness are not the same axis, and leaders who optimize for one at the expense of the other usually end up bad at both. You can be warm and clear at the same time. What you can't do is trade clarity for approval and expect the trade to be free.

I've written before about how 99.5% of people I surveyed had experienced at least one type of bad boss. A huge chunk of those bad-boss stories aren't about tyrants. They're about managers who avoided the hard conversation, who let a problem fester because addressing it felt uncomfortable, who prioritized the relationship over the truth. That's not a nice boss. That's an absent one wearing a nice boss's face.

What Being Real Actually Looks Like

Being real doesn't mean being harsh. It means the version of you your team sees in a one-on-one is the same version that shows up in the all-hands. It means when someone asks "how am I doing," you tell them the actual answer, not the answer that keeps the meeting comfortable.

I had to relearn this the hard way. There was someone on my team years ago who was likeable, funny, great in meetings, and quietly missing every deadline. I let it slide for months because I liked working with them and didn't want to be the person who made things awkward. By the time I finally had the honest conversation, the problem had compounded into something much bigger than a missed deadline. It became a trust problem, and trust problems take far longer to fix than performance ones.

If I'd been real with them in month one instead of month six, it would have been a fifteen-minute conversation. Instead it took a quarter and nearly cost us the relationship entirely.

The Test I Use Now

Before I say anything to someone on my team, I ask myself one question: am I saying this because it's true and useful, or because it's what they want to hear? If it's the second one, I stop and rewrite it.

That single check has changed how I lead more than any framework or leadership book. It's not about volume or bluntness for its own sake. Some of the most real conversations I've had were quiet ones. What makes them real is that nothing in them was shaped to protect my own comfort.

Popularity is a byproduct of good leadership sometimes. It's never the goal. The moment it becomes the goal, you start editing the truth to fit the reaction you want, and your team stops getting the real you. They get a performance instead.

Where This Leaves You

If you're a manager reading this and you can feel a specific face in your mind right now... someone you've been going soft on because you like them, or because confrontation feels risky... that's your answer. That's the conversation you're overdue to have.

Being liked fades the moment you leave the room. Being real is the only thing that built anything that lasted. Which one have you been optimizing for this week?

Thomas Erikson's book Surrounded by Idiots maps human behaviour into four colour types. Red: decisive, results-driven, impatient. Yellow: enthusiastic, social, big-picture. Blue: analytical, precise, detail-obsessed. Green: patient, caring, the best listener in the room.

Most leaders skew Red or Yellow. They talk first and think of questions later. They fill silence because silence feels like failure. In their experience, silence means the meeting has stalled and someone needs to rescue it.

Green is different.

Green personalities listen first. They ask open questions. They wait. They let the other person reach the end of a thought before forming any response. They don't perform attention... they pay it.

Erikson makes one observation I keep returning to: if you're unsure how to read someone, go Green. Shut up. Ask a question. Then hear the answer.

He says this works with every personality type. Reds respect it because you're not filling their time with noise. Yellows love it because it gives them space to think out loud. Blues need it because they're always three steps ahead and they want someone keeping up. Greens light up when they find a leader who genuinely listens.

I am not a natural Green. Ask anyone who has worked with me. I'm a talker. I have opinions. I am entirely willing to share them. But going Green deliberately... treating it as a skill rather than a personality trait... turned out to be one of the most effective shifts I've made as a leader.

The Numbers Are Damning

This is not a soft topic.

Research from 2025 shows 86% of employees feel they are not heard fairly or equally at work. 63% say their voice has been ignored by their employer or manager at some point. Meanwhile, 64% of HR professionals name active listening as the top leadership skill they look for... and only 2% of the population has mastered it.

Two percent.

The people doing this well are nearly invisible because the skill looks like nothing from the outside. They're sitting there, asking questions, letting you talk. They don't appear to be doing anything. What they're doing is building more trust per minute than any speech or strategy delivers.

Managers trained in active listening see 30% higher employee satisfaction. Teams led by strong listeners have 20% lower turnover. 79% of employees who feel heard report higher motivation.

These aren't philosophical numbers. They show up in retention, in output quality, in how often your team brings problems to you before those problems become crises.

What Going Green Looks Like in Practice

Going Green is not passive. It's not nodding along while composing your response.

It's three specific things.

Ask open questions. Not "is everything okay?" but "what's getting in your way this week?" Not "do you agree?" but "what am I missing?" The phrasing matters. Closed questions give people permission to say "fine" and move on. Open questions require them to think and respond.

Tolerate silence. When you ask a question and the room goes quiet, resist the urge to fill it. The person is thinking. Let them. The silence belongs to them, not yours to rescue. Leaders who tolerate no silence almost always answer their own questions, which means they never learn anything from the conversation.

Reflect back before responding. Before offering your view, repeat what you heard. "So if I understood you correctly, the problem is..." This does two things. It shows the person they were heard... which is rarer than it should be. And it forces you to process what was said before reacting. You'd be surprised how often repeating something back changes what you want to say next.

None of this is complicated. All of it requires discipline. The instinct to respond fast, to look decisive, to fill space with answers... it's wired into most leaders. Going Green means fighting the instinct.

What I Had to Unlearn

For years, I thought quick answers were what made me useful.

They made me a crutch.

When I answered everything fast, my team stopped working through problems before bringing them to me. Why develop the muscle yourself when I would hand over the answer in five minutes?

Worse, I was often answering the wrong question.

There's a phrase I've heard from coaches and therapists: the presenting issue is rarely the real issue. In leadership, I've found this to be true more often than I'd like to admit. People come to you with the question they feel safe asking... not the one they need answered.

The question "should we rebuild this module?" was sometimes a signal of burnout dressed up as a technical debate. The question "what do you think about my career path?" was sometimes someone telling me they were about to start looking.

When you answer quickly, you address the surface question and miss the one underneath.

I noticed this when I deliberately slowed down. Not because anyone told me to... but because someone I respected sat through an entire one-on-one saying almost nothing, and I came out with my thinking reorganised. They had asked three questions. I'd done all the talking.

It was the most useful conversation I'd had in months.

The Rebellious Act

Going Green as a leader is a rebellion against the image of leadership.

Leaders are supposed to have answers. They're supposed to project confidence, forward motion, clarity. Sitting quietly and asking questions looks like uncertainty. Like you don't know what to do.

Most of the time, you do know. Going Green isn't about pretending otherwise. It's about making space for your team to get there themselves... because a team working through problems is more capable than a team waiting for your answers.

The leaders I've respected most in my career were the ones who made me feel heard. Not the ones with the best answers... the ones who asked the best questions. Not the ones who filled every room with noise, but the ones who made room for mine.

Going Green is the move most leaders never make because it feels like weakness. In practice, it builds more trust than almost anything else you will do.

Try This Week

Pick one meeting where you'd normally lead. Set one rule: don't offer an answer until you've asked at least two questions.

See what comes up.

Erikson is right... going Green works regardless of who's in the room. What changes is what people bring to you when they trust you're going to listen. And eventually, what they're willing to work out themselves before they even need you.

The most effective thing a leader says is sometimes nothing.

Research from LinkedIn shows diverse decision-making teams deliver 60% better results. Sixty percent. Not a small number. Not a rounding error. The gap between a product team shipping the right thing and one shipping the wrong thing.

Yet most hiring processes are designed to filter out people who feel different, not people who perform differently.

I spent years in the Army. The best teams I worked with were not teams of identical people. They were teams with wildly different skills, backgrounds, and personalities, held together by common purpose. Build a unit with purpose at its center and they cover each other's weaknesses. Build one around who you'd grab a beer with and you get a group of friends making the same mistakes.

Business teams work exactly the same way. A room full of people who all think alike doesn't produce better decisions. It produces faster decisions with less resistance and more shared blind spots.

Only 34% of employees are engaged at work. Many organizations spend enormous energy keeping disengaged people productive. The culture fit filter doesn't create engaged, committed teams. It creates comfortable ones.

No Measurable Standard Means No Accountability

There's no objective measure for culture fit. When a hiring criterion has no measurable standard, it defaults to gut feeling. And gut feelings have biases baked in.

Research on unconscious bias in hiring shows unstructured interviews are weak predictors of future job performance. Yet culture fit gets judged in unstructured conversations, where the interviewer runs on instinct.

Instinct tells you to hire the person who feels familiar.

Anthony Park was a software engineer who didn't fit the Silicon Valley stereotype. He was "buttoned-up" and didn't match the casual, hoodie-wearing culture at Netflix. They hired him anyway, based on what he demonstrated he was capable of doing. He built a Netflix app to prove his skills. He became VP of Engineering.

How many people like Anthony Park have been turned away at the "culture fit" stage? We don't have numbers on the candidates who didn't get the callback. Nobody tracks the talent lost to this filter. But it's there, working quietly in every hiring process where "culture fit" goes undefined.

Culture Add Is the Better Question

Instead of asking "Does this person fit our culture?" ask "What does this person add to our culture?"

Culture ADD means hiring people who share your values but bring skills, perspectives, and experiences you don't already have. Your existing culture grows stronger, not bigger.

Values are worth screening for. Integrity. Accountability. Honesty. Whatever yours are. Those matter. But personality, background, communication style... those differences are features, not problems.

The best hire I ever made was someone who disagreed with me in the interview. Not rudely. Not pointlessly. She had a clear view contradicting mine and said so, directly. I hired her on the spot. She was right about the thing we'd disagreed on. And about six other things afterward.

She was not a culture fit. She was a culture improvement.

What Values Screening Actually Looks Like

The shift from culture fit to culture add requires you to get specific about what your values are. Not the polished version on your careers page. The real ones, the ones you'd actually hold a new hire to.

Here's an example. If "accountability" is one of your values, define what it looks like in practice:

• Do people flag problems early or hide them until deadline?
• Do managers take ownership when projects miss, or do they point at the team?
• Is "I made a mistake" welcomed or punished?

With definitions like these, you screen for accountability in the interview with behavioral questions. "Tell me about a time you made a significant mistake at work. What happened?" The answer tells you far more about values alignment than whether they feel like someone you'd invite to dinner.

Culture add doesn't mean hiring anyone regardless of fit. It means being precise about what fit means, and making sure you're measuring the right things.

The Practical Fix

Stop using "culture fit" as a rejection reason. It tells you nothing and it protects biases you'd rather not admit.

Replace it with specific questions:

• Does this person share our stated values?
• Do they have skills our team is missing?
• Have they worked in high-accountability environments before?
• Do they communicate clearly under pressure?

Those questions have answers you compare across candidates. "Culture fit" doesn't.

If someone in your hiring process says "I don't think they're a culture fit," press them. What did the candidate say or do? If they struggle to answer, the bias is doing the talking.

Require interviewers to document specific concerns against specific criteria. If someone cannot name a specific behavior or answer to back up a rejection, the rejection doesn't stand.

The Real Cost

A team of identical thinkers isn't cohesive. It's fragile. One shared blind spot and the whole team goes down together.

Real cohesion comes from shared purpose and mutual respect. Not shared taste in pubs.

And the people filtered out? Many of them are exactly who you needed. The one who would've spotted the flaw in your roadmap. The one who'd have pushed back on the decision everyone else was nodding along with.

Next time you're in a hiring room and someone says "culture fit," ask them what they mean. Don't let it pass. The answer tells you a lot about your hiring process... and a lot about who's been quietly filtered out.

Ken works with organizations on leadership and getting the best from their people. Find out more at Step It Up HR.

Research from the University of Queensland puts the average number of distinct careers at three to seven before retirement. Not jobs. Careers. The average person changes jobs roughly every two years and nine months. Over a 45-year working life, this adds up to around 16 different jobs.

Sixteen.

CVWizard's 2025 data found 66% of Gen Z workers planned to switch jobs within the year. Not careers ... jobs. And the number was even higher among Gen Z women at 71%.

This isn't failure. This isn't lack of commitment. This is how careers work now. And if we're honest about it, how they've always worked.

The ladder was never real. It was a story companies told employees to make them feel stable, and a story employees told themselves to feel in control. The spaghetti was always there underneath.

The Real Cost of Ladder Thinking

When people believe their careers should go in a straight line, any deviation feels like failure.

I've coached engineers who felt genuine shame about moving into management, as if going sideways meant giving up. I've spoken with managers stuck in roles they hated because leaving their industry felt like starting over. I've met people in their forties who'd never tried anything new because they were afraid of falling off a rung they'd spent twenty years climbing.

The ladder doesn't free you. It traps you.

It creates a permanent state of behind-ness. If you're not on the next rung yet, you're late. If you spent a few years in a different direction, you're off track. If you tried something and it didn't work, you've wasted time.

None of this is true. It is, though, exhausting to believe.

There's also a quieter cost nobody talks about: the skills you never build because you were focused on moving up instead of moving around. The relationships you never make because you stayed inside one industry. The perspective you never gain because you only ever saw one type of problem.

The ladder keeps you narrow. The spaghetti makes you broad.

Why the Messy Path Wins

The more varied your path, the more resilient you tend to be. Not because variation is inherently good, but because every sideways move adds a new set of skills, contexts, and perspectives to your toolkit.

My time in the Army taught me how to lead under pressure, how to give and receive direct feedback without ego, and how to function in high-stakes environments with incomplete information. None of it showed up on my resume in an obvious way. All of it transferred to every role I've held since.

My move from fintech to HR consulting looked strange from the outside. What do engineering teams have to do with employee experience? As it turns out: everything. The hardest problems in software aren't technical. They're human. I spent fifteen years solving them from the engineering side. Now I solve them from the people side. Writing a book about bad bosses wasn't a departure from my career in tech. It was the logical result of spending fifteen years watching management go wrong in organizations built on code.

The context from one world makes you sharper in the next. You don't get it by staying in your lane.

The best leaders I know have careers like mine ... messy, multi-industry, full of moves no one predicted. They're not better leaders despite the wandering. They're better because of it.

How to Stop Thinking in Ladders

This isn't an argument for changing jobs every six months. Spaghetti isn't chaos. It's a tangled path getting you somewhere interesting.

Here's how I think about it:

Follow the problem, not the industry. The question I've always asked: where is the hardest, most interesting version of this problem? If the answer is in a different sector, go to a different sector. The skills transfer. The industry label doesn't define you.

Value the adjacent move. A sideways step into a role teaching you something new is worth more than a promotion into a role teaching you nothing. Rank and title are the ladder model's currency. You don't have to trade in it.

Stop measuring by comparison. The ladder model is inherently competitive ... who's ahead, who's behind, who got there first. The spaghetti model makes comparison nearly meaningless. Your path is yours. Stop checking where other people's pasta landed.

Own the story. Every pivot, every change, every unexpected move builds a narrative. The narrative isn't "I had no plan." The narrative is "I followed what was interesting and ended up with experience most people don't have." Own it.

Know what you're running toward, not away from. A career change driven by curiosity is a healthy thing. A career change driven by fear of honest self-assessment is a different thing. Know the difference.

The Plan Is Overrated

I'm not saying skip planning altogether. I'm saying don't confuse a plan with a script.

A plan gives you direction. A script demands you follow it regardless of what you learn along the way. The first is useful. The second is limiting.

The best thing I ever did for my career was stay curious about problems well outside what I was supposed to be working on. Curiosity took me to an Army base. To a research lab. To a fintech startup. To an HR company. To writing a book. To building something new.

I don't know where the path leads next. I'm genuinely looking forward to finding out.

Your career isn't supposed to be a ladder you climb toward a destination someone else defined. It's a plate of spaghetti ... tangled, surprising, and much better when you stop trying to make it go straight.

What's the most unexpected move you've ever made in your career?

Psychologist Charles Snyder spent decades studying what separates people who reach their goals from people who do not. His hope theory identified three components:

1. A clear goal — you know what you are working toward
2. Pathways thinking — you identify multiple routes to get there
3. Agency thinking — you believe you have what it takes to walk those routes

None of these are passive. All three require you to show up and do something.

Optimism asks nothing of you. Hope asks everything.

The Leader Who "Stayed Positive"

Early in my career, I worked under a leader who was unshakeably optimistic. Nothing rattled him. He never doubted the team out loud. He had a gift for walking into a room of anxious people and walking out with everyone feeling better.

For a while, I thought this was the gold standard of leadership.

Then I watched projects drift. Decisions get delayed. Problems sit longer than they needed to sit. And when I finally named one of those problems directly, the answer was something like: "Trust the process. We will figure it out."

We did not figure it out. Because "figuring it out" requires an actual plan, and we did not have one.

What we had was optimism. It felt like leadership. It was not.

Why This Confuses So Many Leaders

Optimism feels like hope because they produce similar emotions. Both feel forward-looking. Both reduce anxiety in the short term. Both make people feel better in a difficult moment.

The difference shows up later. And by then, you have already spent the emotional capital.

When you project optimism without a plan, you are asking your people to wait. You are telling them the cavalry is coming without explaining when, from where, or who called them. Over time, people learn to read the pattern. They stop bringing you their real problems. They stop believing in the "we will figure it out."

They disengage. And they do it quietly.

Pettigrew's research surfaces something uncomfortable here: leaders who have broken trust through repeated optimism-without-follow-through lose their ability to inspire hope. You cannot repair this with tactics. The pre-condition for hope in a team is trust, and once it is gone, no amount of positivity fills the gap.

The Difference in Practice

Here is how I think about it now.

When I hear someone say "I hope things turn around," I ask one question: What are you doing about it?

If the answer is "nothing yet" or "I'm waiting to see," this is not hope. This is a wish. A wish is fine as an emotion. It is not a strategy.

Hope requires:

1. A destination. Not "things get better" but "by September, we have re-engaged three of the five stakeholders we lost." Specific. Measurable. Worth orienting around.

2. Multiple routes. Not one plan, because one plan fails when the first obstacle appears. Two or three possible paths mean when route A closes, you shift to route B without collapsing.

3. Belief in your own capability. This is the part people skip. You need genuine conviction you are able to make the moves the plan requires. Not confidence for its own sake... but evidence-based belief rooted in what you have done before.

Hope Is Learnable

One of the findings from Snyder's research is worth sitting with: hope is not a personality trait. It is a skill.

Some people seem naturally hopeful. But the research shows even they feel hopeless in specific situations — when the goal is unclear, when no path is visible, when they do not trust their own ability to execute.

And people who are not naturally hopeful learn to build it. Deliberately. Systematically.

This matters for how you develop your team. If someone on your team is struggling, telling them to "stay positive" is optimism-advice. It works on optimism's logic: if you believe hard enough, things will be fine.

Hope-advice sounds different. It sounds like: "Let's get clear on what success looks like here. What routes do you see? What would make you more confident you are able to pull this off?"

One gives a feeling. The other builds a structure.

What This Has Changed for Me

I am not a naturally pessimistic person. If anything, I lean toward optimism by default. So shifting toward hope required real effort on my part.

It meant being more honest in difficult moments. Not "it'll work out" but "here is what I think the path looks like, and here is what I am doing about it."

It meant admitting when I did not have a plan — and saying so directly instead of papering it over with positivity.

It meant asking harder questions of myself and my teams before making promises. Do we know what success looks like? Do we know how to get there? Do I believe we are able to do it?

The uncomfortable truth: sometimes the answer to all three is no. And in those moments, optimism is a trap. It keeps you in a comfortable feeling while the situation deteriorates around you.

Hope forces you to look at the gap honestly and then decide what to do about it.

The Question Worth Asking Yourself

Think about something you are hoping for right now. A career move. A team challenge. A project you care about.

Now ask yourself:

• Do you know specifically what success looks like?
• Do you have more than one path to get there?
• Do you genuinely believe you are able to execute?

If you answered yes to all three, you are hoping. You have a real, forward-facing orientation to the future.

If you hesitated on any of them... you might be optimistic. Which is not worthless. But it is not going to get you where you are trying to go.

Hope is not a softer version of a plan. It is the willingness to hold the belief AND do the work. And it is something any of us is able to build, step by deliberate step.

Start with the destination. Then find the paths. Then find the evidence you are equipped to walk them.

This is what hope looks like when it is doing its job.

A global study analyzing perfectionism and burnout across 43 research papers found a strong link between perfectionistic concerns and workplace burnout. Not perfectionism as a trait in isolation, but perfectionism paired with the fear of not measuring up.

The perfectionist's internal standard is always slightly out of reach. Every win is temporary. Every mistake lingers. They're not tired from the work. They're exhausted from the running commentary in their head telling them it isn't good enough.

And they look productive from the outside. Output is high. Quality is high. No visible warning sign appears until the collapse. People around them see competence. The perfectionist feels like someone drowning in slow motion.

The High Achiever

High achievers operate in a constant state of heightened arousal. Their nervous system is wired to perform.

Research on high performer burnout shows they consistently work longer hours than peers, invest more emotional energy, and assume responsibility without requesting support. They internalize both success and failure more deeply than colleagues.

They're also the last ones to signal a problem. Admitting struggle feels like a threat to the identity they've built. If your entire reputation is "I handle anything," saying "I'm struggling" feels like career suicide.

So they don't say it. They push harder instead.

The result? What researchers call "success fatigue," a point where continued achievement feels meaningless and the reward system stops firing. The high achiever becomes cynical, disengaged, or simply disappears.

The People-Pleaser

People-pleasers are in an impossible position. Their psychological need is to avoid conflict and keep everyone satisfied. Their work response is to take on more, smooth over problems, and absorb other people's stress.

A 2024 study published in MDPI identified people-pleasing at work as a consistent predictor of emotional exhaustion and burnout, with individuals "consistently neglecting personal needs to meet external demands."

The people-pleaser doesn't burn out because they're weak. They burn out because they're so focused on everyone else's needs they never notice their own tank running dry.

The Mask of Competence

What these three types share: they're excellent at hiding it.

Not because they're dishonest. Because they genuinely believe they should be able to handle more. The perfectionist thinks: "I'll get through this project, then I'll rest." The high achiever thinks: "This is what I signed up for." The people-pleaser thinks: "Everyone else is struggling more than me."

None of these are true. All of them feel true.

Research on perfectionism and high-functioning achievers notes these individuals often "struggle alone, believing their value is tied to their output." The moment they stop producing, they fear they become nothing.

So they keep the mask on. They keep pushing.

Until one day they don't.

Organizations Pour Fuel on the Fire

Most organizations unknowingly reward the exact behaviors driving burnout.

The perfectionist who redoes their presentation at 11pm gets praised for quality. The high achiever who takes on three extra projects gets promoted. The people-pleaser who stays late to help colleagues gets called a "team player."

All of this is positive reinforcement for behavior slowly destroying them.

Look at who gets pulled into the priority project every time. Who gets the stretch assignments? It's the same person. The reliable one. The capable one. And nobody asks whether they have capacity, because experience shows they never say no.

Until they do. Permanently.

The Alison Butler Consulting research on high achievers describes this dynamic clearly: organizations "over-rely on top performers to compensate for team gaps" and assume visible resilience equals internal wellbeing. By the time anyone notices something is wrong, the damage is already significant.

Then organizations wonder why their best person resigned without warning. Or fell apart publicly. Or got sick.

The system built to reward strength also destroys it.

The Warning Signs Nobody Sees

Standard burnout warning signs like missed deadlines, irritability, and declining output show up late or not at all in these three types.

Perfectionists deliver on time while running on empty. High achievers maintain output until they stop completely. People-pleasers keep smiling through a quiet breakdown.

The visible signal, when it arrives, is dramatic. A sudden resignation. A health crisis. A complete personality change. Everyone says "I had no idea."

The signs were there. They were the wrong signs.

Real warning signs look like this:

• The perfectionist who stops taking on new challenges, protecting what's left of themselves
• The high achiever who becomes cynical about projects they once loved
• The people-pleaser who quietly withdraws from social moments at work
• The person who was always first to volunteer... who stopped

None of these look like a crisis. All of them are.

If You Manage People

Stop assuming the capable ones are fine.

The person most likely to be in trouble is the person you never worry about. Check in on your high performers with the same care you give your struggling team members. Ask direct questions: "Are you taking on too much?" "What are you saying no to?" "When did you last properly disconnect?"

Don't accept "I'm fine" as an answer. Push once. Create space where admitting struggle is genuinely acceptable, not theoretical.

Watch for the wrong warning signs. Pay attention to the person who used to be enthusiastic and now seems quietly absent. The one who does everything asked of them but seems to have gone somewhere else in their head.

Teams perform better when people feel safe admitting they're struggling. And the people most reluctant to admit struggle are often the people you need most.

If You Recognize Yourself Here

Your capacity to push through is not infinite. You know this intellectually. Most people in your position haven't internalized it yet.

The Army taught me to push through pain. Corporate life rewarded me for it. It took years to understand the difference between resilience and running yourself into the ground.

Resilience means recovering. Not enduring forever.

The strongest people I know have all had a moment, sometimes several moments, where they had to admit they were running on fumes. Not as failure. As information.

If you're the perfectionist, the high achiever, or the people-pleaser reading this: the thing you're most proud of, your capacity, your drive, your reliability, is also your biggest risk.

The strength keeping you going is also what makes it so hard to stop.

What would it take for you to admit you need a break? And more importantly, what's stopping you?

Gallup has studied management selection across thousands of organizations. Their finding: companies fail to select the right person for management roles 82% of the time.

Eighty-two percent. Nearly every single time.

When Gallup asked U.S. managers why they got the job, the two most common answers were: success in a previous non-managerial role, and tenure. Neither tells you anything about management ability.

Gallup estimates only 1 in 10 people have the natural talent to manage well. Think about the management chain in your organization right now. Statistically, most of those people shouldn't be there. Not because they're bad people, but because nobody checked whether they wanted the job or were built for it.

And the financial cost is real. Organizations who select and develop talented managers achieve approximately 147% higher earnings per share compared to their competitors. Getting this wrong isn't a culture problem. It's a business problem.

The Cost Is Double

Here's what companies don't talk about enough. When you promote your best engineer to manager, you don't gain a new manager. You lose your best engineer.

Those aren't separate events. They're the same transaction.

The work this person was doing... the architectural decisions, the mentorship through code review, the debugging nobody else wanted to touch... now sits unassigned. Or gets distributed across people who aren't as good at it. Or falls to the newly-promoted manager, who's now trying to do two jobs and doing neither well.

Meanwhile, your new manager is learning leadership the hard way: through trial and error, on your team, on your watch. The people they manage are the test subjects.

Some grow into it. Many don't. And many leave entirely because managing people turned out to be nothing like what they signed up for when they chose a career in engineering.

You got rid of a great engineer and created both a mediocre manager and a retention problem. All in one decision.

The System Only Has One Track

The root of this is structural. Most organizations offer one progression path: individual contributor to manager.

Want more money? Become a manager. Want more prestige? Become a manager. Want to be seen as a leader? Become a manager.

For someone who loves coding, loves solving hard problems, loves building systems... this is a terrible deal. But they often take it anyway. Because it's the only deal on the table.

And then they're miserable. Or mediocre. Or both. And they start looking elsewhere.

The Fix Is a Second Track

The organizations getting this right offer two paths upward.

The IC track goes from senior engineer to staff engineer to principal engineer to distinguished engineer. Each level brings more scope, more autonomy, more influence, and more pay... without requiring you to manage people.

The management track is separate and intentional. It's for people who genuinely want to lead teams, who get energy from developing other people, who are willing to trade keyboard time for conversation time.

You recruit for these tracks deliberately. You don't assume your top performer wants to manage.

Some companies get this wrong by offering parallel tracks where they aren't equal. The IC track tops out at a lower salary band or a title with less prestige. Engineers see through this immediately. A "Staff Engineer" who earns less and gets less visibility than a middle manager is going to take the management path even when they don't want it.

If you're going to offer two tracks, they need to be genuinely equivalent. Same pay bands. Same access to senior leadership. Same signal to the organization: this person is valued.

How to Know If Someone Should Manage

Before promoting anyone into a management role, ask them directly: do you want to manage people?

Not whether they'd like a promotion. Not whether they want more money. Whether they want to spend their days on one-on-ones, performance conversations, hiring decisions, and team dynamics.

Watch for someone who already does these things without being asked. The engineer who mentors new hires on their own initiative. The one who runs meetings well, who notices when a teammate is struggling, who cares about the team's output more than their own velocity. Those signals matter.

Technical excellence is not one of those signals. It's the most common reason we promote people into management. It's almost completely irrelevant to whether they'll succeed there.

What to Do If You're Already There

If you've been promoted into management and you hate it, you're not failing. You're in the wrong role. Different problem entirely.

Name it. Tell your manager. Ask whether there's a path back to technical work at a senior level. Some organizations will say yes. Some won't. Staying in a role you're miserable at, pretending to be fine, helps nobody... least of all the team depending on you.

For those making these decisions: before you promote your best engineer, sit down with them and ask what they want. Not what they think you want to hear. What they want.

The answer might surprise you.

Garry Ridge called his employees "tribe members" and his managers "coaches." Not marketing language. A statement about how he saw people... as part of something meaningful, not as resources to be deployed. At WD-40, around 97% of employees said their coach respected them. The number doesn't come from a policy. It comes from leaders who genuinely give a damn.

I've been lucky enough to work for people like this. The leaders who remembered what you told them three months ago about something personal. Who sent you home early when you needed it. Who fought for your raise even when you didn't ask. Not softness... genuine investment in another person.

Service Is Not Servility

I once worked with a leader who described himself as a servant leader. He never challenged anyone. Every idea was a good idea. Every complaint was met with "you're right, I'll look into it." His team liked him enormously for about six months. Then they started running over him. Deadlines became suggestions. Standards became opinions. His best performer left because there was no one holding the work to any bar worth hitting.

He wasn't a servant leader. He was a people-pleaser who'd found an ideology to justify avoiding discomfort.

Service means giving your people what they need. Sometimes what they need is a hard conversation. Sometimes it's someone refusing to let them produce work below their own standard. Sometimes it's being told: this is not acceptable, and I know you're better than this.

Servility is giving people what they want in the moment, at the cost of what they need in the long run. It feels kind. It isn't.

Spine of Steel: The Part People Miss

Here's where most "servant leaders" fall apart.

The spine of steel means making the hard calls. It means having the conversation you've been putting off for two months because you knew it would be uncomfortable. It means telling someone they're underperforming, and telling them directly, not burying it in HR euphemisms. It means letting someone go when you've run out of road, doing it with dignity, but without flinching.

Genuine care for someone includes telling them the truth. If someone on my team was not performing and I kept covering for them, saying everything was fine, letting them coast... I wasn't caring for them. I was protecting myself from an uncomfortable conversation. Not servant leadership. Conflict avoidance wearing a servant leadership mask.

In the Army, I learned this firsthand. The NCOs I respected most cared about their soldiers deeply. They also held them to standards with no room for negotiation. Because they understood what was at stake when standards slipped. You don't go easy on people when doing so puts them or others at risk. You care for them by holding the line.

Leadership in business isn't life or death the way military service is. But the principle holds. When you tolerate poor performance, you're not being kind to the underperformer... you're being unfair to everyone else on the team who meets the standard. Culture is defined by what you accept.

The Accountability Paradox

Here's something I didn't expect when I started thinking about servant leadership seriously: true servant leaders often have higher expectations than traditional command-and-control managers.

Because they care about the work. Because they care about the people doing the work. Because they know letting someone drift along in mediocrity isn't respect... it's neglect.

A boss who doesn't challenge you doesn't think much of your potential. The servant leader who pushes you, who holds you to a high bar, who refuses to let you settle... believes you're capable of more. And they're willing to do the uncomfortable work of proving it.

Garry Ridge built WD-40's culture around "learning moments" instead of mistakes. No one was punished for getting something wrong. But no one was allowed to repeat the same mistake without addressing why. Accountability inside a culture of psychological safety. Both things, together. Not one instead of the other.

What It Looks Like in Practice

I spent years leading engineering teams. Servant leadership in a tech context looks something like this:

You clear the obstacles between your team and the work. You fight the internal politics so they don't have to. You make sure they have what they need before they have to ask. You give them credit when things go well.

You also tell them when their code is not good enough. You make the call to pause a feature and fix the foundation, even when the business is screaming for delivery. You address the person who's brilliant at their craft but toxic to the team, and you do it before the team breaks.

There was a period where I had a senior engineer who was technically excellent and interpersonally combustible. Every standup was a reminder of who was right and who wasn't. Other engineers started going quiet rather than risk the grenades. I cared about him as a person. I also had to make clear the behavior had to change, and give him a real timeline. It did change. But not because I avoided the conversation. Because I had it.

The heart of gold shapes how you do all of it. Their dignity matters. Their growth matters. The spine of steel means you follow through, even when it's painful.

The Margarita Party Myth

The myth of the soft servant leader persists because it's appealing. Leadership without bravery. Leadership where everyone likes you all the time. Where no one is ever uncomfortable, including you.

Not how it works. The best servant leaders I've met are often the most demanding. Not in a punishing way... in an "I believe you're capable of more" way. They've earned the right to demand more because they've shown they're in it for their people, not for themselves.

The margarita party version of servant leadership gives you temporary popularity and long-term dysfunction. The real version is harder. It requires you to genuinely care about someone enough to tell them something they don't want to hear.

Heart of gold. Spine of steel. Worth asking yourself which one you're more comfortable with... and whether you're doing enough of the other.

The results are almost absurd in their clarity. By the time he stepped down in 2022, 98% of WD-40 employees said they loved telling people where they worked. 99% said their values aligned with the company's. 93% said the organisation encouraged them to keep growing. Revenue doubled on his watch.

None of this came from a new product line. None of it came from a clever strategy. It came from a leader who refused to stop learning.

We Don't Make Mistakes. We Have Learning Moments.

One of Ridge's most-repeated lines: WD-40 doesn't have failures. It has "learning moments."

This sounds like HR spin. It isn't.

When you rename failure as learning, you change what people do with it. They don't hide it. They don't deflect it. They bring it forward, examine it, and move on. The fear of being wrong starts to shrink. People take risks they'd never take in a culture of blame.

I've worked in companies where mistakes got buried. Where the instinct after something went wrong was to manage the story, not learn the lesson. I've watched this culture eat itself. Good people leave. Bad habits compound. Leaders start believing their own narratives.

The School of Dumbassery is the antidote to all of it.

The Army Taught Me This. I Let It Go.

In the Army, training never stopped. You finished basic and more training followed. You got promoted and training came with it. You reached a level where you were supposed to know things, and training kept coming anyway. Skills faded without use. Situations changed. Complacency got people hurt.

Nobody told you at any point you were done. Because in the Army, "done" is a liability.

I took this into my civilian career and then, somewhere in my thirties, I let it go. I got senior enough for learning to become self-directed, optional, and easy to skip. I got busy enough to stop reading properly. I got confident enough to stop asking the dumb questions in meetings.

I was "experienced." Which, looking back, meant I'd stopped growing.

The Symptoms of Graduation

You don't announce when you've graduated. It happens quietly, and the signs are subtle.

You stop asking questions in meetings where you're supposed to be the expert. You start finding new ideas annoying instead of interesting. You give feedback based on how things were done before, not what the situation needs now. You surround yourself with people who confirm what you already think.

Go deeper and the pattern gets worse. You start interpreting pushback as disloyalty. You mistake seniority for insight. You build a mental model of how leadership works, and when reality doesn't match the model, you assume reality is wrong.

The most insidious part: your team adapts to you. They stop bringing you the hard problems. They tell you what works, edit out what doesn't, and you end up living in a carefully curated version of reality where everything seems fine. Until it isn't.

The leaders I've watched do the most damage had all graduated. They were senior enough for the feedback loop to close. Nobody brought them hard truths because it didn't feel safe. They stopped seeking hard truths because they felt they already knew them. And they took entire teams down with them, often without any awareness of what was happening.

The Danger of Feeling Like You've Arrived

Here's what I've noticed about leaders who've graduated: they stop being curious.

Curiosity drives the good questions, the deep listening, the willingness to sit with uncertainty. And you lose it quietly. Nobody announces it. You notice, eventually, you haven't changed your mind about anything in a long time.

If your leadership model looks identical to five years ago, pause there.

Ridge, at 66, still teaches leadership at the University of San Diego. He runs workshops, writes books, goes on podcasts. Not to explain what he already knows. To keep testing what he thinks he knows.

What Staying Enrolled Looks Like

It doesn't need to be formal. Most of it isn't.

It looks like asking the youngest person in the room what they're seeing you aren't. It looks like reviewing a decision from six months ago, without flinching, and asking what you'd do differently. It looks like reading something you disagree with and sitting in the discomfort instead of dismissing it.

It looks like being wrong in public and not collapsing. Being willing to hear feedback you didn't ask for. Accepting someone changed your mind and saying so out loud, rather than quietly adjusting and pretending you were always thinking this way.

None of this is natural. The whole professional culture rewards appearing competent. We get promoted for having answers. We build reputations on being the person people come to when they're stuck. Admitting ignorance feels like stepping backwards.

It isn't. It's the only way forward.

The School of Dumbassery isn't a place. It's a stance. Garry Ridge wore it as a badge of honour and built one of the most engaged workforces on the planet to prove it works.

The Only Graduation Worth Pursuing

There is one graduation worth pursuing in leadership: the moment you stop caring about appearing competent and start caring about becoming it.

From there, you stay in class. And if you're doing it right, you keep finding out how much more there is to learn.

What's the last thing you read, or heard, or experienced, genuinely changing how you think about leadership? If you're struggling to answer, it might be time to re-enrol.

Research published in the Harvard Business Review put a number on something I've suspected for years: 95% of people believe they are self-aware. The real figure? Only 10-15% genuinely are.

Sit with this for a moment. Nine out of ten leaders walking into work today believe they understand how they come across to their team. How they show up in pressure situations. How their words land. Most of them are wrong.

This isn't about intelligence. It isn't about good intentions. The leaders I've worked with who had the least self-awareness were often among the smartest people in the room. The gap between perceived and real self-awareness doesn't discriminate by seniority, gender, industry, or how many leadership books you've read.

It's a human problem. And in leaders, it becomes everyone else's problem.

The Numbers Don't Lie

A study by MRG assessed approximately 40,000 leaders globally using 360-degree feedback. Their finding: leaders average 7.6 blind spots. More than a third of their leadership behaviours are areas where self-perception diverges wildly from how others experience them.

Seven blind spots. In one leader. Running a team. Making decisions about people's careers.

The MRG research also tells us what leaders most commonly overestimate: their ability to delegate, their tactical adaptability, and their independence in decision-making. In plain English, leaders think they're empowering their teams when they're micromanaging. They think they're flexible when they're rigid. They think they're making bold decisions when they're stalling.

These are not minor misalignments. These are the exact things teams need from their leaders.

What Blind Spots Cost

The consequences of leadership blind spots are not abstract. They land on real people.

A study in the South African Journal of Business Management found leaders with low self-awareness consistently exhibit behaviours linked to toxic and destructive leadership. Not occasionally. Consistently.

I've seen this play out firsthand. I once worked with a CTO who believed, sincerely, he ran a psychologically safe team. His people told me something different in private conversations. They were terrified to raise problems with him because he had a pattern of shooting the messenger. He had no idea. His intentions were good. His impact was corrosive. The gap between the two had never been named to his face.

This makes low self-awareness so damaging. It's invisible to the person causing the harm. The leader gets to keep the self-image of someone doing good work while their team quietly suffers.

I've seen high performers leave jobs they loved because of a leader who didn't know themselves. Not because of pay. Not because of the work. Because they ran out of ways to manage upward around someone who had no idea how they were showing up.

This gap kills teams. Not bad strategy. Not tight budgets. The gap between who a leader thinks they are and who they are.

What "Looking in the Mirror" Means

Let me be clear about what I'm not saying.

I'm not asking you to spend forty minutes journaling about your feelings before your morning standup. I'm not asking you to complete a personality test and announce to your team you're an INTJ.

What I'm asking is simpler and harder.

It starts with three questions. Sit with each one. Don't answer quickly.

"How do people experience me... not how I intend them to?"

Intentions are yours. Impact belongs to the person on the receiving end. These are not the same thing. A leader who says "I was being direct" while their report walks away humiliated has confused the two. Your intentions might be excellent. Your impact might not be.

"What do people not tell me, and why?"

If your team brings you only good news, it's a sign. If nobody pushes back on your ideas in meetings, it's a sign. If people fall suspiciously quiet when you enter the room, it's a sign. What you are NOT hearing is at least as important as what you are.

"What patterns do I keep repeating with the same poor results?"

Every leader has them. The same type of relationship keeps breaking down. The same conversation goes sideways every time. The same kind of hire doesn't work out. If the pattern keeps repeating, the common element is you.

These questions aren't comfortable. That's the point.

The Leaders Who Do This Work

Here's what I notice about the leaders I genuinely respect.

They're not the ones with the most self-confidence. They're the ones who hold their self-perceptions lightly. They ask for feedback and mean it. They notice when they've made an impact they didn't intend, and they address it rather than justify it.

One of the best engineering leaders I've ever met would ask her team a single question at the end of difficult projects: "What did I do to make your job harder?" Not "how do I improve" with its safe, vague responses. Not a survey with a score.

Specifically. Concretely. What did I do to make your job harder?

The answers she got were direct. They weren't comfortable. And her team would walk through fire for her, because they knew she was genuinely trying to see what they saw.

That's what looking in the mirror looks like in practice.

Where to Start

You don't need a 360-degree feedback programme. You don't need an executive coach (though both help). You need to start noticing the gaps between what you intended and what happened.

After your next difficult conversation, ask yourself: "How did it land? Not how I wanted it to land... how did it land?"

After your next meeting, notice who didn't speak. Notice what topics made the room uncomfortable. Notice whether people are performing engagement or genuinely contributing.

After your next decision, ask someone you trust to tell you one thing they were thinking but didn't say.

Small observations. Repeated consistently. Over time, they build a picture.

The leaders who skip this work don't usually fail loudly. They fail slowly... through the gradual departure of their best people, the growing distance between them and their team, the creeping sense something is off but nobody will say what it is.

The mirror is uncomfortable. It's also the cheapest investment you'll ever make in your leadership.

What's one thing you've discovered about yourself as a leader... and wish you'd seen sooner?

"Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?"

I read it one morning over coffee and sat with it longer than I expected. The honest answer wasn't comfortable. I'm not sure I do.

Not a small thing to admit.

The First Identity: Soldier

When I joined the Army, I was handed an identity along with the uniform.

Soldier. The word didn't describe what I did. It described what I was. Everything else followed: how I dressed, how I spoke, how I stood, what time I woke up. The Army is efficient at replacing the person you were with the person they need you to be.

I don't say it as a complaint. I learned more about leadership, discipline, and accountability in uniform than I did in any boardroom. The Army made me better at almost everything.

But it also replaced me.

The kid who showed up to basic training had interests, half-formed opinions, quirks. He liked fixing things. He read more than he let on. He had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, and was oddly comfortable with not knowing.

The soldier who came out the other end was more capable. More disciplined. And significantly less able to answer the question: "Who are you, when you're not this?"

Nobody asks it while you're in. The structure holds. There's always a next thing: a next posting, a next mission, a next assignment. Identity by assignment is surprisingly comfortable when the assignments keep coming.

The discomfort comes when they stop.

The Second Identity: Tech Leader

I moved into tech after the Army, and the pattern repeated.

This time the identity arrived differently. Not through a uniform. Through a title. Developer. Manager. Director. VP. CTO.

Each title brought its own expectations about who I should be. How I should communicate in meetings. What I should read. What opinions were acceptable. How decisive I should appear. What I should care about.

I got good at it. The tech world rewards people who perform the role convincingly. If you show up as "the CTO" long enough, nobody questions whether there's a person underneath the function.

The problem is you start to forget there is one.

I spent years optimizing for the role. Filling my evenings with the right conferences, the right blogs, the right conversations at the right dinners. I built a version of myself the industry expected. I spoke the right language, had the right opinions, prioritized the right things.

It worked. By every visible measure, it worked.

Then one day I sat down and tried to think about what I'd do with a week off. Truly off. No agenda. No one to perform for.

No answer came.

Not because I was too busy. Because I'd stopped being anyone outside the role.

When Burnout Strips the Label Off

The burnout conversation usually focuses on overwork. Too many hours, too many demands, too little sleep. Those things are real.

But there's a more interesting pattern underneath. Burnout is sometimes what strips the label off and forces you to see there's nothing behind it.

When the role you've been performing for years starts to break down under pressure, there's nothing to fall back on. You've outsourced your sense of self to something temporary: an employer, a function, a title. And all three are more fragile than they look.

A genuinely terrifying place to find yourself.

I've talked to people in leadership who hit this wall and describe it the same way every time: "I don't know who I am outside of this." They say it like a confession. Like it's embarrassing.

It's not embarrassing. It's almost universal, if you've been doing this long enough and seriously enough.

The world is extremely efficient at telling you who to be. Career paths. Performance reviews. LinkedIn bios. Family expectations. The stories we tell about "success." These are all external scripts, handed to us so early and so consistently, we start to mistake them for ourselves.

Thomas Oppong wrote about this in Personal Growth on Medium: "We forget who we are after school systems, career paths, expectations, and gurus tell us what success looks like." He's right. Most of us don't notice it happening until the structure collapses and we're standing in the rubble wondering where we went.

The Questions Worth Asking

I started with simple ones.

What did I do for fun before I had a career to build? Not "what would be good for my brand." What I'd do if nobody was watching and there was no professional upside.

What did I read before I started reading things to make me better at my job?

What problems did I find interesting before "interesting" had to mean "commercially viable"?

What kind of conversations did I seek out before networking had a name?

None of these are questions the career teaches you to ask. The career teaches you to ask different ones: what's the next step, who do I need to know, what do I need to achieve. All forward-facing. All external.

The Bukowski question points backward. Not to wallow, but to find something.

What's Still There When You Look

The good news: what was there before doesn't disappear. It waits.

When I started asking honestly, I found a few things there long before the Army, long before any job title.

A genuine curiosity about how things work. Not strategic curiosity, not the performed curiosity of someone trying to look intellectually engaged at a conference. The kind where you pull something apart at midnight because you need to understand it, for no reason other than needing to understand it.

A preference for making things. Writing, building, solving problems with a visible output. Not managing. Not optimizing. Making.

An interest in people deeper than their usefulness to a project. What motivates them. What they're scared of. What they need from the people above them to do their best work. I've been drawn to this my whole life. The career gave it a professional frame. But the interest was there at nineteen, long before anyone would pay me for it.

Those things were there when I was seventeen. They were there before any title told me what they were worth.

They're still there now. The career didn't create them. It gave them a context to operate in, and then gradually convinced me the context mattered more than the things themselves.

You Don't Go Back. You Carry It Forward.

This isn't an argument for abandoning your career or pretending your professional experience didn't shape you. It did. It should have.

The Army made me better. The years in tech made me better. The failures especially made me better.

But there's a difference between being shaped by your experience and being replaced by it.

The work now, for me, is integration. Taking what was there before the labels and bringing it into what I'm building now. A company connecting leadership to real human feedback. Writing about things nobody says out loud in leadership culture. Speaking honestly about what good management requires.

Those things feel more like me than any title I've ever held.

The Bukowski question isn't nostalgic. It's not asking you to go back to who you were at twenty. It's asking you to recognize which parts of yourself you've quietly left behind and to decide whether you want them back.

Some of what you shed along the way was worth shedding. Some of it wasn't.

The work is knowing the difference.

So here's what I'd ask you to sit with this week. Outside your job title, outside the expectations of your role, outside the performance of whatever version of "professional" you've been building for years... who are you?

What were you interested in before your career told you what to be interested in?

I'm still working out my own answers. I'd guess you are too.

Research compiled by Apollo Technical shows the average worker changes jobs 12 times over a career. The average age for a major career change is 39. A survey by GO Banking Rates found 57% of workers were planning a significant career change.

Thirty-nine. Old identity gets heavy somewhere in mid-career. The things you've been avoiding start looking less terrifying. The walls you built start feeling more like cages.

Roland Butcher Said He'd Never Coach

Roland Butcher was the first Black cricketer to play for England. A man of strong opinions. One of them: he would never coach.

He'd watched coaches. He thought he had nothing in common with what they did. He was a doer, not a teacher. In the game, not beside it.

Then came the end of his playing career. An offer arrived.

He took it. Not because he'd changed his mind, but because he needed to find out.

What he found surprised him. Coaching wasn't what he'd imagined. It wasn't about having all the answers. It was about asking the right questions. It was about watching someone else find something in themselves they didn't know was there.

It became his next great chapter. The thing he'd sworn off turned out to be the thing he was built for.

My Own "Never"

I spent years in tech. I led engineering teams, ran delivery programs, managed complex systems. The work was clear. Build the thing. Ship it. Measure it.

Writing about people, leadership, and workplace culture? It felt like someone else's job.

I had a version of the engineer's snobbery. The "soft stuff" wasn't rigorous. Anyone with an opinion and a LinkedIn account was doing it. Why add to the noise?

But the questions I kept returning to weren't technical ones. They were people questions. Why do some teams thrive and others grind themselves into the ground? Why do talented engineers leave good companies for reasons having nothing to do with the work itself? Why do leaders who seem capable on paper make such consistent, predictable mistakes with the people around them?

I kept coming back to those questions. I kept having opinions about them. And eventually, my "never" cracked.

I started writing. Then speaking. Then building things around it.

The work I'd dismissed turned out to be the work I'd been preparing for my whole career.

How to Test a "Never"

The advice I'd give anyone eyeing something they've sworn off: don't make a leap. Make a small experiment.

Roland didn't retire and immediately set up a coaching business. He took one opportunity and paid attention to how it felt.

I didn't walk away from engineering and declare myself a writer. I wrote one post. Then another.

The small experiment separates fear from reality. It gives you data instead of your imagined version of what the thing is like. And it lets you change your mind without losing face, because nobody needs to know you tried it.

A few questions worth sitting with:

What's on your "never" list with no basis in actual experience?

What "never" is protecting a version of yourself you've outgrown?

What would you try if being wrong about it had no consequences?

The Thing Calling You

The thing you're most afraid of being might be the most honest version of you.

Not every "never" turns into a calling. Some of them are "nevers" for good reason, and the small experiment confirms it. Worth knowing.

But the ones built on pride, or a bad experience, or a story you told yourself long ago... those deserve a second look.

Roland Butcher built his second chapter coaching the sport he'd played. I built mine writing about the work I'd done. Neither path was obvious from where we stood. It only made sense looking back.

What are you swearing off right now that might be your next chapter?

According to Gallup's 2024 data, 48% of employees worldwide report feeling burned out at work. Not occasionally stressed. Burned out. The global productivity cost of this is $438 billion every year.

Research compiled by Meditopia found 76% of employees experience burnout at some point. Sixty-three percent of burned-out employees are significantly more likely to take sick days. Fifty-two percent are actively job hunting.

And yet only 21% of employees believe their employer genuinely cares about their mental health.

There's a reason for this disconnect. We are losing people at industrial scale and then making them invisible. The two things are connected.

A study published in the National Library of Medicine found every single study participant experiencing burnout avoided seeking formal help due to stigma. One hundred percent. They knew they needed support. They didn't ask for it, because the message from the organisation was clear: struggling means weakness.

Where do people learn this? From watching what happens to the Sarahs.

The Hidden Cost Nobody Accounts For

When you banish a burnout victim, you lose them twice.

First, the practical loss. Their institutional knowledge, their relationships, their skills. The productivity gap. Replacement costs. These get buried in HR dashboards and recruitment line items, rarely linked back to the culture decision to run people until they break.

Second, the invisible loss: every person watching.

When a colleague disappears after burning out, everyone in the building gets a message. The message is: if this happens to you, you're on your own. You'll be quietly disappeared. Your years of service won't protect you. Your team will not speak your name.

So people hide. They push through when they should stop. They don't mention the three AM anxiety spirals or the Sunday evening dread. They cover for each other because everyone is terrified of becoming the next cautionary tale.

This is how burnout spreads. Not because people are fragile. Because the culture made it more dangerous to admit struggling than to quietly deteriorate.

You've built a system where the rational choice for a burned-out person is to hide it. Then leadership acts surprised the numbers are so high.

I've Been Guilty of This

I'm not writing from some clean moral position.

I've sat in meetings where someone's name came up and let the subject change without pushing back. I've approved "we wish them well" emails. I've chosen not to dig too hard into why someone left, partly because I didn't want to hear what it would tell me about the culture I helped create.

The Harry Potter Effect works because it removes discomfort immediately. Today's problem goes away. The desk gets cleared. Life moves on.

What I didn't account for at the time was the long-term cost compounding quietly in the background. Teams watching colleagues disappear without explanation don't grow more loyal. They grow more paranoid. They start wondering: what won't I be told? What will they say about me if I crack?

The silence doesn't protect the organisation. It erodes it.

The Asymmetry That Tells You Everything

When someone leaves a company for a great new opportunity, we celebrate them. LinkedIn posts. Farewell lunches. "We're so proud of you." The departure gets acknowledged because it reflects well on the place.

When someone burns out, none of this happens. The departure is treated as a failure to be quietly buried. Even though, in most cases, the circumstances surrounding the burnout reflect far more on the organisation than on the individual.

This asymmetry tells you what a company values.

How to Break the Pattern

You don't need to overhaul everything. Three things.

Name it honestly. When someone leaves because of burnout, say so. Not in a way exposing them or causing harm. In a way acknowledging: this person worked hard, the pressure exceeded what any person was built to sustain, and we owe it to ourselves to understand what happened here. With the person's permission, be honest internally about what led to the departure.

Debrief like you mean it. Every burnout is data. Who was the manager? What did the workload pattern look like over the six months before the departure? Were warning signs raised and ignored? The post-mortem you'd do for a failed product launch... do it for a failed people situation too. Then act on what you find.

Don't erase them. Check in on people who leave burned out. Six weeks later. Three months later. Let them know the door isn't permanently closed. Treat their departure with basic human dignity. Sometimes the person who burned out in your company heals and comes back stronger, in a better role, with more clarity about what they need. This only happens if you didn't treat them like a liability to be managed on the way out.

None of this requires a revolution. It requires choosing discomfort over denial. It requires being the kind of leader who names the thing everyone else is pretending not to see.

The Question Worth Sitting With

If Sarah's burnout happened on your watch, and you're honest with yourself about the role the organisation played... what would you do differently?

If your answer is nothing... the Harry Potter Effect is alive and well in your culture.

You don't have to say Voldemort's name. But you do have to stop pretending he isn't there.

The Conversation describes moral injury as "the deep emotional and psychological distress when someone feels they've betrayed... or been forced to betray... their core values." Psychiatrist Christophe Dejours calls it the constant expenditure of "emotional and cognitive energy" workers spend on workplace moral dilemmas.

This is different from stress. It's different from overwork. You feel guilty. You feel ashamed. You feel like you sold something you didn't have the right to sell.

What It Looks Like at Work

Moral injury doesn't always announce itself. It creeps in through small requests adding up over time.

• Your manager tells you to mislead a client about timelines.
• Leadership asks you to cut corners on safety because delivery dates matter more.
• You watch a high performer get pushed out for speaking up.
• You're directed to write a glowing reference for someone you know shouldn't be managing people.
• The company announces layoffs while your CEO collects a bonus larger than your team's combined salary.

Each situation creates a gap between what you believe is right and what you're being asked to do. Cross it enough times, and it leaves a mark.

The injury shows up first as guilt and anger. Then shame. Then something worse: emotional numbing. Dejours documented how people slowly stop feeling the suffering of others... and eventually stop feeling their own. They learn to dissociate from what their conscience is telling them. Over time, their character changes.

Research on healthcare workers found one of the most tragic endpoints: workplace suicide. France and Japan recognize work-related suicide as a public issue. Most nations... and most companies... don't.

Why Leaders Create It (Often Without Knowing)

Here's what makes moral injury so insidious: most leaders who create it don't see themselves as doing anything wrong.

They're under pressure. They're chasing targets. They make a pragmatic call and move on. They tell themselves everyone does this. It's business. Grow up.

They don't see the damage left behind because the damage is invisible on a spreadsheet.

Their people feel it, though.

Harvard Business Review documented the pattern: employees are increasingly unwilling to make moral compromises, and companies have wildly underestimated the impact.

When someone in authority forces you into a high-stakes situation requiring action against your values... a betrayal has occurred. Not of you as an employee. Of the unspoken contract you believed existed when you took the job.

The contract says: "If I work hard and with integrity, I'll be treated with fairness and respect."

Companies break it more often than they admit.

The Cost Nobody Measures

iHire's 2025 Toxic Workplace Trends Report found 53.7% of employees have quit a job because of a toxic workplace. Even more striking: 58.9% would take a pay cut to escape a toxic employer.

Those are massive numbers. And "toxic workplace" covers a lot of ground... but at its core, many of those toxic experiences come down to being asked to compromise who you are, repeatedly, without acknowledgment.

A study published in Scientific Reports found 76.61% of healthcare workers reported feeling betrayed by their organization. More than three quarters of people in a field built around "do no harm."

If an industry with an explicit ethical mission produces betrayal at this scale... what are you producing in yours?

The organizational cost isn't only attrition. It's the walking wounded who stay. The people who've emotionally checked out, who've stopped caring, who've traded their conscience for a paycheck. You're still paying them. You're not getting their full humanity. And you won't, not in this job.

What You Do About It

If you're a leader, start by asking yourself honestly: when did you last ask someone on your team to do something they weren't comfortable with? What happened to the discomfort? Did it get resolved... or suppressed?

A few things worth doing right now:

Name it. When someone raises an ethical concern, take it seriously. Not as a complaint to manage... as information about your culture. They're taking a risk to tell you something important. Respond to it like it matters.

Stop rewarding silence. If your culture treats compliance as professionalism and concern-raising as trouble-making, you're training people to swallow their values. You'll pay for it eventually... in attrition, in disengagement, in the erosion of the people you most want to keep.

Track the exits. When people leave, especially the good ones, find out why. Not with a meaningless HR survey... with a real conversation. Moral injury rarely shows up in exit data, but it appears in what people say when someone takes the time to listen.

Look at your decisions. Not whether they were technically legal or financially sensible. Ask: "Did this require someone to act against their values?" If yes, did you acknowledge it? Did you give people room to push back? Or did you make the call and move on?

If you're an employee sitting with moral injury, I won't tell you staying is always wrong. Sometimes you fight from inside. Sometimes you build support before leaving. But if you've been swallowing your values for so long you've forgotten what they feel like... pay attention to it. Your integrity matters more than your job title, and the longer you ignore the signal, the harder it gets to hear it.

The Harder Question

Here's what I'd push every leader to sit with: Are your people leaving work a little more intact than they arrived, or a little less?

If it's the latter, you're not running a business. You're running a slow-motion extraction operation on the people who trust you with their time, their effort, and their conscience.

Moral injury is real. It's common. And it's entirely preventable... if leaders choose to look.

Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich found 95% of people believe they're self-aware. The number who meet the criteria? Around 10 to 15%. The rest are operating with blind spots they're not naming.

John Blakey is an executive coach and the author of Force for Good, a book about purpose-driven leadership. After years of working with CEOs, he landed on three leadership archetypes... three flavors of dysfunction. He calls them the Zealot, the Martyr, and the Pied Piper.

I've been all three.

The Framework

Blakey's model works across three dimensions of leadership:

• Up: Your connection to purpose. Why you lead. What you stand for.
• In: Your inner resilience. How you sustain yourself.
• Out: Your followership. Whether people are with you.

Each archetype hits two out of three and misses the third. The one you miss is your blind spot.

The Zealot

Zealots score high on "up" and "in." They have purpose. They have grit. They believe deeply in what they're doing and they have the stamina to pursue it relentlessly.

The "out" dimension is empty.

Blakey describes the Zealot as someone with "the passion and determination to pursue their calling, but they risk looking over their shoulders and finding nobody is following them because the intensity of their zeal is off-putting."

I was a Zealot early in my software career. I had strong opinions about architecture, about quality, about the right way to build things. I expressed those opinions loudly and often. I thought my conviction was leadership.

It wasn't. It was performance.

The people around me didn't follow my lead. They waited for me to stop talking. I'd leave a technical discussion feeling energized, like I'd done good work, while the room quietly decided to do something else entirely once I walked out.

Here's what nobody told me: being right about the work and being effective as a leader are two separate skills. The Zealot collapses them into one. You pour everything into your conviction and assume people will come along for the ride. Some do, briefly. Most find ways around you.

The Zealot's blind spot disguises itself as commitment. You're not wrong about the work. You're wrong about how you're showing up for the people doing it alongside you.

The Martyr

The Martyr scores high on "up" and "out." They have purpose, and people follow them for it. Teams love working for Martyrs because Martyrs genuinely care. They show up. They sacrifice. They take the calls no one else wants and they absorb the problems no one else is solving.

And then they burn out.

Blakey says Martyrs "serve the purpose and others with admirable diligence and loyalty but overlook their own needs."

When I moved into management, this was me. I said yes to everything. I absorbed the problems my team brought me because I thought absorbing them was my job. I worked weekends not because my company demanded it, but because I believed it was what good leaders did. I modeled exhausted, selfless service and called it dedication.

My team did follow me. They trusted me. They told me things they wouldn't tell anyone else. And when I eventually crashed... and I did crash, badly... the team felt every bit of it.

What I hadn't understood was that sustainability is not separate from leadership. It is leadership. Every time I stayed late unnecessarily, every time I said yes when I needed to say no, I was teaching my team how leaders behave. I was modeling a pattern I'd never want any of them to follow.

The Martyr's blind spot arrives wrapped in virtue. You're not neglecting people. You're neglecting yourself, which feels noble right up until the moment it becomes a crisis that takes everyone down with you.

The Pied Piper

The Pied Piper scores high on "in" and "out." They have personal resilience and people genuinely follow them. Teams want to be around them. They sustain their energy without burning out and they build real loyalty without trying hard.

But the "up" dimension is missing. There's no clear purpose underneath the charisma.

Blakey puts it plainly: Pied Pipers "lead their teams fantastically well and have no problem maintaining resilience... still, they lack a clear connection with their purpose."

I've seen Pied Pipers in the C-suite. Leaders who are personally magnetic, who run great meetings and build fiercely loyal teams. Their people would walk through walls for them. The trouble is the walls don't lead anywhere meaningful. The team works hard and moves fast in a direction nobody chose deliberately.

The Pied Piper's blind spot is the trickiest to name because all the leading indicators look fine. Engagement is high. People are energized. Retention is good. Nothing feels wrong until someone asks: what exactly are we doing this for?

At Step It Up HR, we work with organizations where the culture feels strong on the surface but the leadership lacks directional clarity. The Pied Piper type often shows up here. The problem isn't effort. It's not even talent. It's absence of a real why beneath the energy.

Which One Are You Right Now?

Be honest with yourself.

If your team respects your conviction but doesn't always follow your lead... you're likely a Zealot. The fix isn't less passion. It's more listening. Turn down the intensity in technical discussions and watch whether people actually engage or whether they go quiet and wait.

If people love working for you and you're running on empty... you're likely a Martyr. Your team is watching how you treat yourself. What you model, they learn. Start there.

If your team is loyal and energized but you'd struggle to explain the deeper "why" behind your current work... you're likely a Pied Piper. Purpose isn't a philosophical luxury. It's the thing driving your best decisions, including the hard ones. Without it, you're leading on borrowed time.

None of these archetypes is permanent. Naming your blind spot is most of the work.

The leaders who create the most damage are rarely the ones who don't care. They're the ones who care in the wrong direction... Zealots burning people with their certainty, Martyrs modeling unsustainability, Pied Pipers building loyal teams around an empty center.

A Question Worth Sitting With

Which dimension is weakest for you right now?

Not historically. Not in theory. Right now, in your current role, with your current team.

Is it "up"? Do you know why you lead?

Is it "in"? Are you taking care of the person doing the leading?

Is it "out"? Are people genuinely with you, or are they politely waiting?

Pick one. Work on it this week. You don't need to fix all three at once. You do need to start somewhere.

John Blakey's Force for Good is published by Kogan Page.

I was once skeptical about the return on investment of good management. Now I run Step It Up HR because I saw, firsthand, how much a manager's behavior shapes everything around them. Good managers don't keep teams together by accident. They're the reason people stay, grow, and bring their best work.

The Data Worth Knowing

According to Stack Overflow's research on engineering management, many engineers who move into management miss the deep technical focus of individual contributor work. The loss of flow state is real. I felt it.

But the engineers who thrive in management are generally those who found a new kind of flow state in the people work... the coaching conversations, the team design, the mentoring. The transition works when you stop mourning the loss of one kind of satisfaction and start genuinely seeking the other.

The research also shows engineering managers of real quality are rare. Most technical leaders get promoted because of coding ability, not people skills. This creates a persistent gap: technically excellent people leading with approaches not serving their teams.

I was one of those people, early on. Learning to lead differently was harder work than learning any new programming language. But it was worth it.

To the Reluctant Technical Leaders

If you're where I was... head down, good at your work, quietly dreading the conversation about whether you want to "go into management"... here's what I wish someone had told me.

Management is not for everyone, and choosing to stay in an individual contributor role is completely legitimate. Some of the best engineers I know are senior ICs who've made a deliberate choice not to manage, and their teams and organizations are better for it.

But if the resistance you feel is based on the belief people are too messy, too unpredictable, too soft... then your resistance is based on a misunderstanding.

People are everything code is not. They surprise you. They grow in ways you didn't expect. They bring insight from directions you never anticipated. The work of leading people well is harder, messier, and more rewarding than anything you'll build in a terminal window.

I used to say people are squishy. Now I'd say people are the whole point.

So if you're on the fence: give it a proper try. Not six months of reluctant compliance, wondering when you'll get back to the "real work." A genuine attempt, where you show up curious and committed, and see whether it turns out to be the thing you were made for.

It was, for me.

According to Gallup's 2024 workplace research, 48% of employees report feeling burned out at work. Not occasionally stressed. Burned out. Forty-eight percent.

Seventy-six percent say they experience burnout at least sometimes. Not a mental health crisis hiding in the corner. The majority of the workforce running on empty.

The Mental Health UK Burnout Report 2025 surveyed over 4,400 adults and found 91% experienced high pressure at work at some point during the year. Twenty-one percent needed time off because of stress-related mental health issues.

Here's what strikes me most: 52% of burned-out employees are actively looking for new jobs. The companies grinding their people down aren't getting more from them. They're losing them.

The cost sits at $438 billion in lost global productivity. And those numbers don't account for the personal cost. The ruined weekends. The missed dinners. The relationships worn down by someone who gave everything to a job and had nothing left for the people at home.

What Real Success Looks Like

I want to suggest a different measure.

Real success is leaving work with enough energy left to be present for the rest of your life.

If you're dragging yourself home every night, staring at nothing over dinner, and spending your weekends recovering from your week, something is broken. Your manager might praise you. You might be hitting targets. From the outside you look like a high performer. But if you're running on fumes, it won't hold. Nobody runs hard on empty for years without paying a price.

The exhaustion-equals-effort idea is outdated. The best engineers I've worked with weren't the ones burning midnight oil every night. They were the ones solving problems efficiently and going home. The best leaders weren't the ones always available. They were the ones energized enough to think clearly when it mattered.

There's a version of career success built for longevity. It doesn't look impressive in the short term. You leave at reasonable hours. You take your lunch. You say no to things regularly. But five years in, you're still sharp, still curious, still enjoying the work. Your colleague who glorified exhaustion burned out two years ago and is somewhere else trying to recover.

The Energy Test

Here's a simple test I've used on myself and shared with teams.

At the end of a typical workday, ask: do I have something left?

Not a full tank. Nobody finishes a productive day at 100%. But something. Enough to go for a walk. Enough to be interested in what your partner is saying. Enough to read a few pages before sleep. Enough to feel like a person and not a wrung-out rag.

If the answer is consistently no, something has to change. Either the workload is too heavy, the work itself is wrong for you, or you're spending energy on low-value work. Often it's all three.

The trap is normalizing it. When everyone around you is also depleted, depletion feels normal. When your whole team celebrates crushing themselves, stopping feels like betrayal. When your industry glorifies sacrifice, protecting your energy feels selfish.

It isn't. Protecting your energy is protecting your performance.

What Changed For Me

When I moved into leadership roles, I started paying attention to how my energy levels affected my decisions. Tired-me was a worse decision-maker. I was more reactive, less curious, quicker to dismiss ideas. I'd shortcut things I shouldn't have.

Rested-me asked better questions. I thought more carefully before reacting. I listened more. The quality of my leadership went up when my workload dropped to something sustainable.

I also stopped feeling vaguely guilty about leaving at a reasonable hour. For years I'd felt like I was cheating somehow. The shift was recognizing I wasn't paid to be present as many hours as possible. I was paid to deliver good work. And good work comes from a clear head.

How to Shift Your Definition of a Good Day

This isn't about working less. Some periods demand intensity. Launch weeks, incident response, tight deadlines are real. The problem isn't going hard occasionally. The problem is treating a sprint pace as the permanent baseline.

A few things worth trying:

Track your energy, not your hours. At the end of each day for two weeks, note your energy level out of ten. Then look at the pattern. Which days left you depleted? Which tasks drained you fastest? The data shows you where the problem is.

Stop using exhaustion as proof. If you catch yourself saying "I've been working so hard" as evidence of doing well, question it. Hard work matters. But sustained hard work without recovery isn't performance, it's damage.

Protect recovery time like you protect meeting time. If you wouldn't cancel a meeting with your boss at 5pm, don't cancel your walk, your dinner, or your sleep. Recovery isn't optional. It's what makes tomorrow's work possible.

Look at what you're delivering. If you're working 60-hour weeks and the output matches what you'd expect from 40, the extra hours are eating your efficiency, not adding to it. Tired brains churn. They don't produce.

Reframe your measure of a good day. A good day isn't one where you worked the most hours or left the most exhausted. It's one where you did good work and left with something in the tank. Start measuring by output and energy, not by hours logged.

The goal isn't balance in some abstract sense. It's leaving work each day with something left over. For your family, your health, your curiosity, your life outside a screen.

Success isn't how tired you are. It's what you built and who you still are at the end of it.

What would change if you started treating energy as the real metric of a good day?

Research from Everymind at Work found A-Grade achievers are four times more likely to develop mental illness than average performers. Four times. The people organizations rely on most are the ones most likely to break under the weight of it.

The American Psychological Association found socially prescribed perfectionism increased 33% over 28 years. Thomas Curran at the London School of Economics says these pressures are growing faster than we realize, and perfectionism "alienates us from other people in pursuit of higher standards." We're not creating high achievers. We're creating a generation of people who feel they have no choice but to be perfect.

The Three Types Who Fall First

In my experience, burnout hits hardest in three groups. You might recognize yourself in one of them.

The Perfectionist

This person sets standards nobody else even attempts. They hold themselves to an impossible bar, and they almost always clear it... until they don't. Perfectionists live in constant friction between where they are and where they think they should be. Every small gap is energy drain. Every misstep triggers a private spiral of self-criticism.

The perfectionist's curse is they're often right about the standards. The work IS better when they're involved. So the organization keeps asking, and they keep saying yes, and the gap between the standard and the capacity keeps widening.

The People Pleaser

This person cannot stand letting anyone down. Every request gets a yes. Every problem becomes their problem. They carry other people's needs quietly, without complaint, because complaining feels like failure.

Research published in MDPI connects this pattern directly to burnout and identity loss: the sense of not knowing who you are outside of your usefulness to others. People pleasers often reach a breaking point not with anger or collapse, but with a quiet, frightening numbness. They stop caring. And for someone who used to care about everything, the absence of caring is a warning sign.

The High Achiever

This is the person measuring their worth in output. More projects, more results, more proof they belong at the table. They're not doing it for praise. They're doing it because stopping feels dangerous.

Research points to CEOs facing double the depression risk of the general population... not despite their success, but because of the weight it carries. These are people who, by any external measure, have everything. And they're exhausted in a way they don't know how to name.

Why They Don't Ask for Help

Here's the part making this so hard to fix.

Strong people don't ask for help. Not because they're proud... because they genuinely believe they're supposed to manage it alone. Asking for help feels like admitting weakness. And weakness, in their world, is not an option.

One study found 33% of high achievers delay seeking treatment due to stigma. The people who need support most are the ones least likely to reach for it.

I've seen this up close. I've been this person.

In the Army, you learn early: showing struggle is a liability. You push through. You don't mention the headaches or the sleep issues or the fact your temper is shorter than it used to be. You perform competence because competence is the only currency worth anything.

The identity follows you into the corporate world. You carry it into every meeting, every performance review, every conversation with your team. You perform strength even when you're running on empty. And unlike the Army, there's no deployment end date, no rotation home. It keeps going.

What Organizations Get Wrong

We make this worse. Not with malice... with celebration.

We praise the person who never takes a day off. We promote the one who's always available at midnight. We write "goes above and beyond" in performance reviews as if exceeding your own physical limits is a skill worth rewarding.

And the high achievers read the room. They learn what wins. So they keep doing it.

The problem with systems built around heroic individuals is heroes burn out. And when they do, organizations are shocked. As if the system didn't build the person who broke in it.

The Warning Signs Nobody Talks About

Burnout doesn't announce itself. It creeps in through the back door.

Watch for these:

• Increased irritability at things never bothering you before
• Sleep problems... too much or not enough
• Physical symptoms: back pain, headaches, getting sick more often
• A growing distance from work you used to care about
• The feeling your best effort produces your worst results
• Cynicism creeping into conversations where it wasn't before

The problem is strong people explain these away. "I'm tired." "It's a busy period." "I'll recover over the holidays."

They won't. Not without changing something.

What I've Learned

Recovery isn't a checklist.

What has to change is the story you're telling yourself about strength. Strength is not the absence of struggle. Strength is knowing when you're depleted and doing something about it before your body makes the decision for you.

The best leaders I've worked with are not the ones who never struggled. They're the ones who recognized the struggle early and stayed honest about it. With their teams, with their families, with themselves.

If you manage people... look at your best ones. The ones who always deliver, who never complain, who take on more than their share. They're not fine simply because they're not telling you otherwise. Ask directly. Create the kind of relationship where "I'm overwhelmed" is a sentence they feel safe saying.

If you are one of these people... give yourself permission to be human. Your value to the people around you is not your output. It's you.

The strongest people I know learned it the hard way.

You don't have to.

There's also research worth knowing. Studies on post-traumatic growth show meaningful positive change after adversity is not automatic... and not common. Researchers found genuine measurable growth in roughly 5 to 25 percent of people following serious setbacks. The rest absorb the hit and either keep moving or get stuck.

The "for me" question doesn't guarantee you're in the growing quarter. But staying in the "to me" story almost certainly keeps you out of it.

Saying "this happened for me" might feel like accepting blame for something outside your control. It isn't. It's refusing to let circumstances you didn't choose determine who you become.

There's a difference between fault and responsibility. You're not always at fault for what happens to you. You are always responsible for what you do with it.

How to Use the Question

Don't apply this in the moment. When you've been blindsided fresh, you're too reactive. Give it time. Hours sometimes. Often days.

When you have enough distance, ask honestly:

What did this show me about myself I wasn't seeing? The promotion I missed showed me I'd been playing a narrower game than I thought. The deal falling apart showed me the assumptions I'd been making about the relationship. What's yours showing you?

What did this force me to build? The cancelled project teaching you to pivot. The bad manager showing you exactly what not to do with your own people. The redundancy making you finally start something of your own. You wouldn't choose these experiences. They often install the most durable capabilities.

Where did my assumptions fail? The sharpest lessons live in blind spots... places where you were so confident you stopped asking questions. Setbacks are often the only force making you look there.

The question doesn't make the pain disappear. It gives the pain a direction.

The Longer Game

The people who default to "for me" end up in different places than the people who default to "to me."

Not because life treats them more gently. Not because they hit fewer walls. The walls are the same walls.

The difference is in what they bring out of each one.

I'm not making a mystical argument. I don't believe the universe is personally arranging your education. I'm making a practical one. When something hard happens, you choose what role it plays in your story. You decide whether it's evidence the world is against you... or data you work with.

Over time, this compounds. The person asking "for me" accumulates insight, capability, and resilience at a faster rate. Not because they're smarter or luckier. Because they're extracting value from every experience, including the hard ones... especially the hard ones.

Both options sit in the same moment. Even when everything is genuinely unfair. Even when you're right about every grievance.

One of them keeps you stuck. One of them moves you.

The practice isn't easy. It gets easier every time you choose it.

What question do you reach for when things go sideways?

I first encountered this framing through the work of James Ferguson, who developed it from his own experience with serious illness. His perspective on leadership and gratitude is worth your time.

Research from the Global Leadership Wellbeing Survey found 46% of leaders don't consistently think about how they want to "show up" when they arrive at work. Nearly half of all leaders walk through the door on autopilot.

Without a reference point, you won't spot the drift. You won't notice the moment impatient became your default setting, or when you stopped asking questions and started issuing directives. You won't catch the shift from leader to traffic cop.

Your "normal" is supposed to be your compass. Without calibrating it, it's useless.

Your Stress Is Contagious

Here's why this goes beyond your own health.

The same GLWS research highlights something I find genuinely unsettling: watching someone get stressed raises cortisol levels in the people witnessing it. This happens even among strangers. In a team where relationships are closer and stakes higher, the effect is amplified significantly.

You are a transmission vector for your own stress.

If you run at a stress level you now consider "normal," your team soaks it in every day. Your impatience in the stand-up. Your short replies on Slack. The way you sigh when someone brings up a problem. They read all of it. They absorb all of it.

Research cited by Most Loved Workplace shows managers typically experience worse wellbeing than the people they manage. Think about it. The people responsible for setting the emotional tone in a team are, on average, the most stressed people in it.

If they don't know their own normal... they have no idea what they're passing on.

What a Baseline Looks Like

In the Army, we ran preventive maintenance before every mission. You checked your equipment against its known baseline: fuel levels, tire pressure, radio frequencies, weapon function. Not because you expected failure. Because you needed to know what "working correctly" looked like, so you'd spot any deviation.

Leaders need the same discipline.

Your personal baseline is specific to you. It might include:

• Sleep. Not aspirational sleep. The number of hours you function well on.
• Physical signals. Where does tension live in your body when you're stressed? Shoulders? Jaw? Gut?
• Cognitive markers. Do you normally process complex decisions quickly? If you're rereading the same email three times, it's a signal worth noticing.
• Social energy. Do you normally enjoy conversations with your team? If you've started dreading them, you've drifted.

Most leaders resist doing this because it feels self-indulgent. Checking in on your own emotional state while a product launch is burning seems like exactly the wrong priority. But this gets the causality backwards. The more you know yourself, the faster you read situations. The faster you read situations, the better your decisions. Your self-awareness isn't separate from your performance. It IS your performance.

None of this requires a meditation app or a wellness coach. It requires paying attention.

How to Find It Again

If you've been running hot long enough to genuinely lose the baseline, create conditions to rediscover it.

Protect recovery time. Not "free time" filling with admin. Actual recovery: walking, sleeping properly, doing something with nothing to do with work.

Build deliberate checkpoints. Before I start my day, I ask myself three things: What's my energy level right now, honestly? What's on my mind besides work? How do I want to show up in the next three hours?

These take ninety seconds. They force me to check my instruments before walking into the day.

I didn't do this for most of my career. I thought situational awareness was for the battlefield, not the boardroom. I was wrong. The skill is identical. Know your baseline. Notice the deviation. Respond before it becomes a crisis.

The Two-Week Signal

There's a useful marker from Most Loved Workplace research: if any of these signals persist for two consecutive weeks, stop treating it as a bad patch. At two weeks, it's a systems problem.

The calendar is too dense. Priorities are unclear. The role has grown beyond what one person reasonably holds. Or you've been here before, recovered, and rebuilt the same conditions without noticing.

This is where knowing your normal pays off beyond the personal. If you've been tracking, you know when the drift started. You know roughly how long it's been building. That's data. Data beats gut feel every time, including your own gut feel about yourself.

Two weeks of signals is your body and mind telling you something structural needs to change. Listen.

Spotting It in Your Team

Once you know your own baseline, you get better at spotting deviation in others.

The signals mirror yours. Behavioral drift: someone who normally speaks up in meetings goes quiet. Cognitive slowdown: a sharp thinker starts second-guessing obvious decisions. Emotional detachment: the person who used to care about outcomes now wants to get through the day.

These aren't character flaws. They're warnings.

The best leaders I've worked with notice change before it becomes a problem. They don't wait for someone to break. They see the small shift, create space for a conversation, and ask before it becomes a crisis.

All of it starts with knowing your own normal well enough to recognize when something is off.

One Thing

Pick three personal baseline markers. Write them down.

What does your body feel like on a good day? What's your normal sleep? What's your default mood when things are going well?

Check them once a week.

No app. No framework. No keynote required.

Know your normal. Then watch for the gap. Your team's wellbeing depends on you doing it, whether you want to carry the responsibility or not.

Sound familiar? 91% of people reported high or extreme stress in the past year, according to the Burnout Report 2025. Most of them have taken holidays. The holidays didn't fix it.

The problem is we've been treating burnout like tiredness. It isn't.

Burnout Is Not Tiredness

Tiredness goes away when you sleep. Burnout doesn't work like that.

The World Health Organization classifies burnout as an occupational syndrome, not a personal failing. It has three components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. You stop caring. You stop feeling effective. You start going through the motions.

Research from the Association for Psychological Science shows burnout causes measurable structural changes in the brain. The prefrontal cortex, which handles decision-making and emotional regulation, thins under sustained stress. Your amygdala, the threat-detection centre, enlarges. You're not tired. Your brain has physically changed in response to conditions that never let up.

Sleep fixes tiredness. Sunshine doesn't rebuild a prefrontal cortex.

55% of U.S. employees currently experience burnout, and 82% are at risk. These people aren't skipping holidays. They're taking holidays and coming back to the same broken system.

The Holiday Illusion

I understand the appeal. I've believed in it myself.

You tell yourself you need to get away. And a holiday does help... temporarily. Your cortisol drops. You sleep better. You laugh more. You're reminded life exists outside of Slack.

Then you land back home. Your phone reconnects. The notifications start. By the time you're through customs, you're back in it.

A Deloitte survey found 77% of professionals have experienced burnout at their current job, with more than one occurrence for over half. Not one episode. Multiple. These are people who took time off between each one. The time off didn't prevent the next one.

Because the fire isn't inside you. It's in the building.

Where Burnout Comes From

New research shows burnout stems equally from two sources. 50% from workload factors. And 50% from people factors: culture, relationships, sense of belonging.

The Burnout Report 2025 found 47% of respondents cited heavy workloads and unpaid tasks as their primary stress trigger. A management problem, not a personal one.

The belonging numbers are harder to ignore. Employees who lack a sense of belonging burn out at a 78% rate. Those who feel connected to their team and organization burn out at 55%. A 23-percentage-point gap. Not fixed by a spa weekend. Fixed by building a culture where people feel they matter.

Fewer than half of employers have redesigned work with employee wellbeing in mind. Meanwhile, 72% of workers face high workplace stress, a six-year high.

We're in the middle of a burnout epidemic, and most organizations are still handing out long-weekend vouchers as the answer.

Why Organizations Keep Getting This Wrong

There's a pattern I've seen throughout my career. Something breaks. Someone suggests addressing the cause. Leadership nods... then offers a symptom fix.

Burnout breaks people. The symptom fix is time off, employee assistance programs, mental health days. All good things. None of them address why people are burning out.

The cause is usually one or more of these:

• Workloads designed for a team of eight, now carried by five
• A culture where busy is confused with valuable
• Managers who don't have the skills to have real conversations
• A lack of autonomy, meaning, or genuine recognition
• A gap between the organization's stated values and the daily reality

None of those disappear while you're in Tenerife.

Research backs this up. The single most effective intervention for burnout isn't time off. It's manager training. Basic training on how to manage people cuts disengagement by half. Not a holiday. A conversation. A skill. A different kind of leadership.

What Organizations Need to Change

This isn't a list of things you fix individually. If your organization expects you to solve your burnout through self-care and better sleep habits, they've fundamentally misunderstood what burnout is.

What needs to change at the organizational level:

Review workloads, regularly. Not once a year at a performance review. Managers need to know what's on people's plates week to week. When workloads are unsustainable, the answer isn't encouraging people to manage their time better. It's reducing the work or adding the people.

Train managers to have real conversations. Not performance reviews. Real ones. "How are you doing? Not workwise... you." Most managers were never taught how. It's not a personality trait. It's a skill.

Build belonging into the work itself. Belonging doesn't come from team-building days. It comes from being heard, being included in decisions, knowing your work matters. If people burn out at 78% when they don't feel they belong, belonging needs to be a design criterion.

Stop rewarding burnout signals. The people who stay latest, skip lunches, and answer emails at 11pm are being trained by what you applaud. When leaders celebrate overwork, they set the temperature for the whole team.

What To Do Right Now

If you're burnt out, take the holiday. Rest. You need it and you deserve it.

But come back knowing this: the holiday isn't the fix. Use the distance to see your situation more clearly. What's the real cause? Is it workload? A manager who doesn't support you? A culture where you're invisible? Work that's stopped having any meaning?

Name the cause. Then decide what to do about it... whether that's having the hard conversation with your manager, setting boundaries and enforcing them, or acknowledging this job or this organization is not fixable from inside.

If you're a manager, ask yourself one question: if someone on my team was burning out right now, would I know? If the answer is no, start there. Not with a policy. With a conversation.

Burnout doesn't get fixed in a week. It gets fixed when we stop treating it as a personal failure and start treating it as the systemic problem it is.

The holiday won't do it. Leadership might.

Research from Elevate Leadership found a striking gap: 92% of CEOs believe their organization is empathetic. Only 72% of employees agree.

Twenty points between what leaders think they're doing and what people experience.

The gap doesn't come from leaders being bad people. It comes from walking in the wrong shoes... their own.

And 58% of CEOs say they find it difficult to demonstrate empathy in practice. Not because they don't care. Because the "shoes" model gives them nothing to work with. You cannot replicate someone else's inner experience. You don't have access to it.

What Riding Shotgun Means

When you ride shotgun with someone, you're not driving. You're not navigating. You're in the car, in real time, as a witness to their journey. You see what they see. You feel the turns. You notice when they're driving tense or when they suddenly relax.

You're present. You're paying attention. And... you're in their car, not yours.

This is what genuine empathy looks like in practice. Not: "I know what this is like." But: "Tell me what this is like for you. I'm here. I'm listening. I won't rewrite your story with my experience."

It requires something most leaders find uncomfortable: park your own interpretation and sit in uncertainty.

The old-fashioned "shoes" approach is active. You're doing something... simulating, projecting, imagining. Riding shotgun is receptive. You're making space. You're waiting. You're witnessing.

What Changes When You Ride Shotgun

In practice, the difference shows up in small ways.

You stop finishing sentences. When you think you know someone's experience, you fill in gaps. When you're riding shotgun, you ask questions instead.

You stop comparing. Saying "I had the same problem once" sounds supportive. It isn't. It shifts the conversation to your experience. Riding shotgun means staying in theirs.

You stop solving prematurely. The urge to fix is strong in leadership. We're trained to diagnose and act. Sitting in someone's car means staying with discomfort long enough to understand the real problem... not the surface one.

You believe them. The hardest one. When someone tells you something disproportionate to the situation, riding shotgun means accepting their experience as real. You don't have to agree. You do have to believe they're feeling what they say they're feeling.

A Story I Think About a Lot

Early in my career, I managed an engineer I'll call Tom. Skilled, quiet, and increasingly withdrawn. He'd miss standup. Give one-word answers in 1:1s. Stop volunteering for anything.

I thought I understood why. Tom was underpaid relative to the market, and I'd been underpaid too at a similar stage. I knew how demoralizing it was... watching your rent go up while your salary stayed flat. It erodes motivation in a specific way.

So I went to bat for his salary. Got him a significant increase. Tom stayed withdrawn. I was puzzled.

I'd walked in his shoes and been completely wrong.

Months later, we had a real conversation... one where I stopped offering solutions and started asking questions. What I learned had nothing to do with money. Tom had requested a specific project assignment six months earlier. He'd been passed over without explanation. He'd taken it as a sign his technical judgment wasn't trusted by leadership.

The salary increase hadn't touched the actual wound. I'd been treating the wrong problem entirely.

I'd been so confident I knew the answer, I hadn't asked the question.

Two Types of Empathy

Most leadership writing collapses empathy into one thing. It isn't.

Cognitive empathy is understanding how someone thinks and feels. Emotional empathy is feeling what they feel. The "walk in their shoes" metaphor pushes toward emotional empathy... but it's a counterfeit version. You're not feeling what they feel. You're feeling what you'd feel in your version of their situation.

Riding shotgun is closer to cognitive empathy. You're not trying to become them. You're trying to understand them, on their terms, without taking over.

According to Chief Executive, 87% of CEOs believe financial performance ties directly to workplace empathy. Nearly nine out of ten top executives think empathy moves the bottom line... and yet the gap between how leaders show up and how employees experience it stays wide.

Cognitive empathy is learnable. Emotional empathy is partly neurological. Cognitive empathy is a skill: listening to someone's story without overwriting it with yours.

Three Questions for Riding Shotgun

If you want to practice, three questions will take you further than any empathy framework.

What does this feel like for you? Not "what happened"... what does it feel like. Emotions are data.

What would help most right now? Not what would help you in this situation. What would help them, right now. Listen carefully to the answer.

Have I got it right? After reflecting back what you've heard, check. The adjustment is where real understanding lives.

These aren't magic. They require you to slow down, stop solving, and trust understanding comes before fixing.

The Point

The "walk a mile in their shoes" metaphor isn't entirely wrong. It's easy to misuse. It gives permission to substitute your experience for someone else's without realizing you've done it.

Riding shotgun is harder. It asks you to give up the driver's seat. To be present without being in control. To listen without knowing where you're going.

People don't need you to have been where they are. They need you to be where they are, right now, with them.

Next time someone on your team seems unreachable, resist the urge to walk in their shoes. Ride shotgun instead.

According to a recent survey, 61% of workers want to switch careers. More than half of UK employees have already made one major career change. Generation Z workers will likely hold 16-17 jobs over 5-7 years.

The ladder model doesn't fit these lives. It never did.

And yet people still feel guilty about it. They apologize for the "gaps" on their resume. They downplay the pivot from sales to software, or from military service to management. They treat their non-linear path as a liability when it's anything but.

What the Army Taught Me About Careers

The Army doesn't do career plans. It does mission objectives.

You get a mission. You figure out how to accomplish it with what you have. You adapt when the situation changes, because the situation always changes. You lead people through uncertainty, not toward a predetermined destination. And when the mission shifts, you don't mourn the old plan ... you pick up the new one.

The mindset didn't fit neatly into civilian corporate culture when I first crossed over. Hiring managers wanted to see a straight line. They wanted to know where I saw myself in five years. The Army had taught me to care about the mission and the people, not career positioning. Nobody in my unit asked what my five-year plan was. They asked what I was going to do today to make the team better.

So I learned to translate. To take those leadership instincts and package them in language hiring managers recognized. And somewhere in the translation, I realized the spaghetti wasn't a problem. It was the product.

Every deployment, every assignment, every lateral move the Army put me through had given me something the straight-path candidates sitting across the table from me didn't have: proof I'd done hard things in conditions I didn't choose.

The Spaghetti Advantage

Here's what a non-linear career gives you:

Pattern recognition across domains. When you've worked in multiple fields, you see connections other people miss. You notice the leadership problem you're solving in a tech company is the same one you saw in a logistics unit fifteen years ago. This cross-domain vision is rare. Most people inside one industry for twenty years see the trees. You see the forest. And when you see the forest, you ask better questions, spot the patterns earlier, and avoid the mistakes everyone else keeps repeating.

Resilience. People who've only ever walked a straight path struggle when it bends. People who've navigated three or four major pivots know disruption isn't the end of the story. It's usually the beginning of a better one. You've already proved it to yourself.

A wider identity. If your entire identity is tied to one job title or one industry, you're fragile. A title change feels like an identity crisis. Spaghetti people have a stronger sense of who they are underneath the resume, because they've had to build it.

Adaptability. The modern job market rewards it. Over 70% of companies now use skills-based hiring rather than hiring for experience alone. Your ability to learn and apply matters more than a clean resume narrative.

How to Tell the Spaghetti Story

Here's what people with non-linear careers get wrong: they apologize for the story instead of telling it.

"I know my background is a bit all over the place..." is a terrible way to introduce yourself. It signals shame before anyone asked for it.

The spaghetti career becomes a problem when you can't explain the thread running through it. Not a ladder, not a straight line ... a thread. A set of values or skills or obsessions you've carried from one thing to the next.

For me, the thread is leadership. Every role I've had, every company I've built, every book I've written comes back to the same question: how do you get a group of people to do hard things together without making them miserable? The thread runs from my first platoon to my latest startup.

Find your thread. Once you have it, the spaghetti stops looking like chaos and starts looking like a career with depth.

The Real Cost of the 10-Year Plan

The plan isn't neutral. It has a cost.

When you're committed to a plan, you say no to anything not fitting it. You turn down the unexpected opportunity because it's "off track." You stay in a role making you miserable because leaving would mean admitting the plan failed.

Only 46% of workers feel supported in their career development, according to a 2023 Gartner survey. Part of the reason is people are trying to shoehorn their actual working lives into a framework not built for them.

The plan becomes a cage.

What I'd Tell Myself at 18

I wouldn't tell myself to plan better. I'd tell myself to stay curious, say yes more often, and stop treating detours as failures.

Every "wrong turn" in my career taught me something the straight path wouldn't have. The Army gave me leadership skills no MBA program teaches. The tech work gave me systems thinking. The writing and speaking gave me a way to share what I'd learned. Each piece fed the next.

Ruth Wooderson puts it this way: screw the 10-year plan. Careers aren't ladders, they're spaghetti. I've stolen the framing completely, because it's the most honest description I've ever heard.

Your Turn

If your career looks messy right now, good. It means you've been paying attention to life instead of a spreadsheet.

The question isn't "does this fit my plan?" The question is: does this make you better at something worth caring about?

Follow the curiosity. Take the pivot. Tell the true story.

The spaghetti is the point.

The Woolley research is clear. Teams where a few people dominated conversation had less collective intelligence than groups where everyone took turns. You are not only failing to hear good ideas when you dominate the room. You are actively suppressing the intelligence of the team. You are making the group dumber by being in it.

A hard thing to sit with, if you built your career on being smart.

Fewer than one in four employees are engaged at work, according to Gallup. One major driver of disengagement is feeling unheard. When your team learns meetings are a performance of your conclusions, they stop bringing their best thinking. They arrive with nothing and leave with nothing. The cost is yours alone.

Three Things I Changed

After the Marcus incident, I changed how I ran meetings.

First, I stopped sharing my position at the start. I had a position, but I stopped opening with it. Instead I opened with the question. "We need to solve X. What are you seeing?" This felt uncomfortable for about a week. Then it started surfacing things I had not thought of.

Second, I started tracking who had not spoken. Not to call people out. To notice when the room's intelligence was being wasted. If someone had been in the room for forty minutes and said nothing, either they had nothing to say... unlikely... or the conditions were wrong for them to say it. My job was to fix those conditions.

Third, I got genuinely curious about being wrong. Not performatively curious. Not "great point, I will factor it in" while privately dismissing it. Genuinely curious. The Marcus incident helped. I had been completely wrong about something I was confident about. Once it happens once, you look for the next Marcus. You want to find them before the system goes down.

The Smartest Leaders I Have Known

Every leader I genuinely respect shares one quality: they think the people around them are interesting.

Not useful. Not subordinates. Not resources. Interesting.

They walk into rooms expecting to learn something. They treat disagreement as information. They know their own thinking has blind spots, and they treat other people as what fills those blind spots.

This is not soft. It is not about feelings or psychological safety as a buzzword. It is an intelligence strategy. You are running a group decision-making system, and the inputs to it are the perspectives of your team. Throttling those inputs to run your own conclusions through the group is expensive waterfall design.

The best teams I have been part of were not the ones with the smartest individuals. They were the ones where the least senior person in the room felt their idea would be heard. Where the quiet engineer would stop a project cold if they had seen something in the logs. Where the room corrected you.

The Question Worth Asking

Think about the last important meeting you ran.

Who talked the most?

If the answer is you, think about what you did not hear. Think about who had something to say and did not say it. Think about the Marcus in the room... who watched you build your recommendation and said nothing, because the room had been trained your recommendation was the destination.

The smartest person in the room is the room. Not a feel-good platitude. A design principle. The question is whether you are building conditions for the room's intelligence to operate, or whether you are shorting it out every time you speak.

Worth sitting with.

According to the Mental Health UK Burnout Report 2026, 91% of UK workers experience high or extreme stress annually. One in three regularly works unpaid overtime. Twenty percent took time off due to poor mental health caused by stress. Only 27% feel mental health is genuinely prioritised by their employer.

In the US, Eagle Hill Consulting found 55% of employees are currently experiencing burnout. Gen Z hits peak burnout at 25. Not at the end of a long career. At 25.

We're not working harder and achieving more. We're working harder and breaking down earlier.

Here's the part worth sitting with: if exhaustion were a reliable signal of success, we'd expect those exhausted workers to be the most effective, most satisfied, most impactful. They're not. Burned-out employees are disengaged, unproductive, and leaving. It costs US employers an estimated $5 million per year for every 1,000 employees... and most of it never shows as absence. People show up. They're not really there.

Exhaustion isn't producing results. It's producing wreckage.

Where I Changed My Mind

I spent years in the US Army before moving into tech. One of the things the Army teaches you is readiness. You don't measure a unit's effectiveness by how tired it is after a mission. You measure it by whether it completed the mission, and whether it's ready for the next one.

Exhaustion compromising readiness for what comes next is a liability. Not a badge.

I carried the readiness principle into my career. For a while, it stuck. But somewhere along the way, tech culture overrode it. The always-on mentality, the late standups, the Slack messages at midnight, the pride in pulling an all-nighter before a launch. I slipped back into the exhaustion-as-success trap without even noticing.

It took a few conversations with people who had clearly defined what success meant for them to shake me loose. One of them put it simply: "I measure a good day by whether I could do it again tomorrow." It landed.

Think about what's in those words. Not "did I stay late enough." Not "did I sacrifice something." Not "did anyone see how hard I worked." The measure is sustainability. Are you able to show up and do it again?

By my own standards at the time, the answer was often no.

Three Signs Your Success Metric Is Wrong

1. You talk about tiredness like it's a competition.

"I'm so tired." "I've been flat out." "I barely slept." If this is your regular vocabulary, and you say it with a hint of pride, your metric is off. Tiredness isn't currency. It's feedback.

2. You feel guilty leaving work with energy.

If finishing at a reasonable hour and still feeling capable makes you anxious... like you should have done more... something is broken. The guilt isn't wisdom. It's a conditioned response to a warped standard. A person who leaves work with energy and got the right things done had a better day than someone who stayed two hours longer out of obligation.

3. Your recovery time keeps growing.

If you need a full weekend to recover from a week of work, and it still doesn't feel like enough, your pace isn't sustainable. Two years ago you felt okay by Saturday. Now it takes until Sunday. Next year it'll take longer. Not high performance. A slow drain.

What Real Success Looks Like

I'm not arguing for coasting. I'm arguing for a better definition.

Real success means you completed what mattered today. You made decisions you're confident in. You treated people well. And you have enough left to show up the same way tomorrow.

It's not about working fewer hours, necessarily. It's about measuring the right things. Did you do quality work? Did you move things forward? Are you able to repeat it tomorrow, next week, next year?

The BBC covered this shift in a piece on the end of rise-and-grind culture: people are re-prioritising what they want from work. Not because they're lazy. Because they've done the maths and the trade isn't worth it.

I see the same thing on Reddit right now. Threads about exhaustion, return-to-office friction, and "is anyone else completely done" type posts are generating enormous engagement. Nobody argues back. People are recognising themselves.

The conversation is shifting. The question is whether you'll shift with it, or keep running a race with no finish line.

What I Changed

A few practical things shifted for me.

I started ending my day with a short review: what did I finish, what needs to carry forward, what was the quality like? It replaced the old exhaustion-check as the measure of a good day. The question shifted from "am I tired enough" to "did I do what mattered."

I stopped responding to late-night messages unless something was on fire. Most things aren't. The culture of instant response trains people to expect it, and then you're trapped. Breaking the habit took a few weeks. Nobody fired me.

I also got deliberate about my own energy... not as a soft concept, but as a practical resource. My best thinking happens in the mornings. I protect this time. No meetings, no email until I've done the work worth doing. Not a luxury. Logistics.

And I started saying, out loud, when things were too much. Not as complaint. As information. "This pace isn't sustainable" is data, not weakness. Leaders who pretend otherwise are lying to themselves and to their teams.

The Question Worth Asking

At the end of today, ask yourself this: do I have something left?

Not so you feel guilty if you're tired. Tired sometimes is fine. Tired always is not.

If your honest answer is "I've been running on empty for months," it's not dedication. It's a system running without maintenance. Worth stopping to ask what you're building, and whether the pace you're keeping is getting you there faster, or getting you there more damaged.

Success should leave you ready for what comes next. Not relieved it's over.

Research from the University of Queensland found around 25% of workers report difficulty sleeping on Sunday nights because of work-related worry. One in four people, lying awake, dreading what morning brings.

The number should be zero. It isn't.

The Dread Is Data

Your body is trying to give you information. The question is whether you're willing to listen.

When the Sunday squeeze shows up, it's usually pointing at one of a few things:

A specific person. Sometimes the dread isn't about the work at all. It's about a colleague, a manager, or a dynamic you'll have to deal with when Monday hits. Your nervous system knows what your rational mind is still making excuses for. If thinking about a specific name tightens your chest, pay attention to what your body is registering.

The workload. If you're mentally scrolling through tasks at 10pm on a Sunday, your brain is telling you something's out of control. Not "a bit much." Out of control. People don't mentally rehearse a workweek unless the structure around them is genuinely broken.

A values mismatch. This one is trickier to identify. Sometimes the dread is vague. You're unable to point to a specific person or problem. Everything seems "fine" on paper. Except your stomach disagrees. Formless dread is often the feeling of spending your days in work misaligned with who you are. When what you're asked to do contradicts what you stand for, your body keeps score even when your mind refuses to.

The key thing to understand: your Sunday night feeling isn't a mental health problem to manage. It's a diagnostic signal giving you an honest readout. Treat it like one.

If You're a Leader, It Gets More Complicated

Here's what makes this test especially important for anyone in a leadership role.

When leaders experience anxiety, it spreads. Research on emotional contagion shows stress radiates through a workplace, and it travels fastest from the people at the top. If you're a manager walking into Monday carrying Sunday's dread, your team will feel it... even if you never say a word.

Think about the best leader you've worked for. Did they walk in every Monday looking like they were marching to their own execution? No. They had energy, presence, a sense of forward motion. It was contagious.

Now think about the worst. Did they bring in Sunday's weight? Did you feel it before they'd even opened their mouth?

If you lead people and you're dreading Monday, you owe it to them to ask why. Not to hide the feeling. To investigate it honestly.

Are you in the right role? Are you in the right culture? Are you carrying a workload no one person should be carrying? These aren't rhetorical questions. They deserve honest answers.

When a leader suffers in silence and pushes through, the team suffers too. The mask slips. The dread spreads. Your job isn't to project confidence at all costs. It's to fix what's broken.

When Sunday Feels OK

I want to say something about the flip side of this, because it matters.

I've had stretches of my career where Sunday night felt fine. Not ecstatic, not euphoric, but genuinely OK. Calm. Ready.

Those stretches shared a few things in common: - The work was hard, but I believed in it - The people around me were honest, and I was honest with them - I knew what I was responsible for and had the tools to do it - The culture didn't ask me to leave my values at the door

The feeling of Sunday-night-OK is worth aiming for. Not perfection. Not a dream job. Something more fundamental: doing work worth doing, with people worth working alongside. When you find yourself in a stretch like this, notice it. Name it. Don't take it for granted.

What to Do With the Signal

If your Sunday nights are tight, resist the urge to rush to solutions. Diagnose first.

Sit with the feeling and ask: what, specifically, is feeding this? Write it down if you need to. Is it a person? A meeting you're dreading? A structural problem nobody wants to name? A decision you've been putting off?

Once you've named it, you have options. Some problems are fixable from where you stand. A conversation you've been avoiding, a boundary you've let slip, a workload you've never pushed back on... these are areas where you have real room to move.

Some problems aren't fixable from inside. If the culture is genuinely broken, if the values on the wall have nothing to do with how decisions get made, if the person making your Sundays miserable has no interest in changing... you won't solve it by working harder or waiting it out. What's left is to stop pretending it's fine.

It sounds harsh. But pretending costs you more in the long run. And your body is going to keep sending the signal whether you listen or not.

The Sunday test doesn't care about your rationalizations. It only registers what's true.

Start Using It

I've gotten better at running this test regularly. Not only when something feels off, but as a habit. Every Sunday evening, a quick check-in: how does my stomach feel about tomorrow?

When it's OK, I take a moment to notice. To appreciate the situation I'm in and the people I'm working with.

When it's not OK, I don't let myself brush it off. I ask why. I write something down. I commit to addressing one thing in the coming week.

Your gut has been paying attention to your work life a lot longer than your conscious mind. It remembers patterns. The moments when things didn't sit right. The broken promises. The culture on days when no one was performing for visitors.

It's not dramatic to take it seriously. It's practical.

What does your stomach say right now?

Research from Kapable Club found 87% of professionals globally have had at least one toxic boss. My own research found 99.5% of survey respondents reported experiencing one or more types of bad boss behavior. Not an occasional problem. The standard experience for most working people.

And yet, 40% of employees stay silent about toxic leaders out of fear. NDAs bind more than a third of U.S. workers, restricting them from discussing workplace abuse or toxic leadership. We've built legal and cultural infrastructure specifically designed to keep the silence in place.

The toxic boss is Voldemort. We've all signed a magical contract not to name them.

What the Silence Is Costing

Toxic culture is 10 times more likely to drive attrition than pay dissatisfaction. Not three times. Ten times. A bigger pay packet does almost nothing to fix what's making people leave.

57% of workers have left a job because of their boss. Not the commute. Not the work itself. The boss.

Bad bosses cost U.S. businesses an estimated $360 billion annually in lost productivity, turnover, and healthcare expenses. The GDP of medium-sized nations. Vanished. Every year.

The personal cost goes further. 72% of employees with a toxic boss report daily stress. 53% have nightmares about their manager. 41% have sought therapy because of a boss. These are not mild inconveniences. These are genuine injuries being absorbed quietly by people who feel they have no other option.

Why They Keep Rising

The most frustrating thing about toxic bosses isn't their existence. It's the promotion cycles.

Research from McKinsey and Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic at Columbia University points to the same root cause: we mistake confidence for competence. The traits getting people noticed and promoted... loud, charismatic, self-assured, magnetic... are the opposite of what makes someone a good leader. Empathy, self-awareness, humility, listening skills. Those traits don't read well in a promotion meeting. They don't fill a room.

So the narcissist gets the job. The bully gets the next one. They rise not despite their behavior, but partly because of it. Chamorro-Premuzic's research found we're actively selecting for dysfunctional leadership traits, mistaking charisma for capability and confidence for strategic vision.

And because no one says anything meaningful in exit interviews, hiring managers at the next company have nothing to work with. The pattern repeats.

The silence doesn't protect you. It protects them.

The Myth of the One Bad Apple

I've spoken to hundreds of people about their leadership experiences. When I dug into the data behind my BAT (Bad Apple Test) framework at StepUp2Bat, the same pattern appeared again and again. People think their toxic boss is unusual. An exception. A one-off.

Wrong.

99.5% of respondents had experienced bad boss behavior. Not one type. Multiple types. The micromanager who second-guesses every decision. The credit-taker who presents your work as their own. The intimidator who makes people afraid to speak. The invisible manager leaving you without direction or support. These behaviors are not rare. They're unnamed.

And unnamed, they're invisible. Invisible, they're untreated. Untreated, they multiply.

We've built a culture around minimizing bad boss behavior. "She's the way she is." "He means well." "Learn to work with people like him." We pathologize the employee and protect the boss. Every time we do, we make it easier for the next toxic boss to get away with the same behavior.

A 99.5% Problem Needs a Name

One thing worth sitting with: if 99.5% of people have experienced bad boss behavior, who are the toxic bosses being produced by? Not some alien system. By organizations failing to name the behavior, confront it, and stop promoting the people doing it.

The Voldemort silence is not neutral. It's a mechanism. It doesn't protect anyone but the person with the power to harm. The employees stay quiet because speaking feels dangerous. HR stays quiet because raising it creates conflict. Leadership stays quiet because challenging a peer is uncomfortable. And the toxic boss moves from role to role, organization to organization, gathering a trail of broken teams and traumatized employees behind them — none of whom ever said anything on the record.

The next person coming in sees a spotless reference. They're walking in blind.

What Naming Looks Like

I'm not suggesting a LinkedIn rant with your old boss tagged. Noise. Helps no one.

Here's what naming looks like in practice.

Write an honest exit interview. Most exit interviews are useless because HR asks generic questions and employees say nothing real. Break the pattern. If the reason you're leaving is your manager, say so specifically. What behaviors? What patterns? Give the organization something to work with, even if you believe they won't act on it.

Be honest in reference checks. Not vindictive. Honest. When someone calls to ask what it's like working with a former boss and you experienced something specific and problematic, say it. Protect the person asking by giving them real information. You're not obligated to perform enthusiasm you don't feel.

Use structured feedback tools. StepUp2Bat exists for this reason. Anonymous, structured, upward feedback gives organizations the signal they need to see patterns they're currently missing. If your team has access to tools like this, use them honestly. Don't game them. Don't soften them. Say what's true.

Have the conversation with colleagues still there. Not gossip. Not venting. A direct: "I want to share what my experience was, because it might matter for you." One honest conversation gives someone else permission to name what they're experiencing.

None of this is comfortable. All of it matters.

The Person Who Comes After You

The next person hired into the role you left is working for the same boss. Having the same experience. Worse... the silence you maintained gave the toxic boss one more year of impunity. One more year of evidence saying their behavior is acceptable and consequence-free.

Your silence is a gift to the person doing the harm. Your honesty is a gift to the person coming next.

I know it's not simple. Jobs, references, legal agreements, fear of reputational blowback. Real constraints. You need to protect yourself. Where the legal risk is low, where the relationship allows it, where the damage from continued silence is certain... say something.

Not for revenge. Not for your own satisfaction. For the person walking in after you, who deserves to know what they're walking into.

Your Voldemort doesn't deserve the silence.

Name them.

Gallup research found companies fail to choose the right management talent 82% of the time. Not 20%. Not 40%. Eighty-two percent. Not occasional bad luck... a systematic failure built into how we think about promotions.

The person best at a job is not automatically the person who should lead others doing it. These are different skills. Entirely different.

What Performance Measures and What It Misses

Performance metrics measure outputs. Lines of code written. Revenue generated. Projects delivered on time. Real, valuable things.

But once you're a manager, your job changes completely. You don't ship anymore. Your team ships. Your role is making other people productive, not yourself.

The skills required are nearly the opposite of what made you stand out as an individual contributor:

• You need to slow down when your instinct is to speed up.
• You need to explain your thinking when you'd rather move on.
• You need to stay calm when everything is going sideways.
• You need to care about someone's development more than the sprint goal.

None of those show up in a performance review. None of them earn a promotion. So most people never develop them... until suddenly they're expected to demonstrate them every single day.

What Emotional Maturity Is and Isn't

People hear "emotional maturity" and think it means being calm, or nice, or sensitive. It doesn't mean any of those things... or not only those things.

Emotional maturity is the ability to understand what you're feeling, decide how to respond, and keep your reactions proportional to what's happening around you.

An emotionally mature leader: - Takes accountability without getting defensive - Gives feedback aimed at growth, not at venting frustration - Handles pressure without spreading it to their team - Disagrees with people without making them feel attacked - Asks questions without already knowing the answer

This isn't soft. It's extraordinarily difficult. It requires a level of self-awareness most high performers never had to build, because technical brilliance doesn't require it.

Research on leadership performance shows 90% of top organisational performers are high in emotional intelligence. Only 20% of bottom performers are. Performance at the individual level still requires some EQ. Leadership at scale requires a great deal more of it.

The Brilliant Jerk Problem

Tech has a specific version of this. The Brilliant Jerk.

You know the type. Immaculate code. Green metrics. Fast problem-solving. And interpersonal behavior so appalling you'd fire anyone else for it. They dismiss colleagues in meetings. They argue past the point of reason. They make junior engineers feel small.

Organisations tolerate this because the output is high. The implicit message: we'll accept behavior we'd otherwise not tolerate, as long as you keep shipping.

This is a catastrophic mistake. The damage a Brilliant Jerk does to trust, psychological safety, and the retention of the people they work with takes years to repair. When organisations promote a Brilliant Jerk into leadership, they scale the damage.

71% of employers say they'd hire someone with higher EQ over higher IQ. Yet promotion decisions still go to the top producer, the highest biller, the person with the biggest number.

The disconnect is real. We measure performance because it's straightforward to measure. Emotional maturity is harder to quantify, so we pretend it doesn't matter... right up until the exit interviews start.

The Peter Principle Hasn't Gone Anywhere

Laurence Peter described it in 1969: employees get promoted until they reach a level of incompetence. Fifty-plus years later, it's still how most organisations operate.

What he didn't say explicitly, but what I've watched happen repeatedly, is the incompetence is almost never technical. The best engineer doesn't become a bad manager because they forgot how to code. They become a bad manager because they never developed the emotional maturity to do the job.

They don't know how to have an uncomfortable conversation without making it worse. They reward people most like themselves and leave others behind. They make decisions based on their own preferences rather than their team's needs. They don't know how to handle the loneliness of leadership, so they make it everyone else's problem.

I've seen it enough times to know it's not bad luck. It's what happens when you promote for the wrong thing.

What I Look For Now

I look for different things when considering someone for a leadership role. Performance still matters. But here's what else I watch:

How do they handle being wrong? Not in a public forum where they perform grace, but in the moment, in a meeting, when someone challenges them unprepared. Do they adapt or dig in?

How do junior people behave around them? Are they open, energised, comfortable? Or quiet and careful? People lower in the hierarchy always know more about someone's true character than peers and managers do.

What do they do under pressure? When the project is going badly and the deadline is real, do they rise... or do they dump their anxiety onto the people around them?

Do they talk about their team? When asked how a project went, does this person say "I delivered X" or "we delivered X and here's what the team did"?

How do they respond to feedback? Do they treat it as data, or as an attack?

None of these require a psychometric assessment. They require watching someone in a hard moment. Most organisations never bother.

Build the Right Track

Part of the issue sits with how we've structured career progression. In most organisations, the only way to earn more and be taken seriously is to move into management. Individual contributor tracks exist on paper. The status and compensation don't follow.

So highly skilled people who'd be brilliant contributors for another decade get pushed into leadership roles they don't want and aren't built for. Some adapt. Many don't. And the organisations lose both: a great individual contributor who's now a mediocre manager, and a team who deserved better leadership.

The answer isn't to stop promoting people. The answer is to promote the right things. Build a genuine technical track with real progression. Assess leadership candidates on leadership criteria. Make emotional maturity a first-class requirement, not an afterthought on a competency framework nobody reads.

And when you're looking at a promotion, for yourself or someone else, ask honestly: are you promoting this person because they'd be a great leader? Or because they've been a great performer and you don't know what else to do with them?

Those are different questions. Most organisations only ask the first one, and call it the second.

Performance Gets You Noticed. Emotional Maturity Determines Whether You Should Lead.

Before your next promotion decision, sit with this:

Has this person done the work of understanding how they affect the people around them? Do they lead themselves well before leading others?

If the answer is no, the promotion won't fix it. It'll make it worse.

And if you're the one being considered for promotion... ask yourself the same question. Your technical record got you into the room. But it's not what will make you worth following.

Here is a number worth sitting with. Gallup studied millions of workers and found 70% of the variance in a team's engagement comes down to the manager. Not the perks. Not the mission statement on the wall. The manager.

I ran my own research for the book I wrote with Step It Up HR, and the number I found was harder to swallow. 99.5% of the people we surveyed said they had worked for one or more types of bad boss. Almost everyone. Sit with the size of it. The boss is not a footnote in someone's working life. The boss is the working life.

So if the manager decides most of it, the question is not "are you a great manager." The question is "are you the right manager for the person in front of you, today."

Why we cling to one style

If adapting works so well, why does almost no one do it? Because one style feels safe. You find a mode early on, it wins you a few points, and you wear it like a uniform. Direct people get praised for being decisive. Delegators get praised for trusting their teams. The praise locks the habit in.

Then the world hands you a person the habit does not fit, and pride keeps you in the rut. Switching styles feels like admitting the old one was wrong. It was not wrong. It was wrong for now. A surgeon does not use one instrument for every cut, and no one calls the surgeon inconsistent. We give leaders a pass on this we would give no one else.

There is a cost to the comfort. Every time you lead from habit instead of need, someone on your team pays for it in confusion, in fear, or in a slow drift toward the door.

Four people, four approaches

Decades ago Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard put a name to this. They called it situational leadership. The idea is simple. There is no single best style. You match your style to where the person stands... how skilled they are, and how motivated.

They sketched four modes:

• Direct. New person, still learning. They need clear instructions, not a coaching question.
• Coach. Getting their feet under them, but wobbling. They need guidance and a reason to care.
• Support. Skilled, but flat or demotivated. They do not need you to teach. They need you to back them.
• Delegate. Skilled and driven. Get out of their way and let them run.

Read the list again and notice the trap. Most of us have one favorite mode. The natural director barks at the senior engineer who needed backing. The natural delegator throws the brand-new hire in the deep end and wonders why she drowns. The style was fine. The match was wrong.

My own worst habit

My default is delegate. I love handing someone a hard problem and watching them grow. With the right person it is the best feeling in the work.

With the wrong person, at the wrong time, it is abandonment dressed up as trust.

I once handed a big piece of work to someone new, told her I trusted her, and stepped back to give her room. I thought I was being a good boss. She read it as me not caring whether she sank. She spent three weeks afraid to ask for help, because I had made "figure it out" the whole job. When she finally told me, I felt sick. I had not given her freedom. I had given her a cliff.

She did not need my favorite mode. She needed direction, then coaching, then support, and only later the freedom I had thrown at her on day one. The failure was not hers. It was mine, for leading the way I like instead of the way she needed.

How to get less one-note

Becoming adaptive is not a personality transplant. It is a habit. A few things have helped me.

Name your default out loud. Mine is delegate. Once you know your favorite tool, you feel the pull toward it... and you start to notice when the moment calls for a different one.

Ask, do not assume. The fastest way to find the right mode is the question Lee Woollsey puts at the heart of a good one-on-one... "What aren't you getting from me?" The answer tells you whether to direct, coach, support, or back off.

Read skill and will separately. Before you pick a mode, look at two dials. How able is this person at this task, right now. How motivated. A skilled but flat person needs something different from a keen but green one.

Change as they change. The person who needed direction in March needs delegation by September. If your mode never moves, you are not leading them. You are leading a snapshot of who they used to be.

Drop the word "great"

I have stopped chasing great. Great is a statue. Great is the marble hero on the pedestal, fixed in one heroic pose forever, useless the moment the situation shifts.

Adaptive is alive. Adaptive reads the room, the person, the week, and picks the tool the moment is asking for. It is humbler work. No one writes legends about the boss who quietly gave one person space and another person structure on the same Tuesday. The people on the receiving end remember, though. They remember being led the way they needed, not the way you preferred.

So here is the question I leave you with. What is your favorite tool... and who on your team is paying the price because you reach for it every single time?

MIT Sloan dug into how leaders behave when things get murky, and the numbers are grim. In their research, 32% of leaders said they felt paralyzed by uncertainty at the exact moment action was needed. Another 42% admitted they postponed decisions because making them felt uncomfortable.

Read it again. Nearly half of leaders stall not for lack of information, but because deciding feels bad.

I've been this leader. I've sat on a call telling myself I needed "more clarity" before I committed, when the honest truth was I didn't want to be wrong. The clarity was never coming. I was hiding.

Stop predicting. Start sensing.

The old model of leadership was prediction. Build the five-year plan. Map the roadmap. Forecast the market. Control the outcome.

This model is broken, and it has been for a while.

The Center for Creative Leadership, which has spent nearly six decades studying how leaders operate, describes the trap perfectly. Leaders get "trapped in endless urgency, reacting to one challenge or crisis after another, without the space or skills to move beyond reactivity." Firefighting becomes the whole identity.

The fix isn't a better forecast. You will not forecast your way out of a world full of surprises. The fix is to swap prediction for sensing. Stop trying to know what happens in 2029. Get sharp at reading what is happening right now, and adjust fast.

A compass beats a map when the terrain keeps changing. A map tells you what someone else saw, once, a while ago. A compass tells you which way you're pointed right now, wherever you happen to be standing. When the ground shifts under you weekly, you want the compass.

In practice this means shorter horizons. Set a goal you genuinely see... three months out, not three years. Far enough to give your team something solid to stand on, close enough to change course before you've wasted a year building the wrong thing.

Treat your decisions as experiments

One trick from the MIT work has stuck with me. They suggest you drop gambling language and pick up scientific language. Don't call it a bet. Call it a hypothesis.

It sounds like a word game. It isn't.

When you "place a bet," being wrong means you lost. It's final, it's personal, it stings. So you avoid it. You stall. You wait for the 42%-of-leaders feeling to pass.

When you "run an experiment," being wrong means you learned something. You expected it. The whole point was to find out. A failed experiment isn't a loss, it's data you didn't have yesterday.

Same decision. Completely different relationship with being wrong. And your relationship with being wrong is the thing deciding whether you act or freeze.

Say "I don't know" out loud

Here's the part scaring people most. Leading through chaos means admitting, in front of your team, you don't have the answer.

Most bosses would rather chew glass.

I get why. We've been sold a story where leadership means certainty, where the boss is the one with the plan, and showing doubt is showing weakness. So leaders fake it. They project false confidence, they bluff, and their teams smell it instantly.

My own research into bad bosses turned up a number I keep coming back to: 99.5% of people said they'd suffered under one or more types of bad boss. Not 60%. Not 80%. Practically everyone. And a huge share of bad behaviour is frightened people clamping down, pretending to know things they don't, because they think the job demands it.

It doesn't.

The strongest thing I ever did as a leader was tell a room full of clever people, "I genuinely don't know how this plays out. Here's what I'm watching. Here's what would change my mind. What are you seeing I'm not?" The relief in the room was physical. Suddenly it was a shared problem, not a performance, and the sharpest ideas came from people who'd been quietly sitting on them while I postured.

Admitting the limits of what you know doesn't cost you authority. It buys you trust. And trust is the one thing moving fast when everything else is uncertain.

Your team feels the chaos through you

There's a reason the calm captain matters. Your team doesn't experience the storm directly. They experience it through you.

When you go silent, they fill the gap with the worst story they dream up. Silence isn't neutral. A vacuum of information always gets filled, and people default to fear. The cure is almost embarrassingly simple: communicate more often, even with nothing new to report. "No update yet, still working it, here's where my head is" beats radio silence every single time.

Use "we" language, not "I" language. Not because it tests well, but because it's true. You're in the boat together. The job isn't to pretend the sea is calm. The job is to be the steady hand on the wheel while everyone watches the waves.

Resilience is reps, not a personality

The lie about resilience is the idea some people simply have it. They're born tough, born calm, built for the storm. The rest of us aren't.

Rubbish.

Resilience is a muscle, and muscles grow under load. Every time you make a decision without full information and survive it, you get a little stronger. Every time you say "I don't know" and the sky doesn't fall, the next time gets easier. Every short-horizon goal you hit while the long-term stays foggy proves to you you function in the fog.

You don't build it by waiting for calm. You build it by leading through the noise, on purpose, before you feel ready.

So stop asking when the chaos will end. It won't. This isn't pessimism, it's freedom. The moment you stop waiting for the bus never coming, you get all your energy back to spend on the one thing ever in your control: how you steer.

What decision have you been postponing while you wait for a clarity never coming?

One in three UK workers want to completely change careers, according to research from Employment Hero in 2025. One in three. Sit with the number.

Now look around your office. Most of those people are in the same seat they sat in last year. The wanting is everywhere. The moving is rare.

The space between "I want out" and "I walked out" is where stuck lives. And stuck is not a fact about your situation. It is a story you tell yourself. I have invested too much to switch now. I am too old. I do not have the right background. My degree says one thing, so my life has to say the same thing.

I believed every version of those. They were lies. Comfortable lies, the kind you wear like an old coat.

The ladder was always a lie

Someone handed us a single metaphor for work: the career ladder. One company. One rung at a time. Straight up. Fall off and you have failed.

The trouble is the ladder never matched real life.

The average American holds 12 jobs across a working life. Roughly half of the people who change employers also switch occupations entirely, according to Pew Research. The straight climb up one pole was never how most of us lived. We kept the picture anyway, then felt like frauds for not fitting it.

A lattice fits better. You grow sideways. You grow at angles. Sometimes you step down a level to reach a branch you want. The lattice has no single top, so there is no single way to fall off it.

Staying put has a price too

We treat the leap as the only risky move. We weigh the downside of changing and ignore the downside of standing still.

The slow erosion of curiosity. The Sunday-night dread. The version of you who keeps shrinking to fit a role you outgrew three years ago. Staying still feels safe because the bill arrives quietly, in instalments. A leap arrives all at once, so we fear it more. Both options cost you something. One cost you notice. The other you do not... until the total is enormous and you wonder where the years went.

The "too late" myth

The loudest lie of all is the clock. You are too old, you missed your window, reinvention is a young person's game.

I did not write my first book or stand on my first keynote stage as a fresh graduate. I did it after decades of shipping code and managing teams. The grey hair was the point. Nobody wants leadership advice from someone who has never led. Nobody trusts a book about bad bosses written by a person who has never survived one, hired around one, or quietly become one for an afternoon and hated themselves for it.

Your years are not a sunk cost. They are the credibility no one hands you and no one fakes. The 22-year-old has energy. You have evidence. Stop apologising for what makes your next move believable.

What carries over

The biggest fear about changing direction is the belief you start again from zero. You do not.

Skills compound. They follow you. The Army taught me how people behave under pressure, and who a person truly is when things go wrong. Engineering taught me systems thinking, how one small change ripples through everything downstream. Leading 43 engineers taught me why so many managers fail the people beneath them.

Every one of those feeds what I do now.

My whole second act exists because of one number I found in my own research: 99.5% of the people I surveyed said they had suffered one or more types of bad boss. 99.5%. The engineer in me refused to look away from a figure like this. The manager in me had watched it happen, team after team. The writer in me had to say something about it. Three careers, all pointing at one book.

You are not throwing away your past when you change. You are bringing it with you as raw material.

How you start without blowing up your life

You do not quit on Monday and panic by Friday. You run a small experiment.

• Have one conversation with someone doing the work you are curious about. Ask what their average Tuesday looks like, not their highlight reel.
• Build one tiny side project in the new direction. An evening, a weekend. See whether the work itself holds your attention.
• Write one thing in public about a problem you find interesting. See who shows up.
• Find someone one step ahead of you on the path and buy them a coffee. Most people love being asked how they got where they are.
• Name your through-line. What is the thread running under all your jobs so far? Mine was always people and systems, long before I had the words for it.

None of those steps need anyone's permission. None of them burn the house down. Each one turns "stuck" from a wall into a door you have not opened yet.

The day you stop believing the story

Claude Silver did not map a route from smoothies to leading thousands of people. She followed the work, the people, and her own curiosity, one branch at a time. The title with "heart" in it did not exist until she grew into it.

Your next chapter likely has no name yet either.

So here is my question for you. What is the story you have been telling yourself about why you are stuck... and what changes on the day you stop believing it?

Researcher Zach Mercurio was studying custodians at a university when one of them explained her Monday morning routine. "I'm cleaning this bathroom so these kids don't get sick," she said.

Not "I'm cleaning because it's my job." Not "I'm cleaning because my boss told me to." She connected the mop in her hand to the health of students she'd never meet. Two words separated her from every disengaged worker on the planet.

So... (these kids don't get sick.)

The Two-Word Reframe

Mercurio calls this the "so..." mentality. People who experience deep meaning at work do something different from the rest of us. They add two words to every task.

I'm writing this report... so my team has the clarity to move forward.

I'm reviewing this code... so our customers don't hit a wall at 2am.

I'm running this meeting... so 12 people don't waste their Tuesday morning.

These aren't affirmations. They're not motivational posters. They're a cognitive habit. And they separate people who show up from people who show up with intention.

The famous NASA janitor story makes the same point. When President Kennedy asked a custodian what he was doing, the man replied: "I'm helping put a man on the moon." He didn't see a broom. He saw a mission.

Most of us lose this somewhere between our first week and our first reorganisation.

The Epidemic Nobody Talks About

Here's the uncomfortable truth about modern work: 75% of workers feel overlooked. Thirty percent report feeling invisible at work. And global employee engagement hit its lowest point since 2020, costing the world economy approximately $10 trillion in lost productivity.

We've spent over a billion dollars on engagement programmes. Surveys. Platforms. Dashboards. And engagement keeps falling.

Mercurio's research suggests we've been solving the wrong problem. The issue isn't engagement. It's significance. People don't need another pizza party or employee-of-the-month certificate. They need to feel like they matter.

And the gap between "my work matters" and "I matter at work" turns out to be enormous. You might love teaching but feel invisible in your school. You might believe in your product but feel replaceable to your company. The work has meaning. The worker doesn't feel meaningful. Those are two different problems, and we keep treating them as one.

You Had a Purpose. Then Work Happened.

Think back to your first week at a job you loved. You knew why you were there. You understood how your work connected to something bigger.

Then six months passed. The meetings piled up. The to-do list grew. And somewhere along the way, the "so..." disappeared. The task became the point. You stopped connecting your daily grind to human impact and started connecting it to... your next meeting.

I've watched it happen to myself. I've built software for decades, and the moments where I felt most alive at work weren't the promotions or the launches. They were the moments someone told me my work changed how their team operated. Or when I saw a customer use something I'd built and it saved them hours of misery.

When those connections dried up, so did my energy.

This is what Mercurio calls "anti-mattering." Research from Gordon Flett at York University shows feeling insignificant at work triggers withdrawal, gossip, and quiet quitting. Not because people are lazy. Because people are desperate to matter and nobody is helping them make the connection.

The response to anti-mattering is telling. People either withdraw their contributions entirely or they engage in what Mercurio calls "acts of desperation." Gossip. Complaining. Stirring drama. We treat these as character problems. They're symptoms of an environment where people feel invisible.

In my own experience building Step It Up HR, I've seen this play out in every organisation I've worked with. The teams with the highest engagement don't have better perks or fancier offices. They have leaders who connect daily work to human outcomes.

Small Moments Beat Grand Gestures

Mercurio asked thousands of workers across 22 industries when they most felt they mattered at work. The answers weren't about bonuses, promotions, or awards.

It was a supervisor remembering their name.

It was someone naming what they did well in a meeting.

It was a three-minute check-in about something personal.

One leader Mercurio studied managed 27 people. Every Friday, she wrote down something personal about each team member in a notebook. Every Monday morning, she scheduled three-minute check-ins to follow up. "How did your daughter's recital go?" "Did your mum's surgery go well?"

The result? Exceptional engagement and loyalty from every person on her team.

Think about the effort involved. A notebook. Three minutes per person. No app. No platform. No annual survey with a 47-page report.

The custodian had a supervisor who once handed her the dictionary definition of her role: a person who has responsibility for or looks after something. He told her everyone in the building depended on her. She never forgot it.

One employee Mercurio interviewed put it bluntly: "Don't give me a free sandwich or certificate. Remember my name."

These aren't leadership programmes. They're not frameworks. They're moments where someone bothered to connect the dots for another human being.

The 99.5% Connection

My own research found 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more types of bad bosses. And the through line in most of those stories isn't cruelty or incompetence. It's invisibility. The boss who never noticed you. The leader who never connected your work to anything beyond the spreadsheet.

Gallup puts the cost of this at $10 trillion per year. Each percentage point of engagement loss represents approximately 21 million fewer engaged employees globally. And manager engagement itself dropped five points in a single year, meaning the people responsible for making others feel significant don't feel significant themselves.

It's a spiral. And it starts with two words nobody is saying.

Mercurio's framework for fixing this is deceptively simple. He calls it N.A.N.:

Noticed. See people. Not their output. Them.

Affirmed. Tell people what makes their contribution unique. "Good job" is not affirmation. "The way you handled the client's concern showed real patience" is.

Needed. Show people how the team would suffer without them. Not in a manipulative way. In a truthful way.

Your "So..." Exercise

Here's something I'd encourage you to try this week. Write down your five biggest tasks. Next to each one, add "so..." and complete the sentence with a human outcome.

I'm preparing this presentation... so 40 people walk away with one idea they'll use tomorrow.

I'm fixing this bug... so a teacher in Wolverhampton doesn't lose her lesson plan at 8am.

I'm answering these emails... so three people go home tonight feeling heard.

If you lead a team, ask each person to do the same exercise. You might be surprised how many of them struggle to finish the sentence. And the ones who struggle are the ones closest to checking out.

If you're struggling yourself, you're not broken. You've been doing the work without the connection. The "so..." fell away and nobody helped you find it again.

The custodian didn't need a leadership development programme to find purpose. She needed someone to help her see the line between the mop and the students.

Your team needs the same. And it costs nothing. No budget approval. No vendor selection. No six-month rollout.

Notice someone. Affirm them. Show them they're needed.

Two words. "So..."

Zach Mercurio drew this distinction when I interviewed him on my podcast, and it hit me hard. He put it simply: you will never be able to care FOR anything... a plant, a pet, or a person... if you don't take time to understand it.

Caring about is a sentiment you hold from a distance. It lives in your head. It costs nothing. You do it while scrolling through emails or driving to work.

Caring for requires presence. It requires slowing down. It requires asking the second question after someone says "I'm fine."

And Mercurio keeps coming back to the same point: hurry and care don't live in the same room.

You have to pick one.

The Numbers Should Worry You

Mercurio's research paints a brutal picture. Only 39% of employees strongly agree someone at work cares about them as a person. Thirty percent say they feel invisible at work. And a leader's behaviour accounts for nearly 50% of whether their people feel they matter.

Think about those numbers. Half of the "mattering" experience is down to you. Not the company culture. Not HR policy. Not the Christmas party budget. You. The person who walks past or the person who stops.

When I ran my own research for Step It Up HR, 99.5% of people said they'd had at least one type of bad boss. And the most common complaint wasn't about workload or pay. It was about not being seen. Not being heard. Not mattering.

Meanwhile, 93% of workers who feel valued report feeling motivated to do their best work. The gap between those two numbers is where leadership lives or dies.

The Three-Minute Interaction

Mercurio tells this story about a custodian named Jane who'd worked at the same place for more than twenty years. She did her job. She showed up. But she never felt like she mattered.

Then a supervisor sat down with her and showed her the dictionary definition of "custodian." Not cleaner. Not janitor. Custodian. Someone entrusted with the care and protection of something valuable.

Three minutes. All it took to transform how she saw her own work. Twenty years of feeling invisible, undone by one person who slowed down enough to notice her.

This is what caring for looks like. Not a big programme. Not a town hall speech about values. One person. Three minutes. Paying attention.

Why We Don't Slow Down

I know the objections because I've used every one of them.

"I've got too many direct reports." "There's too much on my plate." "I don't have time for this kind of conversation."

But look at what you're choosing instead. You're choosing the meeting going nowhere. The status update nobody reads. The email chain going three levels deep because nobody picked up the phone.

Mercurio talks about "liminal space"... the moments between the scheduled stuff. The walk from one meeting room to the next. The two minutes before a call starts. The time you spend in the lift. Those moments are where mattering happens. Or doesn't.

Most of us fill those gaps with our phones. We check notifications. We scan headlines. We tell ourselves we're being productive.

We're not. We're avoiding the thing requiring more courage than any spreadsheet: looking someone in the eye and saying, "How are you doing? And I mean it."

The One-on-One Test

Here's a question Mercurio asks: if your one-on-one is the first meeting you cancel when things get busy, you have a mattering problem.

Because what signal does this send? It tells your team member they're less important than whatever fire you're fighting today. It says, "You matter... when it's convenient."

People read those signals with precision. They notice when you check your phone during their update. They notice when you cut their time short. They notice when you're physically present but mentally already in the next room.

And when people don't feel like they matter, they respond in one of two ways. They withdraw... quiet quitting, silence, eventually leaving. Or they act out... complaining, blaming, gossip. Both are natural responses to feeling invisible.

What Slowing Down Looks Like In Practice

I'm not going to pretend I've cracked this. I still catch myself rushing past moments worth stopping for. But I've started doing a few things helping me stay present.

I write one thing down about each person I work with every week. Something I noticed. Something they said. Something I want to follow up on. It takes thirty seconds. It changes the next conversation entirely because I'm starting from where they are, not from my agenda.

I stopped checking my phone in the two minutes before meetings start. Those are the moments when someone says something real, if you're available for it.

I ask the second question. When someone says "I'm fine," I follow up. "Fine how? What's on your mind today?" The truth lives after the first answer, never in it.

I treat one-on-ones as the last meeting I'd cancel, not the first. If I'm going to drop something from my calendar, it won't be the time I've set aside for an actual human being.

The Dinner Table Test

Mercurio says something staying with me: every person you lead goes home and talks about you at their dinner table. They're not discussing your quarterly results or your project timeline. They're talking about how you made them feel.

This is your legacy. Not what you delivered. How you treated people while you were delivering it.

And you don't get to choose this legacy in a workshop or a team offsite. You choose it in the corridor. In the two minutes before a call. In the moment you notice someone is tired and you either keep walking or stop.

Hurry and care don't live in the same room. The question is which room you're going to spend your time in.

A 2026 Radical Candor report found nobody taught 70% of people to give or receive feedback before they became managers. Seven out of ten. We hand people a title, a team, and zero tools for the hardest part of the job: telling someone the truth.

So they default to silence. And they call it empathy.

Kim Scott nailed it when she named the most common leadership failure "ruinous empathy." You care so much about someone's feelings you withhold the direct feedback they need. You smile through a one-on-one when you should be saying, "This isn't working." You give a glowing review when you should be flagging a pattern.

The person walks away thinking everything's fine. Months later, they're blindsided by a PIP or a layoff or a reputation they never knew they had. And you're the one who let it happen.

It's not empathy. It's abandonment with a smile.

The Numbers Are Brutal

This isn't a soft problem. The research is damning.

Gallup's 2025 Workplace Report found global employee engagement dropped to 21%, matching the lowest point during the pandemic. The cost? $438 billion in lost productivity worldwide.

And here's the part every manager needs to hear: 70% of the variance in team engagement comes directly from the manager. Not the CEO. Not the culture deck on the wall. Not the mission statement nobody reads. You.

Gallup also found employees who received strengths feedback had turnover rates 14.9% lower than those who received none. Teams whose managers gave meaningful feedback showed 12.5% greater productivity. The data is clear: feedback works. Silence kills.

The Radical Candor report adds another layer. 54% of employees rarely or never receive feedback from their managers. 60% are afraid to speak up at work. And 62% say the feedback they do get is too vague to act on.

We don't have an empathy gap in leadership. We have a courage gap.

I Know Because I've Been the Coward

Early in my career, I had a team member. Brilliant engineer. Wrote elegant code. And treated junior developers like they were beneath him. I watched it happen for months. I told myself, "He'll grow out of it." I told myself, "The work is too good to risk upsetting him." I told myself all the stories cowards tell.

What I didn't tell him was the truth: his behavior was poisoning the team. Two junior developers left within six months. I lost great people because I didn't have the spine to have one uncomfortable conversation.

When I finally said something, he was shocked. Not angry. Shocked. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" he asked.

Good question. I didn't have an answer then. I do now. I was scared. Not of his reaction. Of my own discomfort. I chose my comfort over his career development. And I'll carry my share of the blame for those two engineers who walked out the door.

Your Team Wants the Truth (Even When It Stings)

Debra Corey wrote about six barriers stopping leaders from giving feedback on Step It Up HR. Fear of damaging relationships. Lack of confidence in delivery. Time pressure. Past failed attempts. The feeling nothing changed last time. Sound familiar?

But here's what struck me: 92% of people believe constructive feedback, when delivered well, improves performance. Ninety-two percent. Your team wants the truth. They're waiting for it. They're begging for it with every disengaged shrug and quiet exit interview.

I wrote before about how if you're not willing to lose popularity, don't call yourself a leader. This is what I meant. Leadership requires you to say things people don't want to hear. Not to be cruel. To be caring enough to be honest.

The 99.5% stat from my research into bad bosses tells you everything. 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more types of bad bosses. And the most common type isn't the screamer or the micromanager. It's the one who fails to act. The one who lets problems fester. The one with all the empathy in the world and none of the courage to use it.

What Courage Looks Like (It's Smaller Than You Think)

Courage doesn't mean confrontation. It doesn't mean marching into someone's office and dropping truth bombs. It means small, consistent honesty.

It means saying "I noticed something in the meeting today, and I want to talk about it" instead of waiting six months for the annual review.

It means asking your team member, "What aren't you getting from me?" and sitting with the answer, even when it stings.

It means choosing clarity over comfort. Every single time.

The Radical Candor framework puts it simply: care personally while challenging directly. Both parts matter. Drop the caring and you're a bully. Drop the challenge and you're an enabler. You need both. And the second one is where most of us fail.

I've written about authenticity as a weapon before. Honest feedback is authenticity in action. It's showing up as a real human being who respects someone enough to tell them what nobody else will.

The Feedback You Owe Someone Right Now

Think about your team for a second. Right now. Is there someone whose work has slipped and you've been "giving them space"? Someone whose attitude in meetings has shifted and you've been hoping it resolves itself? Someone who keeps making the same mistake because nobody told them it was a mistake?

Every day you stay silent, you're making a choice. You're choosing your comfort over their development. You're choosing a peaceful inbox over a growing team. You're choosing to be liked instead of choosing to lead.

Start With One Conversation

You don't need to overhaul your leadership style overnight. You need to have one honest conversation this week.

Pick the person you've been avoiding. The conversation you've been putting off. The feedback you've been softening until it's meaningless.

Then say the thing. With kindness. With directness. With the understanding it will feel terrible in the moment and transformative over time.

Your team doesn't need more empathy from you. They need you to be brave enough to tell them the truth. And brave enough to hear it back.

The cruelest thing a manager does isn't giving hard feedback. It's withholding it and pretending they care.

Time spent socialising in person has dropped by roughly two-thirds across all age groups since 2003 according to the U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on loneliness. Two-thirds. Gone.

We tell ourselves we're as connected as ever. We just text more. We DM. We send memes. And the Surgeon General's report tells us the health impact of all this lonely connectedness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Social isolation raises premature mortality by 29%. Chronic loneliness in older adults raises dementia risk by about 50%.

We are smoking ourselves to death and calling it social media.

Why putting the phone down doesn't work

Now back to the couple at the cafe. They did the thing the wellness articles told them to do. Phones away. Be present.

And they failed. Not because they didn't try. Because nobody taught them what comes after the phone is down.

Putting your phone down is the easy part. It's the equivalent of buying running shoes. The hard part is the run. The hard part is asking a real question and waiting for a real answer. The hard part is noticing your wife is tired today and asking about it. The hard part is letting someone finish a sentence without thinking about your reply.

That's the muscle that's atrophied. And no app deletes that.

What I'm trying to do about it

I'm not here to lecture you. I'm in this with you. So here's what I've been trying, and it's harder than it sounds.

Ask one extra question. When someone tells me something... how their week went, what their kid did, why they're frustrated... I make myself ask one more question instead of moving on or making it about me. One. "What was that like?" or "Why do you think they did that?" It costs nothing. It changes everything.

Wait three seconds. When someone stops talking, I count to three before I open my mouth. Most of the time, they aren't done. They were breathing. The pause is where the real thing comes out, and we usually trample it.

Watch the face, not the screen. I have a habit of glancing at my phone when there's a lull. I'm trying to stop. The lull is the part where connection happens. The phone is the lullaby putting that part to sleep.

Pick up the phone... and call. Texting is cheap. A phone call is expensive. So when I want to reach my brother, I call. He picks up half the time. The other half, he calls back. Either way, we end up on the line, and something real happens that a thread of text never produces.

What this means for leaders

If you run a team, this matters double. Your people aren't just lonely at home. They're lonely at work too. Mercurio's research suggests only about 39% of people strongly agree that someone at work cares about them as a person. That's not an HR problem. That's a leadership problem.

You can't fix it with a wellbeing app. You can't fix it with another Slack channel. You can fix it by walking up to one person on your team this week, asking how they are, and waiting for the second answer... the real one, the one that comes after the polite "I'm fine."

That's it. That's the whole thing. And it's terrifying, because if you can't do it, you'll find out fast that your connection muscle is gone too.

The point

The phone is not making you lonely.

You stopped practicing how to be with another human, and the phone was just there to fill the silence you didn't know what to do with.

If you delete every app on your phone tomorrow, you will still be lonely. Not because phones don't matter... they do, they helped get us here... but because the muscle is still gone. You have to rebuild it. You have to do reps.

The reps are uncomfortable. They look like awkward small talk with the cashier. Long silences with your spouse. Sitting on the porch with your dad without filling the air. Listening to your teenager tell you about something you don't care about, because they care about it, and the caring is the whole point.

I'm trying. I'm 64 and I'm trying, and some days I still reach for my phone in the middle of a conversation like a smoker reaching for a cigarette. The habit is deep. The skill is rusty. The work is real.

But here's what I know: nobody on their deathbed says they wish they'd spent more time on their phone. They say they wish they'd spent more time with the people in the room.

So put the phone down. And then... and this is the part nobody tells you... figure out what to say next.

That's where life is.

Gallup found employees with strong work purpose are 5.6 times more likely to be engaged than those with low purpose. Half of strong-purpose employees feel engaged. Among low-purpose folks, the number drops to nine percent. Burnout flips the same way... 38% of low-purpose people burn out frequently. Strong-purpose people sit at 13%.

Here is the part I keep coming back to. Only 18% of employees describe their current job as having personally meaningful purpose. Almost half (45%) say they show up for the paycheck.

So when we talk about purpose-driven leadership, we are talking about a thing four out of five employees do not currently experience. The market is wide open. The reason it stays wide open is because purpose is not a slogan you bolt on at the offsite. It is a value you live when it is inconvenient.

Where Borrowed Values Come From

We do not pick our first set of values. We inherit them.

Family. School. The first boss who praised us. The second boss who broke us. The article we read in our twenties. The leader we copied because we were scared of looking unsure. Slowly, we build a wardrobe of values. Most of them fit someone else.

Here is the trap... borrowed values feel safe. They sound right in meetings. They produce the head-nods. They survive the offsite. They photocopy beautifully onto the laminated card by the lift.

Then a hard moment arrives. A layoff. A line crossed. A team member doing well financially while doing damage culturally. A decision with no clean answer. The borrowed values fall over. They were never load-bearing. They were decoration.

The values you hold under pressure... those are yours. The rest is rented.

The Cost of Polling Yourself

I have worked with leaders who poll their teams before stating a position. Not to listen... we should all listen. To find safety. To work out which way the room is leaning before they commit.

It looks like inclusion. It is, in fact, abdication.

Your team needs to know what you stand for. Even when they disagree with you. Especially when they disagree with you. Their job is not to write your conscience. Yours is to bring one to the table.

A leader without stated values puts the moral load on the team. Now everyone is guessing. Everyone is reading the weather. Trust erodes because trust is built on predictability, and you have made yourself unpredictable on purpose.

The Cherokee parable of two wolves, which Dr John Blakey writes about often, says the wolf you feed is the one who wins. I wrote about this before. What I did not say then is the harder part... you have to know which wolf is yours. Not the team's. Yours. Because at three in the morning, with nobody to vote with you, only one of those wolves shows up.

How to Find What's Already Yours

I am not going to hand you a worksheet. I think most values exercises produce the kind of values lists you would write to look good at a corporate retreat.

Try this instead.

Think of three times you walked away from something you wanted. A job. A client. A friendship. A promotion. A round of applause. Write down what each refusal had in common. The thread running through is one of your values. It has been there the whole time.

Now think of three times you said yes to something costly. Same exercise.

Notice... I am not asking what you would like to value. I am asking what your behaviour already reveals. Values are not aspirational. They are forensic. You look back, find the evidence, and name what you have been protecting all along.

This will be uncomfortable. Some of your "values" will collapse on inspection. You will find you value belonging more than honesty, or comfort more than courage, or being right more than getting it right. Welcome to being human. Now you have something to work with.

The Long Game

A leader with one real, demonstrated value is worth more than a leader with twelve laminated ones.

I think about this when I read leadership posts on LinkedIn. The performers post values. The leaders demonstrate them. The performers seek alignment. The leaders create it. The performers want the room. The leaders are willing to lose it.

You will not be celebrated for unpopular values in the short term. You will be respected for them in the long term. This is the trade. It is a slow compounding kind of trade, and it pays the kind of dividend... loyalty, honest feedback, a team who brings you the bad news... you will not buy any other way.

This is also the part of leadership work I obsess over at Step It Up HR. The people-side of the job pays out on a slow clock. Most leaders give up before the interest kicks in.

A Question to Sit With

If your team had to describe what you stand for using only your behaviour over the last six months... not your words, not your slides, only your actions... what would they say?

If you do not like the answer, the news is not bad. It is clarifying. Your values are observable. You have the ability to change what your behaviour broadcasts starting tomorrow.

But you have to stop polling yourself first.

The wolf does not take a vote. Pick the wolf and feed it.

I had Zach Mercurio on Corey-osity Unleashed earlier this year. He wrote a book called The Power of Mattering, and his research stopped me in my tracks.

Only 39% of people strongly agree someone at work cares about them as a person. Think about what the other 61% sound like at dinner. They sound exhausted. They sound invisible. They sound like they're already gone, even if their badge still works.

Gallup's most recent global workforce report backs this up. Global engagement dropped from 23% to 21% last year. The sharpest decline since the pandemic. The cost to the world economy was around $10 trillion in lost productivity. In the US alone, analysts pegged the bill at $438 billion.

Most companies respond to numbers like these by buying another platform. Or running another survey. Or rolling out a "wellbeing initiative" with a free fruit basket and a meditation app.

It doesn't work.

It doesn't work because the problem is not engagement. The problem is mattering. Engagement is downstream. Mattering is upstream. When a person feels seen, valued, and needed... engagement takes care of itself.

The 99.5% Reality

My own research told me something hard to swallow. When I surveyed people about their working lives, 99.5% said they had worked for one or more bad bosses. Ninety-nine point five.

Five hundred people walk past you on the street, and 498 of them have a story about a leader who made their life worse. Who made them feel small. Who treated them as a resource, not a human.

Those bosses don't think of themselves as bad. They think of themselves as busy. They think of themselves as driven. They think the work is the work. The people are a vehicle.

But every one of those people goes home and tells someone about it. Every night. At the dinner table.

What Mattering Looks Like in Practice

Mercurio's three pillars are simple, and they are hard.

Notice. Slow down enough to see the person in front of you. Mercurio shares research showing our average uninterrupted attention on another human dropped from two and a half minutes to forty-seven seconds. Forty-seven seconds. You are not noticing anyone in forty-seven seconds. You are processing them.

Affirm. Show people the specific evidence of their unique significance. Not "good job." Not the dreaded "Employee of the Month." Affirmation sounds like: "The way you handled Jenny on her call this morning... no one else on the team has the patience for those conversations. We need you in them."

Need. Make people feel relied upon. Feel irreplaceable. Not in a manipulative way. In an honest way. Tell them what would be missing if they were not here.

Do these three things, and your people go home with a different story. Instead of "my boss never sees me," the story shifts to "my boss said something today I'm still thinking about."

There is your KPI. There is what wins.

The Sunday Night Test

Here is a question I ask leaders I coach. How does your stomach feel on Sunday night?

If the answer is "knotted up," what makes you think your team feels any different?

Culture has been described as how your gut feels on a Sunday evening. If you lead people and your Sunday nights are filled with dread... look in the mirror first. Then look at your team. The same dread you feel is the dread you're handing down.

I have been the source of dread. I am not proud of it. There was a stretch in my career where I came home short with my wife, distracted with my kids, and impossible on Mondays. I told myself I was "carrying the team." What I was doing was being a burnout spreader.

The team saw it. They went home and told their partners about it. The dinner-table verdict on me was bad.

The Walk I Needed

A few weeks ago I took my grandson for a walk. Nothing fancy. A country path. Acorns underfoot. A stream we threw sticks into. He held my hand for the first ten minutes and then bolted ahead because there was a squirrel.

I came home and thought about all the dinner tables I had ever sat at. The ones with my parents growing up. The ones with my own kids when they were small. The ones with my wife now. And the ones still to come... the ones my grandson will sit at one day when he tells his kids what his grandad was like.

What will he say?

Honest question. More honest than any quarterly review I have ever taken. He won't remember my job title. He won't care about my P&L. He will remember whether I looked up when he was talking. Whether I noticed his drawings. Whether I made him feel important.

Your team is the same. They will remember whether you looked up.

Stop Being Too Busy. You're Not.

Most leaders I know defend their behavior with one phrase. "I'm too busy."

Ben Morton, another guest on the podcast, has a sharper way to put it. You are not busy. You are disorganized. Or you are scared. Or you are hiding from the work of leading because the work of doing is easier.

Mercurio puts it another way. Hurry and care do not coexist. You cannot care FOR a person you do not understand. You cannot understand a person you have not noticed. And you cannot notice a person while sprinting past them on the way to the next meeting.

Want a fix? Try this. One time today, before 5pm, pick up the phone and call one person on your team. Not Slack. Not email. The phone. When they answer expecting some emergency, say this: "Hey... no reason. I was thinking about you. I wanted to thank you specifically for X. You okay?"

Watch what happens at their dinner table tonight.

The Real KPI

I have led teams of two and teams of two hundred. I have hit quarterly numbers and I have missed them. I have run businesses I was proud of and businesses I was ashamed of.

None of it is what I think about now.

What I think about now is the people whose dinner tables I made better, and the ones I made worse. Conversations ending with "my boss is the reason I'm thinking of leaving," and ones ending with "my boss said the thing I needed to hear today."

This ledger is the only one history keeps.

So I will leave you with the question Mercurio asks. When the person you led most recently sat down to eat tonight... did they tell their family about you with affection, with indifference, or with relief you were not in the room?

You don't get to answer for them. You only get to change the next sentence they speak.

Start tomorrow morning. Look up. Notice one person. Tell them, specifically, what makes them irreplaceable. Then let them go home and rewrite the verdict at their dinner table.

It's the only KPI worth keeping.

The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote about this in the 1960s. He called the two halves the True Self and the False Self. The False Self is the version of you built to keep other people comfortable. It is polite, predictable, on-message. The True Self is the bit underneath, the part with the spontaneous reactions you learned to swallow. You will find a good summary on Wikipedia's page on True self and false self if you want the formal version.

Winnicott's point was not "the False Self is bad." His point was the False Self is a useful piece of social machinery, and trouble starts when it grows so capable you forget you have a True Self at all. People in this state look fine from the outside. They are competent and reliable and the wheels turn. From the inside, they are quietly wondering why nothing feels like theirs.

The British Psychological Society wrote a solid piece on midlife reinvention where the same theme keeps showing up. The midlife crisis is not about sports cars and bad decisions. It is about the gap between the person you have been performing and the person who was originally there. The gap gets too wide to ignore, and something gives.

What I noticed when I looked back

I have been picking at this question for a while. Some honest things have surfaced.

The boy on the porch loved building things and taking them apart to see how they worked. The man at his desk also loves this. Forty years and three careers later, the through line is still there. The thing the world did not write over was curiosity about how stuff works. Curiosity survived. Good.

The boy also loved telling stories at the dinner table. He would draw out a small event into a fifteen-minute performance for whichever adults would listen. The man at the desk has spent most of his adult life suppressing this, because corporate environments reward people who get to the point fast. The storyteller is still in there. He has been told to shut up so many times he forgets to come out. Less good.

The boy hated being told what to do without being told why. The man has spent most of his career working for people who give orders without explanations. The boy was right.

This is what the question gives you when you sit with it. Not nostalgia. Not "I should quit my job and become a painter in the south of France." It gives you a measurement. A way to see which parts of the current you are continuations of the original, and which parts are layers you picked up to survive somewhere specific. Once you see the difference, you get a vote. I write about this kind of leadership self-audit at Step It Up HR, because the same question matters for the people running teams. You cannot ask your people to be themselves at work if you have forgotten what your own self sounds like.

Three questions worth asking

If you want a practical way in, try these. None of them are clever. All of them are uncomfortable.

One. What did you love doing as a child, before anyone graded you on it? Not what you were good at. What you would do without being asked. The first answer is usually wrong. Keep going for a second and a third. The real one tends to embarrass you a little.

Two. What do you find yourself defending out loud, even when it would be easier to nod along? Those are your values. Not the ones on your CV. The ones your mouth opens before your brain has decided whether to speak.

Three. When was the last time someone described you in a way you did not recognise, and you let it stand because correcting them felt like too much work? Make a list. Each item is a place where the world wrote a label on you and you stopped pushing back.

The point of these questions is not to produce an action plan. The point is to notice the difference between the person showing up in your meetings and the person who was there before all the meetings started.

What you do with the answer

Honestly, less than you would think.

You do not have to blow up your life. You do not have to quit your job, leave your marriage, or buy a motorcycle. Most of the layers you have picked up are functional. They keep you employed, fed, and welcome at family gatherings. Stripping them off entirely would be a different kind of mistake.

What you do is smaller. You give the original self a vote. You let the boy on the porch back in for an hour on a Sunday morning. You schedule the thing you stopped doing because nobody was paying you for it. You tell the story you were going to swallow in the meeting. You decline the role the corporate version of you would have taken without thinking, because the boy on the porch would have hated it and he was right.

This is not a midlife rebellion. It is a long, slow correction. You are reintroducing the person who was there first to the person you became, and trying to broker a peace where both get airtime.

I do not know the full answer to Kelly's question yet. I am still listing the layers. Some of them I want to keep. Some of them I am ready to set down. The interesting thing is how much lighter the listing itself makes me feel. As if the original self has been waiting in another room, surprisingly patient, surprisingly intact, glad someone finally remembered he was there.

Who were you before the world told you who to be? Sit with the question for a minute. The answer is not gone. It is much closer than you think.

Research from Zippia citing the US Bureau of Labor Statistics says the average American holds about 12 jobs in their working life. Twelve. Men average 12.5. Women 12.1. The career ladder model assumes you climb one ladder. The data says most of us are scrambling across a dozen.

The average age for a full career change... not a job switch, but a career switch... sits around 39. And 80% of those who pivot say they are happier afterward.

Ladders do not predict this. Spaghetti does.

My Own Plate of Noodles

Here is how my career went.

I joined the US Army out of school. I served. I learned what it means to be useful to people who give zero attention to your feelings and only weigh your results.

I left, taught myself to code, and spent years writing software. Then more years leading teams who wrote software. Then more years leading the leaders who led the teams. CTO. Consultant. Advisor. Each transition was its own kind of weird.

Somewhere in there I moved to England, married a woman named Peggi, raised kids, and watched those kids grow into adults I love being around. I am now a grandfather, and my grandson thinks I am the funniest person alive. I will take the win.

A few years ago I started writing about leadership. Then speaking about it. Then helping other people who had been burned by terrible bosses figure out how to be the leader they wished they had themselves. Some of the work shows up over at Step It Up HR.

I also fly paramotors. Not because it advances my career. Because I like being a thousand feet above a field on a sunny afternoon with nothing but the sound of wind and a small engine for company.

If I had been working a ladder, half of those experiences would have been forbidden by the plan.

Why Spaghetti Wins

Spaghetti careers look messy from the outside. From the inside, they make more sense than ladders do, for three reasons.

One: Resilience

When your identity is hooked to one rung of one ladder, losing the rung becomes an existential event. People who have changed direction more than once know how to lose a job without losing themselves. They have done it before. The ground does not feel as far away.

Two: Optionality

Every weird detour I took gave me a skill the next job needed. The Army taught me how to keep my head when other people were losing theirs. Coding taught me how to break a problem into pieces small enough to solve. Leadership taught me how to build a team better than I am alone. Writing taught me how to think clearly enough to put words on a page without lying.

Ladders give you depth. Spaghetti gives you weird, unfair combinations of skills nobody else has. With AI eating predictable work, the weird combinations are the ones with a future.

Three: Life Happens

People get sick. Parents need care. Kids need you home. Industries collapse. Wars start. Pandemics arrive. The neat ten-year plan does not survive any of those events, but a spaghetti career bends without breaking, because nothing about it was ever rigid to begin with.

The Dirty Secret About Plans

I am not saying skip the planning. I am saying do not lie to yourself about what the plan is doing for you.

A ten-year plan is a story you tell yourself to feel less afraid. It does not predict the future. It calms your nervous system today.

Fine. Pick a direction. Take the next reasonable step. But hold the plan loosely. The most interesting people I know all share one trait... they say yes to weird opportunities when those opportunities show up, even when the opportunities do not fit the plan.

The friend who left law to open a bakery. The engineer who became a midwife. The accountant who started a podcast and now interviews founders for a living. The Army medic who became a tattoo artist. None of them planned it. All of them are happier.

What To Do Instead

If the ladder is a lie, here is what works.

Pick a direction, not a destination. Direction is "I want to learn how teams work" or "I want to build things people use." Destination is "Senior VP of Engineering at Acme Corp by 2030." Direction survives surprises. Destination does not.

Follow the heat. Notice what energizes you. Notice what drains you. Do more of the first and less of the second. This sounds simple because it is. It is also the advice almost nobody follows, because energy is not on a spreadsheet.

Take the weird job once. At least once in your working life, take the job everyone tells you not to take, because it does not fit the plan. You will learn something no straight-line career teaches... about yourself, about what you are willing to risk, about how the world works.

Stop apologizing for your detours. Every "wasted" year teaches you something. The years I spent doing things off-plan have made me a better leader than any of my on-plan years did. They gave me texture, perspective, and stories worth telling.

Be the Person Who Took the Messy Path

When I look at the people I admire... the leaders, the writers, the makers, the friends I would trust with anything... none of them got there in a straight line. All of them have a plate of spaghetti behind them.

The straight-liners are not bad people. They are often impressive on paper. But the messy-pathers are the ones who handle whatever the world throws at them, because they have already handled chaos. They have done it. They know they will do it again.

If you are 25 and reading this, do not panic when your plan falls apart. It is not supposed to hold.

If you are 45 and reading this, do not assume the chapter you are in is the last one. It is not.

And if you are 65 and reading this, do not assume the show is over. It is not.

Throw out the ladder. Pick up a fork.

The spaghetti is delicious.

What is the messiest, best decision you have ever made about your work? Sit with it for a minute. The answer is the one to listen to next time.

I picked the question up from a phrase Claude Silver uses. She is the Chief Heart Officer at VaynerX, and she puts it bluntly... if you are not leaving people better than you found them, you are failing. Her whole philosophy is built around the idea. The real measure of a leader is not what they ship. It is who walks out of the room having grown.

It hit me hard the first time I read it. Because I have been around long enough to know most leadership scorecards do not measure this at all.

What Your Scorecard Truly Measures

Look at any leader's annual review. Revenue. Velocity. Headcount. Project delivery. Sometimes an engagement score buried at the bottom.

None of those tell you what the leader did to the people on their team. None of them.

A leader will hit every number on the board and leave a wake of damaged humans behind them. I have seen it. I have worked for some of them. So have you. My own research found 99.5% of people have had at least one type of bad boss in their career. Think about it. It is a near-universal experience. Bad leaders are not rare. They are the default.

And here is the part to keep you up at night... most of those bad bosses thought they were doing fine. Their numbers were good. Their boss liked them. They never failed an appraisal.

But their people went home smaller than they arrived.

The Real KPI

Claude Silver's point is the actual measure of leadership is invisible on the dashboard. It shows up in people's careers ten years later. It shows up in the way someone talks about a former manager at a dinner party. It shows up when a former employee gets promoted somewhere else and quietly credits you.

Gallup's research is consistent on this... managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement. Seven out of every ten units of how engaged someone feels at work comes down to who they report to. This is not a soft skill. It is the entire game.

If you accept this, then the leader's job is not about strategy or execution. Those are the table stakes. The job is about what happens to the people in your care.

Why Most Leaders Miss This

Most leaders do not set out to harm their people. They are not villains. They are simply busy.

They have a board to manage. A budget to defend. A product to ship. A reorg to survive. The people in front of them blur into a list of dependencies. Did Sarah deliver? Is Marcus blocked? Why is Priya's velocity down?

Notice the framing. Sarah is not a human with a life and ambitions and a quiet fear of plateauing. She is a delivery unit. Marcus is not a person going through a divorce and trying to hold it together. He is a blocker.

When you reduce people to throughput, you do not leave them better. You leave them used.

The leaders I admire most ... and the few I would happily work for again ... had a quality the rest did not. They saw the person before the role. They asked questions outside the project. They remembered things you mentioned six months ago.

This is the entire trick. There is nothing more sophisticated underneath.

What "Leaving Them Better" Looks Like

This is not soft. It does not mean being friendly or hosting team lunches. It means making concrete, measurable deposits in someone's career and capacity. Things like:

• Putting your name on the line to get someone a stretch assignment they were not yet ready for
• Telling them the hard truth about a blind spot, even though it costs you a difficult conversation
• Introducing them to people in your network who open doors they cannot
• Defending them in rooms where they are not present
• Letting them take credit for work you helped them do
• Pointing out a talent they have not yet noticed in themselves
• Being honest when you do not know the answer, so they learn real leaders do not pretend

I wrote about a related idea in The Real Badge of Honor Is Leaving on Time. If you cannot model a sustainable life, your people will assume burnout is the price of admission. It is one of the ways you damage them.

The Maya Angelou Test

Maya Angelou had a line about this. People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel. The full quote is here.

Treat it as the audit, not the inspiration poster.

Pick three people you have led. Past or present. Now answer honestly... if I called them tomorrow and asked them how they felt about working for me, what would they say? Not what would they tell my boss. What would they tell their spouse?

This is your real review. The rest is theatre.

If the answer makes you wince, you have work to do. If the answer makes you proud, you still have work to do, but you are doing the right work.

The Hardest Part

Here is what makes this discipline genuinely hard.

You cannot fake it. Performative concern reads as performative concern. The people on your team know whether you care about them, in the same way you know whether your boss cares about you. There is no fooling anyone.

You cannot scale it cheaply either. A vision statement gets written once and broadcast to a thousand people. You will not leave a thousand people better than you found them by sending a Slack post. The work is one human at a time. It is slow, and it does not show up in this quarter's results.

Which is why most leaders skip it. The incentives push in the other direction. The quarterly review does not ask whether your people grew. It asks whether your numbers grew.

But careers are long. Reputations are slow-cooked. The leader who built people for twenty years has a network of grateful former employees. The leader who used people for twenty years has a LinkedIn full of polite silence.

One Question Before You Close This Tab

Pick the last person who left your team. Or the last team you walked away from.

Did they leave bigger than they arrived? Or did you spend their potential to make your numbers?

You already know the answer. It is the only review which matters.

If you want more on what makes a manager genuinely worth working for, I write about it in detail at Step It Up HR. Bad bosses are not the exception, they are the rule. But it is a choice, not a fate. And the fix starts with the simple, painful question at the top of this post.

A team at MIT Sloan analysed 34 million employee profiles to figure out what drives people to quit. The answer wasn't pay. According to their research, a toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more predictive of attrition than compensation. Ten times. People walk over culture long before they walk over salary.

The Society for Human Resource Management ran their own numbers and found 1 in 5 employees has, at some point, left a job specifically because of toxic culture. One in five. Not a niche problem.

And those are the people who finally bailed. Plenty of others stay and shrink instead.

When I ran my own research into bad bosses, I found 99.5% of people had experienced at least one. Not a fluke statistic about a few unlucky souls. It's structural. If almost everyone has been through a bad boss, the system isn't broken in one place... the system is doing what it's set up to do. Most environments aren't designed around your fit. They're designed around their own convenience.

What "finding your fit" looks like

This is where the advice usually gets soft and useless. People hear "find your fit" and assume it means waiting for some mythical perfect company where you'll feel at home from day one. No. Not it.

Finding your fit isn't about searching for paradise. It's about noticing when you're the wrong shape for the room you're in... and being honest about it.

Here's what fit looks like, in my experience:

• Your values rhyme with theirs. You don't have to agree on everything. But if you care about good work and they care about quarterly numbers above all else, you're going to grind yourself to dust trying to bridge the gap.
• Your strengths are useful here. I've watched brilliant people get reduced to mediocre output because the environment had no use for what they were good at. The org wanted compliance. They had originality. Mismatch.
• You don't have to perform a different personality. If you spend Sunday night dreading Monday because of who you have to become on Monday, there's your signal. Not the workload. The persona shift.

The research on person-organization fit backs this up. Decades of studies show a strong correlation between values congruence and job satisfaction. Meta-analyses keep showing the same pattern... fit predicts retention, performance, and well-being more than almost any other variable. We've known this for years. We mostly ignore it.

The cost of staying when you don't fit

I want to be careful here. I'm not saying quit every time something feels uncomfortable. Growth often feels uncomfortable. New jobs always feel weird in month one. There's a difference between "I'm stretching" and "I'm being slowly reshaped into someone I don't recognise."

The cost of staying in the wrong place is usually invisible until it's enormous.

Your health goes first... sleep, blood pressure, the low-grade tension you carry in your shoulders. Then your relationships, because the person you bring home at 7pm is the worn-down version of you, not the real you. Then your confidence, because environments where you don't belong spend a lot of time telling you you're the problem. By the time you finally leave, you've forgotten what you were like before the job started reshaping you.

I've done it. I've watched friends do it. The pattern is the same. The "I should have left two years earlier" is one of the most common things I hear from people in their fifties.

When to stay, when to go

The honest test, for me, comes down to two questions.

One. Do I get to be the way I am here, or do I have to become someone else to survive?

Two. Are the parts of the role draining me also the parts they want more of?

If you have to perform a personality, and they keep promoting the performance, you're going to spend the next decade getting better at being someone you're not. Not a career. A sentence.

If, on the other hand, the parts of you feeling most alive are the parts they value... stay. Even if the pay is mediocre. Even if the building is ugly. Even if your title sounds smaller than your mates'. You've found the rare thing.

You're not for everyone

The phrase I keep coming back to is Erikson's. You're not for everyone. Find your fit.

Sounds passive when you first hear it, like resignation. It isn't. It's the opposite. Your job, in the end, isn't to convince every room you're worth being in. Your job is to know what kind of room lets you do your best work, and then go find it. Perhaps build it yourself.

The thing nobody warns you about is this gets harder, not easier, as you get older. You accumulate mortgages, kids, pension contributions, comfort. The cost of moving goes up. So the question gets quieter, year by year, until one day you realise you haven't asked it in a decade.

So I'll leave you with the question, because someone needs to keep asking it.

If you stripped away the salary, the title, and the LinkedIn line... would you still choose to spend forty hours a week with these people, doing this work, in this room?

If the answer is no, it's worth sitting with.

A 2023 meta-analysis pulled together 53 studies and 71,625 people across 23 countries. The pooled prevalence of workaholism came out at 14.1% after correcting for publication bias. Roughly one in seven working adults shows signs of compulsive overwork severe enough to register on a clinical scale.

In a nationally representative study of Norwegian employees, 8.3% met the threshold to be classified as addicted to work. Not "busy." Not "stretched." Addicted. To the point where their relationships, health, and judgment were measurably suffering.

Now, you might be thinking, "Right, well, Norway is Norway, and 14% sounds high to me." Fair. But notice your reaction. None of us would shrug off a similar number if it referred to a substance.

Picture the headlines. One in seven working adults is dependent on alcohol. Front page. Government inquiry. Public health campaign. Documentaries.

One in seven working adults is dependent on work? Yeah, those are the people getting promoted.

The seven signs nobody wants to look at

The Bergen Work Addiction Scale was built by Cecilie Schou Andreassen and her team at the University of Bergen. They mapped the seven core elements of any addiction onto work specifically. Read these slowly.

1. Salience. You think about how to free up more time to work. Work occupies a disproportionate share of your headspace.
2. Mood modification. You use work to lift your mood or numb something.
3. Tolerance. You spend more time working than you initially intended, because the old dose stopped doing it.
4. Withdrawal. You feel stressed, anxious, or low when you're prevented from working.
5. Conflict. Work has damaged your health, relationships, or other priorities.
6. Relapse. You've tried to cut back and failed.
7. Problems. Important people in your life have told you, point blank, you work too much, and you've waved them off.

Schou Andreassen's research suggests one threshold. Answer "often" or "always" to at least four of those, and you're already in the territory.

I read the list for the first time and felt a bit sick. Salience, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, problems. Five out of seven, easily. I would have told you I was dedicated.

What it cost

I'm not going to do the noble martyr routine here. Plenty of people have written it. The "I missed my daughter's school play and now I am wiser" essay is a whole genre, and it usually ends with the writer still working too much.

But the costs are real, and they are not theoretical.

The research links workaholism to anxiety, depression, burnout, cardiovascular disease, sleeping problems, work-family conflicts, lower job satisfaction (yes, you read it correctly, the people who work hardest tend to enjoy it least), and an increased risk of accidents at work. The body keeps the score. The body always keeps the score.

In my own case, the costs showed up as a slow erosion. Sleep went first. Patience went next. Then the small kindnesses... the quick text to a friend, the willingness to be interrupted, the calm response when something went wrong at home. All of it got eaten by the same animal. The animal was hungry, and I kept feeding it, because feeding it felt like winning.

Why HR will not fix this with fruit

Kelly Swingler has been talking about this for years. She's a former HR Director who burned out twice before she rebuilt her career around burnout prevention. She has coached over 700 leaders through it. She calls work addiction what it is, without flinching.

Her line on this is one I keep coming back to. Free fruit, yoga at lunch, and an Employee Assistance Programme do not fix work addiction. They cover it. They make the company look like it cares while leaving every structural cause untouched.

Think about how most organisations are built.

The bonus structure rewards overdelivery. The promotion path rewards visibility, which usually means hours. The hero of the quarter is the person who saved the launch by sleeping under their desk. The annual award goes to the team who worked through Christmas. The CEO posts on LinkedIn at 6am on a Sunday, and we all clap.

Then HR sends out a wellbeing survey and wonders why people are tired.

I'm not blaming HR for this. Most HR professionals I know are good people in an impossible job, trying to make a humane experience inside a system designed to reward the opposite. But the framing is wrong. You don't solve an addiction by putting blueberries in the kitchen. You solve it by changing what gets rewarded.

Handing it back

Here's the bit I find hardest to write, because I'm still in it.

If work is your addiction, then "handing it back" is the same kind of work as handing back any other dependence. It is not a one-week holiday. It is not a digital detox weekend in the Cotswolds. It is not a Sunday-night promise to leave the laptop closed which dies by Monday lunchtime.

It is a slow, structural change to how you live.

For me, a few things have helped. None are revolutionary. All are harder than they sound.

Name it. Out loud, to someone who matters. Not "I'm a bit of a workaholic, ha ha" with a self-deprecating shrug. Try this version instead: "I use work the way other people use alcohol, and I am not currently winning the argument." It changes the conversation. It also changes how you feel about the next late night.

Watch for the dopamine, not the deadline. The deadline is usually fake. The dopamine of clearing the inbox is real. When I notice myself craving the hit (not the outcome, the hit) I try to stop and ask what I am trying to feel. Productive? Useful? Safe? In control? Loved? Most of the time it's the last one, dressed up as the others.

Build a finish line. Not a goal. A finish line. A specific time on a specific day when the screen closes and another thing begins. Without the other thing, the addiction wins, because nothing else is competing for your attention.

Tell your team you're doing it. The cruellest part of work addiction is the way it spreads. The harder I worked, the more I implicitly told my team they should too. When I started enforcing my own boundary out loud, they started enforcing theirs. The work didn't suffer. It got better, because the people doing it were better rested.

Expect to relapse. I do, weekly. I'm not a recovered workaholic. I'm a person who is paying attention. It's the whole trick. Nothing more.

The question I keep asking

If you'd told me, ten years ago, about one in seven working adults being functionally addicted to their job, I would have nodded sagely and assumed you meant the people in the next office.

It is always the people in the next office. Until you check your own desk at 11pm and realise you're still there because being there feels better than being anywhere else.

So here's the question I'll leave you with. Not a call to action. A question.

If you handed back your addiction to work, tonight, what would you have to face?

Because the thing... whatever it is, the awkward marriage, the silent house, the grief you haven't sat with, the identity you don't know how to rebuild, the boredom you're afraid of... the thing is what work has been protecting you from.

The work has been the medicine.

The next question is whether you still need it.

When you feel threatened, your amygdala fires before your thinking brain catches up. Healthline explains it bluntly: the amygdala disables the frontal lobes, activates fight-or-flight, and shuts down reasoned response. You go from a person who weighs options to a person who reacts. Cortisol and adrenaline flood in. Your body gets ready to run, fight, or freeze. None of those states are good for choosing whether to send the resignation email, fire the employee, or sign the contract.

This isn't weakness. This is biology. You were not built to make calm strategic decisions while your heart is pounding. Our ancestors needed to react fast to lions and rivals. You're using the same hardware to decide whether to reply-all.

Knowing this doesn't make the feeling go away. What it does do is give you permission to delay. The strong move is not to push through. The strong move is to step out of the loop.

The hot-cold empathy gap

There is a concept from behavioural economist George Loewenstein called the hot-cold empathy gap. The Decision Lab describes it well: when you're in a "hot" state (anger, fear, hunger, exhaustion), you cannot accurately predict what a calm version of you will want. And when you're in a "cold" state, you cannot understand why the heated version of you was so worked up.

This is why post-argument you looks at this morning's text thread and winces. This is why the version of you at 2am writes a furious LinkedIn post the version of you at 8am wishes it had deleted before sending. The two versions of you are not the same person. They don't have the same priorities. They don't even have the same memory.

If a decision matters, you owe it to your future self to let the cold version weigh in.

Speed isn't strength

Leaders get this wrong all the time. We celebrate decisiveness. We say things like "she's a doer" and "he doesn't sit on things." We treat the gap between problem and action as a measure of competence.

It isn't.

A good decision holds up six months later. A bad decision is one you would not have made if you had slept on it. Speed only matters if the outcome is right. If the outcome is wrong, the speed is the problem, not the solution.

I have hired the wrong person in a hot rush to fill a seat. I have fired someone in anger and spent weeks unpicking the legal mess. I have shipped product on a Friday because I was tired of waiting and watched it break production by Monday. Each of those was a hot-state decision. Each of those was reactive dressed up as decisive.

The leaders I respect most aren't the fastest. They are the ones who say "let me come back to you on this" and mean it.

What waiting looks like

Waiting is a practice, not a vibe. Here is how it works for me.

Write the email. Don't send it. Get the words out. Read them back tomorrow. If you still think they're right after a night of sleep, send them. Most of the time you won't.

Move your body. Walk. Run. Do the dishes. Mow the lawn. Your nervous system needs to come down off the spike before your brain comes back online. The University of Ottawa found even 24 hours of sleep deprivation dampens the neural signals tied to good decision-making. If exhaustion alone wrecks your judgement, picture what anger plus exhaustion does.

I'm not sure about this part: the Ottawa study quantified an effect on risky decisions specifically, but I haven't pinned down the exact percentage. Direction is clear, magnitude I haven't verified from the public summary.

Talk to someone who isn't in the fight. Not your spouse if it's a work issue. Not your colleague if it's a marriage issue. You want a witness, not an accomplice. Someone who will ask you "is this the decision you'd make if you weren't furious?"

Name the emotion. Out loud or on paper. "I am furious. I feel humiliated. I feel scared." Labelling the feeling moves it from the limbic system into the cortex. The hijack starts to lose grip the moment you describe it.

Set a delay rule. Twenty-four hours for medium things. A week for big things. A month for anything affecting relationships, careers, or money in serious amounts. The bigger the decision, the longer the runway.

None of these are magic. All of them are boring. Boring is the point. Boring is what gets you out of the hot state and into the cold one.

The exception nobody mentions

Now, the honest counter.

Sometimes waiting is the wrong move. Sometimes "let me sleep on it" is what cowards say to avoid having a hard conversation. Sometimes you already know the answer and the delay is theatre.

If your boss has been bullying you for two years and you keep "sleeping on it" before saying anything, you're not deliberating. You're avoiding. If someone you love is in crisis right now, you don't get to wait twenty-four hours to act. If the building is on fire, sleep on it later.

The discipline is this: wait when waiting changes the answer. Don't wait when the only thing waiting does is delay a truth you already know.

You will get this wrong sometimes. So will I. The point is the question. "Am I waiting because I need to be cold, or am I waiting because I don't want to do the hard thing?" Ask it honestly. Then act.

The morning after

The Tuesday-afternoon resignation email I almost sent? I rewrote it on a Friday morning. By then it wasn't a resignation. It was a meeting request with the senior manager's boss. We had a hard, calm conversation. He didn't take credit for anyone else's work again on my watch. I kept my job. I kept the relationships I would have torched. I kept the team I had built.

I was not wise. I gave the wiser version of me a chance to show up.

You will have your own version of this Tuesday. Perhaps a contract you're about to sign. A person you're about to fire. A relationship you're about to end. A boundary you're about to set in fury.

Before you do it, put the laptop down.

Go for a walk.

Sleep on it.

What does the morning version of you want? Ask her. Ask him. Then go.

A 2021 study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research followed thousands of people over a decade and measured how their sense of purpose changed. Across three populations ... almost 2,700 White Americans, 248 African Americans, and 644 Japanese adults ... purpose declined as people aged. Around one in eight reported a meaningful drop. Only one in fifteen reported a rise.

The people who held onto purpose had measurably better physical health. The ones who lost it did not.

You are watching the cost of erased boundaries play out, at scale, in a peer-reviewed dataset.

Boundaries Are Not Walls

The word gets misused. People hear "boundary" and picture a moat. A flat refusal. I do not work past five and I do not answer email on weekends, full stop.

A flat refusal is one kind of boundary. It is not the only kind.

A boundary is information. It tells the people around you what your yes means and what your no means. Without one, your yes is worthless because it has no edge. If you agree to everything, your agreement is a reflex, not a choice.

The most effective boundaries I have set in my career were not refusals. They were declarations. I will lead this project, and the launch date is non-negotiable on these dates ... here is the family event ... so let me know now if the schedule needs to shift. The team got more from me, not less. They got a leader who told them where the edges were.

The colleague with no boundaries is the one nobody trusts with a hard problem. Because they say yes to everything, they finish nothing well.

Why It Feels Rebellious

Kelly Swingler called boundaries "the ultimate rebellion" and the word fits. Modern work culture rests on a quiet assumption ... your time, your attention, and your stress tolerance are infinite. Any limit you put on them is treated as a defect to manage.

I have been told, in different rooms across different decades:

• You are not a team player.
• We need someone with hunger.
• This is a high-performance culture.
• If you want to grow, you have to be available.

Each phrase translates to the same instruction. Hand over your edges. Let the company decide where you end.

The rebellion is not setting the boundary. The rebellion is keeping it once it pisses someone off.

The 6% Tell

Anthropic analysed a million Claude conversations and found six percent of them were people asking the AI for personal guidance. Of those, twenty-six percent were career questions. Run the math. Tens of thousands of people sitting at their desks asking a chatbot what to do with their working lives.

They are not asking because their boss is mean. Some are. Most of them have lost their boundaries one Slack message at a time, and the only one left to set is the resignation letter.

A resignation is a boundary you set when you waited too long.

Five Boundaries I Use

Not theory. Things I do, with words I have used.

The morning lock. From 6 AM to 9 AM, my phone does not pull email or Slack. The hours go to my thinking, my writing, and breakfast with the people in my house. If the company collapses in those three hours, it was going to collapse anyway.

The "ask twice" rule. If a stakeholder pushes back on a no, I hear them out and decide again. If they push a third time, the answer goes from no to never. People who respect your edges ask once. People who do not are training themselves to wear you down.

The Friday vow. I do not commit to anything new on a Friday afternoon. My brain is fried, my judgment is poor, and Monday me is paying the bills. The yes I give at 4 PM Friday is a yes I almost always regret.

The "phone in the drawer" hour. When I am with my grandson, the phone goes in a drawer in another room. Not face down. Not on silent. Out of sight. I have lost two business calls this way over five years. I have gained five years.

The truth budget. I tell one hard truth a week to someone who needs to hear it. Boundaries are not only about what you withhold. They are also about what you refuse to swallow. A relationship where you withhold the truth is a relationship with no edges, and it will rot.

The Hidden Cost of No Boundaries

Companies frame boundaries as a personal indulgence. As if you are demanding a perk. The math runs the other way.

The person with no boundaries makes bad decisions. They commit to too much, deliver late, burn out their team, and quit at the worst possible time. The cost of replacing a senior leader is somewhere between half and twice their salary, before you count the projects stalling while you hire.

The person with strong boundaries makes the company more money over a longer time horizon. They say no early so they say yes well. They protect their judgment. They sleep. They show up.

If you are a manager and you find yourself frustrated by a team member who guards their edges, ask yourself who pays the bill when those edges disappear. The answer is you, six months later, when they leave.

How to Start

If this is foreign territory, do one thing.

Pick a single recurring thing in your week which drains you and has no good business reason to exist. The status meeting nobody owns. The Sunday email triage. The Saturday morning "quick sync" with the founder who likes to think out loud.

Name it. Tell someone you are dropping it. Do not apologize. Do not over-explain. Apologies invite negotiation, and you are not negotiating.

See what happens. Almost nothing will. The world is wider than the people who have been crowding into your time.

Once you survive the first one, set the next.

The Question

If you took an honest look at your calendar this week, how much of it is the life you said you wanted, and how much is the residue of every time you did not push back?

The good news is your calendar is not a contract. It is a draft. Boundaries are how you edit it.

Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist who spent four years studying self-awareness with nearly five thousand participants. Her work was reported in Forbes, and her Harvard Business Review piece is one of the most-cited papers on the subject.

The headline number: 95% of people think they are self-aware. Only 10 to 15% are.

Read it again. Nineteen out of twenty leaders walk into a room convinced they know themselves. One of them is right.

If you are in the 80% wrong about yourself, no mentor in the world is going to fix it. A mentor gives advice based on whatever version of you they hear about. Your description is wrong, the advice is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out.

The gap between who you think you are and who you truly are is the most expensive blind spot in your career.

What a mirror does, and a mentor never will

A mentor will tell you what worked for them. A mirror shows you what is true about you.

Those are different things.

When I left Sun Microsystems years ago, three mentors told me to stay. Stability, vested options, a clear path. They were not wrong about the math. They were wrong about me. I was bored. I was avoiding the conversation with myself about what I wanted next. I needed the mirror, not the advice.

A mirror does four things a mentor will never do.

A mirror is always available. No scheduling. No coffee. No imposing on someone's time.

A mirror is honest. It does not soften the bad news. It does not try to be kind. The work of looking at yourself is the work of refusing to look away.

A mirror has no agenda. Mentors are people. They have their own histories, their own regrets, their own unfinished business. Some of it leaks into their advice. A mirror reflects only you.

A mirror is specific to you. No mentor has lived your life. No mentor sat at your dinner table or carried your scars. Your answer is not in their story.

What a mirror looks like in practice

A mirror is not a metaphor. It is a practice.

Here are the four I have used most in twenty-plus years of leading engineers and building products.

1. Journaling without an audience. Not the kind you do for LinkedIn. The kind nobody else will ever read. Write down what you think about the meeting, the version you would not say out loud. Read it back in a week. The pattern is the answer.

2. Recording yourself. Watch yourself on video. Listen to yourself in a meeting recording. The first time you do it, you will be horrified. The second time, you start to see what your team has been seeing all along.

3. Asking better questions of yourself. Not "what should I do." Questions like those always point to other people. Ask instead... "what am I avoiding?" "what would I tell a friend in this situation?" "if no one ever found out, what would I choose?" Those point inward.

4. Feedback you have to face. I build 180-degree and 360-degree feedback tools at Step It Up HR, and the most painful part of building them was using my own version on myself. The feedback was not what I expected. It rarely is.

Two of these involve nobody except you. Two of them involve other people, but the work is still yours. The mirror does not stop being a mirror because someone hands it to you.

My own mirror story

Twelve years ago, I had a manager I was sure was the problem. He micromanaged. He second-guessed. He held meetings about meetings.

I rehearsed the case against him in my head every morning. I told friends. I told my wife. I asked two mentors what to do.

One of those mentors gave me a piece of paper. "Write down everything you do not like about him," he said. "Then put your own name at the top of the page."

I refused for a week. Then I tried it. About half the list was him. The other half was me. The micromanaging part was him. The defensiveness, the avoidance, the meetings about meetings... those were mine, too. I had been holding a mirror up to him and pretending it was a window.

The conversation I was avoiding was not with him. It was with myself.

I did not need a mentor to give me an answer. I needed one to point at the mirror.

When mentors still matter

I am not telling you to fire every mentor in your life. Doing so would be stupid.

Mentors are the right tool for two things.

Technical knowledge you do not have. If you are an engineer trying to ship your first iOS app, find someone who has shipped ten. Their experience is real, and their feedback is fast. Mentors are great compilers of expertise.

Pattern matching for situations you have never seen. First time CEO? First time being fired? First time managing managers? Talk to someone who has been there. They will spot things you will miss.

But questions about who you are, what you want, what to do with the next ten years of your life... those questions are not theirs to answer. They will never answer them. Even if they tried, the answer would be wrong, because it would be theirs and not yours.

The hardest work is the quietest

The reason people keep asking mentors what to do is the same reason six percent of people ask Claude about quitting. It is hard to sit alone with yourself and tell the truth.

It is easier to outsource the decision. It is easier to ask the wise old voice. It is easier to pay for the masterclass.

The answer was always in the mirror. You only need to be brave enough to stand in front of it.

What are you avoiding asking yourself?

Ruth Wooderson, an HR leader I respect, says careers aren't ladders, they're spaghetti. She's right. But I'd push it further. Careers aren't even spaghetti. They're the whole bowl... pasta, sauce, garlic, the pot you cooked it in, and the friend who showed up unexpectedly to eat with you. Everything in your life feeds back into your work, whether you let it or not.

The people I admire most don't have tidy resumes. They have a body of work, and the work has fingerprints from every part of their life on it. The Army veteran who runs a yoga studio. The accountant who became a children's book author. The CTO who quit to fly paramotors and write essays at 5am.

If your career looks like a plate of spaghetti, you're doing it right. The line was never the point.

What detour did you take to learn something? Where does it show up in your work today? Sit with the question for a minute. The shape of your life is more honest than the resume you've been hiding behind.

Here's a number I want you to sit with. Gallup looked at frontline supervisors and found 65% of them got the job because of their performance or years in the previous role. Only 30% were placed there because someone thought they had supervisory skill. (Gallup)

Read it again. Two out of every three new bosses were chosen for being good at the work the team was doing... not for being good at leading the team doing the work.

Then ask yourself why your last skip-level was awkward.

The pattern shows up in the research too. Benson, Li and Shue studied sales workers across 131 firms and found firms promote on current sales performance even when it predicts a worse manager. The teams under those new managers showed roughly a 7.5% drop in subordinate sales performance after the promotion. (NBER) The best closer became the worst boss the team ever had, and the company paid for it twice... once in the lost individual contributor, once in the dragged-down team.

This is the Peter Principle, alive and humming in 2026. We promote people to a level where they stop being competent, then we wonder why engagement is in the toilet.

The switch nobody tells you about

The thing nobody tells you when you accept the title is the job changed. Not expanded. Not added to. Changed.

You used to be paid for output. Code shipped. Deals closed. Articles filed. Patients seen. Whatever your trade, you were paid for the doing.

The day you take a leadership role, the doing stops being your job. The doing becomes their job. Your job is to make their doing better, faster, smarter, more sustainable.

There's the gig, in one sentence.

If your team ships great work, you did your job. If your team is on fire and you're heroically writing the production hotfix at 11pm, you missed your job. You went back to the old one because it felt safer.

I've done this. Every leader I respect has done this. The pull is real... the old job is the one you know how to be brilliant at. The new job is the one where you don't know what good looks like for at least a year, sometimes three.

The 99.5% receipt

Years ago I ran a piece of research where I asked people whether they'd had a bad boss. Not in their entire career... in their working life so far.

99.5% said yes. One or more. Often several.

Half a percent of working adults made it to the survey without a bad-boss story. The other 99.5% had collected at least one... and most had collected a portfolio of them.

The number is not a "people problem." A people problem would scatter randomly across teams, industries and decades. 99.5% is a system problem. It's what happens when you spend 65% of your promotion energy choosing for the wrong skill, then give the new boss no training, no peer group, and no honest feedback for the first 18 months.

If you're reading this thinking "well, I'm definitely the 0.5%"... mate, you're 200 times more likely to be in the 99.5%. The maths doesn't care about your self-assessment.

What the actual job looks like, in five jobs

When I sit a new manager down, I tell them the role splits into about five jobs. None of them involve being the smartest person in the room.

One: hire and fire well. Most people wildly underestimate the importance of this one. The team you build is the team you lead. If you keep tolerating one underperformer, you teach the rest of the team the bar sits wherever the worst person sits. Hiring is your highest leverage activity. Firing kindly and fairly is your most important act of respect to the people who stayed.

Two: set direction so clear it survives you. Your team should know what to do when you go on holiday for two weeks. If they need you to make every decision, you're not a leader, you're a single point of failure with a fancy title. Clarity is your real product.

Three: remove obstacles. Your team will tell you what's broken if you let them. Their list is almost never the list you'd write yourself. The job is to fix the things on their list, not yours. Most managers I see are buried in their own list... and ignoring the one which would unblock five people on Monday.

Four: develop the people. This is the bit nobody trained you for. It's also the bit where your real legacy lives. Your direct reports five years from now will remember whether you grew them or used them. Nothing else.

Five: tell the truth, kindly. Dan Greene calls this "feedback as a daily habit, not an annual event." If feedback feels awkward, you waited too long. If silence feels safer than honesty, you're not protecting anyone... you're protecting yourself.

Notice what's not on the list. Being the best technically. Having the most output. Being the smartest. Knowing every answer. Charisma. Confidence. The whole bag of "leader vibes" Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic spends a whole book dismantling.

The McKinsey podcast where he discussed the research has a line I wrote on a sticky note above my desk: most leaders are promoted for style, not substance. We pick the bombastic, confident person... and then we're surprised when their team is scared and their numbers slowly tank.

What you do about it

If you're a leader reading this, three things worth trying tomorrow.

Ask the question. Pick one direct report. Ask them: "What's the most useful thing I do for you, and what's the most useless?" Then shut up. Don't defend. Write it down. Do something with it inside two weeks. If you've never done this, the first answer will be polite. The second will be honest. The third is where the gold is.

Audit your calendar. Open last week. How many hours did you spend on the old job (the doing) versus the new job (the people, the direction, the obstacles)? If the ratio is more than 30/70 in favour of doing, you have a job-confusion problem. The calendar is the only honest record of what you believe your job is.

Pick your training. Not the corporate-mandated stuff. Pick one book, one peer group, one coach. The Gallup data was clear: supervisors trained in the past year were 79% more likely to be engaged and 19% less likely to be burned out. (Gallup) Training works. The problem is 23% of supervisors have never had any.

If you're an organisation reading this, one thing only.

Stop promoting purely on output. Build a separate technical track for your best individual contributors so they don't have to take a management role to get paid more. Promote into management based on whether the person has shown they make others around them better. Without those data, start collecting it... ask the team, not the boss.

The job nobody warned you about

I noticed quiet-quitting culture trending again on Reddit this week, in the AskReddit work-life threads. The pattern keeps repeating: people aren't leaving jobs, they're leaving managers. The same finding shows up in every workplace study I've read for 20 years.

The hard part is the 99.5% number isn't going anywhere until we change how we pick the 65%. And we won't change how we pick them until enough of us... bosses, ex-bosses, future bosses... admit out loud the day you took the title was the day the job changed.

So here's the question I'd leave you with. Forget what's on your business card. Forget what your boss thinks your job is.

If you asked the five people who report to you what your job is... not the title, the job... what would they say? And does it look anything like what you've been spending your week on?

If those two answers don't match, you already know what to do.

I'd love to hear what you find. The honest version, not the polished one.

The 2026 Career Identity Report from Resume Genius found that 68% of workers say their job is mainly a way to pay the bills. 60% do not see their current role as their ideal one. Among Gen Z, 77% see work as a paycheck and 57% are only staying until they find something better.

You can read those numbers as a generational complaint. I read them as something else. A whole lot of people have looked at the version of themselves that shows up at work and gone... that is not me. That is the costume. The actual person is somewhere else.

The costume gets heavier

I was talking to a CTO last year who told me he had not laughed at work in eight months. Not once. Not a real laugh. The professional chuckle, sure. The tactical "good one" in a meeting. But not the kind of laugh where your face hurts afterwards.

He was good at his job. He was paid well. He was also, by his own quiet admission, a bit of a stranger to himself. He had been promoted into a version of his life that had no room in it for the person he used to be on weekends, with his guitar, with his kids, with a bad joke he was about to tell badly.

The London School of Economics careers blog describes authenticity at work as expressing "a true inner self... without fear of reproach." That definition sounds easy until you try it on a Wednesday at 3pm in a company that rewards composure over honesty.

The costume gets heavier the higher you climb. Nobody tells you that part on the way up.

I am not against the costume

Let me be honest. I have nothing against professional polish. The world does not need me to bring my eleven-year-old self to a board meeting. There are forms, there are filings, there are humans on the other side of the table who deserve me at my sharpest.

The costume is not the enemy. Forgetting that you are wearing one is the enemy.

The LSE piece makes a point I had not heard put quite so cleanly. Authenticity is on a spectrum. Code-switching is not betrayal. You shape what you show depending on the room. The trouble starts when there is no room left where you do not have to shape it. When every version of you has been handed to you by someone else's expectations.

That is the moment Kelly's question lands like a brick.

Who were you before all of this told you who to be?

The bit where I get suspicious of myself

I have a habit when I start enjoying a question this much. I get suspicious of it. I have seen too many leaders fall in love with the idea that their "true self" is some pure, untouched core, sitting quietly inside them, waiting for permission to come out and run the company.

I do not think that is how it works.

The kid in the basement was not wiser than me. He was less. He had less experience, less judgement, less ability to read a room or sit with a bad meeting and not blow it up. He was great. He was also incomplete.

So when I ask "who were you before the world told you who to be," I am not asking which version of me is the real one. I am asking which parts of me got told to shut up along the way, and whether any of them deserved to keep talking.

That is a different question. It is more useful.

Three of mine

Here are three pieces of the boy in the basement that I think got nudged out of me in my career, that I want to invite back. I am writing them down so I cannot pretend later that I did not know.

One. The willingness to look stupid. At eleven I would ask anyone anything, including the embarrassing question. Somewhere between then and my first big tech job, I learned to nod through things I did not understand. That is not professionalism. That is fear in a tie.

Two. The willingness to break things. That kid took a working clock apart on the chance that he might learn something. Plenty of corporate me has avoided breaking things because the cost of being wrong felt too high. Sometimes that is the right call. Often it is not. Often it is my reputation playing safe at the expense of my curiosity.

Three. The willingness to be quiet. This one surprised me. The eleven-year-old me would spend a whole afternoon alone with a problem. Modern me has trained himself to fill silence with talk, with the next meeting, with a Slack ping. The boy was better at sitting still. I would like some of that back.

Why this is not a self-help post

I am not selling you a journaling exercise. There are plenty of those. What I am saying is more practical, and more uncomfortable.

If 68% of workers see their job as a way to pay bills, and most of them are also walking around in a costume they did not pick, then most of the people you lead are quietly running on a deficit. They are spending energy every day to be a slightly different person than the one who exists outside the building. That deficit shows up. It shows up in disengagement, in burnout, in the polite quiet quit, in the talented hire who stops pushing back.

You cannot fix it with a wellness perk. You cannot fix it with a meditation app. You will not fix it with a great manager either. What you can do is stop adding to the costume. Stop demanding composure when honesty is what the moment needs. Stop punishing the people who answer "I do not know" with the look you give people who answer "I do not know."

If you are a leader, your job includes leaving room for people to bring more of themselves to work. Not all of themselves. Not the version that needs therapy, or sleep, or a holiday. But more of the bits that have been told, somewhere along the way, to shut up.

So... who were you?

I am going to leave Kelly's question with you because that is what it deserves. Not as a clever opening. As a thing to sit with.

Who were you before the world told you who to be?

What did that person know that current you has politely forgotten? Which of their habits got trained out of you in the name of being more "professional"? Which of them might still be useful, even now, even at this level, even in this room?

You do not have to answer me. I am not your therapist. But I would gently suggest that if you cannot answer it for yourself in a quiet hour, that is itself the answer. That is the gap you are walking around with. That is the costume getting heavier than the person inside it.

I am still working on mine. I will let you know when the boy in the basement and the man at the desk are on speaking terms again.

The phrase comes from Jeremy Yip, writing in Psychology Today. He calls it the gap between what leaders think is happening and what employees are living through.

Two things drive the gap. First, leaders assume their view of the world is correct and dismiss disagreement as bias or resistance. Second, employees stay quiet. If you've ever been the one with bad news, you know why. Speaking up gets you labeled negative. So the bad news stays in the corridor and the all-hands stays sunny.

I have been on both sides of this. I have stood at the front of the room talking about the next big thing. I have also been the one in the third row, listening to a vision while wondering how the bug list was going to clear before standup.

Both seats are uncomfortable. The one at the front is louder.

The 20% Problem

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 put global engagement at 20% in 2025. The lowest level since 2020. The price tag... around $10 trillion in lost productivity, or 9% of global GDP.

Read it again. Twenty percent. Eighty out of every hundred people are not engaged with the work they do every day.

Now go back to the vision deck. The five-year horizon. The bold strategic priorities. None of it lands on the eighty. None of it changes the way Monday feels.

Have the best vision in the world. If your team is drowning, the vision is noise.

What Survival Looks Like

When I say "survive Monday," I do not mean melodrama. I mean the small things which pile up and wear people down. Things leadership rarely sees because leadership rarely asks.

A few examples from my own work:

• An engineer with a manager who reschedules their 1:1 every single week. They have stopped preparing for it. They have stopped expecting it.
• A new hire onboarded into a Confluence page from 2021, half the links dead, the other half pointing to systems she does not have access to.
• A team lead drowning in a backlog of admin, never given a single hour to think about the architecture problems his team keeps tripping on.
• A senior IC pinged in three different Slack channels at the same time, by three different VPs, all wanting an update by end of day.

None of these are dramatic. None of these will show up in the engagement survey results next quarter. All of them are eroding someone's ability to do their best work today.

The Hospital CEO

John Blakey tells a story about a hospital CEO who stood in front of staff with a three-year transformation plan. He talked about strategy and culture and the future of care. The staff listened. They went back to wards where they were short on supplies and short on people. The plan made it onto the wall. The wards did not improve.

The line stuck with me: no one cares about your vision if you don't help them survive today first.

This is not an attack on vision. Every team needs direction. Every leader has to lift their head and look further out than next week. The point is sequencing. If your people are in survival mode, the vision they want is "Monday is going to be alright."

I have watched leadership teams pour months into a strategic offsite while the same people running the company never noticed the engineering team had gone three sprints in a row without a working CI pipeline. The offsite produced a beautiful PowerPoint. The engineers produced exhausted faces and a slow trickle of resignations.

What I Do Instead

I do not have this perfectly figured out. I have made the same mistake more times than I want to admit. But over the years, a few practices have stuck for me, and they all start with the same thing... showing up close to the work.

Walk the floor, even when the floor is virtual. I drop into Slack channels I have no business being in. I read the standup notes. I ask the dumb questions. Most of what I learn does not change my strategy. Some of it changes my whole week.

Run 1:1s like the most important meeting on the calendar. Because they are. I ask one question every time: "What is in your way this week?" The first three or four times someone answers, the answer is "nothing." The fifth time, you get the truth. Stay long enough to hear it.

Ask for ground truth before you ask for buy-in. Before I roll out anything new, I find three people who will be doing the work and ask them what would break. They tell me. I listen. The plan changes. Sometimes the plan dies. Both are wins.

Cut something every time you add something. Vision tends to add. Strategy tends to add. Frameworks add. Programs add. The team's hours do not expand to match. Every time I have asked a team to do a new thing, the question I now make myself ask is: "What are we taking off their plate to make room?"

The Test

There is a test I run on myself when I find myself drawn to a new direction. I ask: would the people doing the work hear about this and feel relief... or would they feel another thing landing on top of an already-full plate?

If the answer is the second one, the vision is not ready yet. The work to clear the plate has to come first.

I have been on the receiving end of leaders who got this right. They were rare. They were the ones I would have run through walls for. They started every conversation by asking what was hard. They earned the right to talk about the future by first showing up for the present.

I have also been on the receiving end of leaders who got this wrong. They were everywhere. They sold the vision so hard the daylight went out of the room. The good people left. The rest stayed and quietly disengaged. Eighty percent.

You don't have to choose between vision and survival. You have to put them in order.

What I'd Like You to Do This Week

Pick one person on your team. Not the squeaky wheel. Not the rising star. Pick someone in the middle, someone who shows up, gets their work done, and never asks for anything.

Ask them: "What is your week like right now? What is in the way?"

Then shut up and listen. Take a note. Do one thing about it before Friday.

You will learn more about your organization in fifteen minutes than your last leadership offsite taught you in two days. And the person you asked will remember it for a long time... longer than they will remember the vision deck.

Survive Monday first. The future will still be there on Tuesday.

Research from CLIMB describes it this way: "Politics represents how decisions are made and resources distributed when formal rules do not fully cover the complexity of human interaction."

Organizations compete for limited resources: budgets, promotions, the best projects. When formal rules don't cover every situation, informal influence fills the gap. Always has. Always will.

You don't get to opt out. You only get to choose whether you engage with it thoughtfully or stumble through it without awareness.

The Myth I Believed For Too Long

The myth goes like this: if you work hard enough and deliver great results, the right people will notice.

I believed this completely. It felt principled. Ethical. Like I was taking the high road while others got their hands dirty.

It isn't principled. It's naive.

HR Fraternity puts it plainly: "Promotions involve organizational politics, networking opportunities, and even timing... not purely merit-based decisions."

Visibility matters as much as performance. Decision-makers have limited time and incomplete information. They fill in the gaps with who and what they know. If they don't know you, they fill those gaps with someone else.

Your achievements, unseen by the people who control your career, won't move you forward. This isn't cynical or unfair. It's the reality of how organizations work. The people making decisions about your career are human beings working with incomplete pictures. You are responsible for completing yours.

I noticed data this week suggesting 6% of Claude users have been asking AI about whether to quit their jobs. I'm not sure about this part: I saw this figure cited in a Reddit discussion referencing Anthropic research, but haven't found the original source. Whether or not the exact figure holds, the broader signal is real: a lot of talented people feel stuck. Most of them are doing genuinely good work. The problem often isn't performance. It's visibility.

Two Distinct Versions of Office Politics

Most people conflate two distinct things when they hear "office politics":

The toxic version: Spreading rumors to undermine colleagues. Taking credit for others' work. Manipulating information to protect yourself at others' expense. Building alliances to win at someone else's loss. Creating cliques. Gatekeeping information. Sabotaging peers.

This version is real, common in certain cultures, and genuinely destructive. It's worth avoiding, calling out, and leaving organizations where it runs unchecked.

The smart version: Building real relationships across the organization. Making your work visible to decision-makers. Understanding who informally influences outcomes. Showing up in conversations where your perspective matters. Advocating clearly for resources your team needs. Being known for something specific and valuable.

The second version is not dirty. It's not unethical. It's recognizing organizations are social systems and participating accordingly.

The difference between the two isn't fundamentally about politics. It's about intent. Are you building reciprocal relationships, or exploiting people? Are you making your own achievements visible, or taking credit for someone else's? Are you building influence to serve your team, or to protect yourself?

The Power Moves identifies something worth sitting with: "technical competence alone cannot drive advancement." Success requires combining skill with political awareness and professional presence.

Your job isn't to stay above the fray. Your job is to be a positive actor in it.

Three Things Worth Starting Now

If you've spent your career avoiding this the way I did, here's where to begin.

Map the informal power structure first. The org chart shows formal authority. It won't show you who senior leaders trust, whose opinion gets cited in every meeting, or who has the ear of the person making the final call. Spend time understanding this. Who do people go to for advice? Whose name comes up when something important needs approval? These people matter enormously. Build relationships with them regardless of their title or whether they're in your chain of command.

Make your work visible deliberately. This isn't bragging. It's communication. Write a brief summary of what your team shipped and why it mattered, then share it with people who need to know. Present your own work in reviews instead of letting someone else present it for you. Show up in cross-functional conversations where your work is relevant, even when you're not required to be there. You're not promoting yourself. You're giving decision-makers the information they need to make good decisions about resources and people.

Build relationships before you need them. The worst time to cultivate a relationship is when you need a favor. The best time is when you don't need anything at all. Check in with people across the organization. Ask what they're working on. Offer help when the cost to you is low. Send an article to someone when it makes you think of their problem. None of this is manipulation. It's how humans build trust over time, in every context, work included.

A note on this: I've watched people go years without speaking to colleagues outside their immediate team, then reach out asking for a reference when they're in trouble. The relationship is then effectively transactional from the first interaction. Don't become one of those people.

What I Still Find Uncomfortable

Some of this still doesn't come naturally to me. I'm wired to want work to speak for itself. Self-promotion feels performative and I still resist it sometimes.

What I've learned: the discomfort is worth examining, not worth obeying. There's a version of political behavior wrong because it IS wrong. There's another version wrong only because someone taught me all of it is wrong.

Untangling the two takes time and honest self-reflection. What are you avoiding? Manipulation... or visibility itself?

If you're somewhere in your career watching less-skilled people advance faster, ask yourself whether "staying above the fray" is serving you... or whether it's comfortable because it lets you avoid something difficult.

Office politics aren't going away. They're part of every organization humans have ever built. The question isn't whether to engage. The question is how.

Engage with intent. With integrity. With genuine interest in the people around you. Do this, and office politics stop being something done to you and start being something you shape.

And here's the part leaders need to sit with: research published in Harvard Business Review found 83% of C-suite executives believe their organizations encourage curiosity. Only 52% of employees agree.

Leaders think they're creating curious, questioning cultures. Their teams think they're working somewhere questions are discouraged.

Not a communication problem. A leadership behavior problem.

The gap exists because leaders don't stifle curiosity through grand gestures. They do it in one-to-ones. In quick messages. In the moment they respond to "I'm not sure what to do here" with "Here's what you should do" instead of "What are your options?"

Death by a thousand answers.

Why Leaders Stop Asking

Asking questions when you know the answer feels inefficient. It feels like holding back on purpose. And there's something else: it feels vulnerable.

If you're the boss and you're asking your team member for their view, what does asking say about your expertise? What if they think you don't know?

The fear is: authority comes from knowing things, and questions are a confession of ignorance.

Edgar Schein, who spent decades studying organizational behavior at MIT, wrote an entire book on this. Humble Inquiry makes one core argument: when leaders ask sincere questions instead of issuing directives, teams become empowered to surface hidden problems. The problems nobody mentions to the boss. The problems brewing for months before they blow up a project. The problems your best people are watching you ignore until they decide to leave.

Asking vs. Interrogating

One thing I had to figure out early: there's a difference between asking questions and interrogating.

A question you ask without genuinely caring about the answer is an interrogation. "What do you think?" asked with your own answer already formed in your head ... where you're waiting for the person to land on your view ... isn't curiosity. It's a test. And people pass it by agreeing with you.

Real curiosity means asking when you genuinely don't know. Asking from a place of wanting to understand, not wanting to confirm.

In practice, this means slowing down. Before I ask a question now, I remind myself: I don't know what this person is dealing with. I don't know what they've tried. I don't know what they're seeing from where they stand.

When I approach a conversation from there, the questions come out differently. Less "here's what I'd do, what do you think?", more "walk me through where you've got to."

What I Changed

The shift wasn't dramatic. No retreat, no consultant, no personality overhaul.

I started with one rule: ask before I answer.

In any one-to-one, before I offered my view, I'd ask: "What are you thinking about doing?"

And then: "What have you already tried?"

And then: "What's the obstacle you're not getting past?"

The answers surprised me. Not because they were wrong. Because they were often right. And because the thinking my team members had already done ... thinking I was about to bulldoze with my own answer ... was solid. Sometimes better than what I would have said.

More than this: when someone arrived at a solution through their own reasoning, they owned it. They defended it in meetings. They executed on it with a confidence "because Ken said so" never produced.

I also started ending meetings differently. Not with "here's what we're going to do" but with "what are you taking away from this?" Small shift. The difference in follow-through is not small.

The Curiosity Gap Is a Leadership Gap

Research from Egon Zehnder shows curiosity is the strongest predictor of success in senior leadership roles. Stronger than intelligence. Stronger than experience. Stronger than confidence.

Leaders who stay curious stay close to reality. They ask what's happening, not what they expect to be happening. They find out what their teams are struggling with before it becomes a crisis. They adapt because they haven't already convinced themselves they understand a situation.

Leaders who stop being curious stop learning. And leaders who stop learning are managing, not leading.

The gap between 83% and 52% I mentioned earlier matters because organizations don't lack for solutions. They lack for the right questions. The right questions surface problems earlier. They surface better options. They tell you what your dashboards won't.

What Asking Looks Like in Practice

When someone brings you a problem, the default shouldn't be: "Here's what I'd do."

It should be: "What do you think the options are?"

When you're in a planning meeting, the default shouldn't be: "Here's the approach."

It should be: "What am I missing?"

When something goes wrong, the default shouldn't be: "Here's what we should have done."

It should be: "What do you think happened?"

These aren't soft questions. They're operational. They build the team's capacity to solve problems without you in the room. They surface information you didn't have. They create the kind of psychological safety where your team tells you bad news early, not late.

A team telling you bad news early still trusts you. Worth more than being right.

This connects to the work I've been doing with Step It Up HR around honest feedback in teams. Psychological safety isn't a cultural perk. It's the precondition for honest communication. And nothing builds it faster than a leader who asks rather than tells.

The Uncomfortable Truth

You don't get promoted to leadership by asking good questions. You get promoted by knowing things. But the moment you step into a leadership role, the knowledge-as-product model starts working against you.

Your job is no longer to be the best individual contributor in the room. Your job is to build a room full of people who don't need you to have all the answers.

Harder job. Requires resisting the urge to perform expertise when someone is struggling. Requires patience. Requires trusting an uncomfortable silence after "what do you think?" is productive, not a sign the conversation has stalled.

Most leaders never make this shift. They stay in answer-giving mode until their best people stop bringing them the hard problems.

Don't become the leader people stop talking to.

Try it this week. In your next one-to-one, ask before you tell. See what comes back.

In September 2024, the New York Post ran a story: "Gen Z hires are easily offended, and not ready for workplace." They surveyed 966 business leaders. The verdict was brutal.

Here's what nobody's asking: what if the 966 business leaders are part of the problem?

I'm not dismissing the complaints. Some of them are real. But I've heard the same complaints, almost word for word, about every generation entering the workforce in my adult lifetime. At some point, you have to ask whether the problem is the new workers... or the standard they're being measured against.

The Pattern Every Generation Repeats

It goes like this. Each new generation enters the workforce. The previous generation looks down. Labels get applied. "They don't work like us. They don't respect authority. They're not resilient."

Then twenty years later, the generation doing the criticizing gets replaced. The cycle repeats.

I did it too. When I started managing Gen Z employees, I had the same instinct. They asked too many questions. They pushed back too fast. One young engineer on my team flat-out told me our sprint planning process was a waste of everyone's time.

I was annoyed. He was right.

We spent two hours every sprint doing ceremony nobody believed in. When I examined my own reaction, I realized I had defended the process not because it worked but because we'd always done it. The engineer had been in the industry for two years. He didn't have two years of habit telling him to stay quiet.

What "Allergic to Nonsense" Means

Gen Z grew up watching social media. Not passively... they grew up decoding it. They watched influencers perform authenticity. They watched brands perform purpose. They watched politicians perform competence. For twenty years, they trained their BS detectors on the most sophisticated manipulation machines ever built.

Then they walked into your office.

And you showed them your mission statement.

The one on the wall. The one nobody lives by. The one HR made up in a two-day offsite. The one your managers reference ironically during all-hands meetings.

They clocked it in about thirty seconds.

"Allergic to nonsense" isn't weakness. It's pattern recognition sharpened to a fine point. They see through theater faster than any generation before them. When they don't engage with your theater, you call it impatience.

It's not impatience. It's refusal.

What the Numbers Show

According to Deloitte's 2025 Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey, covering 23,000+ respondents, Gen Z workers rank growth, learning, purpose, and well-being above almost everything else.

UJJI's company culture research shows 69% of Gen Z workers say they'd choose culture over salary when picking a job. Nearly seven in ten would trade a higher paycheck for a workplace worth showing up to.

Read it again. Not salary. Culture.

This isn't entitlement. This is a generation watching what happens when you spend decades in a compliance-first culture, and deciding to negotiate on different terms.

Fast Company's analysis makes it plain: Gen Z isn't quiet quitting. They're rejecting outdated leadership.

"Quiet quitting" is the phrase invented when leaders lose people without losing headcount. When Gen Z workers describe why they've mentally checked out, the answers repeat: lack of purpose, fake values, managers who say one thing and do another.

Sound familiar? Because it should. Those aren't Gen Z problems. They're leadership problems with a younger audience holding up the mirror.

The Diagnosis You're Avoiding

When a Gen Z employee seems difficult, the instinctive move is to diagnose them. What's wrong with this person? Why are they resistant? Why do they keep questioning things?

Try a different question.

What are they reacting to?

I've watched Gen Z employees get labeled as difficult when they were the ones pointing at processes so broken everyone else had stopped seeing them. I've watched them get dismissed as impatient when they were asking why a decision-making chain required five approvals for something worth two hundred dollars.

They weren't being difficult. They were being clear.

There's a distinction between impatience and zero tolerance for waste. Gen Z has almost zero tolerance for waste. Wasted meetings. Wasted processes. Conversations dressed up as feedback but designed to protect managers from real discomfort.

Your annual performance review, for example. It is nonsense. Two conversations a year is not feedback. It's liability management in a nice folder. And Gen Z will tell you so. Directly. In a meeting. In front of other people.

And when they do, the instinct is to label it insubordination. The more useful response is to ask whether they're wrong.

What Has to Change

This is where some leaders stop reading.

The framing of "how do we get Gen Z to adapt" is the wrong question. The question is: what are we asking them to adapt to?

If the answer includes mandatory fun events designed to paper over a broken culture, mission statements your own leadership team treats as wallpaper, feedback systems built to protect managers from real conversations, meeting cadences inherited from ten years ago, or hierarchies so rigid nobody below senior level feels safe speaking the truth... the problem isn't Gen Z.

It's the system they're being asked to conform to.

The fix isn't complicated. Start with honesty. If your meetings are pointless, cut them. If your performance review process is theater, rebuild it. If your mission statement is decoration, either live by it or take it down. If you claim you have an open door policy but nobody walks through it, ask yourself what's keeping them out.

India Today's coverage of the Gen Z "no-nonsense employee" put it well: "For Gen Z, questioning the boss isn't rebellion. It's workplace honesty."

In the Army, the best leaders I served under welcomed being challenged. Not because they were soft... because they knew what you get from an organization where nobody tells the truth. You get surprises. Bad ones. At the worst possible time.

A culture where honesty is rewarded isn't a soft culture. It's a resilient one.

Your Early Warning System

Here's what the Gen Z critics miss: a team member with a finely-tuned BS detector is an asset.

The engineer who told me sprint planning was wasteful? I listened. We redesigned the process. Velocity jumped twenty percent in one quarter.

The Gen Z marketer who told her manager the brand guidelines were incoherent? She was right. They got revised. Execution became faster.

When a Gen Z employee is frustrated, the frustration is almost always pointing at something real. They haven't yet learned to suppress the signal. Experienced employees learn to suppress it. They've watched too many people get penalized for naming problems out loud. Gen Z hasn't made the same accommodation yet.

Don't teach it to them.

The signal has value. Treat your Gen Z team's directness like an alarm going off. Before you dismiss it... check if there's a fire.

If your team seems disengaged, look at what you're asking them to engage with. If they seem impatient, look at what you're asking them to be patient about. If they seem allergic to your culture, ask what your culture is asking them to swallow.

They're not the problem. They're the diagnosis.

What are you going to do with the information?

Dr. Tasha Eurich spent years researching self-awareness. Her finding? 95% of people believe they're self-aware. According to her research, cited in Forbes, only 10-15% truly are.

Think about it. Nearly everyone you work with believes they're seeing themselves clearly. Statistically, most of them aren't. Statistically, this includes you. It includes me.

Not a comfortable thing to sit with. But sit with it anyway.

Self-awareness matters more than most leaders admit. When a leader lacks it, they make decisions based on an inaccurate picture of themselves and their impact. They interpret honest feedback as an attack. They read their team's frustration as a performance problem. They keep arriving at the same dead end and keep concluding the road was wrong.

The Common Denominator

Thomas Erikson wrote Surrounded by Idiots because he kept hearing the same complaint: "I'm perfectly reasonable, but the people around me are impossible to work with."

His answer was blunt. When you're the one constant in every situation where everyone else seems like an idiot... the problem isn't the people. It's your perception of people who think differently from you.

I've been on the receiving end of this. Early in my career, I had a manager who ran on fast-paced decisions and big-picture thinking. He'd set direction at 9am, change his mind by 11am, and wonder why the team seemed slow to catch up. He read their confusion as incompetence. He was looking at a team of careful, detail-oriented people who needed context and consistency before they moved.

They weren't slow. He wasn't giving them what they needed.

He left eventually, convinced the team had failed him. The team was fine. They're still there.

The team didn't need a new member. They needed a different kind of leader.

Four Types, Four Completely Different Worlds

Erikson's model divides people into four behavioral styles, often represented as colors. These aren't rigid boxes... most people blend two or more. But as a thinking tool, they're useful.

Red people are decisive, results-driven, impatient. They want the headline, not the footnote. They move fast and expect others to keep up.

Yellow people are optimistic, energetic, social. They love possibilities and get bored with details. They're the ones who get a room buzzing with ideas.

Green people are steady, reliable, loyal. They process slowly and move deliberately. They hate conflict and need stability to perform at their best.

Blue people are analytical, precise, rule-following. They want data. They want to get it right. They'll ask questions a Red reads as obstruction but a Blue sees as essential due diligence.

Here's where it goes wrong. Most leaders lean heavily into one style. And when someone shows up wired differently, it reads as friction. As incompetence. As an attitude problem.

A fast-moving Red dismisses a careful Blue as "overthinking it." A detail-focused Blue writes off an enthusiastic Yellow as "not serious enough." A people-first Green frustrates a result-driven Red who reads warmth as weakness.

Nobody's wrong. Everyone's different. The person with the most power in the room... usually the leader... gets to define what "normal" looks like. When your default becomes the standard, everyone else looks like a deviation.

This is how entire teams get written off. Not because they're bad teams. Because the leader never learned to speak their language.

The Moment I Had to Check the Mirror

I spent years thinking I was a good communicator. I'm direct. I say what I mean. I move quickly. I find long meetings painful and make no secret of it.

What I was slower to understand: my version of "direct" landed as "abrasive" for people wired differently. My pace felt like chaos to people who needed structure. My obvious impatience in meetings made some people afraid to raise issues.

Not malicious. Not intentionally difficult. But I was causing real damage, and I was mostly oblivious to it.

The mirror moment came from a 360 review. I asked the team to tell me, anonymously, what I did to make their work harder. The answers were uncomfortable. They were consistent.

I'd been reading my team's hesitation as lack of confidence. It was their response to me not creating enough space for them to contribute.

Sits with me still.

The Test Worth Running

If you've had a string of difficult teams, difficult colleagues, difficult bosses... ask yourself honestly: what's the common thread?

I'm not saying every problem is yours to own. Bad organisations exist. Toxic cultures exist. There are genuinely difficult people out there.

But if it's everywhere, every time? You're the thread.

A few questions worth sitting with:

• When did you last ask your team what you do to make their work harder... and listen without defending yourself?
• Do you adjust how you communicate based on who you're talking to, or do you use one style and expect everyone to adapt?
• When someone frustrates you, do you lead with curiosity... why would a reasonable person behave this way?... or do you go straight to a verdict?
• Are you open to feedback, or do you collect it and then explain why it's wrong?

The last one is sneaky. A lot of leaders think they're open to feedback because they don't yell. But if every piece of hard feedback produces a counter-argument... you're not open to feedback. You're tolerating it.

What "Why" Gets Wrong

Here's a useful piece from Eurich's research. When most people try to build self-awareness, they ask themselves "why." Why did I react this way? Why does this situation bother me?

The problem: "why" questions invite rationalisation. Your brain finds an answer... some story you already believe about yourself... and stops there. You feel like you've reflected. You haven't.

"What" questions work better. What was I feeling in the moment? What did I want to happen? What did my behaviour communicate to the other person?

"What" keeps you in the facts. "Why" keeps you in the story.

I'm not a psychology researcher. I'm a leader who's made enough mistakes to know the difference. When I ask myself "why did I get frustrated with them," I get self-justification. When I ask "what did I do to make them shut down," I get something useful.

What Self-Awareness Looks Like

Real self-awareness isn't about being humble or soft. It's about being accurate.

It means knowing your defaults and recognising when they're creating problems. It means seeing your own blind spots... not perfectly, but enough to ask better questions.

It means being willing to update your view of yourself based on evidence, not intention.

Your intentions don't land on people. Your behaviour does.

The leader who always meant well while building frustrated, disengaged teams is not a good leader who was unlucky. They're a leader who never connected the dots between what they meant to do and what they did.

The Payoff Is Real

I'm not asking you to become someone else. I'm asking you to understand yourself well enough to stop accidentally making everyone around you smaller.

When you stop reading "different from me" as "worse than me," your team gets better. Not because they changed. Because you stopped fighting them.

The best leaders I've worked with all had one thing in common. They knew what they looked like from the outside. They'd done the work of finding out. They kept checking.

95% of people think they're doing this. Most aren't.

The question isn't whether you're self-aware. The question is: are you willing to find out?

And if every team you've ever been part of has been full of idiots... you already have your answer.

Gallup's 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, the lowest in years. The productivity loss: $438 billion. Much of this comes from people spending their days being someone they are not.

Research published in the Journal of Business and Psychology found employees empowered to express their authentic selves reported higher job satisfaction and stronger workplace relationships. Not because authenticity is warm and fluffy. Because the cognitive load of maintaining a false persona disappears, and people focus.

The Psychology Today Authenticity Advantage study puts it plainly: "Our bodies know when someone is being real. The moment authenticity is present, our nervous system automatically relaxes, walls drop, and people are more functional."

Your team knows when you are performing. They have always known. And they are performing right back at you.

Why It Is a Weapon

Here is the part most leadership content will not say.

Authenticity filters.

When you are genuinely yourself... your actual opinions, your real standards, your honest reactions... some people will be uncomfortable. They might leave. They might push back. They might decide you are not the kind of leader they want to work for.

Good.

The people who leave when you stop performing were never truly invested in what you were building. They were invested in the performance. When the performance ends, so does their commitment.

The people who stay? They know exactly who they are working with. No surprises. No rug-pulling six months later when the mask slips. They signed up for the real version, and they will defend it.

This is why authenticity is not a soft skill. It is a filter. A sorting mechanism. More efficient than any hiring process or culture programme you have ever run.

When you are clear about who you are and what you stand for, the wrong people self-select out. The right people lean in. This does not happen by accident. It happens because you stopped managing your image and started being consistent.

It Is Not Trauma-Dumping

Let me be clear about what I am not saying.

Authenticity is not the same as saying everything you think. It is not unloading your worst day onto your team before you have processed it yourself. It is not performing vulnerability for social credit in team meetings.

Real authenticity is knowing what you stand for, and not hiding it when it is inconvenient.

It is saying "I disagree with this direction" in a room where agreeing is easier. It is admitting "I made the wrong call" without three paragraphs of justification first. It is holding consistent standards whether the CEO is in the room or not.

The Army taught me something useful here. There is a thing called "officer face," the calm, composed expression leaders maintain in difficult moments. This is not inauthenticity. This is professionalism. Authentic leaders still regulate their emotions. They still choose what to share and when. What they do not do is pretend to believe things they do not, agree with decisions they think are wrong, or perform values they do not hold.

My Career Was Built on This

I have had moments in my career where the authentic response was also the risky response.

Telling a senior stakeholder their plan had a flaw they did not want to hear. Disagreeing publicly with a decision in a meeting where alignment was the expected response. Leaving a well-paid role because the direction no longer matched what I stood for.

Every one of those moments felt dangerous. Every one was the right call.

A 2021 McKinsey study found employees who connect their roles to a deeper purpose are more than twice as likely to remain with their employer. Purpose requires authenticity. You do not connect to purpose through a mask.

I wrote a book about bad bosses. The most consistent thread across every story I collected is not cruelty or incompetence. It is a gap between what leaders said they were and what they turned out to be. The performative ones. The leaders who talked about people being their greatest asset, then cut headcount on a Friday afternoon without so much as a direct conversation.

Inauthenticity breaks trust at scale. And broken trust does not repair with a team offsite.

The Practical Version

If you want to start here, start small.

Say what you think in your next one-to-one. Not diplomatically softened until it means nothing. Say the actual thing. Watch what happens.

Hold the standard you say you hold, even when it costs something. If you say you value work-life balance and send emails at midnight, the emails are your real values. Your words are decoration.

When you get something wrong, say so. Fast, clean, no padding. "I was wrong. Here is what I am changing." Done. Not weakness. The most efficient way to rebuild credibility after a mistake.

Stop apologising for your opinions. Leaders who hedge every view, caveat every observation, agree in public and complain in private... they do not come across as diplomatic. They come across as unreadable. Unreadable leaders do not get followed. They get managed.

Small acts. They compound over time into something no culture programme has ever managed to manufacture: a team who trusts you, because they know who they are dealing with.

Authenticity is not warm and soft and comfortable. It is political. It is sometimes unpopular. It requires you to be willing to lose something, approval, convenience, a quiet life, in service of being clear about who you are.

Stop polishing. Start being real.

In the early 2010s, Google ran a research project called Project Aristotle. They studied over 180 of their own teams, trying to work out what separated the high performers from everyone else.

They looked at team composition, seniority, educational background, how often teammates socialized outside work. None of it predicted performance consistently.

What did? Psychological safety. Specifically, whether team members felt free to speak up, admit mistakes, ask questions, and say "I don't know" without embarrassment or punishment.

Teams where people felt safe to be uncertain outperformed teams where they didn't. Not because they were warmer or more collegial. Because they operated in reality instead of in the story their leader was telling.

Information flows freely when people feel safe. It stops flowing when they don't. And a team operating on filtered, performance-safe information will always lose to a team operating on the truth.

What Changed for Me

When I started saying "I don't know" more deliberately, something shifted.

People started bringing me real information. Not the polished version, cleaned up before it reached my level. The raw version: what was genuinely broken, where we had no good answers yet, what the team had been afraid to raise because they assumed I already knew.

I also noticed my team stopped performing too. When your leader doesn't pretend to have all the answers, people stop spending energy on presentation. They put it into the work instead. Meetings got faster. Problems got named sooner. We made fewer expensive wrong turns.

One specific thing I started doing: ending one-on-ones by asking, "What are you uncertain about right now?" Not "What's the problem?" or "What do you need?" but uncertainty specifically. The answers were always worth more than anything I asked in the rest of the meeting.

The shift I wasn't expecting: my own thinking got sharper. When you stop defending positions you're not sure about, you're free to work out whether they're right.

Two Kinds of "I Don't Know"

One kind is abdication. The leader shrugs, offers nothing, and moves on. The team learns their leader is unreliable. Don't do this.

The other kind is an invitation.

"I don't know... and here's what I'm going to do to find out."

"I don't know. Does anyone here have a better view on this than I do?"

"I don't know. Let's work it out together."

The difference is what comes next. Useful uncertainty is paired with action or curiosity. It opens a conversation. It signals to your team their knowledge has value and their input is wanted.

Your team will spot the difference in about three seconds. So be clear on which kind you're modeling.

The Timing

Right now, leaders across every industry are expected to have answers about AI. What will it do to headcount? Which roles are safe? How does the three-year roadmap hold up?

The honest answer for nearly everyone: we don't know.

This week, Meta announced 10,000 layoffs while stating AI will create more jobs in the long run. Perhaps so. Any leader who tells their team they have this period fully mapped out is not telling the truth. And their team knows it.

The leaders who will do well through this period are not the ones with the clearest predictions. They're the ones with teams that feel safe enough to surface real information, adapt quickly, and say out loud when something isn't working. None of that happens if the leader has to perform certainty about a situation nobody understands yet.

It Gets Easier

The first time you say "I don't know" in a meeting with senior leadership, it feels like stepping off a ledge. You half expect confidence to drain from the room.

What happens instead is respect. Not immediately, sometimes. But over time, people learn to trust what you say, because when you don't know you say so instead of bluffing. Your confident statements start to carry real weight, precisely because you're not making them when you're not confident.

Admitting you don't know invites contribution, collaboration, and trust. Not because it's charming or self-deprecating. Because it's true. And truth is what a team needs from its leader above everything else.

What I'd Tell My Younger Self

Stop faking it. Not because it was shameful. Everyone does it. But the gap between what you know and what you pretend to know is exactly where bad decisions live.

Fill it with honesty instead. Your team will trust you more for it. Your thinking will get sharper for it. You'll shed the exhausting weight of keeping all those performances consistent.

You don't need to know everything. You need to be honest about what you do and don't know. It turns out to be one of the most important things a leader does.

So: where right now are you performing certainty you don't have?

Psychologist Adam Grant writes about what he calls identity foreclosure — settling so fully into one version of yourself, you lose the ability to become another. You've put so much into becoming the person who knows this thing, seeing other possibilities gets harder.

I know how it feels. I held "tech expert" like a shield for years.

What Being an Expert Costs You

Experts answer questions. Explorers ask them.

Experts protect their territory. Explorers cross it.

The more tightly you hold your expert identity, the less curious you get. You stop asking "what if?" and start saying "well, actually."

You spend energy defending what you know instead of learning what you don't.

There's a Zen concept called shoshin ... beginner's mind. The teacher Shunryu Suzuki said it plainly: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few."

Expertise narrows. Exploration widens.

The Shift

I'm not sure exactly when I stopped being a tech expert and started being something else. A writer. A speaker. A builder of things I had no formal training to build.

At some point I realized I'd been an explorer all along... I'd hidden it behind credentials.

I spent a lot of my career making sure people knew what I knew. It took me a long time to realize I got more done... and had more fun... when I stopped performing.

As someone who flies a paramotor for fun, I think about this often. Every flight is a lesson. You don't "master" flying a paramotor. You keep learning how not to crash.

Work is the same. Leadership is the same.

The people I respect most aren't the ones with the most answers. They're the ones still asking questions at the end of the meeting. Still updating their view when new information arrives. Still willing to be wrong.

Try This

Pick one area where you call yourself an expert. Now ask: when did you last change your mind about something fundamental in it?

If you're struggling to remember... the label might be working against you.

What would change if you called yourself an explorer instead?

Not a lesser version of you. A more honest one.

This isn't unusual. McKinsey's research on vulnerability in leadership makes the point most leaders know but ignore: admitting uncertainty doesn't weaken your standing. It builds it. Teams follow people who are honest about conditions, not people performing certainty they don't have.

Worth noting: this week saw a lot of chatter about the London Marathon runner who finished in under two hours... and came second. He ran faster than any human in history, and the story became about not winning. We've trained ourselves to define progress so narrowly it makes everything else feel like stagnation. Sometimes being stuck is refusing to call something progress because it doesn't match the one metric you decided matters.

What Gets You Moving

I've been stuck at real turning points. When I decided to leave corporate engineering. When I joined Step It Up HR and had to rebuild a professional identity, from engineer to speaker to author. When I finished writing Bad Bosses Ruin Lives and had to figure out what came next.

The same few things got me moving each time.

Tell one person the truth. Not a vague "I'm going through something." A specific, honest description of what you're stuck on. For me this is often a conversation with Deb. For you it might be a mentor, a peer, a coach. It doesn't matter who. It matters to say it out loud, because saying it out loud strips it of the distorted shape it has taken in your head.

Change the medium. When I'm stuck on a work problem, walking helps more than thinking at a desk. When I'm stuck on a direction question, travel helps more than planning. You don't think your way out of stuck. You move your body through a different environment and let your brain follow.

Stop asking "what should I do?" and start asking "what am I avoiding?" The thing I'm avoiding is almost always the thing I'm stuck on. Not mysterious once you're willing to look at it directly. The avoidance and the stuckness are the same thing wearing different clothes.

Stuck Is Not Stopped

The ice cave guide's lesson wasn't "don't get stuck." It was: getting stuck is part of the territory.

Snow happens. Visibility drops. The path you planned isn't the path you're walking. Not a failure of planning. The actual conditions.

The guides who get people killed are the ones who refuse to stop. Who push through when stopping is the smart move. Who treat being stuck as a personal insult rather than information.

Being stuck is information. Something changed. Something you haven't examined closely needs examining.

I've known leaders who went entire careers without admitting they didn't know what to do next. Every one of them had teams more lost than they were. Because the leader was performing so hard, the team had no permission to be honest about it either. You set the tone. If you're faking it, your team starts faking it, and before long everyone is stuck together while all the strategy decks say otherwise.

If you're stuck right now, stop moving long enough to see where you are. Look at what you're avoiding. Tell one person the truth about it.

The snow doesn't last forever. But you have to stop and read the conditions first.

Where are you, and who have you told?

Ken Corey is the author of Bad Bosses Ruin Lives and works with leaders through Step It Up HR.

Netflix tried something different. They replaced most of their policies with judgment. No set vacation days. No travel approval forms for small expenses. A 2023 study found employees with unlimited vacation policies were 43% more likely to feel a strong sense of belonging at work. The sky does not fall when you treat people as adults.

I've Been on the Receiving End

Early in my career I worked for a company requiring every external email to be approved by a senior manager before it went out. The stated reason: someone, years prior, had sent a problematic message to a client.

One person. One email. And so for years afterward, a department of forty people spent a combined... I'd estimate two hundred hours per year seeking approvals for routine correspondence. The original cost of the bad email? Whatever the damage was at the time. The ongoing cost of the policy response? Incalculable, and growing every year.

The original problem employee had long since left.

Policies Outlive the People Who Inspired Them

This is one of the strangest things about organizational policy. It accumulates.

Someone does something wrong in 2015. Someone writes a policy. The person leaves in 2016. The policy stays forever.

I've reviewed policy documents at companies where half the rules on the books existed because of situations no longer applicable, from people no longer employed there, in a business context completely changed from the original. The rulebook was a museum of past mistakes.

Meanwhile, the current workforce... high performers you've worked hard to recruit and retain... live by rules designed for people who have already been fired or left in disgust.

Every policy review I've participated in surfaces at least one rule existing because of "the Brian situation" or "what happened with Melissa back in 2019." Brian and Melissa are gone. The policy protecting against them is still there, annoying everyone who showed up since.

Return to Office: A Case Study in Worst-Case Thinking

You want a vivid modern example? Look at the return-to-office wave.

When remote work revealed some employees weren't delivering, leadership at dozens of major companies arrived at the same conclusion: bring everyone back. Not the slackers specifically. Everyone.

The people who thrived at home, delivered strong results, kept their commitments and stayed connected? They came back in too. Because of the people who did not deliver.

This is worst-case policy design in its purest form. A small number of employees used flexibility badly, so companies removed it from the employees who used it well. The message the high performers received was unambiguous: we don't trust you either. Many of them responded by finding employers who did.

The Test Worth Running

Audit your policies with one simple question: "Who is this for?"

If the answer is "the one person who abused the system four years ago," delete it. Deal with bad actors directly when they appear, not preemptively at the expense of everyone else.

Here's a test I use. Picture reading every policy in your employee handbook out loud to a strong performer you're trying to recruit away from a competitor. Watch their face. The policies making a sharp candidate look skeptical? Those are the ones built for your worst employees.

Some rules exist for good reasons: compliance, safety, legal protection. Those stay. Everything else deserves scrutiny.

Trust Is Harder Than Policy

The shift from defensive policy-writing to trust-first management isn't soft. It's harder, not easier.

It means addressing bad behavior directly rather than hiding behind rules. It means having a difficult conversation with the person abusing the system, instead of writing a policy punishing the entire team for one person's choices.

Policy-writing feels like doing something. It produces a document you point to later. It distributes the punishment across a whole workforce without requiring anyone to confront the real problem. This is not management. It's avoidance wearing a suit.

Your best people see through it immediately. They're calculating whether this is an organization respecting them as adults. The policy handbook is one of the loudest signals you give them. If it signals "we expect the worst from you," don't be surprised when they go find an employer who expects better.

A Different Starting Point

Most policy documentation starts with: "What do we need to prevent?"

Try starting with: "Who are we writing this for?"

If you're writing for the ninety-five percent of your team who show up, do good work, and handle their responsibilities without being managed every hour of the day... write accordingly. Give them freedom. Trust their judgment. Deal with the five percent as individuals when the situation arises, not as a statistical ghost haunting everyone else's daily experience.

The people worth keeping already treat the company's resources with care. The ones who won't... a policy won't stop them anyway. It'll only insult the others.

Write your rules for the people you want to keep. Then have the courage to deal with the rest directly.

DDI assessed more than 70,000 manager candidates globally. They found 49% of emerging leaders fail to demonstrate effective conflict management skills. Only 12% show high proficiency.

Only 12%.

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2023 found only 30% of leaders feel confident managing conflict at all. According to Zippia, 31% of managers believe they handle conflict well, while only 22% of their direct reports agree.

The perception gap is telling. Managers overestimate their effectiveness because they're measuring the wrong thing. They're measuring whether the team seems comfortable around them, not whether the team is being led.

This isn't a skills gap. It's a courage gap. Most managers know what they should do. They don't do it because they're afraid of being disliked.

What Popularity Costs

When a leader prioritizes being liked, someone always pays the price.

It's the high performer watching a low performer coast because the boss won't have the awkward conversation. It's the team member who raises a real problem while the manager smiles, nods, and changes the subject. It's the person who deserved the promotion but lost it to the one who played golf with the director.

It's the colleague I watched get treated badly while I said nothing.

I've been on both sides. I've paid the price and I've let others pay it. Both feel bad. One side feels it immediately. The other carries it quietly for years.

The popular manager looks great on engagement surveys right up until things fall apart. And things always fall apart. Problems don't go away when you ignore them. They compound.

The financial cost is measurable. Workplace conflict costs US organizations roughly $359 billion annually in lost productivity. That figure isn't about conflict itself. It's largely the cost of leaders who don't address conflict until it's already damaged the team.

What Unpopular Leadership Looks Like

Making unpopular decisions doesn't mean being harsh. It doesn't mean performing toughness for its own sake. The leaders I've respected most are the ones willing to have the conversation nobody wanted.

They delivered the honest performance review, the uncomfortable one nobody wanted to give. They said "we're not doing this project" when the team had already gotten excited. They shared redundancy news directly, without corporate euphemism, because the person on the other side deserved honesty.

I worked with one leader early in my career who used to say: "I'm not here to make you like me. I'm here to make you better." He was rough around the edges. His feedback stung. And every person who worked for him trusted him completely, because they knew he wouldn't lie to them.

None of those things are cruel. All of them are necessary.

The best leaders I've worked with were not the most popular in the room. They were the most trusted. Trust is built through consistency, honesty, and the willingness to say hard things... not through keeping everyone comfortable.

The Confusion Between Liked and Respected

Most leaders don't consciously want to be popular. They tell themselves they care about the team. They tell themselves being inclusive means hearing everyone's preferences. They tell themselves one more day of avoiding the conflict won't make any difference.

Your team is watching everything.

They see when you ignore the problem. They see when you say one thing in a meeting and something different outside it. They see when you let a bully get away with it because the bully delivers results. They see when you give vague feedback because the real feedback might upset someone.

And they stop trusting you. Not loudly. Quietly. They stop bringing you the real problems. They stop speaking up in meetings. They find workarounds so they don't need to interact with the problem you won't address.

One of the most damaging things a leader does is conflate these two ideas: being liked in the moment, and being trusted over time. They're not the same. They're often inversely related.

Ruth Wooderson puts it plainly: if you're not willing to lose popularity, don't call yourself a leader. She's right. Leadership and popularity are not the same thing. They often pull in opposite directions.

Patterns I've Seen Play Out

Here's what I've watched happen, more times than I'd like to admit.

A team has a problem everyone knows about. A manager avoids addressing it for months. The high performers quietly start looking for new jobs. The people causing the problem interpret the silence as permission. Eventually something breaks publicly and the manager has to act, but the team is half-gone and the situation is worse.

Or this one: a leader runs a 360-degree feedback exercise. The responses come back honest. The leader reads them, files them, and nothing changes. Six months later, they wonder why engagement scores dropped further.

Or the classic: someone in the team is brilliant but interpersonally destructive. The manager keeps them because they're "too valuable to lose." The rest of the team, who are also valuable, start leaving one by one.

Popularity doesn't protect leaders from these outcomes. It creates them.

How to Make the Hard Call

None of this means charging into every conflict without thought. Timing and approach matter. But the hard thing still has to be done.

A few principles I've found useful:

Decide what matters more. Your discomfort in this conversation lasts ten minutes. The consequences of avoiding it last months. Make the decision.

Be direct without being brutal. "This isn't working, and here's what needs to change" is not an attack. It's respect. Give the person the information they need to improve or adjust.

Don't hide behind process. Many leaders use process to avoid accountability. "I'll flag this in the quarterly review." Fine. But have the actual conversation now. Don't wait for the perfect system to give you cover.

Say what you mean, then stop talking. The instinct when delivering bad news is to soften it so much the message disappears. Say the hard thing clearly. Give the person space to respond. Don't fill the silence with reassurances before they've processed the information.

Let your team see you do it. Psychological safety doesn't come from a poster on the wall. It comes from watching you hold a difficult truth and not flinch. When your team sees you address the thing everyone's been tiptoeing around, they learn it's safe to do the same.

Your Legacy Won't Be Built on Being Liked

I think about the managers I've had over my career. The ones I remember with genuine respect are not the ones who were fun to be around or who let things slide. They're the ones who told me the truth when it was hard to hear, and who believed I was worth the honesty.

They weren't always popular. They were trusted. Their teams worked hard for them. Their organizations improved because of them.

The managers who chased popularity? I barely think about them. Their teams were pleasant until they weren't. Then everyone moved on.

You get to decide what kind of leader you are. Not once, but every day, in every moment where the easy path and the right path diverge.

Ruth Wooderson's question is worth keeping close: are you willing to lose popularity?

If your answer is no, your team already knows it.

I heard this story again when I sat down with Dr. John Blakey, executive coach and author of Force for Good, for episode six of Corey-osity Unleashed. A story I'd come across before. But hearing John talk about it in the context of leadership stopped me cold.

Because I knew, sitting there, I'd fed the wrong wolf more times than I wanted to admit.

The Two Forces Inside Every Leader

John's framework starts with a simple premise: every leader carries two competing forces. One is a force for good... driven by purpose, courage, and care for others. The other is something else entirely. Ego. Fear. The need to control outcomes at all costs.

Both wolves are always present. The question isn't which one you have. The question is which one you're feeding, every single day, through the decisions you make.

And here's the part that hit me hardest: the bad wolf doesn't feel like the bad wolf when you're feeding it. It feels like confidence. It feels like high standards. It feels like accountability. You tell yourself you're being direct. You tell yourself you're holding people responsible. You tell yourself you're protecting the team.

But when I look back at my lowest leadership moments... and I have plenty... what I was doing was feeding fear. My fear of being wrong. My fear of losing control. My fear of looking weak in front of people who looked up to me.

That's the bad wolf. And it wears a suit.

Three Ways Leaders Feed the Wrong Wolf

John Blakey breaks purpose-driven leaders into three archetypes based on his Force for Good framework. He calls them Zealots, Martyrs, and Pied Pipers. I've been all three at different points in my career.

The Zealot is strong on purpose and personal resilience but weak on bringing people along. Zealots are so fired up about the mission that they stop checking whether anyone is following. I was a Zealot early on. High energy, clear direction, absolutely convinced I was right... and completely baffled when people seemed disengaged or resistant. Relentless intensity isn't leadership. It's noise.

The Martyr is the opposite problem. Strong on purpose and caring for others, terrible at taking care of themselves. They give and give until there's nothing left, then burn out and wonder why. I've watched leaders run themselves into the ground protecting their teams from bad news, absorbing pressure from above, trying to shield everyone from reality. Noble. And completely unsustainable. The Martyr feeds everyone else's wolf but starves their own.

The Pied Piper is magnetic... people love working for them, and they create great energy. But they have no clear "true north." They're leading from charisma, not from conviction. Eventually the music stops and people realize they don't know where they were going.

Most leaders cycle through all three. The work is recognizing which wolf is driving at any given moment.

The Moment I Recognized My Own Bad Wolf

I was a few years into a leadership role I genuinely loved. The team was sharp. The work was meaningful. And I was slowly poisoning it.

Not dramatically. Not obviously. I was turning inward. Every setback felt personal. Every critical piece of feedback felt like an attack. I started leading from defense instead of from conviction.

I didn't notice it at first. The bad wolf is subtle. It disguises itself as high standards. As not suffering fools. As "I expect a lot."

What snapped me out of it was a peer who said something I didn't want to hear: "You used to ask us what we thought. Now you tell us."

That was it. That was the wolf showing its teeth.

The shift back wasn't dramatic either. It started with one question, asked before meetings: What am I trying to protect right now? And is that worth protecting?

Sometimes the answer was yes... protecting my team from a bad strategic decision is worth fighting for. Other times the honest answer was: I'm protecting my ego. And that's no reason to do anything.

Feeding the Right Wolf Is a Daily Practice

This is what took me longest to understand. Feeding the right wolf isn't a one-time decision. It's not something you sort out at an offsite or in a coaching session. It's a choice you make dozens of times a day.

When someone challenges your idea in a meeting: which wolf do you feed?

When a project fails and you need to account for it: which wolf do you feed?

When a team member pushes back on a direction you've set: which wolf do you feed?

John talks about building daily habits around this... mapping your calendar to your values, looking at where your time goes versus where your values say it should go. Most leaders, when they do this exercise honestly, are shocked by the gap.

I ran this once and found roughly 70 percent of my week was reactive. Responding to things landing in my lap rather than leading from any sense of purpose. You won't feed the right wolf accidentally. It needs to be fed on purpose... no pun intended.

Start small. Before your first meeting tomorrow, ask yourself one question: "What am I leading from today... purpose or fear?"

You'll know the answer. The wolf always does.

The Wolf You Feed Is the Leader You Become

Here's what John said that I keep coming back to: your team spots a purpose imposter from a mile away.

They know. People always know. They know when you're leading from conviction and when you're leading from fear. They know when your feedback is meant to help them and when it's meant to protect you. They know when the all-hands is honest and when it's a performance.

You don't need to announce which wolf you've been feeding. Your team sees it already.

The good news is the choice is always open. Right now. Today. Before the next conversation, the next decision, the next hard moment.

Which wolf are you feeding?

I talked through this in much more depth with John Blakey on Corey-osity Unleashed. His book, Force for Good, goes further if you want to take this seriously.

Gallup research confirms the gap. Only 18% of US workers say their job aligns with a purpose they believe in. Meanwhile, 45% work primarily for the paycheck. Not a purpose problem. A practice problem. Most people have some sense of what matters to them. They don't build the discipline to act on it.

We live in an era obsessed with "finding your why." Simon Sinek. TED Talks. Annual company off-sites where a facilitator asks everyone to write their personal mission statement on a sticky note. These exercises aren't useless. But they create a false impression: purpose is a destination you arrive at, and once you're there, you're done.

You're never done.

When Purpose Felt Like a Destination

Early in my career, I kept waiting for clarity. I figured once I had the right title, or the right salary, or worked at the right company, purpose would show up. I treated it like a destination I'd eventually reach if I worked hard enough.

What happened instead was the opposite of clarity. The more I climbed, the more I noticed the distance between what I was doing and what felt meaningful. I was good at my job. The rewards were real. But if I'm honest... my daily choices weren't building toward anything I deeply cared about.

The shift came not from an epiphany, but from a question someone asked me: "What would you keep doing even if nobody paid you for it?" At first, I gave the polished answer. The safe one. I said something about technology and teams. Then I sat with it longer. The real answer was different... and harder. And it pointed somewhere I'd been avoiding for years.

Purpose is the thing you keep going back to, even when it's uncomfortable, even when there's no immediate reward. It's not a feeling. It's a pattern of choices.

What Purpose as Discipline Looks Like

Purpose as discipline means making the same core choice over and over, even when you don't feel like it. Here's what the practice looks like, concretely:

You say no to work not aligned with what you're building. Not dramatically, not with big announcements... quietly, consistently. A project paying well but hollowing out your week. An impressive-sounding commitment pulling you further from what matters. Every time you say no to the wrong thing, you're saying yes to your purpose.

You measure drift, not feelings. Some days your purpose feels vivid. Other days it feels irrelevant. Discipline means you don't let the bad days rewrite what you know about yourself. You look at your calendar, your choices, your real priorities... not how you feel about them in the moment. Feelings fluctuate. Your choices leave a record.

You show up when the results aren't visible. This is the hardest part. Purpose as a practice means doing the work before the payoff is clear. Writing when nobody's reading. Building when nobody's watching. Developing people when nobody's tracking your influence. The payoff for short-term work is rarely purpose-sized. You're playing a longer game.

You revisit and refine, not abandon. Purpose doesn't stay fixed. What mattered to you at 28 might not be exactly what matters at 45. The discipline isn't about holding your original purpose forever. It's about continually asking the question honestly and acting on the answer. Purpose is less like a destination and more like a compass you check regularly.

You build the tolerance for discomfort. This is the one nobody tells you about. Acting with purpose regularly means disappointing people. It means making choices others don't understand. It means trading short-term comfort for long-term direction. If your purpose costs you nothing, it isn't guiding your decisions at all.

The Numbers Are Blunt

The data on this is worth sitting with.

Gallup's research shows employees with strong purpose are 5.6 times more likely to be engaged at work than those without it. Only 13% with strong purpose report frequent burnout, compared to 38% of those with low purpose. And 68% of low-purpose workers are actively considering leaving their jobs.

Not a soft statistic. A performance indicator.

But here's the thing... none of those engaged, low-burnout workers got there by finding their purpose. They got there by practicing it. By making small daily choices keeping them aligned with what mattered. By building something looking like purpose from the outside because, on the inside, it's been constructed brick by brick.

The good news? Purpose isn't reserved for people with dramatic origin stories or clear vocations. It's available to anyone willing to do the daily work.

Where to Start

If you're reading this and purpose still feels like fog, here's what I'd suggest.

Stop looking for it. Start acting toward it.

Pick one thing you care about... one area where you have genuine conviction, not a vague interest. Then build one small practice around it. Write about it. Do it for someone else. Teach it. Apply it to your work. The feeling of purpose doesn't come before the practice. It follows it.

Ask yourself: what would I keep doing if nothing external reinforced it? Not "what am I passionate about" (too vague). Not "what am I good at" (too narrow). But: what would I return to, again and again, without external pressure pushing me there? Write down your answer. Then look at your last three months. Do your choices reflect it?

If not, you've found your starting point.

Dr. John Blakey, one of the UK's leading executive coaches and author of Force for Good, describes purpose as a discipline, not an inspiration. His clients... CEOs, sports coaches, public servants... don't arrive at purpose-driven leadership through a moment of clarity. They build it through years of deliberate choices.

I've been building mine for over twenty years. I still check the compass regularly. Some weeks I'm aligned. Some weeks I'm not. The discipline is in noticing the drift and correcting it, not in achieving some permanent state of purpose-clarity.

There's no moment where the clouds part and a voice says "you have found your purpose." There's the slow accumulation of choices, which... looked at from a distance, start to look like a life well-directed.

The work. And yes... it's harder than finding yourself. But it's a lot more reliable.

Harvard Business Review has covered this pattern for years... the pattern of people arriving at midcareer success to find the life they'd built wasn't theirs. Not a crisis. Information.

What Feeding Your Purpose Looks Like

No grand revelation required. No quitting to sail around the world.

For me it looked like writing. I spent years as a tech leader... good at it, well paid for it. All along, the work I kept returning to was telling stories. Explaining ideas. Making complexity clear. When I started writing publicly, speaking at events, building content about leadership and technology and the messy reality of human work... something clicked. Not because the earlier work was bad. Because this was mine.

Feeding your purpose means doing a regular audit. Not annually at a performance review. Weekly. Ten minutes. Three questions:

• What did I do this week I'd do for free?
• What did I do this week leaving me empty despite being competent at it?
• Am I making decisions based on what I want, or what I think I should want?

The answers won't always be comfortable.

The Uncomfortable Part

Other people's purposes are often more immediately rewarding. Your company's purpose comes with a salary. Your boss's agenda comes with approval and visibility. Following the expected path comes with social comfort.

Your own purpose... often doesn't pay right away. It asks you to invest in something before you know whether it'll work. It asks you to say no to things looking good on paper but feeling wrong in your gut.

This is why most people don't do it. Not because they lack a purpose. Because they never make space to hear what it's telling them.

Blakey's line isn't designed to make you feel guilty. It's designed to make you look. If your week is full of other people's priorities... fine, bills are real. But if your YEARS are full of other people's priorities, and you've stopped asking whether this is what you want... the problem is clear.

Start With One Question

You don't need to redesign your life this week. One question:

What do I want the next five years to be FOR?

Not for your company. Not for your kids' college fund (real concern, not dismissing it). Not for the LinkedIn version of your career. For you. What are you building?

If you answer clearly, you're feeding your purpose. If you struggle to answer... someone else probably is.

The clock runs either way.

A 2024 study published in Management Science, led by Matthew Bidwell of Wharton and J.R. Keller of Cornell, tracked employees at a large healthcare organization over eight years. People who made lateral moves... stepping sideways into different roles at the same level... were 20% more likely to be promoted within three to four years. They also saw 16% more salary growth over five years compared to peers who stayed in their lane.

Twenty percent. Sixteen percent. Not small numbers.

The researchers' finding: "the career benefits of lateral mobility stem from skill diversification rather than immediate job performance enhancement."

Your performance rating in the new role won't shoot up immediately. You're learning. But underneath, you're building breadth. And breadth is what senior roles require.

Cornell's follow-up research confirmed the mechanism: "upper level jobs use a wide but not necessarily deep set of skills, so a lateral move today will make the worker more productive in the future if the worker is promoted."

The ladder tells you to go deep. The playground rewards you for going wide.

My Own Spilled Map

When I moved from mobile development into cross-functional engineering management, I stepped sideways. I stopped writing code every day. Technical depth narrowed in exchange for organizational breadth.

It felt risky at the time. I was good at Android development. Walking away felt like giving something up.

What I gained was the ability to lead teams building products across platforms, manage stakeholders, read business dynamics, and understand the human side of delivery. Those skills are worth more than my ability to fix a RecyclerView bug.

When I later moved from engineering management into HR technology, nothing about it was a ladder move. A jump to a completely different playground. Every odd angle of my background became an asset. Systems thinking, people experience, product delivery instinct... the combination would not exist if I'd stayed on the ladder.

The detours were the education.

Breadth Is the Promotion Strategy Nobody Talks About

When you make a deliberate lateral move, you learn how a different part of the business thinks. You build relationships across functions. You see problems from angles you've never had before. You become the person who translates between worlds.

Senior leadership requires exactly this.

A senior director does not need to be the deepest expert in any one domain. They need to understand enough of everything to make good decisions, align people with different perspectives, and spot risk before it becomes a crisis.

Breadth builds this capacity. Depth alone doesn't.

So the question is not "will this move get me promoted?" The question is "will this move make me broader?" Broader leads to promoted. The data confirms it.

How to Play

If you're thinking of your career as a ladder, here's how to start treating it as a playground.

Say yes to cross-functional projects. If someone in a different department wants you involved in something outside your normal role, say yes. The short-term cost is time. The long-term gain is perspective and relationships.

Don't only optimize for title. A lateral move to a company with a better team, more interesting problems, or more organizational access is often worth more than a promotion at a company limiting you.

Take the role where you're not entirely sure you belong. Not the one where you're completely lost. The one where you think "I'm not sure I'm ready." Discomfort signals growth.

Stop comparing your path to someone else's. Ladder thinking creates comparison anxiety. You watch a colleague get promoted and feel behind. The playground doesn't work like this. Everyone's path looks different. The only question is whether yours is moving.

Talk to people in functions you don't understand. Spend time with finance, sales, operations, legal. You don't need to become an expert. You need to understand how they think and what they care about. Cross-functional knowledge compounds.

The Playground Is Not Chaos

Playing on the playground is not the same as wandering without direction.

Deliberate lateral moves are nothing like drifting. Every move I've made had logic to it, even when it wasn't visible at the time. Building technical depth first gave me credibility. Learning to manage teams gave me organizational understanding. Moving into HR technology let me apply all of it in a domain where people and systems intersect.

You need direction, even when the path is non-linear. The playground expands your range. It doesn't replace commitment.

Think of it like compound interest. Each move adds to the mix. Over time, the combination of experiences becomes unusual. Unusual is valuable.

Stop Waiting for Permission

The biggest thing holding people back from playground careers isn't opportunity. It's permission. Waiting for someone to say it's okay to step sideways. Worried about what peers will think. Afraid of looking like they're not serious about climbing.

Nobody is going to give you permission. You have to decide your career is yours to shape.

The ladder is someone else's story about how careers work. The playground is where you write your own.

What's the lateral move you've been talked out of?

Fredrik Haren describes himself as "The Creativity Explorer." He's spent over 20 years traveling the world, interviewing creative people in 75 countries, studying what makes human creativity work. He's given over 2,000 keynotes on six continents.

One of his most direct pieces of advice: marry someone from a different culture. Or at least follow them on Facebook.

It sounds flippant. It isn't.

The Assumptions You Don't Know You Have

When you live inside a single culture long enough, you stop seeing it.

The assumptions become invisible. The defaults feel obvious. You stop asking why things are done a certain way because everyone around you accepts this is simply how things are done.

I noticed this when I arrived in London.

In America, you tell a new colleague everything about yourself... your career, your ambitions, your weekend plans, where you grew up. Openness is normal. Warmth is immediate. In London, you earn those conversations over months. The same behavior reads as friendly in one place and exhausting in the other.

The first time I walked into a British meeting expecting American-style brainstorming and got polite, careful silence instead, I thought something was wrong. No one was engaging. No one was pushing back on my ideas. I assumed they were unimpressed, disinterested, or afraid.

Three months in, I learned: they were thinking. And they'd assumed I was done talking when I asked for input. The silence wasn't empty. It was where British meetings go to work.

Feedback works differently too. An American manager gives feedback directly, in the moment, and considers it respectful to be straight. A British manager often wraps the same message in so much politeness the actual feedback disappears. Neither knows they're doing it. Both feel they're being professional.

Career ambition shows up differently. Humility means something different. The person who says "I suppose I've had a reasonable amount of success" in London might be describing the same career as the person in New York who says "I've done pretty well for myself." Read those signals wrong and you'll mismanage people.

Once I saw this, I never saw it the same way again. I started noticing all the other defaults I'd been carrying around without knowing it. Assumptions about hierarchy. About who gets to speak in a meeting. About what counts as appropriate feedback. About what hour the workday ends.

Every one of those moments forced me to update my mental model. To hold two different ways of doing something in my head at once and ask which one was better... or whether "better" was the wrong question entirely.

What This Has to Do With Leadership

Every team you lead is full of people who don't see the world the way you do.

Not because they're from different countries... although some of them are. Because they've lived different lives. Different family structures, different educational paths, different first jobs, different failures, different reference points for what normal looks like.

If you've only ever seen the world through one set of assumptions, you'll miss most of what your team is telling you. Not intentionally. You'll hear the words and miss the meaning.

The managers who struggle most with their people aren't the ones who lack technical skill. They're the ones who've never seriously had to update how they see the world. They've been surrounded by people who think like them for so long they assume everyone thinks the same way.

They don't. And the cost shows up in missed feedback, broken trust, and teams who stop bringing real problems to their manager.

You Don't Have to Move Countries

Fredrik's "marry someone from a different culture" line is deliberately provocative. He's not telling you to choose a partner based on their passport.

He's saying: build relationships where you're regularly exposed to a genuinely different way of seeing things. Not a surface-level different. A deep different. Someone whose assumptions about how the world works don't match yours.

Most of us don't do this. We naturally gravitate toward people who think like us, who have the same professional background, who read the same publications, who went to similar schools. Social media feeds become echo chambers by design. Professional networks become monocultures.

And then we wonder why our thinking feels stale. Why we keep arriving at the same solutions to the same problems.

The Low-Barrier Version

Not everyone wants to move to a different country. Fair enough.

Fredrik's practical suggestion: if you won't marry someone from a different culture, at least follow them on social media. Actively seek out voices from different countries, different industries, different life experiences.

This isn't about being open-minded in a vague, virtue-signalling way. It's a deliberate practice.

Who did you read last week? Who challenged something you assumed was obvious? When did you last walk away from a conversation seeing something differently?

If you're drawing a blank, worth paying attention to.

When Worlds Collide, Ideas Multiply

When I look back at the work I'm proudest of, it almost always came from unexpected connections. Ideas from one domain landing in a completely different context.

The US Army's approach to mission briefing... structured, precise, with no ambiguity about who owns what decision... ended up shaping how I run engineering post-mortems. The British instinct toward understatement taught me to listen harder for what isn't being said. Working in consumer fintech and then HR tech showed me how radically different the same conversation looks from different sides of the table.

The same thing happens across professional cultures. When I moved from writing software to leading teams, I had to completely rebuild how I thought about accountability. When I moved into HR tech after years in fintech, I had to rebuild how I thought about the customer. When I started speaking at conferences, I had to learn to think about ideas the way communicators do, not engineers.

Each time, the transition was uncomfortable. Each time, I came out with a wider set of tools than I went in with.

None of those connections were planned. They happened because I'd been exposed to genuinely different ways of doing things.

Fredrik calls this "making the pie bigger." The more perspectives you've genuinely absorbed, the bigger your creative repertoire. You're not drawing on your own experience alone. You're drawing on a much wider pool of human problem-solving.

This is not about consuming diversity as a box-ticking exercise. It's about genuinely engaging with people who see things differently, being curious enough to understand their perspective on its own terms, and letting it change how you think.

The Check-In Worth Doing

Look at your information diet for the past month. Not your intentions. What you've read, watched, listened to, and discussed.

How many of those sources come from people who share your nationality? Your industry? Your professional background? Your political leanings?

If the answer is "most of them," you've built a narrow world. Narrow worlds produce narrow thinking.

You don't have to do anything dramatic. Follow three people this week who see the world differently than you do. Not to argue with them. To understand them.

Read someone from a country you've never visited. Listen to a podcast from an industry you know nothing about. Have a real conversation with someone whose career looks nothing like yours.

Your thinking will get sharper for it. Your leadership will improve. And you might start to notice the assumptions you've been carrying around without knowing it... the ones doing your thinking for you.

A 2025 study covered by Forbes reports job burnout at 66%... an all-time high. A separate report from The Interview Guys puts it at 82% of employees. Numbers like those tell you something is broken at a systems level.

And yes, workplaces share blame. Bad leadership. Unrealistic expectations. Poor culture. My research over at Step It Up HR found 99.5% of survey respondents had experienced one or more types of bad bosses in their career. Systems do real damage.

But inside those systems, people make choices every day. To stay late. To skip the gym. To say yes to one more thing. To ignore the ache in their chest. To stay silent.

Those are choices.

Uncomfortable to say. Worth saying.

When I look back at the stretches of my career where I was closest to the edge, I see a pattern. Nobody held a gun to my head. I made trade-offs. Every. Single. Time. And I told myself a story about why each one was necessary.

The Addiction Nobody Names

Research from the International OCPD Foundation describes how workaholic behavior is socially acceptable and actively encouraged by employers. The "long hours culture" is real, it's documented, and it's hiding in plain sight.

We have a word for alcoholism. We have treatment programs for drug dependency. But working 70-hour weeks gets you promoted.

The person who leaves on time gets quiet looks. The one who answers email at midnight gets praised in Monday's standup. We've built cultures that reward the addict and shame the healthy.

Workaholism borrows its name from alcoholism for a reason. The compulsion is real. The denial is real. The social reinforcement is real. The difference is your boss hands you a bonus instead of an intervention.

I've led teams while modeling exactly this behavior. When you're the first email in someone's inbox on a Saturday morning, you send a message whether you intend to or not. You normalize it for them. They feel the pressure to match it. They pass it down. The addiction spreads through an org chart faster than any memo about wellbeing.

And the insidious part? It feels good. For a while. The productivity hit. The recognition. The sense of being needed. That's the trap. By the time it stops feeling good, you're already deep in it.

When Your Body Takes Over

At some point, if you ignore enough signals, your body stops waiting for your decision. It makes the decision for you.

A panic attack at your desk. A crying spell you won't explain. A doctor telling you your blood pressure is too high for someone your age. Or the quieter version: waking up and feeling nothing. Not tired, not stressed. Empty.

Your body sends warnings for months before it gets to that point. Little ones at first:

• Trouble sleeping, even when you're exhausted
• Short fuse with no obvious cause
• The Sunday-night dread beginning Saturday afternoon
• Losing interest in things you used to enjoy

Mental Health America lists frequent physical symptoms as key burnout indicators: headaches, digestive issues, muscle tension. Your body speaks before your mind admits anything is wrong.

When I ignored those signals, they stopped whispering and started shouting. And by the time they shout, you've run out of runway. Recovery at that point isn't a lifestyle adjustment. It's a forced stop.

The cruel irony: the more you ignore the warnings, the longer the recovery takes. What would have been a two-week course correction becomes a six-month rebuild.

The Mirror Moment

There's a moment I call the mirror moment. When you stop and see yourself clearly for the first time in months.

For me it came after a stretch of relentless travel, back-to-back client work, and six months of poor sleep. I looked in the mirror one morning and didn't recognize the face looking back. The outside was holding together fine. The inside had been running on fumes.

The uncomfortable part wasn't the exhaustion. It was seeing how many small choices had led me there.

The late emails I didn't need to send. The projects I took on because disappointing someone felt worse than burning myself out. The weekends I worked through because it felt virtuous.

Virtue. That's the word we use to dress up self-destruction.

I wonder how many people around me were making the same small choices, stacking them up, telling themselves the same story. The data suggests a lot. Most of them, and most of you reading this, have been there or are there now.

What Doesn't Work

Let's be direct about what doesn't fix burnout: taking a week off and returning to exactly the same conditions.

Research published in ScienceDirect on burnout recovery found the best outcomes when personal agency was high and reinforced by a supportive environment. Translation: you need to change things, not only pause them.

A spa day treats the symptom. What treats the cause is harder and less Instagrammable.

It's saying no to things that don't deserve a yes. That's not a skill people teach you. You have to build it, and it feels wrong at first, every time.

It's building a schedule with actual white space in it... not aspirational white space that fills up by Tuesday. Real gaps. Time you protect.

It's sleeping. Not optimizing sleep. Sleeping.

It's an honest conversation with yourself about what you're running toward and what you're running away from. Those aren't always the same thing, and the answer surprises people.

And sometimes it's leaving. Not every environment is fixable. Some jobs, some cultures, some managers don't want you healthy. They want you productive. Those aren't the same thing, and knowing the difference matters more than you'd expect. If your workplace needs you exhausted to function, that's information.

The Choice, Right Now

I'm not here to sell you a wellness routine. I don't believe candles fix systemic overwork.

What I believe: you have more agency than burnout culture tells you.

Not unlimited agency. Not blame-yourself-for-everything agency. But enough to notice the choices you're making before your body starts making them for you.

This week there's a wave of social media fatigue running through every platform. People are exhausted by being always-on, always-available, always-reachable. That's not nostalgia for simpler times. That's a collective signal. Burnout culture isn't limited to the office anymore. It's in your phone. It's in your notifications. It followed you home, and most of us let it in.

The question worth sitting with: what is one choice you're making right now that you know isn't sustainable?

Not a list. Not a life overhaul. One thing.

Because burnout doesn't ask permission. But before it gets there, you had a window to choose differently.

The question is whether you'll take it.

Research from MIT Sloan found women received higher average performance ratings than their male colleagues, yet received 8.3% lower ratings on "potential" and were 14% less likely to be promoted. The performance was there. The visibility was not translating into recognition. This is not a women-only problem. It is a workplace-wide one. How your work is perceived depends enormously on how it is communicated.

What Changed for Me

At some point I stopped waiting to be noticed and started making sure my work was noticed.

Not in an obnoxious way. I did not start sending "look at me" emails or dominating every meeting. But I changed a few things, and the difference was immediate.

I started talking about my work in terms of outcomes, not outputs. Instead of "I shipped the feature," it became "the feature went live and here is what we saw." Numbers. Impact. The story behind the work.

I started showing up in the rooms where decisions happen. Not to perform... to contribute. Contributing means you have something real to say and you say it. It means people start associating your name with ideas they find useful.

I started building relationships outside my immediate team. The senior leader who had no idea who I was... I made sure she knew who I was. Not by being annoying, by being useful. By finding the things she cared about and finding ways to contribute to them.

I started asking for feedback from people whose opinions shaped where I might go next, instead of waiting for a formal review to tell me whether I was on the right track.

Things changed. Doors opened. My name started coming up.

Self-Promotion Is Not a Dirty Word

Grace Judson has a phrase I keep coming back to: self-promotion is essential.

Not as a dirty trick. Not as a substitute for strong work. As a legitimate part of professional life.

The rule book most of us grew up with said the opposite. Keep your head down. Let the work speak. Don't be seen to want things too much.

Burn it.

Doing great work in silence is a choice. A choice with consequences.

Around 85% of jobs are filled through networking, according to research aggregated by Forbes. Promotions follow the same pattern. The person who gets the role is often not the one who worked hardest in isolation. It is the person whose name came up when someone asked, "who should we consider?"

Is your name coming up in those conversations?

Three Things You Do Differently Starting Now

If you are sitting somewhere recognizing yourself in this post, here is where to start.

Report your wins. One short, factual message to your manager after something ships. What went out, what the outcome was, what it means. Not a performance. A status update with teeth.

Get into at least one room. Find a meeting, a working group, a cross-team initiative where people outside your immediate bubble are present. Show up prepared. Say something useful. Repeat until your name is familiar.

Build one relationship upward. Not networking in the hollow, forced sense. Find one person a level or two above you whose work you respect, and find a genuine way to be useful to them. Ask a thoughtful question. Share something relevant. It compounds over time.

This Is Not About Being Fake

I want to head off the obvious objection. This is not advice to become a politician. Not advice to perform confidence you do not feel, or to overstate what you have delivered.

This is about not hiding work you are proud of.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to grow. Nothing wrong with making sure the right people see what you are capable of. The professionals I respect most are not the ones who talked the loudest. They are the ones who built real relationships, communicated honestly about their work, and showed up with consistency.

Hard work is necessary. It is not sufficient.

If you are delivering great work right now and wondering why nothing is moving... the work is not the problem. The visibility is.

What would it take to make one thing visible this week?

The workplace and salary frustration posts on Reddit aren't about money. They're about people who optimized for success and found it hollow.

More pay doesn't fix a hollow feeling. A better title doesn't fix it either.

John Blakey, a leadership coach who has thought about this longer than most, puts it plainly: stop aiming for success. Aim for significance.

It sounds like something on a motivational poster. It isn't.

What Significance Is

Significance is not grand or dramatic. You don't have to write a book or start a charity or give a TED talk.

Significance is the difference you made that mattered to someone else.

I've been thinking about the moments in my career I remember most. Not the promotions. Not the salary milestones. The moments where something I did, or said, or didn't say, landed for another person.

The junior developer I stayed late with when she was stuck on a problem I'd solved years earlier. Not because it was my job. Because I remembered what stuck felt like, and I knew how much a calm voice in that moment was worth.

The honest conversation with a direct report heading toward a mistake visible from a mile away. Not a comfortable conversation. One where I told him the truth he didn't want, and he came back six months later to say it was the most useful thing a manager had ever done for him.

The writing I started doing here, and on Step It Up HR, not to build an audience or generate leads, but because I'd learned things the hard way and it seemed worth writing down in case someone else was walking the same road.

None of those are on my CV. All of them are things I'd point to if someone asked what I was proud of.

That's significance. And it's measurable too, in its own way. Not by a number. By whether you'd stand behind it when the metrics don't matter.

How Success and Significance Diverge

Here's where it gets uncomfortable.

Success asks: how am I doing relative to others? Significance asks: what have I done for others?

They're not opposites. You need both. But the more you pursue only the first, the less the second tends to happen.

When you're optimizing for the next promotion, you spend your energy on visibility, on being in the right meetings, on managing up. Nothing wrong with that. But it crowds out the things that build significance. The time investment that doesn't show up in a performance review. The honest conversation that doesn't make you look good in the short term. The support of someone who has nothing to offer you in return.

The best leaders I've known managed both. But they made a choice, sometimes daily, about which one they were optimizing for in a given moment.

That choice shapes everything.

The Shift Worth Making

I won't pretend I've finished making this shift. I haven't.

But a few things changed when I stopped treating success as the destination.

The questions I ask in one-on-ones changed. I stopped leading with "how are you tracking against your goals?" and started asking things like "what's making your work feel worth doing right now?" The conversations got real faster.

The writing changed. I stopped worrying about whether posts would perform and started asking whether they contained something true and useful. The posts that aimed at nothing in particular are the ones people share.

The way I measure a working week changed. I still notice the outputs. But I notice something else too: did I do anything this week that mattered to a person, not a metric?

That's a different question. And it leads to different behavior.

What Matters When Nobody's Watching

There's a version of a career where you optimize every move for maximum advancement, and you succeed. You reach seniority. You earn well. You get the recognition.

And there's a version where you mix advancement with purpose. Where you do the things that don't go on the CV alongside the things that do.

The second version takes longer to see clearly. It doesn't show up on a LinkedIn profile or a salary comparison. But it's what you have when the scorecard stops mattering.

The leaders I most respected across my career (not the most promoted, the most respected) were not the ones who'd maximized for success. They were the ones who'd built something worth pointing to. Who'd changed the arc of someone else's story. Who'd done work that meant something beyond their own progression.

That's what John Blakey is pointing at. Not: don't succeed. But: know what you're building.

Research on the psychology of meaning consistently shows the difference between extrinsic markers of success and the deeper satisfaction that comes from genuine contribution. The research is interesting. The real argument isn't academic, though. It's personal.

When you're 70, looking back at your working life, the promotions won't be the story. The people will be. The moments will be. The difference you made, or didn't make, will be.

So what are you building?

Then Ted starts talking. He quotes "Walt Whitman"... who, as it turns out, never wrote those words. The quote is misattributed. Nobody knows who first said it. The Snopes piece on this is worth a read, if you're curious.

"Be curious, not judgemental," Ted says.

Then he wins the game. Decisively. Because Ted had been watching Rupert's technique the whole time. While Rupert was busy judging, Ted was busy learning.

I've returned to this scene more times than I'd care to admit.

The Default Mode

Your brain has a default mode. It isn't curiosity.

Under pressure, your brain defaults to threat assessment. It takes in new information and asks: is this safe or dangerous? Is this person with me or against me? Does this situation confirm what I already believe, or does it challenge me?

Judgment is fast. Efficient. It's your brain doing what brains evolved to do.

The problem is most situations at work... and in life... aren't life-or-death threats. They're complicated. Messy. Full of context you don't have yet.

When you judge first, you close off the information you needed to understand the situation properly.

As the team at BeHumanize put it in their piece From Judgment to Curiosity: "Most workplace conflict does not start with malice. It starts with interpretation." Your brain builds a story. The story feels like truth. Then you act on the story, not the facts.

My Own Rupert Moment

I'm not proud of this. But I've been Rupert more than once.

Early in my career, I managed a developer who was consistently late to meetings, gave short answers during updates, and never seemed engaged in standups. I'd made up my mind: he was coasting. Didn't care. Showing up for the paycheck and nothing else.

So I started managing him differently. Less trust, more oversight. I stopped including him in decisions. I told myself I was being "professional" about it. But the signal I was sending was clear enough.

Months later, during a one-on-one I almost cancelled, he told me his daughter had been seriously ill for most of the year. He'd been commuting to a specialist appointment every Tuesday... the day he was always late. He was exhausted and scared, and still showing up every single day.

He wasn't coasting. He was surviving.

I'd been judging him from a position of complete ignorance. And in doing so, I made his already hard year harder.

What Curiosity Looks Like in Practice

People talk about curiosity like it's a personality trait. Either you're wired for it or you're not. I don't buy this framing.

Curiosity, in the sense I'm describing, is a choice. A deliberate one. It's the choice to pause before you interpret. To ask before you conclude.

Here's what it looks like in practice:

Instead of: "He's always pushing back in meetings. He's a blocker." Try: "He pushes back a lot. What is he seeing?"

Instead of: "She's been quiet this week. She must be checked out." Try: "She's been quiet. I'll check in and ask."

Instead of: "This team doesn't care about quality." Try: "What would make it easy for this team to care about quality?"

The questions feel small. The shift in outcome is enormous.

As Tom Cutler writes at the Cutlefish Substack, the most capable leaders approach situations with "curiosity and a light touch... resisting the impulse to judge and act, while creating space to explore the thoughts and feelings." Not softness. Discipline.

Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds

Choosing curiosity over judgment is a cognitive effort. Your brain wants resolution. It wants a clean story, a label to file away. Staying curious means keeping things open longer than feels comfortable.

There's also a status element to it. Asking genuine questions... the kind where you genuinely don't know the answer... makes you feel exposed. It signals you don't have everything figured out. In many workplace cultures, this feels risky.

But here's what I've noticed: leaders who ask the best questions get the best information. Leaders who rush to judgment get less information over time, as people learn not to bring them anything complicated or uncertain.

You train your team on what's safe to bring you.

The Pause Is the Practice

The BeHumanize piece has a line I keep returning to: "Culture is built in the pause."

Not in the big speeches. Not in the vision statements or the town halls. In the moment between something happening and your response to it. Your real values live there.

Do you ask or do you tell? Do you get curious or do you get certain?

The pause is a practice. You build it the same way you build any skill: intentionally, repeatedly, with full awareness you'll fail at it regularly.

I fail at it regularly. I still walk into conversations having already made up my mind sometimes. I still catch myself reading tone into an email. The difference now is I recognise the pattern. And recognising the pattern gives me a chance to interrupt it.

For Leaders, This Is Not Optional

If you lead people... any people at all... your default setting gets amplified. Your team watches how you respond to uncertainty. They watch what happens when someone brings you a problem you didn't expect. They're learning, in real time, whether this organisation rewards curiosity or punishes it.

Research on psychological safety shows teams perform better when members feel safe to speak up, to ask questions, to admit they don't know something. The leader sets the tone for all of it.

If you judge first, your team will stop bringing you things worth judging. They'll pre-filter. Pre-spin. They'll work out what you want to hear and give you the sanitised version.

You won't notice it happening. The information will quietly stop flowing.

It Comes Back to Ted

The thing about the dart scene isn't the win. It's the setup.

Rupert spent the whole evening being certain. Certain he understood Ted. Certain of the outcome. His certainty looked like confidence. Like strength.

But Ted was learning the whole time. Watching, listening, taking in what was in front of him without deciding what it meant.

Rupert was judging. Ted was curious.

Whoever originally wrote those words... they were describing something worth practicing. Something separating people who keep learning from people who stop. People who build trust from people who erode it. People who lead well from people who lead badly.

Be curious, not judgemental.

Easier said. Worth the attempt.

What's your default setting, and when did it last cost you something?

John Hagel spent decades researching how large institutions evolve. He wrote about the expert trap directly. For over a century, the dominant organizational model rewarded experts above everything else. Credentials. Degrees. Experience records. Experts were hired to know things and repeat what they knew, faster and cheaper. In a stable world, this worked.

The world stopped being stable.

The rate of change in most fields means yesterday's expertise goes stale faster. The software engineer who stopped learning three years ago is behind. The HR leader working from the 2015 playbook is using an outdated map. The Army officer whose leadership model was built in a different era of warfare... well, I know something about this too.

When the environment changes and your identity doesn't, you've got a problem.

Three Times I Had to Kill the Label

I've been through this more than once, and I'll be honest, none of it was comfortable.

When I left the Army, I was a soldier. I knew how to operate inside structure, follow doctrine, lead under pressure. I was good at it. The problem was none of it transferred cleanly into a software engineering role. I had to start over as a beginner in something I'd never touched professionally.

Uncomfortable doesn't begin to describe it. I'd spent years being competent. Now I was the person asking basic questions and making beginner mistakes.

Then I became a software engineer. I built things. I got good. I started identifying as a technical person, the one in the room who understood how the code worked. People came to me with technical problems. I had answers. It felt good.

Then I moved into engineering management. Suddenly I wasn't writing code. I was listening, coaching, removing blockers, sitting in rooms talking about people instead of systems. The "technical expert" identity didn't fit. Clinging to it would have made me a worse manager, and I watched other people cling to it and become exactly this: brilliant individual contributors who were miserable and ineffective in leadership roles because they kept trying to be the smartest person in the room instead of the person who made the room smarter.

Now I'm in HR tech, speaking, and consulting. Work I genuinely love. Work I couldn't have predicted from my Army starting point. Work I wouldn't have found if I'd stayed attached to being an "engineering expert."

The thread across all of it? Each transition required me to stop being the expert and start being curious again.

There's something else worth naming here. The expert label isn't free. It carries a financial weight too. When you're known as the expert in X, stepping into Y means taking a pay cut or starting at the bottom of a new field. People see this as a reason not to change. I see it as evidence of how much the label controls us. We stay in roles no longer fitting us because the credential we've built feels too expensive to leave behind.

What Explorer Means

Explorer doesn't mean amateur. It doesn't mean pretending your experience doesn't exist. It's not a way of dressing up incompetence.

It means leading with curiosity instead of answers.

Jane Morgan, a leadership coach at IIL, wrote about a client who had built his entire career on being the person with the answers. Technically strong. His expert mode worked brilliantly for technical problems.

Then he moved into change management. The problems weren't technical anymore. They were human. His instinct to diagnose and prescribe fast made things worse. People felt steamrolled. Trust eroded.

The shift for him meant asking more questions. Sitting with ambiguity instead of rushing to resolve it. Treating his team as a source of answers, not a recipient of them.

When I started working on Step It Up HR and the BAT framework, I was not an HR expert. My career was in tech. But approaching it with genuine curiosity, about how feedback works, why bad bosses destroy teams, what behaviour change requires at its core, let me ask questions HR professionals with decades in the field had stopped asking. They already "knew" the answers.

Fresh eyes beat deep expertise more often than experts admit.

I see this pattern on Reddit right now too. There are endless threads from people who feel stuck because they've spent years building expertise in one area and the idea of starting over in another terrifies them. The label of "senior engineer" or "experienced manager" or "HR professional" has become something to protect rather than something to build from. The seniority becomes a prison.

Explorer gives you a way out of the prison. Not by pretending the expertise never happened, but by using it as a foundation instead of an identity.

How to Make the Shift

This isn't about deleting your credentials from LinkedIn. It's a quieter internal move. A decision about how you walk into a room.

Experts walk in with answers. Explorers walk in with questions.

Three things helped me make this shift:

Stop prefacing things with your credentials. You don't need to establish your status before every opinion. Let the idea stand on its own. If the idea is good, it doesn't need the authority prop. If it needs the prop, worth noticing.

Be honest about what you don't know. Not apologetically. Clearly and directly. "I haven't worked in this space before, so I'm curious about..." signals openness, not incompetence. People respond better to this than most experts expect, and it gives the room permission to do the same.

Get comfortable being a beginner again. Pick something you know nothing about and spend thirty days learning it seriously. Not to become an expert in it. To remember what genuine curiosity feels like. Most adults are so uncomfortable appearing unknowing and they stop doing this entirely. Their learning calcifies.

One Word

The eight-year-old son wasn't trying to give his father a reframe. Kids name things directly. They don't carry the same attachment to status labels we develop over careers.

Fredrick Haren swapped "expert" for "explorer." One word.

It shifted how he saw his work. How he introduced himself. What he went looking for. He's still the same person with the same knowledge and the same decades of research. But the lens changed.

I'm not an expert in any of the fields I work in. I'm a person who got intensely curious about how teams work, why leadership fails, what feedback does to human behaviour, and why the gap between knowing and doing is so much wider than most organizations admit.

Explorer. It fits better.

What would your work look like with the same swap?

I wrote a book. Bad Bosses Ruin Lives. I put my name on it, my ideas in it, and my reputation behind it. Then I started speaking at HR and L&D conferences across Europe. Iceland. Croatia. The UK.

I'm an American tech engineer. I was telling HR professionals how leadership works.

The imposter syndrome was real. The discomfort was real. I showed up anyway. Seven keynotes later, I'm still showing up. And every time I walk onto a stage, I'm aware I'm still not fully comfortable doing it. I've made peace with the fact I might never be. I do it anyway.

The Science of the Sweet Spot

The Yerkes-Dodson Law, established in 1908, describes the relationship between arousal and performance as an inverted U-curve. Too little challenge and you're flat and disengaged. Too much and you're overwhelmed. The sweet spot sits between these two poles, at a level of challenge pushing you without breaking you.

A 2021 study published in Psychological Science found treating discomfort as a signal of growth, rather than a warning to back off, increased both engagement and perceived goal achievement. The effect only appeared in areas causing genuine discomfort, not easy tasks dressed up as challenges.

The feeling of discomfort isn't a warning sign. It's a green light.

Your brain is wired to resist this. It reads discomfort as danger and tells you to retreat. The good news is your brain is wrong about this more often than it's right. The danger of staying in your comfort zone is quieter and slower than the danger of leaving it, but it's more certain.

Comfort Is a Liar

Here's what nobody tells you: comfort feels like wisdom.

When you're in a role you know well, delivering results you're able to predict, working with people who respect you... it feels like you've earned this. Like you deserve the ease.

And you have. You earned it.

But you didn't earn the right to stop growing.

I've watched brilliant engineers stay in the same role for five years because they were brilliant at it. I've watched managers stay at mid-level because it felt safe there. I've watched leaders stop reading, stop asking hard questions, stop challenging themselves, and then wonder why their careers felt hollow.

Right now, a lot of people are being pushed out of comfort zones whether they want it or not. Companies are restructuring. Roles are changing. Automation is replacing things people spent years getting good at.

The people I've seen handle this best are the ones who'd been regularly uncomfortable for years. They'd built the muscle. Disruption wasn't a crisis for them. It was familiar territory.

The ones struggling most are the ones for whom comfort had become the goal.

The Horse Isn't Moving

The Ted Lasso quote works because riding a horse isn't passive. If you're sitting comfortably, the horse is doing all the work. You're not communicating, not steering, not growing as a rider. You're cargo.

Your career is the same.

If your current role is completely comfortable, you're not steering anymore. You're cargo. The work is carrying you, not the other way around.

This isn't a complaint about success or seniority. It's a question about trajectory. What is your next uncomfortable thing? What would you be doing right now if you stopped waiting to feel ready?

What Are You Avoiding?

There's something you know you should be doing. A conversation you've been putting off. A role you've been telling yourself you're not ready for. A project you've been waiting to feel confident enough about before you start.

You won't feel ready. Readiness doesn't work like this. You become ready by doing the thing.

The discomfort you feel when you look at what's next... the tightening in your chest, the "not yet" voice in your head... it's the signal. Not to stop. To go.

I didn't become a better engineer by staying comfortable with my existing skills. I didn't become a better leader by managing teams I already knew how to manage. I didn't become a speaker by waiting until I felt like one.

I became those things by showing up when I wasn't ready, being uncomfortable in public, and staying in the saddle.

If it's comfortable, you're doing it wrong.

What are you waiting to feel ready for? Go do it badly. Then do it better.

Psychology Today covered this well, noting that naysayers become powerful motivation sources when you flip the script -- treating their skepticism not as evidence against you, but as evidence you're doing something worth doing.

How to Turn Doubt Into Drive

Converting doubt into fuel doesn't happen automatically. It takes a few deliberate choices.

Write It Down

When someone expresses doubt about you, don't bury it. Write it down. "They think I'm too technical to lead." Seeing the words on paper strips some of the sting. It also forces you to engage with the actual claim instead of only reacting to the emotional impact.

Ask One Honest Question

Is there anything true in this?

Honest answer only. Not defensive, not reflexively dismissive.

If there's something real in the criticism, fix it. A naysayer who's accidentally right still deserves a hearing, even if their delivery was terrible.

If there's nothing true in it, good. Now you know what you're working against. Not the person who doubted you. The version of yourself they've projected onto you.

Make a Private Commitment

Write it somewhere personal. "They said I wouldn't. Here's what I'm going to do instead."

This is not a revenge plan. It's a commitment device. When the work gets hard, and it will, pulling out those words reminds you why you started. Not to prove something to someone else. To keep a promise you made to yourself.

Then Stop Thinking About Them

This is the step most people skip.

The fuel runs out. If you spend too long feeding on someone else's doubt, it curdles into obsession. You stop working toward something and start working against someone.

"Toward" is sustainable. "Against" drains you.

Use the doubt to get moving. Then let the naysayer fade into the background.

Where This Goes Wrong

There's a version of this story with a bad ending.

Some people become so defined by the naysayers in their past, they secretly aim every achievement at a ghost. They never get to enjoy the wins. They measure every milestone against someone who isn't even watching anymore.

I've seen this pattern in leaders who are technically brilliant but chronically unhappy. Their whole identity gets wrapped up in proving someone wrong, and they miss the point of the work itself. They become sharp but hollow. Accomplished but isolated.

If your career runs primarily on spite, you'll work hard. You'll achieve things. And you'll be exhausted and hollow at the finish line.

Use doubt as ignition, not as a permanent energy source. Once you're moving, once you've built momentum, find better reasons to keep going. The work itself. The people you're helping. The problems you're solving. Your own curiosity about what you're capable of.

Those sustain you. Spite doesn't.

Naysayers are useful for getting off the starting line. They're poor long-term travel companions.

When You Succeed

When you reach the place the naysayer said you'd never reach, you have a choice.

Some people go back and wave the achievement in their face. I understand the impulse. It's human. And occasionally, done quietly and without cruelty, it closes a loop.

But in most cases, the more powerful move is to simply move on. Not because they deserve your generosity. Because you do.

Carrying a grudge is weight you don't need. You've already extracted the value from their doubt. The account is settled.

If they show up again and they're open to it, you tell them the truth: "You pushed me harder than you intended. I'm not sure I'd be here without it." And you mean it.

Not weakness. A recognition by someone who has genuinely converted a negative into an asset.

The Bigger Picture

The people who've shaped my career most aren't only the ones who believed in me from day one. Some of them are the ones who looked me in the eye and said I'd fail.

They were wrong. And they were useful.

Your naysayers are not your enemies. They're not your allies either. They're a resource, and most people waste it by either collapsing under the doubt or burning themselves out fighting it.

The person who told you you'd fail... they're not your fuel forever. They're your ignition. There's a difference. A match lights the fire. The fire feeds itself after.

Use it well. Extract what you need. Then put the container down.

The direction you're heading matters more than who's watching you leave.

What's the most useful thing a naysayer ever said to you? Think about it seriously. Chances are, you owe them something.

McKinsey's research on why bad leaders rise to the top is worth your time. They found we consistently mistake confidence for competence. Leaders who project certainty get promoted. Leaders who project nuance and honesty get passed over. It's one of the reasons so many organizations end up with people at the top who are good at looking decisive while being genuinely mediocre at the work of leadership.

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic's research found the traits helping people reach leadership positions... narcissism, overconfidence, low emotional intelligence... are precisely the traits making them ineffective once they get there.

We are, collectively, terrible at selecting leaders. Part of the problem comes from confusing the performance of certainty with genuine capability. We keep rewarding how someone looks under pressure over whether they're making good decisions.

The leader who projects total confidence in an ambiguous situation isn't demonstrating strength. They're demonstrating they value their image more than your reality.

I've Done It Both Ways

Early in my career, I thought my job as a leader was to have the answers. People asked questions, and my internal panic about not knowing would push me to say something... anything... sounding confident.

Sometimes I was right. Plenty of times I wasn't. And on the ones where I wasn't? My team quietly stopped bringing me the hard questions. Not because they stopped having them. Because they stopped trusting they'd get straight answers.

There's a particular kind of loneliness in being the leader who bluffs. You end up in a room full of people who are performing confidence back at you, because you've set the expectation. Nobody admits what they don't know. The whole organization starts running on false certainty, and the gap between what's said in meetings and what's true keeps growing.

The shift for me came during a particularly rough quarter. We had a problem I genuinely didn't understand. Instead of bluffing my way through it, I sat down with the team and said: "I don't know. I don't know what the answer is here, and I'd rather say so than give you something I'm not sure about."

The reaction surprised me. Relief. Visible relief. A couple of people said later it was the most honest thing a manager had said to them in years.

Afterward, the conversation was completely different. We were solving the problem together instead of waiting for me to decree a solution from on high.

Why "I Don't Know" Builds More Trust Than the Wrong Answer

Google spent years studying what makes teams effective. Their Project Aristotle research, looking at hundreds of teams across the company, found the single biggest factor in team performance was psychological safety... the belief you won't be punished for speaking honestly, admitting mistakes, or raising concerns.

Psychological safety doesn't come from leaders who have all the answers. It comes from leaders who make it safe to not have all the answers.

When you, as the person at the top of the room, model honesty about what you don't know... you give everyone else permission to do the same. Suddenly people stop covering up their gaps. They start asking for help earlier. They flag problems before those problems become catastrophes.

The leader who always knows everything creates a team full of people pretending to know everything.

The leader who says "I don't know, let's figure this out" creates a team with the habit of genuinely working toward the right answer.

A Forbes analysis of leadership honesty makes the same point: leaders who admit uncertainty constructively build more trust and make better decisions than those who fake certainty. It's not weakness. It's a deliberate choice to prioritize accuracy over image.

How to Say "I Don't Know" Without Losing the Room

There's a weak version and a strong version of this.

The weak version is vague and defeated: "I'm not sure... it's hard to say... I'll have to check..." This doesn't build trust. It creates anxiety. It reads as a leader who's adrift.

The strong version is direct and action-oriented:

"I don't know the answer right now. Here's how I'm going to find out, and here's when I'll get back to you."

Or: "I don't know yet, and it's an important question. Let's make sure we get the right answer before we move."

Or, the most effective version: "I don't know... what do you think?"

This last one is worth sitting with. When a leader says "I don't know, what do you think?" to the room, a few things happen. They signal genuine interest in other people's perspectives. They create space for the person who does know the answer... because often someone in the room knows exactly what's needed and has been waiting to be asked. And they model the kind of curiosity Ted Lasso captured when he said: "Be curious, not judgemental."

Your team will give you better answers than your ego will.

The Leaders Worth Trusting

Looking back across my career, the leaders I've trusted most share one quality. They weren't afraid to not know. They weren't afraid of the question. They were focused on getting to the right answer, not on performing the impression of already having it.

The ones I've trusted least? Some of them were impressive in meetings. Sharp answers, confident delivery, zero hesitation. But over time, the answers didn't always hold up. The confidence was the point, not the accuracy. Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.

My own research, working with thousands of people across industries, found 99.5% of respondents had experienced one or more types of genuinely bad boss in their career. I don't think the number is as surprising as it sounds, once you understand how we select leaders. We keep rewarding performance over substance. We keep promoting the answer-theatre specialists.

Here's what's worth remembering: your team is watching you the same way you've watched the leaders above you. They're noticing whether your answers hold up. They're tracking the gap between what you say in the meeting and what happens six weeks later. They know when you're performing.

The leaders people write about with respect... the ones people call decade later to say "you changed my career"... are almost never the ones with a perfect answer to every question. They're the ones who were honest enough to say when they didn't know, curious enough to ask, and secure enough not to need to pretend otherwise.

Try This in Your Next Meeting

Pick one meeting this week. One question you don't fully know the answer to. Instead of reaching for the confident-sounding approximation, stop. Say: "I don't know... let me think about this properly." Or: "I don't know. Who in this room has a stronger view?"

Watch what happens.

You won't look weaker. You'll look more trustworthy. Because people know the difference between a leader who's genuinely thinking and one who's performing.

If 99.5% of your team has already worked for a bad boss, they know what answer theatre looks like. Give them something different.

His philosophy wasn't about being the smartest person in the room. He gave himself the title Dean of Dumbassery. His point: awareness of what you don't know, plus the willingness to work on it, beats arrogance every time.

WD-40 replaced the word "failure" with "learning moments." Not as a motivational poster slogan. As a real operating principle. Mistakes weren't career-ending events. They were data. The culture rewarded people for naming what they got wrong and explaining what they'd do differently.

A culture like this doesn't come from a performance playbook. It comes from a leader who goes first. Who sits in a room full of executives and says: "I don't know. What do you think?"

What Bad Bosses Do

Research from Step It Up HR found 99.5% of people surveyed had experienced at least one type of bad boss. One of the most common patterns? The boss who was never wrong.

Not the boss who got things wrong. The boss who got things wrong and couldn't admit it. Who reinterpreted facts to fit conclusions already reached. Whose certainty was always highest precisely when the ground beneath it was shakiest.

People don't leave companies. They leave managers who make them feel stupid for knowing more than the person in charge. When you pretend to know something you don't, you signal two things: your ego matters more than accuracy, and admitting uncertainty is not safe here. Your team absorbs both lessons immediately.

The Army Taught Me the Other Side of This

In the military, "I don't know, but I'll find out" is a complete, correct answer to almost anything. There's no shame in it. You say it, you find out, you report back.

The Army also taught me what happens when people fake it.

When someone doesn't know a procedure but won't admit it, people get hurt. Equipment breaks. Missions fail. There's no softer way to say it. Pretending to know something in a high-stakes environment isn't bravado. It's negligence.

Corporate life rarely carries those stakes. But the dynamic is identical. When your team sees you bluff through ignorance, they learn bluffing is acceptable. Problems go unreported. Decisions get made on bad information. The costs compound quietly until they don't.

Your Team Already Knows What You Don't Know

Most leaders miss something. Your team has usually already mapped your knowledge gaps. They've watched you long enough to know where your blind spots are. The question isn't whether they know. The question is whether they feel safe enough to fill the gap.

When you model intellectual humility, when you say "I'm not the expert on this, let's hear from Sarah," you do several things at once.

You tell your team their knowledge has value. You create safety for others to admit uncertainty. You get better information faster. And you build trust, the type which survives a crisis.

Henley Business School's research on senior leaders backs this up. Admitting uncertainty creates space for colleagues to develop and lead. It removes rigid thinking patterns. It opens the door to fresh perspectives on strategy and decisions.

The admission isn't weakness. It's an invitation.

The Practical Switch

Saying "I don't know" isn't enough on its own. What matters is what comes next.

There are three ways to handle not knowing:

1. Admit it and commit to finding out "I don't know. I'll research it and get back to you by [specific time]."

2. Admit it and bring in someone who does know "I'm not the right person for this. Let's get Lee on the call... this is his area."

3. Admit it and make it collaborative "I don't have a view on this. What do you see?"

All three are better than a bluff. All three build credibility faster than certainty theater.

The one thing to avoid: admitting you don't know without any follow-through. "I don't know" as a full stop signals indifference. What you're going for is intellectual honesty plus action.

When You Own Your Gaps, Your Team Fills Them

The unexpected benefit of dropping the performance? Your team starts showing up differently.

When the leader stops pretending to have all the answers, the people who do have answers finally speak. I've watched quieter engineers become the most valuable voices in a room once the senior leader stopped filling every silence with confident-sounding noise.

You don't have to have all the answers. You have to be the person willing to ask the right questions and act on what you hear.

Garry Ridge built a $3.5 billion business on this principle. He didn't do it by being the smartest person in the room. He did it by being the most honest one about what he didn't know, and by creating a culture where everyone around him felt safe enough to do the same.

There's a word for leaders who pretend to know everything: isolated. Cut off from real information, real problems, and the real capability of their teams.

There's a better word for the ones who don't: trusted.

So here's what's worth sitting with today. What is your team not telling you because they assume you already know?

Find out. Say "I don't know" and mean it. Then watch what opens up.

Stanford researchers published findings showing this kind of thinking leads to narrowmindedness. People who believe passions are fixed and waiting to be found give up faster when things get hard. They adapt less well. They're less likely to build work they genuinely love over time.

Mark Cuban put it differently: "Follow your effort. No one quits anything they're good at." What you put time into... what you keep doing when it's difficult... what you find yourself thinking about on a Sunday morning... those things are more useful data than a vague sense of what you're "meant" to do.

Cal Newport, in So Good They Can't Ignore You, makes the same point from the other direction. Passion follows competence. You get good at something and then you start to love it. The sequence runs opposite to what we tell people.

You don't find the work you love and then get good at it.

You get good at something, and then you love it.

What This Advice Does to Young People

When we tell young people to find their passion, we give them a task with no clear completion criteria. They look inside themselves, see a few interests and no obvious calling, and conclude something is wrong with them.

Nothing is wrong with them. They're 21. They haven't done enough things yet to know what they're good at.

And while they're waiting to feel called, they're not building skills. They're not trying things. They're not getting the experience which would give them real choices. With recession probability running at 30-45% right now according to major economic forecasters, sitting around waiting for passion to strike is a luxury most young people don't have. They need skills. They need adaptability. They need a track record of doing things.

My Career Was a Mess. That Was the Point.

I went through the Army. Then I studied Computer Science at the University of North Texas, graduating in 1993. Then I was a research engineer at Sun Laboratories. Then founder and partner across several tech ventures. Then Lead Mobile Engineer. Then Senior Engineering Manager at a fintech company in London, leading 43 people across 7 teams. Now I'm Chief Innovation Officer at Step It Up HR, writing, speaking, hosting a podcast.

No passion led me through any of it. Curiosity did. Interest did. Effort did.

The "passion" part... the part where I genuinely love what I do... came years in. When I was deep in it and good enough to see what was worth caring about.

The messy path gave me things a passion-first approach never would have produced: a wide skill set, resilience built from working across many different environments, and the confidence of someone who has done things rather than thought carefully about what to do.

What "Getting Messy" Looks Like

Getting messy means trying things before you know whether you'll be good at them. It means taking the interesting job, not the safe-seeming one. It means building a skill set looking incoherent from the outside but making complete sense from the inside, because you went toward what interested you.

This doesn't mean being passive. Being messy about a career is not the same as drifting. You're still making choices. You're choosing based on curiosity and effort, not on a grand vision of your purpose.

Things worth trying:

Try the thing you're afraid of. Not because you'll love it. Because you'll find out. Every experience gives you information. A year doing something you hate is as valuable as a year doing something you love.

Build skills in adjacent areas. You're a developer? Learn to present. You're in marketing? Learn to read a spreadsheet properly. Every skill you add gives you more options and makes you more useful in more contexts.

Pay attention to what you stick with when it's hard. Not what you enjoy when it's easy. What you keep going back to when it's difficult and frustrating. Your competence builds there, and competence is where passion follows.

Stop waiting to feel ready. Mastery comes before love, not after. You have to do the work to care about the work.

The Pressure to Have It Figured Out

There's something cruel about asking 21-year-olds what their passion is. They haven't had enough experiences to know what they're good at. They haven't failed enough to know what they care about. They haven't tried enough things to know what keeps them going at 11pm when they're tired.

We tell them the answer is inside them, waiting to be found. When they don't find it, they don't question whether the advice was wrong. They question themselves.

Research via 80,000 Hours shows four distinct ways "follow your passion" misleads people... and one of the most damaging is this: it encourages people to look inward for an answer built outward. Passion doesn't come from self-examination. It comes from work, from skill-building, from the experience of being good at something and seeing what becomes possible because of it.

What to Say Instead

Instead of "follow your passion," try this:

"Get good at something. Then get better at it. Be curious. Try things. Pay attention to what makes you want to keep going. Build from there."

It doesn't work as a commencement speech. It won't fit on a motivational poster. But it's how careers work... including the careers of people who look like they followed their passion.

Steve Jobs didn't have a passion for typography. He took a calligraphy class at Reed College because it seemed interesting. He had no idea where it would lead. A decade later, it shaped the typography of the Macintosh. Passion wasn't leading the way. Curiosity was... along with a willingness to try something and time.

Fast Company put it well: following competence instead of passion takes the pressure off. If someone tells you to follow your passion and you don't have one, you sit there worrying for months. Following your competence gives you somewhere to start.

Your career doesn't have to be planned. It has to be pursued.

The Messy Career Is the Right Career

I've moved through engineering, management, HR, speaking, writing. People ask how I got from point A to point B. The honest answer: I didn't know where B was when I left A.

I knew what I was interested in. I worked hard at it. I moved toward whatever seemed worth doing next. The career. The whole thing.

If you know a 21-year-old panicking because they haven't found their passion, share this. If you're 40 and still waiting to feel called, this is for you too. The call isn't coming. The work is here.

Don't find your passion. Build your skills. Let the passion catch up.

Remote workers are promoted 31% less frequently than office-based workers, according to an analysis by Live Data Technologies. Not because remote workers perform worse, often the opposite. But out of sight is out of mind for the people making promotion decisions.

A Pew Research survey found 63% of people who left jobs in 2021 cited a lack of advancement opportunities. Most of them were working hard. Hard work didn't make the organisation invest in keeping them.

The uncomfortable truth is your manager doesn't have perfect visibility into everything you do. They're managing their own workload, their own pressures, their own targets. They notice what's in front of them. If you're not putting your work in front of them, you're invisible.

This matters even more right now. When economic uncertainty looms, organisations tighten headcount. The people who survive the process are rarely the best workers. They're the workers whose value is most understood by the people making decisions. Invisible contributors get cut first. Not out of cruelty. Out of ignorance. The decision-makers simply don't know what they'd be losing.

Why We Resist Making Ourselves Visible

Most people hate self-promotion. I did for years. It felt like bragging. Like neediness. Like the sort of thing done by people who dominate meetings and take credit for other people's ideas.

This instinct isn't entirely wrong... it's being applied too broadly.

There is a real difference between loudly claiming credit for things you didn't do, and consistently making your contributions legible to the right people. One is dishonest. The other is professional responsibility.

Think of it this way. You've been asked to deliver something. You deliver it. You leave the room without saying a word. The work sits on a shelf. Did you deliver?

Not if nobody knows about it.

Self-advocacy isn't about inflating your achievements. It's about making sure your achievements count at all. If you don't do it, most organisations fill the gap with whoever is loudest... not whoever is best.

I've seen brilliant engineers, sharp analysts, and exceptional operators get passed over because they treated visibility like someone else's problem. It isn't. It's yours.

What This Looks Like in Practice

You don't need to become someone who talks constantly about themselves. The goal is making your work legible to people who need to know about it.

A few things worth trying, from my own experience and the teams I've built:

Document your wins in real time. Keep a running list of what you've shipped, what impact it had, and when. You'll need this in performance conversations, in 1:1s, in moments when someone asks "what have you been working on recently?" Don't rely on memory. Memory is generous to your failures and forgetful about your wins.

Share progress proactively. You don't need to wait for a scheduled meeting to tell your manager a project wrapped up well. A short message is not bragging. It's keeping the right people informed. They want to know.

Ask for the chance to present your work. If your team runs a demo, a show-and-tell, or an all-hands, get your work in front of people. Not to show off. To give others the chance to understand what you're doing and see its value. This builds credibility quietly and consistently over time.

Find a version of self-advocacy you're comfortable with. Some people are comfortable raising their voice in large meetings. Others do better in writing. Some build visibility through 1:1 conversations with senior leaders. There's no single formula. There's the version you'll stick to without wanting to hide under your desk.

The key is making it consistent. Visibility isn't a one-off move. It's a habit.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Here's something I've asked every person I've managed over the past decade. I first asked it of myself after missing out on a promotion I'd been working toward.

"If I left this organisation tomorrow, who would know what I'd contributed here?"

If you struggle to name three people who genuinely understand the scope and quality of your work... you have a visibility problem. Not a talent problem. Not a work ethic problem. A visibility problem. And unlike talent, visibility is something you choose to address.

The advice to keep your head down and work hard isn't wrong. Hard work matters enormously. But it's half the sentence. The full version is: do great work, and make sure the right people know about it.

Your work deserves to be seen. Making it visible is on you.

I write about leadership, engineering management, and building teams. Take a look at Bad Bosses Ruin Lives or explore more at Step It Up HR.

According to a Randstad survey, 42% of US employees would decline a promotion if offered one. The number surprised me the first time I read it. It does not surprise me anymore.

People are not lazy. They are not disengaged. They have simply realised something: going up is not the same thing as going forward.

There is a particular kind of career anxiety baked into ladder-thinking. Every review cycle becomes a performance. Every one-on-one becomes an audition. You are no longer doing the work for the sake of the work. You are doing the work to be seen doing the work. And somewhere along the way, the work itself becomes a vehicle rather than a destination.

I know this because I lived it. I have sat in annual reviews with a list of accomplishments I had carefully curated for the express purpose of making the case for the next title. Not because it reflected what mattered to me. Because it was what I thought the system wanted.

The Work Worth Being Proud Of

At Curve, I mentored seven engineers into leadership roles. Not because it was in my job description. Not because anyone asked me to. I did it because the work in front of me mattered and I saw what those people were capable of.

It was not a career move. It was not a stepping stone to anything. It was the work itself.

Looking back, those seven people are the part of my Curve chapter I am most proud of. Not the 25% delivery improvement. Not the £300k website migration saving. Those are fine numbers. But the people? The people are the thing.

I was not looking up when I did it. I was looking around. At who needed support. At what gaps existed. At what was happening in the room.

The strange thing is, none of it required a new title. None of it required permission. I did not need to be promoted to do the most meaningful work of my time there. I needed to stop obsessing over the ceiling long enough to see the floor.

The Sideways Step Everyone Underestimates

When I left Curve, I did not take the next rung. I took a hard left turn.

Chief Innovation Officer at Step It Up HR. Podcast host. Conference speaker across Europe, in Croatia, Iceland, the UK. Co-author of research used by thousands of employees. None of it was "up" by any traditional definition. It was sideways. Outward. Into territory I had never explored.

And it has been the most stretching, most interesting, most purposeful work of my career.

The conventional ladder would have had me hunting for a VP of Engineering role at a larger company. There is nothing wrong with this path. It is a fine path. But it was not the path with the interesting problems.

When I look at the work I do now... speaking at conferences about bad bosses and broken leadership culture, building tools and research used inside real organisations, hosting conversations on a podcast with people who have genuinely fascinating perspectives on the world of work... none of it sits neatly on a career ladder. You cannot easily compare "Chief Innovation Officer at a small HR consultancy" to "Senior Engineering Manager at a fintech." They live on different axes entirely.

The interesting problems were around me. Not above me.

What It Means to Look Around

Looking around is not settling. It is not giving up on ambition. It is a different kind of ambition... one measured by depth and breadth rather than height.

Looking around means:

Noticing the unmapped problems. The things in your organisation nobody has bothered to fix, because everyone is too busy climbing to pay attention to them. These are often the most interesting problems of all. They are invisible to people staring upward.

Learning from the people next to you. Not mentors above you. Not your manager's manager. The person two desks over who builds things differently, sees problems differently, comes from a different background. Lateral learning is underrated to a degree bordering on criminal.

Going deep instead of wide. Mastery is not glamorous. It does not photograph well on LinkedIn. But the engineer who understands a system five levels down is worth ten who skim the surface. Depth is a career asset most people trade away too quickly in pursuit of the next title.

Asking different questions. When you are constantly looking up, your questions are about advancement: How do I get to the next level? Who do I need to impress? What does the committee need to see? When you look around, the questions change: What is broken here? What have we stopped questioning? Who needs support and has not asked for it? Where is the work nobody else wants to do?

Following your own curiosity. I started writing about leadership and bad bosses not because it was strategically sound, but because I was obsessed by the topic. I had worked for terrible managers. I had watched talented people leave good companies because of mediocre bosses. I wanted to understand it and say something about it. The book, the podcast, the conference stages... all of it followed from paying attention to what genuinely interested me. Not from a career plan.

The Part Nobody Warns You About

When you stop optimising for the ladder, some things get harder.

LinkedIn performance metrics care about titles. Recruiters use seniority signals to filter CVs. Your parents will ask when you are going to get a "proper" promotion. These are real pressures. I am not dismissing them.

But the people I have met who do the most interesting, most impactful work... the ones who seem genuinely satisfied rather than perpetually stressed... almost universally tell the same story. At some point, they stopped looking up. They started looking at what was around them and went after it instead.

I spent years in rooms where the most interesting work was happening right beside me, and I was too busy staring at the ceiling to notice.

The career advice I wish someone had given me ten years ago is not complicated: the next rung is not the only direction.

What is happening around you right now, at your current level, in your current role? What problems are going unsolved? Who needs support? What is the most interesting work in the room?

Go after it.

Research on burnout and professional identity shows a weak or underdeveloped professional identity increases vulnerability to burnout by reducing coping resources and diminishing the meaning derived from work. In plain terms: when you don't know who you are at work, you have less to fall back on when things get hard.

And then there's the brain piece. Chronic burnout causes structural changes in the prefrontal cortex... the part responsible for decision-making and emotional regulation. By the time you're deeply burned out, the organ you'd use to assess whether you're burned out is already impaired.

I'm not sure about this part: The psychologicalscience.org page might have changed since the research was published... Ken's notes flagged it as potentially unavailable. The underlying science on burnout and prefrontal cortex impairment is well-documented, but verify the specific URL before citing it elsewhere.

You lose the ability to evaluate your own situation clearly. No amount of willpower fixes a damaged prefrontal cortex.

The Hiding Game

Forbes recently identified a pattern called "performative professionalism"... hiding who you are at work to stay employable. The research links it directly to burnout and inauthenticity.

When you spend eight or nine hours a day performing a version of yourself, exhaustion isn't a side effect. It's the guaranteed outcome.

People don't hide because they're weak. They hide because they don't have a clear enough sense of self to know what they stand for, or what's safe to show. So they show nothing real at all.

I've talked to enough people through my work at Step It Up HR to know how widespread this is. The performative professional is everywhere... head down, checking boxes, completing courses, adding LinkedIn badges, and drifting further from the question of who they are.

What Self-Knowledge Looks Like

Not a mindfulness lecture. I'm not going to tell you to meditate or journal your feelings.

Knowing yourself, in a career context, means being able to answer a few concrete questions:

What type of work energizes you vs. drains you? Not in theory. In practice. Think about specific projects from the last two years. When did you feel genuinely engaged? When did you feel hollow?

What are your real values... the ones you'd defend, not the ones on your LinkedIn bio? Most people list "integrity" or "collaboration." Most people haven't identified what they'd sacrifice for those values when something real is on the line.

What does your stress look like, early? Not the final-stage collapse. The early warning signals. Yours will differ from everyone else's. Most people learn them only after burnout has already hit.

What do you need from a leader? Autonomy? Clear direction? Frequent feedback? The absence of micromanagement? Where you'll thrive and where you'll deteriorate depends heavily on this... and most people never articulate it to themselves, let alone to hiring managers.

One tool worth exploring is the personal user manual... a written document where you articulate how you work, what you need, and what burns you out. The act of writing it forces clarity. Most people have never written down what they need from work. They've written CVs, objectives, and performance reviews... but never a document about who they are as a working human.

The Vaccine Metaphor

Kelly Swingler frames it well: a strong sense of self is a burnout vaccine.

A vaccine doesn't stop the virus from existing. It builds your defenses so the virus doesn't take hold.

When you know yourself well... when you know your values, your limits, your early warning signals, and what you need to sustain... you spot burnout conditions before they become a crisis. You notice when a role is asking you to perform for too long. You feel the misalignment earlier. You have internal language to name what's happening and act on it.

Without self-knowledge, you're unvaccinated. Every toxic environment, every poorly-fitted role, every excessive demand lands on someone with no immune response.

The saddest version of this is the high performer... driven, skilled, highly upskilled... who burns out because they never developed enough self-awareness to know they were running on fumes six months earlier.

An Honest Career Question

Here's something worth sitting with: how much of your career path has been driven by intentional self-knowledge? How much has been adding skills, chasing titles, and hoping the right fit shows up by accident?

I've made enough of the latter kind of move to know the cost.

Start here. Write down your last three roles. For each one, list what gave you energy and what drained it. Not what you were good at... what you wanted to do more of, and what you were relieved was someone else's problem.

Look for patterns. They're there. They've always been there.

Then take stock of how much time you've spent on courses, certifications, and frameworks in the last two years. Compare it with how much time you've spent understanding your own warning signals, values, and work needs.

The gap is usually embarrassing.

The Investment You're Skipping

Upskilling is a tool. A good one. Staying current matters.

But tools are useless without direction. And direction requires knowing yourself.

Invest an afternoon in the most important document you'll never publish: a clear, honest account of who you are at work, what you need, and what drains you dry.

This knowledge won't show up in a LinkedIn badge. It'll show up in the career decisions you stop making by accident.

What would you write in your own personal user manual? Start there.

The Training Associates wrote about this shift from expert to explorer in leadership. Their point: in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous world, the expert mindset isn't enough. Change moves too fast. Nobody has all the answers. Leaders who succeed stay curious.

My experience backs this up.

My best moments as a leader haven't been when I knew exactly what to do. They've been when I was genuinely figuring it out alongside my team.

The expert in the room shuts down conversation. The explorer opens it back up.

So Here's What I'm Trying

When someone asks what I do, I'm experimenting with "I work in leadership" rather than "I'm an expert in X." It feels less impressive. It's likely costing me something.

But it also keeps a door open. A door experts tend to close.

What would change about how you show up if you described yourself as an explorer rather than an expert?

According to Forbes in 2025, 66% of workers are experiencing job burnout. Two thirds. And yet the dominant culture in most workplaces, especially in tech and leadership, still treats exhaustion as a credential.

We wear the late nights. We wear the skipped lunches. We compete, sometimes without realising it, on who is most sacrificed to the work.

In this environment, the physical warning signs get reframed. Headaches become "it's a tough week." Sleep disruption becomes "I've always been like this." Loss of appetite becomes "I've been too busy to think about eating," which somehow reads as dedication rather than a red flag.

I did this for years. I am not proud of it.

The American Psychological Association defines burnout as "physical, emotional or mental exhaustion, accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance and negative attitudes." Not existential crisis. Not dramatic collapse. Exhaustion. Decreased motivation. Negative attitudes.

These sneak up so slowly you don't notice the change.

What the Body Says

Here are the physical signals I've learned to pay attention to, in myself and in people I manage.

Sleep changes. Not necessarily insomnia. It's sleep not restoring. You sleep eight hours and wake feeling like you slept four. Or you wake early with your mind already at full speed. The body has stopped recovering during sleep.

The afternoon headache. A persistent, low-grade pressure arriving in the early afternoon, reliably, day after day. Your body is reporting something about your cortisol levels and stress load. Not dehydration.

Appetite shifts. Forgetting to eat, or eating more than usual without hunger, or craving food purely for comfort. Stress disrupts the hormones regulating hunger. What reads as "I've been busy" or "I've been stress-eating" is worth taking seriously.

Frequent illness. Getting sick more often than usual. Colds taking longer to clear. A body under chronic stress has a compromised immune response. Three colds in six months is data.

Persistent tension. Shoulders staying raised. A jaw tight when you wake in the morning. A back aching for weeks. Chronic stress lives in the muscles.

None of these are one-off symptoms. The keyword is chronic. A single bad week doesn't mean burnout. The same headache for three weeks in a row means something.

Why the Mind Lies and the Body Doesn't

Here's the thing I've come to believe: my mental state will lie to me.

I'll convince myself I'm fine because I'm still performing. I'll tell myself the work is important and I'm needed and this is what the job requires. The psychological defence mechanisms are sophisticated. I've watched myself do this, and I've watched others do it, and it's genuinely hard to break through.

My body is less sophisticated. It doesn't have a narrative. It's not trying to protect my ego or keep me employed. It's reporting what's happening.

There's a reason the Cleveland Clinic model has physical symptoms showing up at stage two and three, while full conscious acknowledgement of burnout often doesn't arrive until stage four or five. The body is always ahead. The mind is catching up.

When I finally paid attention to those afternoon headaches, the sleep problems, the appetite changes, I went back and counted. They'd been present for about four months. I'd been explaining them away for four months.

What I Do Differently Now

I take physical symptoms seriously before I take my mental state seriously. Not instead of. Before.

When the afternoon headaches come back, I treat them as a signal, not a nuisance. When sleep goes wrong for more than a few days, I stop looking for external causes and start asking what's going on at work.

I also track it. I keep a note on my phone. When a physical symptom appears, I log it. Headache Monday. Poor sleep Tuesday through Thursday. Left shoulder tight all week. When I look back at the note after two weeks, patterns appear I would otherwise rationalise away in real time.

It's not glamorous. It doesn't scale to a leadership framework. It's paying attention to data your body is already generating, and taking it seriously.

I've also learned to ask the people around me. Not "are you okay?" which gets a reflexive "yes, fine." I ask "how's your sleep been?" or "are you getting proper lunch breaks?" Those questions get real answers.

The Question Worth Sitting With

If you've had a headache three days this week... when did those start? And what was happening at work around then?

If your sleep has been off for a month, same question.

If you keep getting sick, same question.

You don't need a diagnosis. You need to take the question seriously rather than filing the symptoms away as normal.

Your body has been sending the memo. The question is whether you're reading it.

I write about leadership and what makes workplaces better or worse at Step It Up HR. If this topic connects with something you're seeing in your team, the conversation continues there.

According to Gallup, 55% of American workers get their sense of identity from their job. Pew Research landed on a similar figure... 51%. Think about what this means. More than half of us answer "who are you?" with a job title. Not "I'm someone who loves hiking and terrible puns and reads too many books about World War II." But "I'm a Senior Vice President of Whatever."

And when the job goes away... through layoff, retirement, burnout, or a career change... those people face a genuine identity crisis. Because the job wasn't something they did. It was who they were.

The Person Before the Title

I try to remember who I was before all this. Before the titles, the leadership books, the interviews, the conference stages.

I was a kid who loved computers. Not in a "future career in technology" way. In a "stay up until 2am writing BASIC programs on a Commodore 64 because it felt like magic" way. I built things because building things was fun. Nobody told me it would be useful. Nobody told me it would "open doors." I did it because my brain lit up.

I was someone who asked too many questions. Teachers found this annoying. Bosses would later find it annoying too. But asking questions was how I understood the world. It wasn't a "leadership skill." It was me.

I was someone who got angry about unfairness. Still am, honestly. The difference is I've learned to package the anger into polite language and constructive feedback. Sometimes I wonder if the unpackaged version was more honest.

The Nostalgia Trap

Now, I'm not saying we should all quit our jobs and go back to writing BASIC. Nostalgia is comfortable, but it's not a plan.

I noticed Pokemon's 30th anniversary trending across Reddit this week, with people sharing memories and fan art from their childhoods. Millions of adults reconnecting with something they loved as kids. There's something beautiful in it... but also something a bit sad. Because for many of them, those childhood passions became "something I used to be into" rather than a living part of who they are.

Real remembering isn't about going backwards. It's about asking: What parts of the original me did I abandon because someone told me they weren't useful?

The world doesn't erase you all at once. It does it through a thousand tiny edits. A manager who says "you're too direct." A company culture where enthusiasm is "unprofessional." A promotion path requiring you to become someone you're not.

Sense of Self as Armour

Kelly Swingler, who I've had the pleasure of working with on Step It Up HR, has this equation I keep coming back to:

Toxicity minus sense of self equals burnout.

Read it again. It's saying the damage a toxic workplace does to you is directly proportional to how little you know yourself.

If you know who you are... what you value, what you won't tolerate, where your boundaries sit... a bad boss is a problem to solve, not an existential threat. You deal with it or you leave. But if your entire identity is wrapped up in the job? You have no ground to stand on. The toxicity fills every space you should have reserved for yourself.

This is why I've seen brilliant people crumble in workplaces others would shrug off. It's not about toughness. It's about whether you have a "you" outside of the work. And in my research for "Bad Bosses Ruin Lives"... where 99.5% of survey respondents said they'd had one or more types of bad bosses... the people who survived toxic environments best were the ones with a strong sense of who they were beyond the office.

How to Remember

So how do you find the person you were before the world got its hands on you?

I don't have a five-step framework. But I do have three questions worth sitting with.

What made you lose track of time as a kid?

Not "what were you good at." Not "what got you praised." What made time disappear? For me, it was building things and figuring out how stuff worked. For you, it might have been drawing, or arguing with your siblings about who was right, or taking apart a radio to see what was inside.

The activity doesn't matter. The state does. You were most yourself when you were so absorbed you forgot to perform.

What opinions do you hold nobody gave you?

Strip away everything your industry believes, your company preaches, your LinkedIn feed reinforces. What do you think about leadership, about fairness, about how people should treat each other... based on your own experience, not from a book?

Those stubborn, hard-won opinions are you. The rest is borrowed furniture.

What would you do if the title disappeared tomorrow?

If someone took away your job title, your email signature, your LinkedIn profile... who are you at dinner? What do you talk about? What gets you animated?

If the answer is "I don't know," you've done what millions of us have done: you've outsourced your identity to an employer. And employers, to be blunt about it, don't return what they borrow.

The Question Worth Asking

I'm in my fifties now. I've held more titles than I care to count. I've run teams, built products, spoken on stages, written a book. And the most useful thing I've done in the last few years is reconnect with who I was before all of it started.

Not to go back. Going back isn't the point. But to check: is the person I'm being today connected to the person I've always been? Or did I wander so far from the original blueprint I forgot there was one?

Bukowski was a drunk and a cynic, but he asked the right question. Who were you before the world told you who to be?

If you don't know the answer, start looking. Not in your CV. Not in your performance reviews. Look in the parts of yourself you stopped feeding because nobody was measuring them.

Those parts aren't dead. They're waiting.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder affects roughly 0.5% of the US population. One in two hundred people. Yet somehow, every office has three or four "toxic" colleagues.

Something doesn't add up.

Psychology Today published a piece arguing the "toxic" label is overused to the point of meaninglessness. Normal workplace friction gets repackaged as toxicity. Disagreement. Bluntness. A bad day. Loud communication. Even performance monitoring by a diligent manager.

These are unpleasant behaviours. They are not disorders. And there's an important difference between the two.

When we label someone toxic, we give ourselves permission to stop trying. We stop listening. We stop attempting to understand. We write them off entirely. As the article puts it, the label "sticks to the target like a nasty nickname does to a young child." Once you see someone as toxic, you'll keep finding evidence to confirm it. It becomes a lens you look through, and every interaction reinforces the story you already told yourself.

The label doesn't describe the person. It describes how we've decided to see them.

What "Difficult" People Are Telling You

Zach Mercurio is a researcher who studies something he calls "mattering" at work. His findings hit hard.

30% of workers feel invisible at work. 27% feel ignored. Nearly 50% feel undervalued. And 39% say they don't have a single person at work who cares about them as a human being.

Read those numbers again. We're talking about one in three workers feeling like a ghost in their own workplace.

Mercurio's research found something I wish more managers understood: "Many employees whom leaders have labeled 'difficult employees' are usually the most unseen, unheard, and under-recognized employees."

The complaining. The gossip. The withdrawal. The attitude. Nine times out of ten, these aren't signs of a toxic personality. They're the language of someone who feels invisible. Gossip, Mercurio explains, is "an attempt to develop secure relationships elsewhere in the organization, where you and what you say matters." People don't gossip because they're bad. They gossip because they feel unheard where it counts.

I've Seen This Play Out

In 30-plus years of leading teams, I've worked with my share of "difficult" people. Early in my career, I handled them the way most managers do. Avoid. Manage out. Label.

Then I started paying closer attention.

One developer on a team I led was universally described as "negative." Always pushing back. Always complaining about process. The team wanted him gone.

I sat down with him. Not to give feedback. Not to correct his behaviour. To ask questions and listen to the answers. Turns out he'd been raising valid concerns for months and nobody responded. His ideas got ignored in meetings. His contributions went unacknowledged. So he stopped trying to contribute constructively and started being "difficult" instead.

Within three months of being heard, he became one of the strongest contributors on the team.

Was he toxic? Or was he invisible?

I've seen this pattern repeat itself so many times now. The person everyone avoids is often the person nobody sees. The "problem employee" who turns around overnight once a new manager pays attention to them. The "troublemaker" whose complaints turn out to be the most accurate diagnosis of what's broken in the team.

My research into bad bosses found 99.5% of survey respondents said they've experienced one or more types of bad boss. When nearly everyone has had a terrible leader, the question shifts. Is the problem toxic employees? Or is it the environment those employees are trapped in?

Why We Love the Label

Here's the uncomfortable truth. Calling someone toxic is easy. Understanding them is hard.

The "toxic" label protects us. It means the problem is them, not us. It means we don't need to examine whether our leadership, our team culture, or our own behaviour contributed to the situation.

Approximately 23% of American adults experience mental health challenges. When someone is going through a rough time, their behaviour at work changes. They become short-tempered. Withdrawn. Defensive. And instead of asking what's wrong, we stick a label on them.

Meanwhile, Gallup's 2025 data shows global employee engagement sitting at 21%. Only one in five people feel engaged at work. The other four aren't all toxic. They're disengaged. And disengagement looks a lot like difficulty when you're not paying attention.

Three Things to Try Before You Label Anyone

Mercurio's framework breaks mattering into three elements. I've found them useful as a practical checklist before writing anyone off.

1. Notice Them

When was the last time you paid real attention to this person? Not their output. Them. Do you know what they're working on outside their task list? Do you know what they care about? Do you greet them by name when you walk in?

Mercurio's research shows the most meaningful moments at work aren't awards or bonuses. They're a supervisor remembering your name. Acknowledging your specific work in a meeting. Asking about something personal you mentioned last week.

How many of your one-on-ones are about tasks, and how many are about the person?

2. Affirm Them

Generic "good job" doesn't count. Tell people the specific difference they make and how they make it. Name their strengths. Show them the evidence of their impact.

There's a difference between appreciation ("thanks for your work"), recognition ("great job on the project"), and affirmation ("your attention to detail on the API design caught two bugs no one else would have found, and it saved us a week of rework"). Only the last one creates a real sense of mattering.

Most managers I've worked with think they're good at this. Most employees I've worked with disagree.

3. Need Them

People who feel replaceable act replaceable. Mercurio puts it bluntly: "When people feel replaceable, they act replaceable."

Make people feel relied upon. Give them ownership of something meaningful. Ask for their specific expertise in front of others. When someone knows their unique perspective is needed, they show up differently. Not out of obligation, but because they belong.

The Real Question

Before you label your next "difficult" person as toxic, ask yourself this: have I tried to see them?

Not manage them. Not fix them. See them.

Because most people aren't toxic. They're tired of being invisible. They've been raising their hand and nobody called on them. They've been doing good work and nobody noticed. They've been showing up and nobody cared whether they did or didn't.

And after enough of being unseen, they stopped trying to be pleasant about it.

The fix isn't to remove them. The fix is to see them.

If you lead people, this is your job. Not the easy part of the job. The whole point of it. And if you're not doing it, the "toxic" person in your team... might be you.

Research from Microsoft's Work Trend Index found more than 53% of managers report feeling burned out. Not employees in general. Managers. The people who are supposed to be holding it all together.

Gallup found 40% of managers feel their priorities compete with each other. And managers are 50% more likely than their employees to agree they have too much on their plate.

Those numbers don't surprise me. I lived them.

What Happens When You Hold Too Many

When you grip every balloon, you lose the ability to steer any of them.

I learned this the hard way. The cross-functional initiative I was leading? It delivered mediocre results because I split my attention across four other commitments. The mentoring I was doing? Surface-level at best, because I squeezed sessions into 15-minute gaps between meetings. The code I was still writing? Full of bugs because my brain was already in the next meeting before I finished the current function.

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast found nearly 60% of leaders reported feeling "used up" at the end of the workday. A Deloitte survey revealed approximately 70% of high-level executives have considered quitting to protect their emotional well-being.

The instinct is to blame workload. But workload is a symptom. The disease is the inability to choose.

The Art of Choosing Which Balloons to Release

Ruth Wooderson, a leader I admire, frames this beautifully: deflate some balloons. Not pop them. Not throw them at someone else. Deflate them. Gently. Intentionally.

The distinction matters. Popping a balloon is dramatic. It draws attention. People flinch. Deflating one is quiet. You let the air out slowly. The commitment shrinks. It lands softly.

Here's what deflating looks like in practice:

Say it out loud. London Business School researchers recommend being transparent about trade-offs. When you decline an invitation or step back from a commitment, say so openly. "I'm stepping away from this initiative because I need to give my full attention to the project where I'll have the most impact." No vague excuses. No ghosting the calendar invite.

Ask the kill question. Before approving any new initiative, force a gut check: "If we had to stop one thing to make room for this, what would it be?" If nobody has an answer, you're adding work, not strategy.

Model it visibly. When you leave at a reasonable hour, take your full holiday, or block time for rest, you give permission to everyone around you. This isn't weakness. It's leadership.

My Own Balloon-Deflating Moments

After those six months of ignoring my colleague's advice, my body made the decision for me. I got sick. Not dramatically sick. Persistently, annoyingly, won't-go-away sick. The kind of sick where your immune system sends you a memo: "We tried telling you nicely."

So I started deflating.

I stepped off the culture committee. Nobody noticed. The committee continued without a single hiccup. All those meetings I'd attended, all those contributions I'd made... the machine ran fine without me.

I stopped writing code myself and focused on unblocking the team. Our velocity went up. Turns out, a leader who removes obstacles is worth more than a leader who writes mediocre functions between meetings.

I trimmed my mentoring from five people to two. And the mentoring got dramatically better. I knew what those two people were working on. I remembered their goals between sessions. I gave them my full attention instead of a distracted version of it.

The hardest one: I said no to a high-profile project. A visible, resume-building, career-advancing opportunity. I said no because I knew I'd do a B-minus job on it. And B-minus work from an overcommitted leader helps nobody.

Fewer Balloons, Higher Flight

The counterintuitive truth about letting go is this: the remaining balloons float higher.

When you hold three commitments instead of twelve, each one gets your full energy. Your work improves. Your thinking sharpens. You show up to meetings prepared instead of winging it. You respond to messages within hours instead of days.

My research into bad boss behaviours at Step It Up HR keeps confirming this pattern. Leaders who spread themselves too thin become the distracted, unavailable bosses their teams resent. The ones who focus... those are the bosses people remember fondly at the dinner table.

As Zach Mercurio puts it: your real KPI is what people say about you at their dinner table. They're not discussing your project portfolio or your committee memberships. They're talking about how you made them feel.

Nobody ever said, "My boss was amazing because they were on seven committees and always looked exhausted."

The Question Worth Sitting With

If you're reading this with a creeping sense of recognition... good. Sit with it.

Look at your calendar for the next month. Count the balloons. Now ask yourself: which three matter most? Not which three are most urgent. Not which three will make you look busiest. Which three will have the most meaningful impact on the people and work you care about?

The rest? Deflate them. Gently. Intentionally. And notice how much higher the remaining ones fly.

Only 31% of US employees are engaged at work, according to Gallup's 2024 data. A 10-year low. Globally, the number is bleaker: only 23% of workers feel engaged. The other 77% are showing up without showing up.

Three-quarters of the people around you are mentally elsewhere by Monday afternoon. Present in body. Absent everywhere else.

This isn't laziness. It's a signal. When people don't see how their work connects to something larger - when nobody notices whether they're fully there or not - they start treating work as something to survive rather than something to be in.

Researcher Zach Mercurio noticed this in his first job. Almost everyone around him talked exclusively about weekends. Their entire working week existed as a waiting room for the two days they actually wanted. He spent years studying what creates the opposite: work where people feel their presence matters.

The Moment I Stopped Drifting

My turning point wasn't dramatic. It was a one-on-one meeting.

Someone on my team told me, quietly, they hadn't cared about their work in a long time. Not burned out. Not unhappy in any obvious way. Technically good at their job. They simply didn't see the point anymore.

Present in body. Somewhere else in mind.

Sitting across from someone who'd mentally checked out while looking perfectly fine broke through whatever comfort I'd built up. I started thinking seriously about what makes people - what makes me - show up fully. Not in a performative sense. In a real one.

The answer wasn't perks. It wasn't culture initiatives or away days. It was simpler and harder: knowing why what you're doing today matters, and feeling like someone notices whether you're there.

In the military, both things are built into the structure. In corporate life, process and paperwork bury both things.

Seven-Sevenths Is Possible

At Step It Up HR, everything we do comes back to this. Leaders who want to genuinely improve their teams have to do the hard, human work of making people feel seen and needed. Not as a morale exercise - as a leadership act.

When someone knows why their specific contribution matters, they stop watching the clock. When a leader takes five minutes to say "here's what you did last week, and here's the difference it made," a person stops feeling like a replaceable unit in a machine.

The two-sevenths problem is a symptom, not a personality trait. Something in how work is designed, led, or structured has broken down.

The Question Worth Sitting With

When was the last time you were genuinely absorbed in something on a Wednesday afternoon? Not enduring it - fully in it?

If you struggle to remember, pay attention to it.

If you lead people, the question cuts deeper. How many on your team are living for the weekend? Do you know? Have you asked?

The maths doesn't have to stay at two-sevenths. It isn't destiny. It's a design problem. And design problems have solutions.

There's nothing wrong with it. It's human. Zach Mercurio, who studies what he calls the mattering instinct, argues our deepest drive isn't food or shelter. It's finding someone to matter to. We want to feel irreplaceable.

Mentoring feeds that instinct perfectly. You have someone younger, less experienced, looking to you for direction. Of course it feels good. The danger arrives when you start... even without realising it... protecting your position at the centre of their world.

The Ego Trap

I mentored seven engineers into leadership roles during my time at Curve. Each one was different. Some were obvious candidates... natural communicators who needed confidence more than knowledge. Others surprised me. Quiet, technical people who turned out to have strong instincts for people when given space to use them.

And every single time, there came a moment where I had a choice.

The first option was to lean in. Stay central. Keep my hand on the steering wheel. Keep the relationship tied to my methods, my perspective, my approval.

The second was to step back.

The ego trap in mentoring is subtle. It doesn't look like sabotage. It looks like helpfulness. It's offering advice when none was asked for. It's steering conversations back to your way of doing things. It's being a little too available, so the other person never fully develops their own judgment.

I caught myself doing this. More than once. And if you've mentored anyone seriously, I suspect you have too.

The Moment You Know

When Marcus... one of my engineers at Curve... started presenting to senior stakeholders without asking me to review his slides first, I noticed something in myself. A flicker of something. Not quite hurt. Not quite pride. Something in between the two.

He didn't need to run things past me anymore. He'd built his own judgment. His own style. His read on the room was, if anything, sharper than mine. He was closer to the work.

That's the moment.

A good mentor, at this point, thinks: "I hope he stays in touch. I hope he comes back when things get hard."

A great mentor thinks: "He's ready. My job here is done."

The difference between those two reactions is everything.

Why Letting Go Is Hard

Research on this is blunt. A paper in a PMC journal on mentor-mentee relationships puts it plainly: "Sometimes the best thing you get out of a mentor is that they're not your mentor anymore."

Ending a mentoring relationship well requires the mentor to set aside ego and make the whole thing about the mentee's growth... not the mentor's sense of purpose.

Forbes contributors writing on what makes a great mentor name the same barrier: ego. Good mentors help people grow. Great mentors help people grow beyond them.

The uncomfortable part? Most people in mentoring roles don't realise they're holding on. They'd tell you, with full sincerity: "I want this person to thrive independently." And they mean it. They're not lying.

But meaning it and doing it are not the same thing.

Being on the Other End

I've been on the receiving side of this too. I had a manager early in my career... a rare one... who made a deliberate habit of sending me into rooms without him. Senior stakeholder meeting? He'd say "You've got this. Tell me how it goes." I thought he was too busy to come. Years later I realised: he was never too busy. He was building me.

When I eventually moved on to a bigger role, he didn't flinch. He wrote me a reference, introduced me to three people in his network, and told me: "Go. This is what I was preparing you for."

That's what it looks like when someone gets it right.

What Great Mentors Do Differently

I've thought a lot about what the best mentors in my life did differently. A few things stand out.

They asked questions more than they gave answers. The moment I expected a solution, they'd flip it back to me: "What do you think you should do?" Not dismissively. In a way that forced me to trust my own judgment. Over time, I stopped defaulting to them. That was the entire point.

They celebrated wins without inserting themselves. A mediocre mentor, when their mentee succeeds, says "I told you the approach would work." A great mentor says "You did it." Full stop. No co-authorship in the victory.

They were honest when the relationship had run its course. One of the most useful things a mentor ever said to me: "I've given you what I have. You need to find someone who's done what you're trying to do next. I haven't." It took real self-awareness. Real confidence, too.

They made themselves redundant on purpose. They weren't waiting for me to stop needing them. They were actively engineering that outcome from the beginning.

What to Look For If You're Being Mentored

Not every mentoring relationship is what it appears to be. Here are signs your mentor genuinely wants your growth:

They push you toward challenges where they're not present. They introduce you to people beyond their own network. They tell you hard truths about yourself, not flattering ones. They say "you don't need my opinion on this anymore" and mean it warmly.

Signs they need you to need them: they're always available, almost eerily so. They subtly discourage you from taking risks they didn't sign off on. Your successes seem to pass through them before reaching the world.

The best mentors are building you toward independence from the first conversation. If you've had one of those people in your life, you'll know the specific feeling. At some point you stopped thinking "I should ask them about this" and started thinking "I know what to do here." And somewhere, without you knowing, they were quietly delighted.

If You're the Mentor

The question I ask myself now, when working with someone earlier in their career: am I doing this for them, or for me?

Most of the time it's both. And there's nothing wrong with it. The joy of watching someone grow is real. Don't suppress it.

Here's a test: if your mentee got a better opportunity tomorrow... one where your involvement wasn't part of the picture... would you feel pleased, or would you feel something else?

Be honest with yourself about the answer.

The moment your involvement becomes about keeping yourself in the picture... even slightly... you've stopped being their mentor. You've started being their ceiling.

The Ted Lasso line is worth sitting with longer: a great mentor doesn't hope you'll move on. They know you will. Because they've been building toward it from the beginning.

Make yourself redundant. Do it on purpose. Take quiet pride in it when it happens.

The work you produce at 8pm is worse than the work you produce at 2pm. Research from Stanford's John Pencavel showed productivity falls sharply after 50 hours a week. Work 55 hours or more and you get nothing extra for the time... the output disappears into fatigue. The World Health Organization found working 55 or more hours a week raises stroke risk by 35% and heart disease risk by 17%.

You're not working harder. You're working worse, for longer, and hurting yourself doing it.

The Tech Industry's Particular Problem

I spent years in software. The culture is relentless. Startups wear their all-nighters like medals. Hustle is embedded in the language... sprints, crunches, shipping at midnight.

I've seen teams burn themselves to ash and then be surprised when everything caught fire. Engineers making sloppy decisions at 11pm. Bugs introduced in the final push because someone refused to leave a ticket open overnight. Technical debt piling up because the team was too exhausted to write the tests.

The hours were high. The output was poor.

And the worst part? The people who stayed latest were the first out the door when layoffs came. Not because they weren't dedicated... they were, deeply. But dedication isn't what companies measure when the numbers go bad. Output is. Results are. Tired, burned-out people produce less of both.

I know this conversation. The one where you're sitting across from a manager telling someone the company is going in a different direction. And you're thinking: this person works so hard. They were here before me every morning and still here when I went home. And it didn't save them.

Long hours aren't a shield. They're not a store of credit you build up. When the moment of reckoning arrives, nobody counts them.

What Late Hours Tell You

Here's what most managers won't say out loud: when someone consistently works late, it's often a warning sign, not a green flag.

It signals poor prioritization. Work expanded to fill all available time... Parkinson's Law in action.

It signals no clear boundary between what matters and what doesn't. When everything feels urgent, nothing is.

It signals, in many cases, a mismatch between workload and capacity. A management problem, not a dedication problem.

The employee who leaves at 5:30, gets a full night's sleep, and arrives fresh at 9:00am is producing better work on average than the employee who pushed through until 8pm. Research cited by TimeCamp found employees working overtime showed 20% lower productivity compared to those who stopped at end of day.

Twenty percent. The push to prove dedication costs a fifth of your performance.

Most people I know who work the longest hours are the ones with the least clarity about their priorities. Their day is a series of reactions. A Slack message arrives and they respond. Someone drops a request and they take it. They're never quite done because they've never decided what done looks like.

The people I've worked with who leave on time consistently are the opposite. They arrive knowing what they're working on. They make decisions and move on. They protect their attention. They come back the next day with good ideas instead of the fog of exhaustion.

The Skill Nobody Talks About

Leaving on time takes real skill.

It means knowing what you were hired to do. And doing it. It means being able to tell someone no, or not today, or this doesn't belong on my plate. It means spending your working hours on work... not on busywork, not on lengthy meetings, not on the performance of productivity.

It also means having the confidence to be judged on output, not presence. And for a lot of people, it's the terrifying part. What if my manager doesn't see the value I add? What if leaving on time looks like I don't care?

Those are real fears. They speak to something about the culture you're in. If your organisation rewards presence over performance, the problem isn't your hours. The problem is the organisation.

But before blaming the culture, ask yourself honestly: do you stay late because you're expected to, or because you haven't figured out how to be done?

For most of us, it's a bit of both.

If You Manage People, This Is on You

Organisations make leaving on time feel wrong. Your boss sends Slack messages at 9pm. Someone on your team posts an update at 10. The unspoken message: are you still in?

I've been the manager sending those late messages. I'm not proud of it. Without intending to, I was signaling to everyone who worked for me: this is when I expect you to be available. The damage accumulates quietly.

If you want your team doing their best work, leave on time. Do it visibly. Announce it. Stop sending messages after hours. Set up delay-send for anything you write in the evening. Stop rewarding the person who stayed until midnight for hitting a self-imposed deadline. Reward the person who shipped early because they managed their time well.

The culture shift starts at the top. It always does. And leaders who model working reasonable hours don't build lazy teams... they build rested ones. Rested people make better decisions. Better decisions mean fewer crises. Fewer crises mean fewer late nights.

What I Do Now

I leave on time. Not every single day... genuine emergencies are real. But as the default, not the exception.

I plan my day the evening before so I arrive knowing what matters. I protect the first two hours of each morning for deep work, before messages arrive. I write down the three things I'm working on today, in order of importance. If I finish them, I'm done. If I don't finish them all, I know which one to carry forward.

I stop checking messages after 7pm. I close the laptop.

My work is better for it. I'm less irritable. I remember things. I care about the work more, not less, because I'm not running on empty.

I also stopped wearing my hours as a badge. If someone asks what I was up to yesterday, I talk about what I shipped. Not how long I was at my desk.

If you're using long hours as proof of your commitment, I want to ask you one question: what are you afraid people will think if you leave at 5:30?

Whatever the answer is... sit with it. Because the confidence to walk out the door when your work is done might be the most underrated professional skill there is.

What does your current default look like?

Research from the Association for Psychological Science shows chronic workplace stress from sustained difficult environments leads to measurable structural changes in the brain. The prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for clear thinking and decision-making, becomes impaired under prolonged stress. The longer you stay in a situation wrong for you, the less clearly you're able to think your way out of it. The trap gets harder to escape the longer you're in it.

Not a metaphor. Brain science.

What Staying Too Long Does

There's a specific feeling from staying somewhere too long. It's not dramatic. It starts as a dull dissatisfaction... a Sunday night tightness in the chest. A slight reluctance to open the laptop on Monday morning. A vague sense of going through the motions.

Then it becomes a kind of professional shrinking. You stop speaking up in meetings. You stop bringing ideas to the table. You start managing your enthusiasm downward so it matches what the environment will accept. You get good at performing fine.

At some point, you forget what it felt like to be good at your work. You forget what it felt like to be energised by it. What it felt like to wake up Monday morning with something to look forward to.

And all of this gets filed under "work is like this sometimes." So you stay.

The people around you stay too. Nobody talks about it directly, because talking about it would force a decision, and decisions are frightening. So you all keep showing up and performing fine, together.

I've been in rooms like this. You walk in and feel it before anyone says a word.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

When we stay in situations wrong for us, we don't do it thoughtlessly. We have reasons. Good-sounding reasons.

"The market is tough right now." There will always be a restructure, a hiring freeze, an economic headwind, a mortgage renewal coming up. If you wait for perfect timing, you'll wait forever.

"Things are about to get better." The new CEO, the next quarter, the product pivot. Meanwhile the months pass and the "about to" never quite arrives. Hope is not a plan.

"I've invested too much to leave now." The sunk cost fallacy, speaking plainly. The investment is already made. Staying longer doesn't protect it.

"What will people think?" This is the one worth sitting with honestly. If the main thing keeping you somewhere is how leaving would look to other people, you're sacrificing your career for their comfort. A bad trade. And most of those people aren't thinking about your situation anywhere near as much as you think they are.

These stories are protective. They buy you time and insulate you from a scary decision. They also keep you stuck.

Hard vs. Wrong

There's a difference between quitting because something is hard and quitting because something is wrong. This distinction matters enormously.

Hard is fine. Hard is where growth lives. If a role is stretching you, making you uncomfortable, forcing you to learn things you don't know yet... stay in it. The discomfort of growth is worth pushing through.

Wrong is different.

Wrong is when the values of the organisation don't match yours and never will. Wrong is when your health is suffering and nobody above you has noticed or cared. Wrong is when you've been asking for the same conversation for eighteen months and it keeps getting deferred. Wrong is when you've raised something important, directly and clearly, and nothing changed. Wrong is when you find yourself hoping, week after week, something will change, and it doesn't.

At this point, leaving is not quitting. It is a clear-eyed assessment of the situation and a decision to protect your time, your health, and your future.

This takes more courage than staying.

The people I've seen build long, satisfying careers are not the ones who stayed in everything. They're the ones who knew when to move. They left companies wrong for them. They left roles offering no growth. They left with their integrity intact, and moved toward something better.

The ones who stayed too long often ended up in one of two places: burned out and bitter, or so hollowed out they'd forgotten what they were capable of.

How to Know

Ask yourself these questions when you're weighing the decision:

Is this hard, or is this wrong? Difficulty is temporary. A cultural mismatch, a values problem, a leadership environment built on fear... these don't improve with time.

Am I staying because I'm growing, or because I'm scared? Fear of what leaving says about you is not a good enough reason to stay. Fear of the unknown isn't either.

Would I advise a friend to stay? Sometimes we hold ourselves to a standard we'd never apply to someone we care about. If a friend described your situation to you, what would you tell them?

Have I spoken up clearly and directly? Leaving without raising the issue is sometimes running from something fixable. If you've spoken up clearly and nothing has changed, this is a different calculation. You've done the work. The environment hasn't met you.

Am I staying out of genuine purpose, or out of habit? Habits keep people in situations long after the reasons for staying have gone. Momentum isn't the same as meaning.

After You Walk Out

Here's what nobody talks about when it comes to leaving something wrong for you: the relief is immediate, and it surprises you.

Not the relief of escaping... something deeper. The relief of being honest. Of no longer spending energy pretending things are fine. Of getting your Sunday evenings back. Of feeling like yourself again.

The world doesn't end. Your career doesn't end. In most cases, it moves forward faster, because you finally have room. You're no longer carrying the weight of a role or situation with an expiry date you missed.

I've talked to people years after they left roles or companies they stayed in too long. The consistent theme is the same: "I wish I'd gone sooner." Not "I wish I'd stayed." Not "I should have toughed it out." I've never heard anyone say quitting the wrong job was their biggest career mistake. I've heard plenty of people say staying was.

There's a version of your career where you stay in everything, grind through everything, endure everything. Some people wear this as a badge. But if you look closely, it often looks less like strength and more like a long series of things you were too frightened to leave.

Leaving a role, a company, or a situation you've outgrown is not weakness. It's the clearest signal you've given yourself in a long time: you know what you're worth, and you're not willing to keep settling for less.

The bravest thing isn't always pushing through.

Sometimes the bravest thing is walking out the door.

Gallup's 2024 workplace report found only 31% of US employees engaged at work. A 10-year low. We've spent decades and billions on engagement programs, perks, ping-pong tables, and mental health days. We're going backwards.

Think about what 31% means in practice. In a ten-person team, three people care about the work. The other seven are managing their time until they get somewhere they care about.

We keep treating this as an employee problem. A motivation problem. A generational problem. It's not. It's a leadership problem. And the data has been saying so for years.

In the Army, mission clarity was everything. You knew exactly why the work mattered. You traced your role directly to a larger outcome. Nobody talked about living for the weekend, because the work felt like it was for something real.

I don't expect every company to replicate the stakes of military service. But the underlying mechanism is the same. When people understand why their work matters, and when the person leading them reinforces it regularly, the relationship to Monday morning changes.

The Weekend Isn't the Problem

I want to be clear: weekends are great. I love them. Time with family, time to breathe, time to pursue the things I enjoy. I'm not arguing anyone should sacrifice weekends on the altar of hustle culture.

But when weekends are the only thing your people look forward to, the problem isn't work-life balance. It's a meaning gap.

Researcher Zach Mercurio has spent years studying what he calls "mattering": the experience of feeling seen, valued, and needed at work. His conclusion is uncomfortable for most organizations. The engagement crisis isn't about pay, benefits, or remote work policies. People don't feel they matter to the people around them.

Think about the teams you've led. When did someone last come to you excited about their work? When did you last ask what they needed, not to hit a deadline, but to grow?

If you're struggling to answer those questions, your people are likely living for the weekend.

What "Living for the Weekend" Looks Like

It doesn't always show up as misery. This is what makes it easy to miss.

A person who answers emails on time but never volunteers an opinion. A developer who ships clean code and never suggests a better approach. A team hitting targets and feeling no particular satisfaction when they do.

Not burnout. Something quieter. People who've figured out exactly how much to give to get through the week without being fired, and nothing more.

When I was leading engineering teams, I had periods where this was happening right in front of me and I missed it. I was focused on delivery. The team was delivering. Seemed fine.

What I wasn't tracking was the quality of the conversations. Were people bringing problems early, or sitting on them? Were they excited about anything? Did they see this job as part of a bigger story for them, or were they renting out their skills until something better came along?

The answers weren't always what I wanted.

I've written about these patterns on Step It Up HR... the signals leaders miss when they're focused purely on metrics. The signals are there if you know what to look for.

The Dinner Table Test

Here's the most honest leadership feedback mechanism I know. Every person you lead goes home tonight and talks... with a partner, a parent, a friend. At some point, work comes up.

What do they say about you?

Not about the company. About you. Do they say "my manager listened to me today"? Or "my boss doesn't know I exist"? Or nothing at all, because work is the thing they're trying to forget?

Your real performance review isn't the one HR runs once a year. It's those dinner table conversations, repeated every weeknight, for as long as you're their manager.

If your people are living for the weekend, they're going home and counting down. You're the backdrop to five days of counting down.

Let it bother you.

Small Shifts With Real Consequences

I'm not selling a framework here. There are some concrete things to shift the pattern.

Ask about more than the work. Once a week, in a one-on-one, ask someone about their career. Not the project. What do they want to get better at? What's frustrating them? What's working well and they want more of?

Most managers skip this because they're busy. Then they wonder why people leave for a 5% pay bump somewhere else.

Notice something specific. Don't say "good job this week." Say "the solution you came up with for the retry logic in the payment service was clever, and it saved us from a nasty production problem." Specific recognition tells someone you're paying attention. Generic praise tells them you're not.

Stop cancelling one-on-ones. Every time you cancel without rescheduling, you send a message: the task I'm running to is more important than you. People remember this. They adjust their expectations accordingly.

Ask the question directly. "What would make your work more meaningful?" Most managers never ask it. Most people have never been asked it. The answer tells you more than any survey.

The Business Case

Alex Edmans at the London Business School analysed 28 years of stock market data and found companies with genuinely high employee satisfaction outperformed peers by 89% to 184% cumulatively over the period.

Not marginally. By up to 184%.

If you want a number to put in a business case for treating people like people, there it is.

If you need a business case to care whether your people feel like they matter, you've got a bigger problem than engagement scores.

The Real Question

If most of your team is living for the weekend, what are you building?

Not what product. What kind of environment. What kind of culture. What kind of reputation as a leader.

The two-sevenths problem isn't unsolvable. Most people start their jobs wanting meaning in the work. Something happens... a series of small signals from the people above them... and they pull back. The message lands: your work doesn't matter, you're a resource not a person.

You don't need a transformation program. You need to start paying attention.

What would your team say at the dinner table tonight?

Research from Psychology Today puts it clearly: normalizing recovery is part of high performance... not a break from it. The people who sustain performance over years treat rest and slow days as part of the process, not as problems to be solved.

Forbes reports a specific reason high performers burn out faster than average: they treat rest as unproductive. Every slow day becomes evidence of slipping. So they press harder. And they burn out.

The fish aren't biting. Pressing harder doesn't change anything. It exhausts you before the fish show up.

What an Off-Day Is

I've started thinking about off-days differently.

Your brain is not a machine. It doesn't run at constant output. It processes, it consolidates, it repairs. Sleep scientists point to the glymphatic system... your brain's self-cleaning mechanism... which runs during downtime. Slow days at work do something similar. They're processing the input from the fast days.

My best creative breakthroughs don't come on the grinding days. They come the day after a quiet one. In the shower. On a walk when I stepped away from the screen.

An off-day is not wasted time. It's part of the cycle.

The Resilience Training Institute is direct about it: "No matter how high a performer you think you are, we are all vulnerable to the same human factors causing a drop-off."

Worth sitting with. No one is immune. The variable isn't whether you have off-days. It's whether you handle them well.

How Leaders Make This Worse

Here's where it gets uncomfortable.

Most leaders handle this badly. Not because they're bad people, but because they spent their whole careers pushing through difficulty and getting rewarded for it. So when they see a team member having an off-day, they apply the same pressure.

"Is everything okay? Your output has been a bit slow this week."

The team member hears: "You're failing. I've noticed. Fix it."

Anxious on top of tired. You've taken someone having a quiet Wednesday and turned it into a spiral.

The leaders I've seen build genuinely high-performing teams do something different. They normalize the slow days openly. They talk about their own off-days. They don't perform peak performance for their team. They're honest: "Today was flat for me, and it's fine."

This kind of honesty gives people permission to be human.

The Productivity Obsession

We have a cultural problem here, not a leadership one alone.

Online content is full of productivity advice. Morning routines. Output tracking. "How I get 14 hours of deep work done every day." The whole ecosystem rests on one assumption: every day should be a catching day. An off-day means something is broken in your system.

This is nonsense, and most of us know it. We feel guilty admitting it.

Consistency over time matters far more than peak output on any given day. A fisherman who shows up every morning, even on the days when nothing bites, catches more fish across a season than one who only shows up when conditions are perfect.

Showing up matters. The catches will come.

What to Do With an Off-Day

When you recognize you're in a quiet stretch, a few things help:

Don't spiral. The analysis loop... "why am I so unproductive, what's wrong with me, am I losing my edge"... is a trap. It burns energy without producing anything.

Do the necessary, not the ambitious. Off-days are for the low-stakes work. Clear the inbox. Update the docs. Handle the admin. Save the creative, high-stakes work for when you're sharper.

Step away when you're able. A walk, a lunch away from the screen, an hour where you're not pretending to produce. You'll often come back better.

Tell someone. If you lead people, say out loud today is slow for you. Watch what it does for the room. People breathe easier when their leader admits to being human.

Trust the pattern. If you've performed before, you'll perform again. Today is not a verdict on your career.

Normalize the Quiet Days

Roland Butcher went on to coach cricket long after his playing career ended. He's seen thousands of players, thousands of match days. He knows the difference between someone who's done and someone who's fishing.

The players who last... the ones who sustain performance over years... aren't the ones who never have off-days. They're the ones who make peace with them.

Your off-days are not the enemy. They're part of the same pattern as your best days.

Go fishing. The catches will come.

Here's something nobody mentions about mentoring. According to Harvard Business Review, 71% of executives who mentor tend to choose people who look like them, think like them, or share their background. The advice you receive is filtered through someone else's experience, which might have little to do with yours.

Your mentor climbed a ladder in a different decade, a different industry, a different set of circumstances. Their map is not your map.

Careers aren't linear. We all know this. And yet we keep seeking advice from people who drew their route in a straight line and happened to be in the right place at the right time. When you follow their path instead of building your own, you end up confused when the terrain doesn't match the map they handed you.

I'm not dismissing mentors entirely. I'll come back to them. But first: we've turned mentorship into a substitute for something harder and more necessary, which is honest self-examination.

The Mirror Problem

Tasha Eurich is a psychologist who spent years researching self-awareness. What she found is worth sitting with. 95% of people believe they are self-aware. The real number? Between 10 and 15 percent.

Nearly everyone thinks they know themselves. Barely anyone does.

This is the real gap in your development. Not the absence of a mentor. The absence of honest reflection about who you are, what you're doing, and why you keep repeating the same patterns.

I spent the first decade of my career blaming circumstances. Bad companies. Bad bosses. Bad timing. It took sitting still long enough to look in the mirror to see the common thread in every situation where things went sideways: me.

Uncomfortable to write. More uncomfortable to admit in the moment. But it's the one thing producing lasting change.

What a Mentor Cannot Do For You

A mentor tells you what worked for them. They cannot tell you what is blocking you.

A mentor opens doors. They cannot tell you why you keep walking through the wrong ones.

A mentor shares perspective. They cannot show you the blind spots you are actively defending.

Only you are able to do this work. And it requires something foreign in a culture rewarding constant action: sitting down and asking yourself hard questions.

Here are the ones worth asking:

"What patterns keep repeating in my career?"

Not "what bad luck have I had"... patterns. If you've had three difficult managers in a row, what role did you play in choosing those roles, or in staying in them?

"What feedback do I keep dismissing?"

We all have feedback we've heard more than once and haven't acted on. The truth tends to live there.

"What am I avoiding?"

The conversation I'm not having. The skill I'm not building. The decision I keep putting off. These are often the answers to why I'm not where I want to be.

"Would the version of me from five years ago be proud of how I'm showing up?"

This one lands differently than you expect.

The Problem With Always Looking Outward

When you're always seeking someone else's perspective, you outsource your self-knowledge. You get good at absorbing other people's frameworks and terrible at building your own.

I've seen this with engineers and leaders I've worked with over the years. Smart people. No shortage of advice, books, or courses. And yet they stay stuck. Because they keep adding information without doing the harder work of examining their own assumptions and behaviors.

Self-reflection isn't navel-gazing. It's diagnostic work. You're trying to understand the system you're operating in, and you are part of the system.

Research published in PMC shows self-reflection directly improves career adaptability: your ability to respond to new challenges and changing circumstances. Not a soft outcome. The factor determining whether your career bends without breaking.

The paradox is this: the more you look inward, the better your outward decisions become. You stop reacting. You start choosing.

When a Mentor Is Worth It

I'm not throwing mentors overboard. There are situations where they're genuinely valuable.

When you need access you don't have. A mentor who knows people in a field you're trying to enter saves you years of cold outreach. Worth it.

When you're new to a context. Moving into a new industry, a new country, a new type of role... a guide who knows the terrain saves real time.

When you've done the inner work and you're ready to act. A mentor is most useful when you already know what you're building and you need tactical help executing it.

Where mentors fail is when you're using them to avoid the uncomfortable work of looking at yourself clearly. The mentor becomes a place to hide. A way to feel like you're doing something without confronting the real issue.

How to Look In the Mirror

This doesn't require anything elaborate. I do a version of this weekly, and it takes about 20 minutes.

Write down what went well. Not what you produced. What you did where things felt right, aligned, like you were showing up as your best self.

Write down what felt off. Where you avoided something. Where you reacted in a way you weren't proud of. Where you settled when you shouldn't have.

Ask: what is the pattern? Don't look at one week. Look at the month. The year. You start to see things. You start to see yourself. And there's where real change begins.

Not from a wise person across a coffee table telling you what worked for them in a different decade. From you, finally willing to be honest with yourself about what's going on.

The mirror is always available. Most people prefer not to look.

I write about leadership, career growth, and building better teams at Step It Up HR. If any of this resonated, come have a look.

What patterns have you been avoiding examining? Sit with it for a few minutes before you move on to the next thing.

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2025 report found only 21% of employees globally are engaged at work. 62% are not engaged. 17% are actively disengaged... not checking out quietly, but pulling others down with them.

Put it another way: four out of five people at work right now are going through the motions.

Those 62% who are "not engaged" are not bad people. They're not lazy. They've learned showing up is enough. Nobody gave them a reason to care more.

The cost of disengagement runs to $438 billion in lost productivity globally every year. Those are the numbers Gallup measures. The real cost, in relationships not built, ideas not shared, decisions made without full commitment, doesn't show up in any spreadsheet.

I've Been on Both Sides of This

In the Army, I never once watched the clock. Not because the Army was easy... it wasn't. Not because every day carried some grand sense of purpose. But the work mattered. The people around me mattered. There was a clarity to what we were doing and why.

When you're responsible for soldiers, there's no room for coasting. There's no mentally checking out. You're either present or you're failing them.

Later in my tech career, I hit patches where I was absolutely living for the weekend. There were stretches where Sunday evenings brought a specific kind of dread. Where I'd spend Friday afternoon finally breathing again, and Monday morning counting hours until the next Friday.

I remember one job where a colleague kept a weekly countdown on his desk. A little whiteboard. Days till Friday. He thought it was funny. Looking back, it wasn't.

I don't look back on those years with nostalgia.

What I remember from the engaged periods is different. I remember being genuinely curious about what the next day would bring. I remember conversations with colleagues continuing past the workday because we were interested in the problem. I remember being tired at the end of the week... the good kind of tired. Earned, not wasted.

This is the version of work I want for myself. It's the version I try to build for the people I lead.

The Two-Sevenths Problem Is a Leadership Failure

Here's what I see leaders get wrong about this.

They treat disengagement as an individual problem. They send the disengaged person to a training course. They add a recognition programme. They survey the team and then file the results.

None of it touches the real issue.

The real issue is whether the work is worth doing. Whether the person doing it feels seen and useful. Whether they have enough autonomy to care about the outcome. Whether their manager knows their name and what they're good at.

Zach Mercurio's research on meaningfulness and mattering at work found something worth sitting with. When researchers asked thousands of people across 22 industries when they most felt they mattered, the answer was not the pay reviews or the team away days. It was a supervisor remembering their name. Naming what they did well in a meeting. Checking in on something personal.

Small things. Consistently done.

This is what separates the workplaces where people are engaged from the ones where everyone's waiting for Friday.

What Real Engagement Looks Like

I want to push back on one thing.

Engagement doesn't mean loving every task. It doesn't mean skipping into work. It doesn't mean the job has to be your identity.

Engagement means you have enough investment in what you're doing to bring your real self to it. You notice when something's not working and say something. You help a colleague without being asked. You think about the problem when you're in the shower.

You're not mentally clocking out at 3pm.

I've seen people deeply engaged in work I'd personally find tedious. The work itself isn't the variable. The conditions are.

Do they trust the people around them? Do they feel like their contribution is visible? Do they have some say in how the work gets done?

Where those three things are in place, engagement tends to follow.

Perks Won't Fix This. Purpose Might.

Every year, companies spend enormous sums on benefits, retreats, team lunches, and recognition platforms. Most of it is noise.

A good salary matters. Flexibility matters. But these things stop people from being unhappy. They don't make people care.

What makes people care is feeling like their work connects to something real. Like their efforts are visible to someone who has paid attention. Like they have a genuine say in how things get done.

You don't get there by adding a ping pong table to the break room.

You get there by building real relationships with the people on your team. By asking questions and listening to the answers. By noticing what someone did well and telling them, specifically, not in a newsletter.

What To Do If You're Managing a Two-Sevenths Team

First: don't take it personally. A disengaged team reflects patterns built up over time, often under multiple managers. You inherited part of this.

But you own it now.

Start small. Learn something real about each person on your team. Not what they do, but what they're trying to get better at. What kind of work energises them. What frustrates them.

Then look at the work itself. Is it clear why it matters? Not to the company. To the person doing it. Do they see the connection between what they do on a Tuesday morning and what they care about?

If the answer is no, this is where the engagement problem lives.

And stop treating recognition as a quarterly event. The research is clear. Small, specific, timely acknowledgement matters more than the annual awards ceremony. "You handled the client call yesterday with skill. The way you reframed the problem was sharp" is worth more than a plaque.

Two-Sevenths Is Not Enough

I've spent most of my career thinking about what it takes to build teams where people show up fully. Not in body only. In mind too. Where Friday afternoon isn't the goal... where there's something about Monday morning worth showing up for.

This is not naive. It's not asking people to love their jobs.

It's asking leaders to create conditions where work is worth doing. Where people are seen. Where the contribution connects to something real.

Five-sevenths of your life passes at work. Too much time to spend waiting for the other two days.

If your team is running a two-sevenths existence right now... what are you going to do about it?

More than 70% of new CEOs report feelings of loneliness, according to Harvard Business Impact. Seventy percent. And this isn't a phenomenon limited to the C-suite. It ripples down through every layer of management.

Here's why it happens. You get promoted. Everything changes overnight. The people you used to gripe about your boss with are now your direct reports. The complaints flowing freely between colleagues dry up the second you walk into the room. You stop being one of them. You're management now.

The shift is seismic. It happens fast. And almost nobody prepares you for it.

Good Leaders Feel It More

Here's the part which surprised me most. The better you are at leading, the lonelier you get.

Bad bosses don't feel this. They surround themselves with yes-people, mistake compliance for loyalty, and call it a team. They don't notice the silence because they never stopped to listen.

Good leaders notice. They hear what's not being said. They understand their team won't be fully honest with them. They feel the invisible wall rising the moment they walk into a room.

When you care about psychological safety, you're acutely aware when you personally threaten it. The team needs space to vent about leadership decisions. You are leadership. You don't get to be in those conversations.

When you invest in growing your people, you're constantly thinking about what they need. Your own needs slip to the bottom of the list. Who's thinking about what you need?

When you take accountability seriously, you carry weight others don't see. A project failing doesn't land the same on a developer as it does on the person responsible for the whole team's direction.

What It Feels Like

Let me give you a concrete picture.

You have a decision to make. It affects twelve people. You've turned it over in your head for days. You need to think out loud... but who do you call?

Not your team. You're responsible for them. You don't dump uncertainty on the people you're meant to lead with confidence.

Not your manager. You want to bring them solutions, not problems. You're already anxious about looking like you don't have your house in order.

Not your partner at home. They've heard enough about work. And honestly, they don't know enough about the context to help.

So you sit with it. You turn it over alone. You make the call. You move on. Nobody sees how much it cost you.

I did this more times than I remember. At Curve, at Santander, consulting for clients across Europe. The loneliness of leadership isn't dramatic. It doesn't look like a crisis. It looks like a manager who seems fine... because they've had to learn how to seem fine.

The year I was running seven teams at Curve, I was making daily decisions about people's careers, the company's direction, technical architecture, hiring. I knew everyone's goals, their frustrations, their blockers. I knew who was struggling and why. My 1-1s were built for honest reflection. I invested real effort into creating psychological safety for each person I led.

And I had... nobody doing any of it for me.

My manager was excellent. But they had their own pressures. Our 1-1s were for updates and strategy, not for the kind of honest reckoning I was trying to create for my own team. There was a gap there. I felt it.

Why Nobody Talks About It

There's a myth in leadership culture: the person at the top must project certainty at all times. Vulnerability gets filed under "weakness." Saying "I'm struggling" triggers alarm in organisations not ready for honesty from the people they depend on.

So leaders learn to compartmentalise. They wear the mask. And the longer they wear it, the more natural it feels... and the more isolated they become behind it.

My book, Bad Bosses Ruin Lives, came from years of watching what happens when leaders don't have the support they need. People don't lead badly only because they're selfish or incompetent. Some lead badly because they're exhausted, overwhelmed, and have nobody to talk to. Loneliness corrodes judgement. It narrows perspective. It makes leaders defensive when they should be curious.

I've seen it. A leader who starts to see challenges as threats, feedback as attacks, and their team's silence as contentment... because they've been isolated long enough to lose their calibration.

What the Army Taught Me

I served in the US Army. Something I took from my time there was the concept of After Action Reviews. You sit with your team, you go over what happened, and you talk honestly about what went wrong and what went right. No rank protects you. Honest reflection is expected.

The discipline of honest de-brief is something I've carried through my civilian career. Not always successfully. But when I've had access to a real peer group... people who lead like I do, who face the same fog... those conversations were my AAR. They recalibrated me. They reminded me I wasn't imagining things. Other leaders were moving through the same terrain, making the same kinds of lonely calls.

That matters more than most leadership advice I've received.

The Cure Isn't Promotion

Getting to a higher level doesn't fix the loneliness. If anything, it compounds it.

The thing which helps is peers. Not subordinates, not direct managers... peers. Other people at the same altitude, carrying the same weight, moving through the same fog.

The best support I've ever had came from other leaders being honest about their own struggles. Not in a therapy-group way. In a "here's what I screwed up last quarter and here's what I learned" way. Direct. Honest. No performance required.

If you lead people and you're reading this thinking "yes, this is me"... find those people. Join a leadership peer group. Get a coach. Be honest with someone operating at your level about what it's like.

And if you're in HR or you run an organisation? Build support in. Don't wait for your leaders to ask for it. They won't. Asking for help feels like admitting weakness. And good leaders are terrible at asking for help.

Before You Go

Leadership doesn't have to be this lonely. Making it less lonely requires two uncomfortable things: honesty about the experience, and the willingness to seek connection before you desperately need it.

The adage "it's lonely at the top" gets thrown around like a badge of honour. It's not. It's a warning. And most of the people who need to hear it are too busy leading to stop and listen.

If you lead, who do you have in your corner? Not someone who works for you. Not someone who manages you. Someone who gets it because they're in it too.

If the answer is nobody... start there.

Roland Butcher didn't set out to be the first Black England cricketer. He set out to be good enough to get selected for England. He succeeded at the second goal so completely the first became inevitable.

His framing has stayed with me: don't try to be a trailblazer. Be so damn good they have no choice.

The trail gets blazed by people who are excellent at the work, not by people who want to blaze trails. The distinction sounds fine on paper, but in practice it shapes everything about how you approach your day.

Do you spend your time getting better at the thing itself? Or do you spend it building the story of yourself as someone getting better?

One of those compounds. The other inflates for a while, then deflates publicly.

Excellence Alone Isn't Always Sufficient

I want to be fair here. Excellence alone is not universally sufficient.

If you're from a background where the door stays shut regardless of how good you are, no amount of competence forces it open. Systems excluding people based on who they are, not what they do, are real. I'm not pretending otherwise.

Butcher himself had to be better than his peers to get half the credit. He knew the game was harder for him than for white players with similar records. He played anyway, and he played brilliantly.

But even within systems stacked against people, the ones who broke through were experts at their work. Not a comfortable truth, but a real one. The answer to a broken system is to fight the system. The answer is not to decide excellence doesn't matter.

Excellence is the floor. The fight for fairness sits on top of it.

What This Means Day to Day

If you're building a career, here's how this translates into something practical:

Pick something and go deep. Stop treating your skills portfolio like a collection of hobby projects. Find the thing you want to be best at, and commit to it. Not for a month. For years. The person who has spent five years going deep on one thing is more valuable than the person who has spent five years dabbling in ten things.

Be reliable before you're visionary. The leaders given the big problems to solve are almost always the people who first proved they handle the small ones without drama. Trust is earned in small transactions before it's extended to large ones. Spend there first.

Let the recognition follow the work. Visibility feels like currency, and it is... to a point. People who've built genuine skill find visibility follows, eventually, without having to perform it. People who chase visibility first and substance later build a story outpacing their ability. The gap between story and substance has a way of announcing itself at the worst moment.

Don't chase being the first. Chase being the best. Or at minimum, be so good at what you do the "first" becomes a side effect. Butcher didn't need to campaign for his place in the record books. His batting average did it for him.

The Trail Gets Made by Walking

I'm not anti-ambition. I'm anti-performance-of-ambition.

The best people I've worked with, in the Army and in tech, were not the ones arriving at a new role talking about how they'd change everything. They were the ones who looked at the problem, understood it more thoroughly than anyone else in the room, and then worked on it with a focus bordering on uncomfortable.

Those people changed things. Not because they set out to be historical. Because they were so good at what they did the result was change, whether they wanted the label or not.

Roland Butcher walked onto the Bridgetown pitch in 1980 and played cricket. He scored 32 runs in his first Test innings. He took his catches. He did his job.

History got made in the process.

Do your job. Do it so well it speaks for itself.

The trail follows.

Research cited by Together Platform, drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, puts the average number of jobs held across a career at 12 for baby boomers. Twelve. Not a ladder. A scribble on a napkin.

And yet the ladder myth persists. Schools still teach it. HR departments still plan around it. Managers still frown at people who don't follow a tidy, logical upward progression.

I'm done with the ladder.

My Actual Path

Let me walk you through the spaghetti.

I served in the US Army. After leaving service, I studied Computer Science at the University of North Texas. From there, I worked as a research engineer at Sun Laboratories. It was the organisation responsible for Java and much of the infrastructure modern enterprise software runs on.

Then years of building things. E-commerce platforms. High-availability leaderboards in C. No-code tooling in Tcl/Tk. A VAX/VMS networked database. Founder and partner in several tech ventures. Every project was a masterclass in something school wouldn't have taught me.

Then mobile. I led the Android team at Santander's personal banking app. 2.2 million monthly active users. Cut incident rates by 30 percent. Launched an Android Academy to accelerate new engineer onboarding. Hired 56 engineers over four years.

Then I joined Curve, a UK fintech company, as Senior Engineering Manager. Seven cross-functional teams. Up to 43 people. Manager of managers. Building engineering culture inside a fast-moving startup.

And then I turned again. Now I'm Chief Innovation Officer at Step It Up HR. I keynote at conferences across Europe. I host a podcast. I co-authored Bad Bosses Ruin Lives, a book on what makes leadership work and what makes it catastrophic. I speak to HR professionals, L&D practitioners, and senior leaders about the one thing organisations consistently get wrong: management.

My CV reads like someone who kept changing their mind. I read it as someone who followed the interesting problems wherever they led.

Why the Ladder Fails You

The ladder model rests on a few assumptions.

First, it assumes you know what you want at 22. Second, it assumes your industry stays stable long enough for a multi-year plan to survive contact with reality. Third, it assumes your value to an organisation sits neatly on a single vertical track.

None of those hold.

I had no idea I'd end up in HR technology when I was writing C code at a Sun workstation. The prospect of keynoting in Reykjavik about bad bosses would have seemed like someone else's life to the engineer I was at Santander.

And yet every strand of my career fed the next one.

The military gave me accountability, standards, and the habit of following through under pressure. Research gave me intellectual rigour. Mobile development taught me how to build products people love at enormous scale. Managing large engineering teams showed me how organisations work... and how they fail. All of it travels with me every time I step on a stage.

Sarah Ellis and Helen Tupper coined the term "squiggly career" in their book of the same name. Their argument: the most effective professionals today move laterally, build broad skill sets, and treat careers as sequences of experiments rather than a predetermined climb. They're right.

What You Get From Spaghetti

A ladder takes you up one wall. Spaghetti takes you across the whole room.

Here is what broad, winding experience gives you.

Pattern recognition across domains. When you have worked in defence, research, fintech, and HR technology, you see patterns others miss entirely. Problems in one industry often have solutions sitting in a completely different one. Someone who has spent 20 years in a single vertical develops one lens for seeing the world. Someone who has crossed domains develops several. In a room of specialists, being a generalist is an advantage, not a weakness.

Resilience. If your entire career sits on one rung of one ladder and the rung disappears... because companies downsize, industries shift, or AI changes what the job requires... you face a much harder rebuild. People who have reinvented themselves before know how to do it again. They have already proved to themselves it is possible.

Better stories. Nobody wants to hear about 30 years on the same ladder. A former soldier who ended up keynoting at HR conferences in Iceland? People lean in. They want to know how it happened. Your breadth is a credibility engine, not a liability to apologise for.

Stronger networks. Staying in one lane means your professional contacts narrow over time. Crossing industries means knowing people everywhere. Doors open differently when you have built relationships across a wide range of fields. And when you bring a perspective most people in the room don't have, those relationships open in ways they wouldn't otherwise.

The Part Nobody Mentions

Spaghetti careers are uncomfortable.

Every significant change I made meant starting again lower on the knowledge curve. I was the Android lead who didn't know the banking domain. I was the engineering manager who didn't know HR. Each time, there was a period of feeling out of depth. The imposter feeling is real. The people around you raise their eyebrows. Some say it to your face.

And then you figure it out, faster than you expected, because everything you have done before is still in the room with you. Your prior experience doesn't vanish when you change direction. It recontextualises. It becomes the lens letting you see the new environment more clearly than the people who have never left it.

The discomfort is the price. The breadth is the reward.

Stop Planning, Start Moving

I'm not saying abandon goals. Goals matter. A direction matters.

But a rigid 10-year career plan is mostly a story you tell yourself to feel in control of things you don't control. Markets change. Companies fold. Whole industries get rebuilt from scratch. Your interests evolve. You do too.

Worth having instead: a clear sense of your values and what kind of work gives you energy. A willingness to say yes to things which scare you a little. A habit of learning relentlessly, regardless of where you sit on the org chart.

The best career move I ever made looked, at the time, like chaos. So did the next one. And the one after.

Twelve jobs in a career is the average. Your path is far from straight. Stop apologising for the detours. They are the education.

My career looks like a plate of spaghetti. Every strand is there for a reason.

What does yours look like?

Leaders who admit mistakes are rated as more effective by their teams... not less. Research from Entrepreneur and multiple leadership studies consistently finds leaders who acknowledge being wrong score higher for effectiveness with their teams... not lower. Admitting a mistake signals humility, and humility is consistently associated with better leadership outcomes.

The practical argument is even stronger. When a leader admits a mistake openly, they signal to the whole team: it is safe to do the same. People start raising issues earlier. They flag problems when something is still fixable. They offer honest analysis rather than telling you what they think you want to hear.

When a leader treats every challenge as a threat, the team's instinct is self-protection. Information flows upward slowly, selectively, cleaned up before it arrives. By the time you hear about a problem, it has often grown past the point of easy repair.

One honest moment in a boardroom, one clean admission in front of your boss's boss, sets a different tone entirely. It is worth far more than any trust-building exercise your HR team has ever booked a venue for.

The Skills No One Teaches

Nobody prepares you for this in leadership development programmes. The focus tends to be on decision frameworks, communication styles, how to give feedback. All useful. None of it covers the specific skill of being wrong gracefully, in public, without it becoming a spectacle or a wound you carry forward.

The mechanics are simple. You say: I was wrong. You say what you got wrong. You say what you will do differently. You move on.

No qualifying. No softening. No "to be fair, the information I had at the time suggested..." You were wrong. Own it. Done.

The harder part is internal. Most people feel genuine shame or anxiety when caught being wrong in front of people whose opinions matter to them. The instinct is to protect yourself. The more senior you are, the more you feel you have to protect.

A reframe helped me, and I have tried to pass it on to the people I have managed since. Being wrong is a data point. It tells you where your assumptions drifted, where you needed more information, where you rushed a judgment. It is useful. Fighting it is what makes it damaging.

Doing It in Front of Your Team

If you want your team to surface problems early, be wrong in front of them.

Correct yourself in a meeting when new information comes in. Say "I had this backwards" without apology and without drama. Watch what happens. People relax. They start doing the same. The willingness to speak up increases... not because of any initiative you launched, but because of what you modelled.

You do not earn trust by being right. You earn it by being real.

I have written more about the relationship between managers and their teams, and about what separates the leaders people want to work for from the ones they endure, at Step It Up HR. The patterns are consistent across industries.

The Longer View

The day I admitted I was wrong in front of my boss's boss was not the worst meeting of my career. It turned out to be one of the more instructive ones.

My boss's boss saw someone who wouldn't waste the room's time defending a dead position. My peers saw someone they would feel comfortable disagreeing with later. And I reminded myself of something worth carrying forward: the leaders people follow are not the ones who are always right.

They are the ones who treat being wrong as part of the process. Who take the correction, update their thinking, and get back to work.

The boardroom tests a lot of things. How you handle being wrong in it tells the people watching you more about your leadership than most decisions you will ever make in it.

According to reporting from Time, he called their refusal foolish and warned allies who stay out of a "bad future." He announced, as he often does, America "no longer needs" them.

Here's the problem. He burned those bridges years ago. Now he's standing at the river wondering why no one is helping him cross.

This Is What Burning Bridges Looks Like

Since taking office, Trump has torn up trade agreements and punished allies with tariffs. He threatened to annex Canada. Canada stopped taking his calls. He's pardoned convicted criminals who went on to harm more people. He's systematically dismantled the diplomatic infrastructure the US built over eighty years.

And now he needs those allies. And they've looked at what helping him costs, and walked away.

Europe told him clearly: this is not NATO's war. They want to know the goals, the exit plan, what they're signing up for. Trump has no answers to those questions. His approach doesn't include answers. It includes demands.

His Version of Negotiation

Trump's version of negotiation is simple: you give, he takes. He calls it winning. Everyone else calls it getting mugged.

Canada saw it coming. When he floated his annexation "offer," Canada didn't sit down at the table. Not out of weakness. Because they understood what showing up means when Trump is in the room. He had nothing to offer and everything to demand. Walking away was the only sensible response.

The same is playing out with NATO now. Allies are asking reasonable questions about war aims and accountability. Trump responds with fury and threats. He is not a partner. He is a bully who ran out of people willing to absorb the punishment.