Problem of Practice

A few months ago, my team started engaging in a learning activity that’s quite common in K-12 education settings, especially in school reform activities and professional learning communities. I hadn’t seen it executed outside of formal education spaces before, so I was curious how it would work, but I also had a hunch that it could be effective.

In any case, my boss, who oversees all of our organization’s people, HR, and learning functions, decided to bring this to our team, which, like most, is navigating a lot of messy, hard-to-resolve challenges that would benefit from a fresh perspective or two. As a result, I found myself learning things about my colleagues’ pain points that I never would have uncovered in a regular team check-in. It was a space where, rather than mere status updates, we got to hear about the real challenges the team was facing. It was a structure in which people brought forward the hard issues that were, in some cases, literally keeping them up at night. Perhaps most importantly, I watched my colleagues arrive to the profound conclusion that there were indeed possibilities in overcoming the problems they’d been painfully sitting with alone for months, all because of a collaborative, interactive, and creative team learning space.

The protocol is called Problem of Practice—sometimes called the Consultancy Protocol—and I would argue that it’s something we should all be using regardless of role or industry.

Wait, what is this?

The Problem of Practice protocol, originally developed by Gene Thompson-Grove, Paula Evans, and Faith Dunne at the Coalition of Essential Schools and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, was designed for educators working in complex, under-resourced environments with myriad issues and unclear solutions.

Many schools adopted this kind of problem-solving framework because teachers needed a structured and productive way to work together. In the context of frustrating conditions commonplace in educational settings, it serves as a set of agreements and roles that keep the conversation both efficient and meaningful.

It’s fair to wonder whether it’s worth employing school-based tools outside the classroom. After all, if this were indeed applicable beyond the academy, wouldn’t it have already made its way into organizational settings?

From my lens… probably not.

Largely speaking, many organizations have learning cultures with deep, structural biases towards content delivery—something I talk about quite a lot here. People tend to see learning and development staff as the course builders, workshop facilitators, and LMS admins. “Order taker” is another fair descriptor, as L&D leader Jess Almlie highlights in her recent book.

If you aren’t already aware, my posture towards all of that is this: sure, we can churn out content and hope it lands, but the new world of learning and talent development requires less expertise in talking at people, and considerably more expertise in building the conditions for people to think and work together, thoughtfully and carefully, with the roles and conditions that keep the conversation designed around the need to solve the actual problems facing the business. And with that, this is precisely why this framework is effective.

How it works

The conditions that made the Problem of Practice protocol necessary in schools are, contrary to what many folks might be thinking, not unique to them. Across organizational contexts, whether they be schools or Fortune 500 companies, there are messy issues and relational complexities that employees aren’t just carrying individually, but that are costing the organization in numerous ways. Getting to the heart of these issues—or rather, appropriately defining them—is the first step in tackling them.

With a good protocol, you have to remember that the structure is the point. It might feel limiting at certain points, and the temptation to veer away from the processes’ rigidity may exist, but a clean framework is critical in the absence of clean-cut problems.

Here’s how it would look:

Step 1 — Organize your group: Gather somewhere between three and six people, keeping the space small enough that everyone can be active participants in the conversation, yet large enough that you’re able to achieve diversity of thought and perspective. You’ll also need to assign three different roles: one Presenter, one Facilitator, and your Consultants (everyone else).

Step 2 — Have your Presenter share their dilemma (5–7 minutes): The Presenter brings a problem they are working to solve. It should be something they are stuck on, complex enough that it won’t be resolved with a quick answer, and focused enough that it can be framed for the Consultants within about 5-7 minutes. The other piece of this is that, despite the inclination, Consultants are only there to listen at first.

Step 3 — Clarifying questions (3–5 minutes): Consultants can ask brief clarifying questions to help fill in any key gaps. At this point, the questions shouldn’t be probing, but rather surface-level. Things like: How long has this been going on? Who are the key stakeholders? What have you already tried? The Presenter will answer briefly. This is not yet a conversation; only context-filling.

Step 4 — Probing questions (7–10 minutes): This is the heart of the protocol, and probably the most difficult part for everyone. Consultants ask deeper, more probing questions, with the aim of helping the group understand the problem more fully. What makes a good probing question? Examples include: What would it look like if this were working well? Who else is affected by this in ways you might not be fully seeing yet? What’s one thing you haven’t said out loud about this situation? If you had all the resources in the world, what might you do to solve this? What these questions all have in common is that they open something up, expanding the opportunity for continued conversation rather than shutting it down. They invite the Presenter to think about considerations that may not have been fully examined yet, getting them closer to the heart of the problem. The catch is that the Presenter can’t respond.

Step 5 — The Consultants talk while the Presenter listens (5–7 minutes): The Presenter steps back and the Consultants have a conversation with one another about what they’ve heard, noticed, and think. The Presenter does not speak, defend, or explain. They only listen. But this is by design. Not only are we able to generate more free-flowing ideas this way, but we’re listening for the sake of listening, rather than listening to respond and missing out on valuable information as a result.

Step 6 — The Presenter reflects (3–5 minutes): The Presenter steps back in and shares what resonated, what surprised them, and what they are considering as a possible next step. In some cases, the Presenters understanding of the problem may have evolved by the end of the experience, so they may share this as well. In any case, this is not a space for rebuttal, but for reflection.

Step 7 — Open conversation and debrief (5 minutes): The entire group wraps up by engaging in an open conversation. This is where actual suggestions can be made, if applicable. It’s also recommended that, before the space adjourns, the group works to answer the following: How did the protocol work for us today? What would we do differently next time?

Total time? Roughly 30–40 minutes, which is, I’d argue, a significantly better use of time than most meetings we find ourselves attending!

The impact

If you work in learning and development, organizational development, talent, HR, or any function that plays a role in helping people and teams get better at what they do in service of the organization’s broader mission, this protocol serves many purposes.

First, it’s an empathy-building exercise. Seeing your colleague sit in the Presenter seat and spend time describing something heavy they’ve been carrying, with the room having been curated to cultivate listening, the room responds not with a fix but with curiosity. By the end, you will likely realize that you had no idea that was happening in their world, and now you do, which can change something about how you understand their work and your relationship to it.

Second, it develops the skill of asking good questions. Many of us think we’re good at asking questions, but really, are we? The consultancy protocol makes this visible very fast by forcing us to ask very specific kinds of questions, and limiting our ability to respond to them.

Third, it surfaces the problems we haven’t thought about. Oftentimes, we think we’ve identified the problem at hand, but what if we’ve not been looking at it from the right angle? Or, what if we’ve been asking the wrong questions?

And perhaps most importantly, the protocol serves as an exemplar for effective meeting design. When team meetings are 45 minutes of status updates led by one person and 15 minutes of talking in circles hurriedly, most people walk away feeling bored, confused, frustrated, or some combination of the three. They probably aren’t really sure what’s next, and they’re pissed they’ve just lost 45 minutes of precious time during a terribly busy week. But with Problem of Practice, all meeting participants have had the opportunity to listen, learn, and contribute. They have all attended a meeting that had purpose.

My time in the Presenter’s seat

When it was my turn to sit in the Presenter seat, I came in thinking I needed someone to tell me what to do. In other words, I had a problem and I someone in the room would be able to give me an answer. But this was far from what transpired. When I got instead was a new perspective, and perhaps most importantly, a new sense of direction. By the end of it I had redefined my problem and moved closer towards not just a solution, but the right kind of solutions.

The Problem of Practice protocol has been utilized in schools for years, and I believe it’s high time for us to bring it into learning and organizational development. It doesn’t require anything costly, nor does it force us into finding an alternative meeting slot. It can be built into a meeting you already have, repurposed to serve a curious and competent group of people who, as you’ll come to find, were better equipped than anyone to solve daunting problems. All they needed was the right container in which to do it.

What problem are you currently working through that this tool might help you out with? Share in the comments below!

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I spend a lot of time thinking about the relationship between learning and culture. While many organizations treat them as two separate workstreams, the most forward-thinking, transformation-bound organizations are starting to understand that they are so deeply interwoven that you cannot meaningfully talk about one without talking about the other.

If we view learning as something that lives in a training resource or compliance module, I can understand why the link between learning and culture is hard to pinpoint (although a compliance training about sexual harassment does indeed have a connection to culture, so even then, but I digress….).

But if we see learning as the mechanism that fundamentally alters how people think, engage, make decisions, and broadly speaking, how they show up to work every day, we must also recognize that this cannot happen in a vacuum, nor does it merely come to be just because an organization has decided that this is what it wants. Fundamentally, whether or not learning happens is based almost entirely on the environment in which people are spending their days—which is to say that it happens, or doesn’t, based on culture.

The question then becomes: is our culture set up for the learning we so desperately want and need?

To further underscore what I mean, let’s consider what learning requires.

Learning requires a tolerance for imperfection.

Learning happens in the midst of trial and error. Thus, it requires that people are willing and able to try things that they might not get right the first time around. It requires a culture that allows for mistakes.

If we look at our organizational cultures, we need to be able to understand what our disposition towards imperfection is. Do we allow people to try out new things? Do we treat hiccups as data rather than character flaws? Have we created enough psychological safety that someone can raise their hand and say “I got this wrong and here’s what I learned” without fearing that they’ll lose credibility?

In many organizational contexts, these realities have not yet been codified. Instead, the reality is that people are very careful. Errors are torn apart rather than examined thoughtfully, and there’s a social cost of being wrong that’s high enough that most people decide, whether consciously or not, that being cautious is probably the better choice.

In these environments, what we often find is a group of people who have optimized their existence for self-protection rather than growth, and that is exactly why learning stalls.

Learning requires time.

The amount of time people have to learn is important, but just as important is the quality of the time. People need to be able to thoughtfully pause and assess what’s happening in their work.

The temptation is often to simply look at whether or not we’ve hit a particular goal, but just as important is a deeper analysis around how we’re working together and what we could do differently. Oftentimes, this kind of time is the first thing that disappears when an organization gets “busy.” The danger here is that busy is seen as productivity, when it’s really nothing more than motion and output without understanding.

Without time to pause—and not just a couple times a year, but as part of our regular workflows—people keep doing what they’ve been doing and getting what they’ve been getting. It might very well look like progress, but just think about all we’re leaving on the table because we didn’t stop enough to smell the roses.

Learning requires an intentional approach to delivering and receiving feedback.

I would argue that feedback is perhaps the most complicated issue to tackle when you’re talking about learning and culture. Feedback is a critical vehicle through which knowledge moves from one person to another. It is a source of learning and connection. Yet it is also the thing that often fails to land the way in which it was intended.

The art of giving and receiving feedback is one many of us are not well-versed in. It’s not that the feedback being given is wrong, per say, but that the way it’s delivered doesn’t account for the intricacies of the human being on the receiving end of it.

The nature of feedback is that it can be technically accurate yet practically useless, delivered without any consideration for the relationship (or lack thereof), the moment, the person’s capacity to hear it, or the way it will be absorbed, rejected, or defended against. Because of compromised—or altogether absent—conditions for feedback, these scenarios tend to result in feedback, regardless of the relevance of its content that produces defensiveness, not development.

We simply cannot separate the information from the relationship, nor can we separate the delivery from the culture in which it’s happening.

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I don’t want to say that learning can’t happen in imperfect cultures. I’ve found that people are remarkably resourceful and tend to find ways to grow even in the most constricting, learning-averse environments.

But if we’re talking about longer-term organizational capability, this is not the way to get the results we’re looking for. There is a serious tax that employees (and organizations) pay when the organization does not value learning enough to address the cultural realities at play.

People shouldn’t be trying to learn despite their environment. They should be learning because of it. Otherwise, what we end up with is a lack of meaningful collaboration, an indisposition to trying new things, and the same patterns of behavior cycling on repeat.

Culture is not the backdrop against which learning happens, but the condition that determines whether learning, and ultimately, transformation, is possible at all.

Is your culture set up for learning? What have you found to be essential in creating a culture for learning? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The topic of efficiency gets a lot of airtime in organizational life. Just think back to your last strategic planning session, ops review, retreat, or even weekly team meeting. Efficiency is often glorified as both the diagnosis and the cure, as the thing we should always be striving for. On the flip side, what we often miss is the opportunity to ravish in the art of process and all that it—when thoughtfully designed—begets us.

Process is sometimes viewed from a lens of bureaucracy and perhaps even apathy and unresponsiveness. We often blame it when decisions takes too long, when we’re frustrated by a delay, or when market conditions are forcing dramatic responses. We think that process limits us in getting what we want, or where we need to go. But interestingly, it is process that gets us to the point of creating something that we don’t just need now, but that we need down the line.

Process is the actual mechanism through which work gets done. It is the thing through which people figure out what they need to solve, and the thing through which teams become—imperfectly and sometimes painfully—something more than just a group of individuals in the same room. Efficiency, as a goal, keeps asking one question: how do we get there faster? But process, if we allow it to serve as the wonderful tool that it is, reminds us that the work of getting there is not inefficiency to be eliminated, but information, relationship, and possibility to be channeled into something meaningful and sustainable.

Here are three things process offers that an over-indexed fixation on efficiency can’t.

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1. Process surfaces what we don’t know we don’t know.

Efficiency works quite nicely when we’ve already figured out the right answer and just need to execute it cleanly. But this assumes the formula has been written and everything is working perfectly, with only minor improvements needed. Most of the time organizations are operating in the context of conditions that are significantly messier than that. The “right” answer isn’t settled yet, or if it has been, new complications or changing market conditions make the previous way of doing obsolete, or at the very least, in need of some alteration. In many cases, you might even learn that the original problem you were solving for isn’t a problem at all, or perhaps it requires a different point-of-view.

With a process orientation, we open ourselves up to a friction, which, despite the discomfort it produces, can lead to discovery. Through process, we allow people to ask, “Wait, why are we doing it this way? Is this actually serving us?” Through process, we mitigate the temptations of speed, recognizing that sometimes slowing down is what helps us speed up, and most importantly, do things better in the long-run. Turns out that speed isn’t everything.

2. Process builds the relationships necessary to make everything else come to fruition.

Sometimes too much of a focus on efficiency can inadvertently result in relationship-building and collaboration being viewed as costs to be minimized. We may not say this outright, but we might as well every time we make someone’s workload so insane that they can’t step out for a bite to eat with a colleague, or anytime we choose to replace a human-to-human interaction with the latest technological tool. I understand the impulse, and I’m not ignorant to the benefits of convenience and timeliness. Plus, coordination between humans can be slow, hard, and altogether exhausting. But aren’t there also considerable benefits to coordination? Isn’t it the back-and-forth, the space for misalignment to be worked out together, what builds the trust that allows a team to truly innovate and succeed? Are these not the spaces where people share uncomfortable truths early enough, before they become crises? This can’t happen amid the relentless pursuit of efficiency. It doesn’t live in the outcome, but in the process of getting there. In each of the moments that probably look like they’re, from the outside, slowing things down.

3. Process creates the conditions for the things we couldn’t have anticipated before getting started.

I’m actually a big fan of wandering around without direction. You know what Tolkien said: “Not all those who wander are lost.” I’ll never forget my most treasured moments adventuring. They’re the ones that were unexpected and unplanned. While I used to plan every single sight, destination, and restaurant months in advance, I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of a little spontaneity—of just seeing where the road takes me.

I think this can also translate to the workplace. Process in organizational life is about far more than administrative scaffolding. It is the structured way we move through our tasks. It is the sequence of decisions, conversations, and checkpoints that turn ideas into outcomes. It is the environment in which people think and build together. When we make room for process, we open ourselves up to what we couldn't have planned for, including things like the problems we didn't know we had and the powerfully transformative relationships that may not have otherwise had the chance to organically form.

Process, by its nature, also puts us in proximity both to one other and to problems for longer periods than a purely efficient system would. Through this proximity, we unearth new interdependencies, whether it be in the conversation that happens after the formal meeting, or in an adjacent problem someone notices while working through what was labeled as the primary one. The connection between two people or two ideas here is significant, because with efficiency might not have allowed it to happen. Efficiency tends to see all of that as a distraction. But a remarkable number of the best things organizations have ever produced started out that way, turning into something more all because someone had the gumption to take the road less traveled.

Let me be clear in that I’m not making an argument against efficiency in its entirety. We obviously need to achieve goals in a timely manner (some more than others, perhaps) and we don’t want to draw things out or make them harder than they need to be. Still, efficiency as our primary organizing principle, as the metric every decision, move, or interaction is optimizing for, tends to weaken the conditions that make for clear goals and the team dynamics necessary to achieve them. Sure, an orientation towards efficiency may lead to faster outputs, but at what cost? We mustn’t be so obsessed with streamlining things that we hamper the relationships, discoveries, and connections that allow for our organizations to not only be successful in a quantitative sense, but tp become truly thriving ecosystems that people are excited to be a part of.

What are you thoughts on efficiency? Have you seen it be harmful for organizations as well? Share your experiences in the comments below!

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Early in my career I had a manager who wanted us to let them know the moment we arrived at work (I wish I were joking). This wasn’t a check-in tied to a project, nor was it a quick motivational sync before a big meeting. It was nothing more than confirmation that we had physically shown up to the space (this was pre-COVID, so you can only imagine the nature of the obsession with reporting times).

I also had a manager, at a different point, who asked her direct reports to keep her updated on things during our regular 1:1s. They were held weekly, thoughtfully curated, and resulted in an increased level of clarity and buy-in.

The first situation had no tie to the work itself. It was about nothing more than presence, whereabouts, and someone who needed to feel in control.

The second was about partnership. Information flowing up and down and around, in service of the work and our growth alongside it.

Researchers define micromanagement as excessive control, scrutiny, and tight supervision that restricts employee autonomy, stifles independent decision-making, and leaves little room for ownership over the work someone was hired for. We often think of micromanagement in the context of frequency, and in circumstances surrounding individual managers, but I believe it is the nature and intention of the interaction and the system surrounding that person that makes for a true micromanager.

Someone who checks in deliberately even daily in service of the work and the person doing it isn’t micromanaging. However, a manager who checks in to confirm whether you’ve physically arrived at your desk most certainly is. And yet “micromanager” has become one of those labels that tends to get applied so broadly that it’s lost much of its meaning. Managers get called micromanagers for following up on deadlines, asking for status updates, or wanting visibility into how a project is tracking. Employees sometimes call any form of oversight micromanaging, including oversight that is entirely reasonable given the context, stakes, or someone’s newness to a role. One of the challenges here is that, as a result of our unclear application of the word, we’re obscuring the fact that micromanagement is about far more than frequency.

As the saying goes, people don’t leave organizations. They leave managers. Micromanagement undermines morale, engagement, confidence, and job satisfaction by eroding employees’ sense of autonomy and ownership, stifling creativity and innovation, and activating a chronic stress response that, over time, contributes to anxiety, burnout, disengagement, and also significant organizational harm. At the crux of this is a manager that does a whole lot more surveilling than supporting. If we’re being honest, micromanagement is often rooted in an absence of trust between the manager and their directs. But this is something within the manager’s locus of control. They are the ones interacting with their teams, and they get to shape the nature of those interactions.

Still, micromanagement is hardly ever just a singular manager problem, nor is it typically a problem that exists between two people. Sure, you can have a crappy manager. Maybe even a not so great person. A bad dynamic or personality clash. But we must also remember that micromanagement is often a symptom of something way upstream.

It might be a senior leader who hovers over their direct reports, who then hover over their teams. Or perhaps it’s a culture of “excellence,” anchored around numerous lofty yet poorly defined goals. In either case, you can end up with an individual manager who gets labeled a micromanager, even if the organization is what created the conditions that allowed for the behavior to manifest in the first place.

Labeling someone a micromanager and moving on is hardly a fix for anything. If the culture encircling them does not promote an alternate kind of conduct, the cycle will only sustain itself. As we see more often than not, the problem lives in the space between the individual and the system. Responding to both realities proportionally is the only real way to mitigate the harmful effects of micromanagement in our organizational lives.

Think of a time when you were micromanaged. What did it feel like? What did it look like? And what do you think the actual issue was? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Nature or Nurture?

There is something very human about the impulse to sort. To divide into two. Good or bad. Right or wrong. Works for me or doesn’t. This approach or that one. The human brain, faced with a world that is increasingly complex—chock-full of ambiguity and competing priorities and situations that resist any kind of clean resolution—reaches instinctively for the simplicity of two options. Two options are manageable, while a spectrum of choices produces profound tension.

The phenomenon is what psychologists often call dichotomous thinking, otherwise known as black and white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking. Dichotomous thinking is formally defined as the propensity to understand things in the context of opposites, in a binary way. Either you’re stuck or not, or as one researcher put it, in either the thesis or the antithesis, unable to move toward synthesis. It is, in the truest sense, either-or thinking rather than both-and thinking, and it is (at least in my opinion) one of the most fascinating patterns in human psychology.

A bit of biological perspective always does us wonders, so let’s start there. Some scientists believe that because our brains evolved under conditions where quick categorization was necessary and adaptive, our ability to engage in this kind of thinking became a survival advantage, especially in the midst of human discomfort of uncertainty. Think about it…when we’re facing the need to choose, a kind of mental shortcut that quickly categorizes things that feel ambiguous or unresolved helps reduce our sense of being threatened. We seek out immediate relief, even if it dilutes space for perspective and nuance. And if we can blame it on nature, what’s there to do about it?

There’s also a case for nurture, as is evidenced by the belief that dichotomous thinking is a cornerstone of Western philosophy with its penchant for binary and dualistic thinking. As philosopher Thorsten Pattberg points out, philosophies of “the Orient” and more specifically, China, reflect formulas of balance, harmony and/or equilibrium, whereas the West relies more on opposition and contradiction as our primary engines of understanding. If the tendency toward either/or thinking were indeed innate and universal, we could safely expect it to show up across cultures, right? In the interest of time, I won’t dive too deeply into this (neither am I an expert in the domains of biological psychology and philosophy nor is that the purpose of this post), but I do think some framing is important.

I also want to name that dichotomy isn’t all bad. The same cognitive pattern that creates problems in our thinking and relationships and, more relevant to this piece, our organizations, is also, in certain contexts, quite useful. The ability to simplify, make quick decisions, cut through ambiguity, and reach a clear conclusion are not trivial capabilities, but moments in organizational life where decisiveness is exactly what we often want and need, mostly because there’s a cost (financial or otherwise) to extensive deliberation.

The problem though is that this approach to thinking and decision-making often becomes the default. Our brain’s preference for two clean categories starts shaping decisions, teams, policies, and cultures in ways that we’ve hardly taken the time to examine, make conscious, or question, even if it harms us in not doing so.

For this reason, my focus for this week’s post is the innately human tendency to engage in dichotomous thinking, and why we need to get a bit more comfortable with the grey.

It Always Starts With You and Me

Before dichotomous thinking shows up in organizational systems and policies, it shows up in you and me, everyday people. Take a moment to think about the subtle yet almost immediate assumptions and judgements we make about the situations, people, and ideas we encounter in our everyday workflows. I like this person or I don’t. This approach works for me or it doesn’t. This meeting was productive or it was a waste of time. That feedback was fair or it wasn’t. These reactions can feel like grounded and true assessments, and perhaps they are at times, but more often than not they tend to represent moments in which a complex situation is flattened into a verdict without thoughtful care and examination.

This is significant in the context of organizational life because judgments hardly remain personal and individualized for very long. There are managers who decide quickly that a new employee “gets it” or doesn’t (usually within the first few weeks, often on the basis of relatively sparse evidence), thus making a binary call that will surely inform how much investment, opportunity, and developmental feedback that person receives moving forward forward. There are colleagues who decide that a proposed change is good or bad, for or against their interests, even before the full picture has been shared, in turn setting up a defensive posture that makes the prospect of engaging in dialogue considerably harder for everyone else.

In many of these cases our actions aren’t entirely conscious. Our brains are simply doing what they do: assessing threat, pattern-matching, categorizing, and reaching for the nearest available label to choose from. This also happens quickly, so by the time our conscious minds catch up and begin to account for the possibility of nuance, a mere thought or perception can turn into a settled fact. And this is precisely why we need to slow down.

From Individuals to Systems

Once I started looking for binary thinking in organizations, I began to uncover it in a lot of different places. For example, I found it encoded in language, embedded in processes, institutionalized in policies, and captured in diverging stances across teams. From my perspective, the most interesting thing about dichotomous patterns in organizational behavior is that they become so hardened that people feel totally and utterly dictated by ways of seeing and doing that they themselves didn’t choose.

One of the ways in which this manifests is in how we talk about a specific approach or method. We often believe we need to do it this way or that way… choosing this framework or that one…this strategy or the alternative. The funny thing is that the real world of organizational happenings is hardly ever a clean either-or paradigm, but the language of meetings, strategy sessions, and cultural norms often is. This is, in part, because it’s easier to debate two options than to hold five in mind simultaneously, but it also has to do with the fact that we crave immediacy and productivity in a way that sitting with complexity comes into tension with, even if it’s what many situations actually require.

Binary thinking also tends to emerge in conversations about change. The old way or the new way. The way we’ve always done it or the disruption. I think that just as we can remain far too attached to the old way, we can become far too excitable about the new way, and both are relevant. From my lens, the biggest issue within dichotomy in the context of organizational change is that we often see shifts as swaps rather than evolutions. We often don’t see change as progress, which in some cases mean we hold on far too tightly to what once was, and conversely, we sometimes dismiss the importance of what will be. We need not discard rather than build—we need not always choose a side. Oftentimes what we need to do is integrate what’s working from the past with what we need for the future.

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Space for Grey

In almost every case, the binary thinking that shapes many of the organizational mindsets, norms, and policies you and I carry forward in our everyday work have emerged from perhaps a genuinely human impulse towards the principles of clarity, efficiency, and resolution. Still, I believe we have both the ability to trace these back to the source and the responsibility to see things not from a mere black and white lens, but one that also honors the grey.

When we frame decisions as either-or, we foreclose the both-and options that often turn out to be more generative than either pole can offer on its own. In the spirit of statistical analysis, when we write binary policies, we create systems that fit the average case reasonably well but serve the edges of the distribution poorly, which is often where transformative talent and opportunity live. And when we let dichotomous thinking operate without awareness, we end up perpetuating the kinds of organizations that pain us most—those that don’t know how to respond to nuance, adapt to new market conditions, or cultivate the kind of transparent work environments we all crave.

I’m not proposing that we eliminate binary thinking, because that’s neither possible nor entirely desirable. Besides, in the words of 90s music queen Alanis Morissette, recommending this would be ironic, don’t you think?

What I am suggesting is the practice of noticing—of developing enough self-awareness to catch ourselves in moments of harmful bifurcation. Is a two-bucket framing actually serving the situation at hand? What’s being lost when we limit our options to only two? What would it look like to hold a spectrum rather than a binary?

These are the kinds of questions that tend to open up possibility, and in most organizations, we surely need a bit more of that. People deserve more of that. We might be accustomed to the ease and temptation of black and white thinking, but we mustn’t forget about the power that lies in the grey.

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How does dichotomous thinking show up most for you? Do you see it somewhere in yourself? With your team? In the systems and policies around you? I'd love to hear more about how you experience it! Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Are We Protecting Or Evolving?

Like most of us, I’ve been on a lot of hiring committees over the years. Each one is its own thing, with different organizations, roles, and dynamics shaping how things play out. Some required intensive trainings beforehand for all participants. Some have strict hiring guides and requirements for note-taking. Some are almost lacksadasical, with an unprepared group of interviewers showing up the day of the interview without a single pre-planned question.

There are a couple of things I’ve observed in all of this, and one of them is that you can’t expect anyone to know all the best practices through common sense alone. You have to explicitly state what it is people can and can’t do. And if you want the interview to have a certain tone, you have to state that, too. I’ve also observed that someone almost always has to say something along the line of": “I just don’t think they’re a culture fit.”

It’s an interesting concept, don’t get me wrong, but I often find that it feels like a paradox: an incomplete thought with a certain conclusiveness to it. Something feels self-evident enough that it often goes without proper interrogation. We often accept the statement and move on. But if you’re lifting the hood, you might also ask what “culture fit” actually means here. Fit with what, specifically? Which parts of the culture are we trying to protect, and are those parts actually working for people, or are they what we’re trying to evolve away from?

What “Culture Fit” Typically Means in Practice

Theoretically, culture fit sounds like a reasonable thing to screen for. We all want to work with colleagues who share our values, can work well with existing teams, and won’t create unnecessary tension. This kind of logic alone isn’t the problem. The issue is that in practice, “culture fit” rarely gets defined with clarity and precision. It’s a murky and sometimes even deceiving translation for familiarity, and comfort—someone who reminds us of who’s already here, and someone who will more or less stay in line.

I’d like to argue that this is actually bias with a fancy name.

Studies on homophily—the well-documented human tendency to gravitate toward people who are similar to us—have demonstrated that hiring decisions made on the basis of “fit” tend to reproduce the demographic and cognitive makeup of existing teams rather than expand it.

Think about how a magnet works. It pulls toward itself what is already like itself. Culture fit mirrors this, representing a self-reinforcing pull toward sameness, and it's so innately human that many hiring teams miss that it's happening.

With this, we may think we’re protecting culture, but what we often do is end up replicating it. Add the fact that many organizations have real problems, including but not limited to communication, accountability, low psychological safety, unsupported leadership, and you start to realize that hiring for fit can actually exacerbate these problems and ultimately, give them a longer lifespan.

Culture Isn’t Some Static Thing

The concept of “culture fit” treats culture like a fixed thing. In other words, it’s seen as something that exists in its current form and must be preserved. But if you look at the history of mankind regardless of era and setting, culture is never fixed for long. It’s always moving, always being shaped by the people inside it, the decisions being made, the behaviors being tolerated. And with how much access to knowledge we have in an increasingly technologically-driven, interconnected world, we have the ability and duty to be really intentional about how culture change manifests.

When we hire with a heavy tilt towards the culture that currently exists, we’re betting hard that the culture we have right now is the culture we’ll want and need a few years from now. For most organizations, this is risky, because the teams that learn, grow, adapt, and outperform over time are the ones that intentionally brought in people who challenged assumptions, introduced new ways of thinking and doing, and helped the organization become something better than what it already was.

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A Better Framing: Culture Contributor

Before I proceed, I want to name that I’m well aware of the popular alternative to “culture fit, which is “culture add.” I know I risk the possibility of perpetuating the very problem I hope to help solve. That is, swapping terminology without changing the underlying dynamic. Because ultimately, if hiring committees don't change how they evaluate candidates, we can call it whatever we want, but will anything change?

Let me share a bit about some of my concerns with the term “culture add” (and by no means is this meant to be dismissive of it entirely). The issue I see with “culture add” is that the framing still positions the existing culture as the baseline. It suggests that the culture is something complete that we simply need to add to, like an ingredient, implying that the organization is largely “right” and a person walking in can bring a little something extra. It has also started to feel like HR rebranding in an era where the term “diversity” is under scrutiny.

But what if there’s an alternative (or an add-on)? What if, instead of just asking whether this person fits in with or adds to our culture, we also asked something like, “How does this person help us become the culture we’re trying to build?”

This is an interesting shift from a fixation with someone who is a good culture fit to someone who is a “Culture Contributor.” What this essentially means is that we’re not hiring for those who simply blend in, but those who add something to what is being built1. Their perspective, background, or approach may be totally different from what we’re used to, but isn’t that the point?

“Culture Contributors” do something different from “fits” and “adds.” A contributor isn’t supplemental, but essential to the desired outcome and to what comes next. It also implies agency and reciprocity, implying that the organization isn’t just receiving something from this person, but that they’re investing in a collaborative relationship. If your organization is trying to work on alleviating power dynamics, this is one way to do that.

Again, I should also name values alignment is very real and worth screening for. We all want people who share a genuine commitment to doing good work, to how people are treated and work together, and to what the organization stands for in terms of its mission and values. But values alignment is hardly same as stylistic similarity, demographic familiarity, a shared professional pedigree, or the vague sense that someone “just feels right” for a role.

Stylistic similarity is about communication patterns, personality, and the way someone carries themselves in a room, none of which are values. Demographic familiarity is about shared background, identity, or life experience, which, when used as a proxy for fit, is seriously harmful thing a hiring committee can do. Professional alignment is about pedigree—the companies someone came from, the schools they attended, and the career path they followed—and while experience matters, we mustn’t confuse a familiar resume with a values match.

Values are about how someone approaches their work, how they treat people, what they do when things get hard or ambiguous, and whether their behavior holds up in rooms where nobody is watching. Values are worth screening for carefully and deliberately, because they go a lot deeper than what mere pattern matching can offer.

When we look for values, we are entering the territory of screening for someone who is a Culture Contributor: someone who brings forward something that the organization might not have, but would certainly benefit from. Culture Contributors complement existing strengths, yes, but they also push edges, introduce friction where it’s useful, and help the culture evolve in a way that benefits the organization. This differentiation, I believe, is essential to great hiring.

A Simple(ish?) Audit For Hiring Teams

Before the whole idea of “culture fit” surfaces in any hiring conversation, it’s essential to do some reflecting about what this term means for you. If you’re not thinking about values, behaviors, and current gaps and opportunities at your organization, you’re missing some critical perspective.

I also recommend taking a moment to determine when the concept of “fit” is doing work it shouldn’t be. Does it stand for comfort rather than values? Familiarity rather than capability? Are you looking for someone who reminds you of you rather than adds something we all would benefit from? These kinds of questions might not spark immediate solace or consensus, but they do make for great hiring.

Culture fit as a concept may not always have bad intentions, but intentions alone don’t determine impact. If the criterion we're bringing into hiring committees is preserving the dynamics our organization might benefit from changing, it's time to retire it. In terms of culture, most organizations don’t need more of the same. They need Cultural Contributors.

How does your organization’s hiring process look? Are you looking for cultural “fits,” “adds,” or “contributors?” Would love to hear more about what’s working and what isn’t!

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1

I recognize that many organizations don’t have a clear, honest picture of where they're trying to go culturally, so some of these ideas open up a can of worms. Still, I think this could be a good starting point to figuring some of this out.

The Four Pillars of Trust

I was recently at a team retreat where we spent some time with Charles Feltman’s book, The Thin Book of Trust. Admittedly, I had never read or heard of this book before, but I was familiar with Brené Brown’s reverence towards the author.

As someone who loves learning (and who leans with a heavy tilt towards input), I find the sheer volume of great books out there to be more and more overwhelming by the day. Perhaps this isn’t unique to me, but at any given time, I’m perusing my way through a few different books. But this one is quite nice in that, as the name suggests, it’s pretty short. You can honestly read it on a short flight. One might wonder how much impact such a short read can have on a person, but as most of us here know, quality often matters much more than quantity.

In any case, Feltman defines trust as choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions. In other words, it’s a deliberate decision to hand control of something that’s important to you over to someone else, knowing that they might cause harm or drop the ball, but still believing they won’t. Felt also says that trust is anchored around four pillars:

Pillar 1: Care — Believing the other person has your interests in mind.

Pillar 2: Sincerity — Believing the person is honest and acts with integrity.

Pillar 3: Reliability — Believing the person keeps commitments.

Pillar 4: Competence — Believing the person has the ability to deliver.

All four pillars are worth some sitting with, but the one that stood out to me most was competence, probably because so much of starting a new role (as many of you know I recently did) is about “proving your competence”—whatever that means. What’s interesting about competence is that we often equate it with perfection or at the very least, minimal faultiness. But being competent doesn’t mean being perfect. As Feltman articulates, part of competence is knowing what you don’t know, being willing to learn, and asking for help when we need it. As such, part of competence is recognizing where we’re incompetent and owning that fully.

Now bear with me, but as I was sitting with this idea, I started thinking about how our competency muscle is exercised in the context of feedback conversations—formal or otherwise. More specifically, I was reflecting on the fact that this is the place where the rubber meets the road in terms of whether we’ve actually built out the conditions for trust. Both giving and receiving feedback are risks. The person giving feedback is making their observations vulnerable, while the person receiving it is making different aspects of their being vulnerable. Thus, whether either of these risks feels safe to take depends almost entirely on the trust holding up the relationship underneath the conversation.

Trust isn’t always about a framework, nor is it always about timing. Rather, it’s about the relationship, and that’s what I’m here reflecting on this week.

Words Aren’t Everything

Most of us have been in situations where the feedback handed to us landed beautifully despite it being hard to swallow. It was specific, behavior-based, and framed in a spirit of generosity. We in turn heard something hard about ourselves and walked away with more clarity and more motivation, and very much ready to do something with it.

I’ve also been in situations where where the exact same type of feedback landed more like an accusation. This is the kind of interaction where things go quiet and body language closes off. There may have been developmental intention on the part of the feedback-giver, but that really meant nothing.

The difference here is often less about the words and more about the relationship. In the rooms where feedback lands well, there is often a powerful history with a real, accumulated sense that one person is seriously invested in the other’s growth and that they weren’t delivering observations from a place of judgment or self-interest, but from one of genuine care. Conversely, in rooms where feedback falls short, there’s an absence of history, and even careful, well-intentioned feedback can get distorted.

Of the four trust-building pillars, Feltman argues that care is the most important for lasting trust, mostly because there’s considerable power that comes when people believe you genuinely hold their interests alongside your own: they tend to extend trust more broadly and are more forgiving when things go off track. This is absolutely foundational in determining whether feedback is going to work. It has far less to do with the right framework than it does with what’s being built behind the scenes in everyday interactions.

Most feedback training focuses on the side of the feedback-giver. It encompasses different feedback models they can use, the kinds of language they should choose, and the broader sequence and flow of the conversation to adhere to. These elements are all significant, and we should all have feedback training, but I do think we’re missing some of the fundamentals, because ultimately, if the person receiving the feedback doesn’t trust the person delivering it, there’s not a whole lot we can expect.

Stanford researchers David Yeager and Geoffrey Cohen (along with others) conducted what they called “wise feedback” experiments. These were essentially studies through which they found that critical feedback (for students in particular, although the findings have professional application as well) paired with a simple relational signal such as “I’m giving you this because I believe in your ability to meet these standards” shifted how people engaged with and acted on the feedback. The content within the feedback wasn’t different, but the relational signals were, emphasizing the importance of the trust variable in determining both the reception and outcome of feedback.

I should also add that I firmly believe the setting matters more than we often realize. There’s something about always delivering feedback in a formal context, whether it be a pre-scheduled meeting, a closed door, a calendar invite that says “discussion.” This kind of thing prompts the person on the other side of the invite to walk in with a pre-set posture. But when we contrast this approach with feedback that happens over coffee, during lunch, or even on a walk, the same observations we name may be processed entirely differently. Many managers haven’t been trained to think about this, but trust is innately human, and an informal setting reflective of real human needs is a highly effective way of cultivating relational trust.

Easy, right?

Well, not necessarily.

I think this is tricky because it means that the work of building a rich and effective feedback culture starts earlier and goes deeper than many organizations realize. It starts in ordinary, less than glamorous moments, like in how managers show up on the day-to-day, whether they follow through on what they say they’ll do, whether they ask questions from a place of openness and curiosity, and whether people experience them over time as someone who is invested in their growth. This reflects an accumulation of what Feltman calls sincerity and reliability, showing up again and again in small yet consistent ways. And in the end, it’s what builds the trust necessary for feedback to yield opportunity and behavior change.

Receiving Feedback

Receiving feedback well is also imperative here. We spend a fair amount of organizational energy training managers to deliver feedback, but I think we do a lot less when it comes to sending folks into conversations with the actual preparation for how to hear difficult things without shutting down, deflecting, or responding defensively.

Defensiveness in response to feedback isn’t a character flaw. It’s a pretty predictable and human response to perceived threat. But again, trust is the anchor. When a relational context has low-trust, the brain is more or less justified in registering threat, because in low-trust relationships, critical feedback may indeed signal that something “bad” is coming. The problem is that defensiveness, whatever its origins, inhibits what feedback is supposed to do, because we cannot update our understanding of ourselves while simultaneously defending our current understanding of ourselves.

This is why trust has to come first. Without trust, our nervous system is working against the whole feedback endeavor, and no amount of skillful delivery can get around it. Real trust—built through Feltman’s four distinctions, thoughtfully and over time—is what creates the conditions for people to hear hard things and do something meaningful with them.

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Upward Feedback

I also want to spend a minute on the topic of upward feedback. Many organizations have this mechanism (via forms, surveys, etc.) built into their infrastructure, but is it used?

Not always.

Upward feedback requires the individual with less power to make themselves vulnerable to the individual with more power, which isn’t a small task. Research monitoring employee experiences has found that feeling genuinely trusted by a manager is a primary predictor of whether employees voice concerns and share upward feedback. It’s not enough to simply tell people it’s safe to speak up. Instead, we need to show them, repeatedly and over time, through the kind of sincerity and reliability that Feltman describes. Without this, upward feedback forms and other well-intentioned mechanisms will fall short.

Building the Conditions for Organizational Success

If words are secondary to the relational context in which they land, then perhaps the most important questions we need to be asking ourselves are as follows:

“Have I built the kind of relationship where my feedback can be heard and acted upon?”

“Have we nurtured the trust and safety—on both sides of the exchange—that would make that process meaningful?”

In my newsletter I talk a lot about the fact that many managers were never really developed as people leaders. They were promoted because they were excellent individual contributors, and then handed a team and largely left to figure out the ins and outs of supporting and developing people on their own. I think it’s worth flagging this again here, because the skills that made someone great at their individual function are not the same skills required to build the kind of relationships that make feedback—dare I call it a requirement for a flourishing organization—work. When we skip this development, we’re not just setting the manager up to struggle, but their entire team, all because trust hasn’t been given enough attention.

Feltman’s framework isn’t really about trust as a standalone concept, and that’s precisely what I love about it. We need to think about trust as a cornerstone for everything else, rooted in daily, accumulated choices anchored around the principles of sincerity, reliability, competence, and care that, over time, build the conditions for positive interpersonal relationships and ultimately, organizational success.

Feedback goes on to live or die inside these conditions. When we build them first, feedback becomes possible. Trust first, feedback second. In that order, always.

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Have you read The Thin Book of Trust? I highly recommend it! Either way, I’d love to hear about your experience with all things trust and feedback in the comments below.

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Sometimes the person who challenges everything is the one who catches what everyone else was too tired, polite, or conflict-averse to flag. They’re the person who identifies that important thing buried in the contract, the assumption no one had stress-tested, the question everyone else was too afraid to ask, or the idea that will probably cause more harm than good. There’s a version of this “work persona,” if you will, where friction is not only the point but a strategic advantage. Their disposition might be bringing about discomfort, but there’s a lot of impact in what they tend to see, say, or do.

Research by Lindred Greer, an organizational behavior researcher at Stanford, has found that having a constructive dissenter on a team—someone who carefully and artfully surfaces differences and weaknesses—can deliver what she describes as the holy grail of team dynamics. This person is so skilled at constructive dissent that they generate the kind of healthy conflict that improves creativity, decisions, and outcomes, and do so without the team even fully registering it as conflict. However, the key in all of this is the word “carefully.” For this kind of situation to manifest, you need someone with high emotional intelligence to play the part.

A bit of context about what emotional intelligence is, according to a piece by award-winning journalist Liz Mineo in The Harvard Gazette:

This is significant in that Greer’s research has found is that effective dissenters aren’t just those who create friction, but those with the emotional intelligence to communicate differences in non-confrontational ways, thoughtfully and skillfully, and in a way that makes the space almost feel absent of the tension that conflict inevitably brings.

Taking things a step further, I’d also argue that this version of antagonism—that which improves things on a team—is specific and rare and requires a kind of emotional calibration that many individuals are not trained for or that, simply put, do not have. This might be due to early experiences in one’s life, including trauma or neglect, limited exposure to diversity of thought and perspective, and/or limited self-awareness. It’s not that people are malicious, but many of us were never explicitly taught about what’s “emotionally intelligent” and what isn’t. We learned how to have opinions, how to push back, and how to defend a position, but we may have not been taught how to do any of that in a way that reserves space for the other person in the room.

Also worth noting is that there’s is a growing understanding that emotional intelligence, much like any other skill, can be used for good or bad. As Adam Grant points out, “When you’re good at controlling your own emotions, you can disguise your true feelings. When you know what others are feeling, you can tug at their heartstrings and motivate them to act against their own best interests.” Thus, you could argue that the emotional intelligence I described earlier isn't just “high EQ” in the broad sense of the term. Rather, it's a specific orientation toward other people, and one that's genuinely aimed at the work rather than at being right and winning.

But what separates useful antagonism from the corrosive kind?

Having seen this distinction play out in various contexts over the course of my career, I feel confident in saying that it’s largely rooted in whether a person’s critique and overall energy are being directed at specific ideas and behaviors, or whether, consciously or not, they’re being aimed towards people, feelings, and motives. The colleague who challenges a proposal after they’ve leaned in with openness and curiosity and asked various questions about it is different from the one who jumps to criticism from the start, or who steers a conversation in a particular direction for the purpose of their own gain. In the first scenario, it might be a little hard to take at times, but at least there’s collaboration and idea-sharing happening. In the second scenario, however, people are being conditioned to share less and take fewer risks in order to keep the temperature cool and comfortable for the dissenter.

Perhaps not intentionally, but many organizations allow this to happen on repeat. It might be because friction is seen as a positive thing, or maybe it’s because the people behind the friction have been deemed high-performers.

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I should also name that I’m not making a case for relentless agreeableness. In general, a room full of people who nod at everything brings about its own kind of organizational risk, and I’d rather have someone who challenges things when no one else is. But there is a significant difference between friction that makes teams sharper and friction that makes teams smaller. This is because there’s nothing at all the same about challenging work and challenging control and positioning, or pushing back out of care concerning the outcome and pushing back because it’s simply what someone likes to do. This is, in a nutshell, the difference between constructive and destructive dissent.

It’s worth sitting with this distinction, and perhaps it’s worth asking whether you yourself have ever taken the role of dissenter a bit too seriously or too far. I think most of us probably have at one point or another, and that’s okay, so long as we do something about it moving forward.

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Have you seen constructive dissent in the workplace? What about destructive dissent? Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

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This past week was a productive one.

It was one of those weeks where I objectively got a lot done, and what I mean by this is that I moved work forward in ways that felt quite substantive. I was, for the most part, not just doing hollow tasks, but those that could (fingers crossed!!) have a significant and positive impact.

And yet, somewhere midweek, I caught myself wondering if I was doing enough. I didn’t have as many meetings as usual, and there was a persistent hum in the back of my mind that sounded like this:

In total honesty, I was annoyed with myself, because I know better. In fact, I’ve been vocal about the need to have a balanced calendar for quite some time. So, why was I putting so much pressure on myself to have more meetings? And more importantly, why was I feeling as those a lack of meetings meant the work I was doing was less important than that of someone who spends all day in meetings?

In this week’s post, I explore the topic of meeting “overload,” offering a perspective that positions meetings, yes, as an opportunity for connection, but also as a potential barrier to cultivating thriving organizational cultures and the outcomes that follow.

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Our Prevailing Narrative About “Busy”

I think a lot about this topic. Even before I became a learning-talent-and organizational development professional, I was drawn to the work of building systems that supported the people inside them.

As an educator, at first it was all about my students and the idea of setting them up for success beyond the walls of the classroom. But then, after experiencing the gap between what our aims were and how staff were supported—or not, rather—in achieving them, it became about the people within the organization.

As such, a lot of my work became about coaching teams on how to work more confidently and effectively, helping leaders foster and protect the conditions that yield positive results, and broadly speaking, designing people-first systems.

The key word in all of this is “people.” You can’t do this work in isolation. To be an effective talent development professional you need to work hand-in-hand with the people you’re supporting. Heck, to be an effective leader, you need to work hand-in-hand with the people you’re leading. So, naturally, my calendar has long been filled with meetings and other people-centric commitments.

Still, I realized that for me to do my best work, I needed ample time for quiet, low-stimulation work. I needed time to process what I was hearing from the people I was supporting. That was the only way I’d be able to actually do something about it without compromising my own sense of well-being in the process.

But in the context of hustle culture and performative busyness, I couldn’t entirely shake the feeling that a lower key calendar was somehow indicative of being less relevant, or not being needed enough. That’s how deep the conditioning around this seems to go. We know something, yet our bodies have a visceral reaction that contradicts what we know to be good and true.

We have built, slowly, collectively, and in some ways without meaning to, a culture where the number of meetings on our calendars has become a proxy for impact. Being booked solid reads as importance, whereas an open afternoon reads as absence, and the question “what does your calendar look like?” comes with a lot of weight.

I don’t think I need to cite any research here, because it’s well-known that, for many workers, the workday consists of high volumes of meetings that take away time from “actual work.” For many people, a lack of uninterrupted focus time compromises not only their well-being, but their ability to do their jobs well.

Despite this almost universally shared sentiment, we tend to just continue on with our poor scheduling habits. No one really decided this. No one sat down and said “let’s make sure our people don’t have time to think, and if they do, let’s make them feel guilty about it.” It simply accumulated, the way these things do, because scheduling a meeting takes almost no effort, while declining one carries a hefty amount of social risk.

Further, in the absence of any real organizational philosophy about when a meeting is actually the right tool for the task at hand, meetings become the default response to just about everything, and especially uncertainty, misalignment, anxiety, and the institutional propensity to make it seem like something is always happening.

And so, calendars fills up, while other forms of high-impact work wait.

The Cost Of An Overloaded Calendar

Again, I’ll reiterate that my aim here isn’t to dismiss the value of the connection and opportunity that meetings can bring about. But it is important to name that there’s a cost when meetings have too much influence on an organization’s culture.

The crux of the issue isn’t just time either, although the time cost alone is quite significant. Various sources, including the Harvard Business Review, have estimated that meetings cost U.S. businesses roughly $37 billion annually. The more insidious cost is cognitive, however. Some research has found that back-to-back meetings result in a neurological recovery deficit, as the brain needs transition time between concentrated periods of social interaction to reset. Research published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine highlights what happens in the context of numerous meetings being scheduled back-to-back, noting that while higher quality meetings help, people need recovery after both good and bad meetings, and the cost of not creating space for this can lead to burnout and even safety concerns.

What’s more interesting from my lens, though, is the identity piece. As a society, we’ve allowed meeting attendance to become a badge of honor, even if the most focused and generative work is happening elsewhere. We allow a packed calendar to dictate our sense of worth and accomplishment, even if the meetings we’re attending aren’t producing much.

Atlassian’s Work Life publication notes that a survey of more than 5,000 knowledge workers discovered that meetings aren’t just considered ineffective 72% of the time, but also deemed the number one barrier to productivity.

Atlassian findings about what people think of meetings:

They can’t get a word in. A handful of voices tend to dominate the conversation, leaving most attendees struggling to contribute their thoughts.

There’s no clarity on next steps. Too many people leave meetings with no idea what’s happening next, with no decisions having been made, and nobody clear on what’s expected of them.

Information is on repeat. Sitting through an announcement you’ve already heard is painful; no wonder people sneak in other work during meetings.

That could’ve been an email. Many people would rather read information because it’s a significantly better use of time.

The conversation is chaotic: Without a clearly stated purpose or agenda, meetings lack focus.

Collaboration is indeed important, but meetings—especially when left poorly designed and unstructured—take up unnecessary space, compromising the conditions that allow for the kind of deep thinking that can yield innovative solutions to persistent business problems. All because of a calendar infrastructure problem.

Calendar Relief

On the bright side of things, a few organizations have started doing something about this issue by providing targeted calendar relief. In 2023, Shopify deleted every recurring meeting with three or more people, and they also asked that staff not add them back for at least two weeks, if at all. They also instituted meeting-free work blocks. As stated by Shopify’s COO and VP of product, Kaz Nejatian, “We think it’s important to force change. You build a muscle by doing it.”

It’s also worth naming why this idea is so contradictory to the status quo. Programmer, investor, and essayist Paul Graham articulates this well through his description of “maker schedules” and “manager schedules”:

“The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour. When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done. Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command.

But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.”

As Graham points out, for many workers, meetings incur a cost. Thus, the importance of providing calendar relief at a systemic level becomes all the more important.

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A Quick Pulse Check

If any of what I’m saying here is resonating for you, there are a few questions that are probably worth sitting with—a diagnostic of sorts that can be used by you, your team, and maybe even your organization.

1. When you look at your calendar, how much of it represents work you’ll actually do versus work you’ll observe other people talk about?

2. Does your meeting schedule reflect the work you’re trying to accomplish, or is it a bad habit that you’ve not stopped to critically examine?

3. Before your next meeting invite goes out, can you name the specific thing it needs to produce? Is it that a decision needs to be reached, a problem properly diagnosed, or a plan pressure-tested? If not, it might not be worth having.

4. Are you sure a meeting is actually the most efficient and effective way to produce the outcome you desire?

5. Think of a recent meeting you attended that left you feeling energized and clear. What made it so?

6. When you have a productive, meeting-light week, what is the outcome? And finally, what story do you tell yourself about it?

Wrapping Up

I think that last question above is where a lot of the critical work lies, both at a micro-level and a macro level. Our calendars are a mirror, and sometimes, they reflect really important realities about ourselves, our teams, and our organizations. An overbooked calendar isn’t a strategy, but a calendar with ample time and space for deep work certainly is.

I’d love to hear about your perspectives on meeting culture! How do you approach the issue of calendar overload? Have you tried any kind of meeting reset with your team or in your organization? What worked or didn’t? What you wish you’d done differently? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Sometimes you have to let someone go.

When behavior crosses into harassment, safety is at risk, someone has been given every reasonable opportunity, or you have a documented trail of chaos leading straight back to them, separation is often the right call. There are situations where forced departure is the only appropriate outcome, and obscuring that line in the name of compassion doesn’t help anyone, least of all the people being harmed.

I say all of this very plainly because my aim here is NOT to argue that letting people go is something we should avoid. In fact, I’d say that many organizations are a bit too averse to the idea of letting people go. They avoid investigations, or they execute them haphazardly. And so, despite problematic behaviors being on repeat, the person behind them remains.

However, I’ve also noticed that many organizations who do indeed remove people regularly tend to be lacking in their understanding of why those people needed to be removed in the first place. They may have all the right documentation protocols, HR-approved scripts for difficult conversations, mediative efforts, and humane off-boarding processes, but what they often haven’t built is the infrastructure to proactively mitigate the need to do any of this in the first place. Here, I’m referring to the mechanisms that could have caught the core issue earlier, or asked whether the organization’s culture itself was part of the recipe that kept reproducing the behavior in need of correction.

In this week’s post, I talk about this gap, while offering some ways that organizations can design better systems to address toxicity and, ideally, prevent it.

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Toxic Behavior Rarely Appears Out of Nowhere.

Most of what we label as “toxic” behavior at work doesn’t materialize in isolation, but over time, in the context of conditions that allowed it to prevail.

Let’s consider what we know about psychological safety. Amy Edmondson is well-known for her work on the topic, reminding us of the reality that when people don’t feel safe speaking up, they don’t, which means problems are unreported, patterns go unaddressed, and the person whose behavior is eroding the team never hears anything concrete about it until things have deteriorated far enough that HR needs to get involved. By this point in time, the gap between the behavior and the feedback has widened significantly.

Also relevant is the distance between what an organization espouses and what it rewards in practice. When we say we value collaboration but promote the person who hoards credit, we’re communicating something important. When we say we value respect but look the other way when a high performer is consistently described as “difficult” by everyone below them, we’re communicating something. When feedback only flows in one direction and managers are never developed on how to have hard conversations and receive feedback themselves, again, we’re communicating something. And the “toxic” employee, in a lot of cases, was paying close attention to all of these interactions.

Let me be clear in my belief that none of this is an absolution. People are still responsible for their choices, and impact has significance regardless of intent, but if we’re serious about building healthier organizations, we need to be honest about what we’ve built and what it produces.

Diagnosing: The Step Many Orgs Miss

Before any intervention with an individual, there is a prior question that HR leaders and people systems designers need to be asking, and that’s this:

I’m big on diagnostics, so here are a few questions that can help us determine the actual issue at play.

Has this person ever received clear, specific, documented feedback about the impact of their behavior before now? And I’m not talking in a vague way. I’m talking about a pointed, grounded conversation about what they did, who it affected and how, and what needs to change and why.

Do other people in similar roles exhibit similar behaviors? If the answer here is yes, that’s not a coincidence. You can know with near certainty that the issue stems from a cultural place.

Were they ever developed as a people leader, or were they promoted to the role because they were good at an individual function? I find this to be one of the most common and least-named sources of management-level harm in organizations. I talk about it a lot. Some of you might be annoyed by now LOL. But there’s a reason for this. Because when you have high individual performers who are promoted without any real investment in the skills that leadership actually requires, you’re actively perpetuating an issue.

What does your organization reward in practice? Look at who got promoted in the last year or so, or who’s celebrated publicly. It’s also important to look at what behaviors are tolerated in top performers that aren’t tolerated in others. This information is key in unearthing the source of your culture, and ultimately, deciding if something is going to be done about it.

The point of this diagnostic isn’t to excuse harmful behavior or to delay accountability indefinitely, but to gather a more honest picture before we make a consequential decision—because the decision we make about one person will be watched by everyone else, and the story this communicates our organizations matters significantly and will define its culture for years to come.

Building the Right Infrastructure

If the answer you came to above is that the system is indeed part of the problem (and it usually is, at least partially!), then the work you need to do has to do with a whole lot more than the individual in front of you. Your task now is to build the right infrastructure that helps you catch things earlier and stops producing the outcomes you’re trying to prevent.

Robust feedback structures. Most organizations have annual reviews. They’re often overzealous about the whole process, too if you ask me. But what few organizations have are cultures where honest, clear, timely, and behavior-specific feedback is embedded within people’s weekly workflows. The fix here can often be traced back to investing in the right skills, like training managers on how to give feedback, guiding teams on how to share upward feedback, and dare I say, making 360 evaluations a non-negotiable. Research from the NeuroLeadership Institute has shown that feedback is often received as a threat, which activates the same neural pathways as physical danger. This is why vague or loaded feedback tends to produce defensiveness rather than change. And thus, the right kind of feedback structures can make or break the culture you’re trying to build.

Structured behavioral intervention before the point of crisis. Many organizations move from informal discomfort to formal action with very little in between. There might be the “we’ve been noticing some things” conversation that never quite gets documented. Or maybe there’s an abrupt and poorly implemented (and designed) performance improvement plan. What’s often missing is the middle part of this sandwich (no one wants two pieces of crappy bread without the fillings, right?!). People in these situations deserve structured, honest, dignified, and development-oriented conversations that clearly name the specific behaviors causing harm, set clear and measurable expectations, provide real support for change—whether that’s via coaching, a shift in role, or targeted development—and plainly defines what accountability looks like. Done well, I’d argue that this is actually more answerable and demanding than a PIP because it requires everyone, including the organization, to show up.

Leadership development that isn’t just for the designated high-potentials. A significant portion of interpersonal harm in organizations originates with managers who were never actually taught how to manage. Research from Gallup has consistently found that the majority of variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager, meaning that who you put in those roles, and of course what you invest in developing them, aren’t nice-to-haves. If your leadership development pipeline is reserved for a small cohort of pre-selected high-potentials while everyone else figures it out on the job, the reality is that you’re actively producing the conditions for harm. It’s also worth identifying the specific behaviors (competencies) that make managers effective and then making these behaviors trainable across the organization. This is what it would look like to take this issue seriously and to make it work at scale.

A culture that rewards the right things. This one can be tricky because it requires leadership (not just your people team!) to look at the incentive structures in place and determine whether they’re producing the culture that’s actually intended. To do this work, we need to evaluate who gets protected, who gets promoted after a pattern of complaints, and whether psychological safety we’re actively working to cultivate, measure, and protect. People throughout the organization are watching all of this, and they tend to draw pretty accurate conclusions based on what they observe.

Exits Don’t Fix Systems

When someone gets removed from an organization, it often feels like resolution. There are cases when it genuinely is, too. People feel a sense of reprieve, joy, and maybe even gratitude. But oftentimes, the conditions that produced the situation have gone untouched, and so the organization will work its way back to the same place, just with a new cast of characters.

Harmful behavior should have consequences, of course. But it’s arguably more important that our organizations have built the systems that can catch and address problems earlier. We need to develop people before the point of deterioration, we need to ensure issues are being tackled in an appropriate and timely manner, and we need to examine the role we’re playing in either producing or preventing a toxic culture.

I’d love to hear your perspective! Have you had to navigate a situation like this from inside an organization, either as the person trying to build better systems to prevent this sort of thing, or as someone who has lived through the systems gap? Share in the comments below!

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For decades, we’ve built our training programs, our assessments, our onboarding experiences, and our development frameworks as though filling people with information was more or less synonymous with making them capable. But now we have a technology (AKA AI) that can retrieve, synthesize, and present information faster and more comprehensively than any human ever could. This is great, and it underscores a pretty big issue:

In this post, I think out loud about how AI is changing our entire disposition around learning—not in a “the robots are coming” kind of way, and not in an uncritically optimistic “AI will solve everything” kind of way either. What I’m most interested in is the question that lies beneath the technology: if the retention of knowledge is no longer the bar, what is? And are organizations—and the people responsible for developing the talent within them—asking that question yet?

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The Traditional Model

For a long time, the model of learning and developing talent at work went something like this: someone doesn’t know something they need to know, so we teach it to them (typically via training), and then we assess whether they’ve retained it. This is the architecture underneath most corporate training programs. It’s essentially a matter of knowledge in, behavior change out, or at least that’s what it was supposed to be the theory.

The problem with this model isn’t new, and to be fair, learning professionals have been pushing back on it for decades. Hermann Ebbinghaus documented the forgetting curve quite some time ago, finding that that learners forget roughly 70 percent of new information within 24 hours and up to 90 percent within a week if they don’t have reinforcement. I’ve touched on this before in the context of exploring training versus enablement, but this piece explores a different angle, because AI is changing A LOT.

If I can ask an AI tool a question and get a synthesized, contextualized, reasonably accurate answer in under ten seconds, then the argument for designing learning primarily around information transfer becomes quite difficult to sustain. The information isn’t scarce anymore. What becomes scarce, and genuinely valuable, is the unique ability to take that knowledge and do something meaningful with it.

Recent research from McKinsey points out that as AI absorbs more routine cognitive tasks, like synthesizing data, generating first drafts, surfacing patterns, workers need to lean more heavily on the things AI doesn’t yet offer: judgment, critical thinking, the ability to navigate ambiguity, and the capacity to interpret and apply what they’re seeing in a specific human context. Knowledge work, in particular, is becoming less about knowing and more about deciding, curating, and implementing.

What’s Next?

There is growing concern among researchers that outsourcing cognitive work—the thinking, synthesizing, and problem-solving we used to do ourselves—risks atrophying the very abilities we’re now being told to prioritize. If judgment is what we’re trying to build, but we’re also offloading more and more of our lower-stakes judgment calls to AI, are we actually able to improve when it comes to judgment? Or are we just getting better at prompting, which is a related but different skill?

I definitely don’t believe the answer here is to avoid AI tools, but I do think it underscores the need for us to dramatically shift our approach to how we design learning experiences and develop our talent. Because the old model of “here’s the information you need; please retain it” just isn’t cutting it anymore.

So What Do We Do?

If the goal of learning at work is no longer primarily retention, we need to get much more specific about what it is. You’ve probably heard about how employers are flagging critical thinking and complex problem-solving as significant skill gaps in their workforce. There’s some validity to this, and I also find the point on it’s own to be oversimplified, especially because these skills are quite hard to develop through a course or a curriculum. And guess what? Many organizations still lean heavily into this approach to learning design. You know what they say… the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Skills like judgment, critical thinking, and the ability to navigate ambiguity don’t develop through information delivery, but through practice, feedback, being put in situations where the answer isn’t obvious and you just have to work through it, and debriefing with someone who can challenge your thinking. Call it what you want—a coaching model maybe? What is isn’t though is a training model. It’s a culture of intentional and continuous learning. Not a calendar of learning events.

This ultimately means that a few things need to shift across many organizations, and I want to name them directly:

How we design learning experiences. If we’re building for judgment rather than retention, our approach to learning design must change completely. We need less content delivery, and more structured practice, less assessment of recall and more reflection on decision-making. Our units of learning are no longer modules, but scenarios, case studies, and moments of connection with other humans.

How managers think about developing people. Developing someone’s judgment means giving them hard problems with real stakes, staying close enough to debrief what happened, and creating the psychological safety for them to make calls that don’t always land perfectly. This is an entirely different job than managing performance or delegating tasks, and most people managers weren’t hired or developed for it. This right here is fundamentally an organizational design problem.

How individuals think about their own growth. If knowing things is no longer the differentiator for talent, what is? In this climate, I’d argue that your development is now anchored around what you’re practicing, what decisions you’re making, and what you’re getting feedback on, and from whom. The people who thrive in AI-integrated environments will be the ones who’ve developed the most nuanced sense of when to trust an output, when to push back on it, and what to do in the gap between what AI produces and what the situation actually requires. And perhaps most importantly, they’re the ones who know that human trust and connection is the ultimate differentiator in the workplace.

Who’s Building This Infrastructure?

Most of the organizational conversation right now is about AI tools. It centers around questions of which ones we should adopt, how we should integrate them, how to get people to use them, etc. This is, of course, legitimate, but I think we need to go deeper: given that AI is significantly altering what it means to be capable at work, are we redesigning how we develop that capability? Or, as we often do, are we just adding AI onto the old model?

I understand why the latter is dominating in many workplaces. The pace of change is pretty disorienting, the technology is moving faster than organizations have historically been set up to respond, and the people best positioned to drive the conversation are often under-resourced, under-positioned, under-leveraged. But still, we need to name that—for the organizations striving to stay ahead—the window is narrowing.

This is Talent Development’s Time to Shine

I think the narrative around AI and the future of work in many contexts has a tendency to position talent development—L&D, HR, OD, people operations, whatever we’re calling it in a given organization—as an afterthought in the broader transformation conversation. But if you look at what this work is about, you’ll see that this is backwards.

What does it mean to develop capability when knowledge is no longer scarce? This is a question that the best talent development practitioners are actively wrestling with. They’re thinking a whole lot less about how to integrate AI into existing learning structures than they are about how to fundamentally rethink what developing people means. These are the people whose careers have been spent thinking about how human beings grow, and while historically the HR function has been seen as “behind,” this is definitely a place in which it’s ahead.

Still, if this group is more important than they’ve ever been, we need to change how the role is understood—both by organizations, and sometimes even by the practitioners themselves.

The talent development function isn’t a content producer or a course administrator. Sure, we can do that, and there’s a time and place for it. But the role, as I highlight below, is something considerably more expansive than that.

The 7 Roles of The Talent Development Professional

Below are 7 roles I believe the best talent development professionals play in this new world order.

Strategist. Talent development needs to be in the room where business strategy gets made. We can do a whole lot more than simply execute someone else’s training plan. We actually translate organizational direction into human capability. This means figuring out how learning results in skills, judgment, and behavior that aligns with where the organization is going.

Advocate. The people who work in talent development understand how human beings actually learn, what gets in the way of it, and what the subtle conditions for development look like. This type of knowledge is an organizational asset, and we have a responsibility to use it. That means means pushing back when an organization wants a two-hour course for something that requires six months of practice and feedback, protecting people from initiatives that simply check a box, and making the case, again and again if necessary, that the humans inside an organization are a whole lot more than just resources to be upskilled.

Curator. In a world where information is everywhere and infinitely accessible, the design question shifts from “what content do we create” to “what conditions do we create.” The job of those developing people increasingly involves shaping the learning environment, which includes curating the experiences, conversations, challenges, and feedback loops that develop judgment in context, rather than delivering information in isolation. This is a far more sophisticated (and interesting!) design challenge than building a course library.

Connector. AI cannot replicate the learning that happens when two people are working through a hard problem together, when a peer names something we couldn’t see in ourselves or when a mentor pushes back on a decision you were confident about and you realize you were missing something. The role of facilitating human connection across teams, levels, and functions—creating the conditions for that kind of learning to happen—becomes significantly more valuable as AI assumes more of our individual cognitive work. Peer learning, communities of practice, mentorship infrastructure, structured reflection become the cornerstone of truly AI-integrated organizations.

Researcher. In the context of this framing, talent development professionals are researchers in that they assess what’s working, what isn’t working, and how to use this information to develop evidence-based practices that develop their people continuously. I always say that the best part of this work is that you have a unique opportunity to see across functions, levels, and roles in ways most other parts of the organization don’t. This kind of vantage point affords us valuable diagnostic information, and the best practitioners use it that way, positioning themselves as diagnosticians of sorts, always asking questions, connecting the dots, and figuring out what patterns and behaviors are saying about what people need.

Experimentalist. None of us fully knows yet what developing people looks like in an AI-integrated organization. It’s too early. And the technology is changing way to fast. This means the job right now is less about building a definitive program that we get locked into for years and more about running fast experiments, paying close attention to what they reveal, and then iterating on what you find. Those of us developing talent are well-positioned to pilot new approaches and bring solid evidence back to the organization about what is working for people on the capability-building front.

Culture carrier. I’ll die on this hill: talent development is unique because it sits at the intersection of values, behavior, and performance in a way that very few other functions do. In an AI-integrated organization, this orientation matters more than it ever has. As more cognitive work gets handed off agents, what remains distinctly human inside an organization—things like how people treat one another and what they value—becomes the primary expression of culture, and the people whose job it is to develop other people have always had a hand in shaping these realities.

The Ultimate Differentiator

None of what I’m stating here is a small ask. It requires us to expand our scope, make a stronger case for our strategic value, and sometimes push back against organizations that still think of developing people as a compliance checkbox or a line item to cut in the midst of tight budgets. It’s a kind of dramatic unlearning. But in reality, who is better positioned to help with that than the professionals whose job it is to cultivate the right conditions for learning?

The argument for change has never been stronger, and not just because there’s a widening capability gap, but because technology is accelerating rapidly, and the question of what we’re trying to develop exactly has become more important than ever.

A lot of people in the talent development field have been nudging us towards this for years. What AI did is make it a non-negotiable, exposing the fact that knowledge is hardly enough. We need to be able to decide, curate, and implement. What we do with our knowledge is the ultimate differentiator.

Are you seeing organizations actually redesign for judgment and capability, or mostly just loosely tack AI onto existing structures? And if you work in talent development, L&D, HR, or people operations, how are you thinking about your own role and the value you bring? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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I have a tab problem.

At any given moment, I have somewhere between 20 and 40 browser tabs open. Some of them are articles I’ve been meaning to read for what feels like years. Some are tools I want to “try out soon.” A few are research rabbit holes that started because I was curious about something and then cascaded, as they always do, into a bunch of other things I absolutely “needed” to understand before I could move go on.

Most of these tabs, if I’m being honest, will remain open for a while, accumulating until I can’t take it anymore and engage in one of those dramatic “I’M DONE” purges that’s probably rooted more in overwhelm than anything else.

This may look like a problem centered around productivity, but for me, it’s actually more of a wiring one.

Perhaps you’ve heard of CliftonStrenghts (formerly known as StrengthsFinder), and perhaps you also tend to lean heavy into the Input theme. If this is case, you know well that this kind of never-ending tab behavior is, while certainly beneficial, mildly annoying at times as well.

I’ve been sitting with my Input theme for a while, not just because I live it daily, but because I firmly believe in the power of a strengths-based approach to self-understanding and growth. Maybe it’s the educator in me, but how can we expect anyone to achieve their potential if they don’t view themselves from a strengths-first lens?

I’ve also had the opportunity to meet and work with a lot of Input-strong leaders. Some of them are profoundly self-aware about it, having figured out how to lean into its incredible power and steer clear of its limitations, and some of them aren’t quite sure why they can’t seem to get things moving.

That’s why, for this week’s post, I want to talk about what Input is, where it serves us, and where it derails us. My hope is that, for those of us who’ve been thematically blessed with Input, we can build a simple practice around knowing when we have enough to take the next step.

A Bit About Input

CliftonStrengths defines Input as the need to collect and archive. Things, facts, books, quotes, data, people, ideas… all of it. The descriptor that shows up in the official assessment language is a person who is “inquisitive.” For those high in Input, there’s a low threshold for what counts as worth saving. Everything might one day be useful. Plus, the act of collecting itself is genuinely satisfying in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who’s more inclined towards minimalism.

Here’s some perspective about Input directly from the source:

“Whatever you collect, you collect it because it interests you. And yours is the kind of mind that finds so many things interesting. The world is exciting precisely because of its infinite variety and complexity.

If you read a great deal, it is not necessarily to refine your theories but, rather, to add more information to your archives. If you like to travel, it is because each new location offers novel artifacts and facts. These can be acquired and then stored away. Why are they worth storing? At the time of storing, it is often hard to say exactly when or why you might need them, but who knows when they might become useful?

With all those possible uses in mind, you really don’t feel comfortable throwing anything away. So you keep acquiring and compiling and filing stuff away. It’s interesting. It keeps your mind fresh. And perhaps one day some of it will prove valuable.”

Input is often equated with an extraordinary ability to research, curate, and connect seemingly disparate ideas across domains. We’re often the people in the room who say things like, “Actually, I read something about this,” and then produce a useful reference. We’re also keen on building mental libraries and repositories so that knowledge isn’t just gained, but shared. To us, it’s not always about the end destination, but the opportunity to learn something in and of itself.

This is genuinely a gift. In the context knowledge work especially, the ability to hold a lot of information and make unexpected connections across domains is enormously valuable. Those with high Input tend to ask better questions. We organically seek out opportunities for collaboration and perspective-building. We’re also harder to blindside given we tend to have a lot of context simply because we’ve been accumulating it almost instinctively for years.

But as we all know, most gifts come with a few drawbacks.

Gathering isn’t Doing

Broadly speaking, the challenge with Input is that the act of gathering can get in the way of doing. More specifically, it can become a way of delaying decision or action under an entirely reasonable-sounding justification that we just need a little more information before we can move forward.

This is sometimes called “analysis paralysis.” The phrase itself is a tad overused, but there’s relevance in it for high-Input people given we sometimes chew on decisions a bit longer than necessary. We just need one more piece of context. One more perspective. One more article to ensure we’ve framed the problem appropriately. And so the collecting continues, while the deciding waits.

There’s also what I one might call the “curation trap.” Those of us high on input maintain a robust collection of information that can sometimes start to take up more cognitive and emotional bandwidth than we’re actually using. If you’ve ever found yourself re-reading something you’ve already processed because you want to make sure you haven’t missed anything, you know exactly what I’m describing. The system that is supposed to support our thinking becomes more like a second job.

None of this makes Input bad, but as with any strength, it can be a source of friction unless counterbalanced.

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Input as Fuel

What I’ve started to believe is that Input is less a goal than it is fuel. But we need to use that fuel responsibly.

I’m sharing here a set of six questions I’ve found useful whenever I find myself deep in the throes of collecting and gathering and want (or need!) to move forward.

1. What decision, action, or output is this input supposed to support? If I can’t name it with specificity, it’s worth pausing for a moment.

2. What would change about the decision if I had more information? If the answer is “not much,” then I might have enough.

3. Is there a deadline (either real or self-imposed) attached to this? If not, this can influence things for the worse sometimes.

4. Can I summarize what I know in three sentences or fewer? If I can’t, then the issue is less about information than it is synthesis.

5. What’s the cost of waiting? What is being delayed while I continue gathering?

6. Am I collecting because it’s useful, or because it’s comfortable for me? These are two different things, and they lead different places.

I share these questions not to shame Input—I, for one, have seen the incredible value behind it. But they are meant to add a small layer of intentionality to a behavior that, for high-Input people, typically runs on autopilot.

Less can indeed be more, depending on the context, of course, but the goal is really isn’t to collect less. What we need to do is be disciplined in knowing why we’re collecting, and to recognize the moment when the most useful thing we can do is stop and use what we already have.

It’s about knowing when to close out the tabs, in other words. Not all of them, but some of them. Because we need to make room for what’s next: action, and of course, in time, more input.

If you’re a fellow Input, I’d love to hear how this plays out for you in all the ways! Share in the comments below!

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The User Manual

Many of you know I recently started a new role. My boss is also new to the team, and so we’re deep in the throes of trying to figure things out together.

My take? She is extremely thoughtful, bright, and honest. Our values align, I enjoy working with her, and I’m learning a lot. I feel lucky, because I believe firmly that everyone deserve to be in the company of a good leader.

One of the first things my boss did as she was getting settled was have each of her direct reports complete “user manuals,” also commonly known as “how-to-work-with-me guides.” I’ve used and seen some version of this before, but nothing with this level of detail.

In my boss’ version, we were invited to share information about our work preferences and styles, our values, behaviors that trigger or frustrate us, and a whole lot more. It was a nice exercise in self-reflection, and it was a great opportunity to help my boss get to know me better.

But what was perhaps most interesting for me about the activity was that it prompted me to think a bit deeper. To reflect not only on how I experience other people’s behaviors at work, but how they experience mine.

The Space Between

The feedback that you’re unapproachable hardly gets delivered directly—especially when you’re a people manager.

It won’t typically show up in one-on-ones with your direct reports, or in your 360 performance review, nor will it show up in peer reviews. As is the case with most bigger yet underestimated organizational issues, it commonly shows up in more discrete ways, such as in the way people swallow deeply before knocking on your door, in the meetings where people hold back on constructively critiquing your idea even when they almost certainly should, in the Slack message that someone spent 20 minutes typing out only to find themselves deleting it, in the colleague who has learned to work around you rather than risk whatever tax the interaction might cost them.

Nobody tells you that you’re unapproachable or some other version of “hard to work with.” There are those folks who are seemingly just that way, and the organization adapts to it. People adjust—sometimes so much so that it isn’t until years later when a fresh pair of eyes comes in that you realize your organization has built a custom set of workarounds designed specifically to manage one thing: friction with you.

The workarounds do their job, and from your vantage point everything probably looks basically fine. But it’s quite easy to mistake “fine” for “good” when ultimately, they’re not the same thing.

This post is for those of us who want to better understand the space between how we experience ourselves as leaders and how the people around us actually experience working with us. Most people who are unapproachable don’t think they are, and that’s a big part of the issue. The other thing is that it’s uncomfortable to look at this directly, which is why many people prefer not to. Still, it has a lot of significance, because self-awareness is what leads to growth, and even more importantly, people’s everyday experiences at work depend on it.

A Hidden Tax

People think that approachability is determined through big, grand gestures, but this often isn’t the case, especially when we’re talking about its counterpart: unapproachability. You don’t have to have ever raised your voice or said something overtly dismissive for people to decide that candor with you is a risky transaction. It might be as subtle as consistently seeming distracted when someone is talking to you, or offering a solution before someone has had a chance to finish describing the problem. It might be unintentional, but in these moments, we signal that we have our own preferred stance and aren’t really open for anything different.

If unchecked, over time, we end up with a managed version of ourselves—one in which the people around us have learned, through trial and error and careful observation, what lands well with us and and what doesn’t. This ultimately informs how they curate their interactions with us, and while it might be convenient from our side of things, the lack of honesty, and in some cases, utter silence, is a hidden tax everyone’s paying for.

Faceless Problems

Unapproachability doesn’t have one face. It’s totally faceless, which may be part of why it’s so easy to miss in yourself. Below I share some of the ways in which it often manifests.

The strong opinions problem. Having high standards and a clear point of view are genuine assets to an organization… until they’re expressed in a way that signals the conversation is already over before it starts. If you’ve ever walked into a meeting having already decided the answer, and the meeting’s stated purpose was technically to explore and arrive at the answer, the other people in the room will certainly notice that, and eventually they’ll stop offering their own thinking altogether. At that point you’ve stopped being part of a team and rather designed a room full of people performing agreement.

The intensity problem. This one shows up a lot in high-performers who’ve moved into leadership roles, because the qualities that made them exceptional individual contributors—things like pointedness, speed, a deep commitment to everything, and functional devotion—don’t always land well when there’s a power differential involved. Intensity that reads as drive in one context could easily read as pressure in another, and that can have significant negative effects on the people around you.

The feedback problem. This is probably the one people least often see in themselves, because it requires being honest about your actual behavior rather than just your intentions. How do you respond when people give you feedback? What does your face say? How does the conversation end? What’s your follow-up like? These actions (or lack of) register with people, and if they’ve flagged things before and watched nothing shift, it’s no surprise when they eventually stop raising them.

The availability problem. Sometimes unapproachability is more tied to the issue of accessibility. Are you always in back-to-back meetings? Do you respond to messages days late? Are you constantly multitasking? Are you perpetually at capacity, unable to step in and support? You may have great intentions and be genuinely warm during your interactions with folks, but a lack of availability teaches your team over time that bringing things forward is almost a waste of time. And ultimately, things that should have been thoughtfully tended to earlier can end up piling up to the point of crisis.

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Self-Assessment

Self-report is a genuinely poor instrument here. People who are hard to work with often have well-developed explanations for the friction in their relationships, or they’re just totally unaware of it. Worst case scenario, they don’t care, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I won’t go into that here. In any case, it’s important to look at the behavioral signals around you. In other words, what is the data telling you?

There are a few things that can better position us to get to the heart of this:

When you share a strong opinion in a meeting, do people engage with it or do they simply align with it? Engagement looks like pushback, or like someone offering an alternative framing and being comfortable defending it. Alignment, on the other hand, might look like nodding and moving on. If you mostly get the latter, it might be a sign that you have some work to do.

Another one to look at is what happens when something goes wrong. Do you tend to hear about it earlier or later? Leaders who are genuinely approachable tend to get bad news when it’s still small enough that they can help do something about. But if you’re consistently surprised by the number of full-fledged crises that emerge without your former knowledge, it could be that your team doesn’t see you as trusted person they can go to.

When was the last time someone told you something genuinely hard to hear, specifically about a behavior you exhibit? What did the feedback look like? And even better, was it feedback from a peer or someone who reports to you?

What Now?

If any of this is landing with some recognition, the instinct is usually to want to fix it immediately by way of another lengthy communication, an open-door policy, or making a point of asking for feedback during your next team meeting. While the intention here is good, these actions are surface-level, because approachability is much more than a policy to be declared.

What works here is probably a lot less gratifying, in things like noticing when you’re about to cut someone off, in taking someone’s feedback with grace, in asking a follow-up question when someone shares a concern, and in actually considering an alternative approach. These are the actions that teach people, slowly and through repetition, that you’re approachable.

But the starting point is probably the hardest thing in all of this, because we have no choice but to ask ourselves, “What is the price people are paying to deal with me?”

Let me also name very clearly that we’re all more than entitled to our quirks. We’re human beings, fundamentally flawed and glorious, and we deserve the space to be authentic. A lot of this is subjective, too. What one person finds unapproachable another finds totally safe and comfortable. But as leaders, we also have a serious responsibility to be reflective. To understand how we show up, what might trigger us, and what might hold us back.

Most leaders aren’t trained to ask these kinds of questions directly. Which is, somewhat ironically, part of what makes them hard to work with. Don’t be that leader. Be the one who does the work and asks the hard questions. You got this!

If you’re open to sharing, I’d love to hear from both sides—whether you’ve worked with someone like this, or you’ve been the unapproachable one yourself. Drop a note in the comments below!

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In or Out

Somewhere in your organization, there’s probably some sort of list. You may know about it, or you maybe not—but it likely exists in some form, whether it be inside a formal program, a stack ranking exercise, or simply inside the head of a senior leader who’s already decided, without much rigor, whose name comes to mind when that sticky word “potential” comes up.

If you’ve ever been on that list, you may be familiar with the pressure that comes with it. In other words, there’s a sense that you’re now performing not just your job functions, but the label and all it carries. And if you’ve ever had the sense that you weren’t on the list, you might know the other thing: that nobody tells you directly, and the message still somehow hits like a ton of bricks.

Both of those experiences are worth examining. Because HiPo programs, despite significant organizational investment and the genuine strategic intent that tends to motivate them, have a way of creating two very different, very consequential realities for the people inside them—and those who are left out.

In this post, I offer a critique of these programs, while emphasizing some alternative approaches. The goal here isn’t to have us do away with intentional leadership pipeline programs, but to get us to view and cultivate talent a bit differently.

Sound Logic. Rough Execution.

Let me be clear that I’m not here to argue that identifying and developing high-potential talent is inherently a bad idea, because it isn’t. Succession planning matters greatly, especially in the context of differing generational views on professional growth and rising burnout. Resources are finite, and not everyone’s in pursuit of the same kind of career trajectory, so there’s a real and legitimate argument for making intentional, focused investments in people who are positioned (and interested in) to take on more complex roles.

Gartner makes the business case compellingly, noting that HiPo employees are estimated to deliver significantly more value than their peers. One report shows that many organizations are investing heavily in these programs, with 65% of them moving away from other talent investments to fund them.

Still, despite all of that investment, only one in four people leaders describe their organization’s HiPo strategy as actually effective.

One in four. So, why are we allocating resources to something that, by the field’s own admission, mostly isn’t working?

A Measurement Problem

From my perspective, one of the most fundamental flaws in many HiPo programs is that we tend to conflate current performance with future potential in an entirely different capacity. But in reality, these aren’t the same thing.

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a business psychologist and author of Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It), has explored the talent development question extensively. One of his arguments is that many programs have a persistent tendency to reward charisma, confidence, and strong performance over the aptitudes that actually predict whether someone will be effective in a more complex, more senior role—things like learning agility, emotional intelligence, and the capacity to develop and bring out the best in other humans. In other words, we focus on the stuff that’s most visible, rather than the stuff that’s really needed for what comes next.

Broader talent development expertise reinforces this further, noting that current performance isn't always a reliable indicator of future potential. In fact, it’s been found that only 20 percent to 30 percent of high performers have the potential to assume higher levels of leadership, and nearly 90% struggle to adapt.

The source of the problem here, I’d argue, is that we’ve not figured out how to properly assess and discern our talent.

Part of this is likely the tools we’re using, or perhaps more accurately, the tools we’re not using. We tend to lean heavily on performance reviews, manager nominations, and, unfortunately, “gut” instinct—all of which are well-documented vehicles for bias, whether we intend them to be or not.

Even worse is the fact that the percentage of women and professionals of color falls significantly at the manager level and above, a reality that’s certainly tied to our talent development infrastructure.

As you can see, “climbing the ladder” is hardly a matter of luck and coincidence alone, but of structure as well. When we ask managers to nominate people “with potential” without providing clear, defined criteria for what we mean, we shouldn’t be surprised when the resulting list reflects the backgrounds, identities, and personality preferences of the people doing the nominating. And so the status quo remains.

Two Problems

I want to spend a moment here, because I think the dual impact of HiPo programs is genuinely misunderstood and underappreciated.

The first problem lives inside the program itself. The qualities that typically set someone up to be identified as “high potential”—things like being highly results-driven, self-reliant, excellent at execution—can sometimes become the qualities that lead to issues when that person moves into a leadership role. Or at the very least, they can result in a lack of emphasis on the fundamentals of effective leadership Research by Joe Folkman and Jack Zenger found that things like emotional intelligence, communication, and the ability to develop others were persistent areas where designated high potentials needed growth.

The second problem is a bit less in your face, but in many ways does more organizational damage because it touches far more people. Imagine being one of those employees who hasn’t been identified as a high potential, yet who cares deeply about their work, does a genuinely good job, and has the qualities that could help take the organization to the next level. The thing is, none of those qualities have been valued by the organization. The result of this is likely to be decreased engagement and commitment to the organization. Not because anyone told them explicitly that they lacked potential, but because the message landed that way.

What follows here is often a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy wherein the employees who aren’t labeled as high potential receive fewer supports and opportunities. In the end, the organization gets back exactly what it implicitly predicted and then interprets this outcome as confirmation that the process they underwent for selection is viable. A closed loop approach like this costs organizations far more than they realize, both in lost capability and in the erosion of trust that happens when people correctly sense that their ceiling has already been decided for them.

High Potential is Built

None of this is an argument for abandoning intentional talent development. Not in the least. What I do think is important however is that organizations start to measure potential with more depth and rigor, and in ways that systematically address opportunity gaps.

Psychologist Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset is useful here. When we treat ability as a fixed trait that you either have or not, we tend to build systems that reflect and reinforce this belief. But when we treat ability as developmental—something that grows in the right conditions with the right investment—the whole system changes, transforming who we develop, how we define readiness, and what we’re looking for in the first place.

Some organizations have already moved in this direction. Google’s Project Oxygen, for instance, identified key behaviors that made managers effective and then launched customized training, resources, and infrastructure to uphold them.

The underlying logic in naming this here is that leadership capability isn’t a genetic trait exhibited exclusively within a select cohort. Instead, it’s a set of learnable behaviors that a much wider range of people can develop when given support and opportunity. In other words, high potential is built.

A Quick Audit

If you lead an organization, manage a team, or influence how talent gets developed in your workplace, I’d encourage you to spend some time with these questions as a quick sort of audit:

Who is doing the nominating of high potentials, and what criteria are they using? If your selection process runs primarily through manager nominations without a validated framework underneath it, you’re measuring visibility and familiarity more than you’re measuring potential.

What’s happening to the people who don’t make “the list?” If engagement is slipping among employees, it might not be a coincidence or an individual attitude problem. You might just be a bit off balance in terms of how you’re allocating resources and support.

Does your definition of potential match where your organization or industry is going? The professional skills and dispositions that mattered five years ago are likely not going to be the ones that matter in the next five. If how you see talent hasn’t evolved, you may be building a leadership bench for a world that no longer exists.

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Hardly a Rarity

There’s a version of talent development that treats potential as something rare—a resource found in a small percentage of people we must carefully identify against a set of vague and outdated criteria and then groom. And there’s another version that treats potential as something more distributed—something that exists across a much wider range of the workforce and simply requires the right conditions, the right feedback, and a bit of investment.

Many organizations tend to lean into the first version, whether they intend to our not. But as you can see, the second is representative of not only what’s most people-centered and ethical, but what’s best for the organization.

Potential is hardly a rarity, and with this, it’s seriously worth asking what we’ve been leaving on the table. And maybe more uncomfortably, who we’ve been writing off.

I’d love to hear if you’ve been on either side of a HiPo program—inside it, excluded from it, or tasked with running one. Share your experience in the comments below!

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Both Sides Of The Table

I’ll be honest in that I’m writing this from both sides of the table at once.

I recently stepped into a new role as Director of Learning and Development at a social impact start-up. This means that, as part of my role, I spend a significant portion of my time thinking carefully about how we bring people into the organization—the design, the intention, and the places where things start to break down. Yet simultaneously, I’m the new person. The one who’s asking where things live, mapping out the unwritten codes, and trying to connect with key stakeholders and build the relationships that are essential to the work.

I think it’s also worth noting that my onboarding experience has been fantastic. The communication, the resources, the support. I’d really have to dig deep to find concerns, and I think that says a lot given my passion for the onboarding process overall. Still, I can’t help but think about the fact that this is not the norm in many organizations.

Ironically, we build organizations around human-centered values—equity, dignity, belonging, transformation—yet we onboard people in ways that communicate almost none of those things. The values are posted up on the website and the mission is clear as day, but the culture is a total mystery.

The gap between stated values and lived experience doesn’t start at the six-month mark, but on day one. And the reason, I often find, is because most hiring managers view onboarding as a logistics problem, when it’s actually a relational one.

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Do I Belong Here?

If you ask most hiring managers what onboarding is for, and they’ll describe a process: set up accounts, introduce the team, review goals, explain core workflows. It’s not that all of this isn’t necessary. It is. But it’s hardly sufficient when you consider the fact that humans, above all else, are relational beings, wired around the need for care and connection.

Underneath the entire onboarding experience, a new hire is trying to answer a single question from the moment they walk in the door: do I belong here?

Sure, there’s a bit of imposter syndrome in many cases. It’s not uncommon for a new hire to be asking themselves whether they’re up for the job. But really, they already have some version of an answer for this, or they wouldn’t have taken the offer in the first place. The concern is typically subtler: Will I be seen here? Will I have real relationships here? Is this a place where I can eventually tell the truth about what I’m struggling with? or is that the kind of thing that gets held against people?

These issues many seem secondary to the job functions, but the fact is that they’re often the questions that determine whether someone brings their full capability to the work from day one.

This, ultimately, is what onboarding is actually for. It’s far less about information transfer than it is about trust-building between humans, and understanding this matters enormously for how you design the experience. Because when you build an onboarding plan around content—decks, documents, surface-level introductions, systems access—you’re hardly solving for the person’s needs, and that’s what needs to be at the center.

Don’t Start With The Calendar

Before you open up your calendar or draft a 30-60-90 plan, there are some harder questions worth spending time with. I’m not talking tactical prep questions, but philosophical ones, all anchored in an understanding of the power of relationships.

What would it mean to design this experience for the person?

This question centers us around an organization’s most critical asset: people. Most onboarding timelines are built around what the organization needs from someone — when they’ll be productive, when they’ll be independent, when they can take things off your plate. That’s understandable, and don’t get me wrong—clarifying these things is important. But it doesn’t account for human needs that, quite frankly, exist regardless of any organization’s prestige, hierarchy, or unwritten codes. As hiring managers, it’s worth starting instead with a framing that asks what this specific person needs to feel oriented, capable, and connected. The answer will vary, of course, and you can’t account for everything based off an interview process alone. A new hire coming from a very different industry may need more context than someone who’s done the same role before. Someone introverted by nature may need more explicit permission to ask questions than someone who asks them reflexively. Designing for the person ultimately means doing the work of thinking about the needs of who you hired.

What does belonging look like here, and can you articulate it?

This is harder than it sounds. “Culture” is the word most organizations use, but culture is vague enough to mean almost anything. Try to be specific here. What signals belonging to people? And conversely, what signals exclusion, even if unintentional? If you can’t answer these questions clearly, your new hire will spend months trying to decode the answers on their own, which is exhausting, and perhaps even inaccurate.

What assumptions are you making about how quickly someone should ‘get it’?

Most managers have a rough internal timeline for new hires. It’s usually faster than they’d admit out loud, and almost always shaped by their own experience coming into the role. But that timeline is arbitrary. It reflects how long it took you, in your circumstances, with your background and supports. It doesn’t reflect how long it can often take to build the context, relationships, and confidence needed to do meaningful work in a new environment. Research on hiring and onboarding has shown that the ramp to full effectiveness is longer than managers expect—often a year or more. Thus, the question isn’t how fast someone should get there, but what they need at each stage to keep making progress.

What does this person need to feel safe enough to ask real questions and contribute honestly?

There’s a version of onboarding that goes smoothly on the surface but underneath it teaches the new hire that this is a place where, first and foremost, you need to perform competence. This often manifests with people not asking essential questions to fill in knowledge gaps, and an overemphasis on managing impressions. But if you want someone to bring their honest thinking to the table—especially the early and untainted kind that’s often most valuable—you need to design for safety from the start.

What would make this process more exhausting… or easier?

This is the most basic but perhaps the most practical question on the list. Put yourself, genuinely, in the shoes of someone walking into your organization for the first time. What would wear them down? The volume of information in their first few days? The ambiguity about who to go to for what? The expectation that they’ll be contributing to high-stakes work before they’ve fully found their footing? Now flip it: what would make things easier? The answer is probably fewer things than you think, done with more intention. One person who takes real ownership of their transition, honest conversations about what’s hard here, and a lot of patience.

Gaining Altitude

Once you’ve sat with these questions, the shape of the entire onboarding plan changes. The 30-60-90 structure I stand behind myself isn’t meant to be a checklist, but rather a purpose-driven guide, so that the whole experience builds confidence and, most importantly, relationships.

I like to think of it like a plane taking off rather than a rocket launch. A rocket goes from zero to orbit in about 8 minutes, whereas a plane takes off with controlled acceleration followed by a deliberate climb, gaining altitude gradually and steadily until it reaches cruising speed. Both get airborne, but only one is designed to carry everyday people.

The first 30 days: understanding

The focus here is understanding, not contribution. Your new hire should be in observation mode, meeting people, asking questions, and mapping the landscape. The instinct many new hires experience to demonstrate value early is real but often counterproductive. The most useful thing someone can do in the first month is develop an accurate picture of what they’ve walked into before they try to change any of it, and your job as the manager is to protect that space. Resist the urge to fill it with urgencies. That’s the responsible thing to do—both for the person and the organization.

Days 31–60: curious contributing

Around day 30 your new hire begins taking on real work. But the posture here is everything. Given the person’s newness, you want to maintain their curiosity. Give them something small to own, and let them make real decisions within it, but make sure they have the space to ask questions. You’ll often find the questions get better in this window, with greater specificity and contextualization. But you’ll also want to pay attention to what’s still unclear or confusing. These gaps can sometimes reveal something worth fixing in how your team communicates or documents things.

Days 61–90: collaborative calibrating

This is the phase where managers most often pull back, assuming the new hire has found their footing and is ready to go. Sometimes they have, but more often I find this not to be the case. Don’t take perceived stability for granted. Have a genuine conversation—a real check-in, not a performance review—about what’s working, what’s not, and where you need to invest energy next. The question that tends to open this up is relatively simple: where do you want to grow from here? This signals that your investment in them extends past the probationary window.

Less Logistics, More Relationships

I’m still navigating my own version of this, which is part of the reason why I find myself thinking about it so carefully. There’s something clarifying about being the new person because you feel firsthand how much it matters when someone has thought intentionally about your arrival and integration into the organization.

For many organizations, this may be treated as a peripheral concern, but we must remember that we can’t build a culture of trust, belonging, and authentic contribution if our first extended message to new people is: figure it out, keep up, and don’t look uncertain. If we want people to show up fully in their professional capacity, we have to acknowledge their human needs, especially in onboarding.

Elaborate onboarding programs have their place, but what matters more is having a hiring manager who slowed down enough to ask more basic questions before building their new hire’s plan. They thought less about logistics, and more about relationships.

What does your organization’s onboarding experience look like? Has it been effective? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Surviving Versus Thriving

As a woman, there’s a particular kind of disappointment that tends to hit differently when it comes from another woman at work. You might know the feeling. You walk into a meeting expecting an ally but instead find yourself being undermined, or you reach out for mentorship and get a cold shoulder, or you watch another woman climb the ladder and seemingly pull it up behind her. Maybe you’ve caught yourself doing a bit of mental math, sizing up another woman’s success against your own, feeling something you’re perhaps too uncomfortable to name but recognize nonetheless.

There are many women who talk about these phenomena, but I find the narrative tends to fall into two exhausted, intellectually lazy camps: either women are natural collaborators, instinctively supportive of one another in ways men could never understand, or we’re painted as catty competitors, trapped by neverending judgment and a struggle for power. But if you’re reading this, I’m guessing you understand the value of nuance, and recognize that the truth, as with most things involving human beings in the context of power structures, is far more complex than either of these narratives allow.

The roots of women-on-women conflict run deep—deeper than corporate culture, professional ambition, or any particular industry’s propensity for toxic behavior. For most of human history, a woman’s survival depended on her position within a social group, and in tribal societies, a woman’s access to resources, protection, and successful reproduction was often mediated through relationships with other women. Evolutionary psychologists like Kimberly Rosvall and David Buss have documented what they call “female intrasexual competition”: the evolutionary pressure that influenced the importance of women’s status relative to other women. Our standing in the female hierarchy affected everything from our children’s survival to our own safety, which meant that other women weren’t just colleagues or friends, but competitors.

As a society, we often diminish the nature of womanly conflicts. We deem them as petty, which ignores the fact that they actually stem from a survival mechanism. And while the context of today’s workplace has radically changed in that we’re no longer competing for literal survival, some of the underlying layers remain at play. This is particularly true in environments that recreate conditions of scarcity. Unfortunately, this is a situation women often find themselves in, as modern organizations often function as spaces in which power is limited, and where there are few seats at the table available for women.

Research from places like Forbes and Pew consistently shows that women hold roughly 10% of Fortune 500 CEO positions and less than 30% of senior leadership roles globally, numbers that have been resistant to dramatic change despite decades of intervention. This, combined with mounting external pressures—both economic and social—creates a system in which many women are struggling to simply survive, let alone thrive.

In moments of scarcity, old patterns tend to resurface. This is why the “queen bee” phenomenon has continued to be reported across industries and hierarchies. Rather than supporting other women, many successful women distance themselves from their gender group, defining themselves in masculine terms while remaining critical of other women’s ambitions. Still, this isn’t exactly evidence that women are inherently unsupportive of one another.

Studies show this reality emerges specifically in the context of pervasive organizational gender stereotyping and discrimination. When women experience high gender discrimination and low identification with their gender group, they’re more likely to define themselves in opposition to other women to signal that they shouldn’t be evaluated on the basis of gender. This is deeply important because it shows competition between women not as intrinsic, but as a strategic response to a discriminatory system that we indeed have the power to address.

It’s important to give weight to the other side of this equation as well. Most of us have witnessed or benefited from women’s profound support of one another in the workplace. In the right kind of environments, it’s not unusual to see women create some of the most powerful support systems in professional life. They’re mentors who see another woman’s potential before they themselves do, colleagues who speak another woman’s name in rooms they’re not yet invited to, and friends who remind us of our worth when we’re feeling demoralized and ready to walk out the door. Research on workplace networks shows that women benefit enormously from female sponsors and mentors, often more than from male ones. So, it might even be said that the same evolutionary history that fostered competition among women has also inspired our deep capacity for care and coalition.

The power dynamics we often see between women aren’t a bug in how we’re wired, nor are they something to be solved for through better networking events or empowerment workshops. Instead, they’re a feature of systems that never centered the voices and experiences of women. In this interview-style post, Jen and I strive to have honest conversations about this reality, acknowledging the impact—both good and bad—of women-on-woman dynamics in the workplace in the context of support and our unique feminine power.

Claiming & Asserting Power

When have you seen a woman use power well at work? What made it effective?

Here’s Jen:

I once watched a woman use power in a way that permanently changed how I understand leadership.

She held a very senior role at our head office in Los Angeles, and I worked in a smaller satellite office in Canada. We had interacted a handful of times because of our roles, but not in a way that felt particularly memorable to me. I certainly didn’t see myself as someone on her radar.

She was in the process of transitioning out of the company, and on her way out, she made a deliberate choice about how she would use the influence she still had. She advocated internally that my work was undervalued and that I was significantly underpaid. She negotiated a $25,000 raise on my behalf as part of her exit conversations.

She owed me nothing; we had never discussed anything like salary, and I didn’t even know she was doing it. I was only told after the fact that I was getting a raise, and that she had been the one to advocate for me.

When I found out, I was stunned. It wasn’t just the money, although that raise moved me into a salary bracket that changed my life. It was validation that someone at the highest levels of the organization had clearly seen my contributions and attached her credibility to them.

What impressed me most was that she understood, even on her way out, that her voice still carried weight. The company followed through after she left, which told me everything about the respect she commanded. They could have nodded along and done nothing, but they didn’t.

She used institutional power in a way that redistributed it.

There was no performance attached to it, no expectation of credit, or loyalty. Just a strategic intervention that shifted my trajectory. It was the first time I was making what felt like real, grown-up money. It changed how I negotiated, how I saw my own value, and how I understood my responsibility to others, especially to other women.

I have carried that forward in my own leadership. Power is never neutral; if you have it, even briefly, you can use it to stabilize a system or to stretch it open for someone else. She chose the latter.

Is there a moment you realized you had more power than you thought, and if so, what did you do with it?

Here’s Melissa on this one:

I once assumed a position of leadership on a team that had navigated a lot of turmoil. I won’t get into too many details for reasons of confidentiality, but let’s just say there had been some serious moral and safety issues. On top of all of this, leadership had changed multiple times, turnover was rampant, and support in its most critical ways was lacking, leaving workloads totally imbalanced and some staff unable to find the time and space to do any work from home or even take time off.

As I was getting started, the weight of all of these realities came to my attention. There was plenty of “actual” work to be done, but I quickly realized that this was secondary to reestablishing a sense of trust, safety, and balance—otherwise there’d be no one left to actually do the work! It was tricky territory to navigate, especially as a new person, because it meant ruffling some feathers with people who had been accustomed to (and benefited from) seeing the team operate differently. But I knew I was making the right call both in the short- and long-term.

As many of us already know, psychological safety is vital. Without it, an organization can only go so far. I knew I had the responsibility to take action not only for the organization’s sake, but for the team’s sake. It’s not that I was saving anyone, but I had the power to make a small difference in the lives of multiple people. If I didn’t take the opportunity to act then, who would? And if not in that moment, when? This experience cemented within me the belief that leadership is recognizing the opportunities—big and small—when you have power to make a difference, and not letting them pass you by.

Women Supporting Women

What gets in the way of women supporting each other at work? What would need to change?

Jen shares her perspective:

The workplace was not built to reward women. If anything, it was designed to punish us for even the smallest misstep, while others survive with little to no consequences. Research from Harvard Business School has documented what they call a “gender punishment gap,” finding that women in financial services were about 20% more likely to be fired for comparable misconduct and roughly 30% less likely to be rehired afterward. In many cases, the men’s violations were more severe or repeated.

Once you understand that the margin of error for women is finer, you behave differently by becoming more vigilant, cautious, and more protective of the ground you’ve earned. And if there are only a handful of senior roles available to women in the first place, the stakes compound. Supporting women can add unwelcome and risky scrutiny.

It’s not that women don’t value each other; it’s that many of us are operating in systems where credibility is conditional. In that context, aligning with the top feels a lot safer than aligning laterally, or worse, being perceived as aligning below you. Proximity to the dominant power is stabilizing, so sponsoring another woman can feel like attaching your reputation to something that the organization may already be predisposed to doubt.

In order for that dynamic to change, the conditions have to change. The margin of error can no longer be gendered. Leadership and succession pipelines can’t stay as narrow as they are, but then be framed as meritocratic. Performance systems can’t keep rewarding individual advancement while ignoring the labour that comes with developing and growing others.

When power is less fragile, support and advocating becomes less of a risk. Until then, we will continue to see women toggling between coalition and self-protection because that is a resonable response to the terrain we are navigating.

What’s one way you’ve supported another woman recently, even if only in a small, ordinary way?

Jen gives us an awesome example here:

Recently, one of our junior team members took on a project that had grown larger than originally imagined and began organizing it. She created a task list, clarified ownership, set timelines; basically reigned everything in.

Later, a senior leader came to me, clearly rattled. He told me he didn’t appreciate that she “took over” something that she hadn’t been asked to manage. When I asked him what specifically bothered him, he boiled it down to the fact that it made him feel like she didn’t think he could handle it.

I told him, “You’re seeing someone overstepping. I’m seeing someone who’s really good at her job and wants to show you she can handle more.” He was focused on figuring out how to get her to back down. I was focused on how to leverage her impressive skill set.

To his credit, he took a moment to sit with this and admitted it hadn’t occurred to him to see it from that perspective.

Women already have to walk such a tightrope around assertiveness. The same behaviour that reads as “leadership potential” in a man can read as “too much” in a woman. Sometimes, supporting another woman is as simple as asking, “If this were a man, would we be reacting like this?”

Working Moms

What’s a policy, norm, or small gesture at work that’s helped you manage caregiving, or would help if it existed?

Both of us are moms, but Melissa has some thoughts on this one:

Becoming a mom has shaken me to the core in terms of having to learn to manage competing demands and interests.

I truly enjoy both my children and my career, and although I can say with confidence that my girls are my biggest source of pride and joy, it has at times been challenging for me to say “no” to professional opportunities due to childcare responsibilities. For example, I feel really really guilty when I have to change my schedule around due to one of my kids being sick. I do it, obviously because my kids come first, and it has certainly gotten easier, but that’s not to say I don’t experience the tension of it all. And this is even in the context of supportive work environments, where work-life balance and family are celebrated.

I’ll never forget the time we had to take my daughter to the ER for the first time. She was two, and with that, I was still a “newer” mom. Oh, and I was also 7 months pregnant, so my hormones were out of control. It was terrifying, and I found myself in a state of total disarray. My boss has previously shared some of her own child’s health challenges, as well as other obstacles she had run into during her motherhood journey, so I made the choice to be pretty open with her about everything that was happening.

In response, my boss encouraged me to take as much time as I needed, and not only that, but she offered to help. It wasn’t a generic, “Let me know if I can help,” but a “Is there anything I can take care of while you’re gone?” The difference sounds relatively insignificant, but it meant a lot to me, because it was a concrete question—and one that genuinely supported me rather than simply offering up lip service.

I know my boss had a lot on her plate, but she was truly committed to making the work environment one that allowed parents to thrive. It wasn’t a result of fancy employee resource groups or family leave policies (although those are great and absolutely essential), but in the way a human being engaged with another human being in a moment of distress.

Honestly, when I look back on this role, I think one of the reasons I thrived there was because the multiple facets of my personhood—as a professional, as a mom, as a wife, as a woman—were all not only respected, but unquestioned. This was, in part, due to the fact that most of the leadership at this organization had families, or had recently been in the throes of navigating complex caregiving responsibilities in one way or another. Further, the idea of family was embedded within the organization. Not in the yucky “We’re all family here,” but in the way that honored people’s identities.

So, I guess my point here is to say that it’s not always about policies. Those can help, but more than anything, it’s about the culture you cultivate from the top, what you choose to honor and celebrate, and dare I say, the people you promote into positions of power. That combination, I’d argue, is what allows the caregivers among us to thrive professionally.

Carving Your Own Path

What advice were you given early in your career that you’ve since rejected?

Here’s Melissa:

“Don’t be too direct”—whatever that means—is feedback I heard a lot earlier in my career. It’s interesting, because I had never considered myself to be an overly assertive person, nor had I ever received that feedback before in my life. Sure, I had opinions, but I was always open to discussion, and I could always read a room. And because I was in my early 20s, a bit fragile and uncertain, I wasn’t really sure what to make of it. In fact, there had been times in recent years where I found myself getting in “trouble” because I probably wasn’t as direct as I should have been. Being more direct was, in fact, something I was working on.

So now, at a time when I was trying to figure out who I was, I had to contend with the need to be a bit more assertive in my personal life with the need to be a bit less so professionally.

In those years (not that I’m super old), discussions about work-life balance weren’t exactly front and center. The concept of finding a semblance of equilibrium between the two wasn’t something many people articulated and so, for better or for worse, people didn’t necessarily bring their “full selves” to work. Still, from the moment I entered the workforce, I struggled with the idea of compromising parts of my identity to fit the mold. It’s not that I was overly eager to share intimate details about my life, but I did want to be able to show up to work and feel like I could safely express who I was.

I wrestled back and forth with how I should respond to this feedback. In some regards, I wanted to keep the peace, but in others, I wanted to push back. Mostly, I chose the former, because I didn’t want to be seen as defensive or brash. I also proceeded to see myself as “too direct,” questioning every move I made out of fear that I’d be perceived as problematic. And while this was perhaps the right course of action to take earlier in my career, I’ve come to view this feedback much differently.

Being “direct” is perfectly acceptable for men. Some might say it’s expected, valued even. But for women? Directness is seen as a deficit. I spent years questioning myself, tempering my opinions, and shrinking to fit someone else’s idea of professionalism. Now I understand that the problem was never my directness, but a culture that isn’t always sure what to do with women who speak with clarity and confidence. These aren’t isolated incidents or individual misunderstandings. Nor are they outliers stemming from rudeness. Rather, they’re patterns. What gets labeled as feedback is often just the perpetuation of biases about how women should act, and when we internalize these messages too much, we risk losing fundamental aspects of our identities.

So, I guess the moral of the story is that it’s important to take feedback into consideration, but don’t let it leave you confused, especially when it’s tainted by unfair gender norms. As women, we ultimately need to carve our own path forward.

Stronger Together

We’ve come a long way, baby. The progress women have made in the workplace is real, yet the underlying systemic issues have not changed as much as we’d like to think, and that tension shows up in the subtle dynamics between women at work. We need to start building systems in which women can support each other without it feeling risky, and where there’s enough distributed power that we don’t feel the need to ration it.

As they say, “Empowered women empower women.”

But empowerment doesn’t materialize out of thin air, and it certainly doesn’t sustain itself on slogans alone. It shows up in everyday moments and interactions. In whether we name another woman’s contribution in a room she’s not in. In whether we share credit. In whether we offer honest feedback with generosity. It lives in the tension between scarcity and collaboration, and in the daily choice to believe that we are stronger together.

We’re further than we were, and that’s such a great thing. But we’re definitely not finished yet. The way we navigate power with one another will shape how much further we actually go.

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Before We Jump Into The Tool…

Everyone's asking whether AI will make their organization better, faster, smarter, bolder—really whatever version of "better" you’re chasing.

Sure, it can, but before we jump into the tool, I’d argue that the answer will depend, first and foremost, on what kind of learning culture you’re committed to building.

Many people think AI will transform organizational learning and development. I’ll take this a step further and say that many people think it will transform organizations entirely. In some ways, they're not wrong. It has unlocked—and will continue to— considerable potential and opportunity. But I’d argue this transformation will only occur if you have the right foundation in place.

If your organization treats learning as little more than information overload and transfer, AI may help people generate faster answers, but long-term capability will be fragile. Conversely, if you design your systems around learning—and more specifically, its principles of judgment, reflection, and shared understanding—AI becomes a tool for building long-term, transformative capability.

In this week’s post, I make a case for the latter as a means for maximizing the power of AI in the workplace—and doing so in a way that keeps human potential at the center.

Information Versus Capability

Learning scientists and practitioners have long warned that learning failures often come about because we’ve overloaded people’s attention, obscured the relevance of specific content, and/or failed to facilitate the gap between practice, feedback, and reflection.

Cognitive psychologist John D. Bransford has discussed how knowledge only becomes useful when people work with it across contexts—trying, adapting, and making sense of it in situations that don’t exactly mirror how they first encountered it.

Performance expert K. Anders Ericsson’s research on expertise extends this idea further, emphasizing that capability is built not through exposure, but through deliberate practice and refinement.

With this, the best learning designers have come to agree that information indeed supports learning, but only when it’s embedded in systems that require people to use intellectual muscle in applying it, and to do so consistently, in varied contexts over time.

In this regard, AI becomes both a problem and an opportunity. The technology itself is neutral in the sense that it can identify information instantly, generate explanations on demand, and even simulate scenarios for practice. But that speed also creates a seductive trap in which we over-index on access to answers.

When organizations implement AI with their minds heavily fixed on efficiency and immediacy, they’re essentially digitizing the same mistakes, but simply doing so at a pace that looks more impressive. The biggest problem with this approach is that learning continues to be treated as information transfer, with AI making it easier than ever not only to flood people with content, but to prioritize this over the work of actually developing adaptive and transferable skills. We might get faster surface-level performance, but we neglect the slower (but more powerful) work of building a collaborative and sustainable learning infrastructure built on judgment, reflection, and shared understanding.

This matters because, even with AI, the core mechanics of how we learn haven’t changed. We still need repetition, we still need to struggle with application in new contexts, and we still need feedback loops that help us refine our thinking. AI can accelerate some of this, but only if we employ it alongside these cognitive realities rather than around the allure of speed.

AI and learning research supports this as well. When AI is used primarily as a tool to generate answers, short-term performance may improve, but the long-term benefits are compromised unless supported by well-structured learning strategies. In other words, sure, we can use AI for purposes of instant gratification, but only when it’s used to prompt explanation, comparison, and reflection do we start to create ecosystems poised for compounding capability.

In Practice

Below I share some examples to highlight the difference of each approach in practice.

Performance Reviews. Consider a manager preparing for a difficult performance conversation. In organizations oriented around speed, the manager might ask AI to draft feedback or talking points for them. At first glance, the conversation sounds polished, but when the employee reacts with a heightened level of emotion or raises unexpected concerns, the manager struggles. While they have a nice script, their judgment is lacking.

In organizations with a stronger learning infrastructure, managers use AI earlier in the process, and much more thoughtfully. They use it to reflect on underlying performance patterns, anticipate reactions, and explore scenarios. The conversation becomes more responsive because the manager has done the work ahead of time, using AI as a partner to help them develop the capacity to adapt in real time.

Change Management. As another example, let’s look at the common scenario of a policy change rippling across teams. In fragile learning systems, the policymaker might use AI to quickly draft new documentation or summarize an update for mass communication. The initial draft looks fine, but downstream it’s found that each team is interpreting and implementing the policy differently because, unfortunately, cookie cutter communication doesn’t capture the nuances of how each team might be impacted.

However, in environments where learning capability is stronger, AI is used to compare old and new policies, surface possible points of friction, and prompt teams to discuss implications well before implementation—and before the policy is officially active. As a result of this kind of proactivity, the launch improves and fewer issues surface later on.

Cross-departmental Collaboration. When it comes to fast-moving cross-functional projects, teams operating in fragile learning systems may rely on AI to generate plans, timelines, or status updates, which creates the appearance of alignment but results in teams needing to redo work because they’ve missed some dependencies or made conflicting assumptions about priorities.

Learning systems that emphasize collaboration and shared sense-making use AI to outline dependencies, unearth assumptions around historically disparate functions, and test alternative approaches, better equipping them to understand, respond to, and mold the entire system in a way that aligns with and supports their individual tasks.

Onboarding. During onboarding into complex roles, organizations might use AI to help new hires find answers ti questions quickly or generate explanations of unfamiliar processes. This us great because it helps speeds up surface-level productivity, but issues can often emerge later when situations deviate from the “standard.”

This is where a durable learning approach can make all the difference, as AI would be used as a tool to promote explanation, comparison, and reflection during onboarding, helping new hires understand more than just which steps to follow, but how decisions are made.

In each of the above cases, the differentiator isn't AI, but how it's used within the organization's learning infrastructure. AI will serve as an amplifier to whatever foundation already exists—either building shared understanding, judgment, and coordination, or simply accelerating output in the short-term without strengthening capability in the long-term. The first might look prettier, but it’s also more fragile.

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From Answers To Infrastructure

At its most effective, AI will be part of a broader learning ecosystem—one that sees learning as the infrastructure that unlocks organizational capability. This, in practice, means designing systems, practices, and norms that position AI as an enhancement, not a replacement.

If you’re not sure where to begin, that’s okay. As always, I recommend starting small. You can try something as simple as this: the next time you see someone use AI to come up with a quick answer, invite them to also use it to generate a couple of questions that invite learning and collaboration.

“What assumptions am I making here?”

“What could we be missing that might be impacting another team?”

Over time, small redirections like these can reshape how an organization not only learns, but functions. We build the opportunity for more thoughtful preparation, more adaptive judgment, and more collaborative teaming—all of which strengthen the organization’s broader capability.

I don’t believe AI will fix a broken workplace. On it’s own, it can’t create these kinds of outcomes. But a strong, learning-centric culture combined with AI has the power to do that and more, turning fragility into transformative capability.

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Titles and Reporting Lines Aren’t Enough

Most organizations design themselves around titles and reporting lines. You’ve got your directors, your managers, and your specialists and coordinators, all stacked in boxes on perfectly curated org charts.

While this approach gives people a good idea of the chain of command and looks impressive in slide decks, you’re often stuck either trying to shoehorn people into boxes that don’t fit or watching them leave for somewhere that actually uses their strengths. And perhaps worst of all, it tells you almost nothing about whether you actually have the capabilities you need to do the work you’re trying to do.

But many employee development experts propose a better way, and it starts with asking different questions: What skills do we actually need to achieve what we’re trying to achieve? And which strengths do our team members have that we’re not yet tapping into?

A Recap: Operating From A Skills-Based Lens

I talk a lot about employing a skills-based approach in organizational design in my post from early January.

As a recap, operating from a skills-based lens means obsessing less about roles and more on the skills and capabilities required to execute the organization’s goals and needs. It requires us to ask deeper questions, like:

“What capabilities does our work actually demand right now?

What do people genuinely have versus what we assume they have?

Where are the specific gaps that are creating unnecessary friction?

Where are we trying to go and what do we need to get there?”

Instead of saying “we need someone to handle communications,” we look at what kind of outreach we’re trying to do and why. Maybe the organization is trying to bolster its business development pipeline, so it needs someone who has more experience with relationship building, which is a totally different skillset than email marketing and copy editing. But how would you know if you started with the title and not the skills?

A skills-centric lens doesn’t mean we throw out job descriptions, but it does require us to get super clear about which skills matter most and which skills we already have, and to design roles that leverage people’s strengths instead of forcing everyone into cookie-cutter boxes that ultimately don’t propel the organization forward.

Leaning Into People’s Strengths

A skills-based lens is even more powerful when paired with a strengths-based approach—one that doesn’t just identify what people can do, but what they do exceptionally well when they’re working from their zone of genius.

Don Clifton, the psychologist behind CliftonStrengths (also known as StrengthsFinder), is well-known for a relatively simple idea: we perform best—and grow most—when we lean into our areas of greatest strength rather than trying overcome our weaknesses.

In the context of organizational design, this lens can be taken further by structuring teams, roles, and workflows around people’s natural strengths and talents. In practice, this means spending less energy forcing someone who thrives in the strategic thinking domain into a role that demands significant tactical execution. As you consider their opportunities for growth, you design the work so they can lean into what they do well. Organizations like Meta and Gallup itself have embedded this thinking into their talent systems, using strengths data to inform hiring decisions, team composition, and even how they structure projects, allowing for a more harmonious orchestration of work that’s poised to drive better outcomes.

It’s important to note that when we use lean too heavily into skills without considering strengths, we risk placing technically qualified people into roles that end up draining them, resulting in disengagement and low morale. Similarly, when we zoom too far in on strengths without evaluating necessary skills, we might find ourselves with highly energized people working on things that don’t move the organization forward.

But together, these two approaches amplify each other in profound ways. A skills-based lens is diagnostic and forward-looking, telling us what our organization needs to function and grow—the technical capabilities, knowledge domains, and specific competencies required to execute the strategy. A strengths-based lens is about alignment and sustainability, telling us how to deploy the people we have in ways that maximize their natural abilities. So, imagine what can happen when we blend the skills our organization needs with an understanding of where each person excels.

Opportunities

Here are a few ways organizations reap the benefits of orientating themselves around both skills and strengths.

They hire for impact. When they’re clear about the skills they need and assess candidates for their strengths, candidates can be evaluated more holistically and with greater fidelity.

They use the people they already have more effectively. Many organizations are sitting on untapped talent and potential because they’ve never taken the time to understand what skills their people harness beyond what’s outlined in their job descriptions. But a skills-and-strengths-based perspective allows you to tap into previously unknown capabilities while deploying them in a way that works for people.

They adapt more quickly. When an organization builds itself around skills and strengths rather than roles, teams can be adjusted with greater fluidity and ease. People are also often more willing to flex when they’re working from a place of competence and energy, and when they understand the organization’s broader direction.

They have more meaningful growth paths. Instead of people waiting around for openings or lacking clarity around how to actually advance, these organizations are better positioned to have transparent and accessible development opportunities that align with people’s goals and aptitudes.

They reduce burnout and turnover. When people spend more time doing what they’re good at and what energizes them, they’re far less likely to run for the door.

Through a skills-and-strengths-based approach, there’s so much opportunity, all because we’ve created the conditions for people to do their best work, in alignment with where the organization is headed, without the tension of working against their natural inclinations.

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Challenges

There are also a few challenges with a skills-and-strengths orientation. I won’t spend too much time on them, but I think they’re worth naming. Objectivity, friends!

It’s a bit messier than a clean org chart. With a skills-and-strengths orientation, you focus less on reporting lines and hierarchies, so you might have people contributing to multiple teams, or someone junior in title leading a critical initiative. This can create tension and confusion if proper guardrails aren’t incorporated.

It requires you to get to know people. To understand the skills your organization has, you need to have real conversations. Transactional relationships do little when it comes to unearthing people’s interests, passions, and talents. But when you take the time to get to know them, showing genuine curiosity in who people are and developing deeper connections with them, you open up considerable possibilities.

It requires ongoing reassessment. Our strengths don’t necessarily change, but they are like muscles in that they can and should be developed further over time. This is important because it means that identifying an employee’s strengths once is hardly sufficient—you need to continue to develop your people. Similarly, the skills an organization needs to meet the ever-evolving demands of the market will continue to change, which requires regular evaluation of the skills you have and those you don’t.

All of this to say, I truly think the benefits of focusing on skills and strengths outweigh the limitations, and there’s a reason these operating models have gained so much traction in recent years.

People, Purpose, And Profit

A skills-based approach paired with a strengths-based mindset is about matching the capabilities our work demands with what people naturally do well. It sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly rare in practice, which results in numerous missed opportunities.

Conversely, when we start with skills, we move with greater clarity around what we need to achieve our goals. And then, when we layer in strengths, we deploy people in a way that maximizes their talents for the benefit of both people and profit. This combination builds organizations that are more adaptable, more effective, and quite frankly, a lot more interesting to work in. People get to contribute from areas of genuine capability and enthusiasm instead of pretending to fit into roles that were designed for different people at a very different time.

Designed with intention, these are the organizations that have figured out how to stop choosing between people, purpose, and profit, and instead deliver all three.

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Quick Tip! Interested in trying it out at your organization? Keep the stakes low by starting with one team or project. Try organizing everything around skills and strengths, assess what works and what doesn’t, and then share your findings with key decision-makers.

Have you experimented with skills-based and/or strengths-based organizational design? What worked, or what didn’t? Share your experiences in the comments below!

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A Costly Assumption

When people think about employee development, they often picture something formal and relatively contained, whether it be a workshop, a training series, an out-of-town retreat, or a learning management system full of courses that are—let’s be honest—a bit out of date and not necessarily pertinent to one’s everyday work.

Sometimes that is indeed what employee development (also known as “talent development,” “learning and development,” or “L&D”) looks like. A mandatory virtual training with a bunch of bad actors, a learning day with crappy food, or a generalized onboarding experience with a bunch of content that, at any given point, doesn’t apply to more than 60% of people in the room.

More often, however, the most powerful employee development emerges in less obvious ways. Like in whether new hires understand what “good” work looks like in their first month on the job, in whether managers from across different units describe expectations the same way, or in whether people are left to piece the organization’s social norms together on their own or given a new hire mentor to support them. They may be subtle, but these experiences can actually turn out to be far more consequential, with individuals, teams, and the entire organization benefiting greatly,

I can understand why this kind of stuff doesn’t immediately come to mind. After all, employee development has historically functioned around one-time events and trainings. But there’s another belief embedded within people’s assumptions around L&D that I struggle to wrap my head around: that L&D doesn’t contribute to the bottom line.

In fairness, I get that tough choices that need to be made when budgets are tight. And I get that employee development has costs, with its benefits not always being clearly articulated. The problem is that this disposition only holds if you look at employee development in isolation, rather than as one of the places where operational and financial problems often surface first.

Unfortunately, L&D is still treated as discretionary by many organizations. It’s something we invest in when budgets are stable and scale back when they’re not. In this vein, learning is seen as a separate entity, sitting on top of the “real” work, rather than viewed as an essential tool to resolve workflow complexities. But this assumption is quite a costly one, because learning is a powerful cost-saving measure.

Learning As A Diagnostic Tool

A VP notices that project timelines keep slipping, always in the same phase. When she asks around, she gets five different explanations about what “handoff” means and when it’s actually required. No one’s being careless. People are just all working from what they’ve pieced together—some from a template they found in a shared drive, some from watching a colleague, some from a conversation they half-remember from their first week on the job.

The problem here has less to do with people’s fickleness around deadlines and more to do with the fact that the organization never clearly defined the handoff process. This is a perfect example of not only a learning breakdown, but the costs that can arise from it. Standards were never documented, expectations were never reinforced, and now the cost is showing up as delays, rework, and frustration.

I find one of the most frustrating things about L&D is that it’s often treated as the solution rather than the diagnostic. What I mean by this is that people see it as something we use to respond to an issue versus something we use to identify the issue. But when we pay attention to where people are struggling—whether it be in onboarding, manager-employee relations, or procedural adherence—we’re not just identifying a training need. Instead, we’re seeing exactly where the organization can do better.

When leaders actually examine these breakdowns, they get a far clearer view of what’s costing them time, money, and momentum. This is where learning starts to intersect directly with the bottom line, offering us a powerful opportunity to identify and reduce waste.

Shadow Learning

When organizations don’t fund formal development efforts, there’s a cost in what is often referred to as “shadow learning.” Here’s an example of how this might look:

A new customer success manager joins the team and asks how to handle a pricing question. Her department head is seemingly always in back-to-back meetings, so she asks a colleague. The colleague shares what’s been working for them, which may or may not reflect the current pricing structure or company policy. The new employee uses that approach, and while it saves some headaches up front, it ultimately results in a client escalation. She then gets pulled into a tense conversation with her department head about “going off script,” except she was never made aware of the script in the first place.

In this specific context, the customer success manager learned from what was available. But what was available was off-beat. Shadow learning happens constantly. It’s not always a bad thing—organizations want collaborative, engaged, and adaptive teams—but the point is that there’s a cost to not formally investing in learning. A manager may pick up leadership habits by watching another manager in the room, even if that person’s style doesn’t align with the manager’s team or personality. An analyst may learn what “urgent” means by observing how different people respond to requests, because they weren’t told about the priority framework.

Shadow learning is hardly malicious; it’s actually quite adaptive. People are trying to do good work with incomplete information. But when learning only happens in the “shadows,” without any kind of structure around it, it can be uneven, erroneous, and a source of major problems down the line. The manager’s learned behaviors about leadership end up costing the organization two of their most valuable employees. Or the analyst misses an important “deadline” that puts the company at risk of losing one of their biggest clients. To rely on shadow learning alone seems economical upfront, but organizations almost always end up paying the price down the line.

Hidden Costs

The financial case for learning usually focuses on what’s easy to count, in things like recruiting costs, training hours, turnover rates. However, the bigger costs are often the ones that don’t show up in a single line item.

Distrust

First, you have distrust, which can brew in the absence of clear standards. If two people do the same task differently and both get praised, how does the company define “good?” And how can it be replicated? If one manager gives feedback one way and another gives it differently, how are people supposed to know what’s expected? This kind of ambiguity may come from good intentions, but it ultimately feels confusing and political. People can start to assume decisions are arbitrary, and that success depends more on who you know than what you do. In turn, they often stop asking questions and taking risks—doing less, all because it feels safer.

Firefighting

Second, you have firefighting. When a manager is constantly wrapped up in solving preventable problems—clarifying expectations, redoing work, smoothing over conflicts—they’re not spending time on activities that lead to growth and profit. Things like developing their people, building scalable systems, and sparking innovative collaborations.

Reputational Risk

And third, you have reputational issues. When one employee promises a client something another employee can’t deliver, clients can start to lose trust in the organization as a whole. Or when quality and experience varies depending on who’s doing the work, clients start asking for specific people by name, or they may go elsewhere. Inconsistency can signal a lack of rigor and dependency, and that the organization doesn’t have its act together—perceptions that are hard to undo once they set in.

Again, I understand that these issues might be dismissed because of their subtly, but they can compound into profoundly costly business challenges, all because the system people are operating within wasn’t designed with learning—and ultimately, clarity—as a cornerstone.

The Alternative

Below are some examples of what happens when learning is used as a tool to solve real, cost-inducing organizational problems.

Case Study 1

A 75-person professional services firm was losing an estimated $150K annually in rework because project managers weren’t aligned around quality standards. What constituted “done” varied wildly and clients were beginning to notice.

L&D partnered with operations to create a performance standard guide, a 30-minute asynchronous training module, and a manager toolkit for exploring gaps and reinforcing standards in 1-on-1s and project debriefs. Within a few months, the need for rework dropped dramatically and client escalations decreased by nearly half. What was initially a considerable cost became savings. And that calculation isn’t even accounting for client retention.

Case Study 2

A mid-sized nonprofit had a track record of promoting high performers into management roles without any leadership training, leaving the HR team constantly fielding complaints about unclear expectations and poor communication. Three strong individual contributors had recently left, citing their manager as the reason.

L&D built a manager enablement program that included a leadership playbook integrated within a custom GPT, monthly peer learning cohorts, and required coaching support for the first 90 days in role. Six months later, manager-related complaints to HR decreased by 50%, and employee engagement scores around manager support and satisfaction increased by 25%. The cost of replacing those three employees was over $200K, whereas the program cost was $20K.

The Myth Of Scale

There’s one more persistent belief that I find quite annoying: that L&D is something you add once you’re “big enough.” In other words, smaller teams don’t really need it. But in reality, the risk of not investing in learning often hits smaller teams with greater force.

In a 15-person organization, there’s often very little slack. When one person struggles, the impact can be felt almost immediately. When onboarding is weak—or altogether lacking—everyone can feel the consequences. And when a manager burns out, there may be no one ready to step in and assume their responsibilities.

Larger organizations may not feel the impact right away, but they experience the same dynamics through repetition. Inefficiencies, repeated hundreds of times, can result in enormous waste. It may be a different scale, but the math is pretty much the same.

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A Reframe

The idea that L&D doesn’t affect the bottom line usually comes from looking at it as an expense rather than as a diagnostic, cost-saving tool.

Conversely, when leaders commit to a learning framework—paying attention to confusion, delays, and repeated mistakes and using learning as a tool to rectify, prevent, and—get this—learn from them—they’re not being financially irresponsible. They’re actually being disciplined, choosing to spend deliberately once, instead of paying more for bigger issues down the line.

In this regard, a more thoughtful, business-centric question than “Do we need L&D?” is this: “Where are we losing where we don’t need to, and how can L&D help us solve it?”

The goal here is never to eliminate mistakes. We’re human beings after all, prone to error and oversight. But organizations that take learning seriously reduce how often the same ones recur, how costly they are, and how much energy is spent containing them.

So if L&D is on your list of cuts, it’s worth pausing and considering a reframe before you make the call. In many cases, you probably won’t be saving anything. The costs will simply be delayed, becoming harder to identify, harder to address, and far more expensive to fix later.

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Some Context

It’s 2026, and suddenly, everyone’s talking about Venezuela.

But for many people, the issues occurring within, around, and from Venezuela have been on the radar for years.

I won’t get into all the details as I don’t want to distract from the key elements of this week’s post, but I want to start by sharing some context around why I’m saying anything about Venezuela in the first place.

It sounds strange, but for nearly 23 years I thought I was of Venezuelan heritage. I ended up being Mexican in the end (adoption paper error… don’t ask…), but still, by the time I had found out about my true identity, I was deep in the throes of just about Venezuelan everything.

Again, I’ll keep it short, but I ended up visiting Venezuela for the first time in 2013. While there, I met my now-husband, a Caracas-born Venezuelan who came to the U.S. as a baby and lived in Venezuela again between 2012-2014. We’ve not been able to go back since 2014, but we’ve been watching closely for the last 10+ years as the country has descended further into chaos.

Needless to say, Venezuela is a significant part of my story, but even more so for my husband—the actual Venezuelan here.

Anyways, in the context of recent events, I feel it’s both important and relevant to speak to this topic—both because I feel a moral duty to shed some light on the unfortunate realities Venezuelans have endured, and because I see monumental lessons to be gained from what has happened in this once thriving country.

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The Power Of Imagery

I think the case of Venezuela can teach us a great deal that applies to organizational life. But for this post, there’s one critical idea I want to focus in on:

Institutions are only as strong as their willingness to face reality, and conversely, as weak as their need to show the right face.

Let me share a bit more about what I mean.

During my time in Venezuela, I was always stunned by the imagery. Now I’m not talking about the country’s breathtaking landscapes—which are myriad. Rather, I’m talking about its use of visuals to evoke emotion and propaganda to elevate the regime’s strategic positioning.

All across the country, from the mountains of Mérida in the West to the tepuis in the East to the stunning Caribbean shores in the North, you would see images of Hugo Chavez next to smiling children plastered on street corners, billboards, and just about anywhere that had halfway decent foot traffic.

But simultaneously, you would find people in line waiting for hours to withdraw what little money they had from the bank.

You would witness (or be a victim of) countless petty crimes.

You would see 18-year-old boys with assault riffles outside the metro stations, because that was the only job they could find.

You would meet 27-year-olds who had been trying to finish their bachelor’s degrees for 7+ years, all because their were shortages of faculty and other resources.

You would hear stories about your friends, family members, and neighbors getting robbed at gunpoint, over things as silly as a cellphone.

And what was most shocking to my American eyes was the fact that people often couldn’t locate basic medicine for their babies.

Still, the dictatorship portrayed a very different scene—one that couldn’t have been further from the daily reality that people were living.

Two Faces

Nation-states aren’t the only entities that show two faces. Organizations do it, too—saying things like “our people are our greatest asset” while gutting training budgets, wishing for innovation while punishing failed experiments, valuing transparency while keeping employees in the dark about basic organizational realities.

I draw the comparison to organizations here not because I believe life at the office is equivalent to the many horrors of that in Venezuela throughout the last 25+ years, but because I believe there are important lessons for us to garner when it comes to ensuring proclaimed organizational goals and values align with what people experience in their day-to-day work.

How many organizations have you seen with grandiose claims about valuing people, yet who chronically underinvest in staffing, training, and workload sustainability, framing burnout as an issue of individual resilience rather than structural defect?

With cultures that are little more than slogans posted up on the wall, disconnected entirely from how people show up and engage with each other in their daily workflows?

With feedback mechanisms that technically exist on paper, but don’t meaningfully change behavior, teaching people that speaking up is probably more of a risk than anything else?

With an emphasis on collaboration and trust, while decision-making remains concentrated among a few voices, leaving employees uninformed and disengaged?

An organization’s fragility ultimately lies in the gap between its official narrative and the lived reality of its people.

Venezuela’s government kept denying the truth even as grocery shelves emptied, violence surged, people were disappeared for political dissent, hyperinflation strangled people’s savings, and more than 25% of the population fled in a span of roughly 10 years.

What makes this kind of pattern particularly insidious—whether we’re talking about organizations or nation-states—is that by the time a full-blown crisis emerges, our capacity to respond has become significantly compromised. The people who could fix things have left while the ones who remain are wrapped up in cynicism, compliance, and utter demoralization. And the trust that’s been lost takes years to rebuild, if it can even be rebuilt at all.

So what can we do, if anything, to prevent this kind of collapse in our organizations? I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I do have a few general ideas on the topic, integrated from both my understanding of organizational dynamics and the crisis in Venezuela.

Tips For Prevention

Pay attention to early warnings. When people start leaving, don’t dismiss it as normal attrition. Dig deeper. Find the patterns. When you hear the same complaint from multiple sources, resist the urge to dismiss or generalize it. When your team stops bringing you problems, don’t assume they’ve started solving them on their own. It might just be a sign that they’ve stopped believing you’ll do anything to help.

Prioritize competence over compliance. Hire and promote people who challenge your thinking, not those who simply echo it back. Create the conditions where people can share the truth they’re actually living—no matter how uncomfortable—and remind yourself that this is ultimately good for both people and profit.

Bridge the gap between what you say and what you do. Stated values on the wall mean nothing if they’re not reflected in everyday action. What gets rewarded? Who gets resources? Whose voice travels farthest? Culture is far less about what you claim in the strategic plan than about what happens on the day-to-day.

Don’t assume everyone has good intentions. I’m prone to giving people the benefit of the doubt, even if it stabs me in the back later. But a bit of skepticism isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s not that people are inherently problematic, but the reality is that human systems are hierarchical structures, and power distorts behavior. To reduce the likelihood of wrongdoing, make sure your systems are embedded with proper accountability measures.

Acting Before The Crisis

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the aforementioned tips alone prevent major crises, nor am I equating organizational dysfunction with the human suffering Venezuela has endured over the last 25+ years. The scale, stakes, and consequences are not the same, and it would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise.

But what is comparable are some of the underlying dynamics that show up in human systems of all kinds.

As human beings, we don’t get the luxury of treating crises as isolated tragedies and then moving on. When we do, we allow the same dynamics to resurface elsewhere— just under different names, in different systems, and with different victims.

Organizations are human systems, which means they’re vulnerable to the same forces that carved out Venezuela’s crisis: ego, disregard, the destruction of accountability, and, ultimately, a disconnect between narrative and reality.

The lesson here isn’t just what went wrong, but how it was allowed to persist for so long. Who was ignored? Which warnings were dismissed? What incentives created a culture of silence? What were our narratives?

If we don’t carry these lessons forward—into how we design organizations, evaluate leaders, reward behavior, and respond to dissent—then a crisis may end, but the conditions that produced it remain intact. And when that happens, the next failure is hardly a surprise.

Regardless of where we’re leading, we have both the agency and responsibility to act, and to do so earlier than we think. Long before a crisis forces our hand, there are moments where we get to choose choose honesty over optics, competence over loyalty, and accountability over comfort. These choices may come with challenges of their own, but they’re what keep institutions morally intact.

Venezuela has taught me a lot about institutional collapse. Most importantly, I think it has helped me understand that there’s a key difference between what is said and what is done. I’ve also come to see that organizations don’t always lose their way all at once. A big dramatic moment is attention grabbing and newsworthy, but it’s hardly reflective of the slower, more subtle erosion happening behind the scenes. In that vein, I’ve come to believe that acting sooner is usually better.

I believe we can and should build organizations whose realities match the stories they tell. Who face hard truths sooner, respond more courageously to dissent, and strive to preserve their integrity through actions, not just words. We can’t eliminate risk altogether, but we can play an important role in preventing—or at least not repeating —a crisis.

Which other warning signs have you become attune to? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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