Yes, coloring books and fun. On purpose. With intent. And here’s the whole reason in one sentence: I am good at HR and leadership development, but none of it is truly fun.

That’s not a complaint. It’s just true, and it’s true for almost everyone in this field. The diagnostics are real. The turnover numbers are real. The conversations about why a good employee just quit, or why a manager keeps getting complaints nobody will put in writing, those are real too.
They are heavy.
And they are not fun.
And shouldn’t be.
But training can be!

I built my whole consulting practice on being direct about HR and leadership…not softening it. So when people meet the coloring books, they assume there’s some contradiction. There isn’t. The coloring books exist because I know exactly how heavy the real work is, and I decided the delivery didn’t have to match the weight.

The Dinosaur Who Thought Being Loud Was Leadership

The first one is called “Dinosaurs Make Bad Leaders,” and its main character is a dinosaur named Trek. Trek has some genuinely archaic ideas about what a leader is supposed to look like. Loud. Certain. Always right, or at least never caught admitting otherwise. If you’ve worked for a Trek, you know exactly the type, and you probably have a story.

Trek is not a punishment for bad managers in the room. He’s a mirror, and mirrors work better when nobody feels like they’re being lectured at. Handing someone a coloring page of a dinosaur getting it wrong does something a slide with a bullet point about “authoritative leadership styles” cannot do. It gets people laughing at the behavior before they recognize it, and by the time they recognize it, they’re already halfway to admitting they’ve done it too.

Trek isn’t the only one doing this work, either. When I presented “The Butterfly Effect of Good Leadership,” Luna the Butterfly was right there with me, making the case that small leadership actions ripple outward further than most people think, for better or worse. And “What We Normalize Today Becomes Tomorrow’s Culture” runs through Ramble the Blue Monster, a reminder of what happens when bad behavior goes unchecked long enough to grow into something bigger. Different animal, same mechanism. Fun is what gets the lesson past the defenses people bring into a training room.

Fun Is Not the Opposite of Serious

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying trainings should go light on content, or that a fun afternoon is a substitute for real diagnostic work on why a team is struggling. I still do that work, the direct, sometimes uncomfortable kind, and I’m not backing off it for anybody.

What I am saying is that the delivery method is a choice, and most of the industry picked the same one: a deck, a facilitator, a whiteboard, forty five minutes of people nodding without absorbing much of anything. Nobody actually decided that was the best way to teach adults. It’s just the default, and defaults are not the same thing as good decisions.

So I made a different choice. Coloring books, characters, sessions built around real leadership content that makes someone think…not just content that fills a 45 minute block of time.

Where This Is Headed

Trek isn’t done growing, and neither am I. There’s a children’s book coming, short and cute, still starring Trek, still about learning to lead well instead of just loudly, and I’m aiming to have it ready before the holidays this year.

If a five year old can understand why Trek’s old way of leading doesn’t work, there’s no excuse for the rest of us taking longer to get there.

If any of this sounds like something your team needs, here’s the simple version: check out the coloring books, grab a time to chat about training, and keep an eye out, the children’s book is coming before the holidays.

Do better. Be better. Bring the crayons.

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The new question is: do you remind me of me? And once that’s what “fit” actually means to you, you don’t have a hiring philosophy anymore. You have a mirror with a job posting attached to it.

The Problem

I worked for an organization that hired a new COO. We were in different states, so I hadn’t met him in person yet, just heard through the grapevine that he ran a little stuffy. I am not stuffy. About three months into his tenure, he finally met me face to face, took one look at my purple hair (at the time) and my tattoos, and tried to fire me on the spot.

Not for my work. Not for a single missed deadline or dropped ball. For my hair. HR stepped in and stopped it, which tells you something on its own, because it means someone above him had to override a decision that should never have been made in the first place. And here’s the part that actually matters: he didn’t last long there. On paper, this man was an incredible hire. Great résumé, great references, said all the right things in the interview. In person, he was judging people on how well they matched the picture in his head of what “professional” looks like, and that instinct didn’t stay contained to me. It became a pattern, and the org couldn’t sustain it.

That’s the culture fit trap in one story. It feels like judgment to some. It feels like protecting standards to others. What it actually is, most of the time, is comfort dressed up as a hiring criteria.

Comfort is not a job qualification.

The Consequences

When you hire for familiarity instead of values and skillset: you’re not protecting your culture, you’re shrinking it.

Every person who gets passed over because they “didn’t quite vibe” in the interview is a data point your organization decided it didn’t need. Do that enough times and you end up with a room full of people who solve problems the exact same way, spot the exact same risks, and miss the exact same blind spots, because you selected for sameness and called it chemistry.

It also has a cost nobody puts on a scorecard. The candidate who pushes back in the interview, or who asks the uncomfortable question, or who doesn’t quite match the energy of the room…that person often reads as a bad fit. So they get hired somewhere else. And somewhere else gets the benefit of exactly the perspective you decided was too much friction to deal with. You didn’t dodge a problem. You handed a gift to whoever hired them instead.

And the person doing the judging rarely thinks of themselves as biased. My stuffy COO didn’t think he was discriminating. He thought he had standards. That’s what makes this trap so hard to catch from the inside: it never announces itself as prejudice.

The Solution

You don’t fix this by throwing values out. You fix it by getting specific about what you actually mean by culture, and then hiring for that instead of for comfort.

Define your actual values before you’re in a room with a candidate, not during. If “fit” isn’t something you could write down and defend, it’s not a criteria, it’s a feeling…and feelings shouldn’t be deciding who gets a job.

Hire for what someone adds, not how easily they blend in.

The goal isn’t finding people who agree with the room. It’s finding people who share your actual values and think nothing like the room, because that’s where the good ideas come from.

I saw the other version of this work, too. A few weeks into a different job, I got pulled into a hectic project at the main office and started flagging down anyone who walked by to answer my questions. I was new, I had a few hundred of them. One of the people who stopped, in a lovely sundress and heels, patiently answered everything I threw at him for about 30 minutes. Over the three days I was at on that project, I never once saw anyone treat him differently than any other employee. Nobody was managing a mold. They were just getting the work done with the best people, exactly as they were.

That’s the whole difference. One organization hired for a reflection. The other hired for a mission, and let everyone show up as themselves while they built it.

Do better. Be better. Go off the beaten path.
And maybe check whether “fit” is a value or just a mirror.

CTA: Set up a call with me and we can reset your hiring practices!

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That is a whole different topic.

This got me thinking this week about my pet peeves in life.

And before I get further, pet means favorite and peeve means grievance. So in a sense, pet peeve is favorite grievance. This kind of fits, especially for those things that we tend to focus on regularly. Maybe not our favorite, but at least the most frequent.

Back to my pet peeves. Or my pet peeve of the day.

Not everything in your life is bad!

My biggest pet peeve is when I talk to someone, whether business or personal, and all they can update me on are all the horrible things happening. “I hate my job,” or “My kids are driving me crazy,” or “My husband and I are fighting again,” or “My pinky toe has hurt for a year, but I refuse to see a doctor.”

Can we even attempt to focus on the good things? Or at least make it a sandwich?

Good/Bad/Good, so that the good outweighs the bad?

The irony is, and you know this if you know me at all, I am the worst-case-scenario person. In any situation, I have determined at least five ways that I could be maimed or die, and at least two exits out of that situation. But on the flip side, that makes me completely understanding of how amazing my life is! The reason why? Because I have never been maimed or killed, and I have never had to use any of those extra exits in haste.

Being thankful for all of the amazing things in your life makes the bad things just meh.

What am I thankful for?

• Amazing partner in life who supports all my craziness.

• Amazing kids that truly test my patience and make me better daily.

• Roof over my head, paychecks in my bank account, and all the accoutrements that go with that.

• The ability to get my doctorate and succeed at amazing things in life.

• My creative ability to bring a little whimsy into the world.

Someone said that we all need to start writing more personal stuff on Substack. This is my first foray into that. And I am going to try to do it more often. Let’s see how it goes!

🦋🦖🐧🦁👾

𝘋𝘰 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘉𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘎𝘰 𝘰𝘧𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩.

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That’s my tagline, and I mean it in a bigger way than most taglines get to mean anything. I truly believe the world would look different if everyone focused on doing better and being better each day, on their own path, in their own way. What that looks like is going to be a little different for every person, and that’s fine. It’s the point, actually. Nobody’s path is identical, so nobody’s version of “better” should be either.

I get asked sometimes what this actually looks like day to day, outside of a nice line under my name. So here are three small, unglamorous ways I try to live it.

When I Don’t Know Something, I Look It Up

This one sounds almost too simple to write down, but a lot of people don’t do it. Someone hears a word they don’t recognize, or bumps into a concept they’ve never heard of, and they just let it slide past. No follow-up, no five-second search, nothing. It’s gone.

Here’s the thing: if you picked just one of those moments a day and actually looked it up, you’d learn 365 new things a year. Probably more, because one thing tends to lead to another. This morning it was literacy statistics, and I went so far down that rabbit hole that I lost a whole hour and drug my partner into a discussion. I don’t regret it. Curiosity compounds, and it’s one of the cheapest ways I can do better than I did yesterday.

Holding My Tongue When I Know I Can Fix Something

This is the hard one. I’m a fixer by nature, and it shows up everywhere, but especially with my 18-year-old. I see the problem, I see the fix, and every instinct says: just say it, just do it, just hand them the answer.

I’ve actually written before about “just give me the damn fish,” and that piece was really about business. Because, yes, sometimes you have to just fix things for people. But the same fixing instinct shows up at home, and the same problem comes with it. When I fix things for people without them asking for help, I’m quietly telling them I don’t think they can fix it themselves. I’m taking something away from them. Holding my tongue, as much as it makes my brain twitch in the moment, is how I let someone else do better and be better.

Being Nice When Others Aren’t

Especially to people in the service industry. I go out of my way to thank the people making my food, cleaning the bathrooms, sweeping the floors, doing the jobs most people walk right past without a second look. Very few people say thank you to them. It costs me nothing and it might be the only kind word that person hears all shift.

Being nice is a small thing. But small things are still things. A genuine thank-you can shift someone’s whole outlook on their day, and that ripple doesn’t stop when they clock out.

None of these are dramatic. No single one of them is going to change the world on its own. But that was never really the promise. The promise was just: do better, be better, on your own path, one small choice at a time.

How do you plan to do this?

Do better. Be better. Go off the beaten path.

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Doctoral research study: ethics and leadership in the workplace.

My name is Sarah Davis, and I’m a doctoral candidate at National University researching how employees across generations experience and respond to ethics and leadership in the workplace.

If you’re 18+, have at least 2 years of professional work experience, and have worked in a for-profit organization, I’d appreciate a few minutes of your time on a short survey to see if you’re eligible for a follow-up interview.

https://ncu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6D4F2enagZQXTkG

Questions? Email me at s.davis3510@student.nu.edu

Thank you for considering being part of this research.

Sarah Davis
Doctoral Candidate, Doctor of Business Administration
National University

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It is true. That would be too obvious, too documentable, too easy to hand to a lawyer. I have seen it happen. The slower, quieter process that is built entirely on deniability. Every move below has a legitimate-sounding business reason attached to it, and that’s the whole point. Retaliation isn’t a single dramatic act. It’s a pattern, and patterns are exactly what companies count on you not noticing until you’re already gone.

When the retaliation isn’t blatant, it is harder to prove.

What does this slower, quieter process look like?

The Reorg That Just Happens to Land on You

Six weeks after your complaint, there’s a restructure. Your role gets folded into someone else’s team, your title gets softened, your reporting line changes to someone new who “needs to get to know your work before making any calls.” Nobody says a word about the complaint. Org charts don’t come with footnotes. But the timing is never a coincidence, and everyone in the room knows it, including you.

The Sudden Performance Problem

You had no documented issues for two years. Then you raised a concern, and within a quarter you’re on a PIP for “communication style” or “not being a team player,” vague enough that it can’t be disproven and specific enough to look procedural. The paper trail gets built after the fact, not before, which is the tell if anyone ever bothers to check the dates.

The Meeting You’re No Longer In

Nothing was announced. You just stopped getting the invite. The project didn’t need you anymore, or the group got “streamlined,” or someone decided the meeting was getting too big. You find out decisions were made without you three weeks later, in passing, from someone who assumes you already knew. Isolation is cheap and it’s nearly impossible to prove, which is exactly why it’s a favorite.

The Withheld Information

Deadlines change and nobody tells you. Files get shared with everyone but you. The context you need to succeed arrives late, or incomplete, or not at all, and then your performance suffers because you were working with a fraction of what everyone else had. When you ask why, the answer is always an oversight. It’s never an oversight twice, but somehow it’s always framed as one.

The Frozen Career

No promotion. No raise. No “not now, but soon.” Just silence, indefinitely, while people who complained about nothing move steadily upward around you. Nobody has to say you’re being punished. They just have to make sure your career stops moving at the exact moment theirs didn’t, and let you draw your own conclusions.

The Reputation Quietly Rewritten

Somewhere along the way, a new story starts circulating about you. You’re “difficult.” You’re “not really a culture fit anymore.” You “used to be great but something’s changed.” Nobody can point to a single incident, because there isn’t one. There’s just a narrative, seeded carefully enough that by the time you hear it secondhand, it already sounds like consensus instead of what it actually is, which is a smear campaign with better manners.

Why This Works

Every one of these moves is individually defensible.
A reorg happens.
Performance conversations happen.
Meetings get trimmed. Information gets missed.
Promotions get delayed for budget reasons.
Any single one, on its own, is nothing.

That’s the design.

If you want to catch it while it’s happening, the tell isn’t any individual event.

It’s the clustering. One vague performance note is nothing. A vague performance note, a reorg, and a meeting you got quietly dropped from, all within eight weeks of the day you filed a complaint, is not a coincidence, it’s a pattern, and patterns are evidence even when no single piece of them is.

Write it down anyway. I recommend keeping the dates, names, what changed and when. And anything else that seems important at the time. Not because it guarantees anything, but because the version of this story your employer wants you to believe is that none of it is connected. Keeping your own timeline is how you make sure you’re the one who gets to decide whether that’s true.

Do better. Be better. Go off the beaten path. And keep the receipts.

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This particular trip took me to Michigan for my first conference of 2026, and it was a bigger deal than usual because my daughter Ashley came with me and presented alongside me. It was her first time presenting at a conference, which meant more prep and more review than I’d normally put in solo. It was also, honestly, a good reminder of something I don’t think about often enough: as a solopreneur, I don’t work with people on projects like this very much. Having Ashley up there with me pushed me out of the comfort zone of being the only voice in the room, and out of your comfort zone is pretty much always where the good stuff lives.

Two Talks, One Theme

We presented two sessions: “The Butterfly Effect of Good Leadership” and “What We Normalize Today Becomes Tomorrow’s Culture.” The conference theme was “Transforming Tomorrow Together,” and both talks landed right in the middle of it, which felt less like luck and more like proof that the ideas were right on time.

Every attendee also got pages from my leadership coloring books and a handful of crayons, so they had something to do with their hands besides scrolling. People actually used them. At the end, the room held up their pages for a photo, which is a genuinely fun way to know you have a room’s attention instead of just hoping you do. One guy told me he couldn’t wait to go home and tell his daughter that he got to color at work. That’s the whole point, honestly. Leadership doesn’t have to be delivered in a way that feels like homework to land.

What the Room Told Me

Talking about leadership in front of people is trickier than it looks, because a lot of the audience is quietly sitting with a bad boss, or with a leadership habit they recognize in themselves, and either one can turn emotional fast. Some people get defensive. That’s normal, and I expect it. But the overwhelming majority, somewhere around 99 percent, showed up with real questions, real examples from their own jobs, and a genuine willingness to take something home and try it.

One moment stuck with me more than the rest. A woman in the audience told the group how hard it was to actually talk to her boss, because he was so dismissive whenever she tried. What got me wasn’t the story itself, it’s a familiar one, it was watching how openly she told it to a room full of relative strangers. She could be that honest with people she’d known for an hour, but not with the person she saw and worked with every single day. Her leadership should have been in that room to hear it. That’s the gap, right there, in one sentence.

What I’m Carrying Forward

Ashley presenting with me, the coloring pages, the two topics landing exactly on theme, the woman who could be honest with strangers but not her own boss: all of it is data for what to pitch next. Co-presenting worked, so I’m looking at more of it going forward instead of treating solo as the default. Giving people something to do with their hands worked, so that’s staying in the toolkit. And the leadership gap that showed up in that one story is exactly the kind of thing I want to keep building sessions around, because if a room full of strangers can hold that much honesty, the goal is figuring out how to get some of it back into the rooms where it actually matters.

This was my first presentation of 2026, (and yes, it is late in the year, but I was this doctorate thing!)…and I’m actively looking for more, this year and next. If you know of an open call for speakers, a conference looking for someone to talk leadership, culture, or the kind of stuff that makes a room a little more honest, send it my way. I’d love to hear about it.

Do better. Be better. Go off the beaten path. And maybe bring crayons.

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She didn’t tell anyone right away. She didn’t want to do it over the phone. And keeping positive, why would she? There was still time to find something before the trip. No sense worrying people over what might just be a rough month.

The rough month kept going. The weekend arrived. She still hadn’t told them.

Here’s the part that gets me. The bad part. She sat through two full days with people she’d known her entire life, and not one of them asked how her job was going. Not “how’s work?” Not “anything new?” Nothing. The conversation orbited entirely around their jobs, their kids, their vacations, their problems.

She had a seat at the table and somehow no room in the conversation.

So she said nothing. Not because she was hiding it.
Because nobody left a door open for her to walk through.

This has happened to me a lot in the past, too. Mainly because people in my family (and even some friends) who work traditional jobs don’t understand what I do and don’t want to. They just don’t ask.

Back to the story….two months later, she landed something better than what she’d lost. She posted it on LinkedIn, the way you do. And within a day, a few of those same family members messaged her. “You never told us you were job hunting.” and “We didn’t know anything was wrong.”

Sit with that for a second.

The people who spent an entire weekend (and the following two months) not asking a single question about her life were now offended that they hadn’t been given an update on it.

The family being offended IS NOT a concern.
That’s an ego bruise dressed up as concern.
They weren’t upset she struggled alone.
They were upset to find out from an algorithm rather than from her directly, as if they’d earned that kind of access. They hadn’t. You don’t get to skip the asking and still expect the telling.

This isn’t really a story about a layoff. Swap it out. A divorce. A diagnosis. A miscarriage. A bad month that never got better. The details change, the pattern doesn’t. People will talk for hours about themselves and never once turn the conversation around, and then act wounded when they’re the last to know something big.

Curiosity about other people is not automatic. It’s a habit, and most people never build it. They mistake talking near someone for talking to them.

So here’s the ask, and it costs nothing. The next time you’re with someone you supposedly care about, ask them something that isn’t a setup for your own story. Not “how are you, good?” as a formality on your way to talking about yourself. An actual question.

• How’s work going?

• What’s been hard lately?

• What are you looking forward to?

Then stop talking and let them answer.

If needed, let the silence be for a minute. Then listen!

You don’t need a crisis to justify asking.
You need to ask before there’s a crisis…
…so people know you’re someone worth telling when it is.

Do better. Be better. Go off the beaten path.

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That’s the problem. That’s exactly the problem.

Organizations are remarkably good at responding to a single dramatic failure. A server goes down, everyone mobilizes. A lawsuit lands, legal and comms move in an hour. A scandal breaks, the board convenes by morning. Give leadership one loud, undeniable crisis and watch how fast the machine works.

Give it a thousand quiet cuts instead, and the machine does nothing at all.

Most organizational collapses don’t look like a collapse while it’s happening. It looks like a string of individually reasonable explanations. Each story stands on its own. Nobody stacks them next to each other and looks at what they add up to.

I want to walk through three of the cuts I think do the most damage.

Cut one: policies that exist but are never upheld.

A certain company had a policy or procedure for everything. I knew this because nothing ever got deleted from SharePoint, years of documents, all still sitting there. And I mean NOTHING….nothing was deleted, archived, update, anything. I was crazy, but I digress. The problem was that those policies were never actually shared with new employees, never trained on, never expected to be followed day to day. They existed mainly as a paper trail, something leadership could point to when it was time to fire someone.

The result was two very different companies operating under one name. Some clients got full-service treatment because their employee actually followed the process. Other clients got the bare minimum because their employee never did, and nobody corrected it. A standard that only gets enforced selectively isn’t a standard. It’s a liability with good branding.

Cut two: warnings that get pushed off until they become emergencies.

Volunteers reported a leak in one corner of a storage unit. Leadership kept brushing it off. Not that bad, they said, we’ll get to it. This went on for weeks, then months, each time the concern got a little smaller in the retelling. Then the leak became a flood, and nearly $50,000 in inventory was lost.

It got fixed within days after that. Of course it did. A crisis always gets fixed fast. The tragedy is that the fix for a fifty-thousand-dollar loss and the fix for a small leak were probably the same phone call. The only difference was how loud the problem had to get before someone made it.

Cut three: public metrics that have nothing to do with private reality.

One organization proudly advertised that it had gone hundreds of days without a recordable injury. The safety board looked impressive every time someone walked through the door. Behind the scenes, though, employees admitted they avoided reporting injuries because nobody wanted to be the person who reset the clock.

The metric wasn’t technically false. It simply measured the wrong thing. A metric that’s disconnected from the truth underneath it isn’t reassuring. It’s a countdown nobody’s watching.

None of these three organizations was blindsided. The unenforced policy was sitting in plain view. The leak was reported, more than once. Everyone “knew” the injuries were happening. Nobody was missing information. They were choosing not to treat the information as a problem yet.

That’s the real difference between a crisis and a slow collapse. A crisis forces a decision. A slow collapse only ever asks for one, quietly, over and over, until the day it stops asking and just happens.

The thousand cuts were never hidden. They were tolerated.

🦋🦖🐧🦁👾

𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 (𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦) 𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴.

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Who am I? Can I say that I don’t know?
I feel we all grow, so I am changing in small ways all the time. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Basics: I read a lot, I love to draw and paint, and I love being creative. And somehow, with all of that, I ended up in HR. Which, in a lot of ways, is the least creative job I can think of! (and definitely a bit boring!)

How did I get here?

Twenty-plus years ago, I started collecting a very specific skill set: how to walk into chaos, figure out what is actually going on, and get people moving in the same direction again. Military and veteran serving nonprofits, disaster response with the Red Cross, building HR from scratch at a startup, among other things…and for the last thirteen plus years, running my own consulting practice. Along the way, I have worked with every kind of person you can imagine, brilliant ones, stubborn ones, ones who taught me more than they will ever know, and I have gotten very good at solving the kind of problems most people would rather pretend do not exist.

How do I work?

Find it. Fix it. Move on. That is it. That is the whole philosophy. I am not a coach. Coaches walk beside you while you figure things out over the next six months. I am the person who figures out what is broken, tells you how to fix it, and expects you to actually do it. If you want gentle and gradual, I am not your person. If you want direct, I am exactly the person you want!

A little personal?

A few things about me that have nothing to do with any of that: my dog has her own designated “working couch” next to my desk, where she sleeps every hour that I am working. She is super cute and getting older, so she loves naps and treats. Her picture is in the cover photo below. Additionally, I listen to audiobooks at a pace that some people would call concerning, and my favorite series of all time is the In Death books by J.D. Robb, which I will defend to anyone. I truly would rather listen to a book than watch TV. And I am somehow still in school. I am finishing my doctorate in Organizational Leadership soon, and honestly, learning new things still gets me a little too excited. Apparently, I never grow out of it.

What is next?

I am working on a children’s leadership book series, because it turns out teaching kids to spot bad leadership early is both hilarious and necessary. The first book will be unveiled at the beginning of September or sooner. And I am working on a series of resources that will all be available on Maven by the end of Q3. Lots happening and lots more to go!

So that is me. Find it, fix it, move on, a dog who works harder at napping than most people work at their jobs, and a stubborn belief that most broken things are fixable if someone is finally willing to say the problem out loud.

Glad you are here. Let’s get into it.

Do better. Be better. Go off the beaten path.

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I don’t buy it. I think generosity and self protection are supposed to coexist, and most of us have only ever been taught one half of that equation.

My partner spoke at a conference a few months back. It was unpaid, he did it because he’s a member of the organization and genuinely wanted to share what he knows, and then he went home and didn’t think much more about it. No angle, no ask, no strategy. Just knowledge, offered because he had it and someone wanted it.

Four months later, someone who saw him speak reached out.
They remembered him.
They want him at another conference, and this one pays.
Nothing about the first talk was designed to produce the second one.
That’s the part worth sitting with.
The return showed up precisely because he wasn’t chasing it.

Give without keeping score

There’s a specific kind of generosity that only works if you let go of the outcome entirely. The second you do something “for the exposure” or “because it might lead somewhere,” you’ve already turned it into a transaction, and people can smell a transaction from across the room. The talks…the favors…the introductions that actually build a reputation are the ones where you would have done them even if nothing ever came back.

This is uncomfortable for a lot of driven people, because we like to believe our effort is always in service of a plan. Sometimes it should just be in service of the thing itself. You share the knowledge because you have it and it’s useful. You help the colleague because they needed help. You show up because showing up mattered more than what showing up might earn you. If a return comes, good. If it doesn’t, you still did something worth doing.

But don’t give it all away for free

Here’s the half of this that doesn’t get said enough, especially to women, especially to people early in a career or a business:

generosity without discernment isn’t a virtue, it’s a vulnerability.

There is a very specific type of person and organization that has learned exactly how to spot someone who says yes to everything, and they will keep asking, because you keep delivering, and somewhere along the way “generous” quietly turns into “free labor.”

The unpaid conference talk worked because it was one talk, for an organization my partner actually belongs to and believes in, offered once, not a standing arrangement where he’s expected to show up for free indefinitely because the first time went well. That’s the line. Generosity that’s occasional and chosen builds a reputation. Generosity that’s constant and assumed gets exploited, and the person exploiting it will rarely feel like they’re doing anything wrong, because you never told them there was a line to cross.

A few questions worth asking before you say yes again:

• Is this a one time gift, or is it quietly becoming the expectation?

• Would this person or organization ever offer to pay you, or have they made it clear they never will?

• Are you saying yes because you want to, or because you’re afraid of what happens if you say no?

• Has “just this once” happened more than once with this same person?

If the answers make you uneasy, that unease is information. Use it.

Both things are true

Do the generous thing because it’s the right thing to do, not because you’ve calculated an eventual payoff. And also, protect your time and your knowledge like they’re worth something, because they are, and the people who respect you will never ask you to give them away for free forever. The version of generosity worth practicing isn’t unlimited. It’s chosen, and it’s occasionally, deliberately, said no to.

Give freely. Just don’t give away the whole store.

🦋🦖🐧🦁👾

𝘋𝘰 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘉𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘎𝘰 𝘰𝘧𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩.

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He also built himself a golf course. $13 million of construction, on land he partly owned personally, so the company paid to improve his own backyard. He kept three private jets in rotation, one of which flew his son and friends to an African safari, another to a castle in the south of France. His son Timothy carried a $700,000 golf club membership. The family kept two luxury apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, plus vacation homes in Cancun, Beaver Creek, and Hilton Head. When the office needed new furniture, $12.4 million of it, the order went to a furniture store in a small Pennsylvania town called Eleni Interiors. Which John Rigas owned.

None of this was Rigas’s money.

It was Adelphia’s. The cable company he’d built from a $300 purchase in 1952 into the sixth largest cable provider in the country, and by extension, it was the money of every shareholder who’d bought stock believing they owned a piece of a cable company, not a piece of a family foundation for golf memberships and safaris.

This week in history, on July 24, 2002 to be exact, John Rigas and two of his sons were arrested and led out in handcuffs. The number that finally sank the company: $2.3 billion in debt the family had quietly stacked onto Adelphia’s books without telling anyone, plus another $252 million in company cash used to cover the family’s personal margin calls when their own stock bets went bad. Adelphia filed for bankruptcy. Investors lost more than $60 billion.

Rigas, 77 years old at sentencing, got 15 years.

Here’s the part that should bother you more than the golf course. This wasn’t one bad year. Prosecutors traced the pattern back to at least 1999, with the family treating a publicly traded company like a personal trust fund, and nobody inside stopped it. Why would they stop it? I mean, Rigas and his sons ran the company. Rigas and his sons sat on the board. His son-in-law sat on the board too. The people whose job was to ask “wait, why are we paying for a golf course” were the same people getting free rounds on it.

Lesson one: when a founder stops seeing a line between “the company” and “mine,” it doesn’t stay small. It starts with a furniture order at a store he happens to own. It ends with a hockey team. Self-dealing doesn’t plateau. It just finds the next thing to buy, because nobody made it stop the first time.

Lesson two: a board full of family and friends isn’t a board, it’s an audience. Every governance structure exists to have someone with real authority ask the uncomfortable question before the outside world has to. Adelphia had a board. It just didn’t have anyone on it who was willing, or able, to say no to the man who owned their loyalty and possibly their next paycheck.

Lesson three: the sign this is happening isn’t a scandal, it’s a shrug. Somebody at Adelphia processed that $12.4 million furniture order. Somebody signed off on golf course construction invoices. Somebody in Coudersport, Pennsylvania knew exactly whose name was on the furniture store’s deed. Fraud this size doesn’t survive on one person’s silence. It survives on a whole building deciding it’s not their place to ask.

You’ve watched a smaller version of this play out somewhere, maybe not with a hockey team, but with a leader who started treating a piece of the organization as personal territory and nobody with the standing to stop it did. That’s the pattern worth remembering, not the golf course.

Do better. Be better. Go off the beaten path.

Sources: Details on the Rigas family’s spending and the fraud timeline pulled from the Buffalo News’ reporting on Adelphia’s internal finances, the Rutland Herald’s coverage of court documents detailing the family’s lifestyle, EBSCO’s research summary of the Adelphia scandal, the U.S. Department of Justice’s July 24, 2002 press statement announcing the arrests, and the Second Circuit’s 2007 opinion in United States v. Rigas.

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I used to think that was lazy. Somewhere along the way I picked up the idea that rest has to be earned, that you tough it out until the weekend or the vacation or the mythical someday when things calm down. But here’s what I’ve come to believe after twenty years of watching organizations, leaders, and myself: the little things aren’t cute add ons to the big things. They’re the mechanism. Nobody transforms their life, their business, or their relationships with one heroic move. They do it with small, repeated, unglamorous choices that compound when nobody’s watching.

I think about this in three buckets: what you do for yourself, what you do for your business, and what you do for the people around you. Most people are decent at one. Almost nobody is intentional about all three. So let’s fix that.

The little things for yourself

This is the one people skip first, usually because it feels indulgent, and then wonder why they’re running on fumes by Thursday. Self care doesn’t have to be about a spa day or a week away at the beach. Those things should happen too, but self-care also includes a series of small deposits you make regularly…so you have something left to give. Preferably every day; something little!

I’ve watched brilliant leaders burn out not because the big decisions broke them, but because they never did the small maintenance that would have let them absorb the big decisions in the first place.

A few that actually move the needle:

• Ten minutes of quiet before you open your inbox, not after

• Saying no to one thing this week that you would have said yes to out of guilt

• Actually taking the lunch break instead of eating over your keyboard

• Writing down one thing you’re proud of before you go to bed

None of these are impressive. All of them add up.

The little things for your business

Here’s where I get consultant-brained on you. Companies don’t usually collapse because of one catastrophic decision. They erode. A policy nobody updates. A meeting that stopped having a purpose two years ago but still eats an hour every Tuesday. An onboarding process that quietly tells new hires the culture is chaos before they’ve unpacked their laptop bag.

The lie companies tell themselves is that culture and process get fixed with a big initiative. They don’t. They get fixed, or broken, one small habit at a time.

Small business moves that outperform the big flashy strategy doc:

• Responding to the small internal complaint before it becomes the big external one

• Writing down the process that’s currently living only in someone’s head

• Thanking the person who did the unglamorous work nobody noticed

• Killing one meeting that has outlived its purpose

Boring. Unsexy. Extremely effective.

The little things for others

This is the bucket that gets sentimentalized into meaninglessness, so let me be specific instead of sappy. The little things for other people are rarely grand gestures. They’re noticing. They’re the text that says “thinking of you” for no reason. They’re remembering that someone’s kid had a rough week and asking about it three days later, not just the day it happened. It all keeps circling back to this same findings in my own dissertation work around ethics in the workplace: people don’t stay silent or speak up in organizations because of policy, they do it because of whether they believe someone actually sees them.

That belief gets built in small moments, not annual reviews.

A short list here too:

• Asking a follow up question instead of moving straight to your own story

• Giving credit out loud, in the room, not just in your head

• Checking in on someone after the crisis has passed, not just during it

• Saying the specific thing you appreciate about someone instead of a generic compliment

None of these take more than sixty seconds.
All of them are remembered for years.

The thread

Here’s what ties all three buckets together, and it’s the part people miss. You cannot sustainably do the little things for your business or for others if you’ve abandoned the little things for yourself. The neglect always starts there and radiates outward. Take care of yourself in small ways, and you have the capacity to take care of your business in small ways, and that capacity is exactly what lets you take care of the people around you in small ways too. It’s not three separate disciplines. It’s one discipline, practiced in three directions.

So which bucket have you been neglecting, and what’s the smallest possible thing you could do about it this week?

🦋🦖🐧🦁👾

𝘋𝘰 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘉𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘎𝘰 𝘰𝘧𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘩.

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(And remember: this is just for fun)

The Agenda Aries
Sends the agenda forty minutes early with time blocks down to the minute. Gets visibly upset when item four runs long. You respect the discipline and also slightly fear them.

The Silent Taurus
Says nothing for fifty-eight minutes, then in the last two delivers the single sentence that reframes the entire meeting. You never see it coming. You should start expecting it.

The Gemini Multitasker
Camera on, clearly answering three Slack messages, somehow still knows exactly what was said when called on. A mystery. Possibly a threat.

The Cancer Consensus-Seeker
Cannot let the meeting end until everyone has said they’re “aligned,” even if nobody actually is. Peace at all costs, even the cost of an honest disagreement that needed to happen.

The Leo Monologue
Answers a yes-or-no question with a four-minute story that technically contains a “yes” somewhere near the end. You love them. You also start scheduling thirty extra minutes whenever they’re invited.

The Virgo Nitpicker
Finds the typo in the slide deck. Every time. Every single time. Somehow this is their whole leadership brand and it’s not wrong.

The Libra Fence-Sitter
Presents both sides so evenly you leave with no idea what they actually think. Diplomatic to a fault. You wonder if they’ve ever had an opinion, or just very good manners.

The Scorpio Interrogator
Asks the one question everyone was quietly avoiding. The room goes still. You’re grateful and also a little afraid of them.

The Sagittarius Tangent
Starts strong, then somehow the conversation is about their weekend hike. Gets everyone back on track eventually, mostly through sheer charisma.

The Capricorn Timekeeper
Ends every meeting exactly on time regardless of what’s unresolved. Ruthlessly efficient. The unfinished business becomes someone else’s Tuesday.

The Aquarius Disruptor
Proposes scrapping the whole plan fifteen minutes before the meeting ends. Sometimes brilliant. Sometimes exhausting. Always memorable.

The Pisces Vibes-Reader
Says almost nothing about content, but somehow accurately names the tension nobody else acknowledged. The unofficial emotional thermostat of every team they’re on.

Most leaders are actually two or three of these depending on the week, the coffee, and whether the meeting could have been an email in the first place. The real diagnostic question isn’t which one you are. It’s which one you become when you’re tired, and whether the rest of your team can tell the difference.

Do better. Be better. Go off the beaten path.

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Years ago, I sat across from a business coach and asked a direct question. I needed to know what to do about a specific, real problem.

She asked me,“Well, what do you think you should do?”

I asked again, a different way. Same answer, reflected right back at me. Third time in one session, I finally said, out loud, “I don’t know, that’s why I’m paying you.” She smiled like I’d just proven her point. I hadn’t. I’d just confirmed why I do things differently now.

I’m not a business coach. I’m a consultant. (Or maybe a sports coach?)

That’s the distinction nobody talks about. There’s no such thing as a sports coach who could successfully operate the way a business coach does. A football coach doesn’t respond to “should I run the ball or pass?” with “well, what do you think?” He tells you the play. He corrects your form on the spot. He puts you exactly where you need to be and tells you exactly what to do to get across that goal line, because that’s the job. Directive, specific, immediate.

Somewhere between sports and business, “coach” flipped meaning entirely. A business or personal coach is trained to be non-directive, to ask questions instead of give answers, to guide you toward a solution you supposedly already had inside you. And look, there’s a real, defensible reason for that model. Good non-directive coaching is supposed to build a client’s own capacity to solve the next problem alone, not hand them a fish and walk away. I get the theory.

But I’ll be honest, a lot of it has quietly turned into pseudo-therapy with an invoice attached. And some people just need the d*** fish!!

I know I am mixing sports and fish examples…but fishing is a sport, right?

Back to the point…If you could already figure out your own solution, you wouldn’t be paying someone to ask you the questions that get you there. You’d have already asked yourself. What most leaders actually need isn’t someone reflecting their own thoughts back at them for an hour. It’s someone who walks in, looks at what’s actually broken, and tells them precisely what to fix and a few avenues on the how.

That’s the whole philosophy behind Find it. Fix it. Move on. Find the actual problem, not the symptom everyone’s been talking around. Fix it, directly, with a real plan, not a worksheet of open ended questions. Move on, because organizations don’t have unlimited time to sit in reflection while the problem keeps costing them money, people, or trust.

I’m not going to ask you what you think you should do.
I’m going to find what’s broken, and give you a few avenues to fix it.

If you want a coach, there are plenty of good ones out there.
If you want something different, reach out to me!

More information!

🦋🦖🐧🦁👾

𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 (𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦) 𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴.

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So let’s clear some space by saying what leadership is not.

Leadership is not a personality trait.

You don’t get it from being extroverted, charismatic, or the loudest person in the meeting. Some of the best leaders I’ve worked with are quiet. Some of the worst are magnetic. Personality is packaging. Leadership is what happens after the packaging wears off.

Leadership is not about being liked.

If your primary metric for how you’re doing as a leader is whether people like you, you’ve already lost the plot. Liked is a nice byproduct. It is not the job.

Leadership is not a title HR put on your door.

A title tells people where to send the org chart. It does not make you capable of the hard conversations, the hard calls, or the hard truths that the role actually requires. I’ve seen plenty of titles doing none of the leading.

Leadership is not comfortable with silence when someone needs to be told the truth.

Silence feels safer in the moment. It is not safer for the team, the culture, or the person who needed the feedback six months before they finally got it, usually from someone else, usually too late.

Leadership is not covering for the same person’s mistake a fourth time.

That’s not grace. That’s avoidance wearing grace’s clothes. And it costs everyone else on the team who is watching you do it.

So what is leadership?

Leadership is the willingness to have the conversation everyone else is avoiding.

Someone has to say the thing out loud. That’s the job.

Leadership is doing the unpopular thing and staying in the room afterward.

Anyone can make an unpopular call and then hide behind an email or a delegate. Leadership is standing in the room while people process it.

Leadership is accountability with your name on it, not your team’s.

When it goes wrong, it’s yours. When it goes right, it’s theirs. That math never flips.

Leadership is noticing the dysfunction before it shows up in the exit interview.

By the time it’s in the exit interview, you’ve already lost the person and the information. Leadership means you were paying attention long before that.

Leadership is the discipline to fix the system instead of blaming the person stuck in it.

Most “performance problems” are system problems wearing a name tag. Fix the system. Watch the performance problem disappear.

None of this is glamorous.

None of it fits on a poster.

But it’s the actual job, and it’s the difference between a title and a leader.

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It is not that we have too few leaders. It is that we keep looking for them in the wrong places. We scan the org chart from the top down. We look for the right title, the right office, the right number of direct reports. We dress leadership up in a tuxedo and then act confused when the most formally dressed person in the room turns out to be the least inspiring one there.

Meanwhile, actual leaders are everywhere. We just keep walking past them.

Think about the nurse who has been on the floor for fifteen years. She does not manage anyone. Her name is not on any organizational chart above the department level. But when a new doctor makes a call that doesn’t feel right, she speaks up. When a younger colleague is drowning, she notices and she helps. When the unit is in chaos, people look to her, not because of her title, but because she has earned it a thousand times over through how she shows up every single day. That is a leader.

Think about the warehouse supervisor who came up through the ranks, no degree, no formal training, no conference keynote credits. But he knows every person on his team by name. He knows who is going through something hard at home. He knows who is ready for more responsibility and he advocates for them loudly. His team would walk through walls for him. That is a leader.

Think about the woman who left a completely different industry, brought an entirely different lens, and asked the questions nobody else thought to ask because they had been too close to the work for too long. Her outsider perspective was not a liability. It was the thing that cracked the problem open. That is a leader.

None of them were wearing the tuxedo (uniform). All of them were leading.

Here is what this means for organizations: if your leadership pipeline only pulls from people who already have leadership titles, you are leaving an enormous amount of talent and potential completely untapped. The next great leader in your organization might be someone you have never seriously considered, because you have been looking at the wrong signals.

And here is what it means for individuals: if you are waiting for a title to give you permission to lead, stop waiting. Leadership is not something that gets handed to you with a promotion. It is something you demonstrate, consistently, in the way you treat people, the way you handle hard moments, the way you show up when it would be easier not to.

The tuxedo is optional. The character is not.

🦋🦖🐧🦁👾
𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 (𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦) 𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴.

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But here’s what nobody talks about: last impressions stick just as long, and most people completely blow their exit.

Getting laid off or walking out the door is painful. That part is real, and it deserves acknowledgment. But the way you leave says something about you that people remember long after the offboarding paperwork is filed. And in a world where industries are smaller than they look and reputations travel fast, “how you left” becomes part of your professional story, whether you wrote it intentionally or not.

References get checked. Rehire eligibility gets noted. Industry word of mouth moves faster than you think. And future clients have a way of knowing someone who knows someone who watched you walk out the door.

Your exit is not just a moment. It is data that follows you.

I have watched a lot of exits.
Some were graceful.
Most were not.

There was the woman who had months of warning. Or at least she should have, had she been paying attention to any conversation in the last 6 months she was there. The company had gone public to their investors about budget pressures and upcoming cuts in the new fiscal year. It was not a surprise. But on the day it became official, she swore at her boss on a Zoom call, closed the laptop, and disappeared. She took all her remaining vacation time immediately, skipped the last two weeks entirely, and refused to hand anything off. The people left behind scrambled. The work suffered. Her name became a cautionary tale in that office for years afterward. And even more years because, obviously, I am still writing about her today!

Then there are the employees who choose to leave and give notice. When people choose to leave with notice, it usually means they care about their exit strategy and/or their last impression. In this case, he did not. His complaint was micromanagement, which turned out to mean that his new boss held weekly check-ins and occasionally asked if he needed help. He gave a month’s notice, which sounds generous, right? We thought so, too… until he stopped showing up for meetings with external partners, went AWOL for entire days, and essentially checked out the moment he handed in his letter. He promised a month and delivered almost nothing. The goodwill he might have built on his way out? Gone before his last day.

Each of the people in these examples (and I could give a million more) was hurting, frustrated, or just done. Those feelings were valid. The behavior was not. And neither of them seemed to understand that the way you leave becomes the thing people say about you when your name comes up later.

I have good examples, too. I am going to use one of myself because…why not!

I got fired once, just after Thanksgiving. And yes, it felt like a gut punch. Getting through the end-of-year holidays with that hanging over my head was like wearing a weighted blanket all the time. But here is what I knew even then: my emotions did not get to dictate how I ultimately handled the situation. There was a small severance, and I took that as a signal that a clean handoff was expected and the right thing to do. So I did it. I handed everything over, answered follow-up questions, and made sure the people left behind were not left hanging. It was not heroic. It was just decent.

As Michael Corleone put it in The Godfather: “It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.” I chose to treat it that way.

Then February rolled around. An email landed in my inbox asking for help with something they could not figure out on their own. In my role, I had been the signer on a lot of things, so honestly, when I read it, I almost laughed. I had wondered about a few things that would come up. Wondered if they would figure it out. I almost knew that the email was coming.

And I also knew exactly what to do. I responded, quoted my consulting rate, and sent an invoice. There were a few days of silence, which told me everything. They were looking for another way. But I wasn’t going to budge. I had a set hourly rate for that kind of work, and that is what I charged.
They paid it. I helped. Everyone moved on.

That is the takeaway.
Leave well, even when it hurts.
Hand things off, even when you are angry.

Do better and be better than the situation you are walking away from.
That is hard, I know.

However, the best last impression you can leave is showing (quietly and without fanfare) that you were always the bigger person in the room.

Do better. Be better. Go off the beaten path.

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Frankenstein’s monster didn’t set out to terrorize anyone. He was just poorly constructed and turned loose without adequate preparation. The creature from the black lagoon? Mostly confused and reactive, stumbling around making everything worse. And the invisible man? Technically present, technically in charge, and completely impossible to pin down when you actually needed him.

Sound like any leaders you’ve worked for?

Here is the uncomfortable truth about monster leaders: most of them have no idea they are monsters. That is what makes them genuinely scary. The ones who know they are difficult are at least self-aware enough to potentially change. The ones who are absolutely certain they are great leaders while their teams quietly fall apart around them, those are the ones that keep me busy.

Let’s meet the three types I see most often.

First, the Smotherer.

This is your classic Frankenstein situation. Good intentions, genuinely bad outcomes. The Smotherer micromanages because they care, or so they tell themselves. They jump into every decision, rewrite every deliverable, and hover over every project because they cannot quite bring themselves to trust that anyone else can do it right. What they actually do is kill initiative, exhaust their team, and create a group of people who have learned to wait for permission before doing anything. The Smotherer doesn’t think they’re the problem. They think they’re holding everything together.

Second, the Disappearer.

This one is trickier because they are often well-liked. They are pleasant in meetings, agreeable in conversation, and completely unreachable when a decision needs to be made. The Disappearer avoids conflict, avoids accountability, and avoids anything that requires them to actually lead. Their teams become paralyzed, not from too much oversight but from too little. Nobody knows what the priorities are. Nobody knows if they are doing a good job. Nobody knows what the Disappearer actually wants because the Disappearer won’t say. Invisible man energy, all the way.

Third, and my personal favorite, the Chaos Creator.

This leader is enthusiastic, energetic, and absolutely exhausting. They change direction constantly. They launch initiatives before finishing the last three. They pull people into urgent meetings about things that stopped being urgent two weeks ago. They mean well. They are often genuinely visionary. But without the structure, the follow-through, and the self-awareness to recognize the wreckage they leave behind, vision without discipline is just noise.

Here is where I will push back on the easy narrative: bad leadership is not simply a personality flaw. Plenty of naturally difficult people become excellent leaders when given the right training, the right feedback, and real accountability structures. And plenty of naturally pleasant people become organizational disasters when promoted without preparation and left to figure it out alone.

Organizations create monster leaders. They promote people for the wrong reasons, skip the development work, and then act surprised when things go sideways. The monster didn’t appear out of nowhere. You built it.

The good news is that monsters, unlike actual monsters, can be fixed. But only if someone is honest enough to name the problem, and only if the leader in question is willing to hear it.

So here is the question worth sitting with: if the people on your team were honest with you today, which monster would they say you most resemble?

🦋🦖🐧🦁👾
𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 (𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦) 𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘴.

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And without thinking, without even a half second of consideration, I say it: “No major complaints on my side! How about you?”

It’s true. I don’t have any major complaints. But it doesn’t tell the other person anything. It’s not a lie, but it’s not really an answer either. It’s a placeholder, a sound my mouth makes so the conversation can keep moving.

I’ve been thinking about why that’s my go-to. And I think it comes down to a quiet calculation that runs in the background of almost every casual exchange we have: do they actually want to know? Probably not. So I won’t make them find out.

The barrier nobody built on purpose

We don’t teach this. Nobody sits a kid down and says, “When someone asks how you are, give them a content-free answer that signals you’re fine without actually telling them anything.” But somehow, by adulthood, almost everyone has the same three or four answers loaded and ready to go. Good. Can’t complain. Living the dream. Hanging in there.

These phrases exist because they work, in the narrow sense that they keep things moving. They cost the asker nothing, and they cost you nothing. Nobody has to actually engage.

But here’s what I keep coming back to: if almost every interaction starts with both people offering each other a slightly hollow answer, what does that actually build, over time, between two people?

Are we building relationships, or just maintaining the appearance of them?

This is the part that gets uncomfortable, because I don’t think the answer is “we’re doing it wrong and should stop.” Honestly, walking around telling every cashier, every coworker, every acquaintance at the gym the truth about how you’re doing would be exhausting, for you and for them. The script exists for a reason. It’s social lubrication, and most of the time, that’s fine.

But I think there’s a difference between a relationship that’s built on a foundation of these exchanges and a relationship that’s only made of them. The “no major complaints” answer isn’t a problem in itself. The problem is when it’s the only answer you ever give to a particular person, no matter how long you’ve known them, no matter how many years you’ve worked side by side.

At some point, “no major complaints” stops being a polite shortcut and starts being a wall. And the strange part is, both people can be standing on either side of that wall, both giving the same hollow answer back, both quietly assuming the other one doesn’t really want to know, neither one ever testing whether that’s actually true.

You don’t need the whole truth.
You need a crack in the wall.

I don’t think the alternative to “no major complaints” is total honesty. Nobody needs your full emotional inventory in the hallway. That’s not more honest, it’s just inappropriate timing dressed up as authenticity.

But there’s a wide, mostly unused space between “no major complaints” and “here is everything I’m carrying right now.” Something like, “Honestly, it’s been a long week, but I’m okay.” Or, “Pretty good, actually. I finally finished that thing I’ve been stressing about.” Small. True. Specific. Not a confession, just a tiny window someone could choose to look through, or not.

What strikes me is how rarely we offer that window, even to people we’ve known for years. We save the real answer for the people we’ve decided, in advance, have earned it. But nobody ever actually announces that they’ve been promoted to “real answer” status. The door just stays closed by default until someone decides to open it. And mostly, nobody does.

The questions worth sitting with are…

If the people around you, the ones you see every week, the ones you’d probably call a real relationship, never get more than “no major complaints,” what is that relationship actually built on?

And if you’re waiting for them to go first, what are the odds they’re waiting for the exact same thing from you?

🦋🦖🐧🦁👾

My own journey—crazy, worth it, and nowhere near done.

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