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The Person You Thought You Had to Be
What Could Possibly Be Wrong? Everything Is Perfectly Fine.
I’ve been moving through life at my typically faster than I would prefer pace—work, obligations, commitments all accumulating into a rhythm built up over years. What I wasn’t used to was the thing that quietly fell into step alongside my perfectly comfortable existence.
It wasn’t dramatic. No breakdown, no defining moment. Just a low-grade sense of wrongness that settled in one day and refused to leave. Something was off—not broken, not urgent, just consistently, quietly off.
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When Vision Is Clear, Everything Changes: A Guide for Leaders and the Teams Around Them
When Gallup surveyed more than 30,000 people across 52 countries and asked what they want most from their leaders, the answer wasn’t better pay, more flexibility, or even job security. It was hope—defined specifically as a clear vision of the future and an understanding of their role in it.
Not strategy decks. Not all-hands meetings. Not a carefully worded mission statement hanging in the lobby. Hope. And the research is unambiguous about where hope comes from: leaders who communicate where the team is going, why it matters, and how each person fits into that picture.
Most leaders believe they’re doing this. Most teams would disagree. That distance can be closed—and the way forward is more straightforward than either leaders or teams expect.
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How Workplaces Go Toxic Without Anyone Trying—But Someone Still Has to Fix It
You probably don’t need a definition. If you’ve worked in a toxic environment, you felt it before you could name it—the low-grade dread on Sunday evenings, the careful way you chose your words in meetings—if you spoke at all—the growing suspicion that the rules applied differently depending on who you were. The classic version has recognizable villains: the boss who humiliates, the colleague who undermines, the culture that runs on fear. And yes—the engagement survey that gets conducted annually and referenced never.
So yes—the screaming boss is a problem. The workplace that runs on fear is a problem. The organization that treats certain people as invisible is a problem.
But there’s another version of toxic that doesn’t make it into those categories. It has no villain. No incident report. No single moment anyone can point to. It’s the kind of toxic that employees feel in their bones but struggle to describe at the dinner table, because describing it sounds almost reasonable. “My organization doesn’t have clear role definitions.” “We say we value people, but the culture doesn’t reflect that.” “Nobody knows what the rules actually are until they break one.”
That’s structural toxicity—and it may be the most widespread kind that goes unexamined.
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Leadership Theater vs. Leadership Work
The conference room was perfectly arranged. The computer, projector, and screen were ready and the slide deck was loaded. Water bottles were in place for everyone and the light breakfast buffet had already been raided. The leadership team was ready for their day. The facilitator—an outside consultant—opened with an enthusiastic welcome about the wonderful and productive experience everyone was about to have, then immediately jumped into a mindfulness exercise. By 9:15, the word “alignment” had already been written on a whiteboard in large, confident letters. This was going to be great!
By 3:30 PM—so the facilitator could “…give [them] back some of [their] day”—the team was headed home with a printed version of the slide deck, a set of prioritized strategic initiatives, and a renewed sense of shared purpose. The initiatives had been assigned owners and a follow-up meeting, now without the facilitator who had taken their money and cleared out, was scheduled two weeks out to review progress.
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How to Build an Innovation Habit (Without a Big Budget)
A colleague recently pitched me on what he called an “innovative” way to improve our customer service. He spoke about a report found within one of our online systems—a report that contains useful information but that most of us ignore because obtaining it is far too cumbersome and time consuming. His idea? Have someone print out the report on a regular schedule and hand-deliver copies to each of us.
He was genuinely excited about this. And knowing his background, I understand how he got there. For him, this was innovation—a real improvement over the current state in which dozens of people burn time accessing and generating the document, if they even bother.
But honestly, from where I sit—immersed in technology, automation, and systems thinking—the suggestion looked like a solution from another decade. My first instinct was to dismiss it. Printing reports? Walking them around the building? In 2026?
Then I caught myself.
Who’s right here?
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Why Your Satisfaction Surveys Are Lying to You
When our organization first adopted Net Promoter Score (NPS), it felt like we had finally found a shared language for measuring how we were doing. Every team could use the same question. Every chart could be rolled up into a single number. We could compare our internal teams to each other and to organizations within and outside our vertical. For a group that had been wrestling with fragmented, team-specific metrics, NPS looked like great clarity.
For eight years, the numbers rewarded that choice. Our scores never dropped below 90. In some years they climbed into the high 90s. Detractors were rare. The dashboards were beautiful. Our comparisons to other organizations left us feeling good.
The only problem was that I also had a front‑row seat to our work—and the NPS numbers did not always match the reality I was seeing.
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Attention Fragmentation: Why You Feel Busy and Get Nothing Done
Most work nights feel like the last one. I climb into the car, start a podcast—because I am determined to always be learning—and pull out of the parking lot at work. Within a few minutes, the podcast fades into background noise. My mind has already left the episode and is replaying the last eight to ten hours.
I also see all the things I intended to accomplish and never touched.
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Where Good Ideas Go to Die (And What That Tells You About Where You Work)
You’re good at noticing things. You see the broken process everyone else walks past. You catch the obvious improvement hiding in plain sight. And if you’re honest, you’ve been sitting on at least one idea right now that could make something meaningfully better.
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Stop Pretending That Meeting Was Necessary
This isn’t a crisis. This is Tuesday.
You’re probably sitting in the back of the meeting room or as close to it as you can get. You’re trying to be invisible and you’re thinking through the best way you can try to accomplish something during the meeting without looking too obvious about it.
Most of us are in the same meeting. And what’s special about this meeting? Nothing at all. It’s just another Tuesday.
What comes next will be too many slides containing too much text and too much clip art—perhaps even stupidly animated clip art.
Your task: Endure and simultaneously try to be productive.
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Email as an Organizational Operating System: Why Your Inbox Is an Illusion
Somewhere along the way, email became the operating system for work.
Nobody planned this. No committee convened to decide that a message-delivery tool should also manage tasks, track approvals, archive decisions, coordinate projects, and serve as institutional memory. It happened by accretion—one forwarded thread at a time—until here I am, running my work through a system that was never designed for the job.
Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. And that’s the first step toward something better.
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Avoiding Burnout When You Love Your Work
I became someone I didn’t like.
It happened slowly—so slowly I didn’t notice until I was already there. Struggling to smile. Snapping at people who didn’t deserve it. Complaining about everything. I was unpleasant to be around, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew it. But I couldn’t seem to stop.
The frustration just kept building.
I was working harder than ever, putting in more hours, pushing myself to meet what I believed was required. The work mattered to me. I cared about it deeply. And that caring had become a weapon I was using against myself.
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Stop Recording Your Time. Start Designing It.
Calendars have stopped being tools and started being tyrants.
Digital calendars have been part of my world for decades. I don’t remember exactly when this happened. Likely, it was a long evolution. A meeting request here, a recurring sync with someone there, and eventually the blank spaces on your calendar belongs to everyone except you. The empty hour that might have been your best thinking time gets colonized by someone else’s agenda.
What’s striking about this pattern isn’t that it happens. It’s how rarely anyone questions it. The implicit assumption in most workplaces is that an open calendar slot equals availability—that if you haven’t blocked the time, it’s fair game. And since most of us never block time for thinking, creating, or recovering, the time never gets protected.
The result is a kind of slow-motion surrender. Your calendar becomes a ledger of what happened to you rather than a design of what you intended.
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