Then one of her directors found out, via an innocuous comment from someone else, that a meeting about the restructure had happened without them. They weren’t upset about the change itself, they were upset about being left out of the meeting, despite it being one of a dozen that week that they had no need or particular reason to be at. However from their perspective, the omission felt like something else entirely.

It’s a dilemma most leaders leading change will recognise. Explain the reasoning behind every tiny decision (including who is invited to which meetings), or invite everyone to everything, and you’ll never get anything done. Don’t, and someone eventually feels snubbed, even when there’s no meaning or malice in it.

That’s the catch 22. Say too much and people think you’re over-explaining or over-managing people. Say too little and people fill the blanks themselves, not always in a good way. If it feels like you’re wrong whichever way you go, that’s not a sign you’re doing it badly, it’s the nature of the beast. Let’s explore.

Get used to being wrong either way

Over- and under-explaining can both feel like reasonable choices in the moment. This isn’t about being careless vs. careful. Often it comes down to something much simpler: your own comfort with uncertainty. If you hate not knowing, you’ll probably default to giving others the full picture to try to reassure them. If you’re more relaxed about ambiguity, with a kind of “I don’t need to know, I’m sure it’s fine” attitude, you’ll probably under-explain, because you genuinely wouldn’t need more detail yourself.

Neither instinct is wrong, however, neither is automatically right for the person in front of you. Part of managing this is noticing your own default and being aware that your team won’t all share it – some will want more than you’d naturally offer, some less. What matters is knowing your own preference, so you can catch yourself when you’re defaulting rather than choosing.

It is one of many leadership challenges with no right answer – the appropriate level of transparency depends on context, history, the individual, and the trust already built between you. Then it’s about noticing your impact. If something feels off, do something about it – adjust, experiment, have the conversation – rather than live with the discomfort or just dismiss it and move on.

Subscribe now

You’re always training people what to expect

Whichever way you lean by default, you’re teaching people something about what’s normal, usually without meaning to. This is what I mean when I say “we are always training people how to treat us” – our patterns become familiar, and the people around us adjust their expectations and behaviour to match.

Over-explain consistently, and silence reads as trouble. Under-explain consistently, and people fill the gaps themselves based on their fears and insecurities. Either way, the pattern you default to becomes the norm, and it’s changes from that norm that cause friction later, not the original choice itself. Jo’s director wasn’t reacting to one missed meeting invitation. They were reacting to a gap between what they’d come to expect and what happened this time.

This is usually both unintentional and entirely self-created. Nobody sets out to build this dynamic; it develops the background through repetition, until one day a conversation, or a question, or a meeting invite lands in a way you don’t intend.

Relationship does what explanation can’t

The good news is that the search for “the right amount to explain” is the wrong question; what makes a difference is the underlying relationship. It’s about building enough trust that someone can tolerate not knowing. Enough trust that they’ll ask you directly if they’re genuinely worried, rather than assume the worst. Enough trust that you can sometimes say “not right now” without it landing badly.

Relationship also allows you to have a different conversation when someone’s anxious about something you haven’t explained. Instead of supplying more information, try addressing the how and why of their need to understand; ask what’s making them uneasy, rather than justifying the decision itself. Often that’s the real issue.

It’s one more place where consistency over time is key. Trust isn’t about explaining, it’s built through being consistent between what you say and what you do. The stronger that foundation, the less weight any individual instance of silence or explanation carries.

Notice, then choose

If you’re facing this challenge yourself with a particular team member, here are a few practical suggestions to try:

Notice your own default. Do you tend to over- or under-explain, and which is your instinct under pressure, when you’re busy and operating on autopilot?

When you choose not to explain something, say so explicitly rather than leaving it ambiguous. “I’m not going to unpack this fully right now, and that’s not because anything’s wrong” does more work than silence.

When someone’s anxious about something you haven’t explained, ask what’s driving the worry before you answer the surface question. Sometimes the real issue isn’t the decision itself.

Build the trust account before you need to draw on it. Regular, honest one-to-ones do more for that than any single well-worded explanation in the moment.

And let go of getting this exactly right. There is no correct line between transparency and trust – it’s about noticing when you’ve drifted too far either way and then course-correcting.

Stop looking for the “right” way

Most leaders will get this wrong in both directions at different points, potentially even with the same person. Jo wasn’t wrong to run a working session without her director in the room. She also wasn’t wrong to have built a culture of openness that made the gap feel jarring when it appeared.

The goal is to build enough trust, and enough self-awareness, that getting it wrong occasionally doesn’t do any lasting damage.

Hit reply or leave a comment to tell me: do you tend to over-explain or under-explain, and what has it cost you when it went the other way?

Leave a comment

Restack

This week an interesting one from Simon Sinek on what happens when an established narrative we have about someone (or something) is challenged by new information.

Simon Sinek

The Vermeer Dilemma

I love Vermeer, the 17th century Dutch painter. So much so that when I got a new laptop and had to name the hard drive, I named it “Vermeer”…and used one of his paintings as my desktop wallpaper…

Read more

19 days ago · 379 likes · 35 comments · Simon Sinek

Meme of the week

Continuing a theme from last week…

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Sarah

Ask, then actually listen. I know that. But right now, every second I’m talking to anyone, I’m doing the maths on how I can meet that deadline in my head.”

You’ve been there. You know listening matters. You understand that your attention brings out the best in the people you work with. When things are calm, you’re pretty good at it. But when things get busy, it feels impossible to drown out the nagging voice saying “I don’t have time for this, have you SEEN my inbox?”

There’s no bad intent here, or even hypocrisy. The curiosity is real, it just doesn’t survive under the weight of an impending deadline.

You’re not short of curiosity; you’re short of the space for it, and that matters. As I say in the book:

And that isn’t something you can create just by trying harder. Let’s explore.

Which version of you turned up today?

The thing about behaviour is that it isn’t the average that matters – it’s the extremes. Your team won’t give credit to the ten times you were curious, that you did give them your full attention, if there is an eleventh when they felt brushed off, shut down or ignored.

That inconsistency causes each conversation to require a pre-assessment of your mood to decide if it’s worth them bringing up the challenge they need help with, or the complicated issue they’d like to work through. Any doubt? The answer will be no, because that’s always safer.

It’s worth saying, in passing: in many ways this is harder to work for than a leader who’s simply never very curious. At least then, people know what they’re getting.

It’s why psychological safety isn’t only “can I say the hard thing,” it’s “do I have to do the work to predict whether now is the moment I’m allowed to”.

Sitting with what’s unfinished

Let’s revisit that voice running underneath the conversation, doing the maths on a deadline while someone else is mid-sentence. It doesn’t quieten down because you’ve decided it should.

And, waiting for it to go quiet before you can be present is waiting for something that isn’t coming. In case you haven’t worked it out yet, your inbox will never sit at zero (for any material amount of time). The deadline you clear will be replaced by the next one, possibly before you’ve had time to take a breath. If presence depends on the noise dying down first, you’ll never quite arrive.

So the work isn’t about making the stress disappear. It’s staying in the conversation while it’s still there.

Ask yourself (in those hard moments): what would you have to tolerate, right now, in order to actually be here? Or, more plainly – what’s the discomfort you’d need to sit with, just for the length of this conversation?

Neither question has a tidy answer. This isn’t about resolving the tension between curiosity and urgency; it’s about naming it as the actual work, rather than something to push past in silence or apologise for afterwards.

Sometimes that means choosing a better moment for the conversation, and saying so out loud. Sometimes there isn’t a better moment, and it means one breath, and a conscious choice to come back to the person in front of you. Both are legitimate. Neither is a technique so much as a decision, made again and again, to stay.

Subscribe now

The mindset, not the method

None of this comes with a five-step process, and if anyone else claims it does, you should be very suspicious of it. A list of hacks would undermine the whole point: curiosity survives pressure because of an internal choice, more than an external set of fixes.

Build it in the calmer moments – the conversation with no deadline attached, the update that doesn’t much matter either way – so it’s already a habit long before the high-stakes one turns up.

Notice, too, your own irritation when an answer is slower than you’d like, or takes you somewhere you didn’t expect. That flicker of impatience isn’t a character flaw to hide. It’s diagnostic. It tells you precisely where the edge of your patience currently sits, and that’s worth knowing.

And when you do stay – when you sit through a conversation with your list still shouting at you in the background – notice that the discomfort of it isn’t a sign something has gone wrong. It’s what staying present actually feels like. Comfortable, sadly, was never really an option.

Where does your curiosity run out?

There wasn’t a neat fix to the dilemma this piece opened with, and I’m not going to manufacture one here. The deadline was still real. So was the curiosity. Both of those things stayed true at once, and the work was learning to hold them at the same time.

Hit reply or leave a comment: where does your own curiosity tend to run out – and what are you tolerating, or choosing not to tolerate, in that moment?

Restack

To practise a little curiosity (even if you’re busy right now…) this is a gloriously random set of interesting things.

Aspiring Generalist

Curiosity Weekly

A weekly collection of links to interesting things curated by Colin Wright…

Read more

13 days ago · Colin Wright

Meme of the week

Let’s be honest, we all know one… (The whole post is worth a scroll through 😂).

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Sarah

She said almost nothing.

At one point, her entire intervention was a single word, dropped in with an upward inflexion – barely a question at all, simply a gentle nudge on the other person’s thinking.

I was uncomfortably aware of my own well-practiced instinct: to build a proper question, set the context, make sure it landed clearly. Watching her, I realised my questions might have a very different impact to what I was intending.

This isn’t about the more obvious distinction between being directive vs. being curious. The nuance sits inside curiosity itself – in how much of yourself you put into the asking. Let’s explore.

Not all curious questions are created equal

Picture two versions of the same moment. Someone brings you a problem.

Version one: you offer a full, careful set-up – some context, a caveat or two, a bit of your own thinking laid out before you finally arrive at the actual question.

Version two: a single word, or a short phrase, delivered with the right pause and the right tone, that does the same job with none of your fingerprints on it.

Both are questions. Both come from a genuine desire to help someone think. But they are not the same intervention.

The difference is about how much of you shows up inside the ask. And the more of yourself you put into a question, the more it can function as an interruption – however well-intentioned.

You’re still taking up space

Every extra word, every qualifier, every bit of careful framing fills space that could be theirs to think in. You intend to open things up. They experience being steered – it may be gently and politely, but steered all the same. That’s the gap between intent and impact, showing up in how your curiosity is experienced by the other person.

It’s similar to what Nancy Kline describes in Time to Think:

Attention isn’t only about listening once they’ve started speaking. It’s already there, or possibly already crowded out, in how you frame the question that starts them off.

I’m aware of my own default here: a tendency to be long-winded in the name of clarity. It feels helpful, but watching someone do the opposite, it was very clear that’s not always the case.

Subscribe now

The upside of feeling a bit clumsy

Noticing this isn’t always fun. Honestly, since that MCC session something that had become second nature to me – I mean I’ve build a career on asking good questions – suddenly felt clunky and clumsy. It’s uncomfortable, yet will also feel familiar if you’ve ever tried to develop a new skill.

That discomfort is the sign it’s working, that you’re in the right place to learn and grow. It isn’t a sign you’re doing something wrong.

And the benefit is worth the discomfort. A lighter-touch question creates more space – for someone else’s thinking, their ownership of the answer, their awareness and creativity. This isn’t a skill confined to coaching sessions. Most workplaces would benefit from more of this kind of question, because it’s part of what actually builds capability and confidence in your people.

Putting this into practice

If you’re up for the challenge of developing this skill yourself, here are a few places to start:

• Before you ask anything, ask yourself a second question underneath the first: am I framing this for my own need for clarity, or to support their thinking?

• Notice your habitual question length. If you tend towards fuller, more careful framing (as I do…), try the short version first. You can always add more if it doesn’t land, but you can’t take an over-built question back once it’s out.

• If in doubt, go lighter. A small nudge leaves someone room to steer their own thinking; a fuller, more elaborate question can end up doing the steering for them, even when that’s the last thing you intended.

It’s worth making the point that obviously it is equally important to notice when this doesn’t apply. Sometimes being directive is exactly the right call. And sometimes even a well-framed question is the wrong tool entirely – if someone is genuinely stuck, another question can just make them feel stupid. Knowing when to ask at all is its own skill.

Get your hands off the wheel

In that training, watching someone else do so little, so well, was the moment my own habits stopped feeling helpful and started feeling like choices I hadn’t been making consciously. Uncomfortable, yes. But it’s exactly the kind of pause I now want before I open my mouth, to notice before I start to ramble.

There’s a difference between a small correction on the wheel and taking hold of it outright. Both can look, from the outside, like “just a question.”

This week, notice your own questions – not so much whether you’re being directive or curious (though that may be useful too), but how much of yourself you’re putting into the ones you already think of as open. Was it a nudge, or was it a shove?

Hit reply or leave a comment: what’s the shortest, lightest question you’ve ever asked that did the most work?

Restack

Useful, practical and honest. Because no one wants to sound like a d*ck but many of us could benefit from being more direct…

Workbaby

How to be direct without sounding like a d*ck

Not learning to be direct will hold you back in your career…

Read more

2 months ago · 704 likes · 33 comments · Soph Hirst

Meme of the week

Totally unrelated. Also accurate. And one of an ongoing series of cheese-related memes shared with one particular friend 🧀

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Sarah

The words were spoken warmly, no sense of a telling-off. Someone in the meeting had disagreed with a decision. They managed to get as far as saying “I’m not sure that’s the right call, because…” before their manager jumped in and offered the reminder instead. Their point of view was never heard and the meeting moved on.

If you asked that manager, they’d probably say that’s psychological safety in practice: ensuring things don’t get heated, that people feel comfortable and conversations stay constructive. Yet in reality it’s the opposite. Trying to make it feel comfortable was the very thing that made it unsafe to finish the sentence.

This is the tragedy of psychological safety: it is a genuinely useful concept that’s become so overused and under-understood (is that a word? It is now) that its real substance and value has got lost along the way.

So today I want to revisit what it actually means, and look at the different ways it gets misused. Because building real psychological safety is simple to describe and genuinely demanding to do. Let’s explore.

So what actually is psychological safety?

Let’s look at Amy Edmondson’s definition:

It’s worth examining each part of that definition, because the whole thing tends to get subsumed into a single, vague idea of “a nice culture.”

They feel comfortable means the vast majority of the team shared this belief, not that they’ve been told it is true. A leader announcing psychological safety creates about as much of it as a leader announcing trust creates trust – none. Belief has to be developed through repeated evidence, not asserted once from the front of the room.

Comfortable sharing concerns, admitting mistakes, asking questions means every kind of contribution is genuinely welcome – including the one that’s a challenge, an objection, or a flagged risk. Not just the positive update. Not just the idea that supports where the leader already wants to go.

Without fear of embarrassment or retribution relates to two different moments. There’s the immediate consequence – do you get shut down, potentially humiliated – and there’s the longer-term one: do you get passed over for the promotion, or side-lined from conversations. This might not even be deliberate; it can come from a subconscious labelling of someone as “difficult” or “not a team player”.

Many teams might appear psychologically safe in the moment but undermine it all with longer-term actions.

Is “safe” really effective?

Psychological safety isn’t a fluffy nice-to-have dressed up in important-sounding language. It was the standout finding from Google’s Project Aristotle, a multi-year study into what actually separates high-performing teams from the rest. Psychological safety came out as the strongest single predictor of performance, ahead of who was on the team, how experienced they were, or how the team was structured or led.

And crucially, it has to be built and felt and understood. Writing it into a values statement doesn’t create it. Saying it in a meeting doesn’t create it. It exists in how people actually behave towards each other.

Subscribe now

Psychological safety doesn’t mean having “safe” conversations

It’s worth taking a look at the misconceptions around the concept. Here are a few things it is emphatically not:

It is not an absence of challenge or accountability.

It is not permission to avoid difficult conversations.

It is not a culture where everything goes and nothing is really expected of anyone.

It is not protection from the consequences of poor performance.

Real psychological safety sits alongside accountability. A team can hold each other to a high standard and still be entirely safe; in fact, the two tend to work best together, because holding people to a standard without psychological safety just produces people who hide their mistakes instead of fixing them.

How it’s been weaponised

The misuses of the concept links directly back to the misconceptions above.

• It’s used to protect comfort rather than to enable courage – prioritising a pleasant meeting over an honest one;

• It’s used to justify avoiding difficult conversations altogether – “I don’t want to damage the psychological safety” becomes a reason never to address the underperformance that’s affecting everyone;

• It’s used to resist accountability, both by leaders who don’t want to hold others to it and by people who don’t want to be held to it themselves;

• It’s used to justify speaking inappropriately – hiding behind the guise of being direct or offering challenge, rather than the reality of being unkind or worse, actively bullying; and

• It can sometimes be used to enforce a specific, approved way of expressing disagreement – which is its own kind of unsafe, just with better branding.

The nuance that matters here is significant. There’s a difference between someone feeling unsafe because they genuinely need support to have a hard conversation, and someone using their discomfort to avoid having the conversation at all. Telling the two apart for yourself and others, in real time, is a large part of what building psychological safety requires of you.

Which is why it’s simple to describe and genuinely hard to build.

Psychological safety is built in the small stuff

Not in a workshop, not on the website, and certainly not in a values statement laminated on the wall in reception. It’s built (or destroyed…) in the small moments: the first mistake someone admits to, the first piece of pushback you get in a meeting, the first honest question that makes you slightly uncomfortable. How you respond to each of those sets the pattern for everything else.

Amy Edmondson’s research, in The Fearless Organization, breaks the leader’s role in building psychological safety into three parts.

1. Setting the stage
   Yes, this includes naming what’s expected – a reminder of why people are in the room and that their honest view is wanted, not just tolerated. However it goes beyond this to modelling the behaviour: saying “I don’t know the answer here, tell me if I’m wrong” creates psychological safety rather than simply announcing it.

2. Inviting participation
   Asking real questions, listening properly rather than waiting for your turn, and making space for the people who aren’t confident to compete for airtime. It also means leaving room for the uncomfortable silence where courage gathers before someone says the harder thing.

3. Responding productively
   Not stigmatising failure and genuinely appreciating someone speaking up, while still sanctioning real violations – psychological safety isn’t permission to say anything, to anyone, at any time.

What’s your tolerance for discomfort?

Let’s be clear: genuine psychological safety won’t always feel safe. A live disagreement, a direct challenge, or an uncomfortable question in front of the group are usually signs it is working, not signs it’s failing.

That’s a hard instinct to build, because high-performance cultures tend to train leaders towards the opposite. You’ve been rewarded for having the answer, for moving things along, for looking decisive. Real safety asks you to tolerate not knowing, being challenged, staying in the discomfort a little longer than feels natural.

If you’re up for the challenge, here are a few practical places to start:

• Notice your response in the first sixty seconds after someone brings you bad news, a mistake, or a challenge. That reaction is the real measure of what your team has learned to expect from you.

• Build in the pause before you respond, deliberately, especially in the moments your instinct is to move things along quickly. (Yes, I know I go on a lot about slowing down, but it matters and it works!)

• Separate “I disagree” from “This feels uncomfortable” out loud when it matters, rather than letting both shut a conversation down in the same way.

• Go looking for small places to practise – a minor mistake, a mild challenge – rather than waiting for a large one to prove you mean what you say.

A measure that matters

Go back to that meeting. The leader who said “Let’s keep this constructive” never noticed what the sentence actually did – not because they didn’t care, but because the words felt right, and the room stayed calm, and calm is easy to mistake for safe.

Think about the last time someone brought you bad news, a mistake, or a genuine challenge. What did you actually do in the moments that followed?

Hit reply or leave a comment to tell me: what’s the smallest moment you can remember – yours or someone else’s – where a leader’s response in those first few moments either built safety or shut it down?

Leave a comment

Restack

Unrelated to this week’s topic, but as someone who (a) loves good questions and (b) doesn’t always enjoy small talk, I thought these were great!

DAYLIGHT by Elizabeth Day

133 Non-Boring Questions To Start A Conversation

Last week, I posted a clip on Instagram of the comedian Mae Martin confessing on my podcast, How To Fail, that they hated small talk. The idea of it was enough to prevent them from going to parties and triggering a social anxiety spiral. So Martin came up with an elegant solution: they devised a list of handy quick-fire questions designed to elicit revealing, funny and interesting answers. In this way, they always had a prompt for conversation…

Read more

a year ago · 1584 likes · 5 comments · Elizabeth Day

Meme of the week

Accurate 😂

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Sarah

These days, in many meetings (not coaching, at least not for me) AI note-takers have solved the practical problem – you don’t need to write everything down any more. But they haven’t solved the real one. Because the issue was never really about the notes; it was about what I was paying attention to.

Presence isn’t only about what you’re physically doing. You might be busy with something – notes, your phone, your inbox – or you might be doing nothing at all, and simply thinking about something else entirely. Either way, presence is about where your attention actually is.

I’ve touched on presence a number of times before – in how we listen, how we build relationships, how we think before we speak – but it’s important enough that it deserves its own space. So this week, let’s dig a bit deeper.

When you’re not all there

Presence isn’t a switch that’s either on or off. Its absence is more usually partial: you’re doing or thinking something that either looks like attention from the outside, or feels like attention to you, when in fact it isn’t.

These are the small, familiar ways our attention often slips without us really noticing – you might think of them as presence leaks:

• Rehearsing what you’re going to say next, rather than actually hearing what’s being said now

• Noticing someone looks tired and drifting into “I wonder if they’re okay” instead of listening to what they’re actually saying

• Clocking whose camera is off and spinning up a small story about why

• The email that pings, and the “I’ll just have a quick look” that follows it

• Mentally drafting the agenda for your next meeting while you’re still in this one

We tend to be less prone to these in one-to-one meetings. However, in a group – especially online – I’d bet most of us have done most of them at some point.

Let’s be clear: it’s rarely done in bad faith. Sometimes we do it because our mind wanders, unbidden. Sometimes we do it because we’ve quietly decided this conversation only needs half our brain. Either way, it’s less about malice and more about efficiency, or simply the mind doing what minds do.

Nobody complains. Everybody notices.

In all honesty, I’m not sure there’s a polite way to say “I don’t think you were actually listening to me.” So people mostly don’t say it. But they do notice, and, they remember.

Your attention, or the lack of it, radiates whether you mean it to or not. You’ve probably experienced this phenomenon – emotional contagion – yourself: the boss whose mood you could read the second they walked in, the colleague whose energy shifted the room before they’d said a word. Emotional contagion means we pick up and mirror the state of the people around us, especially those with authority over us.

At a senior level, this becomes a signalling problem. If you’re only half there in a conversation, the message you send – albeit unintentionally – is that this person, right now, isn’t the priority. Say “your development matters to me” while visibly checking your phone in the same conversation, and you’ve created one of the most common, and most damaging, incongruences a leader can fall into: your words and your actions telling two different stories.

No single missed moment sinks a relationship. But it accumulates, moment by moment, until one day it’s the reason someone leaves.

The reverse is just as real. When people experience someone actually paying attention, trust builds faster. They say more, not less, because they sense it’s safe to. And their thinking improves too – when someone feels they’re genuinely being heard, they think more clearly, not just speak more freely.

But be careful: none of this works if you fake it.

Subscribe now

The upside of actually being there

This isn’t about performing engagement – the nodding, the eye contact as technique. If there’s a mismatch between how present you look and how present you actually are, people trust the gut feel over the performance, every time.

However, presence is trainable. It’s something you can practise, not a trait you either have or don’t. If you’ve picked up some bad habits, more intention – and sometimes some support from your environment – can shift it.

The bonus is that the payoff is disproportionate to the effort. A short burst of genuine attention tends to be worth more to someone than a long stretch of half-attention ever will be.

How to actually arrive

None of this requires a personality transplant – just a bit of structure, and a habit of noticing. Try these in your next meeting:

• Name your leak.
  Which of the patterns above is most often yours? You can’t interrupt something you haven’t first noticed.

• Set up your environment before you need to.
  If you know you’re prone to distraction, close the email tab, put the phone in a drawer, shut the notebook, before the conversation starts.

• Reset in the moment.
  If you notice yourself drifting mid-meeting, that’s not a failure – it’s an opportunity. Quietly bring yourself back.

• Treat video calls as needing more intention, not less.
  Fewer cues means it’s easier to hide distraction from others, and easier to fool yourself that you’re still tracking the conversation.

• Keep buffer time in your calendar.
  A back-to-back day makes arriving anywhere close to impossible – that’s a structural problem worth solving, even briefly.

• If you must capture something, say so.
  “I’m going to jot a couple of things down so I don’t lose them” turns a covert half-listen into something transparent, and keeps you honest about what you’re doing with your attention.

Where did you go?

What looked like diligence, in my early note-taking days, was actually the opposite of it. I thought I was capturing the conversation; I was actually leaving it.

Take a moment to reflect: what’s your version of the notebook? What’s the thing that looks productive, or feels efficient, but is costing you your presence?

Before your next meeting, take two minutes. Actively choose to pay attention, and set yourself up so that you can. Phone away. Notebook closed. One deep breath. Ask yourself: what does this person need from me today? Then go in.

Hit reply or leave a comment to let me know: what’s the thing your attention drifts to most in meetings? The phone, the next agenda item, your own notes? Or something else entirely?

Leave a comment

Restack

Consistently a good read, this week I enjoyed this from Bruce Daisley on how a bad apple really can ruin a team.

Make Work Better

Can one bad apple ruin your team?

I knew Adele was ruining everyone’s buzz. For years I thought it, but it wasn’t until this week that it clicked that she had been. I should clarify, I’m not talking about singer Adele. Far from being the Grammy winning superstar, Adele was a sales person who worked with me about a decade ago. Superficially Adele was a dream colleague. Generous with laug…

Read more

3 months ago · 70 likes · 2 comments · Bruce Daisley

Meme of the week

This made me laugh (and perfectly sums up my childish humour…😂).

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Sarah

The truth turned out to be more specific, and more interesting. Chris wasn’t failing to listen, he was failing to tolerate silence. The moment a pause opened up after he asked a question, even a pause of two or three seconds, he filled it. Sometimes he repeated the question. Sometimes he rephrased it slightly, as though the first version had been unclear. Sometimes he simply answered it himself. In his mind, any gap meant one of two things: the other person hadn’t understood, or the other person had nothing to say. Neither was usually true; they just needed a moment to think.

It’s a more common pattern than most leaders would like to admit, and it’s costing you exactly the thing you’re trying to create when you ask a question in the first place. Let’s explore.

Answering your own question

Watch yourself in your next few conversations and you’ll likely catch it: the reflex to refill any gap almost the instant it appears. A rephrase here, a repeat there, a second point stacked on top of the first before anyone’s had a chance to respond to it. Most leaders believe they leave a reasonable amount of space after asking something. In practice, three seconds can feel like thirty, and very few of us make it past five before we’ve said something else.

This isn’t usually about ego or a desire to dominate the room, though it can look that way from the outside. More often it’s discomfort, dressed up as helpfulness. Chris wasn’t trying to control the conversation. He was trying to rescue it from a silence he found unbearable.

You’re training the wrong thing

Every time you fill a silence, you interrupt someone’s thinking mid-formation. Whatever second thought was on its way, whatever more considered version of the first answer was starting to take shape, never gets the chance to arrive. Do it often enough and you’re not just missing one better answer; you’re teaching people that there’s no point pausing to think at all, because there won’t be any space to share it.

Over time, this trains fast, safe, superficial answers. It trains people to give you the version that costs the least effort and carries the least risk, not the version that took a moment’s genuine thought or the version that felt slightly difficult to say out loud. You end up with compliance, not clarity, and you may never notice, because the answers you get sound perfectly reasonable. They’re just not the honest - or useful - ones.

Nancy Kline, whose work on thinking environments underpins much of this, described it beautifully:

Fill the silence, and you’ve already answered the question of how much attention you’re actually paying.

Subscribe now

The upside of shutting up

The reality is that silence isn’t a gap to be managed. It’s where the more considered answer lives, if you leave room for it to arrive.

In Do Sweat the Small Stuff, I wrote about the value of making your silences golden, of treating the pause after a question as thinking time rather than dead air. Kline goes further still, describing real attention as ‘… the act of listening with palpable respect and fascination…’. That’s a high bar, and worth sitting with: not tolerance of silence, not patience with it, but genuine interest.

That silence can also provide information, and even feedback to you. If someone stays stuck even after you’ve given them genuine space, that’s useful to notice; it may be less about their thinking and more about how you asked the question. You only find that out if you leave the silence long enough to see what happens in it.

How to hold it

Holding silence well isn’t passive. It’s an active, whole-body signal that there’s room here to think, and it takes more than simply not talking.

Start with a long, slow breath rather than counting through the pause; counting keeps you in your head, whereas breathing keeps you present and visibly calm.

Keep your face relaxed and open (if you possibly can). A tense expression often gets read either that you’re about to jump in or that you’re frustrated, neither of which is helpful.

Stay connected, whatever that looks like for you. For some people that’s steady eye contact; for others it’s simply making sure your attention is unmistakably on the conversation rather than drifting elsewhere. There’s no single right way to do this, only a clear signal that you’re still there and still listening.

If the silence goes on and genuinely nothing is coming, be intentional about what you say next rather than defaulting to filling the gap fast and overcoming the awkwardness.

• If you jump in by accident, own it lightly: ‘Sorry, go on,’ or ‘I think you were about to say something.’

• If they look like they’re thinking but stuck, try a gentle nudge: ‘Want to share any of that out loud?’

• If they look blank, take responsibility rather than assuming: ‘Would it help if I asked that a different way?’

• If there’s a long pause and still nothing, offer: ‘Did that make sense, or is there anything I can clarify?’

The common thread across all four is gentle helpfulness paired with a willingness to take ownership. If someone is genuinely confused or struggling, it may well be about the question rather than their capability, but that’s only ever discoverable if you leave the silence in the first place, rather than filling it, panicking, or answering for them.

Sit with the discomfort

We tend to get uncomfortable with silence long before the other person does. That gap between our own low tolerance and their actual need for thinking time is exactly where the useful part of the conversation happens, if we let it.

Chris’s shift didn’t come from a script. It came from noticing, every time he felt the urge to fill a pause, that the urge was his and not evidence of anything about the other person. Once he started leaving the space instead of rescuing it, the answers he got changed, and so did what people were willing to bring to him.

In your next one-to-one, after the other person finishes speaking, take one long, slow breath before you say anything. Notice what fills that space, from them, not from you.

Hit reply or leave a comment to tell me: what’s the longest you’ve ever let a silence run in a conversation you were leading, and what happened in it?

Restack

This week, a short but interesting read from a friend and colleague, Cath Bishop, on uncovering the unwritten rules of the game.

Cath Bishop

Uncovering Assumptions...

Another useful perspective to understand existing cultures at work, school or in sports or other environments, is to uncover the assumptions that govern how ‘stuff gets done’. Often these remain unspoken and unwritten. But if we want to do things differently and better in the future, we need to recognise these, bring them out onto the surface and then d…

Read more

2 months ago · 2 likes · Cath Bishop

Meme of the week

Very much enjoying this account (@tudortongue) at the moment, and these seem particularly apt given the ongoing hot weather here in the UK…

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Sarah

My client hadn’t noticed. Yet once it was named, they started to notice it everywhere: the moment someone else drew breath, they were already speaking. Not because what had just been said didn’t matter, but because they had barely been listening to it. They’d been waiting for their turn, half-formed reply loaded and ready, from roughly the second the other person opened their mouth.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone, and you’re certainly not unusual. It’s what happens when autopilot is running the conversation instead of you. Let’s explore.

Autopilot isn’t the enemy

Autopilot is not, on the whole, a problem. It’s what lets you drive a familiar route, chair a routine meeting, or answer a predictable question without expending much thought at all. Most of the time, it’s efficient and incredibly useful.

The trouble starts when it runs conversations that need more than pattern-matching. Finishing someone’s sentence because you’re confident you know where it’s going. Cutting in because you’ve spotted the point and want to save everyone the time it would take to get there. Treating the sensation of recognising something as though it were the same thing as understanding it.

Back-to-back meetings make it worse. When there’s no gap between one conversation and the next, there’s no room to actually think between them either – you arrive at each one still half in the last, running on whatever momentum autopilot built up. One thing after another, with nothing in between.

Autopilot isn’t the enemy here. Unmanaged autopilot is.

Fast feels good

Senior leaders are often busy to the point of absurdity – over-scheduled well beyond what’s sensible (there’s a separate debate to be had about whether you need to be in half those meetings at all). In that context, pace looks like a virtue, and a quick answer feels like proof you’re o top of things. There’s also an identity cost to pausing that’s rarely said out loud: if you don’t have an instant response, what does that say about you as the person meant to have the answers?

There’s a more basic cost too: pausing slows things down. Meetings that leave room for a beat before the next person speaks simply take a little longer, and there’s often more discussion, not less. When you’re already stretched, that can feel like time you don’t have.

But fast comes with a cost: you don’t hear what people are saying. You don’t let yourself be influenced by the expertise and ideas sitting around the table, because you’ve already decided before they’ve finished. Over time, people stop bothering to say the real thing. Sometimes a hasty reply has to be walked back. More subtly, relationships erode: people stop feeling seen, heard, understood. Eventually the question in the room isn’t spoken, but it’s there – do you actually respect me and my view, or am I just an tool here to do a job?

There’s only a pause if you make one

Autopilot doesn’t switch itself off. Left alone, it runs by default – which means getting out of it has to be a deliberate act, not something you hope will happen when you’re less busy.

There’s a quote often attributed to Viktor Frankl which is particularly relevant here:

That space doesn’t exist unless you make it. And what it gives you access to is considerable: presence, deeper relationships, sharper questions, more considered thinking. Every one of those things depends on you actually being in the room listening rather than running on autopilot through it. None of them are available to you until you get out of autopilot first.

One breath is all it takes

The practice is deceptively small: one breath, before you speak.

It sounds almost too simple to bother writing down. But that’s exactly the point – if it were complicated, you’d have an excuse not to do it. There isn’t one. The only thing standing between you and the pause is remembering to take it.

That one breath does more work than it looks like it should. It’s just enough of a gap to let the sentence you were about to say sit there for a second rather than firing straight out. Long enough to notice whether you’re actually responding to what was said, or simply delivering what you’d already prepared. Short enough that nobody else in the room will register it as anything other than you, momentarily, listening.

There are three places worth practicing the pause, because they’re exactly where autopilot tends to have the strongest grip.

The first is when someone challenges your view. This is where the instinct to defend kicks in fastest, and where the pause matters most – because a defensive answer, however quick and however right you might be, tends to close the conversation down rather than open it up.

The second is in a fast-moving thread or group chat, where the pressure to reply immediately can feel enormous, and where a hasty response is hardest to take back once it’s sent. A breath before you type buys you the half-second you need to ask whether what you’re about to send is actually what you mean.

The third is in a meeting you’re leading, in the moment before you speak first. Leaders often fill silence reflexively, partly from habit and partly because silence in a room you’re responsible for can feel like a problem to solve. Try holding the pause instead. What fills it is usually someone else’s thinking, and that’s literally the point.

Pick one of the three. Not all of them at once – that’s a good way to make the whole thing feel like a project rather than a practice. Just one, this week, and see what you notice.

The one that didn’t arrive

A small, related confession: some of you may have noticed there was no Substack last week. I’d had every intention of getting it done before I went away, and the autopilot option, at 11pm the night before a holiday, was to push something out to keep the run going. I took a breath instead, decided the world would survive a week’s gap, and came back to it properly this week.

That’s the same space at work, just in a different setting – the one that gives you access to more thought and more intention and quite frankly better decisions than the automatic option would have.

So here’s the question worth sitting with: where, this week, are you going to commit to taking that breath before you respond?

Hit reply or leave a comment to tell me – where’s the one place you’re going to try it?

Restack

An interesting read on a topic I spend a lot of time talking to my clients about: running effective 1:1s.

Get Good With People (For Managers)

The Coaching Loop: How Great Managers Leverage One-to-Ones

Read more

8 months ago · 196 likes · 20 comments · Nicky Lawrence

Meme of the week

Accurate 😂

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Sarah

It took twenty minutes. It would have taken the project lead longer – he was juggling three other things, and there was a reasonable chance his first attempt wouldn’t have been exactly what the CEO wanted anyway. So he just did it.

Here’s the thing: that CEO wasn’t trying to be unkind, and he certainly wasn’t trying to undermine his project lead. If anything, the opposite – he didn’t want to pile more onto someone he knew was already stretched.

But here’s what actually happened. The project lead found out the dashboard existed when it was sent round, already built. He felt side-lined on a piece of work that had been his to own, and not quite trusted to get it right. So he went away and built his own version on his own time, largely to prove he could. The thing that was meant to save fifteen minutes ended up costing considerably more than that, in hours and in trust.

This is solution bias in action: the pull to jump straight to here’s what you need to do – or, more often, to I’ll just do it myself – without pausing long enough to ask whether that’s what was needed or what was helpful. Let’s explore.

The filter you didn’t know was on

We don’t usually make a conscious decision to take over; it happens subconsciously in how we listen. When someone starts to explain a problem, often we aren’t really hearing the whole of what they’re saying – we’re scanning for the bit where we can step in. We start listening for ‘How can I fix this?’ rather than listening for ‘How can I help them figure out a solution for themselves?’ Two entirely different filters, and most of us have no awareness over which one is switched on.

Once you’re listening for the fix, everything that follows is shaped by it. You stop tracking their reasoning and start building yours. You interrupt with “have you tried…” before they’ve reached their own point. The problem in front of you becomes something to solve rather than something to understand – and the person who brought it to you becomes, in that moment, slightly beside the point.

Subscribe now

The dopamine hit of done

It’s worth being honest about why this filter is so hard to switch off, because it isn’t laziness or arrogance. It’s that fixing things yourself is, in almost every practical sense, the more rewarding option.

It’s faster – you already know what you want, so there’s no need to explain it, no risk that someone else’s first attempt falls short of what you had in mind. There’s also a slightly addictive satisfaction in finishing something. A solved problem is a closed loop, and closed loops feel good in a way that “I coached someone through their own thinking” rarely does, even when the second one may be the better use of your time.

And for a lot of senior leaders, fixing things is precisely what got you here. Earlier in your career, being the person who could sort the problem fast was the thing that got noticed, rewarded, promoted. That instinct doesn’t simply retire once you’re managing a large team with a strategic remit. It just finds alternative, less visible places to keep operating.

The fix isn’t free

The costs are real, even when the fix itself looks free.

There’s the time cost: you, doing work that wasn’t yours to do, at a level below where your time is most valuable. There’s the development cost: every problem you solve on someone’s behalf is a problem they didn’t get to practise solving, and capability doesn’t build itself in their absence.

Then there’s the relational cost, which is often the most expensive and the hardest to see. People who’ve had a problem taken off their hands without being asked don’t typically feel grateful – they feel overridden. It reads as a vote of no confidence, however well-intentioned. Do it often enough, and people stop bringing you problems early, or stop trying to solve anything themselves at all, because why would they? You’ll just do it anyway. That’s not a high-performing team; it’s a queue of people waiting to be told what to do.

And underneath all of it, there’s what you miss: their context, their reasoning, the option they’d already ruled out for a good reason you never heard. You may have got the dashboard, but you didn’t get any of that.

Take your hands off the wheel

If we can recognise that this is an unhelpful habit, the next question is how can we break it.

The single biggest shift is also the simplest to state and the hardest to do: slow down. Notice the pull towards fixing before you act on it – that half-second where you feel the urge to jump in is exactly where the choice still exists.

From there, ask more and assume less. Before you offer the solution, ask what’s actually being asked of you. Is this person handing you a problem to fix? Asking you to help them think it through? Or simply letting you know what they’re planning to do? Those are three entirely different requests, and most of us answer all of them the same way by default.

If your honest answer is that they don’t need you to fix it, hand it back – but stay present while you do. Ask how they’re planning to approach it. Offer to talk it through if they want that. Validate their thinking if it’s sound. The goal isn’t to lob the problem over the fence and walk off; it’s to make it clear you’re available, while making the choice and the ownership theirs.

Sometimes, just fix the damn thing

None of this means you should never step in. There are situations – genuine crises, compliance issues, moments where someone simply doesn’t yet have the skill or experience to handle what’s in front of them – where being directive is exactly the right call, and coaching them through it would be unhelpful and even unkind.

The problem isn’t fixing things. It’s fixing things by default, regardless of whether the situation calls for it. The skill is telling the difference, and that starts with the same pause: noticing what’s actually needed before you decide how to respond.

Capability or dependency. Your choice.

The dashboard got built either way. What changed was whether the project lead came out of it more capable and confident, or more cautious – and that outcome had very little to do with the dashboard and everything to do with the fifteen minutes either side of it.

Every time you fix something that wasn’t yours to fix, you’re making a choice, even if it doesn’t feel like one. You’re building either capability or dependency in the person standing in front of you. Only one of those is sustainable in the long run.

Hit reply or leave a comment – think about the last problem someone brought to you. Did you ask what they needed, or did you just decide?

Leave a comment

Restack

This is an interesting overview of the cognitive neuroscience of learning, with implications for how we effectively grow capability within our teams, Well worth a read.

The Learning Chronicles

How do we learn? A simple cognitive science-based approach

There is a particular kind of disappointment that most teachers know well…

Read more

2 months ago · 9 likes · Doug O’Brien

Meme of the week

To everyone sweltering through the current heatwave, this one is for you…🥵😂

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Sarah

Ruined 👀

Yes, dear reader, that is the word he used. Not because of a massive hangover, but because of a domino effect that derailed his highly (obsessively?) optimised life: slightly worse quality sleep, slightly lower performance at work, slightly less healthy eating and so on. Ruined I tell you.

I’m not going to add to the online pile-on that followed; others have made the case for the downsides of excessive health optimisation far better than I ever could.

But I do want to examine optimisation in our professional lives, because this sits uncomfortably close to home for me. As someone who espouses the value of sweating the small stuff (as does a certain Mr Bartlett I might add…), one might imagine I was also an obsessive optimiser.

To some extent I suppose I am. However, I also fervently believe in the importance of knowing when to stop, the inevitability of screwing up, and the value of being willing to make a mess sometimes as part of learning. Let’s explore.

Surely optimising is a good thing?

What does optimisation actually mean? Let’s look at the definition:

“An act, process, or methodology of making something (such as a design, system, or decision) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible.” Merriam Webster

Looking for ways to improve and pursuing them has real, tangible value. Process improvements – such as those developed by Toyota and their Kaizen philosophy of continuous improvements, or the aggregation of marginal gains propounded by Dave Brailsford when leading Team GB cycling (even bringing their own mattresses and pillows when they travelled for a better night’s sleep) – make a genuine difference to performance, and can reduce costs and increase profit.

They are also signals that drive a wider culture, changing behaviours and raising expectations. An attention to detail and a determination to try to be at our best can be a motivating and exciting place to work, with people encouraging each other and driving forward to breakthrough results.

So optimising certainly isn’t all bad. But it also isn’t all good.

When motivation becomes obsession

When optimising goes too far, at best it can become a waste of time, and at worst, it can be toxic.

I recall an occasion travelling with a colleague. We had nipped into Sainsburys to grab a bottle of wine to enjoy on a train ride home at the end of a long, successful day. There were two nigh on identical bottles of red wine, both priced at £10. My colleague (who may recognise themselves in this….sorry!) insisted on spending a good five minutes googling online reviews to understand which was the nicer bottle, something that led to us having to do a very brisk walk to the station, and could easily have caused us to miss our train. The conclusion, by the way, was that there was no material difference…

My gut had told me to just pick one, which turned out to be a perfectly reasonable answer. As it turned out, the unnecessary optimisation was a mild irritation. Had we missed the train that would have been a more frustrating, and more costly, impact.

Going too far with optimising can have much more significant costs as well – not least around culture.

A damning independent review of GB cycling in 2017 described a “culture of fear” and a lack of proper monitoring from UK sport, where the drive for medals – which also determined funding for each Olympic cycle – meant that action to address cultural and behavioural issues, known about since 2012, was not prioritised.

It leaves the impression of an organisation that optimised obsessively for results but declined to consider athlete welfare and experience within that, leaving staff and athletes feeling demoralized, intimidated, and afraid to speak out against oppressive leadership (via the BBC). No matter how many medals they won, that cannot be described as a healthy or a sustainable culture.

Subscribe now

The micro-interaction connection

Much of what I write about – and what Do Sweat the Small Stuff is built on – is, at its heart, a form of optimising. Paying attention to the small moments: how you open a conversation, the tone you use when someone brings you a problem, how long you pause before you respond. These micro-interactions are tiny adjustments, and the cumulative effect of getting them right matters enormously.

So I’m not arguing against optimising. Far from it.

The difference is in the goal. The book’s central premise is not about being perfect – it’s about making progress. “Practice makes perfect” is a fundamentally flawed notion, because it assumes perfection exists. It doesn’t. Not only because we can never get there, but because there is no single way of being and acting that constitutes perfect leadership. There are more effective approaches and less effective ones; there is no finish line.

The freedom that comes from letting go of perfection as the goal is real. It creates space to try things, to make a mess sometimes, to learn from what didn’t work and try again. That is not a consolation prize for falling short of something better; it is the thing.

Knowing when enough is enough

So if perfection isn’t the benchmark, what is? How do you decide when to keep improving something and when to call it done?

Three questions are worth asking yourself.

Does it actually matter?
Not everything deserves the same level of attention. The wine in Sainsbury’s didn’t warrant five minutes of research; the wording in a difficult message to a senior stakeholder probably does. Part of leading well is developing a reliable sense of what genuinely moves the needle and what doesn’t – and being honest with yourself when you’re over-investing in something that won’t make a material difference to anyone.

Do you have the headspace for it right now?
There is a real cost to attempting careful, deliberate improvement when your cognitive bandwidth is already stretched. Optimising well requires conscious attention and intention. If you’re running on empty, trying to finesse five things simultaneously will mean you do none of them particularly well. Better to identify the one thing that matters most in this moment, give it proper attention, and consciously note the rest for later – not as failure, but as a considered choice.

What is the cost of continuing?
Every act of further optimisation has a price: time, energy, focus, sometimes relationships. The question is whether what you might gain is worth what you are spending to get there. Often, it isn’t. The train you nearly miss, the three days “ruined” by a glass of wine, the team that delivers brilliant results but dreads coming to work – these are the costs of optimisation gone too far.

This doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It means applying them intelligently; directing your attention where it creates the most value, and releasing it where it doesn’t.

Good enough is good enough

Good enough is not a euphemism for mediocre. Used well, it is a deliberate, considered judgement that what you have is fit for purpose – and that spending more time, energy or anxiety on it would cost more than it would gain.

The leaders I work with who do this well are not less ambitious than the ones who over-optimise. They are simply better at choosing their battles. They know which things deserve their full, careful attention, and they protect that attention fiercely. They also know when to pick the bottle on the left and walk briskly to the train.

It’s worth asking yourself: where in your work right now are you optimising beyond the point of useful return? What is that costing you – and what might you do with that energy instead?

Hit reply or leave a comment to share one area where you’re going to call “good enough” this week – and what you’re going to do with the time and headspace you get back.

Leave a comment

Restack

A more philosophical exploration of the cost of optimising…

Human, being

your "best self" is such a drag

“Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so…

Read more

3 months ago · 162 likes · 31 comments · Erin Nystrom

Meme of the week

😂

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Sarah

Their manager, relatively new in post and still finding their feet, starts to feel the friction. And somewhere in that friction, subconsciously, without any formal decision ever being made, a label forms: difficult.

After that, everything that team member does starts to confirm it. The challenge in the meeting becomes grandstanding. The silence in the next one becomes sulking. The moment they actually agree with something becomes suspicious – strategic, probably. Yet while every rough edge gets noticed, the substance beneath it doesn’t. Rather than address the timing or the delivery (the real issue), the manager routes around this person and simply shuts them down.

They think they’re reading the situation clearly. They’re not. They’re building a case for a verdict they reached without a fair trial.

This is confirmation bias in action – one of the cognitive biases we’re looking at this month that shape how you lead in ways you might not be aware of. Let’s explore.

The case you didn’t know you were building

So what actually is confirmation bias? The term was coined by the British psychologist Peter Wason, whose experiments in the 1960s demonstrated that people tend to seek out confirming evidence alone when testing a hypothesis – and fail to look for anything that might prove them wrong. Wason described it as:

Cognitive biases often get talked about as character flaws or failures of intelligence. They’re neither. They are a reflection of how our brain works in a System 1 thinking mode: fast, automatic, pattern-matching, and designed to be efficient. Your subconscious is trying to protect you from information overload. So it takes shortcuts; it looks for familiar patterns; it confirms what you already think you know and filters out anything that would slow it down and force it into the much harder work of System 2 thinking. Biases are not a sign that something has gone wrong. They are a sign that your brain is doing its job – just not always the job you need or want it to do.

The problem in leadership is the cost. And when the bias in question is confirmation bias, that cost tends to be invisible: because the whole point is that you don’t notice what you’re not letting yourself hear.

Subscribe now

They just keep proving you right

As I explored in Do Sweat the Small Stuff, we all listen through a filter. What you listen for shapes what you notice, what you remember and what you file under ‘unimportant’ or ‘irrelevant.’ Confirmation bias is what happens when that filter gets set to a conclusion rather than a question.

It doesn’t just affect how you interpret information. It affects what you allow yourself to hear in the first place. Here are three examples of how it tends to show up, and they are more common than most leaders would be comfortable admitting.

“I don’t think she’s ready for this.” From the moment that conclusion forms, you notice every stumble and miss every recovery. Hesitation in a presentation is evidence; a strong decision the following week is luck, or someone else’s steer.

“He’s not a team player.” Once this label is in place, every action gets interpreted through it. He declines an invitation to a cross-functional meeting – there it is. He attends the next one – networking, probably.

“This project is struggling.” Setbacks confirm it; progress gets treated as fragile. The team senses your low confidence and starts to respond to it, which then confirms your view. You didn’t observe the outcome – you helped create it.

Your brain thinks roughly four times faster than the people around you are speaking. That spare capacity, if it’s left unmanaged, tends to get used to fill in the blanks with what you already think you know.

No right of appeal on your verdict

The cost of confirmation bias isn’t just a missed insight here and there, it compounds.

Once a bias locks in, it becomes self-reinforcing. You stop listening properly to the person you’ve labelled; they sense it and either disengage or escalate; so their behaviour shifts in response to yours and that shift confirms your original view. You didn’t observe that outcome – you created it, through a series of micro-interactions so small and so automatic that you may not have noticed any of them.

There is a psychological safety dimension here too. When people sense they’ve been written off, they adapt: they withdraw and stop contributing, or they get louder and more persistent in an attempt to be heard. Either way, the team loses something – and the environment gets harder for everyone else in it.

It’s also worth noting that confirmation bias amplifies every other bias we carry (which might be around how someone looks, how they present, what they believe etc.). Once someone fits a preconceived pattern the filter kicks in and disconfirming evidence has an even harder time getting through. If you’re in a leadership role, that has real consequences for who gets developed, who gets heard and who gets promoted.

One more thing you may not have noticed: this is rarely a private judgement. It leaks, through where you direct your attention in meetings, whose contributions you build on, who you stop asking questions of. Your leadership shadow is long, and the people around you read it more clearly than you think.

The uncomfortable truth

Here is what makes confirmation bias particularly stubborn: the moment it is most entrenched is usually the moment you feel most certain you’re being objective. That certainty is the tell.

Updating a long-held view about a person – particularly when you’ve acted on it, spoken it aloud, or organised your management approach around it – asks something that doesn’t come easily: the willingness to be wrong in a way that’s visible. When a belief has become part of how we see ourselves, revising it can feel less like learning and more like losing ground. That feeling tends to make us less open to new information, not more.

But consider what’s actually at stake for the manager in the opening story. They haven’t lost anything by reconsidering; what they’ve done is conflate two quite different things. The timing and delivery of that team member’s challenges are behaviours – specific, observable, and entirely addressable in a feedback conversation. Difficult is a character label, and character labels don’t lead to conversations; they close them down. Separating behaviour from character opens something up, keeping them fused keeps it shut.

Loosening the grip

Unfortunately confirmation bias doesn’t dissolve simply because you’ve been made aware of it! It dissipates through deliberate, repeated effort to do something different. Here are a few places you might start:

One. Name what you’ve already decided
Think of a person, a project or a strategy you hold a firm view about. Write it down. Then ask: what evidence am I not looking at? What am I consistently filing as exception or anomaly?

Two. Actively look for disconfirming evidence
And do this before anything else on this list. Not in order to be excessively generous, but to be balanced, which is more likely to be accurate. Ask yourself what a fair witness to this person or situation would actually observe.

Three. Ask the question most of us avoid
What would change my mind? If the honest answer is nothing, that’s the problem – not the evidence.

Four. Separate behaviour from character
Behaviours are specific and can be addressed directly; character labels are fixed and tend to end conversations before they’ve started. When you feel a label forming, look underneath it: what’s the actual behaviour you’re responding to?

Five. Slow down
System 1 thinking thrives on speed; the antidote is the deliberate pause before reaching for a conclusion you’ve already reached before. That pause is where System 2 thinking can do something useful.

So what have you already decided?

The manager in the opening story is not a bad leader. They’re a very human one – and the bias formed without any conscious intention, as it always does.

The question isn’t whether you have confirmation bias. You do; we all do. The question is whether you’re willing to notice it before the verdict becomes permanent – and before the people around you quietly stop bothering to offer evidence to the contrary.

Next week, we turn to a closely related trap: solution bias – that reflexive pull towards fixing the thing in front of you, sometimes before you’ve properly understood what it actually is.

For now: think of someone, or something, you’ve already made up your mind about. What are you not letting yourself hear?

Hit reply or leave a comment: who have you already decided about – and what would it take to look again?

Leave a comment

Restack

A sobering and thought-provoking read this week from Rutger Bregman. Well worth a few minutes of your time.

Rutger Bregman

An Inconvenient Truth About AI

Hey everyone! I don’t say this often, but I think this is the most important thing I’ve published in quite some time. Watch it as a video essay or read it below. I think we're sleepwalking through the most important shift of our lifetimes, and the people who should be sounding the alarm are looking the other way. If you agree, please share it widely…

Read more

3 months ago · 748 likes · 174 comments · Rutger Bregman

Meme of the week

Just a little reminder…

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Sarah

Why? From his perspective, his team aren’t stepping up. They keep making the same mistakes, never seeming to see the risks he sees. And no matter how many times he flags gaps in their thinking, they just look deflated and go quiet. He has started to wonder whether he has the wrong people.

I asked him a simple question:

“When a team member gives you an update – how do you respond?”

Mark paused. Then: “I look at what’s wrong.”

That habit is costing him. Let’s explore.

What you’re wired to notice

Negativity bias is one of the most robust findings in behavioural psychology. Our brains are wired, quite literally from an evolutionary standpoint, to prioritise threat over opportunity. Negative signals demand more of our attention, stick in memory longer, and shape our judgment more powerfully than equivalent positive ones. In survival terms, this makes sense. Spotting the danger matters far more than savouring the view.

In leadership, it creates a very specific problem with how you listen.

We all listen through a filter: an often unconscious bias that determines what we actually hear. If your filter is tuned to problems, gaps and risks, that is what you will pick up on. Not because that’s all there is, but because your brain is wired to find it. Everything else gets subconsciously downplayed or ignored.

The result is that what you focus on and what you filter out diverge dramatically – yet you remain largely unaware of the gap.

How it plays out in the room

Imagine this scenario:

Your team member gives you an update. Ninety per cent of it is progress: things are on track, relationships are solid, momentum is building. Ten per cent is a problem or a risk.

You hone in on the ten per cent and barely acknowledge the rest.

When you respond you jump to: What about the deadline? Have you stress-tested that assumption? What’s the contingency?

You probably think you’re being helpful. You’re identifying blindspots, that’s what good leaders do, right?

But here’s what your team hears: Nothing is ever good enough.

And it’s at this point that something even more insidious kicks in. Because you are also, almost certainly, a problem-solver; you got to where you are partly because of your ability to see what’s wrong and fix it. There’s a satisfaction in fixing things as well, a sense of usefulness, of value. When someone brings you a challenge, your instinct is not just to notice it, but to step in and sort it.

The pattern becomes self-reinforcing: you only acknowledge the gap, so your team leads with gaps. You jump in to fix things, so they stop trying to resolve issues before they reach you. You are frustrated that they’re not stepping up. They are frustrated that nothing they do seems to land, and that they aren’t empowered or challenged to find solutions themselves.

You are both continuously reinforcing each other’s behaviours – while simultaneously frustrating each other deeply.

What you lose access to

The consequences extend well beyond frustrating meetings.

When leaders can only hear problems, their teams learn – quickly and rationally – to report accordingly. Early wins get buried. Momentum goes unmentioned. Good news feels risky to share, because it will just prompt a “yes, but.” The information that reaches you becomes a curated version of reality, filtered for your preference.

This matters. The things you stop hearing are often exactly the things you need to know: what’s working and should be scaled, where energy is building, what your team feels confident about. What’s worse is you also tend to lose the early signals of what’s not working because people have stopped trusting that they can bring it to you without a full post-mortem following.

Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety showed it is the strongest predictor of high-performing teams. That safety is frequently built or eroded through micro-interactions – how you respond, what you acknowledge, what you make people feel when they speak. A listening filter primed for problems dismantles that safety. If there are things you cannot or will not hear from your team, they will start to distance themselves from you. They will stop sharing the things that are probably exactly what you need to hear.

Mark wasn’t dealing with the wrong team. He was dealing with a team that had learned, very efficiently, to reflect back what he showed them he valued.

Subscribe now

Learning to listen past it

The good news – and there is good news – is that the filter is not fixed.

The first step is simply to notice it. Not in the abstract, but in the room. What did you respond to in that last update? What did you acknowledge, and what did you immediately start questioning? Where did your energy go?

Rather than trying to eliminate your filter (which never really works), get familiar with it, and learn to listen outside it. That means building a deliberate counterweight. Many problem-focused leaders give many pieces of negative feedback for every piece of positive reinforcement. Rebalancing that doesn’t mean being uncritical; it means acknowledging the ninety per cent before you move to the ten.

And crucially, shifting it means sitting on the problem-solving impulse long enough to ask: does my team actually need me to fix this? More often than not, they don’t. They need to feel heard, trusted, and capable of figuring it out. When you jump in, however well-intentioned, you communicate the opposite.

Small moves, different signal

If you’ve recognised yourself in any of this, here are a few things worth attempting.

Audit your responses. In your next three team updates, note what you responded to first. The progress or the gap? The confidence or the risk? You don’t need to change anything yet. Just notice.

Acknowledge before you question. Before you move to “what about…?”, name what’s working. Make it specific. Not “good job” – that’s noise. Something like: “The progress on the integration piece is significant. That’s not easy given the timeline.” Then ask your question.

Ask what’s working. Not just in performance conversations. Build it into your regular check-ins. “What’s worked well this week?” is not a soft question. It surfaces information you are currently missing.

Resist the fix. When someone brings you a problem, pause before you solve it. Ask what they’ve tried, what they’re thinking, what they need from you. Sometimes the answer is advice. Often it isn’t. Let them tell you.

The difference a question makes

Mark did something simple at the start of his next team meeting. Before anyone had said a word, he told them: “I’ve realised I spend most of my time responding to what isn’t working. I want to change that. So before we get into issues today, tell me what’s gone well.”

The room went quiet for a second. Then, slowly, people started to talk. And they didn’t stop.

The information had always been there. He just hadn’t shown he wanted, and was willing, to hear it.

Your negativity bias isn’t a character flaw. It is an entirely human, deeply ingrained cognitive habit. But left unchecked, it shapes not just what you hear, but what people choose to tell you. And at a certain level of seniority, the gap between what’s happening and what reaches you is one of the most consequential risks you carry.

This month, I’m going to be looking at some of our most common cognitive biases and the particular havoc they wreak in leadership. Next week: confirmation bias – and why the more senior you are, the less likely anyone is to challenge what you already believe.

Hit reply or leave a comment: in your next team update, what percentage of your response went to what’s working versus what isn’t? And what does that tell you?

Leave a comment

Restack

An interesting one on the mindsets we may benefit from cultivating to survive (or dare I say thrive in) the decade ahead, given the world is changing far faster than our brains can evolve…

Meme of the week

A philosophical question about your problems this week… And perhaps a prompt to help you realise things aren’t as bad as they seem!

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Most leaders will say no, or, not really. Or they’ll say, only occasionally, and only harmless stuff. And then half an hour later, they’ll say something about a colleague that they’d probably never say to their face.

Gossip isn’t a character flaw reserved for the indiscreet or the unkind. It’s human. Deeply, inconveniently human. We have been talking about each other since we first gathered in groups, and no amount of professional development is going to change that entirely.

So this isn’t an invitation to feel guilty. It’s an invitation to look honestly at what gossip actually is, what it does – to the people around you, and to you – and where, as a leader, you need to draw a line that perhaps you haven’t drawn clearly before.

Let’s explore.

What actually is gossip?

Let’s start with a definition: gossip is evaluative conversation about absent third parties. (Adapted from the Oxford Handbook of Gossip and Reputation).

That’s it. Not necessarily malicious, not necessarily false, just expressing opinions about people who aren’t in the room.

The word “evaluative” matters. We’re not just describing someone, we’re assessing them. Forming a view, and often, sharing that view with others who will form their own.

Now, not all conversation about absent colleagues is gossip; the key distinction is whether it’s sanctioned, or to put it a different way, whether there is consent. A leader discussing a team member’s performance with their line manager? Legitimate, necessary, even. The same leader sharing their frustrations about that team member with someone who has no reason to be part of that conversation? That’s different. That’s gossip.

So why do we do it? Our motivations can be many and varied: venting after a difficult week; seeking confirmation that our read of someone is right; building closeness with a colleague by sharing something in confidence; recruiting allies; or simply habit. Half the time we barely notice we’re doing it.

Not all of those motivations are bad, and many are entirely normal. The issue isn’t the impulse, it’s the context, the frequency, and the consequences.

Do you know where the line is?

Not all gossip lands in the same place. Sharing a genuine compliment about a colleague with someone else is low risk. A mild, occasional vent between peers? Mostly harmless.

But there’s a simple test worth applying: would you say this to their face if that person walked in right now?

If the answer is no? Stop.

The line becomes much clearer when you factor in the power dynamic. Gossip between peers is one thing, but gossip that flows downward – from a senior leader about someone in their team, or two layers below them – is something else entirely. The mismatch in power and authority makes it land harder and often causes it to spread further.

It also crosses a line when it becomes habitual, when it’s personal rather than situational, or when it’s being used as a substitute for a conversation that should be happening directly.

Subscribe now

These things always get back

Let’s start with the person being spoken about: they almost always find out. Not always immediately, or in full, but that can cause more harm when the version that reaches them is even worse than the one that left you.

Then there’s what it does to you.

In Do Sweat the Small Stuff, there’s a chapter called “You are always being watched.” The principle is simple and uncomfortable: people are constantly taking cues from your behaviour, particularly when you hold authority. When you gossip, they’re not just learning about the person you’re discussing, they’re learning and making an assessment about you. They’re learning whether you can be trusted with information, and whether what you say to people’s faces matches what you say behind their backs. Whether, if they shared something in confidence, it would stay there.

There’s something else worth highlighting: gossip is often a symptom of over-familiarity.

Leaders who feel a strong need to be liked sometimes use gossip as social currency, as that shared confidence creates closeness. But if closeness depends on speaking about others in ways you shouldn’t, it’s already a problem. Because at some point, you will need to hold those same people accountable, or give the hard feedback, or take action on something serious. And you can’t do that cleanly if you’ve already blurred the boundary.

You’ve just given everyone permission

The other problem with gossip is that it doesn’t stay with you.

When leaders gossip, they set a norm. They signal that it’s acceptable to talk about people who aren’t in the room, or that back-channel conversation is fair game. So everyone around and below them adjusts accordingly.

What follows is a culture of suspicion, politics, and people managing what they show you rather than being honest with you. None of that is good for performance, nor does it make the hard conversations easier. And it can be very hard to undo once it takes hold.

There’s a deeper incongruence too. If you tell your team you value direct, honest feedback – but model gossip – you are sending two completely different messages. People will always believe the behaviour over the words.

It’s also worth being aware that gossip is often a complaint in disguise. The leader who regularly vents about a team member’s behaviour to others – but never addresses it directly with them – is using gossip as a pressure valve while avoiding the actual conversation that needs to be had. If you recognise that pattern in yourself, the question is: what are you going to do about it?

It’s not about being saintly, it’s about being aware

You will probably never eliminate gossip. That’s not realistic, and it’s not the goal.

But there are three things worth holding in mind.

First, the reach. As a leader, the position you hold amplifies everything so your words carry further than you think. Something said casually over coffee doesn’t stay casual.

Second, the multiplier effect. Every time you gossip, you make it more normal for the people around you to do the same. You are always setting the tone.

Third, the friendship line. Work friendships are genuinely good, the evidence is very clear on that. But if you manage someone, there is a limit to how close you can get. Not because you can’t care about them – you absolutely should – but because at some point you may need to be direct with them in ways that closeness makes harder. Gossip is often a sign that line has already been crossed.

Ready to stop? Here’s how

Three things you can do to cut down.

Catch yourself.
Notice when you’re in a gossip conversation, or about to start one. Awareness is the whole game here. Most of it happens on autopilot.

Apply the test.
Would you say this if they walked in right now? If not, stop. You don’t need to make a speech about it. Just don’t continue.

Don’t engage.
When someone gossips to you, you have options. You can listen, and then offer them a choice: take action, or let it go. You can reflect it back: have you spoken to them directly? Or you can simply say, I’m not comfortable in this conversation – and mean it. You don’t need to moralize. You don’t need to make it awkward, just don’t participate. That, in itself, sets a standard.

In the book, I was fairly clear of my view on gossip: ditch it altogether, and don’t tolerate it.

While I stand by that as an ambition, I’m also more aware now of the nuance. Gossip is part of how we build closeness, navigate relationships, and make sense of each other.

It’s not going away, however, you can be intentional about when you do it, with whom, about whom, and whether it’s doing harm. Those questions are worth asking – regularly, and honestly.

Because the thing about gossip is it almost always feels low-stakes in the moment.

It almost never is.

Hit reply or leave a comment – have you ever caught yourself gossiping about someone you manage? What did you do with it?

Leave a comment

Restack

This week, an interesting and much more detailed breakdown on the different types of gossip and the motives that sit behind them.

Maybe Baby

#247: The Gossip Matrix

I’ve long been a conditional defender of gossip—don’t be cruel, petty, dishonest; otherwise have fun. I’ve written that gossip can help us figure out who we are and what we think, establish social mores, define group membership, sow intimacy. I’ve written (and said) many times that, above all, it’s more about us than about our subjects. This is the goss…

Read more

9 months ago · 294 likes · 29 comments · Haley Nahman

Thought of the week

A practical one this week from @‌femmenova.club: some great ways to shut down gossip politely, clearly and directly. Worth clicking the link above to read all ten.

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Nobody ever said anything.

It wasn’t that there was nothing to ask. There were concerns about the approach or the timeline, areas of genuine confusion, questions that frankly needed asking before the meeting ended and everyone dispersed. But something about the way he asked had already communicated a message – the meeting was over. Asking felt unwelcome and unwanted.

He had no idea: he thought he was inviting input. His words said “my door is open”, yet his tone had already closed it.

When your words and your tone don’t align, your team doesn’t agonise over which to believe. They trust the tone, and that has a cost. Let’s explore.

The message under the message

When we speak, many of us think about the words we choose (at least to some degree…), particularly in conversations we perceive as important. We consider how to frame something, what to include, how to be clear. However, we pay far less attention to our tone – and that’s where the message can get lost.

Tone tends to run on autopilot, a direct reflection of whatever is happening inside us in that moment. This is the System 1 dimension of communication: automatic, instinctive, largely beyond our conscious control. The problem is you can bring all the considered, deliberate System 2 thinking you like to what you say, but if your tone is running on a different track, two messages go out simultaneously. And the one that lands may not be the one you intended.

The consequence is a specific kind of failure: despite applying thought and intention to what you say you can still lose the message entirely, because your tone has sent a different one.

There are examples everywhere once you start looking:

“That’s interesting” delivered flatly.
“What do you think?” asked by someone who has clearly already decided.
“Good work” acknowledged with the energy of someone saying what they know they’re supposed to say, rather than actually meaning it.

The words are technically fine, but the tone tells a different story.

Why do they never say anything?

When tone contradicts invitation, people learn not to take the invitation seriously; they stop testing it, and eventually they stop trying altogether. This happens gradually rather than all at once, and it’s rarely a conscious decision. It’s simply what happens when the signal and the message are in conflict for long enough

The consequences run deep. Psychological safety – the foundation of any team that challenges, questions and brings problems to the surface – depends less on what leaders say they want than on the signals they actually give. Tone is one of those primary signals, telling people moment to moment whether the space is genuinely open or just nominally so, and people respond to how they feel, not what they’ve been told.

One of the most common frustrations leaders bring to me is a version of the same question:

Why don’t people speak up?
Why, when I specifically invite challenge or input, does the room go quiet?

The answer, more often than is comfortable, lies with the person asking the question, and the unintended signal they’re giving off. Yet it is far easier to blame the other person. To say: “they should be more proactive” or “I gave them the chance to ask but they didn’t take it”.

One particular challenge with tone is that it often stems from context you have but the people around you don’t. You know you’re speaking quickly because you’re running late to your next meeting; you know (or at least have peripheral awareness) that the tension in your voice is the residue of an infuriating email you read five minutes ago, nothing to do with the person now in front of you. That context makes the tone feel explicable, even neutral, from the inside. But the people on the receiving end don’t have that context – all they have is what they hear, and what they hear shapes what they do next.

Subscribe now

When intention matches impact

Managing your tone to ensure it matches your message starts with a few specific things.

Pause before you speak.
A genuine pause – before asking for input, before closing a meeting, before inviting a challenge – resets your internal state and signals to the room that you mean it. The pause itself communicates that there is space here, before a word has been said.

Look at the words, too.
“Any questions?” is technically an invitation, but it doesn’t presuppose there are any. “What questions do you have?” does – a small linguistic shift that carries a meaningfully different signal, an expectation of engagement rather than a polite opportunity to exit.

Greater intention in your choice of words or the framing of your question not only helps clarify the message, but also helps remind you to notice your tone as you speak. It’s much harder to ask “What questions do you have?” in an abrupt tone!

Notice your state before you open your mouth.
If you’re already mentally in the next meeting, your tone will be there too; the frustration from a difficult conversation earlier has a way of bleeding into the one you’re in now. Noticing that, even briefly, gives you the chance to filter it before it lands somewhere it doesn’t belong.

Ask for specific feedback.
Not “how do I come across?” but something more targeted: when there’s a gap between what I say and how I say it, what do you notice? Give someone you trust the permission to be honest, then take it seriously when they are.

Returning to the client example I started with: he made exactly two changes, and both mattered. The first was what he said. Asking: “What questions do you have for me?” may have been a small rewrite, but it shifted the entire frame from invitation to expectation.

The second was harder, and as it turned out, more important. Before asking, he paused. He took a breath, consciously slowed his pace, made proper eye contact, and rather than already being halfway out of the room (or off the call) he stayed present for a moment longer. For the first time, what he said and how he said it were sending the same message.

The questions came. Not all at once, and not immediately – trust doesn’t rebuild in a week. But they came. And with them came the things he actually needed to know.

Two seconds that changes everything

All of this comes down to a window of about two seconds, the moment just before you open your mouth. That’s where the real message is set: not in the words you’ve prepared, but in your pace, your breath, your presence.

Your team isn’t just listening to the words you say, they’re reading all of you.

This week, pick one phrase you use habitually – ending a meeting, asking for input, giving feedback – and ask yourself honestly whether your tone is backing it up. The shift is smaller than you think. It starts with a pause.

Hit reply or leave a comment: what’s your version of “any questions?” – the phrase you say that you suspect your team might not be taking at face value?

Leave a comment

One additional note: I’ve written before about the pressure tone comes under and how to recover when it misfires – you can find that piece here.

Restack

A short, thought-provoking read on why our focus can end up on what feels controllable rather than what really matters.

Wild Leadership

Tight and Loose

A friend of mine makes cold brew with mineral water. He is loose about a lot of things. Coffee is not one of them…

Read more

4 months ago · 3 likes · 1 comment · Magnus Wood

Thought of the week

Are you having fun? (This reminder is just as much for me as for any of you!)

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Her team meetings ran at pace. There was always a lot to cover and somewhere to be next, so she’d talk for forty minutes straight, rarely pausing. The team nodded and took notes. Nobody asked questions.

Then a major client recommendation went sideways. The assumption had been that the team understood the approach, agreed with it, and had spotted the risks. They hadn’t, and reversing it was costly.

In the debrief, someone finally said what everyone had been thinking: “We stop listening. We’re still processing point two when you’re on point five. By the time you ask for questions, it feels too late to go back.”

My reflection to her: fast isn’t the same as efficient.

Let’s explore.

Leading at 100mph

Senior leaders are busy – that’s not an excuse, it’s just a reality. Back-to-back meetings, competing priorities, information to cascade, decisions to make. When time is short and there’s a lot to cover, pace feels like the logical response, the efficient one.

Add stress or nerves and it accelerates further. When the brain is under pressure, it defaults to autopilot: System 1 thinking, habitual patterns. And for many leaders, the habitual pattern is fast.

There’s an identity dimension to this too. In high-performance cultures, moving fast signals competence. Slowing down can feel like a luxury you haven’t earned, or simply haven’t got time for.

In Do Sweat the Small Stuff I include a short self-assessment on our patterns of speech, which includes pace as one of its core dimensions – fast versus slow – precisely because it’s one of the most telling, and one we are often the least self-aware about.

The message you didn’t mean to send

Your team isn’t just hearing your words, they’re reading your pace. Speaking fast, using minimum words, asking few questions sends a message. The translation becomes:

“I’m busy, leave me alone. I don’t have time for you.”

That’s rarely the intention, of course. But intention and impact are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where trust erodes.

Fast pace can also read as anxiety, or lack of control – urgency without importance. It signals that there’s no space in this conversation for your questions, your thinking, or you.

For senior leaders, this matters more than it does for anyone else in the room. Your composure, or lack of it, sets the emotional temperature for everyone else. When you’re running at 100mph, the people around you are too – and that’s precisely the wrong mode for the complex, high-stakes conversations you’re supposed to be leading.

Subscribe now

The processing problem

There’s a cognitive reality underneath all of this: most people cannot absorb complex information delivered at speed with no pauses for processing.

By the time your team has processed point two, you’re on point five. They can’t formulate questions in real time, can’t flag concerns, can’t engage with the nuance – so they do what the senior partner’s team did: nod, disengage, and fill the gaps with assumption.

When your people are the source of your competitive advantage that’s particularly costly. The value of your team is far more than just their execution, it’s their thinking, their challenge, their ability to spot what you’ve missed. Fast pace doesn’t just exclude them from the conversation; it actively suppresses the contribution you’re paying for. Risks go unspotted, decisions get reversed, rework follows. All of it more expensive than a slower meeting would have been.

Slow the f*** down

Slowing down is the single thing that will help you make the biggest shift in your micro-interactions, and indeed your leadership.

It doesn’t feel that way. It feels inefficient, like you’re struck in treacle, while watching tasks pile up in front of you, unable to get to them. But when you actually pause – give people a moment to catch up, to think, to formulate a question or surface a risk – the quality of the conversation changes, and so does the quality of the thinking.

The senior partner tried it. Same team, same agenda, deliberately slower pace, pauses between points, a genuine invitation to push back. The meeting ran ten minutes longer. The team asked questions. A significant risk was surfaced before it reached the client. Her reflection afterwards: “I thought fast was efficient, but in reality it just created rework.”

Deliberate pace also signals: “I have time for this. I have time for you.”

That builds trust in a way that efficiency never quite does. Composure reads as someone who has the situation in hand, rather than someone running to catch up with it.

And it’s worth saying: this isn’t about slowing everything down uniformly. Deliberate pace isn’t monotone or padded out. It’s about varying pace with intention – faster when energy serves the moment, slower when complexity demands it – rather than running at one speed all the time.

How to hit the brakes (gently)

Some things that genuinely help:

• Breathe before you begin. One breath before you start speaking resets your nervous system, reduces your pace and signals that you’re present. It will feel self-conscious at first. Do it anyway.

• Pause between points. Count to three before moving on. It feels much longer to you than it does to the room.

• Ask, then wait. After a question, stop. Sit with the silence. The most useful response often comes in the pause, not immediately after it.

• Buffer your meetings. Give yourself two minutes before you walk in. Arrive calmly, not running in from whatever came before.

• Use a physical reminder. A note at the top of your pad, a watch on the wrong wrist – something that catches your eye mid-meeting. When you notice it, make the connection: SLOW DOWN.

• Tell your team. Let them know you’re working on slowing down and give them permission to name it when you are going too fast. Being open about what you’re practising is one of the more disarming things a leader can do.

The pace you bring to a meeting sets the conditions for everything that follows. It’s a micro-interaction in itself, before a word of substance has been spoken.

Your team’s best thinking is available to you. Whether it shows up depends on whether you’ve left enough room for it.

Try slowing your pace in one important conversation this week. Notice what changes – in the room, in the quality of questions, in the decisions you make together.

Hit reply or leave a comment: what happened when you slowed down? Or what’s making it hard to try?

Leave a comment

Restack

This week, slowing down our perception of time from a neuroscience perspective.

mindbox

a neuroscience-backed guide to slow living

The slow living trend has been everywhere (especially if you’re on TikTok or Pinterest). Soft sunlight, slow mornings, long walks, minimal everything, and a gentle, aesthetically pleasing routine that seems to stretch time itself. And while that all looks dreamy, for many of us, it also feels completely out of reach. Our lives are packed with deadlines…

Read more

a year ago · 5042 likes · 37 comments · yana yuhai

Meme of the week

I felt this one 😂

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Before a single point had landed, the room had already received a message. Not about the forecast, the strategy, or whatever was coming next – a message about how seriously to take what followed.

This is hedging, and most of us do it, far more than we realise. It comes from good instincts: a desire to leave space for other views, to be the kind of leader who doesn’t bulldoze people into agreement.

Those aren’t bad instincts, but the effect is often the opposite of the intention. Let’s explore.

The usual suspects

How many of these do you recognise? Better still: how many do you actually use?

I might be wrong but…
Just wondering…
This is probably a stupid question…
Sort of / kind of / maybe / possibly
I think / I feel like / it seems like
You might disagree, but…

They’re small and habitual, which is precisely why they’re so hard to spot. But what the room hears isn’t always what you mean. The translation can go something like this:

“I might be wrong but…” → I’m not confident in what I’m about to say.
“Just wondering…” → This probably isn’t worth your time.
“This is probably stupid, but…” → Please dismiss this.

Here’s the irony worth naming: nine times out of ten, when someone says “I might be wrong but…”, they are not wrong. They know exactly what they think; they’re almost daring you to disagree. The hedge has nothing to do with genuine uncertainty, it’s just the packaging. Yet the gap between what the speaker means and what the room actually hears and understands can be enormous.

Good intentions, bad outcomes

So why do we do it? The reasons run deeper than politeness.

For many of us, the fear underneath the hedge is about what happens if we get it wrong. Making a clear, declarative statement feels exposing – it makes you accountable in a way that a softer version doesn’t. The hedge offers an escape route: “Well, I did say I might be wrong”, so the softening feels like risk management.

There’s a related fear alongside it: the fear of coming across as arrogant or overconfident. Most leadership cultures pay at least lip service to being collaborative and inviting contribution; being seen as someone who always has the answers, who states rather than explores, who never asks for input, can carry real social cost. Hedging sends a signal that you’re not that person. It’s a way of taking up a little less space, of staying on the right side of likeable.

Much of this is learned long before anyone reaches positions of leadership. Many of us were taught – in school, at home, through early professional experiences – that being wrong was bad, or that sticking your neck out invited ridicule. When a declarative statement got shut down, when confidence was read as arrogance, we learned what to avoid.

But what has become a habit then outlasts its usefulness. We find ourselves in a leadership team meeting, in a conversation where clarity is exactly what’s needed; and we hedge anyway, because the pattern is so well worn we no longer notice we’re doing it.

Subscribe now

The cost of hedging

The habit isn’t neutral. It can have real and tangible costs:

• It signals uncertainty to the listener, even when you’re certain, because the room can’t distinguish genuine doubt from reflexive softening

• It trains others to treat your recommendations as provisional – a starting point for negotiation rather than a considered view (not always a bad thing, but not helpful if it happens all the time)

• It contributes over time to how people perceive you: “She never quite commits.” “He always hedges.” That kind of reputation, once formed, is hard to shift

• It can mean your perspective gets lost in decision-making: when a room needs to act, the person who sounds clear tends to get heard

For senior leaders, the stakes are higher still. What you model, others learn to mirror; if hedging is the norm in how you communicate, it will spread through your team. It also undermines your authority in a more immediate way. If people around you regularly hear you sound uncertain about things you’re not uncertain about, they begin to second-guess even the decisions you’re confident in.

The cost isn’t equal

Here’s where it gets more complicated, because the cost of hedging isn’t the same for everyone.

Women are socialised more heavily to soften, to not take up too much space, to be seen as collaborative rather than directive. The result is a catch 22 that is well documented and deeply frustrating: women who hedge are read as lacking confidence or authority; women who don’t hedge are often read as aggressive or abrasive. Men who hedge are typically read as thoughtful; men who don’t are read as confident. Same behaviour, different reception.

This asymmetry isn’t unique to gender – it applies across groups whose identity sits outside the dominant norm in a given environment, where directness gets read through a particular lens and where the social cost of being too certain is higher.

As Mary Ann Sieghart, author of The Authority Gap, said:

“Women are in this real double bind. If they’re not confident enough, they’re not going to be respected. They’re not going to be taken seriously, but if they are confident enough, they’re often going to be disliked and it’s terribly hard for women to navigate this very narrow path between the two.”

Leaders who understand this asymmetry can help to level it – by modelling clear language themselves, by listening to the substance of what people say rather than letting the packaging do the work of assessment, and by noticing whose clarity tends to get rewarded in the room.

The legitimate hedge

Let’s be clear, not all hedging is a problem. The goal isn’t to strip nuance from your communication, it’s to make sure your language is doing what you intend.

There are times when naming uncertainty is exactly right: when you genuinely don’t have all the information; when a decision is complex and you’re inviting collective input; when you’re testing an early-stage idea rather than presenting a conclusion. In those moments, language like “I’m not certain about this yet – here’s what I know and here’s what I’m less sure of” or “I want to test this thinking before we act on it” is precise and honest.

The distinction that matters is between intentional hedging – which accurately reflects your thinking and signals a genuine invitation to contribute – and habitual hedging, which is applied regardless of whether you’re actually uncertain. The two can look identical from the outside, which is part of what makes the habit so costly: if you hedge everything, the room has no reliable signal for when you’re genuinely inviting input and when you’re simply reporting a conclusion.

You need the contrast for either to work. If everything you say is declarative and directive, you close down thinking; if everything is softened and tentative, nothing lands as clear or actionable. The skill is developing enough awareness of your own patterns that you can choose deliberately.

Confident, not arrogant

I’ve worked with leaders who know this pattern well. A senior leader I coached was preparing to raise a concern with her leadership team; she had done the analysis, she knew the numbers, and she was certain of her recommendation. In the room, she opened with: “I might be wrong, but I think we should possibly consider whether the Q3 forecast needs a second look.”

Everyone nodded along, but nobody acted.

At the next meeting, he stripped out the hedges: “The Q3 forecast needs revising. Based on three data points, we’re on track to miss by 15%. My recommendation is that we adjust now rather than wait.” The room acted immediately.

Same person, same data, same room. Completely different reception. When we debriefed, her observation was simple: “I knew the answer both times. I just didn’t say it clearly the first time.”

If you have a tendency to hedge, here are three things that can help:

Notice first. Record yourself in one meeting – not to edit in real time, just to listen back. Count the hedges. Most people are genuinely surprised by the frequency.

State your thinking, then open the door. “Here’s what I think: [clear statement]. What am I missing?” That’s not arrogance; it’s clarity with a genuine invitation attached, and the two together are more powerful than either alone.

Replace the pre-emptive apology with a real question. Instead of “I might be wrong but…” before a statement you’re confident in, say the statement. Then, if you want input: “I’d welcome a challenge on that.” The difference is that the invitation comes after the thinking, not before.

Clarity rather than certainty

The deeper irony of hedging is that it usually comes from wanting to get it right – not wanting to seem arrogant, not wanting to close down the conversation, not wanting to expose yourself unnecessarily. Those are understandable instincts, and in the right context they serve you well. But when the habit runs on autopilot, the room doesn’t get the benefit of the valuable thinking you’ve done.

Your job as a leader isn’t to project certainty. It’s to be clear. Those are different things, and understanding and getting comfortable with that distinction is the basis of making intentional choices about how you speak.

Record yourself this week. Count the hedges. Notice the pattern.

Hit reply or leave a comment: what’s your most common hedge – and what do you think you’re telling the room when you use it?

Leave a comment

Restack

This week, some practical tips about how to speak more clearly. It’s short but worth a read.

Life & Brain OS

How to be well-spoken and articulate when you speak

Most people think being well-spoken is something you either have or you don’t…

Read more

4 months ago · 3459 likes · 44 comments · Sabrina | Life&Brain OS

Meme of the week

This week, some lovely (hedging) phrases from @‌Wankernomics to use when you have no idea what you’re doing…

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

This was the phrase one of my clients used to describe someone considered and passed over – again – for promotion. My client was frustrated. “Why won’t she step up? She is so great at the technical stuff but doesn’t have the strategic view.”

My challenge back: “When did you last give her a real stretch assignment? And the support she needed to succeed at it?”

He fell silent.

And that’s how labels can stick. An assessment made once, which becomes a fact, reinforced over time because no one ever challenges it; whether through what they say, or the assignments they allocate, or the questions they ask. (We’ll leave aside any question of internalised misogyny – that’s a topic that would need a whole post of its own.)

A few weeks later, he asked her to lead a strategic client review, something he had previously considered her not ready for. She delivered – a sharp, well-structured piece of work that showed her ability was there, it had just never been tested.

Yet she left just a few months later. By then the damage was done: she’d been overlooked for too long and had lost confidence that anyone there would ever see her differently. The firm had spent years developing her, then lost her to a competitor who looked at her actual skills, not their perception of them.

Three words that cap a career: “That’s just how…” Once the label is there, you stop seeing the person. You see the label. Let’s explore.

From observation to obituary

Over time, labels become facts.

“She isn’t detail-oriented.”
“He’s not strategic.”
“She’s too junior.”

There’s a finality to these phrases, a permanence, that closes down any possibility of change. They don’t describe a moment, or even a pattern of behaviour. They describe a person, and once you’ve labelled the person, you stop looking at the behaviour.

Compare these two: “She’s not strategic” vs “In that presentation, she didn’t connect the proposal to the client’s longer-term objectives.” The first is a verdict, while the second is a specific observation, about a specific moment. One can be worked on, the other just is.

As leaders, the labels we apply don’t stay in our heads. They become visible and concrete in how we introduce people, what work we assign them, and how we talk about them in performance reviews. Power dynamics amplify them: once you’ve said it, the people around you are unlikely to push back. The label circulates, gets adopted, and slowly becomes fact.

Even positive labels carry a trap. The “spreadsheet guru” who’d love to develop a wider skill set but keeps getting landed with the same work, because that’s what the label says they’re good at, and therefore what they should be doing.

Congratulations. You were right. (You made sure of it.)

Once a label exists, our brains do something unhelpful: they stop looking for new information and start looking for confirmation of what they already believe. This is System 1 thinking at work – the fast, instinctive, pattern-matching mode our brains default to, as opposed to the slower, more deliberate thinking that genuinely weighs what’s in front of us.

In practice: anything that contradicts the label gets subconsciously dismissed, and anything that confirms it gets given unearned prominence.

There’s something else at play too. The better we know someone, the less carefully we actually listen to them. We anticipate their responses and we stop noticing what doesn’t fit. Behavioural psychologists call this the closeness communication bias – and it’s particularly corrosive when you’re also carrying a label about that person.

The labelled person feels all of this: in the assignments they get; in how they’re described; and in the feedback that always circles back to the same story. So they stop pushing for visibility and begin to perform to the mould you have created for them.

You observe this and think: I was right all along.

But you weren’t observing reality, you were creating it.

Subscribe now

The benefit of the doubt is not equally distributed

Another big problem is that labels usually aren’t applied consistently. Who gets labelled “difficult” after one challenging meeting and who gets called “direct”? Who is “not strategic” and who is “a big-picture thinker”? Familiarity, affinity, and who reminds you of yourself all quietly shape which story sticks and whose gets revised.

Psychologist Toni Schmader’s research on stereotype threat offers a useful perspective here. When people sense they might be viewed through the lens of a negative stereotype about their group, it creates a genuine cognitive load – a mental overhead that actively disrupts performance. The effort of managing that anxiety uses up working memory that would otherwise go into the work itself. Which means the label doesn’t just predict underperformance, it can produce it.

This isn’t about blaming anyone, or saying people are doing this deliberately. Most labels are applied in good faith by busy people making quick judgements, but sitting underneath them are biases that more often than not, disadvantage already disadvantaged groups. So the question is worth sitting with: whose labels do I apply most readily, and to whom? And who in my organisation might be carrying a cognitive overhead I’ve never had to carry myself? As leaders, we have to be responsible for our impact, not only our intent, which means understanding and actively working on our biases.

The drain on talent and potential

The most visible cost of labels is capped potential. People get managed for what the label says they are, not encouraged beyond and developed for what they could become. No stretch assignments, no stretch conversations, and no visible path forward.

Then your talented people leave. Because people feeling trapped in a box that doesn’t fit and yet won’t shift – no matter what they do – eventually find an organisation that sees them differently. The competitor who recognises her walks away with everything you invested. Your exit interview might tell you why, if you’re lucky, but by then, there’s little useful action you can take with that information.

There’s a more subtle cost too. When labels stick in a culture, people learn the environment isn’t safe for reinvention. They manage perception instead of building capability. The organisation loses something it can’t easily measure: the potential it never knew it had.

How to start peeling off the labels

The first step is noticing that you are using them. Try this: list your team members and next to each name write the first word or phrase that comes to mind. Then cross every one of them out. That’s a good place to start.

From there, there are three things you might practice:

Look for disconfirming evidence.
Actively seek moments that don’t fit the label. When you find them, take them seriously rather than writing them off as exceptions.

Ask “what am I expecting here?”
Before a conversation or a piece of work lands on someone’s desk, notice whether you’ve already decided how it will go. That awareness alone is useful.

Update out loud.
When your view of someone shifts, say so – to them and to others. Labels usually need dismantling visibly, not just privately. The people around you are carrying them too.

Notice who you default to.
Finally: when allocating stretch opportunities, notice who you’re defaulting to – and who you’re not even considering. Try replacing “she’s not ready” with “she hasn’t had the chance to show that yet.” One closes a door, the other opens it and invites someone to walk through.

My client didn’t set out to cap her career. But intention and impact are rarely the same thing.

The accumulation of micro-interactions that carried the label – the work she wasn’t given, the rooms she wasn’t invited into, the feedback that always circled back to the same story – built a ceiling she couldn’t see past and couldn’t get out from under.

Your job isn’t to be without bias. That’s not really possible, as it is so deeply ingrained in how we function as humans. Your job is to stay curious about yours, and to keep challenging, and keep updating.

What label are you carrying for someone right now? What evidence are you quietly filtering out? And if you stripped it away entirely – what might you be seeing for the first time?

Hit reply or leave a comment: tell me about a label you’ve had to shake off – about yourself or someone else. What finally shifted it?

Leave a comment

Restack

A fantastic article from Steve Magness on the role and power of belief, and what else you might need to reach your stretch goals. All told around the story of Sabastian Sawe’s incredible performance at the London Marathon last weekend.

Meme of the week

Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Yet four one-to-ones are cancelled in the months that follow. You don’t mean to, but something more urgent keeps coming up. In a team meeting last month, a team member floated a new approach to a recurring problem. Your response: “Good point – we’ll think about that.” But you still haven’t followed up…

The result? Your team stopped listening to the words some time ago. They’re watching the patterns of your behaviour, and those patterns are telling a different story.

This isn’t about dishonesty: most leaders genuinely mean what they say. But your team is not reading your intentions, they are watching what you do. And if there’s a gap between the two, they will believe the behaviour pattern every single time. Let’s explore.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

The gap isn’t usually deliberate. A huge proportion of our behaviour is governed by what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking – automatic, habitual, instinctive. You’re not consciously deciding to cancel one-to-ones or let “we’ll think about that” disappear without follow-up. Instead, your subconscious is running the show, optimising for whatever feels most urgent in the moment.

However your team has no idea what’s going on in your subconscious. All they can see is the outcome of it.

You say “my door is always open” – but your calendar is back-to-back with no buffer. You say “work-life balance matters” – but you celebrated the person who worked through the weekend.

You say “speak up with concerns” – but the first person who did got shut down. You say “development is a priority” – but your conversations circle endlessly around this quarter’s numbers.

Unfortunately it doesn’t matter how many times you say something if your attitudes and behaviours don’t back it up. Maya Angelou put it simply:

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Your team has applied that logic to you.

When trust goes, so does the truth

When there’s a persistent gap between your words and your micro-behaviours, trust erodes. Not overnight, but steadily, almost invisibly, until one day you notice the cynic at the back of the room during the next values initiative. “Here we go again.”

The research is unambiguous. Paul Zak’s work on organisational trust, published in Harvard Business Review, found that people in high-trust organisations report 74% less stress, 50% higher productivity, and 76% more engagement than those in low-trust ones. Trust is not a culture metric, it is a performance metric.

And when trust breaks down, people don’t disappear – they adapt. They stop bringing you the full picture. They optimise for what you actually reward rather than what you say you value. They tell you what you want to hear. You become progressively more isolated from the reality of what is happening in your own organisation.

That is a real problem with a real cost.

Subscribe now

Your team has learned to translate

Here’s the translation your team is making, whether you’re aware of it or not.

You say: “Speak up with ideas.” Yet your response to the last three ideas was “Have you thought about [the obvious thing]?”
They learn: Don’t bring half-formed thinking.

You say: “I value your time.” However you arrive five minutes late to every meeting and take calls during their presentations.
They learn: Your time matters. Theirs doesn’t.

You say: “People are our priority.” Your calendar shows twenty-seven client meetings and zero development conversations.
They learn: Clients matter. People are a stated value.

You say: “Mistakes are learning opportunities.” But the first time someone admitted a mistake, your tone went sharp and you asked “How did this happen?”.
They learn: Hide mistakes until they’re unfixable.

You say: “I want honest feedback.” Yet the last person who gave it got a defensive reaction. They learn: Tell you what you want to hear.

I would guess that every leader reading this will recognise themselves in at least one of these. That recognition – however uncomfortable – is the beginning of something useful.

Closing the gap

You cannot talk your way out of this. You cannot write a better speech or run a better away-day. The work isn’t in the communication strategy, it’s in your micro-interactions, repeated consistently over time.

In the book I write about this through the lens of congruence and your Leadership Shadow – the alignment between what you say, how you act, what you prioritise, and how you measure. Most leaders have inconsistencies across at least some of these – and it is worth noting some of these inconsistencies can be baked into the systems and processes of the organisation. Unpicking these takes time, but is equally important.

For you personally, your calendar is one of the most honest indicators of what you actually prioritise. Not what you say you prioritise – what you actually do with your time.

Your tone in the first five seconds after someone brings bad news tells your team more about psychological safety than any training programme.

Who you publicly acknowledge – and who slips by unrecognised – tells your team exactly what gets rewarded here.

This isn’t about perfection. Incongruence is part of the process; noticing it is what matters. The goal is to close the gap – repeatedly, consciously, over time.

Start your audit now

Pick one thing you say is a priority. Just one. Then take a really honest look at the evidence from the last two weeks:

• What did your calendar actually show?

• What did you celebrate, or let pass unacknowledged?

• Who got your time and attention – and who got squeezed out?

• What happened the last time someone brought you bad news or a half-formed idea?

If there’s a gap between what you say and what you actually did, your team has probably already noticed, and they’ve already drawn their conclusions.

The question is: What are you going to do to close that gap?

Hit reply or leave a comment to share one thing you’ve noticed in your own words-versus-actions gap – and what you’re committing to do about it.

Leave a comment

Restack

A brief but useful read on why the mismatch between intention and action isn’t so much a character flaw, as a bad habit.

The Behaviour Brief

What they say and what they do

A great way to break someone’s trust is to say one thing and do something else…

Read more

4 months ago · Elin K.F

Meme of the week

Too good not to share… (not even slightly work related, but 🤷‍♀️)

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Why we can’t just say it

The “right answer” reflex doesn’t come from nowhere. For most of us it was built early, and built well.

Growing up in a high-achieving family, I absorbed the message fast: knowing things was how you earned your place. School confirmed it: the system rewards the right answer, so I learned to perform certainty, and to treat not knowing as something to hide.

Fast forward to early leadership, and the filter was still running. I perceived it as genuinely unsafe to admit I didn’t know something. Which meant I spent hours working things out alone when asking would have taken minutes. I contorted myself to avoid questions that might expose a gap.

It was exhausting, and completely counterproductive.

Most leaders carry a version of this. At senior level the stakes feel even higher; you’re supposed to know, and people are watching, so when you don’t know, you reach for something that sounds like you do.

What happens when you always have an answer

Here’s the thing. Even when it works – even when the room buys it – it costs you.

First, it signals to the people around you that not knowing is not acceptable here.
Leaders train their teams constantly, whether they mean to or not. If you always have an answer, your team will conclude that they should too. So they stop admitting uncertainty, and they stop asking questions. They perform confidence they don’t have, just as you do.

Second, it closes down thinking. When the most senior person in the room has already landed somewhere, why would anyone explore further? You’ve inadvertently shut down the conversation before it really got started.

Third – and this one stings – it erodes trust. People can usually sense when someone is reaching. When you offer a considered answer on something you’ve genuinely thought through, they trust it. When you offer a confident-sounding answer on everything, it actually sows a seed of doubt rather than building confidence.

And underneath all of it: it takes real effort. Performing certainty you don’t feel requires constant emotional energy – scanning for questions you might not be able to answer, managing how you come across, keeping the performance consistent. It’s a drain that’s entirely unnecessary.

Three words that change the room

“I don’t know.”

Said calmly. Without apology. Without the nervous laugh or the immediate pivot to something you do know.

It’s remarkable how much changes.

It signals that intellectual honesty is valued here over performance. It models that gaps in knowledge are normal – because they are. It invites contribution: suddenly the room isn’t waiting for your verdict, it’s part of the conversation.

And crucially, it makes your certainty mean something. When you do know, when you do have a clear view, people believe it – because they’ve seen you say the alternative.

This isn’t a call for false modesty or performative humility, it’s simpler than that. It’s simply an invitation to say the true thing, when the true thing is that you don’t know.

Subscribe now

How to actually do it

Here are three practical places to start.

Notice the impulse first. Before you can change the habit, you need to catch it in the act. That instinctive flinch – the moment the fear of being exposed kicks in and you’re about to reach for something plausible – is the signal. Just noticing it is useful, even if you don’t yet feel able to change what comes next.

Have a few phrases ready. “I don’t know – what do others think?” “I want to sit with that before I answer.” “Good question. I genuinely don’t know yet.” These aren’t scripts, they’re just options. Having them ready makes it easier to reach for them in the moment rather than reaching for the usual alternative.

Follow up when you do know. This matters. “I don’t know” followed by silence is avoidance, and in some circumstances risks sowing unnecessary doubt. “I don’t know – and I’ll come back to you by Thursday” is leadership. It closes the loop and shows that the admission was genuine, not a deflection.

The smartest thing in the room

There’s a certain irony here. The leaders most compelled to always have an answer are often the ones who care most – the conscientious ones, the high achievers, the people who set high standards for themselves and their teams.

And those are exactly the leaders whose teams most need to see them say: “I don’t know.”

Not because it makes them look humble. Because it makes it safe for everyone else to be honest, too. And teams that can be honest – about what they don’t know, what isn’t working, what they need – are the ones that actually perform.

Three words. Enormous impact.

This week, notice once when you don’t know the answer – and try saying so.
Hit reply or leave a comment to let me know: when did you last say “I don’t know” out loud at work – and what happened when you did?

Leave a comment

Restack

This beautifully captures the inner struggle of feeing like we need to know when we don’t

The Place of Peace

The Total Glory of Not Knowing.

A friend sent me a message yesterday with the word ‘phonological’ in it. I had to look it up. I knew it must have something to do with sound but I did not know what. I discovered - and how lovely it is to discover, and to have the means of discovery at my fingertips - that phonology is ‘the science of speech sounds including especially the history and t…

Read more

4 months ago · 27 likes · 19 comments · Tania Kindersley

Meme of the week

Unrelated to the topic this week, but still spot on.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

And yet, I am here.

For anyone who knows me, that is progress. For a long time after I started my own business, I wouldn’t have been. I’d have found a reason to delay, or I’d have gone but kept one foot – and both eyes – at work. This year, I made a commitment to myself to go anyway, things undone and all.

By the time you read this, I’ll be in Portugal, almost certainly eating my bodyweight in Pastéis de Nata and drinking port. Sorry not sorry.

But I’m writing this one for you as much as for me. Because if you’re anything like me, you’ll recognise the pattern I’m about to describe.

The finish line that moves

At some point, most of us absorbed a belief about rest: that we have to earn it. That downtime and relaxation is a reward for completed work, and that we get to stop when the work is done.

There’s a pretty obvious problem with that logic: the work is never done.

There will always be a project in progress, a deliverable due, a conversation that needs following up, or a piece of thinking that isn’t quite there yet. That is the nature of working at this level. But the inbox doesn’t reach zero (or at least never stays there). And the diary, left to its own devices, will fill back up within forty-eight hours of being cleared.

And so we wait. We push the holiday back by two weeks, we take the laptop, just in case (yes, I know, I brought mine, that’s where I’m writing this…). We tell ourselves we’ll properly switch off once this project is over, once things calm down.

But as we know, they don’t quieten down. The finish line moves, and so we don’t stop.

What it costs you – and everyone around you

Here’s what I know from working with senior leaders: depletion isn’t invisible. You cannot run on empty and expect it not to show.

When you are exhausted, your thinking suffers, your patience shortens and your presence in every conversation – every micro-interaction with your team – diminishes. You’re there, but you’re not really there. And the people around you feel it, even if no one says a word.

What we often forget is that emotions and energy are contagious. Your team subconsciously picks up on what you bring into the room – from your face, your tone, your energy – and they respond accordingly. A frazzled leader creates a frazzled team. Not through any single dramatic moment, but through the slow accumulation of small signals sent in dozens of interactions every day.

Refusing to rest is, in other words, not just a problem for you; it becomes a problem for everyone around you.

You’re also modelling to your team what is OK, and what isn’t. If you don’t take breaks, your team won’t feel they can either. Not because you’ve told them they can’t, but because you’ve shown them that rest isn’t really how things are done around here. You are always being watched, whether you intend it or not.

Subscribe now

“But what if everything falls apart?”

There’s one more thing we need to address around this. The little belief that often underlies all of this: the fear that if you genuinely switch off, things will fall apart.

Maybe they will. It’s unlikely – but let’s say, for the sake of argument, they do.

If that’s true, it is not a reason to never take a holiday. It is quite frankly a serious and urgent problem with how your team or your organisation is set up. An operation that can only function if one person never takes a break is not a resilient operation; it is a single point of failure, dressed up as dedication.

The more honest version of this fear is that it is often less about the organisation and more about our own identity. We want to be needed, we want to matter. Taking a step back can feel uncomfortably like discovering we are more replaceable than we thought. And that isn’t something our ego likes to contemplate.

That discomfort is worth sitting with. Because a team that can hold things together while you’re away is not a threat to your leadership, it is evidence that your leadership is working.

“But I shouldn’t need time off”

Spending time on yourself can feel self-indulgent. I’d argue it is anything but, because the time you invest in yourself has a direct impact on everyone around you.

Rest is a requirement for sustained performance. Done right, it is an act of leadership in itself – a visible signal that recovery matters, that your team has permission to be human, that showing up well is more important than showing up constantly.

Here are a few things worth doing before you go:

• Stop waiting for the work to be done. It won’t be. Book it anyway.

• Brief your team properly. Clarity before you leave is the gift that means they don’t need to reach you.

• Name someone to hold the fort. Not as a last resort – as a deliberate act of delegation.

• Set the out-of-office and mean it (yes, yes, I’ll go and do this now…)

• Accept that some things will be outstanding when you go. They were always going to be. They will still be there when you get back – or perhaps they won’t, as someone else will have handled them. Both outcomes are instructive.

And on switching off: the decision to not check in is its own small act of intentionality. Choose it, and choose it deliberately.

Before I go through the gate

As I close my laptop and head to the gate, some things remain unfinished, yet I’m pretty sure the world will continue to turn.

Here’s what I want to leave you with: the break you keep not taking isn’t optional.

The version of you that arrives back from it – restored, clear-headed, present – will show up differently in every single interaction. That matters more than whatever is sitting in your inbox right now.

Go. You need it. Even if you wish you didn’t.

Hit reply or leave a comment – what’s the thing you’re waiting to finish before you let yourself stop?

Leave a comment

Restack

A lovely one this week from Adekunle Adekunbi with a reminder that some of us might need to (re) learn how to rest.

Reflections & Revelations

Rest Is a Skill

I used to think rest was something you fell into…

Read more

5 months ago · 48 likes · 11 comments · Adekunle Adekunbi

Meme of the week

As always, Liz and Mollie have it spot on.

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

She was a senior consultant. Good at her job, and known for staying calm under pressure.

And she spent the entire weekend catastrophising.

Her manager had handed her a complex client project on Friday afternoon with six words and not much else. I need you to take this one. No context, no framing, and no indication of what this one actually meant.

Was it a test? Was the manager too stretched to run it properly? Was the client difficult and nobody wanted to say so? Was she being set up to fail – or handed something she wasn’t ready for?

She walked into Monday’s kick-off meeting tight and defensive. Her manager was baffled. The energy was off from the start, and neither of them could quite articulate why.

Later, with a subsequent project, the manager decided to try something different.

“I’m giving you this client because I trust your judgement and I want you to have experience at this level. My intention is to be available to support you, not to micromanage. Sound good?”

Same information, but a completely different experience for the recipient. The consultant asked clarifying questions, got stuck in, and delivered well.

One sentence was all it took. Let’s explore why many leaders don’t say it.

The gap nobody talks about

Here’s the thing about intentions: they feel obvious to the person who has them.

When a leader asks a pointed question, they know they’re curious. When they delegate a stretch project, they know it’s a vote of confidence. When they go quiet in a meeting, they know they’re thinking.

But the person on the receiving end? They have none of that context. What they have is a gap – and when we don’t fill it clearly, people fill it themselves.

In Do Sweat the Small Stuff, I describe this as the transparency trap: the tendency to assume understanding in others, to not take time to explain because it feels unnecessary, or because it will waste time. It’s a habit born of efficiency, but that efficiency is an illusion. You save thirty seconds of explanation and create three days of misunderstanding.

The gap isn’t neutral, because by nature, most people won’t fill it with the most generous interpretation. They fill it with the most familiar one – which, for most of us, means the most anxious one.

Subscribe now

When silence does the talking

Think about how this plays out in practice:

• Questions sound like interrogations.

• Feedback sounds like criticism.

• Delegation sounds like dumping.

• Directiveness sounds like dismissal.

• Silence sounds like disapproval.

None of that is what you meant, but it is hard for intention to travel without words.

There’s a reason this matters beyond individual relationships. Ambiguity generates anxiety, and anxiety closes down exactly the behaviours leaders need from their teams: honest conversation, creative thinking, appropriate risk-taking. You cannot build a psychologically safe environment on a foundation of unexplained actions.

And the human brain doesn’t help. Author and entrepreneur Isaac Lidsky articulates it well in his TED talk:

“Your fears distort your reality… Fear fills the void at all costs, passing off what you dread for what you know, offering up the worst in place of the ambiguous.”

In other words, when we don’t know, we don’t stay neutral: we awfulise. We take the unknown and replace it with the awful. Your team is doing this in every interaction where your intention isn’t clear – not because they’re catastrophists, but because that’s what human brains are wired to do when they don’t have enough information.

The irony is that the time you save by not explaining is the time your team spends decoding, worrying, and second-guessing. That’s not efficiency, it’s a deferred cost, and not a small one.

The shift is smaller than you think

This isn’t about softening your leadership or over-explaining every decision. It’s about removing unnecessary noise from the signal.

One sentence up front can change the entire dynamic of what follows.

“I’m asking because I’m curious, not because I think you’re wrong.”

“I’m giving you this because I trust you, not because I’m overwhelmed.”

“I’m quiet because I’m thinking, not because I’m angry.”

That’s it. The listener is no longer trying to decode what you really mean – they’re just listening.

In the book, I describe clarity of intention as one of the four foundational pillars of effective leadership. It’s not enough simply to have good intentions; they need to be visible. When intention and impact are aligned, trust builds. When they’re not – even when the intention was fine – the gap does the damage.

Stating your intention out loud is how you close that gap before it opens.

When it matters most

This isn’t required in every conversation. But there are moments when the stakes of ambiguity are high enough to make it non-negotiable.

When you’re giving feedback. Name your intention before the difficult message. “I’m raising this because I want to support your development” changes how someone receives what comes next.

When you’re delegating stretch work. Say why you chose them and what your involvement will look like. Don’t make them guess whether this is a reward or a burden.

When you’re asking questions about someone’s work. The difference between “Tell me about your approach” as curiosity versus scrutiny is invisible – unless you say which one it is.

When you’re being directive. If a decision isn’t up for debate, say so, and say why. People expend significant energy trying to influence decisions that have already been made. That’s a waste for everyone.

When you go quiet. Silence is rarely interpreted as neutral. A simple “I’m thinking, give me a moment” stops the room filling in the blank.

The timing also matters: front-load the intention, don’t offer it as a retrospective explanation when the damage is already done. Say it before you say the thing – not after you’ve noticed the energy shift.

What they hear when you don’t say why

Most leadership misunderstandings don’t come from what leaders say, they come from what leaders assume they don’t need to say.

It’s not that your team doesn’t trust you, it’s that they’re filling a gap that you left open, with the only material available – their own fears and assumptions.

The fix is genuinely small. Before your next feedback conversation, delegation, or pointed question, complete this sentence out loud: “My intention here is…”

Notice what changes, in the room, and in you.

Hit reply or leave a comment to share: what’s one conversation coming up this week where stating your intention upfront might change the dynamic – and what would you say?

Leave a comment

Restack

An interesting read on the difference between focusing on process vs outcomes.

Admired Leadership Field Notes

Excellence Is Not a Performance Target

Leaders and performers have a critical choice to make…

Read more

5 months ago · 153 likes · 9 comments · Admired Leadership

Meme of the week

Someone built a Google Translate tool for LinkedIn and it is 👌 The whole post is well worth a scroll through…

Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or read my full Substack archive here. Follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.

Please use this button to share this with someone who you think would enjoy it!

Share

Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!