Author: Alexis

Most of us are addicted to over-delivering. We think adding more features, more slides, more planning, and more process makes our projects safer and our leadership more effective. We were taught in school that doing more gets you the A+.

But what if your obsession with doing “more” is actually the exact thing holding your team back?

The Source: Jon Kern on Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership

In the latest episode of our podcast, I sat down with Jon Kern, an aerospace engineer turned software architect and one of the original co-authors of the Agile Manifesto.

Jon didn’t help create Agile because he loved corporate frameworks. He helped create it as a pragmatic, lightweight defense mechanism against bureaucratic lunacy. Early in his career testing jet engines for the Defense Department, he realized that rigid, heavyweight processes (like trying to predict a year of R&D in advance) were worse than useless: they were actively destructive.

The Reframe: The Strategic Value of “Laziness”

We typically view laziness as apathy or a lack of drive. But Jon advocates for a different kind of laziness: Strategic Laziness.

In development and leadership, being “lazy” means finding the smartest, smallest possible thing to build (or do) to get immediate feedback. It is a rebellion against doing too much work, too far in advance.

When we over-prepare, we usually do it out of anxiety. We build massive plans to soothe our fear of the unknown. The signal hidden inside the urge to over-engineer is that we are afraid to test our assumptions against reality. Strategic laziness forces you to stop hiding behind bloated plans and start treating your requirements as hypotheses.

The Leadership Application: Purpose vs. Process

You cannot ask your team to be “lazy” and agile if they don’t know what they are actually trying to achieve.

If a team doesn’t understand their core business purpose, they become mere order-takers. And order-takers will just blindly build every feature, tick every box, and follow every process, no matter how bloated it gets.

Jon’s rule is simple: Start with a clear, 25-word purpose.

When your team has a razor-sharp flag in the distance, they are empowered to exercise micro-judgments. They can look at a massive project requirement and say, “To achieve our purpose, we don’t actually need to build all of this yet. Let’s just do this tiny piece and see what the customer thinks.”

Even in the modern frontier of AI and “Vibe Coding”, which Jon actively uses to automate rigorous testing and compliance, this discipline holds true. You can use AI to do the heavy lifting, but you still must “coerce” the tools into following sound engineering fundamentals. Agility requires a clear purpose and relentless consistency.

The Practical Takeaway

Mantra: “I can out-small anyone.”

Whenever you are faced with a massive, ambiguous project, do not ask, “How do we get all of this done?” Ask, “What is the smallest, embarrassingly tiny piece of value we can deliver right now to get real-world feedback?”

The Coaching Prompt

Grab a notebook or bring these to your next 1:1. Answer honestly:

• The 25-Word Test: Can you clearly articulate your team or project’s core purpose in 25 words or less?
• The Bloat Audit: Where are you currently doing too much work, to too great a depth, too far in advance of actual feedback?
• The Next Small Step: What is the tiniest, smartest thing you could test or build this week to prove (or disprove) a major assumption?

I was on stage in Lyon last week at the Tech’Work conference, talking about a concept that radically shifts how we build teams.

We were discussing the “Above the Line / Below the Line” framework. When we are below the line, we are in survival mode: defensive, closed, and committed to being right. This is biology, not a character flaw. It’s normal. But when we pause, breathe, and step above the line, we choose a conscious response: open, curious, and committed to learning.

The audience was highly engaged, mapping out the behaviors of both states. But during the interactive session, two brutally honest comments from the audience hit the floor like lead weights:

1. “Too much empathy is bad because you just end up doing all the work in place of other people.”
2. “Some people just don’t want to take responsibility.”

You can practically hear the exhaustion and resentment dripping from those statements. If you’ve ever led a team, you’ve probably felt both. We are told to be “empathetic” and “empowering,” but the reality often feels like we are just babysitting.

So, what is the signal hidden in this frustration?

The Source: The Drama Triangle and Unconscious Commitments

To unpack this, we need to look at two heavy-hitting psychological models.

First is the Karpman Drama Triangle. When we drop below the line, we often fall into three roles: the Victim (powerless), the Persecutor (blaming), or the Rescuer (saving the day).

Second is the concept of Unconscious Commitments from the Conscious Leadership Group. Often, the outcomes we complain about the most are the exact outcomes our hidden behaviors are perfectly designed to create.

The Reframe: Friction as a Signal

When we complain about empathy and responsibility, we are misdiagnosing the problem. Here is the reframe:

The Empathy Trap is actually a Boundary Problem. When the leader in Lyon said, “Too much empathy means I do all the work,” they were describing the Rescuer role, not empathy. Empathy is understanding someone’s struggle. Rescuing is doing their work for them to alleviate your own discomfort with their struggle. Over-functioning for your team isn’t a surplus of caring; it is a deficit of boundaries.

The Responsibility Myth is actually a Mirror. When we declare, “Some people just don’t want to take responsibility,” we have slipped into the Victim role. We are blaming their character rather than looking at the system. The hard, transformative truth is recognizing our own unconscious commitment to the dynamic. If your team isn’t stepping up, what is the payoff for you? Often, it’s the ego-boost of being the “indispensable fixer.”

Leadership Application: Evolving the System

Leadership is a property of the system, not a personality trait. If people aren’t exhibiting leadership, the system is actively preventing it.

To create the conditions for leadership to emerge, you have to stop playing the Rescuer. Yes, some individuals, bruised by previous micromanagers or toxic cultures, will need time to trust that taking a risk won’t get them fired. They need proof.

But you cannot provide that proof if you keep doing their work. You have to step back, establish firm boundaries, and allow them to feel the natural friction of their role. You must accept that an old version of your leadership, the one that swooped in to save the day, is no longer useful. It got you here, but it is actively sabotaging your team’s growth for the future.

A Practical Takeaway

Empathy without boundaries is just enabling. You cannot rescue someone into taking responsibility.

The Coaching Prompt

Grab a notebook or open a blank document, and ask yourself these questions about your current team dynamics:

• Where am I confusing empathy with doing the work for someone else?
• If I am complaining that my team won’t take ownership, what is my unconscious commitment to being the “fixer”?
• What is the “payoff” I get from a team that constantly needs my help?
• What is one clear boundary I can set today to shift the system from enabling to empowering?

“Get on the bus or get left behind.”

“We need to build a burning platform.”

“If they don’t like the new direction, they know where the door is.”

How many times have you heard these phrases tossed around during a corporate restructuring, a messy pivot, or a sudden round of layoffs? We’ve been conditioned to believe that driving organizational change requires a kind of executive shock-and-awe. We issue top-down mandates, weaponize performance metrics, and use the unspoken anxiety of the next economic downturn to force compliance.

We call it “driving alignment.” Let’s call it what it actually is: corporate coercion.

We use these heavy-handed tactics because we assume force is the most efficient way to get results. But modern history, human psychology, and data tell a completely different story.

The Source: 100 Years of Uprisings

On a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, political scientist Erica Chenoweth dropped a data-backed bomb on our collective assumptions about power. Chenoweth studied over a century of global revolutions and insurrections to determine what actually forces a system to change.

Her research revealed two staggering facts:

• Non-violent movements are twice as likely to succeed as violent ones.
• The 3.5% Rule: No government or regime in her data set failed to change once 3.5% of the population became actively, visibly engaged in the movement.

Chenoweth also uncovered a dark tactical truth. Authoritarian regimes intentionally use violence and intimidation not just to hurt their active opponents, but to terrify the “neutral middle” of the population. The goal is to make joining the movement look so dangerous that the average citizen decides to stay home and stay quiet.

When we use coercive language, tight ultimatums, and fear-based pressure in business, we are running the exact same autocratic playbook. And it backfires beautifully.

The Reframe: The “Neutral Middle” is Your Bedrock

When a new initiative drops, leaders tend to divide the company into two camps: the enthusiastic early adopters and the “resisters.” Anyone who doesn’t immediately drink the Kool-Aid is viewed as passive, checked out, or a barrier to progress.

That is a short-sighted leadership blind spot.

Let’s reframe the emotional signal of the “neutral middle.” These employees aren’t lazy, and they don’t hate growth. They are corporate survivors.

They have deep institutional memory. They’ve watched three different “transformations” come and go under different leaders. Their neutrality isn’t a lack of commitment. It is a healthy mechanism of self-protection. They are trying to shield their energy, their focus, and their daily output from a chaotic management wave so they can actually do the work.

The neutral middle has good intentions. They are the essential bedrock holding the business together while executives play with new frameworks. If you treat their caution as a threat, you will push them directly into active resistance.

Leadership Application: How to Activate Your 3.5%

If you want real, sustainable evolution in your organization, you have to stop trying to force 100% compliance through fear. Instead, you need to attract a critical mass.

• Ditch the Coercive Language: Eliminate phrases that imply people are disposable if they don’t instantly fall in line. Fear produces superficial compliance, but it utterly destroys the psychological safety required for actual innovation.
• Build a Cross-Functional 3.5% Coalition: Your critical mass shouldn’t just be the executive team or a specialized squad of “change champions” who look like corporate cheerleaders. Your 3.5% must be a micro-coalition across all levels and roles. Find the informal culture carriers: the quiet senior engineers, the respected front-line managers, the operations experts. If they buy in, the system shifts organically.
• Lower the Cost of Entry: Dictators hate humor and flexibility because it strips away their power. In organizations, instead of high-stakes mandates, use what Chenoweth calls “dilemma actions”—lightweight, low-friction experiments. Invite teams to try a new process for just two weeks as a trial. Keep it conversational, flexible, and iterative.

When you make the change safe, low-risk, and genuinely collaborative, the neutral middle will naturally lean in. You don’t need to drag them onto the bus. They will walk over to see why it’s worth riding.

A Practical Takeaway

Mantra for the week:

“Compliance can be forced; commitment must be attracted. Stop hunting for resisters, and start building your 3.5%.”

The Coaching Prompt

Ask yourself or your leadership team these questions this week:

1. Look at your current top-priority initiative. What coercive language or fear-based pressure (implicit or explicit) are you using to drive it forward?
2. Who are the informal, trusted influencers in your organization, outside of the executive team, who need to be part of your critical 3.5%?
3. How can you reframe the skepticism of your neutral team members? What valuable thing are they currently trying to protect?

“Hey, what are your thoughts?”

It happens in almost every meeting. You are sitting there, minding your own business, when a colleague or executive throws a conversational hand grenade your way.

Suddenly, the spotlight is on you. Your heart rate spikes. Your brain frantically scrolls through every piece of data you’ve ever acquired, trying to find the “perfect” thing to say. And when you finally open your mouth, what comes out feels less like a strategic insight and more like a word salad.

We look at people who are effortlessly articulate in these moments and assume they possess a rare, genetic gift. We tell ourselves, “I’m just not good on my feet.” But that panic isn’t a sign of incompetence. It’s a structural failure.

The Source: Why Your Brain Freezes

In his book Think Faster, Talk Smarter, Stanford communication expert Matt Abrahams highlights the real culprit behind our impromptu speaking anxiety: Cognitive Load.

When you are put on the spot, your brain is suddenly forced to do two incredibly difficult things at the exact same time:

1. Listing: Generating the raw content (the facts, the ideas, the data).
2. Sequencing: Deciding the order in which to say them.

It’s the mental equivalent of trying to bake a cake while simultaneously writing the recipe from scratch. Your mental RAM maxes out, your internal system crashes, and you resort to “umms,” “ahhs,” and rambling.

The Reframe: Structure is Freedom

Here is the shift: Stop trying to think of what to say, and start choosing how to say it.

That sudden spike of adrenaline you feel when put on the spot isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It is raw energy looking for a container. If you don’t give that energy a boundary, it turns into anxiety. But if you give it a framework, it turns into focus.

As Abrahams notes, structure sets you free. When you choose a structural map before you start speaking, you automate the sequencing part of your brain. This frees up 50% of your cognitive capacity to focus entirely on your message. You don’t need a silver tongue; you just need a track to run on.

The Leadership Playbook: 3 Frameworks to Lean On

The next time you are caught off guard, do not just start talking. Take a breath, silently pick one of these three structural blueprints, and fill in the blanks:

1. The Everyday Anchor: What? So What? Now What?

This is the undisputed heavyweight champion of impromptu speaking. It works for project updates, giving feedback, or answering a sudden question from a client.

• What: State the cold, hard facts or the current situation.
• So What: Explain why this matters. What is the impact on the team, the budget, or the timeline?
• Now What: Define the immediate next step or call to action.

2. The High-Stakes Pivot: Challenge – Opportunity – Resolution

When things go wrong and everyone looks to you for answers, use this to reframe a crisis into a strategic moment.

• Challenge: Acknowledge the problem or obstacle directly without sugarcoating it.
• Opportunity: Pivot to what can be learned, or what new door this challenge opens.
• Resolution: Propose the definitive action step to move forward.

3. The Vision Builder: Past – Present – Future

Perfect for milestones, kicking off unexpected initiatives, or when you need to align a team that has lost its bearings.

• Past: Where did we start? What is the context?
• Present: Where are we standing right now? What is the immediate reality?
• Future: Where are we going? What does success look like?

The Practical Takeaway

The One-Second Blueprint: The moment you are put on the spot, pause for one full second. In that silence, whisper a mantra to yourself: “I am doing a ‘What, So What, Now What’.” Deciding the structure before you open your mouth is the difference between wandering aimlessly and leading with authority.

The Coaching Prompt

Bring these questions to your next reflection session, or use them to coach a team member who struggles with visibility in meetings:

1. Where do I ramble most? In which specific scenarios (e.g., upward management, peer debates, client pushback) do I feel my cognitive load redlining?
2. What is my default defense mechanism when caught off guard? Do I over-explain with data, shut down and say too little, or pass the mic to someone else?
3. How can we build a “structure-first” culture on our team? How can we use frameworks like What? So What? Now What? in our async updates or daily standups to save everyone’s mental RAM?

Let’s talk about the lie we tell ourselves when we’re stressed:

“If I just think about this problem for another three hours, I’ll finally solve it.”

We replay past conversations like we’re a director trying to edit a bad movie, or we project into the future, convinced that worrying is just “proactive preparation.” We convince ourselves that this mental gymnastics is useful.

Spoiler alert: It’s not. It’s a maze. And the deeper you run into it, the harder it is to find the exit.

The Source: Thoughts are Weather, Not the Sky

In her book Just a Thought, Dr. Amy Johnson introduces a liberating paradigm shift about how our brains actually function.

As human beings, we are evolutionary marvels wired for survival. Your thinking mind isn’t trying to torture you when it loops on a mistake you made in a meeting last Tuesday; it’s simply trying to keep you safe.

The problem is that your brain doesn’t know the difference between a physical predator and a difficult client email. It treats both as existential threats, flooding your system with thoughts designed to “fix” the danger.

The Reframe: The Suggestion Box

Here is the twist: Rumination isn’t a sign that you are broken; it’s a sign that your survival brain is working perfectly. The loop of worry is just an emotional signal. It’s your brain saying, “Hey, I care about this outcome, and I feel unsafe right now.” But just because your mind hands you a thought doesn’t mean you have to buy into it. Your brain is a suggestion box, not a dictator. Thoughts are not solid objects; they are transient energy. They only become a maze when we grab onto them, unpack our bags, and decide to live there.

Nothing external can lift you out of that maze. No new strategy, no extra data, and no amount of reassurance. The exit is entirely internal: it’s realizing that a thought is just a thought, and you have the power to let it pass.

Leadership Application: Stop Time-Traveling

In leadership, staying stuck in the maze is a quiet productivity killer. When we ruminate, we aren’t leading; we are time-traveling.

• We are either in the past, trying to manage a reality that has already occurred.
• Or we are in the future, trying to control a reality that doesn’t exist yet.

When you are trapped in the past or the future, you are completely unavailable to the people you are leading in the present.

Letting go of the thought loop and returning to the room takes practice. It feels counter-intuitive because your brain tells you that dropping the worry means you’re being irresponsible. But true human-centric leadership requires the discipline to say, “Thank you, mind, for trying to protect me. But I am choosing to be right here, right now.”

A Practical Takeaway

The Leader’s Mantra: “It’s just a thought. It doesn’t need a meeting.”

The tl;dr: You cannot stop your brain from producing thoughts any more than you can stop the sky from producing clouds. But you can stop mistaking the clouds for the sky. Drop the debate with your own mind and anchor back into the present moment.

The Coaching Prompt

Ask yourself, or your team, during your next 1-on-1, these four questions to break the cycle of rumination:

1. What is the actual data here, and what is just the “survival story” my mind is spinning about it?
2. Am I actually preparing for the future right now, or am I just using worry to feel like I’m doing something?
3. If I chose not to believe this specific thought today, what action would I take right now?
4. What does my team need from me in this exact moment that I am currently missing?

Anxiety is creeping into leadership circles. A late-2025 study by The Conference Board suggests that AI can now handle up to 90% of routine career coaching tasks.

I’ll be honest: the knee-jerk fear of obsolescence was exactly my response recently. A client told me she was looking into AI to scale coaching across her organization. In her company, coaching has historically been locked behind a velvet rope, available only to those who reach a certain hierarchical level. She wanted to democratize it.

I was skeptical, but I investigated. And frankly, I was blown away. I found a platform that is incredibly effective if you want your people to practice soft skills, like navigating a difficult conversation with a colleague, or nailing a sales pitch, rather than practicing on actual prospects and customers.

My initial fear quickly gave way to a counterintuitive observation: AI isn’t here to kill human coaching or leadership; it’s here to save us from our own transactional mediocrity. The algorithm is forcing a brutal but necessary question: If a machine can do my job, was I operating like a machine?

The Framework

The Integral Institute offers a brilliant framework for navigating this shift. They divide our development needs into two distinct lanes:

• Top-of-Funnel (How do I think about this problem?): The realm of performative, cognitive coaching.
• Bottom-of-Funnel (Who am I becoming as a leader?): The realm of existential, transformational coaching.

Researcher Tatiana Bachkirova (HEC Paris) draws the absolute dividing line at “embodied empathy.” AI possesses flawless syntactic empathy: It knows exactly what words to string together to validate an emotion. But it has never lived through anything. It doesn’t know risk, loss, or mortality.

The Reframe: The Signal Behind the Threat

The fear of being replaced isn’t a bug; it’s a signal. It tells us we’ve spent way too much time in the “performative” zone: optimizing skills, running role-plays, and offering cognitive behavioral tweaks. AI excels here. It treats symptoms, optimizes metrics, and operates 24/7 without burning out.

The positive side of this “threat” is liberation. By offloading habit tracking and cognitive prep to an algorithm, human leaders and coaches are forced to step up and do their actual jobs: navigating the messy reality of human identity. An AI can give you ten perfectly structured frameworks for delegating tasks, but it cannot help you when your nervous system is terrified of losing control.

Leadership Application: The Hybrid Model

In organizational life, this demands a shift in how we build and support our teams. The future belongs to a tiered, hybrid model:

• Phase 1: AI as the Pre-Coach (Performative). The tool is used for onboarding, baseline skill assessments, and goal-tracking. It handles the “presenting problem.”
• Phase 2: The Human as the Alchemist (Transformational). This is where you step in. You use the AI’s data as a baseline, but focus entirely on the human. You read the shifting energy in a room, spot systemic power dynamics that an algorithm is blind to, and possess the courage to sit in the discomfort of silence to force a real breakthrough.
• Phase 3: AI as the Accountability Partner (Continuous). Post-breakthrough, the AI steps back in to provide the daily nudges and micro-learning needed to turn a transformational epiphany into a sustained habit.

The Takeaway (TL;DR)

If coaching and leadership are just about giving advice and tracking KPIs, the algorithm wins. If they are interpretive, embodied, relational practices meant to reinvent how a human operates in the world, you are irreplaceable.

Leave the tasks to the bots; keep the identity for the humans.

The Coaching Prompt: The Impact Audit

Take five minutes before your next 1:1 or team meeting and ask yourself:

1. Looking at my meetings last week, which ones were just information transfer or checklist tracking (things an AI could easily do)?
2. When a team member struggles, do I rush to hand them a “solution framework” (bot mode), or am I capable of sitting in the discomfort and listening for the “unsaid”?
3. Am I trying to optimize this person’s symptoms, or am I trying to help them transform their professional identity?

P.S. If you are curious about the AI simulation tool I mentioned earlier—the one that blew me away for safe, scalable soft-skill practice—just reply to this email. I will gladly introduce you to the people behind the solution. Ironically enough, they are fantastic and very human.

P.P.S. Speaking of doing the deep, human work: if you haven’t yet taken the ​Emerging Leadership Navigator​ from last week’s newsletter for a spin, consider this your gentle nudge. It’s designed specifically to help you map out your own leadership bottlenecks and identity shifts: exactly the kind of “bottom-of-funnel” inner work an algorithm can’t do for you.

We all have a default setting. When the pressure dials up at work, we unconsciously retreat into the tasks that feel safe. The visionary strategist ignores the operational messy work; the relentless executor ignores team morale; the empathetic people-pleaser avoids hard business metrics.

We usually dress this up as “playing to our strengths.” But if we are being honest, it is often just a sophisticated way of neglecting the parts of our role that make us uncomfortable. The friction, exhaustion, or stagnation you might be feeling right now isn’t a sign that you are failing, it’s a signal that a critical dimension of your work is being starved of your attention.

The Source

More than a decade ago, I was working with a team that was hitting a wall. They were talented, but they were deeply misaligned on where their energy should be going. To help them map out their blind spots, I built a tool to force reflection on the neglected aspects of their roles.

Over the years, I’ve refined this framework through individual coaching and team sessions. It works just as well for Individual Contributors as it does for Managers. I call it the Emerging Leadership Navigator.

As you can see in the profile map below, it breaks your role down into four distinct compass points:

• Business: The strategy, the market, and the value you are delivering.
• People: The relationships, the culture, and the emotional intelligence required to lead.
• Execution: The delivery, the grind, and getting things across the finish line.
• System: The processes, the structures, and how things scale.

The Reframe

When you look at a radar chart like the one above, the instinct is to judge the gaps between where you are (Self-Perception) and what the role requires (Importance).

But let’s reframe that gap. That negative space isn’t a character flaw or a permanent weakness. It is pure signal. If you are feeling overwhelmed, the gap is showing you exactly where the bottleneck is. The anxiety of feeling “behind” is simply the emotional signal that you have outgrown your current default setting and it’s time to intentionally step into a new quadrant.

Leadership Application

Leadership does not emerge by being perfect at all four dimensions simultaneously. That’s a recipe for burnout. Leadership emerges when you create the conditions for awareness.

When you map your role using the Navigator, you suddenly make the invisible visible. You might realize that as an IC, you’ve been over-indexing on Execution while entirely neglecting the System that could make your life easier. Or as a manager, you might realize you are focusing so heavily on the Business that the People dimension is eroding. Recognizing this misalignment is the first step to correcting it.

I recently decided to make this tool accessible to everyone by creating a simplified online version. You can read more about the philosophy behind it ​here​, and you can start your inquiry right here: ​The Emerging Leadership Navigator​

Note: I would love to hear your feedback on the tool itself, or simply hear how it made you reflect on your role differently. Hit reply and let me know.

A Practical Takeaway

TL;DR: You can’t navigate out of a rut if you don’t know where you are on the map. Mantra: “The friction I feel is the exact dimension of leadership I am avoiding.”

The Coaching Prompt

Before you click into the tool, ask yourself (or your team) these three questions this week:

1. Of the four dimensions (Business, People, Execution, System), which one do I naturally retreat to when I am stressed?
2. Which dimension am I currently avoiding because it makes me feel incompetent or uncomfortable?
3. If I shifted just 10% of my energy this week into my most neglected dimension, what specific problem would it solve?

We’ve all got that one colleague. The one who sends our blood pressure spiking the second they open their mouth in a meeting. Our default response? We label them as difficult, passive, or overly rigid, and we vent about it to our work bestie later.

But what if your intense frustration with them isn’t about their incompetence, but a massive flashing signal pointing toward your untapped potential?

The Source: Daniel Ofman’s Core Quadrant

Dutch management expert Daniel Ofman developed a remarkably intuitive framework called the Core Quadrant. In studying human behavior, Ofman noticed that our greatest interpersonal clashes don’t happen because we are fundamentally broken, but because we misunderstand the nature of our own innate strengths.

As ​Ofman explains in this video​, we are all born with effortless core qualities, things like determination, flexibility, or caring. But as he says, “There is no light without shadow.”

The Reframe: The “Too Much of Something Beautiful” Principle

When we look at our frustrations through Ofman’s lens, the emotional signal changes completely. Let’s break down the anatomy of a conflict using a common leadership trait: Determination.

• The Core Quality: You are naturally driven. Pushing projects across the finish line is effortless for you.
• The Pitfall (Too much of a good thing): Under stress, your determination tips over into your shadow side. You become Pushy or Demanding.
• The Challenge (The Antidote): To balance your pitfall, you need to develop its positive opposite. The antidote to being pushy is developing Patience. If you can be “patiently determined,” you become unstoppable.
• The Allergy (What you despise in others): Here is where the magic happens. What happens when someone takes Patience too far? They become Passive. This is your Allergy. Passive people drive you absolutely insane.

Here is the quote from Ofman that completely shifts this paradigm:

“If people would only realize that whenever you see something in another person that you don’t like, by definition it is always too much of something beautiful, it would change the world.”

That colleague who drives you crazy because they are “too passive”? They are just over-expressing the exact trait (patience) that you desperately need to develop.

The Leadership Application

In organizational life, we unconsciously look for our “Challenge” in others. The visionary founder partners with the methodical operator. The fiercely determined director hires the exceptionally patient manager.

This complementarity is incredibly powerful… until the pressure hits.

When stress enters the system, we retreat into our extremes. Suddenly, the determined leader views their patient partner as “lazy,” and the patient partner views the determined leader as a “bully.” You are allergic to their pitfall, and they are allergic to yours. It’s a predictable script that plays out in boardrooms every single day.

The goal of human-centric leadership isn’t to eradicate the people who annoy you. The goal is to stop judging your allergy and start mining it for the underlying “beautiful” trait. You don’t need to become passive, but you do need to learn the patience that lives underneath it.

A Practical Takeaway

Your intense emotional reactions to others are rarely about them; they are a diagnostic tool for your own imbalances.

Mantra: “My greatest frustrations are pointing to my greatest areas for growth.”

The Coaching Prompt

Grab a notebook and take 3 minutes to map this out before your next team interaction:

1. Identify the Trigger: Who is the one person at work who consistently triggers your “allergy” (frustration, anger, eye-rolls)?
2. Name the Label: What specific negative label have you placed on their behavior (e.g., passive, chaotic, overly rigid, wishy-washy)?
3. Find the Beauty: What is the positive, “beautiful” core quality hidden beneath that annoying behavior? (e.g., If they are “wishy-washy,” the core quality is “flexibility”).
4. The Integration: How can you integrate 10% more of that positive quality into your own leadership style this week?

We need to talk about process fatigue.

If you’ve spent any time in modern corporate software or product development, you know the feeling. The endless sprint planning sessions. The two-week agile cycles that feel like a relentless treadmill. The daily stand-ups where a dozen people justify their existence to a Jira board.

We often view this bureaucratic friction as an annoying “bug” of scaling a company. But what if it’s an emotional signal? That feeling of drowning in meetings and coordination isn’t a sign that you need a better Scrum Master. It is a signal that your teams are too big, your boundaries are too weak, and you are trying to manage uncertainty through surveillance rather than trust.

Shape Up

What if the approach developed by the team at Basecamp, and detailed by Ryan Singer in the book ​Shape Up​, is the exact answer we need? While traditional Agile often relies on large, multidisciplinary teams (Product Managers, Scrum Masters, UX, UI, Front-end, Back-end, QA) passing tickets back and forth, Shape Up advocates for a radically autonomous, micro-squad: one designer and one or two engineers.

Relevance in the Age of AI

Why is this incredibly relevant right now? Because we have entered the era of AI. With AI coding agents handling more and more software development tasks, a two-person squad today has the output capacity of a larger team from five years ago. Bloated multidisciplinary teams don’t make you faster anymore; they just multiply your communication tax.

The Reframe: Fixing the Time, Freeing the Humans

Traditional frameworks try to eliminate the anxiety of the unknown by breaking work into tiny pieces and asking: “How long will this take?”

Shape Up flips the script. You don’t ask for an estimate; you declare an appetite (e.g., “We are willing to spend six weeks on this problem, no more”).

By fixing the time constraint, you liberate the small team to creatively negotiate the scope. You give them a safe, strict container, and then you get out of their way.

The Shape Up Playbook: A Leadership Guide

This isn’t about blindly installing a new framework; it’s about drawing inspiration to fundamentally rethink how your organization delivers software. Here is the interconnected language of Shape Up, decoded for your context:

1. Preparing the Work (The Act of Shaping)

• Shaped versus unshaped work: You cannot hand a micro-team a vague, unshaped idea (“fix onboarding”) and expect success. You must define the boundaries, the problem, and the guardrails before you delegate.
• Designing at the right level of abstraction: When shaping, you don’t provide pixel-perfect wireframes—that stifles the team’s autonomy. You provide constraints.
• Concepting with breadboards and fat marker sketches: You sketch the flow and the logic of the solution using thick markers (to prevent getting bogged down in UI details) or text-based “breadboards.”
• Setting appetites instead of estimates: You declare what the problem is worth to the business in time (usually 2 or 6 weeks), rather than asking the team to predict the future.

2. The Commitment (The Contract)

• Choosing the right cycle length: Basecamp uses a six-week cycle. It’s long enough to build something meaningful from start to finish, but short enough that the end is always looming, forcing tough decisions.
• Making bets with a capped downside: You don’t “plan” a project; you make a bet on a 6-week appetite. The “capped downside” is the circuit breaker: if the project isn’t done in six weeks, it dies. No extensions. It forces the team to ship.
• Honoring uninterrupted time: Once the bet is made, leadership steps back. No daily stand-ups. No checking in. You give the team total focus.

3. Executing the Work (The Team’s Ownership)

• Breaking projects apart into scopes: Instead of organizing work by technical layers (e.g., “build the database”), the team organizes work by user flows or “scopes” that can be built, clicked through, and evaluated independently.
• Downhill versus uphill work: This is brilliant emotional vocabulary. “Uphill” work is full of unknowns, it’s the anxiety of figuring out how to solve the problem. “Downhill” work is just execution. Teams use this language to communicate their confidence levels to leadership without needing a status meeting.
• Scope hammering: To hit the immovable 6-week circuit breaker, the team must ruthlessly separate the “must-haves” from the “nice-to-haves.” They hammer the scope down to fit the time box.

4. The Reset

• A cool-down period: After a 6-week cycle, you mandate a two-week cool-down. No scheduled projects. The team fixes bugs, explores new tech, and breathes. You cannot run human beings at 100% capacity indefinitely.

The Practical Takeaway

AI has given us the tools to keep teams incredibly lean, but lean teams require high trust and clear boundaries. Stop feeding people unshaped work and demanding estimates. Give a small team a shaped problem, a fixed time appetite, and the autonomy to hammer the scope.

(And remember, this is just a primer. There is a wealth of tactical depth to learn in the actual book, I highly recommend reading it in full to rethink how your team builds.)

The Coaching Prompt

Bring these questions to your next planning session or your own weekly review:

1. Am I tossing “unshaped” work over the fence?(Where am I causing team anxiety by delegating vague ideas instead of bounded problems?)
2. Where are we suffering from communication tax?(Could a specific initiative be handled faster by isolating 1 designer and 1 engineer and leaving them alone for 6 weeks?)
3. Are we managing risk through surveillance or boundaries?(Do we rely on daily stand-ups to feel safe, or do we rely on a strict “circuit breaker” that caps our downside risk?)
4. What is currently “uphill” work for my team?(Where are they carrying the emotional weight of unknowns, and how can I help them push it over the hill into execution?)

We’ve all heard it. Maybe it was on the playground after a scraped knee, or at the dinner table after a frustrating day at school:

“Don’t cry.”

“Be a big girl/boy.”

“Don’t get angry. It’s not a big deal.”

From the time we can walk, we are taught that “strength” is synonymous with “silence.” We are coached to treat our emotions like unruly pets that need to be locked in the basement so the “productive” version of us can go to work.

But as Andy Puddicombe, the co-founder of Headspace, famously put it:

“Trying to outrun our emotions is as effective as trying to outrun our shadow in the sun.”

When the sun is high and things are easy, the shadow is small. But as the day goes on and the pressure mounts, that shadow stretches out behind you, looming over every decision you make. If you don’t learn to turn around and look at it, you’ll eventually trip over it.

The Source: Emotional Agility vs. The “Be Strong” Script

Psychologist Susan David, author of Emotional Agility, argues that modern culture often promotes a “tyranny of positivity.” We’ve been conditioned to treat difficult emotions as problems to fix rather than experiences to understand.

When we tell a child—or a direct report—not to feel what they are feeling, we aren’t teaching resilience. We are teaching suppression. And suppression is costly. Research shows that when people push emotions down, they don’t disappear. They tend to increase internal stress and often resurface later as disengagement, chronic stress, or emotional outbursts.

The Reframe: Emotions as Bio-Data

We need to stop viewing emotions as “weaknesses” and start viewing them as biological data points.

If you were driving a car and the “Low Oil” light came on, you wouldn’t put a piece of tape over it and say, “I’m a strong driver, I don’t need oil.” Yet, that’s exactly what we do when we tell ourselves to “power through” anxiety or “ignore” resentment.

• The Old Way: “Stop crying/getting angry. Get back to work.” (Repression).
• The New Way: “I feel tension in my chest. My body is noticing a threat. What is the signal?” (Literacy).

Leadership Application: The Stone-Faced Leader

The “Be Strong” narrative creates leaders who are emotionally stunted. If you can’t acknowledge your own fear, you will react with frustration when your team expresses theirs.

Unexamined emotions always “leak”:

• An unacknowledged fear of failure manifests as micromanagement.
• An unexpressed feeling of being undervalued manifests as passive-aggression.
• The “Don’t Cry” kid grows up to be the “Don’t Complain” boss who wonders why their turnover is so high.

True human-centric leadership requires us to stop being “policemen” of our feelings and start being “detectives.”

A Practical Takeaway: The “Data Scan”

Next time you feel a “negative” emotion, don’t try to outrun it. Stand still and name it. Use the “Physical Anchor” tool:

1. Locate it: Where is it in your body? (Tight jaw, heavy chest, knotted stomach?)
2. Label it: Use the Emotion Wheel. Start at the center (e.g., “Sad”) and move outward until you find the specific word (e.g., “Abandoned” or “Empty”).
3. The Mantra:“I don’t have to like this feeling to listen to the data it’s giving me.”

The Coaching Prompt

Try these questions to break the “Be Strong” cycle with yourself or your team:

• The Legacy: What was the “rule” about expressing emotions in my house growing up? How is that rule affecting my leadership today?
• The Signal: If this physical tension in my body had a voice, what is the one sentence it would say right now?
• The Shift: Instead of trying to “get over” this feeling, what would happen if I just sat with it for 90 seconds without judging it?

Header picture by Martino Pietropoli

I watched a new TV show last weekend, and there it was again. The line that, once you notice it, ruins almost every script it touches.

“What do we do now?”

I want you to watch this short clip of Reese Witherspoon explaining exactly why this four-word sentence is so toxic. It is a masterclass in identifying the subtle ways we give away our power.

Before I heard Reese talk about this, I never truly “heard” the line. It was just background noise. I never considered it a problem, let alone a symptom of something deeper.

This is the definition of a blind spot.

We don’t know what we don’t know. Often, the things we are missing are the very things that would make the most difference in our growth. In movies, this line strips a character of their agency. In the workplace, it does something even worse. It turns high-performing professionals into passengers who are simply waiting for a driver.

Once you see this pattern, you cannot unsee it. You start to notice it in meetings, in emails, and in the way teams lean on their leaders. It is the sound of potential stalling out.

We usually think of blind spots as embarrassing or dangerous. We treat them like bugs in our software that need to be patched immediately.

But here is the reframe: The moment you identify a blind spot, you have found your next level of performance. The “What do we do now?” feeling is a signal. It isn’t a sign that you are failing: it is a sign that you have reached the edge of your current “map.” When you feel that urge to ask for directions, you aren’t actually lost. You are just standing at the frontier of your own agency.

The discomfort you feel when you realize you’ve been “scripted” is actually the birth of a new leadership capacity. It is the transition from a Fixed Mindset (waiting for the right answer) to a Growth Mindset (creating the answer).

Once you realize that “What do we do now?” is a signal of a blind spot, you have to decide how to respond to it in real-time. Whether the words are coming out of your mouth or someone else’s, the goal is the same: move from Passive Waiting to Active Intent.

When you hear yourself saying it

It usually happens when you’re tired, overwhelmed, or facing a problem you haven’t seen before. Your brain wants to offload the cognitive load to someone else.

The Pivot: Catch the question before it leaves your lips. If it does slip out, immediately follow it with: “Wait, let me rephrase that. Based on what I see, I think our best move is X. What am I missing?”

The “I Intend To” Rule: Practice the habit of never presenting a problem without a proposed next step. Even if you are 90% sure your idea is wrong, stating an intent forces your brain back into the driver’s seat. It changes your posture from a passenger to a navigator.

Intent is not “The Answer”: This isn’t about being a lone genius. Stating an intent can be as simple as saying, “I intend to pull the team together this afternoon to analyze our options.” By doing this, you aren’t waiting for a boss to tell you when to collaborate. You are designing the conditions for the solution to emerge. You are owning the process, even if you don’t own the final answer yet.

When you hear your team saying it

This is the “Answering Machine” trap. When a report or a coworker asks you what to do, your ego wants to provide the answer. It feels good to be the expert. But every time you provide the “fix,” you are accidentally training them to remain in the blind spot.

Create the Container: Instead of giving the answer, hold the space for theirs. Use what David Marquet calls “The Ladder of Leadership.”

The Reflection Technique: When they ask “What do we do now?”, respond with: “That’s a critical question. Before I share my perspective, I want to hear yours. If you were in total control here, what would your first move be and why?”

Adjust and Decide Together: This isn’t about leaving them stranded. It’s about collaborative adjustment. Once they share their intent, you can say: “I like that logic. Let’s tweak this one part to account for X, and then let’s run with it.” You are no longer giving orders: you are refining their leadership.

Banish the “Answering Machine” response. Next time you or your team feels stuck, remember that the goal isn’t to be right. The goal is to be active. Replace “What do we do now?” with “I intend to…” even if that intent is just to gather the right people to solve it together.

The Coaching Prompt

Grab a notebook or bring these to your next 1-on-1:

1. The Reaction Audit: The last time a team member suggested a “wrong” course of action, did you shut it down or did you explore their logic?
2. The Safety Check: Does my team know what “safe to fail” looks like in this project? Or do they feel they only have one shot to be right?
3. The “I Intend To” Challenge: How can I encourage my team to start their updates with the phrase “I intend to” this week?

Thank you for reading the Emerging Leadership Newsletter Each edition explores one idea that helps leaders create organizations where people take responsibility and deliver impact. If this resonates with you, feel free to share it with a colleague or start a conversation in your team.

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