Difficult people can pull you into their chaos without even trying—their tone, their urgency, their moods, their criticism. If you’re not grounded, you’ll get swept into reacting on their terms instead of responding on yours. 

Staying centered protects your clarity, your confidence and your emotional space. It keeps you from mirroring their behavior or getting hooked by their intensity. When you stay in control of your state, their behavior loses its power to derail you.

Practice these 5 core skills to stay steady when they’re chaotic, calm when they’re reactive and confident when they try to push your limits.

Emotionally detach → “Separate the person from the problem”

When dealing with difficult people, emotional detachment is the skill that helps you separate their behavior from your worth, your mood and your identity. It’s the ability to stay steady when someone else is being reactive, rude, dismissive, demanding or dramatic.

Difficult personalities often pull you into their emotional world—frustration, urgency, negativity, blame. Emotional detachment acts like a buffer. It lets you observe the situation instead of absorbing it. You stop taking their tone personally and start seeing the pattern behind it.

Emotional detachment doesn’t make you passive. It makes you effective. It creates the breathing room you need to choose a smart, calm response even when the other person is doing everything they can to get a reaction out of you.

It’s about what happens inside you. It protects your inner world.

• Staying anchored
• Reducing emotional charge
• Not taking behavior personally
• Preventing emotional hijack

Use these 5 ways to practice emotional detachment:

• Shift your mental lens from “This is about me” to “This is how they operate.” Most difficult behavior is about others’ stress, habits, insecurities or patterns, not your worth or competence. When triggered, silently say: “This is their behavior, not my identity.”
• Create a mental glass wall when someone’s tone or words feel sharp. Imagine placing a glass wall between you and them. You can hear them, understand them, but their emotions can’t hit you. The wall goes up before they even speak.
• Turn down the internal volume. People can speak loudly or harshly, but you can choose to internally “turn down the sound.” Picture a volume knob and mentally dial it from a 10 → 4. You can still hear them, just without the intensity.
• Switch to observer mode. Switch from reacting emotionally to observing neutrally. Think in statements like “They’re stressed” “They’re speaking quickly” “They’re repeating their point.” This keeps you in observer mode, not absorber mode.
• Choose consciously what is not yours. After the interaction, ask yourself: “Is this mine to hold?” If not, picture placing their emotion in a box and sliding it away. Detachment grows when you consciously release what doesn’t belong to you.

Nothing other people do is because of you. It’s because of themselves. All people live in their own dream and their own mind. Even when words seem personal, such as a direct insult, they really have nothing to do with you. When we personalize, we negate the personal story and history of the other people involved. Personalizing assumes that everything is about us.
― Nedra Glover Tawwab, Set Boundaries

Keep a neutral tone → “Speak calm, stay calm”

When people become defensive, aggressive, passive-aggressive or emotional, your voice can either escalate the moment or calm it. A steady, even tone signals clarity, confidence, and control without inviting further conflict. It prevents the other person from feeding off emotional cues and helps you maintain authority without sounding harsh or reactive. 

A neutral tone also creates psychological space, allowing you to respond thoughtfully instead of being pulled into someone else’s emotional intensity.

This is about how you sound, which directly shapes how the other person responds. It regulates the temperature of the interaction.

• Calms the conversation
• Prevents escalation
• Signals steadiness, not defensiveness
• Reduces pushback or aggression

Use these 4 ways to maintain a neutral tone:

• Slow your pace by 10–15%. Speaking slightly slower than usual naturally softens your tone and reduces emotional leakage. When you feel triggered, your natural instinct is to speak faster. Deliberately slowing counters this.
• Drop your volume just one level. Not whispering, just enough to sound grounded. Lower volume = higher control. Loud voices invite matching energy; soft, steady voices disarm it.
• End sentences with downward intonation. Rising intonation (“You didn’t send the report?”) sounds anxious or unsure. Downward intonation (“You didn’t send the report.”) conveys calm certainty. Practice the difference out loud.
• Use short, steady phrases. Long, emotional sentences build intensity. Shorter phrases reduce escalation. Practice these: “I understand.” “Let’s look at this step-by-step.” “Here’s what we can do next.”

Your volume speaks volumes. Be aware of your dynamics, your tones as well as the loudness and softness of your voice on the phone and in person.
― Loren Weisman

Use assertive body language → “Lead with your posture”

When dealing with difficult people, your body speaks before your words do. Most tense interactions escalate not because of what you say, but because of how your posture, movement and facial expressions are interpreted. Difficult people often test boundaries, push buttons or try to dominate the interaction. 

Your body language becomes a non-negotiable anchor that signals you are not intimidated, you are not surrendering and you are not escalating. It shows presence without aggression and confidence without confrontation.

This is about how you carry yourself. It communicates boundaries and confidence without saying a word.

• Standing tall
• Using steady gestures
• Avoiding defensive postures
• Looking grounded and confident

Use these 5 ways to use assertive body language:

• Stand or sit tall. Roll shoulders back and down. Loosen your jaw. Align your spine. This trains your nervous system to associate upright posture with safety and groundedness. Slumping signals submission; collapsing inward invites more pressure.
• Practice with your voice. Say any sentence (e.g., “Let me think about that.”) at 70% of your usual speed. This conditions your voice to stay calm even when your mind speeds up. Repetition builds the pattern.
• Relax your facial expression. Relax your eyebrows, soften your eyes, unclench your jaw. Practice in front of a mirror so you know what your neutral, approachable expression looks like. Tightness in the face reads as aggression or anxiety to the other person.
• Still your hands. Place one hand lightly over the other. This removes subconscious agitation—tapping, fidgeting, crossing arms—that signals nervousness or defensiveness even when you’re not feeling either.
• Ground your feet. In conversations where someone becomes difficult, gently plant both feet on the ground. Feel the contact. Stable body → stable presence. This simple act interrupts the physical stress response.

When our body language is confident and open, other people respond in kind, unconsciously reinforcing not only their perception of us but also our perception of ourselves.
― Amy Cuddy, Presence

Pause before you speak →  “Be intentional, not impulsive”

When you’re dealing with difficult people, the difference between reacting and responding can completely shift the direction of the interaction. Reactions are quick, emotional and automatic, often fueled by frustration, hurt or stress. Responses are intentional, grounded and thoughtful. They come from awareness, not impulse. Reacting drains your energy. Responding protects your energy.

Reacting looks like:

• Snapping back
• Shutting down
• Avoiding
• Taking it personally

Reacting is the mind’s attempt to protect you. When you feel disrespected, ignored, criticized or threatened, your brain jumps into fight, flight or freeze, often within seconds.

This is why you might:

• Snap at someone
• Shut down
• Over-explain
• Feel defensive
• Say something you regret
• Withdraw or replay the moment all day

These reactions are normal. But in a workplace context, they often create more conflict instead of resolving the existing one.

Responding looks like:

• Speaking slower
• Asking questions
• Staying factual
• Keeping tone neutral

Responding is a learned skill. It means creating a pause between the trigger and your action. You don’t need to suppress your feelings. You need to choose what to do with them.

A response usually:

• Acknowledges emotion without letting it take over
• Considers the outcome you want
• Stays aligned with your values
• Keeps the conversation constructive
• Protects your boundaries without escalating tension

Responding is calm but not passive. It is firm but not aggressive. It is clarity instead of reactivity.

Learning to respond instead of react is about creating a small but powerful pause between what happens and what you do next. A small pause interrupts the emotional momentum. Even a 2–5 second pause shifts your brain from fight-or-flight to problem-solving mode. This gives you a chance to choose clarity over chaos.

Use these 3 pause tools during difficult interactions. These tools strengthen your ability to stay grounded, stable and thoughtful, even when others are not.

The 10-second trick

The ten-second trick is a simple but effective technique to interrupt the automatic response before it escalates by creating a pause between feeling strong emotions and reacting to them. It allows your mind to cool down, giving you a chance to respond thoughtfully instead of impulsively. It involves pausing for ten seconds, allowing you to gain control over your reactions instead of being controlled by them.

1. Notice the trigger: Recognize the signs—a racing heart, clenched fists or heated thoughts.
2. Pause and breathe: Take a slow, deep breath and count to ten in your mind. Focus entirely on the count or your breath.
3. Shift focus: Use those ten seconds to redirect your mind to something neutral or calming, like the feel of your feet on the ground or a soothing image.
4. Reassess: After the pause, ask yourself: Is this worth your energy? What’s the best way to respond? Are you making assumptions here?

Name the emotion

When you feel overwhelmed, silently name the emotion you’re experiencing. Labeling reduces emotional intensity. When your brain identifies a feeling, the emotional centers calm down and the thinking centers activate. This creates clarity and reduces reactivity.

1. Pause the moment you feel tension rising.
2. Name the emotion silently to yourself.
   • I’m feeling irritated.
   • I’m feeling pressured.
   • I’m feeling defensive.
   • This is making me anxious.

   3. Take one breath before speaking. You don’t have to say it out loud. The power is in the recognition.

The breath & hold method

This technique uses controlled breathing to shift your body out of a reactive, fight-or-flight state and into a more grounded one. The brief “hold” in the middle gives your nervous system a moment to settle, allowing your mind to catch up with the moment.

1. Inhale slowly through your nose for 4–5 seconds. Let your stomach rise. Avoid shallow chest breathing.
2. Hold your breath gently for 2–3 seconds. This brief stillness interrupts your body’s stress momentum.
3. Exhale fully through your mouth for 5–6 seconds. Release tension from your shoulders, jaw and hands.
4. Repeat 2–3 times or until your body feels less charged.

The pattern: Inhale 4–5s  →  Hold 2–3s  →  Exhale 5–6s  →  Repeat 2–3 times

The difference between responding and reacting is choice. When you are reacting, they are in control. When you respond, you are.
― Henry Cloud, Boundaries

Prepare Before You Walk In → “Get ready before it gets hard”

The anxiety before a difficult interaction is often worse than the interaction itself. Your mind starts rehearsing, bracing and anticipating—running worst-case scenarios, replaying past conversations, trying to prepare for every possible thing they might say or do.

That kind of mental preparation doesn’t help. It keeps your nervous system activated before anything has even happened, which means you walk in already reactive, already tense and already at a disadvantage.

Preparing intentionally is different. You don’t need to script every response or steel yourself for battle. You need to arrive grounded—clear on your goal, settled in your body and less likely to be caught off guard by your own emotional reactions.

Use this five-step ritual before any interaction you’re already feeling anxious about:

Step 1: Acknowledge what you’re feeling

Don’t push the anxiety down. Name it first.

Ask yourself: What am I feeling right now about this interaction?

Then name it simply and specifically:

• I’m anxious about how they’ll react
• I’m angry about what happened last time
• I’m dreading the conversation starting
• I’m worried I’ll say the wrong thing

Naming the emotion reduces its intensity. No need to eliminate it. Just take it off the background and put it somewhere you can see it. Once you’ve named it, it has less power to ambush you mid-conversation.

Step 2: Separate the story from the facts

Your mind has probably been telling a story about this interaction—what they’ll do, how it will go, what it means. Most of that story is prediction, not fact.

Ask yourself:

• What do I actually know about this situation?
• What am I assuming or predicting?
• What has happened before that I’m carrying into this moment?

Write down, even briefly, the facts you know and the stories you’re adding. This simple separation interrupts the mental spiral and brings you back to what’s actually real right now.

Step 3: Get clear on your one goal

Difficult interactions go sideways most often when you walk in without a clear sense of what you actually want from them.

Ask yourself: What is the one thing I want to achieve or clarify in this interaction?

Choose one. Not three. Not “I want them to understand how I feel AND agree to change AND apologize.” 

One clear, realistic outcome:

• Agree on a revised timeline
• Clarify who owns this decision
• Address the specific behavior that happened last week
• Set a boundary about after-hours messages

Write it down. This becomes your anchor if the conversation drifts or becomes difficult. When you lose your footing, you return to this.

Step 4: Ground your body

Your nervous system doesn’t know the difference between a real threat and an anticipated one. If you’re already anxious, your body is already in a mild stress response, which means your thinking is already narrower than usual.

Spend two to three minutes before the interaction doing one of these:

Breathing reset: Inhale for 4 counts, hold for 2, exhale for 6. Repeat five times. The extended exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system, the one that signals safety.

Physical grounding: Stand or sit with both feet flat on the floor. Feel the weight of your body. Relax your jaw, your shoulders and your hands deliberately. This tells your nervous system the environment is safe.

Cold water: Splash cold water on your face or wrists. This triggers the dive reflex and slows your heart rate quickly. It’s very useful when you have very little time.

Shift your goal from trying to feel calm to feeling less activated, enough that you can think clearly and respond instead of react.

Step 5: Set a behavioral intention

Finally, decide before you walk in how you want to show up. Not what you want to say. How you want to be.

Choose one intention:

• I will stay factual, not emotional
• I will pause before responding
• I will not over-explain or justify
• I will ask questions before making statements
• I will leave if the conversation becomes disrespectful
• I will keep my responses short

This intention becomes a quiet internal reference point during the conversation. When you feel yourself being pulled off course, the intention brings you back.

Summary

1. Other people’s moods, urgency and criticism can easily throw you off balance if you let them. Remaining centered safeguards your mental clarity and self-assurance, so that their behavior doesn’t dictate your reactions. 
2. Emotionally detach. Draw a line between someone else’s conduct and your own sense of self-worth. Rather than getting emotionally entangled, learn to watch the situation unfold from a slight distance, which stops you from internalizing their negativity. This distance gives you the mental room to pick a thoughtful reaction rather than getting baited into one. The underlying mindset shift: their actions reflect who they are, not who you are.
3. Keep a neutral tone. How you sound in the moment can either fan the flames or take the heat out of a conversation. Speaking in an even, controlled manner projects composure and authority while denying the other person any emotional fuel to escalate further. Essentially, your tone sets the emotional climate of the exchange and buys you time to think before responding.
4. Use assertive body language. Conflicts often intensify because of how someone’s stance, movements and facial cues are perceived, not just their words. Carrying yourself with steady, grounded body language sends an unmistakable signal that you won’t be pushed around or provoked. It’s a silent form of communication that establishes limits without a single word being spoken.
5. Pause before you speak. Impulsive reactions are fast and driven by emotion, while deliberate responses come from a place of awareness. Reacting on autopilot tends to leave you depleted, whereas choosing your response conserves your energy. A brief pause of just a few seconds is enough to move your brain out of a defensive state and into problem-solving mode.
6. Prepare before you walk in. Dreading a tough conversation is often more draining than actually having it, since your mind tends to rehearse worst-case outcomes beforehand. Don’t try to rehearse every possible line. Enter the conversation already settled and clear-headed.

Recommended Reading

How To Deal With Difficult People Workbook By Vinita Bansal

The Laws of Human Nature By Robert Greene

The post How To Stay Centered Around Difficult People appeared first on TechTello.

I have worked with many different kinds of teams—some that I lead myself and others that I observed from a distance. In my experience working with different groups of people, I realized that what makes a team stand out isn’t the knowledge, expertise or skills of its people. Those things were important, but they didn’t decide which teams outperformed and which teams barely met my expectations.  

All these teams had a good mix of people, clarity on their goals and the resources they needed to succeed. Yet, only a few groups consistently delivered while others struggled to keep up their commitments. 

Teams that did well did not always succeed—what mattered more was not their success, but how they handled failures. Their ability to rise above the challenges came from their ability to take risks. Their sense of freedom enabled them to experiment and find unique solutions. They were quick to adapt new tools and processes—curious to learn new technologies and integrate them into their workflows. They did not rely on one individual to carry the team’s load, it was their collective effort that made them shine. 

Great teams consist of individuals who have learned to trust each other. Over time, they have discovered each other’s strengths and weaknesses, enabling them to play as a coordinated whole.
— Amy Edmondson

While there are many small qualities that make a high-performing team, these 5 fall into a common pattern that always repeats:  

Utilizing collective intelligence of the group as opposed to siloed thinking

Teams that do not come together to brainstorm on ideas miss out on diverse thinking and differences of opinion. When people in the group don’t seek feedback on their ideas or don’t invite critical review of their logic, they make decisions based on their own knowledge and beliefs. They fail to hear perspectives that can help them see the flaws in their thinking—assumptions that may not be true, challenges they did not anticipate, risks they might have ignored or a better way to achieve their goals.

Relying on individual knowledge as opposed to collective wisdom leads to poor choices and bad decisions—more work is required to fix mistakes that could have been avoided, more time is consumed in revisiting and rehashing old decisions and more energy is spent in trying to make a sub-optimal solution work. 

Each person thinks differently and it’s this difference that adds value to the conversation. Every disagreement, every conflict, every question raised is an opportunity to align, resolve and converge on a common solution towards an approach that’s vetted and well thought out. A group of people can provide insights and expertise that no one individual can bring. 

To become a team member who contributes towards collective intelligence, ask:

1. How often do I involve others in my decision?
2. What kind of feedback do I seek—validating my thoughts or contradicting them?
3. Do I trust my team to give me the inputs I need?
4. What value do I see in getting diverse opinions? 

Teams that harness the power of collective intelligence are more innovative, better aligned and feel more supported—having others they can count on gives them the confidence to take the hard path and avoid easy choices. 

In a complex world, isolated experts are a liability. What you need are networks of teams sharing real-time context and intelligence.
— Stanley McChrystal, Team of Teams

Teams excel when they count on each other to guide, support and learn. Their collective value exponentially exceeds what an individual member can achieve on their own.

Prioritizing team goals over individual needs

When each individual in the team cares only about themselves—their aspirations, growth, promotion and success—they put their own goals above everyone else. They lean towards tasks that will make them look good and help them get promoted. They refuse to do the grunt work even if that’s what their team needs. They don’t collaborate and co-operate to help their team succeed. Their support is conditional—subject to what they’ll gain from the transaction instead of doing it to help others without expecting anything in return. 

Looking for opportunities to build new skills, taking on higher level roles and responsibilities or trying to stand out isn’t wrong. The problem occurs when individual aspirations start coloring their choices and impacting team goals. When everyone is thinking only for themselves, there is less alignment, more misunderstandings and confusion. Finger pointing and blame games start within team members as they try to protect themselves instead of taking responsibility. 

When team members work with each other instead of working against each other, they achieve more as a group. They share knowledge, openly express their concerns, work out solutions to the obstacles in their path and align on a common direction forward. The shared camaraderie in facing challenges together also builds a strong bond which makes work feel more fun and less like a slog. It energizes the team to push themselves and face the challenges with more conviction and resilience. 

To become a team member who puts team goals over individual needs, ask:

1. Do I understand my team goals?
2. How do my current goals fit into my team’s priorities?
3. How can I help my team in achieving success?
4. What can I learn from them?

When people in the team don’t separate their success from their team’s success, they achieve better results—being aligned on a common mission removes the friction that comes when everyone is rowing in a different direction. 

Inattention to results occurs when team members put their individual needs (such as ego, career development, or recognition) or even the needs of their divisions above the collective goals of the team.
— Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Teams collapse when every member puts their own interests above team goals. Working together strengthens the team to push for bigger and better goals.  

Feeling empowered to act independently without approval every step of the way

Teams that aren’t allowed to make their own decisions wait for approvals and permissions every step of the way. They need a higher level authority to review every minor detail, every small decision, every action they plan to take. They don’t feel confident about their decision. They worry about making a mistake. Being always dependent on someone else to make the final decision prevents them from taking accountability—they don’t feel responsible for how things turn out. 

Forced dependency tremendously slows down the team. They are often blocked, waiting for someone up the hierarchy to validate. Things that could be achieved in a few hours take days and weeks. Not feeling empowered also demotivates the team—if they can’t be trusted with small decisions, they might never get the opportunity to take on bigger roles. Always having someone to correct them also prevents them from making mistakes and learning from the process—a key element to progress and grow at work. 

Teams that understand which decisions they can make on their own and which require additional input excel as they can move fast on a large part of their work while slowing down for only a small fraction of it. Being trusted to lead decisions also creates the confidence and motivation to exceed expectations—when someone owns a decision, they’re more likely to stretch out and do everything possible to succeed. It creates a sense of accountability that’s otherwise missing. 

To become a team member who can act independently, ask:

1. What prevents you from making your own decisions?
2. What’s the worst that can happen if your decision does not turn out the way you anticipated? What issues can you predict? What steps can you take to mitigate those risks? What action can you take if it still fails?
3. What have you done to earn the trust to think and act independently?
4. What are the gaps preventing you from being given this opportunity?

High-performing teams are built by individuals who realize that waiting for permission is a guaranteed way to fail. They demand trust, ownership and support to make their own decisions. 

If you want people to think, give them intent, not instructions. Instructions breed compliance and dependence; intent breeds initiative and ownership.
— L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!

Teams that can think and act on their feet will outperform those who are always waiting to make a perfect decision. Don’t surrender your agency. Stop being dependent.

Taking carefully evaluated risks without always playing it safe 

When people in the team worry too much about failures and mistakes, they stop taking risks and start playing it safe. They do the work as it has always been done instead of identifying better ways. They give up on opportunities that require taking risks and sign up for the ones that feel safe. They hide mistakes instead of turning them into learning lessons. They don’t easily bounce back from failures as they treat even minor setbacks as major disasters. 

Not taking risks keeps them locked in a cycle of mediocrity—working hard without being impactful. People in the team stop growing as they don’t push themselves beyond their comfort zone. They don’t build new skills. They don’t learn to navigate the uncharted territory. They don’t develop the thinking that’s required to tackle challenges. It eventually leads to frustration and a lack of motivation from being stuck in the same place for too long.

Instead of basing decisions on what feels safe, carefully evaluated risks enable team members to introduce better processes, practices and solutions. Embracing unknowns and uncertainty make work feel more exciting and enjoyable. Whether it’s choosing a risky strategy, taking bold steps or running small experiments, taking an unconventional path requires thinking above and beyond. It requires asking questions, challenging the status quo and refusing to take the easy path.

To become a team member who isn’t afraid of taking risks, ask:

1. Am I leaning towards a safe choice only because the other option feels risky?
2. Do I avoid going down the path with unknowns and uncertainties?
3. What can I learn by pushing myself beyond my comfort zone? 
4. How can I stack the odds in my favor?
5. What’s within my control? 
6. How can I take more risks? 

Teams that make failure and feedback as part of their strategy invest in taking risks—they use a proper decision criteria to evaluate which risks are worth their time and attention.

If you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t taking enough risks. And if you’re not taking enough risks, you’re not learning.
— John C. Maxwell, Failing Forward

Great teams aren’t risk averse. They treat obstacles in their path as a learning opportunity instead of a thing to avoid. They build the mental muscle to take risks with courage, experience and practice. 

Leveraging AI to increase productivity and performance instead of resisting it

When team members do not invest in identifying how to apply artificial intelligence to their daily work, they take longer to complete tasks—something that could be done in a few minutes can take hours and even days. They might also make mistakes that could be easily flagged by an AI tool. They may miss critical insights or fail to see the flaw in their own thinking—something that ChatGPT, Google Gemini or Claude can easily point out when leveraged as a thinking partner. Their time and energy that can be better put to use in dealing with demanding and challenging tasks gets wasted by doing repetitive work manually instead of building workflows and delegating it to the AI agents. 

Teams that don’t leverage AI can’t match the quality and pace of work of teams that make it a part of everything they do. Doing grunt work themselves prevents them from taking on higher level responsibilities. The number of people in the team itself becomes a limiting factor when AI is not treated as another teammate who can share your workload and help you become more productive and performant. 

AI is really good at writing code, identifying bugs, summarizing content, doing analysis, generating insights, reviewing your approach and automating repetitive work. It can do all this without ever getting tired or complaining. It can free up your time to focus on things that only you can do—clarifying requirements, seeking alignment, validating and reviewing AI output and strategizing how to do more in less time. 

To become a team member who uses AI to their advantage, ask:

1. How can I partner with AI?
2. What tools are available to me?
3. What do I repeatedly do that can be accomplished using an AI agent? 
4. Which parts of my work should I continue doing myself and which parts should I delegate to AI?

When team members treat AI as their partner, they stop wasting their time and energy on tasks that are beneath their potential. 

Within five years, the ability to work effectively with AI will be a standard expectation in most professional roles. Not because AI will replace human workers, but because AI-assisted workers will consistently outperform those who can’t harness these tools effectively.
― Enamul Haque, A Beginner’s Guide to Prompt Writing

AI will not replace human intelligence. It will enhance it. Teams that leverage AI will easily outpace those that resist it.   

Summary

1. Teams that skip the brainstorm and skip the feedback loop make decisions on incomplete knowledge. They miss the assumptions, risks and better paths that only come from other people’s eyes on the problem. Teams that invite disagreement instead of avoiding it end up more innovative, better aligned and more confident taking the harder path.
2. When everyone optimizes for how they look instead of what the team needs, you get finger-pointing and misalignment instead of progress. When people stop separating their own success from the team’s success, the friction disappears and the whole group moves in one direction.
3. Teams stuck waiting on permission for every small decision move slower, feel less accountable and never build the muscle to make bigger calls. Teams that know which decisions are theirs to own move fast on most of their work and only slow down where it actually matters.
4. Playing it safe out of fear of failure keeps a team stuck in mediocrity—no growth, no new skills, no capacity for the unknown. Teams that treat risk and failure as strategy, not accident, are the ones that find better processes and better outcomes.
5. Teams that don’t build AI into their daily work waste time on what could be done in minutes and miss the flaws AI could’ve flagged for free. Teams that treat AI like a teammate free themselves up for the work only a human can do and outpace everyone still doing it the old way.

Recommended Reading

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team By Patrick Lencioni

The Culture Code By Daniel Coyle

The post Why Some Teams Excel While Others Collapse appeared first on TechTello.

Your brain prioritizes immediate rewards over future benefits. This makes you react to deadlines, pressures and urgencies. You sign up for work that isn’t part of your goals, you entertain adhoc requests and you try to fix a production bug while fearing another deadline that’s due tomorrow. You rush from one task to the next, try to keep up with the high expectations and meet the commitments you promised to fulfil. 

This keeps you reactive—always responding to what’s right in front of you instead of pausing to think about the big picture. Urgent work consistently crowds out important thinking—it keeps you busy by completing a task, checking an item off your to-do list and feeling a temporary sense of relief. It gives you a sense of progress without expanding your skills. Your work is less impactful, hardly thoughtful and does not get noticed. 

Being stuck with today’s priorities also prevents you from embracing future opportunities. When you’re too occupied meeting deadlines, you don’t notice the opportunities that might advance your career. Lack of time also prevents you from identifying where your skills might be valuable and how you can contribute beyond assigned tasks to do more impactful work.  

It’s easy to get caught up dealing with everyday mess at work leaving the future unplanned and unhinged. When daily chaos pulls all your focus, you may fail to think strategically and act in ways that aligns your long-term goals with short-term actions.

Because we’re disconnected from our Future Selves, we opt for near immediate goals or dopamine hits. This short-term seeking ends up costing our Future Selves big.
― Benjamin P. Hardy, Be Your Future Self Now

I have made this mistake over and over again many times in my career where I have used the excuse of being overburdened by my current commitments as a reason to not plan my future. You don’t have to repeat those mistakes. You don’t have to limit yourself. By building the habit of thinking beyond current tasks and deadlines, you can align your present with your future.    

You can fulfill your commitments without being overstretched. You can build new skills and sharpen existing ones. You can take on additional responsibilities that are aligned with your strengths. Big picture thinking can enable you to evaluate the consequences of your decisions and make choices that are inline with your long-term goals.

You don’t have to carve out extra time to do this. You don’t have to lock yourself up and force yourself to think critically. By making small changes in your daily thinking habits, you can achieve significant results in your future. 

Anticipate challenges

When you’re rushing from one deadline to another, you don’t take time to plan for the obstacles and challenges in your path. You consider the best case scenario without planning for the worst. You ignore the risks that might make your current strategy infeasible and force you to reevaluate your options. You keep executing your plan until you hit a roadblock. 

Unexpected challenges and unknowns you never planned for can confuse or upset you. Being unprepared can overwhelm you. You may feel completely knocked down and find it hard to recover from the setback. You may make decisions you later regret. 

When you don’t take time to think through the challenges you may face, even a small hurdle can feel like a major stumbling block. Every small thing that doesn’t go according to the plan adds to your trouble. More time and effort is required to fix unexpected issues. More rework to navigate the uncertainty. You may miss deadlines you worked so hard to achieve.  

When planning a task or a project, instead of considering only the happy path, prepare for the bumps in the road:

What are the assumptions you’re making?

What issues might come up later?

What can make this project fail?

What risks have you not considered?

Do you have a plan B?

Working backwards from your destination and imagining everything that might go wrong along the way gives you an opportunity to plan for them upfront instead of reacting to them when they show up. It also does not tax you mentally and emotionally because you’ve already gone through the exercise of imagining issues that might break your momentum and derail your progress. 

The only guarantee, ever, is that things will go wrong. The only thing we can use to mitigate this is anticipation. Because the only variable we control completely is ourselves.
― Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle Is the Way

Think beyond the deadline by thinking about the journey to get there. Consider the ups and downs, highs and lows and victories and failures. Build a future that’s intentional, not circumstantial. 

Identify opportunities

When you have a packed agenda every day—do a few meetings, fix some bugs, make some decisions and add some new features—it’s hard to think about where your skills can be put to better use or when your abilities need to be expanded. You keep doing the work that comes easy to you without stretching yourself and stepping out of your comfort zone. 

Staying busy with assigned work makes you overlook unassigned opportunities—a new project which can help you build team lead skills. Architecture and system design opportunity for a new initiative that can enable you to own a system end-to-end. Opportunity to attend stakeholder meetings where you can learn conflict handling and negotiation skills. You may miss many of these unless you take the initiative to identify them and convince your manager that you’re ready to take on bigger and better responsibilities. 

Managers are busy with hundreds of things to do and leaving this decision to them may not be in your best interest. Partnering with them by understanding what challenges they’re facing and how you can contribute can enable you to find the right opportunities for yourself:

What are their biggest pain points?

What new initiatives are being kicked off?

What are the low hanging fruits?

How can you ease out a little bit of their workload?

Aligning your aspirations with the right opportunities requires continuous interest in your manager’s work life. You cannot expect them to give you work that does not exist. But by understanding them better, you can contribute more than just the assigned tasks. You can request specific assignments, be part of new initiatives and sign up for work that can help you expand your skills. Actively seeking the right opportunities also makes you come across as someone who’s interested in their own growth. It builds trust.  

If you want your boss to adapt to you, you must be willing to adapt to her as well. Are you ready, willing, and able? 
— Mary Abbajay, Managing Up

Chasing the next deadline won’t get you in front of the right opportunities. You need to work closely with your manager to find work that aligns your interests with their plan—look for win/win opportunities.  

Consider long-term consequences 

When completing a task is the goal you adopt, you get wired for quick thinking and fast decisions. You consider the problem right in front of you and find the easiest way to get it done. Ticking an item on your list creates instant gratification—it gives you a dopamine hit and a never ending cycle of quick fixes and short-term thinking. You face a problem and apply the first solution that comes to mind without considering its long-term consequences. 

Stress and anxiety to complete the task can make you avoid a better solution because it takes longer to complete. Worry that you’ll not meet the deadline can make you apply shortcuts and skip critical reviews. Considering only the next step without taking a larger view makes you miss the impact of your decision into the future—issues keep repeating, systems don’t scale and more time is spent in rework than building new systems. 

While making decisions, optimize for long term gain at the cost of short term pain. Think about:

How can you make decisions with positive outcomes compounded in the future?

Is this decision attractive only because it has an immediate effect (first order consequence) positive?

What can be the potential downside of this decision and its effect later?

Thinking about the future is uncomfortable, but embracing this discomfort can make you get past many avoidable problems. It can enable you to push aside your short-term thinking and consider the implications of your decision into the future. By analyzing each task, every problem from the perspective of its second and third order consequences, you can train your brain to give up short-term rewards in favor of more long-term growth. 

Failing to consider second- and third-order consequences is the cause of a lot of painfully bad decisions, and it is especially deadly when the first inferior option confirms your own biases. Never seize on the first available option, no matter how good it seems, before you’ve asked questions and explored.
— Ray Dalio, Principles 

It’s tempting to give in to good outcomes with small upsides that are easily accessible and visible to you without weighing in on the potentially large downside of your decisions in the future. Doubt what may seem like an obvious choice. Seek hard truths. 

Implement the feedback loop

The biggest mistake you can make when running behind deadlines is to not learn from the process. You may stop paying attention to the feedback and continue running on autopilot. Not pausing and taking these signals into account prevents you from separating behaviors that are helpful from the ones that are damaging to your own growth and those of others. 

You may not see the gap between how you view yourself and how others perceive you. You may become so hyperfocused on your own wants that you may not see what others need. You may push too hard for your own ideas while ignoring alternative perspectives and differences of opinion. Without the process to know how you’re doing, you can’t improve. You can’t learn from your mistakes. You can’t do better.

Designing a better future comes from reviewing your past, making corrections in your present and repeating this loop often so that you are constantly learning and becoming a better version of yourself:

How do others feel when they’re around you?

Do they feel safe to communicate and collaborate?

What are their concerns?

Can you separate signal from noise? 

Getting quality feedback requires curiosity and giving up your default urge to defend your stance. It requires putting your own ego aside and paying attention to other people’s thoughts and feelings. You don’t have to act on every feedback that comes your way. You don’t even have to accept that it’s true. But, you definitely need to do some soul searching to identify the useful parts, even if it hurts. 

Feedback is valuable information about where one stands now and what to work on next. It is welcome input rather than upsetting verdict.
― Douglas Stone, Thanks for the Feedback

Honest feedback paints a true picture of where you stand right now. It gives you a direction on the steps to take in the future. Take it seriously. Implement a feedback loop. 

Anticipating challenges keeps you from being blindsided. Identifying opportunities keeps you from being overlooked. Weighing long-term consequences keeps you from repeating the same fixes. Listening to feedback keeps you from standing still. They don’t require extra time or a separate process, just small shifts in how you show up to work everyday. Stop working harder on what’s right in front of you. Occasionally step back and take a look at the big picture. 

Summary

1. Deadlines keep you reactive, not strategic. When you’re always responding to what’s urgent, you trade long-term impact for short-term relief. Being busy isn’t the same as being valuable.
2. Anticipating problems is cheaper than reacting to them. Working backwards from your destination and imagining what could go wrong lets you plan for setbacks instead of being blindsided by them.
3. Opportunities don’t find people who are heads-down. You have to actively understand your manager’s pain points and initiatives because no one is more interested in your growth than you—spot it, ask for it.
4. Fast decisions favor short-term comfort over long-term gain. Training yourself to weigh second- and third-order consequences is uncomfortable, but it’s what separates decisions that compound positively from ones that require rework.
5. You can’t improve without a feedback loop. Reviewing your past, correcting your present and repeating that cycle is what turns intention into an actual future-self worth building.

Recommended Reading

The Long Game By Dorie Clark

Essentialism By Greg McKeown

The post How to Think Beyond Today’s Deadlines appeared first on TechTello.

In the previous article, I wrote about the five leadership styles that can turn your strengths into blind spots. Here are the next five.

Firefighter Leader 

Your strong sense of urgency to respond to problems—whether it’s a missed deadline, unhappy customer, production issue or a major execution roadblock—makes you solve them quickly and prevent major disasters. You thrive on solving pressing problems and jumping into crises. Your ability to remain composed during difficult situations, identify solutions to problems that block progress and protect business from immediate risks makes you as the person everyone turns to when things go wrong. 

You’re admired for your ability to handle pressure and resolve critical issues faster than anyone else in the company. 

However, being a “Firefighter leader,” when crisis management becomes your default way of leading rather than the exception, you become so busy in solving today’s problems that you fail to prevent tomorrow’s issues. Problems keep repeating as the team moves to the next emergency before addressing the root cause. Priorities are constantly shifted to handle the latest urgency. Long-term initiatives are delayed as they are constantly interrupted by the latest fire. People learn to be reactive, rather than being proactive. They stop paying attention to the important priorities as immediate demands keep them occupied.

Being trapped in a cycle of urgency leaves little time for planning or improvement. When you don’t learn to escape the reactive mode, strategic work suffers.  

Here are the signs you may be leading as a firefighter leader:

1. You feel valuable when solving crises.
2. Most of your day is spent responding to urgent issues.
3. Important priorities are pushed aside constantly to address the latest problem. 
4. You measure success by how quickly issues are solved, not how rarely they occur.
5. You barely have time for strategic thinking.

Solving the root cause of problems is always more urgent than solving any problem which it produced. Addressing the root cause of problems never costs time; it always gives time.
― Luca Dellanna, 100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late

Pride yourself on preventing problems, not extinguishing fires. Address the root cause. Reward preparation, not the ability to handle crises. 

Stabilizer Leader

When your leadership strength is to create structure around chaos, you become really good at building dependable systems and processes, improving execution and reducing unnecessary risks. You’re able to reduce surprises, establish order and restore confidence and stability. Predictability, reliability and consistency makes business operate with a greater discipline. Execution speeds up as work becomes more organized with clear expectations, defined roles and responsibilities, better planning, less uncertainty and operational excellence.  

Employees feel less overwhelmed by constant change, customers experience greater reliability and trust increases as teams become more aligned around common processes and know what to expect.

However, when consistency and stability takes priority over growth and opportunities, you start resisting change. Bold ideas are shot down because they appear too risky. Every new initiative requires extensive documentation, multiple review cycles and a long chain of approvals. Maintaining the status quo takes priority over experiments and innovation. Instead of pursuing growth, people start playing safe. The desire to reduce risk can make the organization slow to adapt and reluctant to innovate.

Resisting change until every uncertainty has been addressed, becoming increasingly cautious in decision-making and not being able to separate healthy experimentation from unnecessary risk limits future growth. It prevents you from launching products and entering new markets much faster.

Here are the signs you may be leading as a stabilizer leader:

1. You look for risks before opportunities.
2. You stick to processes at the cost of agility.
3. New ideas are scrutinized more than existing practices. 
4. People rarely challenge the status quo.  
5. Competitors move faster than your organization.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday’s logic.
— Peter F. Drucker

Stop treating change as a threat. Evolve and embrace tomorrow’s opportunities before the organization falls behind. Thoughtfully adapt instead of trying to preserve the status quo. 

Visionary Leader

You’re a strategist—someone who’s always thinking about the future, new ideas and big opportunities. You recognize emerging trends, question conventional thinking and lean towards ideas that may seem just beyond reach. You’re energized by change, innovation and creating a better tomorrow. You encourage people to think bigger and not be limited by today’s constraints. You convince them that a meaningful change is possible. You rally them around a compelling purpose. You inspire direction and transformation. You inspire growth and possibility. 

Your optimism is contagious. It makes the future feel exciting and within reach. 

But when you continue to play the role of a visionary leader and keep chasing the next big opportunity before giving life to the existing ones, projects compete for the same people and resources. Roadmaps change repeatedly. There’s a constant shift in direction. People who were enthusiastic before now feel exhausted because they can’t make out what truly matters and what are the organization’s top priorities. Constantly introducing new initiatives overwhelms teams and prevents existing priorities from gaining traction. When execution is not prioritized, even the best ideas lose value.

You need to translate strategic ambition into executional reality. You need to let important initiatives complete before launching new ones. You need to protect strategic focus by limiting active priorities.

Here are the signs you may be leading as a visionary leader:

1. You have laid down a solid strategy without execution plans.
2. New opportunities constantly interrupt ongoing work.
3. Success is measured by ideas rather than successful completions.
4. People feel overwhelmed by constant change.

No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility. Until then, there are only good intentions.
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive

Don’t let new ideas outpace execution. Turn initiatives into reality. Measure success by outcomes, not an imaginative future. 

Expert Leader

You have the deepest knowledge, technical expertise and the experience to solve difficult problems. You’re consistently right and have the best answers. You have high standards. You establish best practices, solve problems others cannot and are trusted with high risk decisions because of your informed judgment. You raise the quality of thinking by asking tough questions that most people avoid. 

People listen when you speak because you have built competence over many years and are now highly respected. Your expertise is invaluable when an organization needs someone with deep knowledge and a reputation for excellence. 

However, continuing as an “Expert leader” limits others’ growth. You correct instead of coach. You give answers instead of asking questions. You review every important decision. You’re involved in every technical detail. Always having the best answers makes it difficult to step away because everything starts depending on your perspective. Team members struggle to make confident decisions without you because they believe they can’t succeed without your knowledge and expertise.  

Instead of being the person with all the answers, you need to develop independent thinking, build the confidence and judgment others need to succeed. 

Here are the signs you may be leading as an expert leader:

1. Discussions often end with your opinion carrying the most weight.
2. You feel indispensable because of your knowledge.
3. People constantly come to you for answers instead of making their own decisions.
4. Success depends heavily on your expertise. 

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.
― Jack Welch, Winning

Stop measuring your success by being the smartest person in the room. Measure it by how capable your team becomes without your involvement. Delegate judgment, not just tasks. 

Protector Leader

You protect your people from brutal work environments where others lack respect for their time and productivity. You constantly filter information before it reaches the team. You shield them from executive pressure. You protect them from organizational politics. You act as a buffer for everything. 

Protecting your team from getting overwhelmed by requests, blocking information that doesn’t concern them and keeping them away from anything that might distract them gives them an opportunity to  focus for long durations without interruptions, which leads to increased productivity and high quality work. 

However, good intent and healthy protection can turn into toxic behavior when you don’t draw the line and go overboard with it. You block people from getting the necessary exposure. Your team acquires technical excellence, but fails to learn other valuable skills like effective communication, conflict resolution or delegation. You create strict team boundaries with a “my team” vs “your team” attitude by treating your own team’s goals as primary and everything else secondary. This breaks down collaboration necessary to achieve common goals. Instead of creating a resilient team, you build a dependent one. 

Instead of trying to over-protect your team from unnecessary distractions and interruptions, coach them to manage their own time well. Explain the benefits of healthy collaboration and show what it looks like. Empower them to say no to requests that do not align with their goals.  Encourage them to go beyond team boundaries to acquire knowledge about other teams and functions. Tell them to make decisions aligned with the larger interest of the organization and not just their teams.

Here are the signs you may be leading as a protector leader:

1. You absorb pressure instead of letting your team learn from it.
2. You negotiate deadlines and expectations without involving them.
3. You worry that exposing people to failure, criticism or conflict will damage morale.
4. Team members approach you whenever they face resistance instead of resolving it themselves.  

Employees don’t benefit from leaders who take away the suffering. They need leaders who come alongside them to understand the struggle and support dignity, capability, and purpose.
― Nate Regier, Compassionate Accountability

Your good intentions to act as a gatekeeper only hurts your team. Stop shielding and start empowering to help them move forward. 

Summary

1. You solve problems faster than anyone. But when firefighting becomes your default, root causes never get addressed. Problems keep repeating. Stop rewarding speed. Reward prevention.
2. You bring order to chaos. But when stability becomes the goal, change becomes the enemy. Bold ideas get buried in approvals. Stop protecting the status quo. Start protecting the future.
3. You see what’s next before anyone else. But when new ideas keep arriving before old ones finish, execution suffers and people burn out chasing your next pivot. Stop measuring success by ideas. Measure it by outcomes.
4. You have the answers. But when you’re always the answer, no one else learns to think. Your team depends on you instead of growing past you. Stop being indispensable. Start making yourself unnecessary.
5. You shield your team from noise and politics. But over-protection breeds dependence, not resilience. Your people get good at the work and bad at everything around it. Stop shielding. Start empowering.

Recommended Reading

Leadership and Self-Deception By The Arbinger Institute

The Leadership Challenge By James M. Kouzes

The post When Leadership Strengths Become Leadership Blind Spots appeared first on TechTello.

Your leadership style may no longer fit the organization and the hardest part is seeing it. The startup you built with your hands-on, move-fast style may start to suffocate as it grows—it needs structure and delegation, but you refuse to give up control. Your ability to solve crises and bring order to chaos can become a bottleneck once stability returns and the organization is ready to take risks. Your exceptional thinking skills that inspired and launched many new initiatives may fail as you love kicking-off projects, but lose interest during the execution stage. Your strength to build strong relationships can come at the cost of avoiding difficult conversations—when preserving harmony takes priority over speaking the truth.

You can be highly effective in one stage of the organization and become a liability at a different stage. What made you excellent and effective once can now become the very thing that limits you. 

You have not become incompetent. You simply refuse to adapt to the changing context. You fail to see that your strengths and assets have now turned into a weakness. You ignore the possibility that what you bring to the role may need a fundamental shift. 

Leadership at scale—and leadership as you scale—means you’re constantly adapting and evolving. You can’t follow a single style or approach. You’re always leading through transitions. Your company is always changing around you. And this means you’re naturally going to have a very resilient kind of leadership, producing a resilient team and company.
― Reid Hoffman, Masters of Scale

Leadership isn’t about finding the perfect style. It’s about recognizing the strengths that once made you successful are no longer the strengths your organization needs now. It’s about constantly adapting and evolving instead of being fixated on a certain style. 

Here are the leadership styles that stop fitting different stages of organizational growth:

Hero Leader

In a startup mode, build fast, break fast mentality prevails. Speed and agility matters more than process and perfection. After working in this mode for many years, you may learn to thrive in uncertainty—solving problems personally, making quick decisions and carrying the team through difficult times. You were always available, dependable, resourceful and someone who worked the longest hours and carried the biggest load. 

In the early stages of the organization, these qualities were invaluable. They inspired confidence, created momentum and helped the team navigate ambiguity. 

However as the organization grows, instead of establishing processes, building systems and developing people, you may continue to operate in the “Hero mode.”

Believing that you’re the only person capable of helping or that everything depends on you makes you a rescuer of problems rather than a builder of capability. This slows down growth as it becomes limited by one person’s capacity. Your willingness to do everything prevents others from stepping up and taking ownership. It holds them back. 

Here are the signs you may be leading as a hero:

1. You’re copied on every email.
2. Team members wait for your review and approval on everything.
3. You frequently step in to solve problems.
4. You prefer doing things yourself than delegating them.
5. You feel guilty taking time off with the worry that things may fall apart.

Ultimately, the most important person to have control over is yourself—for it is that self-control that will allow you to ‘give control, create leaders.’ I believe that rejecting the impulse to take control and attract followers will be your greatest challenge and, in time, your most powerful and enduring success.
— L. David Marquet, Turn the Ship Around!

As the organization grows, evolve your leadership style from a hero to an enabler. Instead of trying to save the day, build a team that no longer needs saving.

Commander Leader

When working with new or inexperienced teams, high risk projects or during times of uncertainty and emergencies, providing clear instructions, telling people exactly what to do, reviewing every detail, checking every deliverable and monitoring the progress closely may get things moving and solve problems within the specific time constraints. 

It provides clarity, direction and quick decision-making. It prevents problems from turning worse due to lack of guidance and support. 

However, continuing in the “Commander mode” as teams mature or when there’s no rush, kills ownership and initiative. What once created alignment starts limiting creativity and independent thinking. Once team members become experienced, they don’t need hand-holding, continuous monitoring or constant direction. They need autonomy, trust and support. They need someone who can inspire confidence and believe in their ability to figure things out on their own. 

Here are the signs you may be leading as a commander:

1. You micromanage every small detail.
2. You dictate how things must be done. 
3. You’re overly cautious and hyper vigilant.
4. You don’t give space to your team to think and learn. 

Micromanagement fails because no one person can control multiple people executing a vast number of actions in a dynamic environment, where changes in the situation occur rapidly and with unpredictability. It also inhibits the growth of subordinates: when people become accustomed to being told what to do, they begin to await direction. Initiative fades and eventually dies. Creativity and bold thought and action soon die as well. The team becomes a bunch of simple and thoughtless automatons, following orders without understanding, moving forward only when told to do so. A team like that will never achieve greatness.
― Jocko Willink, The Dichotomy of Leadership

As your team matures, shift in your leadership style from exerting control to providing context. Promote ownership and empowerment, not dependency. 

Builder Leader

Building products and systems from scratch, spotting opportunities, leading complex decisions and establishing a strong culture and a sense of purpose can make you highly valued and respected as a leader. You understand the products, people and customers better than anyone else. You’re deeply connected to the organizational challenges and its realities. 

Your energy, enthusiasm, a strong sense of conviction and willingness to do whatever the situation demands enabled you to build the organization from the ground up and that’s no small feat. 

As the organization grows, complexity increases as more teams, more products and more customers now need your attention. However, continuing to work in the “Builder mode” and operate as if the organization is still in its early days prevents you from realizing that you can’t scale without process and structure. You can no longer rely only on your instinct, decisions will now need data. Knowledge can no longer stay inside people’s heads, it needs to be documented and made available to everyone. You can’t be the one with all the information who builds everything personally, you now need to delegate responsibilities, decision-making and execution.  

Here are the signs you may be leading as a builder:

1. You’re involved in operational details rather than strategic priorities.
2. You try to establish a deep understanding of the systems instead of operating with a 10,000 feet view.
3. You don’t invest in establishing processes, documenting knowledge or creating structure so others can operate without your presence. 
4. You believe that no one understands the organization as well as you do.

Letting go and trusting others to do things well is one of the more challenging aspects of being a leader of a growing organization.
― Verne Harnish, Scaling Up

As the organization expands, shift your leadership style from intuition to processes and systems. Continue to build momentum and strong culture without personal involvement.  

Consensus seeker Leader

Collaborating with people from different teams and functions is one of the hardest jobs and you may be really good at it. You invite different perspectives, encourage others to speak up and create a safe environment to ensure everyone feels heard before any major decisions are made. Your ability to bring people together, have them resolve differences of opinion and agree on a common approach builds trust and alignment. It creates a buy-in which is otherwise hard to get. 

Your leadership style prevents siloed execution, reduces unnecessary conflict and makes people feel valued and respected.  

But, getting everyone to agree before moving forward isn’t always practical and desirable. Too much collaboration can slow down execution and create decision paralysis. When every decision requires universal agreement, speed, accountability and execution suffer. Too many meetings are conducted before important decisions are made which causes meeting fatigue. Plans are discussed, but never put into action because someone or the other is dissatisfied. Revisiting decisions that were already made becomes a norm leading to loss of opportunities and momentum. 

Instead of always seeking consensus, shorten decision cycles for lower risk issues. Seek inputs, but make the final call and have others disagree and commit—stop waiting for everyone’s approval. 

Here are the signs you may be leading as a consensus seeker:

1. You postpone decisions because not everyone agrees.
2. You’re reluctant to make unpopular decisions.
3. More time is spent in meetings and less in execution.
4. Opportunities are missed because you refuse to take the final call. 
5. You feel increased emotional burden and decision fatigue from prolonged discussions. 

Use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this, but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?
― Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander

When working for a growing organization, seek input, not permission. Stop prioritizing harmony when the organization needs speed. 

Coach Leader

When your leadership style involves growing people by asking questions, encouraging learning, developing skills, creating opportunities and building confidence, you invest in building strong relationships, creating engaged teams and a culture where people feel valued. Your goal is to develop future leaders by building long-term capability. Your coaching and support matters a lot when people face obstacles and challenges. 

People perform best when they’re supported, developed and encouraged. Protecting your team’s confidence and maintaining good relationships is a smart strategy to build a strong organization that can scale with the future demands. 

However, when developing people begin to overshadow delivering results, continuing in the “Coach mode” may unintentionally create a culture where accountability feels optional. You avoid difficult conversations with the worry it might discourage them. You don’t give direct feedback because it feels uncomfortable. You let high performers pick up slack as underperformance goes unaddressed. When accountability or decisive action is needed, endless coaching can delay progress. It can set up wrong expectations with the people that they’ll always be supported regardless of their performance.  

This doesn’t mean you should stop developing people. Growth requires balancing support with accountability. It requires providing encouragement with clear expectations, giving feedback early and holding people accountable instead of letting poor performance slip.  

Here are the signs you may be leading as a coach leader: 

1. You’re known for being highly approachable and supportive.
2. You celebrate effort more than results.
3. You explain away poor performance instead of confronting it.
4. You give repeated chances to underformers without meaningful improvement.
5. You try to address missed targets with additional coaching. 

Leaders must…become better communicators and enforcers of what they want done. If you are more interested in being liked and popular than holding people accountable for results, you have a serious leadership weakness. Your job is to get them better. Holding people accountable to high standards and results is nothing to apologize for. Failing to stretch them to their potential is. 
— Dave Anderson, No-Nonsense Leadership

Accountability is not the opposite of support. Lasting growth depends on both. Don’t leave expectations unclear and standards inconsistent. Recognize when coaching has reached its limits and decisive action is needed.

My next article will cover 5 more leadership styles that can turn your strengths into leadership blind spots.

Summary

1. As the hero leader, you were the one everyone counted on. That dependability built the organization. But your team now waits for you instead of figuring things out. You didn’t build a team, you built a dependency.
2. As the commander leader, you brought order when there was none. But your team has grown since then. They know what they’re doing. What once created clarity is now creating frustration and slowly turning capable people into ones who wait to be told.
3. As the builder leader, you built something from nothing and understood it better than anyone. But the organization has outgrown what one person can hold in their head. You’re still operating like it’s day one and that’s exactly what’s slowing everyone else down.
4. As the consensus seeker, you made people feel heard and built real alignment. But somewhere consensus became a requirement rather than a goal. You’ve confused harmony with progress and the organization is paying for it.
5. As the coach leader, you believed in your people before they believed in themselves. But support without accountability isn’t kindness, it’s avoidance.

Recommended Reading

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There By Marshall Goldsmith

Scaling Leadership By Robert J. Anderson

The post When Your Leadership Style No Longer Fits the Organization appeared first on TechTello.

Are you making too many decisions in a day? Are you the escalation point for everything? Do you constantly firefight, struggle to think strategically and instead of being influential and impactful, becoming a bottleneck in the team?

If everyday feels like a burden that keeps you stressed and awake, if it feels like you’re simply going through the motions or if you lack energy, enthusiasm or emotional connection to whatever you’re doing, you may have drifted from being challenged and stretched to becoming strained and unsustainable. 

Most leaders fail to notice this drift because it’s often subtle and invisible until you’re deep in it. You may mistake being stretched beyond what feels comfortable with dedication, resilience and commitment. You may shrug it off as a tough phase until it becomes permanent. You may keep pushing yourself thinking it will lead to growth until it starts costing you. 

Burned-out, stressed-out, and frazzled leaders foster organizations that experience high turnover, low employee engagement, steep healthcare costs, and dysfunctional teams that often work against one another. 
― Jim Dethmer, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

If you already know that something isn’t right but can’t give it a name, these signs might help you recognize when your leadership role has stopped being challenging and started becoming unsustainable:

You’re always on

There’s constant demand on your time as a leader—making decisions, shaping strategy, aligning stakeholders and ad hoc meetings that creep into an already overpacked calendar. What starts as a busy day soon turns into a busy week. No time to rest, take a break or go offline. As many things vie for your attention, working round the clock becomes a norm. 

You’re always available, always on. Downtime and rest feels like a luxury.  

If you’re finding it hard to disconnect from work, if the thought of letting go leads to stress and anxiety or if you feel like your role demands you to always be on, you have shifted from productive to an unproductive zone. You’re exhausted, unrested and there’s no time for recovery. There’s always some demand, some distraction, something that makes you anxious and prevents you from mentally disconnecting. Unstructured time creates restlessness and an impulse to check in, stay connected and keep working.

Continuing in this mode keeps you busy, overwhelmed and ineffective. You keep jumping from one thing to the next without pausing to understand how it fits into your overall goal and whether taking it on will create a meaningful outcome or impact. Always being “on” leaves no time to apply the brakes, slow down and question if you’re on the right path. 

Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty. What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you’re utterly and completely overworked? 
― Ryan Holiday, Stillness is the Key

Your leadership has become unsustainable if you’re available 24/7 without any room for rest or recovery. 

Every choice feels heavy

Your role as a leader requires you to make many decisions in a day. But when every problem lands on your desk and every small decision runs through you, your mental capacity to make good decisions starts depleting. Even small decisions overwhelm and drain you under the effect of decision fatigue. You start applying shortcuts, ignore important aspects, refuse to validate assumptions and fail to see the risks in the direction you plan to take. 

Solving problems and making decisions your team should be making bottlenecks your team. They can’t move without you. They feel blocked for your consent and approval. 

If you lack trust in your team to make independent decisions, if you intervene in every small decision and if the thought of not being involved makes you restless and tense, you’ve signed up for a path that’s infeasible and unscalable. Trying to make too many decisions causes poor, erratic and delayed choices—you avoid complex decisions, default to the easiest option and say no to innovative ideas because sticking to the status quo is the path of least mental resistance.  

Building a dependency instead of building a team makes people feel suffocated, disempowered and untrusted. Always watching, always meddling and always demanding control slows down your team’s progress while hurting your own productivity. 

Cars and decision makers, both need a service break, for better performance and long life.
— Harjeet Khanduja

Your leadership has become unsustainable if you’re making too many micro-decisions and refusing to delegate. 

You’ve shifted into survival mode

If you don’t consciously plan how to make the most of your time and energy as a leader, you spend your day firefighting and reacting to the things around you. There’s no time to think strategically and chart out a future growth path. There’s no time to assess risks and put measures in place to avoid problems. There’s no time to reflect on your actions and learn from your mistakes. This makes you lead from fear, not vision. You make decisions to avoid failure, rather than pursuing long-term goals. The loudest voice in the room gets your attention, while important issues get pushed aside. 

Your day ends with a feeling of relief, not accomplishment. You’ve normalized chaos as a part of your work life.

If getting through the day has become your goal, if you have lost control over your time and strategy and if you feel a sense of powerlessness, you’ve shifted from thriving at work to barely surviving. Your day gets dictated by incoming pings, urgent emails and ad hoc meetings with no dedicated blocks for quiet, focused work. You constantly cut short important conversations to catch up on a previous crisis. You’re always busy, always exhausted without any sense of what you achieved this week. 

Quick patches, short-term thinking and analysis paralysis on important decisions leads to chaotic environments, repetitive issues and strategic blindness. Constantly staying in a firefighting mode also emotionally exhausts the team. Survival mode creates a perpetual cycle of fear, distress and agony—you dread the next morning while feeling like a massive weight has been lifted off your shoulders for making it today. 

Survival mode becomes our default when we inhabit it for months or years, and it begins to exact a significant toll. Physiologically, it manifests as chronic fatigue, disrupted sleep, weakened immunity, and increased susceptibility to illness.
— Alexander Betts, Refuge

Your leadership has become unsustainable if you react to daily demands instead of proactively leading with a long-term vision. 

Obligation has replaced passion

If nothing excites you at work, if you have lost your sense of “why” and if you do the work only to fulfil your responsibilities, you fail to put your knowledge, experience and skills to use. You don’t push yourself hard. You don’t show curiosity to explore diverse perspectives. You play safe and refuse to navigate the uncharted territory. Without passion, what keeps you going is only a moral sense of duty. But work without meaning and purpose feels like a drag—transactional, boring and mundane. Routine and repetition dulls your enthusiasm and creativity.   

You feel trapped by the high expectations of your role while feeling disconnected from the vision you’re expected to lead. Cognitive dissonance makes it worse with feelings of disconnection and resentment. 

If you’ve become risk averse and stick to the playbook to manage the status quo and avoid failure, if you ignore your team’s morale and don’t feel invested in their growth and if the energy around you feels tensed and guarded, you’ve slipped into a black hole which has killed your sense of creativity, enthusiasm and drive. You avoid difficult conversations because you lack the emotional energy required to navigate them. You show up to meetings and conversations while you’re mentally checked out. You become resistant to change and new ideas because they feel like disruption, not an opportunity. 

Your contagious energy trips the team into maintenance mode—they mirror your emotional state which kills their passion. They stop learning, experimenting and stretching. Opportunities that once excited them now feels like a burden. 

Returning from work feeling inspired, safe, fulfilled and grateful is a natural human right to which we are all entitled and not a modern luxury that only a few lucky ones are able to find.
— Simon Sinek, Leaders Eat Last

Your leadership has become unsustainable if you’ve lost your sense of purpose and drive and challenges that once felt meaningful now feel exhausting.

You’ve normalized feeling unwell

If work takes priority above everything else, if health falls last on your list and never gets prioritized and if you ignore your own needs and well-being, you start normalizing exhaustion and stress as part of your life. You ignore your body signals that’s screaming for rest. You avoid dealing with headaches and pains that have become a constant part of your life. You start relying on caffeine or other boosters to manage your energy levels. Your sleep, health and emotional regulation breaks down because you refuse to prioritize yourself.

You can’t remember the last time you felt well. You’ve forgotten what it means to have a life.

If you treat working long hours, lack of sleep and declining health as part of your job, you may mistake toxic coping mechanisms with being tough. Treating personal life and family time as distractions makes you consider 80-hour work weeks, late night emails and no time for vacation as a mark of dedication and commitment. You talk about them as a badge of honour. 

This behavior sets a wrong expectation with the team—they think they’re required to sacrifice their own health and match your unsustainable hours. Taking a break, leaving on time or disconnecting during vacation triggers performance anxiety. Collaboration breaks down as team members turn on each other due to exhaustion and lack of empathy. 

Your body always speaks — not in words, but in signals. Tiredness, cravings, tension — it’s not weakness. It’s wisdom. Listen before it starts to scream.
— Barbara O’Neill

Your leadership has become unsustainable if work has more importance than your own health, personal goals and family life. 

You’ve forgotten who you’re without the title

If your identity is tied to your role, if it consumes your narrative of the self and if you’re uncertain of who you’re without it, then any threat to the role feels existential. You make decisions based on what protects your role instead of what helps the organization—resisting change, avoiding delegation and controlling work in a way that no one gets an opportunity to shine and diminish your presence. You spend more time people-pleasing and maintaining perception. You show up everywhere and speak often to remain visible and build credibility. You reframe reality by hiding bad news and surfacing only the information that makes you look good.  

Your job defines you and losing it feels like losing yourself. You protect your position, not the purpose—spending energy on optics and position than doing actual leadership work. 

If you’re always insecure of your position, if you feel a sense of fragility and if you experience an identity crisis in the form of restlessness and irritability, you start acting out of fear, not conviction. You try hard to stay close to others in a position of power and secure their loyalty—even if it means staying silent when you disagree. You double down on control to establish a sense of authority. You push back on changes that involve scope of your work because any reduction to it feels like a challenge to your status and worth.  

Tying self-worth to your position and title makes you dictate minor details to establish your sense of importance. People start to notice that you value a sense of authority and control which makes them absorb the message that a direct challenge is unsafe and quiet non-compliance is the only way to survive. 

Our jobs were never meant to become the center of us. They were never meant to be the source of our worthiness. They were never meant to become the start and end of our identity.
― Robin Kirby, The Sparkle

Your leadership has become unsustainable if striving to protect your identity is your main focus than doing your actual job. 

Summary

1. If you can’t disconnect, if rest feels like a luxury and unstructured time creates restlessness, you shift from productive to an unproductive zone with no room for recovery.
2. If every problem lands on your desk and every small decision runs through you, you’re building a dependency instead of building a team—bottlenecking progress while depleting your own capacity to make good decisions.
3. If getting through the day has become your goal, you’ve stopped leading with vision and started reacting to daily demands—firefighting instead of thinking strategically.
4. If you’ve lost your sense of why and show up only to fulfil your responsibilities, you don’t just lose your own drive, your contagious energy trips the team into maintenance mode too.
5. If you treat long hours, lack of sleep and declining health as a mark of dedication, you’ve mistaken toxic coping mechanisms for being tough and set the same unsustainable expectation for your team.
6. If your identity is tied to your role and any threat to it feels existential, you stop protecting the purpose and start protecting your position—spending energy on optics instead of doing actual leadership work.

Recommended Reading

Burnt Out to Lit Up By Daisy Auger-Dominguez

Nine Secrets of Resilient Leaders for Coaching Teams By Dr. Sandra L. Abbey

The post Signs Your Leadership Role Has Become Unsustainable appeared first on TechTello.

You may not realize it, but your ego plays out in many different ways. It quietly seeps into the decisions you make, the way you communicate and how you present yourself. It often shows up as defensiveness, insecurity, control and the need to protect image. 

When your goal is to raise your self-esteem, prove to others that you’re smart, intelligent and capable or projecting an image of strength matters to you, your ego gets involved in everything you say and do. 

Becoming argumentative when someone disagrees.

Trying to be right by proving others wrong. 

Never accepting your mistakes.

Becoming a control freak. 

If you don’t consciously watch out for ego, it can damage your relationships at work by coming across as arrogant, selfish, condescending, snobbish and superior. Considering your own ideas, thoughts and opinions as important while holding others in contempt, showing impatience or disrespect through eye-rolling, smirking or sighing or invalidating other people’s feelings, brushing off their suggestions or changing the subject to deflect attention away from an uncomfortable topic are some of the ways in which you may act when your ego feels threatened.  

Competitiveness is an important force in life. It’s what drives the market and is behind some of mankind’s most impressive accomplishments. On an individual level, however, it’s absolutely critical that you know who you’re competing with and why, that you have a clear sense of the space you’re in. Only you know the race you’re running. That is, unless your ego decides the only way you have value is if you’re better than, have more than, everyone everywhere. More urgently, each one of us has a unique potential and purpose; that means that we’re the only ones who can evaluate and set the terms of our lives. Far too often, we look at other people and make their approval the standard we feel compelled to meet, and as a result, squander our very potential and purpose.
― Ryan Holiday

You can either let your ego run the show which can stagnate your career and degrade your work experience or you can keep it in check by watching out for these small ways in which ego shows up at work:

Resisting help to prove you can do it yourself

When your pride and ego gets tangled up, you fear reaching out and asking for help. You don’t want to risk appearing incompetent. You don’t want to appear weak. You’ve built an identity of an independent person who can overcome any challenge. You want to protect it. 

Asking for support feels like surrender when you put up a facade of strength and resilience. It feels like giving up and appearing vulnerable, defenseless and exposed. Hiding your struggles, covering up your feelings of doubt and inadequacy and masking your limitations does not raise your status—it only protects your ego. 

Knowing your limits and saving your time by leveraging others’ expertise is a strategic move, not surrender. Accepting reality when you hit a roadblock instead of refusing to give up and pretending everything is fine signals high emotional intelligence, self-awareness and maturity of a person who prioritizes the right outcome over personal pride. 

Asking for help does not make you look needy or incompetent. It requires humility and strength. It shows that you believe in your ability to find answers—that you’re open to do the work necessary to succeed.   

Asking for help is a power move. It’s a sign of strength to ask and a sign of strength to fight off judgment when other people raise their hands. It reflects a self-awareness that is an essential element in braving trust.
― Brené Brown, Dare to Lead

Ego check: Is your priority to solve the problem or protect your image?

Taking feedback personally 

Your ego considers any constructive criticism as a personal attack. It forces you to obsess about a negative remark and view it as a measure of your self-worth. It makes you extremely insecure and jumpy about anything that concerns your skills and abilities. It keeps you trapped within your own bubble of self-assessment away from reality. 

This makes you defensive—you instantly reject feedback without hearing others out. You look for excuses or blame to justify your results or the outcomes you achieved. You may even counter-attack by belittling others or calling out their own gaps. Ego makes you edgy, reactive, easily irritable and closed-off. You start doubting others’ intent. You turn an important critique into a debate. 

Ignoring feedback or putting up a shield of self-defense lets ego protect what it cares about—your self-image. It thinks highly of you which makes it shun down the critiques that are necessary to grow. 

Constructive criticism is not an attack on your identity or a sign of disrespect. It’s a useful tool to stay grounded, sensible and open to suggestions. It helps you bridge the gap between perception and reality by uncovering your blind spots and helping you focus on areas that need correction. Putting ego aside can help you pay attention to others inputs, separate signal from noise and accept and acknowledge the hard facts. 

Feedback is harsh and uncomfortable. Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. Extract the signal from the noise, so you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.
— Scott H. Young, Ultralearning

Ego check: Is your priority to look flawless right now or become better over time?

Struggling to admit mistakes or saying you were wrong

When you fail at something or make mistakes, instead of showing curiosity to understand what went wrong and taking responsibility for your actions, you may look for excuses and justifications. You may blame others or your circumstances. You may try to cover up your faults. Your ego will not let others discover your flaws, be judged or exposed. It will not let you accept defeat. 

To hide your feelings of guilt, shame and inadequacy, you may mislead others, give them false information or deflect attention away from your mistakes. You may refuse to accept you were wrong or made an error. Fear that others will think less of you or you’ll look weak can make you cover up your tracks instead of owning them.  

Given a choice, ego will choose denial over reality to keep your self-esteem intact. It wants you to think you’re smart, capable and always right and accepting a failure can shatter that image. 

Acknowledging that you made a bad decision or took a wrong action does not make you a failure. It does not harm your reputation or credibility. Rather, taking ownership of your outcomes, finding a solution to your problem and working harder to fix the issue earns you respect—it shows that you can bounce back from a challenging situation stronger and smarter.  

Being right all the time acquires a huge importance in education, and there is this terror of being wrong. The ego is so tied to being right that later on in life you are reluctant to accept that you are ever wrong, because you are defending not the idea but your self-esteem. 
― Edward De Bono, Po

Ego check: Is your priority to be right or be effective?

Turning disagreements into personal battles

When you’re too attached to an idea or a viewpoint, any difference of opinion on it turns into a battle. You make it a part of your identity. Confirming views raises your confidence and boosts your self-esteem while disagreements instantly put you off. Your ego does not like dissent and triggers an intense response to shut down opposing views. It keeps you locked inside a tunnel vision where you fail to see the value in alternate perspectives. 

Trying hard to prove your point without showing curiosity to listen invites pushback. Repeating your ideas and thoughts while disregarding others views makes you come across as closed-minded, argumentative and arrogant. This creates tension, strains relationships and makes others reluctant to work with you. 

Your ego prevents you from seeing the flaws in your thinking—it makes you too rigid to notice the risks and drawbacks. To defend your image, it stamps others as ignorant, flawed or malicious. It creates a false illusion that your opinions signify your worth and someone challenging your idea is inherently challenging you.  

Disagreements are not an attack on your identity. They are not a battle ground to win and lose. They’re an opportunity to create win/win situations—look at new ideas, see what you missed and collaborate with others to solve the problem together instead of attacking them. When you approach disagreements with the desire to find the right solution instead of being right, you make others feel safe, heard and valued. It strengthens your work relationships while also setting you up for success. Separate who you are from the idea you are fighting for. If someone proves your idea or argument is wrong, your identity shouldn’t feel crushed.

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it.
― Colin Powell, It Worked for Me

Ego check: Is your priority to learn the truth or to win?

Refusing to let go of control

When you identify your worth with the outcomes you achieve, you have a hard time letting go—it’s too terrifying to trust anyone else to do the job as well and as correctly as you will. This makes you micromanage, refuse to delegate and be involved in the nitty-gritties of every day work. Your ego also fears being no longer needed or valued if things go well without your intervention.

This makes you too involved and too controlling to avoid feelings of shame and embarrassment if things go wrong later. You create dependencies, bottleneck decisions and withhold information to feel important. You dictate how things must be done, making others feel undervalued and suffocated. You jump in prematurely to fix situations without giving others room to self-correct or learn from their mistakes. 

Your ego likes to feel secure and superior—dictating how others act and controlling every move makes it feel safe by avoiding future failures and surprises. It equates letting go with being weak, useless and unimportant because it wants to prove that you exist and that you matter.

Letting go is not giving up. It shows that you trust others, believe in their skills and their ability to learn from their mistakes and solve problems on their own. It not only creates space for others to grow, it also gives you time to focus on your own goals and priorities. 

You don’t need to control everything that’s happening. You don’t need to push, struggle, fight, force things or try to manipulate people in order to make things the way you want them to be. It’s exhausting and unnecessary.
― John Purkiss, The Power of Letting Go

Ego check: Is your priority to achieve the best outcome or to have things done your way?

Interrupting others to redirect attention towards you

When your ego demands attention, it wants you to be at the centre of every meeting and discussion. It wants you to have the final word, be heard and can’t take it when others appear to be dominating the discussion. It doesn’t like when others get the spotlight. It feels hurt when someone else appears to be capturing interest and attracting attention. 

This makes you say and do things that will redirect the focus towards you—hijacking the conversation by interrupting, giving unsolicited advice, passing mean remarks, fault finding or one-upping them by sharing your own experience.   

Trying to hog the spotlight and focusing on an opportunity to speak prevents you from processing what the other person is saying. Cutting others off frustrates them as they lose their chain of thought. Treating every conversation as a competition for status and validation turns it into an exhausting game which only leads to loss of trust and backlash.

You cannot learn if your focus is on talking. You cannot build trust if you can’t celebrate others and let them shine. Deep connection is built by making others feel heard, valued and respected—not by owning the room at all times.   

To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know. It’s what we all crave; to be understood as a person with thoughts, emotions, and intentions that are unique and valuable and deserving of attention. Listening is not about teaching, shaping, critiquing, appraising, or showing how it should be done (“Here, let me show you.” “Don’t be shy.” “That’s awesome!” “Smile for Daddy.”). Listening is about the experience of being experienced. It’s when someone takes an interest in who you are and what you are doing. 
― Kate Murphy, You’re Not Listening

Ego check: Is your priority to make a connection or make an impression?

Refusing to revisit decisions

When a decision you made earlier is no longer working for you, when the cost of continuing is more than its benefits and when you can no longer justify the investment in a certain direction, the right thing to do is to pivot, invest in other opportunities or simply quit. However, your ego can make changing course feel like a failure. Quitting can feel like giving up and accepting defeat. 

Ego can make you continue investing in a failed cause because it can’t let go of the past investments and calling it quits. Instead of evaluating the opportunity cost of continuing, you focus on the sunk costs. Fear of being judged as incompetent, reckless or a failure makes you maintain an illusion of progress. You don’t want to lose your status. You don’t want to lose face. 

Giving up on a failing path or changing direction is not weakness—it’s an act of intelligence to save your future from your past. It shows that you’re capable of making tough and uncomfortable calls. It’s a sign of agility and progress. 

Sunk costs do have a small effect—decision makers are biased in favor of their previous investments—but three other factors are more powerful. One is anticipated regret: will I be sorry that I didn’t give this another chance? The second is project completion: if I keep investing, I can finish the project. But the single most powerful factor is ego threat: if I don’t keep investing, I’ll look and feel like a fool. In response to ego threat, people invest more, hoping to turn the project into a success so they can prove to others—and themselves—that they were right all along.
― Adam M. Grant, Give and Take

Ego check: Is your priority to save face or maximize your future potential?

Avoiding people who challenge your thinking 

When you pride yourself on your knowledge and expertise, anything that you don’t understand or don’t know appears terrifying and intimidating. You don’t want to appear uninformed. You don’t want to be in a position where you can’t make decisions or lead the group. To avoid appearing ignorant, you avoid people who have the tendency to ask tough questions. You avoid those who typically challenge your thinking. Your ego does not let you accept that it’s normal to not know everything. 

You refuse to say “I don’t know” or “I am not sure” because your pride tells you that it will make you appear as someone who lacks experience, wisdom or judgment. So, you either pretend to know or avoid facing such situations. Faking knowledge makes you come across as a fake—others can see when you truly know something and when you’re just faking it. Avoiding situations where you might be challenged prevents you from learning and growing. 

Not knowing something does not make you inferior or less valued by others. What matters more is your curiosity, ability to ask questions and the quality of finding the right solution over trying to be right. What leaves a lasting impact is your humility and courage. 

Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important than whatever it is you do know. Most people make bad decisions because they are so certain that they’re right that they don’t allow themselves to see the better alternatives that exist. Radically open-minded people know that coming up with the right questions and asking other smart people what they think is as important as having all the answers. They understand that you can’t make a great decision without swimming for a while in a state of “not knowing.” That is because what exists within the area of “not knowing” is so much greater and more exciting than anything any one of us knows.
― Ray Dalio, Principles

Ego check: Is your priority to hide from what you don’t know or to grow from what you can discover?

Summary

1. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness or incompetence. It is a strategic and self-aware move that shows you prioritize the right outcome over protecting your pride.
2. Constructive criticism is not an attack on your identity but a valuable tool that helps you uncover blind spots, bridge the gap between perception and reality and grow over time.
3. Taking ownership of your failures and working to fix them does not damage your reputation. In fact, it earns you far more respect than making excuses or blaming others ever would.
4. When you separate your identity from your opinions, disagreements become opportunities to discover new perspectives, collaborate effectively and find better solutions together.
5. Micromanaging and refusing to delegate signals a lack of trust. Letting go not only empowers others to grow but also frees you to focus on what truly matters.
6. Constantly hijacking conversations to stay in the spotlight destroys trust and connection. Making others feel genuinely heard and valued is what builds lasting relationships.
7. Holding on to a failing path just to avoid looking wrong is costly. Recognizing when to change course and acting on it is a sign of agility, courage and good judgment.
8. Dodging tough questions and difficult people stunts your growth. Embracing what you don’t know with curiosity and humility is what leads to better decisions and continuous learning.

Recommended Reading

The First Rule of Mastery By Michael Gervais

Ego Is The Enemy By Ryan Holiday

The post The Subtle Ways In Which Ego Shows Up at Work appeared first on TechTello.

Most career slumps don’t announce themselves with a bang. The shift is subtle at first—you may not even notice the change in your work habits and routines that keeps you running on autopilot without forward momentum. You may ignore the signs that point to a sense of dissatisfaction and unfulfilment. 

You may still go about meeting your daily expectations, but there’s no excitement or a sense of accomplishment. You may feel unmotivated, unchallenged and disconnected. Work that was exciting at first now feels repetitive and draining.  

All your high aspirations, dreams and the desire to do something big seem like a thing of the past. Instead of getting close to the finish line, you seem to be moving further and further away. You feel stuck. You feel restless. You may believe that you have lost your spark. 

But a career slump is not a total failure on your part. Whether you’ve outgrown your current position, prolonged stress has depleted your energy or there’s lack of alignment between goals and opportunities, you can get out of the rut by recognizing the signs, understanding the root cause and identifying what needs to change.  

When we are stuck in a rut we are being invited to grow and expand.
― Dana Arcuri, Reinventing You

Here are the 9 signs you might be stagnating at work:

You are never in a state of flow

Do you struggle to focus? Have you stopped enjoying work which prevents you from being completely absorbed in the activity? Do you no longer enter into a state of flow, which is when you are completely immersed in a task and the time seems to stand still?

Not being able to focus and do deep work prevents you from experiencing the joy and pleasure that comes from being in a state of flow—it keeps you unhappy, stuck and dissatisfied. This is often one of the first signs of career stagnation that most people fail to notice. 

Flow minimizes distractions, prevents procrastination and leads to high performance and productivity. It makes work more enjoyable, less exhausting and accelerates learning. It sparks creativity, heightens focus and deepens satisfaction. 

Without flow, your attention shifts every few minutes to minor interruptions, relying on willpower to get things done depletes energy and tasks take twice as long to complete with often worse results. Work feels strained, highly inefficient and mentally draining.

Attention is like energy in that without it no work can be done, and in doing work is dissipated. We create ourselves by how we use this energy. Memories, thoughts and feelings are all shaped by how we use it. And it is an energy under control, to do with as we please; hence attention is our most important tool in the task of improving the quality of experience.
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow

You’re headed for career stagnation if you’re constantly distracted and don’t remember the last time you were in a state of flow.

You don’t feel challenged 

Do you look for familiar tasks and responsibilities—things you already know how to do well? Do you avoid growth opportunities because they seem hard and untested? Do you resist new processes, systems and ways of working because the old way feels easy and convenient?

When predictability and routine takes priority over learning and experimentation, you rely on what you already know instead of stretching yourself and building new skills. You do the work that keeps you busy without expanding your thinking and problem solving skills. 

Being scared of uncertainty and unknowns, you refuse to navigate the uncharted territory. You sit inside your comfort zone and fail to embrace the opportunities outside it. Career stagnation is obvious without doing the work that seems hard, unconventional and challenging. 

Taking on challenges involves taking on risks—it involves solving complex problems, making tough decisions and facing obstacles with curiosity and resilience. 

If we explore only well-trodden paths, if we avoid games we don’t know how to play, we’ll remain stagnant. Only when you’re dancing in the dark, only when you don’t know where the light switch is—or even what a light switch is—can progress begin.
― Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist

You’re headed for career stagnation if you’ve stopped taking steps outside your comfort zone. 

You’re reluctant to ask questions or share ideas

Do you stay quiet in meetings? Do you contribute your opinion only when asked? Have you stopped asking questions because you don’t feel the curiosity to know or identify better ways to do things?

Becoming hesitant to share your opinion or holding back your views not only decreases your visibility, it prevents you from exploring different perspectives, updating outdated beliefs and learning new things. Not asking questions makes you come across as rigid, closed-minded and uninterested. It leads to career stagnation because without curiosity you shut the doors that are required to tread new paths. 

When you keep your thoughts to yourself or become disengaged in meetings and discussions, you give up on the opportunity to share your knowledge. You refuse to leverage others’ experience. When it’s time to get promoted, your name is not on the list because you did nothing to showcase your value or be seen.   

The truly curious will be increasingly in demand. Employers are looking for people who can do more than follow procedures competently or respond to requests; who have a strong intrinsic desire to learn, solve problems and ask penetrating questions. 
― Ian Leslie, Curious

You’re headed for career stagnation if you don’t take the initiative to voice your concerns or share your opinion.

You’ve stopped taking feedback seriously

Have you stopped seeking feedback? Do you consider it as noise and don’t make an attempt to find how it could be valuable? Do you consider it unworthy of serious consideration without even listening? 

When feedback no longer matters to you or you ignore the one that lands your way, you disengage from improving. Being unreceptive, defensive and dismissive to feedback makes you uncoachable. People find it hard to communicate and collaborate with you. They find you unapproachable. 

Taking feedback constructively enables you to find better solutions, avoid mistakes and build relationships based on mutual trust and respect. It makes you come across as a person who cares about others opinion, their viewpoint and how they see the world. Avoiding and ignoring feedback prevents you from making changes to your behavior, actions and attitude. It keeps you stuck and stagnates you because you refuse to act on feedback that can help you grow. 

How you react to the feedback and what you do afterwards will impact your career trajectory at the company. Your first instinct may be to rebut, defend, or explain the behaviors that led to the feedback. But perceptions don’t change because of explanations or more information; they change over time after you adjust your actions and behaviors.
― Marlo Lyons

You’re headed for career stagnation if you’ve stopped investing in seeking and giving feedback.

You’re driven by external pressure, not personal motivation

Do you feel a lack of sense of ownership and motivation? Do you work only when there’s a deadline approaching, pressure from your manager or something urgent shows up that demands your time and attention? Do you feel no personal drive to hit targets, achieve goals and exceed expectations?

Intrinsic motivation is driven by personal satisfaction, enjoyment of the activity and a sense of purpose. Extrinsic motivation is driven by obligations, experience of pressure, demand towards specific outcomes and a fear of negative consequences.  

Enjoyment and importance are two main components of autonomously motivated goals. When you work on goals to meet other people’s demands or out of necessity, you rarely feel the satisfaction that comes with achieving goals. It’s the accomplishment of goals caused by internal motivations such as interests, desires, values and identities that fulfils you. Extrinsic motivation leads to career stagnation because it kills your curiosity, reduces enjoyment and turns work into a daily chore.   

When you are intrinsically motivated, your own internal reward system in the form of positive emotions acts as a powerful force to pursue the task. You repeat behaviors that are fulfilling because the activity itself seems pleasurable. It’s a process that you enjoy repeating every single day. The joy of acting inline with your values inspires you to keep going even when you face challenges and setbacks.

The most successful people, the evidence shows, often aren’t directly pursuing conventional notions of success. They’re working hard and persisting through difficulties because of their internal desire to control their lives, learn about their world, and accomplish something that endures.
― Daniel H. Pink, Drive

You’re headed for career stagnation if you rely on external pressure to do the work instead of being self-motivated. 

You’re surrounded by the same set of people

Have you stopped taking the initiative to expand your network at work? Have you limited yourself to a certain set or group of people? Do you prefer hanging out with some while ignoring the rest?

When you surround yourself with a certain set of people, your thinking gets limited by the topics they discuss, views they have and the perspectives they share. These interactions instead of expanding your thinking makes you more rigid in your ideas, thoughts and beliefs. You automatically lean towards certain decisions. You automatically favor some while disregarding others. You automatically act without consciously evaluating different options.

Forming echo chambers at work by gravitating towards people who share similar backgrounds, communication styles or personal philosophies can lead to blind spots and groupthink. You may fail to spot risks and flaws in your plan as you don’t let dissent in. You may rehash the same ideas instead of coming up with a completely new strategy. Echo chambers stagnate growth by keeping you trapped inside a bubble.  

Increasingly, we take our disagreements not to the people we disagree with but to our own echo chambers—spaces where we can talk about, rather than to, the other side—where like-minded people echo our own beliefs right back to us.
― Justin Lee, Talking Across the Divide

You’re headed for career stagnation if you seek confirmation and groupthink instead of exploring diverse opinions. 

You constantly complain about growth

Do you blame others for not being able to grow? Do you spend your time agonizing over the fact that nothing changes instead of acting in ways that will enable growth? Have you stopped investing in learning and improving because you believe that putting effort will be of no use?

If all you do is blame, complain and sob instead of identifying what’s blocking your growth and taking action to fix it, you’ll be left feeling undervalued, unappreciated and miserable. Blaming other people or external circumstances for your situation prevents you from accepting the reality of your situation—you fail to separate fiction from facts. You fail to notice the gaps in your own skills that’s holding you back. You fail to make your work visible which will establish your knowledge and credibility. Your career stagnates when you don’t feel empowered for your own growth. 

Taking responsibility shifts your perspective from problems to solutions. You can look at the obstacles in your path and devise ways to navigate each one. You can create a plan of action to bridge the gap in your knowledge and skills. You can identify opportunities to showcase your value and make your work visible. You can schedule regular feedback conversations with your manager to stay updated on how you’re doing while also sharing your expectations and concerns. 

Constantly focusing on the limitations, instead of all the possibilities, is how people become stuck in their lives. It only serves to recreate the same old reality from day to day. And soon the days turn into years, and lifetimes.
― Anthon St. Maarten

You’re headed for career stagnation if you refuse to take responsibility for your own growth. 

You keep bringing up past achievements 

Do you rely only on your past experience and knowledge to make decisions? Do you bring up your prior achievements and success in conversations frequently? Do you talk more about what you’ve accomplished earlier instead of something that happened recently? 

Living in the past prevents you from paying attention to the present—you fail to notice when your old skills are no longer relevant. You fail to take into account the current context which demands an entirely new approach. You fail to challenge ideas because you assume that what worked in the past must still be relevant. Using your past successes to measure your current worth is a flawed approach—it stagnates your career by preventing you from striving for learning and getting better.  

Applying old knowledge, experience and judgment to new decisions without validating their relevance to the current context leads to bad choices and poor decisions. Assuming what worked in the past must work in the present makes you ignore other options and possibilities. Your past keeps you trapped from paying attention to the future and its needs.

No matter how much you’ve done or how successful you’ve been, there is always more to do, more to learn, more to achieve.
― Barack Obama

You’re headed for career stagnation if you keep bringing up your past experience and achievements because your current work isn’t worthy of mention.

You feel threatened by high performing people

Do you compare yourself to others? Do you wish you could do what they’re capable of doing? Do you ruminate about the things you don’t have—intelligence, confidence, presence—and feel inadequate when you see it in others? 

While comparison is naturally tempting and can sometimes be a valuable source of motivation and growth, not considering the downsides of using others as a benchmark of your worth can trap you within a frenzy of constant self-doubt. Playing the comparison game can lead to feelings of inadequacy if the rate at which you’re achieving things doesn’t measure up in comparison to others’ bigger and better accomplishments. Instead of feeling inspired by people who are excelling at work, you may feel insecure, jealous and resentful. You may consider them as your rivals. 

If you constantly compare yourself to others, you unconsciously put yourself through a lot of mental agony—you obsess and ruminate about what you lack instead of your unique abilities. It kills the joy and pleasure of learning new things and getting better at your craft. It erodes your confidence and causes you to overlook your strengths. When you rely on others achievements to measure your self-worth, you set yourself up for inevitable frustration. Your career stagnates as you stop trying and putting in the effort that’s necessary to succeed. 

Instead of beating yourself up with the accomplishments of those around you, what if you compared yourself to your own ideal self—the person you wish to become? When life is about becoming a better version of yourself, you’re no longer concerned with falling short in comparison to others. Rather, what matters is how you’re improving, what you’re learning and whether you’re getting better each day. 

This fundamental shift is what Warren Buffet, one of the most successful investors in the world, refers to as keeping an “inner scorecard.” The inner scorecard refers to living through values that are important to you. The outer scorecard refers to what could be measured by those around you.

The only comparison for you to make is with yourself. You are the only person you should outperform.
― Cristina Imre

You’re headed for career stagnation if comparing yourself to others leads to feelings of frustration, low self-confidence, shame, resentment or envy. 

Summary

1. You can’t remember the last time you lost track of time at work. Flow—that state of complete immersion where time stands still—is gone. And with it, the joy, the energy and the quality of your work.
2. Your to-do list is full but you’re not growing. You’re busy, not challenged. There’s a difference and it matters more than most people realize.
3. You’ve gone quiet in meetings. You stopped asking questions. You stopped sharing ideas. Curiosity didn’t disappear—you just stopped acting on it.
4. Feedback has become background noise. You hear it, but you don’t act on it. Without course correction, you keep making the same mistakes on a longer timeline.
5. You only move when someone pushes you. Deadlines and pressure have replaced personal drive. When external pressure is your only fuel, the tank is usually empty.
6. You’re surrounded by the same people, thinking the same thoughts. Familiarity is comfortable. It’s also where fresh thinking goes to die.
7. You talk about what’s not working more than what you’re doing to fix it. Complaining feels productive. It isn’t. Responsibility is the only thing that actually moves the needle.
8. Your best stories are from a few years ago. Past success is a reference point, not a resting place. If it’s all you talk about, your present isn’t saying much.
9. High performers make you anxious, not inspired. The gap between where you are and where they are doesn’t have to breed resentment—it can be a roadmap.

Recommended Reading

Designing Your Life By Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

The Squiggly Career By Helen Tupper, Sarah Ellis

The post 9 Signs You’re Stagnating at Work appeared first on TechTello.

Employees who are highly motivated, energized and most likely to produce high quality work with minimal support or intervention are also most likely to be overburdened with ad hoc tasks and requests that keep showing up every now and then. They’re almost always the first one to get called when there’s a crisis. They get pulled into unplanned meetings and discussions because they’re the default fallback to lean on in case something urgent comes up. 

Having a few of these people in your team makes your life easy as a manager because you can always count on them to step up and get things done. But over relying on your best people is your worst mistake—by expecting them to do too much you push them away. 

All the extra work they’re expected to do takes their focus away from their main priorities—when unannounced tasks keep showing up, there’s less time left to do work that inspires and motivates them. They have to put in more hours to meet their original goals as unplanned work takes away a lot of their time and energy. The high expectations along with the exhaustion from addressing last minute requests, urgent problems and other work priorities takes a toll on their well-being and may even lead to burnout.

Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.
― Jim Collins, Good to Great

Motivated employees may be your first choice when unexpected and unintentional work shows up, but the question you need to ask yourself before you act on your impulse is this: “At what cost are you willing to assign them this work?”

Overreliance on your high performers can lead to overwhelm making them quit, become frustrated or resent you for not managing the workload evenly. Instead of placing excessive demands on your most engaged employees, follow these practices to utilize their potential without weighing them down with too many responsibilities.

Consider existing workload

Whether it’s a small task or a large unit of work, every new task assigned to your most engaged employees must take their current workload into account. 

What if you assign them something new today and it makes them fall behind on the deliverable that’s due tomorrow?

What if they end up spending more time on the ad hoc request than what was originally anticipated?

What if they don’t like this work which makes them unhappy, discouraged and annoyed?

Instead of the default tendency to lean on them for everything new that shows up, evaluate the cost of involving them vs the benefit of leaving them out. Think about:

1. What will get impacted if you assign them this work? Is it acceptable?
2. What makes them your only choice to get this done? 
3. Who else in the team might be able to take this on or share their workload so that one person isn’t expected to pull the weight?
4. What’s the worst that can happen if you don’t involve them? 
5. Who else might feel thankful to be given this opportunity?

Burnout happens when there’s an ongoing mismatch between the conditions an employee needs to support their well-being and their best work, and what their organization actually provides. Not being given the resources or time you need to manage your workload, for example, or working in an environment where you have insufficient control and autonomy, are known burnout triggers.
― Kandi Wiens

Stop taking your high performers time and energy for granted. Consider their workload to be more fair and unbiased. 

Align opportunities with interests 

Engaged employees don’t mind the extra work when it’s an opportunity that aligns with their interest. What keeps them inspired is to solve tough problems, identify unique solutions and do the work that helps them expand their knowledge and build new skills. 

However, when you assign them every ad hoc unit of work assuming they will be the most efficient in getting things done, you ignore what keeps them inspired and motivated. You don’t take into account what matters to them. You ignore what kind of work will help them improve and what will simply keep them busy without improving their skills.  

Aligning opportunities with interests may not be possible all the time, but consciously trying to do this can help you achieve a much better allocation of work—you can avoid giving them work they’ve mastered and done multiple times before. You can consider their aspirations and the gap in their skills to keep the work growth-oriented. You can even frame it that way to keep the conversation productive. 

To avoid overburdening your most engaged employees, ask this:

1. What will this task/project help them improve? 
2. Does this work align with their goals, aspirations and interests?
3. If it’s something only they can do, how can you frame it in a manner that establishes the importance of the task while clarifying why you’ve chosen them to take it on?
4. Have you connected with them to know how they actually feel about the work and whether they find it interesting or mundane?

Remember that performance follows a power law distribution in most jobs, no matter what your HR department tells you. Ninety percent or more of the value on your teams comes from the top 10 percent. As a result, your best people are worth far more than your average people. They might be worth 50 percent more than your average people or fifty times more, but they are absolutely worth more. Make sure they feel it. Even if you don’t have the financial resources to provide huge differences in pay, providing greater differences will mean something.
― Laszlo Bock, Work Rules

Stop ignoring your high performers goals and aspirations. Taking it into account can keep them energized and inspired. 

Plan and reprioritize 

Engaged employees are most likely to have more things on their plate than they can handle. Being good at what they do does not automatically make them good at planning and prioritization. They may underestimate the time it will take to solve a problem. They may commit to doing more work than they can handle. 

Without planning and prioritizing their work well, they may feel overloaded, overworked and overwhelmed. But instead of relooking at their priorities, they may try to meet their commitments by working extra hours. More work only adds to their burden, leaving them exhausted and burnt out. 

To help your most engaged employees achieve more without feeling overloaded, do this:

1. Schedule planning meetings with the goal to identify what deserves their attention and what must be reorganized, replanned or decluttered. 
2. Identify tasks which must be reallocated—someone else can do the work to help them focus on their most important goals.
3. Add in buffers to account for unknowns to keep commitments real and productive.
4. Eliminate tasks that are no longer useful or can be postponed to a later date. 

We’re lousy at figuring out how much time something will take us to complete. It’s a combination of overestimating our abilities and, to add insult to injury, underestimating the degree to which we are overestimating. We think we can do more than we can. 
— Michael Bungay Stanier, The Coaching Habit

Stop assuming that your high performers can manage their own priorities well. Help them stay realistic by planning and reprioritizing their work. 

Provide active support 

Just because your engaged employees are self-motivated does not mean that you can assign them responsibility and leave them to figure everything out on their own. They may be dedicated and committed and may even navigate challenges on their own, but knowing that you’re around and will support them when they need help is crucial to act independently. 

Your presence matters. Your time and attention boosts their confidence in their decisions, enables them to take risks and makes them feel valued and trusted. Your advice during difficult moments helps them consider different possibilities. Your ability to ask questions without providing solutions expands their thinking skills. Knowing that you won’t abdicate them when they need you the most empowers them to push boundaries and reach for their potential. 

Your support is required at every step—connecting with them on a regular basis to understand how they’re doing and what they need to do better. Without actively engaging, you may not notice signs of overwork and exhaustion. You may miss the opportunity to keep their workload sane. 

Provide support without micromanaging their work:

1. What challenges are they facing and how do they plan to solve them?
2. What prevents them from making progress?
3. What’s creating unnecessary friction, making it difficult to achieve goals?
4. What kind of help do they need?

Talent is the multiplier. The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield. The time you spend with your best is, quite simply, your most productive time.
― Marcus Buckingham, First, Break All the Rules

Stop ignoring your most engaged employees. Just because they’re doing well does not mean they don’t need your support. 

Take their feedback

Your most engaged employees may be the most dissatisfied even though it may not be visible to you. Their ability to produce good work may overshadow the deep frustration they feel from being taken for granted. But, sooner or later, these feelings of discontentment will start impacting their work—they may not show the same enthusiasm or drive they brought to work. They may become reluctant to take on additional responsibilities. They may stop putting in the effort which made them shine and succeed. 

The change may be minor and hard to notice at first, which can leave their feelings unaddressed and unacknowledged. The only way to know how they’re actually feeling and what’s bothering them the most is to engage in a candid feedback discussion. By showing that you’re genuinely interested in their feedback, you can encourage them to open up and share their true feelings. By asking questions, you can dig deeper and try to understand their real concerns. 

Getting this feedback is not always easy though. You need to approach the discussion with curiosity without defensiveness or justification. You need to make them feel comfortable without fear of reprisal. You need to show an intent to actually fix things. All talk and no action will eventually make them shut down. 

To get honest feedback that’s actionable:

1. Make them feel safe by listening to their concerns without justifying or turning defensive.
2. Help them understand why their feedback matters and how you plan to act on it.
3. Make it a habit to have such conversations regularly so that you can fix things before it’s too late.  

The essence of good listening is empathy, which can be achieved only by suspending our preoccupation with ourselves and entering into the experience of the other person.
― Michael P. Nichols, The Lost Art of Listening

Stop assuming that your high performers don’t have concerns. Listen to them before the workload becomes unsustainable. 

Summary

1. Over-relying on your best people is your worst mistake. High performers are the first to get called in a crisis, pulled into unplanned work and expected to always deliver, but this pattern leads to burnout, frustration and eventual departure.
2. Every new task must account for what the person is already carrying. Before assigning work, ask: what gets impacted, who else could do this and what’s the real cost of involving them vs leaving them out?
3. Engaged employees stay motivated when work helps them grow. Avoid assigning tasks they’ve already mastered. Consider their aspirations, skill gaps, goals and frame assignments in a way that makes the purpose and the choice of them clear.
4. High performers often over-commit and underestimate time. Hold regular planning sessions to declutter priorities, reallocate tasks, build in buffers and eliminate work that’s no longer useful. Act before the pile becomes unsustainable.
5. Self-motivation doesn’t mean people don’t need you. Regular check-ins asking about challenges, blockers and friction signal that you won’t abandon them. Your presence builds confidence and enables bigger risks.
6. Your best performers may be quietly the most frustrated. Declining enthusiasm and effort are early warning signs. Create space for candid feedback with curiosity, no defensiveness and a genuine intent to act on what you hear.

Recommended Reading

It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work By Jason Fried

Slack By Tom DeMarco

The post Are You Overburdening Your Most Engaged Employees? appeared first on TechTello.

Leadership is an act of courage. It requires making tough decisions, choosing unconventional paths, and staying resilient when faced with challenges and setbacks. It requires killing projects with sunk costs and investing that time and energy into potential prospects. It requires standing apart and pushing through for the right cause even when everyone around is choosing a safe path. 

Leaders make hundreds of decisions throughout the day and every small decision they make and every action they take has a substantial impact on the growth of the organization and its people. Their underlying feelings of self-doubt and unworthiness, hidden motives to be liked and respected and unfounded concerns around appearing vulnerable can sometimes manifest as fear—fear of not being liked, fear of failure, fear of not knowing, fear of being judged, fear of being found out or fear of losing their position. 

This can make them play safe by sticking with the status quo, avoid decisions with unknowns and uncertainty to limit mistakes, people please to avoid being disliked or pretend to know things when they don’t have a clue.  

Fear that starts from the top seeps into organization culture—people learn to say things that will earn them a nod even when it does not lead to growth. They stop raising concerns, stop taking risks and stop trying to excel because mediocrity is not only accepted, but expected from them.  

Fear is a natural thing though and leaders are humans too who are not devoid of this feeling. The high stakes of their role can make fear even more prominent and real. 

But there’s a difference between productive and unproductive fear—productive fear can make you challenge your assumptions, ask better questions, listen to others and be better prepared while unproductive fear can make you lean towards popular opinions, shut down differences of opinion and care more about protecting your image than solving problems.  

We often think of courage as an inherent trait, however, it is less about who people are, and more about how they behave, and show up in difficult situations. So feeling fear is not a barrier. The true underlying obstacle to brave leadership is how we respond to our fear. The real barrier to daring leadership is our armor, the thoughts, emotions and behaviors that we use to protect ourselves when we aren’t willing and able to rumble with vulnerability.
― Brené Brown, Dare to Lead

Instead of thinking of fear as a thing to avoid, you need to accept it while not letting it get in the way of how you act or make decisions. To do this, you need to watch out for signs of fear that can make people feel unsafe, unheard and unseen.

Fear of losing control

Do you lack trust in your team to make independent decisions? Do you worry about things going wrong if you’re not involved? Do you jump in at the first chance of trouble and try to fix things without letting your team take control?

If you feel the need to be part of every meeting, every decision and every small discussion, you have a fear of losing control. You can’t let go, can’t delegate, can’t rest without overseeing everything that happens in your team. 

Your desire to stay in control impacts your team’s performance—seeking your approval every step of the way prevents your team from thinking independently, making mistakes and learning from them. They become too dependent on you for every small decision. They don’t get the opportunity to step up and take charge. They don’t develop the confidence to solve problems without hand-holding. 

This is the crux of management: It is the belief that a team of people can achieve more than a single person going it alone. It is the realization that you don’t have to do everything yourself, be the best at everything yourself, or even know how to do everything yourself. Your job, as a manager, is to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.
― Julie Zhuo, The Making of a Manager

Instead of seeking control, share context. Empower your team to think and act on their own. 

Fear of failure

Do you refuse to take on new challenges with the worry you might fail? Do you stick to easy choices and safe bets? Do you choose a path of certainty because it’s less risky even though the path with ambiguity looks more promising?

If you’re risk-averse, focussed on avoiding mistakes and succeeding at all costs, you have a fear of failure. You don’t invest in experimentation, don’t create space for exploration and don’t encourage risk-taking. You stick to tried-and-tested approaches because you don’t like dealing with unknowns and uncertainty. 

Playing safe may get the job done, but it does not lead to growth. Not having the opportunity to face obstacles, handle conflicting situations or navigate the uncharted territory prevents your team from building the skills required to learn and grow, which leads to unhappiness and dissatisfaction in the long-run.

The fear of failure kills creativity and intelligence. The only thing it produces is conformity.
― Anup Kochhar, The Failure Project

Instead of avoiding failure, embrace risks. Choose the hard path because it’s more rewarding in the end. 

Fear of criticism 

Do you consider disagreement as an attack on your intelligence? Do you consider differences of opinion as a challenge to your status and authority? Do you encourage opinions that match your viewpoint and reject ideas that are not inline with your assumptions and beliefs?

If you engage with others to prove your smartness, raise your self-esteem and consider any opposition or pushback as an attack to your status, you have a fear of criticism. You worry that others will not find you credible or your reputation will be damaged if you let them see your flaws and imperfections. This makes you abuse your power and position to silence your team and make them adopt faulty logic, outdated beliefs and less optimal solutions. You push for what you believe is right instead of showing curiosity to find the right solutions. 

When dissent is discouraged, people in the team stop sharing their thoughts because they don’t see the value in voicing their concerns. Issues that could have been avoided are not discussed. Better ideas never surface. People in the team feel unheard, dismissed and overlooked. Lack of safety to express openly creates an environment where people feel uninspired to excel. 

Psychological safety is the key to creating a workplace where people can be confident enough to act without undue fear of being ridiculed, punished, or fired – and be humble enough to openly doubt what is believed and done. As Amy Edmondson’s research shows, psychological safety emerges when those in power persistently praise, reward, and promote people who have the courage to act, talk about their doubts, successes, and failures, and work doggedly to do things better the next time.
― Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss

Instead of looking down upon criticism, reward healthy disagreements. Value finding the right solution over being right.  

Fear of conflict 

Do you put off difficult conversations because they make you uncomfortable? Do you procrastinate and ignore the conflict instead of trying to face it head-on? Do you hope that the issue will resolve itself instead of actively trying to seek alignment and reduce misunderstandings?

If you keep avoiding difficult conversations because you don’t think you can handle them well, you have a fear of conflict. You worry about what to say, what to avoid and how to say it in a manner that does not hurt the other person or damage the relationship. You keep postponing the conversation with useless reasons and excuses because you fear saying the wrong thing or making things worse.

But putting off conflict can actually make things worse. Issues left unaddressed escalate over time. What was once a manageable problem can grow into a much larger issue if not addressed on time. Constant worry about unresolved issues can also take a toll on your mental health and lead to increased stress, anxiety and even feelings of helplessness. When important issues are being ignored or swept under the rug, it can erode trust, build resentment and damage relationships with your team. 

Beginning a conversation is an act of bravery. When you initiate a conversation, you fearlessly step into the unknown. Will the other person respond to favorably or unfavorably? Will it be a friendly or hostile exchange? There is a feeling of being on the edge. That nanosecond of space and unknowing can be intimidating. It shows your vulnerability. 
— Sakyong Mipham, The Lost Art of Good Conversation

Instead of putting off a hard conversation or delaying it forever, address issues directly. Providing clarity and closure will help you gain trust, respect and also alleviate stress. 

Fear of being disliked

Is likability important to you? Do you seek approval to please others? Do you go with the popular opinion as opposed to a more promising unpopular choice because you worry that not going with the majority will make them dislike you? Do you keep saying yes to requests even when they do not align with your goals because saying no can make others unhappy?

If being liked is at the core of how you behave, make decisions or how you act, you have a fear of being disliked. You try to people please your way through tough situations, challenges and setbacks instead of showing the courage to make the hard choices and stand apart. You try to play nice and refuse to give critical feedback because it creates a risk of becoming unpopular and unadmired. 

Likability and popularity leads to bad choices and poor decisions. It makes you unsee problematic behavior, ignore real problems and play favorites to those who charm you with their sweet talk and flattery. Seeking consensus and approval does not make others like you. It does not earn you trust and respect. Rather, it prevents you from emerging as a strong leader that others want to emulate. 

Being nice does not come out of goodness or high morals. It comes out of a fear of displeasing others and receiving their disapproval. It’s driven by fear, not virtue.
― Aziz Gazipura, Not Nice

Instead of being liked, focus on building trust. Stand up. Speak up. Say no. Don’t be afraid of upsetting a few people in the short-term. 

Fear of appearing weak

Do you refuse to take responsibility for your decisions? Do you blame others for not getting the desired outcomes? Do you try to cover up your mistakes as accepting them makes you look incompetent? Do you project an image of strength because you consider vulnerability as a weakness?

If you don’t take responsibility and blame others or external circumstances for your situation, you have a fear of appearing weak. Instead of accepting when your decisions lead to bad outcomes, you look for justifications and excuses. Instead of trying to understand what went wrong when things don’t work out the way you anticipated, you look for a target to blame. Instead of owning up your mistakes, you try to hide them and pretend they don’t exist. 

Never showing vulnerability makes it hard for you to connect with people—putting on a facade of strength and imperfection makes you come across as fake and unreal. You also fail to hold people accountable in the team because you yourself don’t set a good example. 

Humility is a reflection of vulnerability; it is the self giving itself permission to say, “I don’t know everything.
― John Baldoni, Grace Under Pressure

Instead of pretending to be strong, take responsibility for your actions. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s a strength. 

Fear of losing credibility

Do you worry that if a project fails, it will reflect badly on you as a leader? Do you constantly look out for mistakes and try to correct them even before they’ve occurred? Do you point out flaws and shortcomings with the concern that if you miss catching them, others may question your expertise?

If you watch your team like a hawk and try to ensure nothing ever goes wrong, you have a fear of losing credibility. You closely monitor tasks, keep reminding your team not to miss anything and create a lot of fuss when there’s even a minor slip or small deviation from the expectations. 

When the team feels constantly judged and monitored, it lowers their morale. Always reminding them of the gaps without appreciating them for things they did well also makes them feel disregarded, undervalued and unappreciated. Your tendency to avoid mistakes at all costs creates a sense of fear and resentment in the team. 

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
― Aung San Suu Kyi, Freedom from Fear

Instead of hunting for mistakes, build a resilient team that can face challenges and solve problems on their own. You’ll be more trusted and respected. 

Fear of change 

Do you delay decisions that require stepping out of your comfort zone? Are you reluctant to make changes to keep up with the future demands? Do you continue with old ways of doing things because the idea to change and adapt leads to stress and anxiety?

If you consider “change” as a thing to avoid instead of as a means to build a future-ready organization, you have a fear of change. You continue with projects that are no longer serving you well instead of investing in new opportunities. You don’t spin off new initiatives and restructure your organization to align with them. You keep doing the work that seems safe, familiar and easy. 

Continuing with old methods, practices and systems with the worry that any change might break what’s already working well leaves you behind—you fail to build an organization that can scale to future needs. Top performers in the team eventually leave as they get frustrated without learning and growth.  

Executives are often reluctant to accept the need for change; they may have a vested interest in the status quo, or they may feel that time will eventually vindicate their previous choices. Indeed, when we ask executives what prompts them to seek out blue oceans and introduce change, they usually say that it takes a highly determined leader or a serious crisis.
― W. Chan Kim, Blue Ocean Strategy

Instead of resisting change, embrace discomfort. Change may be challenging, but it’s an opportunity to grow and evolve.  

Summary

1. Fear of control can prevent you from empowering your team and become a bottleneck for everything that happens in the team. Build a team that can function independently.
2. Fear of failure can make you give up on opportunities that appear risky and stick to a safe path, impacting your team’s learning and growth. Make conscious bets, invest in taking risks. 
3. Fear of criticism can make you shut down differences of opinion and push others to accept your thinking, even when it’s suboptimal and biased. Make better choices by encouraging dissent.   
4. Fear of conflict can make you put off or avoid difficult conversations thereby turning a small problem into a major issue. Handle challenging conversations at the right time even if they’re uncomfortable at first.
5. Fear of being disliked can make you lean towards consensus instead of pushing for what’s right. Instead of seeking approval, learn to say no.
6. Fear of appearing weak can make you use blames and excuses to justify your outcomes instead of identifying what went wrong and taking steps to fix it. Take responsibility, own your mistakes.
7. Fear of losing credibility can make you constantly point out your team’s flaws and shortcomings making them feel judged and turn resentful. Stop pointing out mistakes and share your support. 
8. Fear of change can make you continue with the status quo instead of investing in opportunities that are necessary for future growth. Embrace change to grow and evolve.

Recommended Reading

The Anxious Achiever By Morra Aarons-Mele

Leading Beyond Fear By Neil Pretty

The post What Fear Costs Your Team Over Time appeared first on TechTello.