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.

When I was a manager, automation meant looking for routine tasks that prevent people from doing their best work. We were limited to automating data pipelines, deployments, reporting, alerting and other tasks that can leverage tech.  

We never imagined a world where machines can make decisions on our behalf and act autonomously. We never considered the possibility of an agent who can scan inboxes, schedule meetings, respond to emails, connect to internal task management systems or slack messages to separate signal from noise. 

Whether it’s summarizing information, writing code, fixing bugs, interacting with external APIs and data sources, retaining information over long multi-step workflows, evaluating outcomes and adjusting strategies dynamically in response to new information or achieving complex multi step goals without human intervention, autonomous systems that use AI agents can do this round the clock without complaining or ever getting exhausted. What you can achieve with Agentic AI is only limited by your own imagination.  

For a manager, leveraging Agentic AI is no longer optional, it’s a necessity. Continuing to operate without it means choosing a less efficient, more time consuming, resource intensive and error prone path. Teams that leverage AI to their advantage can achieve their goals in less time—they’re more performant, productive and more present to tackle everyday challenges at work. 

Over the next decade, AI won’t replace managers, but managers who use AI will replace those who don’t.
― Harvard Business Review, Artificial Intelligence

Here are a few use cases in which managers can leverage AI to run their teams more effectively:

Executive assistant  

Every day managers waste a tremendous amount of time in managing inbox, calendars and stakeholders. They still miss important emails, struggle to prevent their calendars from overflowing and disappoint stakeholders for not sending out critical updates on time. 

Even after spending so much time trying to be organized, they don’t have a simple way to separate signal from noise. 

They have to keep checking emails every few minutes because what if something shows up that deserves their immediate attention—system alerts, emails from leaders, stakeholders or others who are a critical part of their day-to-day work. They have to manually schedule and reschedule meetings to handle conflicts, plan and prioritize time for critical work and decline meetings that are not worth their time and attention. They have to follow-up on each deadline manually, create a summary (highlighting risks, achievements and plan ahead) and send that update to their stakeholders.    

All this consumes their focus and energy, which ideally should be spent in building better products, solving complex problems, designing efficient processes and growing their teams. 

Instead of having to do this manually, wouldn’t it be nice to have a personal assistant who would do all this and much more for you?

An intelligent PA can:

1. Scan your inbox and summarize urgent items, approval delays, follow-ups, categorize emails and suggest actions and can notify you instantly (on your WhatsApp, slack) of an email from a certain group or set of people so that you don’t have to constantly check your email.
2. Highlight your most important meetings in the day, remind you of important deadlines, upcoming travel plans and flight status. 
3. Send out an automatic status update message to your team every day at a certain time asking for progress, blockers, plan for the next 24 hrs, dependencies and any other callout. It can then summarize it for you and flag risks or anything that needs your attention. 
4. Convert a meeting transcript into key decisions, action items, owners, deadlines and follow-ups and send them to the entire team. It can also automatically follow-up on the actions items and keep track of progress. 
5. Gather information from meetings, documents, emails, notes, slack and other channels to create a status update summary for stakeholders highlighting progress, blockers, risks and other important information. 
6. List the most important decisions you need to make today with contexts, risks and even recommended action.
7. Put a meeting on your calendar from simple call outs like: “Schedule a recurring meeting every Friday from 3-4pm with my team.” or “Schedule a bi-weekly 1-1 meeting with every member of my team for 30 mins. Keep it in the second half of the day.”  or “Block this Tuesday afternoon from 12-3pm for my daughter’s PTM.” or “Mark a dentist’s appointment next Thursday at 6pm.”
8. Work with you on meeting conflicts, advise you on available slots and do the actual work of scheduling the meeting without you having to open your calendar. 

A PA built using Agentic AI has the capacity to plan, reason and act autonomously. It can do all this and much more without your intervention. 

To build your own PA, think about the questions you need answered:

Any critical meetings today? Do you need to prep for it?

What are the emails that need an urgent response?

What deadlines do you have this week?

What are the top 2 focus areas for today?

What risks do you need to mitigate?

AI Automation doesn’t replace human judgment—it spotlights where it’s needed most.
― Ian Michiels, The Validation Economy

You can start building simple use cases and then add more complex use cases depending on the amount of control you want to give to your assistant. I built my own PA within 8 hours which sends me a daily brief on WhatsApp using Twilio. It wasn’t the most sophisticated version, but with all the systems connected and basic intelligence already plugged in, it will only take me a few more days to automate it for all my use cases. 

Here’s a simple prompt I used:

You are a high-quality executive assistant.

Emails:
{emails}

Events:
{events}

Generate a WhatsApp-style daily brief.

Format:

Daily Brief

Priorities:
...

Inbox:
...

Meetings:
...

Risks:
...

Focus:
...

Onboarding copilot

When new members join your team, getting them up to speed is a time consuming process. How well they understand the existing systems and processes also gets limited by their mentor—a dedicated and focused mentor can quickly ramp them up and make them productive from day 1 while a mentor who doesn’t take this responsibility seriously can leave the new joinee confused and demotivated. 

Onboarding shouldn’t be taken lightly because it shapes the early experience and determines whether the new joinee excels or struggles at work. 

What if this entire process is automated and handled by an agent who’s intelligent enough to curate a custom experience based on each individual’s role, expectations and gaps? This agent can provide a mentorship experience without being biased or busy.

An intelligent onboarding agent can:

1. Create an email id for the new employee and send a welcome mail to them.
2. Add them to all relevant tools, groups and corresponding message channels with proper access and usage readiness. 
3. Create a procurement request to get them assigned a laptop, badge, desk, food coupons and other necessary resources. 
4. Send them content to understand org hierarchy and get themselves acquainted with leaders, managers and stakeholders.
5. Identify key people to meet (team members, stakeholders, cross-functional partners) and help them build the right relationships early by scheduling meeting invites. 
6. Create a tailored onboarding plan based on role, level and location. 
7. Curate role specific learning (docs, videos, other material) that adapts based on progress and gaps.
8. Allow them to ask questions to understand past decisions, project context and why certain things are done the way they are. This reduces dependency on people to answer basic questions. 
9. Break down goals into daily/weekly actions. Keep track of their progress and nudge them to complete their assigned tasks. Adapt in real-time based on whether they’re ahead or behind. 
10. Take their inputs and notify you of their concerns or challenges faced. Also, detect signs of disengagement based on missed tasks, low interaction or delayed responses to catch early onboarding failure. 
11. Track onboarding milestones and flag any delays or lack of engagement. Nudge you on when to check in, what to communicate and what to clarify.  

An onboarding agent built using Agentic AI can be your partner to provide a seamless experience to new employees which keeps them focused, engaged and learning. 

The best way to think about what to build in an onboarding agent is to think about the questions that need to be answered:  

Who should they reach out to if they get stuck?

What are the best practices and processes for communication, collaboration, meetings, deployment and debugging?

Who are the key stakeholders?

Who are the different leaders, managers and architects in the org and what areas do they own?

What are the expectations at their level based on their role and competencies?

What are their goals for the first 30-60-90 days?

How can they get the feedback?

Who can answer their queries?

How can you know their progress and what kind of help can you provide?

You must design a system for training and onboarding that gives people a real, fighting chance at success.
― Mitch Gray, How to Hire and Keep Great People

Here’s a sample prompt to start:

ROLE:
You are an AI Onboarding Agent designed to help new employees become productive quickly and confidently.

OBJECTIVES:
- Accelerate time-to-productivity
- Provide clear, actionable guidance (not generic advice)
- Personalize onboarding based on role, goals and progress
- Drive accountability through commitments and follow-ups
- Reduce confusion by explaining context and priorities

INPUTS AVAILABLE:
- user_profile: {role, team, level, start_date}
- onboarding_plan: {30_60_90_goals, tasks, milestones}
- progress_data: {completed_tasks, pending_tasks, delays}
- knowledge_base: {company_docs, processes, FAQs}
- interaction_history: {past questions, responses, issues}

INSTRUCTIONS:
1. Identify the user’s current onboarding stage and immediate priorities
2. Provide a concise “Focus for Now” (top 1-3 priorities)
3. Break work into specific, time-bound next steps
4. Highlight blockers, risks or dependencies (if any)
5. Ask 1-2 focused questions to drive clarity or ownership
6. Adapt responses based on progress and past interactions
7. If delays or confusion are detected:
   - simplify tasks
   - reduce scope
   - re-prioritize essentials

OUTPUT FORMAT:
- Focus for Now:
- Next Steps (numbered, specific, time-bound):
- Risks/Watch-outs (if any):
- Question(s):

CONSTRAINTS:
- Be concise, practical and specific
- Avoid generic advice or long explanations
- Do not overload with information
- Prefer action over explanation
- Prefer clarity over completeness

SUCCESS CRITERIA:
- The user knows exactly what to do next
- The user can act immediately without further clarification
- Progress is measurable by next interaction

Performance tracking and signal detection agent

Giving constructive feedback to your team on a regular basis is not an easy process. Most managers suck at it because it requires continuous effort to gather, organize and summarize feedback in a way that motivates them to do better at their job instead of damaging their confidence. Your cognitive biases like confirmation, recency, fundamental attribution error and several others also prevent you from being impartial and neutral when delivering this feedback. 

The biggest challenge is having all your observations in one place—capturing those impromptu feedback moments or conversations, logging when they did well and where they lagged, documenting appreciation or complaints from other teams/functions, their behaviors/attitudes towards other team members and in general how communicative, collaborative and attentive are they. 

Before AI, I used to maintain feedback of each of my team members in an excel file. But it was a painful process to sift through all the notes and try to make sense out of them. Lack of time and my own biases would often make me miss critical inputs that could have been tremendously beneficial to my team. Not having a structured process also made me miss entering details into the excel—there was no system to remind me or nudge me to stay consistent.  

What if you could use AI to manage your team’s performance without relying on your memory or rough feedback notes? 

An intelligent performance system can:

1. Convert your inputs into more concrete feedback points based on each member’s role, goals and competencies.
2. Point out when your feedback seems biased and challenge you to rethink. 
3. Call out incomplete or opinionated feedback and ask you to provide examples to keep it real.
4. Identify if a certain feedback is a one-off event or a behavior pattern based on their past performance and history. 
5. Nudge you to enter feedback when it detects you haven’t been consistent or focusing on only a few team members while ignoring others.
6. Pull each team member’s achievements and misses from the task management system to identify how they’re progressing on their goals—missed deadlines, low output or inconsistent performance. 
7. Cover the gap between someone not performing and why they’re not performing by spotting patterns like “struggles with prioritization” or “poor stakeholder management.”
8. Read messages from emails, slacks and other channels to gather their contributions or concerns raised by others. 
9. Help you frame feedback clearly by avoiding emotional or vague language and connecting behavior to impact.
10. Convert data into performance summaries, promotion cases and review notes. 
11. Create a single snapshot of each team member with clear direction for you on the next steps to take.

A performance management system built using agentic AI can make giving and receiving feedback less intimidating, more structured and highly valuable.

To think about what to include in your performance management system, think about your pain points:

How do you keep feedback organized and easy to summarize?

How do you separate patterns of behavior from one-off events?

How do you ensure you’re not being unfair or biased?

What challenges do you face when trying to compare performance to their goals and expectations?

How do you know how others feel about working with them? 

Corporate performance management systems and processes are gradually moving away from a static, unidirectional, and time-bound avatar to a more dynamic, continuous, and interactive state.
― Pearl Zhu

Here’s a sample prompt to start:

ROLE:
You are a performance management assistant helping managers give clear, fair and actionable feedback.

INPUTS:
- user_profile
- goals
- task_data (achievements, misses, deadlines)
- communication_data (messages, feedback, concerns)
- past_feedback

YOUR JOB:
1. Identify key signals (progress, gaps, patterns)
2. Distinguish one-off issues vs repeated behavior
3. Suggest likely root causes (e.g. prioritization, ownership, communication)
4. Convert insights into clear, specific feedback
5. Challenge vague or biased feedback and ask for examples
6. Suggest next actions for the manager

OUTPUT FORMAT:

Performance Snapshot

Key Signals:
...

Patterns:
...

Possible Causes:
...

Feedback Suggestion:
...

Gaps in Feedback:
...

Next Actions:
...

RULES:
- Focus on facts and observable behavior
- Avoid vague or emotional language
- Highlight bias or missing evidence
- Keep output concise and actionable

These are just a few examples. Managers can build so many other systems using agentic AI like goal tracking and completion, an agent that manages collaboration initiatives or a system that minimizes downtime by proactively monitoring, raising alerts and maybe even applying a patch before it becomes an issue. 

Summary

1. Managers who adopt Agentic AI to delegate and manage their workload can run their teams more efficiently. By having agents summarize, plan and take automatic actions, managers can focus on work only they can do. 
2. Building a personal assistant is critical. Without it, you have to manually manage your emails, calendar, messages and other information that’s scattered across different sources and channels. PA built using agentic AI can collect information from different sources, summarize it for you and help you act on it in just a few minutes without spending hours trying to make sense.
3. Onboarding is a time consuming and an error prone process. Employees feel lost and demotivated when it’s not done well. Building a personalized onboarding agent using Agentic AI can ramp up new joinees with a structured, customized and engaging process that works for their role, goals and expectations. It can notify you and help you address their concerns proactively without waiting for them to become disengaged. 
4. Managers who take the feedback process seriously build high performance teams. But giving the right feedback is still a challenge most managers face. This can be solved by automating the process using agentic AI, which can manage the entire performance history of each of your team members and help you keep feedback clear, constructive, fair and unbiased.

Recommended Reading

Agentic Artificial Intelligence By Pascal Bornet, Jochen Wirtz

AI Engineering By Chip Huyen

The post Essential AI Automations to Run Your Team Smarter appeared first on TechTello.

Many people get into leadership positions without the ability to think critically. They spend each day firefighting instead of solving problems that won’t repeat these issues. They continue with how things have always been done without challenging the status quo. They make decisions based on present issues without considering the future opportunities. Without the ability to look into the future and its needs, without being proactive and without moving away from addressing only current needs, they cannot be effective. 

They can support business as usual, but they can’t predict and meet future needs. They can solve today’s crisis, but they can’t prevent another setback from happening. They can deliver products, but they can’t make something with an edge that will stand out in the market. Reactive thinking and reactive action keeps them busy without being effective. 

Strategic thinking is a big part of a leader’s job and cultivating it requires conscious prioritization, careful planning and not using lack of time as an excuse. It requires taking responsibility for managing your own time well and not blaming others for keeping you busy. It requires shifting from execution to analyzing situations, anticipating outcomes and developing plans that are bold and visionary. It requires stepping out of your comfort zone. It requires making hard choices. 

Strategy determines what matters most and what doesn’t. It requires making informed trade-offs. It requires solving deep-rooted problems, not just the surface level symptoms. It includes preparing for multiple possibilities, not just a predictable future. It’s knowing when to push forward and when to pivot. It’s a map that gives you a sense of direction without laying out every step of the way.  

Every organization has momentum, however, the core strategy determines whether it moves forward, backwards or in circles.
― Wayne Chirisa

Leaders who provide strategic clarity makes it easy for their teams to act on complex decisions, turn ideas into positive outcomes and accelerate progress. They build strategic excellence by following these practices:

Create focused blocks of time

If you don’t plan your time well, you allow unplanned tasks, ad hoc requests and other time-wasting activities eat up into your day. You may run from one meeting to the next, problem solve issues as they occur and get pulled into discussions with little or no use only to find yourself exhausted at the end of each day without creating any value. 

Strategic thinking requires strategic time management. You can’t expect to find time for it if you never intentionally plan your day. To improve strategic thinking, create focused blocks of time into your calendar. Schedule them in advance so that they don’t get filled with other inconsequential activities. 

Regularly schedule thinking, reflecting and planning blocks that are focused on identifying core areas that need attention, efforts that are leading to wasted time or sunk costs and drawing learnings from projects that are doing well to apply them to other initiatives. Identify the needs of your organization from a hiring, training and growth standpoint—what skills do people need to build to manage future expectations. What are the gaps? 

When you consciously plan thinking time, you give yourself time to slow down and think with a clear head. You’re able to draw connections and identity initiatives that aren’t possible when you’re always rushing and in a firefighting mode. It also gives you the opportunity to re-evaluate your decisions, identify the changes you need to make to adapt to new information and proactively put measures in place to course correct instead of being reactive. 

Much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed or down-right prejudiced. Yet the quality of our life and that of what we produce, make, or build depends precisely on the quality of our thought. Shoddy thinking is costly, both in money and in quality of life. Excellence in thought, however, must be systematically cultivated.
― Richard Paul, Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools

You can’t lead effectively without the ability to create space for thinking time. Plan and put it on your calendar upfront before it gets filled with other activities.  

Push back and say no

Time is finite and so are the things you can do in a day. Amongst many paths you can take to achieve your strategic goal, you need to lock down on one or two. You need to cut down on hundreds of possibilities and choose only the ones that are most promising. You need to plan and prioritize goals that will deliver the biggest impact. You’re not being strategic if you try to fit everything into your plan because determining what shouldn’t be done is tough while including everything is easy.   

Strategic thinking involves elimination, subtraction and decluttering. Elimination requires careful analysis to separate useful ideas from distractions. Subtraction involves reducing the number of things you sign up for when multiple options are viable. Decluttering is an on-going exercise to clean up and remove the mess that’s no longer serving you well. 

Strategic planning requires the courage to upset a few people by saying no. It requires understanding that achieving excellence in a few things is more important than doing too many things with a mediocre outcome. It requires the hard work of separating important from urgent and committing to fulfilling important priorities so that there’s less urgency and chaos everyday. 

You don’t have to play nice and agree to doing something that must not be done at all. Remember this: Doing something always comes at the cost of not doing something else. You need to evaluate the opportunity cost by viewing every request through a strategic lens:

Does it fit into your long-term vision?

What will it help you achieve? 

How does it stack rank compared to your other priorities?

What will you have to give up to make time for it? Is it worth it?

What will you lose if you don’t do it now?

What will you gain? 

Good strategy requires leaders who are willing and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests. Strategy is at least as much about what an organization does not do as it is about what it does.
― Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy

Strategic planning requires saying no to good opportunities so that you can focus on great ones. Eliminate, subtract and declutter. Say no more. Add less.  

Challenge long-standing rules

Sticking to old methods of solving problems, building products or even how decisions are made feels like a safe approach—it has worked in the past and there’s less effort involved to make it work again. But, doing things the way they’ve always been done or taking on opportunities based on what feels safe prevents you from taking risks that are necessary for growth. 

Without questioning assumptions, challenging the status quo and pushing for unconventional strategies, you cannot give the push your org needs to keep up with the future demands and not get sucked into business as usual. Avoiding new opportunities with fear of failure, dismissing ideas because they seem too risky or defaulting to tried-and-tested methods over bold initiatives caps your team’s potential. 

Standing up and suggesting an unpopular choice is often risky—it may not work, others may not like it or you may face a lot of resistance. But it’s a risk you’ve got to take as a leader. Staying within your comfort zone feels safe, but it also limits growth. Strategic thinking involves pushing the boundary of known and stepping into uncertainty. It involves taking bold risks and navigating the uncharted territory. 

To build risk-taking appetite, you’ve got to take risks. You can’t go about taking the easy path and hope to achieve great things. A few questions worth asking:

Is the risk worth it?

Is the decision reversible or irreversible?

How can you stack the odds in your favor?

What’s within your control?

Truly transformational learning requires that we experience situations that put us totally outside of our known zone, well beyond the realm of familiarity and control—so much so that our world feels mangled or turned upside down.
― Julia Sloan, Learning to Think Strategically

Build the appetite to take risks. Don’t take the easy road—fight for choices that are hard at first, but rewarding in the end.

Align product and talent

Many leaders make the mistake of setting up a great product strategy without a people strategy. They define a strong vision for the kind of products to build, marketing plan to promote them and a rigorous feedback loop to learn from the process and make corrections. But, when it comes to people, they take things for granted. 

There’s no strategy for hiring, retaining and training employees. There’s no plan to build a talent pool that can keep up with the growing demands. People are expected to scale magically without any strategy. This creates a huge gap between expectations and reality. Product strategy fails miserably because people who are required to give life to that strategy aren’t aligned.  

Scaling people shouldn’t be an after thought. It needs its own strategic plan—is org structured in a way that’s best aligned with the growth areas? Do employees have the skills and experience needed to excel in their roles? What are the gaps in hiring? What challenges do you foresee at the people level, which if not solved, can lead to delays and poor quality? What’s your strategy to solve communication and collaboration challenges that people face—can introducing better processes reduce these problems?

You have to align product with talent. Strategic thinking that overindexes on product while ignoring people almost always fails to produce the desired impact. Thinking about both together helps you face the reality of your situation—constraints, gaps and challenges—which then enables you to devise a more realistic plan.

In a future ready organization, ‘talent’ is increasingly a metaphor for capability—at the right place, at the right time and equally, at the right price.
― Gyan Nagpal, The Future Ready Organization

Don’t make the mistake of creating a solid product strategy without considering the people aspect. You need both working together. One cannot succeed without the other. 

Use AI as a thinking partner

With multiple AI assistants (ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude etc.) at your disposal, it may be tempting to let AI do all the work—tell me what to do, how should I solve it, what are my options, what would you suggest? 

But asking AI to think for you will not sharpen your thinking skills. It will make you dependent on it for every small decision. If you stop using your mental muscles to think hard, you’ll lose your ability to question and reason. You will not learn to challenge ideas, separate signal from noise or reason through a difficult situation. 

AI is a wonderful decision partner. But, you have to use it for the right reasons—challenge your thoughts, validate your assumptions, analyze data and draw patterns, run risk simulations and even review your strategy. It can do all of these well and help you further expand your thinking. AI can be your devil’s advocate—helping you see your biases, confront your fears and identify flaws in your strategy. It can help you apply great frameworks like second order thinking, pre-mortem analysis, regret simulation, bias audit and reversibility test to create an excellent strategy. 

But, you have to do the hard work of sitting with your discomfort and continuing to prod your mind till you’ve an “aha moment.” Pushing through the hard task of drawing connections, having a breakthrough when you’re stuck at an impasse and not taking the easy path of asking AI to do the work is what strengthens your thinking skills and enables you to be an effective leader. 

Take a look at our strategic plan for our upcoming fiscal year. Acting as an executive coach, I need you to challenge our assumptions. Start by questioning our goals: are we really pushing the envelope, or are we playing it safe? Then assess the structure of our plan: is it robust enough to achieve our goals even when things don’t go as planned, or are we too reliant on ideal conditions? After our discussion, I’d appreciate your feedback on the strengths of our plan, areas for improvement, and actionable advice to ensure we’re set up for success.
― Geoff Woods, The AI-Driven Leader

Effective leadership requires strategic thinking which involves changing gears by disconnecting from the present moment into visualizing a better future. If you keep delegating this job to AI, you’ll never be that leader. 

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Summary

1. Leaders who don’t practice strategic thinking skills can only cater to the present without the ability to shape the future.
2. Strategic thinking requires dedicated thinking and planning time away from distractions so that you can identify the future needs of your organization without getting pulled into daily chaos. Leaders who don’t put this on their calendar consciously never make time to do it right. 
3. Strategic thinking is as much about deciding what shouldn’t be done at all as it’s about determining what deserves attention. Doing something always comes at the cost of not doing something else. Eliminate, subtract and declutter. Learn to say no.
4. Strategic thinking involves taking bold risks and initiatives. You can’t stick with the safe path and wish to achieve great things. Challenge the status quo, question assumptions and be willing to navigate the uncharted territory. 
5. Strategic thinking requires aligning product with people—having a great product strategy without any thinking into how to scale people to make it work always ends up in disappointing results. You need a realistic plan that involves people who can adapt to the future and its needs.
6. AI can create a strategy for you, but it can’t sharpen your thinking skills. Only you can do it by doing the hard work yourself and using AI to challenge, question and validate your assumptions. 

Recommended Reading

The Art of Strategy By Avinash K. Dixit, Barry J. Nalebuff

Leading with Strategic Thinking By Aaron K. Olson, B. Keith Simerson

The post How to Improve Strategic Thinking for Effective Leadership appeared first on TechTello.

Amongst different kinds of people I have worked with, I find lazy people to be the worst. Not only are they casual about expectations, deadlines and commitments, they can make you doubt yourself if you’re someone who’s dedicated, committed and hard working. They consistently deliver low quality products and expect others to pick up their slack. They don’t feel bad about doing a half-arse job because that’s their general attitude towards work, responsibility and anything remotely meaningful.  

Working with them is highly frustrating because they’ll make you feel bad about trying to do a good job. 

You’re being dramatic. 

There’s no need to do more. 

We have done enough.

While you can’t expect them to take initiative, the worst part is not being able to rely on them for anything. Too lazy to communicate if they’re blocked on you or waiting for something. Too lazy to call out assumptions or expectation mismatch. Too lazy to consider better ways of solving a problem. 

They stick to tried-and-tested approaches, old practices, outdated knowledge and look for shortcuts and easiest ways to get things done because doing anything new requires effort and dedication. Arguing with them, challenging them or blaming them does not change their perspective—rather, they tend to turn more rigid and defensive when confronted with an attitude problem. The walls they’ve built around themselves prevents them from seeing the comfort bubble they’re living in. 

Weak-minded people are willing to catch any random train that’s going to ‘somewhere’ because going somewhere is easier than having to sit down and determine a ‘somewhere.’ 
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

While not always easy, following these practices can make working with lazy people a lot less stressful and more productive:

Check if it’s a temporary thing

While some people are lazy out of habit, for others it may be situational or circumstantial—they may be dealing with a personal problem or some issue at work. What may seem laziness to you, may actually be a motivation problem—they may not be excited about work or feel stagnant in their current role. They may be dealing with a health issue that prevents them from focusing and meeting expectations. Other challenges at work or in personal life can also distract people, making them appear uncaring, unprofessional or indolent. 

Before stamping people with a “lazy” label and placing them into specific buckets, take a moment and try to understand if their behavior is a temporary thing or a general attitude problem. Not all “lazy” behavior is the same. Some of it is fear. Some of it is confusion. Some of it is misaligned effort. And some of it is actually an attitude problem.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to distinguish between a temporary dip vs a behavioral pattern:

1. Do they lack skill (can’t do) or lack motivation (won’t do)?
2. Do they show energy for certain types of work but not others?
3. Have they always shown this behavior or is it recent?
4. Could you be biased? Would you judge the same behavior differently in someone else?
5. Is there a pattern of doing the bare minimum regardless of the scope of work?
6. Could it be burnout or stress rather than laziness?

If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don’t tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don’t understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don’t have the courage to ask questions.
― Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements

Before labeling someone as lazy, ask: is it fear, lack of clarity, poor incentives, burnout or truly unwillingness?

Discuss expectations and hold them accountable

Lazy people often get a free pass to keep repeating the behavior as you may find it easier to do the work yourself than holding them accountable. But without setting up accountability upfront and aligning on expectations, you let their default tendency to avoid work overpower their sense of commitment and responsibility. 

Without setting clear expectations on what they need to do or what you expect of them, lazy people will find a way to disregard your concerns using excuses like lack of clarity, lack of direction or lack of alignment. 

By agreeing on deliverables, timelines and quality expectations, you leave less room for excuses later. By asking them to call out if they’re blocked without waiting for a follow-up, you tell them to be proactive and push information instead of relying only on a pull. By calling out their dependency and how it impacts others, you make them understand why their effort matters. 

When setting expectations or aligning on goals, hold them accountable by making them verbally agree and commit to a plan. While silent commitment is easy to ignore, spoken commitment is harder to break. When you tell someone what to do, the responsibility stays with you. But, when they say it themselves the ownership shifts. The shift is powerful because verbalizing a commitment creates the internal pressure to stay consistent and do what they said they’re going to do. 

In the end, ask: 

Can I count on you for this?

Can I trust you to meet this commitment?

Can I rely on you for this deliverable?

Do you promise to make this work?

Setting boundaries and holding people accountable is a lot more work than shaming and blaming. But it’s also much more effective. It’s hard for us to understand that we can be compassionate and accepting while we hold people accountable for their behaviors. We can, and, in fact, it’s the best way to do it. The key is to separate people from their behaviors—to address what they’re doing, not who they are.
― Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

Lazy people tend to drift or disengage with vague expectations, unclear deadlines and lack of accountability. Make them follow-through by being upfront on deliverables and having them verbally commit to it. 

Setup daily or bi-weekly sync up

Lazy people tend to commit and disappear, often using excuses to justify their lack of progress. When the gap between follow-up and commitment is too wide, it’s easy for lazy people to drift and hide. 

Shortening this loop by setting up regular sync ups makes it harder for them to avoid work—they can’t state “still thinking” or accept “doing nothing” in every update. They can’t give the same excuse in every meeting. Frequent check-ins also enable you to identify blockers and work on solutions instead of letting them become a reason for delays and inaction. When issues are caught early, course correction can happen sooner instead of letting it show up as a surprise failure later. 

Make it hard for lazy people to stay vague, deflect or over-talk by asking these questions during sync-ups:

1. What exactly has moved forward since last time in terms of what’s actually done and not just in progress?
2. I need to see a tangible outcome. Can you show the current version? 
3. What’s blocking you and when did this show up?
4. This was due on [some date]. What’s preventing you from completing it?
5. What will be completed by the next sync up and what does “done” look like for that?

The mechanism that pushes an organization’s execution is the accountability built into relationships. Tough conversations that are uncomfortable are a part of building relationships. There is increased accountability when you ask another person to follow up or check in – to share in this accountability with you.
― Henry J. Evans, Winning With Accountability

Lazy people will procrastinate without a push. Use checkpoints and regular sync-ups as a strategy to ensure they don’t go for too many days without producing a meaningful outcome. 

Give direct feedback when things don’t improve

Some people don’t intentionally act in sluggish ways—they just don’t understand the impact of their behavior on others. This happens when others silently keep making up for their lack of effort without giving them concrete feedback. They keep producing mediocre work and others keep trying to polish it. They keep missing deadlines and others stay back late to finish their work. Over time, lazy people stop trying to be good because they’re not expected to do well. 

An honest face-to-face conversation can sometimes wake them up from lethargy and put them right into action. You need to be careful and cautious though. Words matter. Calling them lazy or using blame and other belittling tactics will do more damage than good—attacking people or their character is bound to put them on the defensive and make them turn against you. 

You’re lazy.

You’re not serious.

You always do this.

Instead, talk about specific behaviors—what they’re expected to do and what they actually do. Discuss the impact of not producing quality work, missing timelines or not being proactive in communicating. Use calmness, not aggression to convey your concerns.

It’s important to be candid though. You can’t sugarcoat your feedback and expect them to understand it. You need to be direct without coming across as pushy, rude or insensitive. Avoid words that sound judgmental or have the potential to be misinterpreted. Don’t come across too strong. Talk about the problem without making it personal. Express your concerns in a non-judgmental neutral tone. Stick to facts, not opinions. 

I’ve noticed your updates are often vague and the team ends up spending extra time chasing clarity instead of moving forward. That’s slowing overall progress. Going forward, what will you change in your updates so they’re clear and actionable?

This deliverable was committed for Friday but wasn’t completed. That caused timeline shifts and rework for others, which we need to avoid. What will you do differently to ensure you meet your commitments next time?

Right now, your share of work is lower than expected and others are having to compensate. That’s creating frustration in the team. How will you take more ownership to ensure the workload is more balanced?

When your deadlines slip, it directly impacts others. They either have to pick up the work or delay theirs. That’s not sustainable. What specific steps will you take to prevent this from happening again?

The goal shouldn’t be to remove interpretation or judgment. It should be to make judgments thoughtfully, and once made, to have them be transparent and discussable.
― Douglas Stone, Thanks for the Feedback

When giving feedback to a lazy person, don’t pick them apart or criticize them for their failing. Rather, talk about how resolving the challenges they’re facing will lead to growth and opportunity.  

Keep their manager in the loop

Some lazy people are smart, manipulative and highly political—they’re the most dangerous kind. Strategic avoidance while doing image management makes them appear useful while minimizing real accountability. 

They use long explanations, strategic language and jargon-filled conversations to create an illusion of contribution. They spend more time discussing things and hashing them out instead of doing the actual work. They’re smart to stay at the forefront of highly visible and high credit work while avoiding tasks that involve execution. They overcomplicate things to create confusion and dodge responsibility. They use likability and strong rapport with managers and leaders as a shield to protect themselves from being challenged. 

With such people, the only way to get them to take their commitment seriously is to document everything and add their manager to the loop. Looping in the manager increases seriousness and raises the cost of not meeting commitments. Without documentation, their talking can be perceived to be their contribution, but with documentation, it’s only the deliverables that count. Documentation also makes it easy for managers to see the gaps—missed tasks, repeated delays and lack of follow-through are not one-off incidents, they expose patterns over time. 

To make work and ownership visible to their manager, include these in your emails:

1. Don’t use “we” statements, establish clear ownership by stating who is responsible for what.
2. Share specific deadlines. Don’t use words like “soon” or “this week.”
3. Clearly define the expected outcome and what “done” looks like. This prevents them from doing a poor job.
4. Document meetings and discussions—what was decided and what’s expected to happen next.
5. Highlight gaps between what was promised and what actually happened.
6. Call out patterns of repeated slippages and missed follow-ups.
7. Mention questions asked which never got addressed.  
8. Keep focus on the impact of delays and rework. 

Those who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable.
― Stefan Molyneux

Lazy people who are manipulative and political don’t care about work, but they do care about their reputation. Shift their focus from talk to output by escalating and making their commitments visible. 

Summary

1. Lazy people at work can be a real nuisance due to their casual attitude and lack of commitment at work.
2. What may appear laziness at first can be situational or temporary. Before stamping people with a “lazy” label, take a moment to understand if their behavior is a pattern or a one-off event.
3. Lazy people tend to use excuses like lack of clarity and lack of alignment to cover up for their lack of effort. Hold them accountable by setting clear expectations and making them verbally commit to it.
4. Leaving a gap between commitment and follow-up can make lazy people procrastinate for long without any meaningful progress. Setting up a regular cadence around sync-ups can break this habit.
5. Laziness is sometimes not intentional and may simply be a result of lack of concrete feedback. Have a candid conversation with them to help them understand the impact of their slack on others.
6. Lazy people can employ manipulation tactics to dodge responsibility and still look good. Save yourself from getting sucked into their political moves by writing things down and adding their manager to the loop. 

Recommended Reading

Getting Along By Amy Gallo

Surrounded by Bad Bosses (And Lazy Employees)

The post How to Handle Lazy Coworkers appeared first on TechTello.

How often do you react to other people, situations and your circumstances only to regret later—dismissing feedback because it feels personal, succumbing to time pressure, attaching faulty conclusions to someone’s actions, overindexing on negativity while ignoring positive aspects, proving others wrong to win the argument, overfitting past experience into current decision, letting old stress seep into current interactions, becoming overconfident without fully understanding the situation and trying to gain control when there’s unknown and uncertainty involved. 

It’s not your situation but your past experiences, emotions, assumptions and your need for speed and certainty that makes you interpret what’s happening around and jump to conclusions.  

Your mental shortcuts that are designed to make quick decisions come with a cost—they fill in gaps, connect patterns and make you react before you’ve fully understood the situation. They make you judge others, disregard their viewpoint and turn defensive by getting your ego involved.  

We need shortcuts, but they come at a cost. Many decision-making missteps originate from the pressure on the reflexive system to do its job fast and automatically. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I want to be closed-minded and dismissive of others.” But what happens when we’re focused on work and a fluff-headed coworker approaches? Our brain is already using body language and curt responses to get rid of them without flouting conventions of politeness. We don’t deliberate over this; we just do it. What if they had a useful piece of information to share? We’ve tuned them out, cut them short, and are predisposed to dismiss anything we do pick up that varies from what we already know.
— Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets

To stop reacting and start responding, you need to interrupt automatic thinking. Move from reacting automatically to responding deliberately by recognizing these mental traps.

Personalization trap

When you interpret a challenge to your idea as a challenge to you, you try to protect yourself. This leads to defensive responses, over-explaining and pushing back immediately. Treating disagreements as a personal attack makes you react instantly without considering how a different opinion may be valuable to you. You react before you think because the discussion turns emotional, taking away your ability to think clearly. 

Research by Aaron Beck and David Burns shows that people often interpret neutral or ambiguous events as being directed at them personally. According to Beck’s cognitive model, it is your interpretation of a situation, rather than the situation itself, that shapes your emotional response.

For example:

A colleague questions your idea in a meeting. You immediately defend yourself instead of evaluating the feedback.

Your manager suggests changes to your design proposal. You interpret it as criticism of your ability rather than a suggestion to improve the work.

To avoid personalization trap, ask yourself:

1. Are you reacting to the content of the feedback or how it makes you feel about yourself?
2. What part of your identity or competence is being threatened right now?
3. If someone else had presented this idea instead of you, would you view the criticism differently?
4. Are you interpreting disagreement as rejection even though it might be simply a different perspective?
5. How would your response change if you separated your idea from your identity?

Personal importance, or taking things personally, is the maximum expression of selfishness because we make the assumption that everything is about “me.” Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds. 
— Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements

By not taking things personally, you can stop reacting to criticism and start taking feedback constructively. 

Urgency illusion

When you feel the urgency to take action, you may respond instantly without thinking, even when nothing requires an immediate reaction. This leads to impulsive emails, hasty decisions and situations that are escalated for no good reason. Action bias and time pressure can make you prioritize speed of response over quality of response. You react before you think because time scarcity makes you rely more on automatic, intuitive processes and less on deliberate, analytical thinking. 

Research in decision science shows people often take action simply to relieve discomfort from uncertainty. Studies in behavioral economics also show that time pressure reduces deliberative thinking.

For example:
You receive a blunt email and reply instantly. Later, you realize your response escalated the issue.

A leader challenges your data in a meeting. You rush to respond before fully understanding the question.

To avoid urgency illusion, ask yourself:

1. Do you actually need to respond right now or are you reacting to the discomfort of waiting?
2. What might improve if you gave yourself time to think first?
3. Are you prioritizing speed of response over quality of judgment?
4. What consequences could arise from reacting quickly rather than thoughtfully?
5. If you stepped away for sometime, how might your response change?

The action bias causes us to offset a lack of clarity with futile hyperactivity and comes into play when a situation is fuzzy, muddy, or contradictory.
― Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly

By not defaulting to simpler, faster decision modes under time pressure or succumbing to a false sense of urgency, you can be more focused and deliberate in your choices. 

Assumption trap

When others behave in a manner that does not meet your expectations, you attribute their actions to their personality or character without taking the situational factors or alternative explanations into account—you instinctively assume it’s who they’re, rather than what situation they may be in. Inferring intent without evidence, treating behavior as identity or assuming character instead of context leads to misunderstandings, conflict and unnecessary tension. You react before you think because when someone behaves in a way you don’t like or don’t understand, your brain fills in missing information with a story. But the story may be wrong.

Assumptions create reactions faster than facts. Research by Lee Ross shows that people tend to overemphasize dispositional explanations (personality, character) while underestimating situational explanations when interpreting others’ behavior. 

For example:

Someone doesn’t respond to your message. You assume they’re ignoring you when they may simply be busy.

A teammate pushes back on your plan. You assume they’re being difficult instead of considering their concern.

To avoid assumption trap, ask yourself:

1. What are the facts and what parts of the story are you filling in yourself?
2. What alternative explanations exist for the other person’s behavior?
3. Are you assuming intent from someone’s action?
4. What questions could you ask to get information you don’t have yet?
5. How often have you misjudged a situation in the past because of jumping to conclusions?

The error lies in our inclination to attribute people’s behavior to the way they are rather than to the situation they are in.
― Chip Heath, Switch

By not overestimating the importance of personal characteristics and underestimating the importance of situations, you can explore alternative perspectives that are grounded in reality and not made up stories.  

Negativity bias trap

When something slightly negative happens, your brain gives it more importance than it actually is. Instead of evaluating the full picture, you react strongly to the negative event while ignoring other positive interactions and pleasant experiences. This leads to overreaction, assuming the worst about others and obsessive focus on problems while ignoring progress. You react before you think because your brain is wired to notice and remember negative information more strongly than positive one. It has the tendency to exaggerate perceived threats. 

Research by Roy F. Baumeister shows that negative events have a greater impact on our thoughts, emotions and behavior than positive ones. In other words, one critical comment can overshadow multiple positive interactions.

For example:

Your manager praises your work and mentions one improvement. The improvement is all you can remember.

You deliver a high quality project, but miss an edge case. You obsess about the edge case instead of celebrating your success.  

To avoid negativity bias trap, ask yourself:

1. Are you giving criticism more weight that it actually deserves?
2. What positive feedback or evidence are you overlooking right now?
3. If someone else received this feedback, would you judge it as harshly as you’re judging yourself?
4. Are you reacting to the message or the strong emotions that came with it?
5. If you considered all the information, how would that change your perspective?

Take the bad with the good, we stoically tell ourselves. But that’s not how the brain works. Our minds and lives are skewed by a fundamental imbalance: bad is stronger than good.
— Roy F. Baumeister, The Power of Bad

By refusing to see only the bad aspects of the situation and dwelling on them, you can step back and look at the full picture. 

“I Must Be Right” trap

When being right to you is more important than understanding, you talk more and listen less. You escalate minor issues and turn them into major arguments. You stick with what you know and believe instead of exploring alternative views and contradictory positions. This tendency to selectively listen only to arguments you already believe, dismissing opposing ideas too quickly, interrupting others when you disagree and escalating the conversation just to prove your point leads to defensive behaviors and damages collaboration. You react before you think because your brain is wired to incline towards information you already believe and dismiss evidence that challenges it. 

One of the most influential demonstrations of this trap comes from research by psychologist Peter Cathcart Wason in the 1960s. His work showed that when people form an initial belief, they tend to look for evidence that confirms it rather than evidence that could disprove it.

For example:

A colleague suggests a different approach. You quickly explain why your solution is better.

In a discussion, you keep repeating points that support your view instead of considering others.

To avoid “I must be right” trap, ask yourself:

1. Are you trying to understand the issue or trying to win the argument?
2. What evidence exists that contradicts your current belief?
3. When was the last time you changed your mind after hearing someone else’s perspective?
4. Have you listened to others’ viewpoints with genuine curiosity or just waiting to prove they’re wrong?
5. If your goal is to find the best solution rather than being right, how would you approach the conversation differently?

How often – I continue reflecting – is it that we see what we want to see, rather than what is really before our eyes. In the trade we call this confirmation bias, and our brains are riddled with it. We take a position on something and thereafter only see whatever confirms that position, ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
― John Dolan, Everyone Burns

Before responding to a disagreement, pausing and asking “what might the other person be seeing that you’re not” can shift your brain from defensive reaction to curious thinking. 

Pattern projection trap

When deciding how a situation will turn out, instead of evaluating what’s happening now, you may jump to conclusions based on how things unfolded in the past. Your mind can assume your current situation is the same as before and project patterns that do not exist. Filling in missing information using past experiences or believing you already understand the situation and know how it will end can make you skip deliberate thinking and fall for reactive judgments. You react before you think because you rely on memory alone to make the decision instead of separating current evidence from past assumptions.  

Research by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky shows that people often judge probability or meaning based on ease of recall rather than actual frequency or relevance. Events that are emotionally charged, dramatic or recent are especially powerful because they are easier to remember. As a result, the mind can mistakenly treat memorable experiences as typical ones, leading to rapid conclusions and reactive decisions.

For example:
A previous project failed, so you assume a similar proposal will fail too.

A teammate missed a deadline once. You assume they’ll struggle again without considering recent performance.

To avoid pattern projection trap, ask yourself:

1. Are you reacting to what’s happening now or something that happened before?
2. How similar is this situation to the one you’re recalling from the past?
3. What details might make this situation different from the one you’re assuming?
4. Could your past experience be shaping this decision even though it’s not relevant to your current situation?
5. What new information should you gather before assuming the same outcome will repeat?

The availability heuristic, like other heuristics of judgment, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of a category or the frequency of an event, but you report an impression of the ease with which instances come to mind. Substitution of questions inevitably produces systematic errors.
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

By considering the current facts of a situation and not treating past experiences as evidence of future outcomes, you can slow down automatic reactions and choose more thoughtful responses. 

Emotional carryover trap

When you carry over fatigue, frustration or unresolved tension from a previous event, instead of responding to the current situation objectively, you may respond to strong emotions from a while back. Under the influence of past emotional state, even neutral events or small issues may seem more significant than they actually are. Unrelated stress can carry over to the present moment leading to escalation of minor issues, misinterpretation of others behavior and sharper responses than intended. You react before you think not because of the current issue, but because of accumulated stress. 

Research by Paul Slovic shows emotions strongly influence decision-making and judgment. People use their feelings as a signal to judge whether something is good or bad, safe or risky.

For example:
After a stressful day, a small comment from a colleague irritates you more than usual.

You respond sharply to feedback because you’re already overwhelmed by other pressures.

To avoid emotional carryover trap, ask yourself:

1. What emotions were you carrying before this situation occurred?
2. Would you react the same way if you were rested, calm and not under the same pressure?
3. Is the intensity of your reaction proportional to the actual issue?
4. What other stressors might be amplifying your response right now?
5. How would things change if you allowed yourself to cool down before responding?

Strength is about how you show up. It requires you to choose what energy and action you want to bring to a given situation. At its heart, Strength is about self-management. It’s not about controlling your emotions—it’s about honoring them and choosing what you do next. It’s hard to stay in control and get yourself off autopilot. It takes a lot of Strength to move through the world with more thoughtfulness and intention. And sometimes it requires a heavy lift!
― Darcy Luoma, Thoughtfully Fit

By connecting with your emotions and naming them, you can create a bit of space between you and the emotion, which can diffuse their charge and lessen the burden they create thereby giving you a sense of control to choose a more appropriate response. 

Certainty illusion

When you feel confident about your interpretation before verifying facts or believe your conclusion is the truth without enough evidence, you stop asking questions, stop exploring alternatives, ignore new information and react quickly instead of thinking carefully. This leads to a false sense of clarity and certainty with faster responses that are often less accurate. Overconfidence makes the feeling of certainty so convincing that you don’t pause to notice when you might be wrong. You react before you think because you already believe your version as the truth without fully understanding the situation. 

Research on the illusion of explanatory depth shows that people often believe they understand situations more deeply than they actually do. This perceived coherence creates a strong sense of confidence, even when the underlying understanding is incomplete.

For example:
A colleague starts explaining an issue. You interrupt because you think you already know the answer.

You form a conclusion about a decision before asking for the full context.

To avoid certainty illusion, ask yourself:

1. How certain are you about your interpretation and what might you be missing?
2. Have you gathered enough information to justify this level of confidence?
3. What assumptions are you making that have not been tested yet?
4. What questions could help you see parts of this situation that you haven’t considered?
5. If you turned out to be wrong, what signs would you expect to see?

Like the body craves oxygen, the mind is desperate for certainty. It believes that without a safe foothold on reality, it will die. But the fascinating thing is that the illusion of certainty is exactly the opposite of safety because it hardens and narrows the vision to make everything fit its own scope. Then when new information arrives which would be its ally, the mind pushes it away in favor of the leaky life raft to which it clings, sinking all the while beneath the waves of change.
― Jacob Nordby

By challenging your version of the truth and showing curiosity to understand how you might be wrong, you can be less trapped within your own sense of certainty. 

Control reflex

When a situation feels uncertain, there’s ambiguity involved or the path ahead has many unknowns, you may either rush to make decisions to get over feelings of lack of control or try to micromanage the situation by obsessing about minor details. You may also jump in to take over and fix the situation when things are slow moving or are imperfect. This leads to solving the wrong problem because the real issue isn’t explored, jumping to solutions without fully understanding the situation and overriding others to gain control. You react before you think because uncertainty leads to discomfort, which makes your brain seek relief through action and control.   

Research by Arie W. Kruglanski shows that people have a need for Cognitive Closure (NFC), the desire to have a firm answer and avoid ambiguity. He explains that when people experience uncertainty, they are motivated to quickly seize on an answer and then freeze it—holding onto that conclusion to avoid further ambiguity. This happens because uncertainty is psychologically uncomfortable and the mind seeks relief by closing the gap as quickly as possible.

For example:
A discussion becomes complex. You push for a quick decision to end the uncertainty.

A project feels unpredictable, so you start controlling small details more closely.

To avoid control reflex, ask yourself:

1. Are you pushing for a decision because the uncertainty feels uncomfortable?
2. What insights might emerge if you allowed more time before deciding?
3. Are you shutting down the discussion too quickly to regain a sense of control?
4. What risks do you see from prematurely closing the conversation?
5. How can you tolerate a little ambiguity while continuing to explore options? 

We think we’re making a cogent decision about specific circumstances when we’re really just having a pre-programmed reflexive response.
― Joseph Deitch, Elevate

When there’s uncertainty and ambiguity involved, waiting and observing can lead to better outcomes than giving in to the urge to regain control.  

Summary

1. When disagreements seem like a personal attack, you turn defensive, argumentative and irrational. Personalization trap makes you fight the feedback instead of identifying ways to improve. 
2. Action bias and time pressure leads to impulsive decisions and hasty moves instead of deliberate thinking. Urgency illusion makes you respond instantly instead of being thoughtful. 
3. Attaching people’s behavior to their character without considering their situation leads to misunderstandings and conflict. Assumption trap overindexes on personality while missing contextual reasons.
4. Focussing on negative aspects without looking at the full picture creates a sense of inadequacy and unworthiness. Negativity bias makes you pay more attention to negative information than positive experiences.
5. Listening only to arguments that match your belief while disregarding contradicting opinions leads to faulty judgments and biased decisions. “I must be right” trap makes you inclined towards evidence that confirms your belief while rejecting evidence that disproves it. 
6. When you rely solely on past experiences to decide future outcomes, you make hasty decisions based on past assumptions. Pattern projection trap makes you fall for patterns that are irrelevant to your current situation or do not exist.
7. Strong unresolved emotions from the past can seep into the present moment making minor disappointments seem like major disasters. Emotional carryover trap makes you apply past emotions to current decisions.
8. While confidence can make you put your knowledge to use, overconfidence can make you stick with outdated beliefs without correcting them. Certainty illusion can provide a false sense of illusion that’s not grounded in reality. 
9. Trying to gain control over a situation that feels ambiguous or uncertain pushes you to solve the wrong problem as you quickly try to seize an answer. Control reflex makes you intolerant to ambiguity. 

Recommended Reading

Master Your Cognitive Distortions By Vinita Bansal

Mental Models By Peter Hollins

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