I’ve sat in enough hiring debriefs and promotion conversations to lose count of the times an obviously sharp engineer’s growth stalled out, and the reason, when anyone bothered to name it, got filed under “needs to work on soft skills.” Communication. Collaboration. The ability to disagree with someone without making them feel stupid. Sometimes that gap got someone passed over. Just as often, it got someone hired or promoted anyway, with nobody ever circling back to close it. Either way, the word “soft” did quiet damage: it made the gap sound optional, a nice-to-have you could get to later, right after the technical stuff that matters.

I don’t use that word anymore. Here’s why.

What We’re Talking About

Strip the label off and look at what’s underneath. Writing and speaking so the person receiving it can act on what you said, not just so you said it, the same audience-first instinct I’ve written about before. Understanding the social norms of an org well enough to work inside them, the same way you’d learn any other system: by observing it, naming its rules, and testing your read against what actually happens. Collaborating as part of a team, not just producing good individual output and assuming it assembles itself into something bigger. Reporting and managing up, translating your own work into what the person above you needs in order to make a decision, not what you’d want to say if the floor were yours. In my field specifically, it’s technical translation, taking something complex and handing it to a non-technical stakeholder in a form they can act on, and needs analysis, figuring out what someone needs, which is often not what they asked for in the first place.

None of that is instinct, or a personality trait some people are born with and others simply lack. It’s observable, describable, and learnable, the same as any technical skill, except it never maxes out the way a technical skill can. You can finish learning a programming language. You never finish learning how to translate your work for the next audience.

What I Call Them Instead

Core professional skills. The skills that decide whether the technical skill ever reaches the person who needed it: writing for an audience, reading an org’s norms, collaborating inside a team, reporting and managing up, technical translation, needs analysis. Push the frame out one step further and they’re core human skills, core societal skills: reading an audience and adjusting what you say doesn’t stop mattering when you leave the office. I don’t have a perfect replacement word yet, but any of those beats “soft,” because they describe what the skill is and does, instead of implying it’s just a disposition some people happen to have.

Not Soft, Necessary

In tech, the skills everyone agrees are “hard” are coding, data engineering, security, networking, systems administration, architecture, technology solutioning, things you can point to and measure directly. But none of that was ever the only thing that mattered. The project and the project team mattered. The client’s adoption of what got built mattered. Communicating status, planning the next phase, explaining how the new thing behaves, in language the person across the table could use, mattered. Helping a less experienced tech grow mattered. None of that is garnish. It’s what decides whether the technical work reaches anyone, holds together under a team, or outlives the person who built it. Calling it soft doesn’t make it optional. It just hides how necessary it already is.

That shows up in places you can count. It shows up in hiring, when a candidate who communicates differently gets read as weaker instead of just different. It shows up in promotion, when the person moved into management tested well on technical output and was never read for whether they could hold a team together once they were leading one. It shows up in who gets picked for the next stretch project, because picking someone easy to read feels like less risk. And it shows up in who doesn’t get passed over: someone gets hired, or promoted, with a clear gap here, and the org does nothing further about it. No development plan. No pairing with someone whose strengths round out theirs. A technical gap gets a remediation plan. This one gets left to sort itself out.

The Org Needs Both

Here’s the part that gets lost. The work doesn’t happen with only one skillset in the room. A brilliant technical solution that nobody can explain, adopt, or operate doesn’t ship, it sits. A team that communicates beautifully around a problem nobody can solve doesn’t ship either, it just has pleasant meetings about the thing that isn’t getting built. The org depends on both at once, not on one subsidizing for a weakness in the other.

That’s true across a team, too. When a technical person and a relational person both show up, and neither one is fluent in the other’s way of working, the gap between them isn’t proof that one of them is deficient. It’s two operating styles that haven’t learned to translate for each other yet, and building that translation deliberately, instead of hoping someone just gets it, is its own skill, as necessary as either one alone.

Not Evenly Distributed, and That’s Fine

None of this means everyone has to be equally strong at both. In my own experience, the broader tech industry has shifted toward expecting these skills across the board, security somewhat less so, but that shift isn’t universal, and it isn’t a failing in anyone who hasn’t made it yet. Neurodivergence is part of why. There are plenty of brilliant neurodivergent people doing deep technical work for whom this particular skillset doesn’t come as easily, the same way holding a dozen system dependencies in your head doesn’t come easily to everyone who’s strong on the relational side.

Uneven by aptitude is fine. It’s why roles should vary in which skills they lean on, and why teams should be staffed so the variation covers itself, not treated as though everyone owes the same proficiency in both directions. Uneven by expectation is a different problem. In technical workspaces, the relational work, the follow-up note that smooths over a blunt exchange, the extra beat spent making sure someone felt heard, defaults to the women in the room more often than to the men, not because men can’t do it and not because every woman is good at it, but because the ask gets made differently depending on who walks in the door. Economists Linda Babcock, Maria Recalde, and Lise Vesterlund documented the same pattern across workplaces in 2018: women take on unglamorous, non-promotable work at a far higher rate than men, and say yes to it more often, because the ask was never distributed evenly to begin with. One kind of unevenness is just how people are built. The other is a bill someone else should be paying too.

Where I’ve Been Wrong About This Myself

Early in my career, and for a long time after, I wasn’t the one with the gap. I’m a technologist, the kind who’s worked across nearly every corner of IT: operations, architecture, security, customer experience. I fixed things. I built systems. I solutioned creatively. I’ve also always been a bridge builder, a completionist who doesn’t leave a mess on the floor for someone else to clean up, more capable of this work than most people around me. I’ve been the scaffold, the gap filler, the glue. For a long time I let that turn into a default: if nobody else was going to translate, smooth over, or follow through, I would, whether or not it was mine to carry. That’s its own trap, and it cost me, time and visibility spent holding things together nobody asked me to hold.

The place I had a gap was narrower than people might assume: directness, without enough of the niceties that make the person on the other end feel respected along the way. I’d go straight at a problem and skip the part where I made sure it landed well, and for a long time I didn’t see why that mattered if the fix itself was right. It took watching the same fix land differently depending on how I delivered it before I understood: the niceties weren’t decoration. They were the job.

Crux

These skills aren’t soft. They’re necessary, the same as the technical skills they get ranked under, and the work doesn’t happen without both in the room at once. Nobody has to be equally strong in both directions, that was never the ask. But whoever ends up carrying the relational half shouldn’t be carrying it just because the word “soft” let everyone else assume it wasn’t really work.

I’ve recently changed roles. Before I took this job, someone asked me what impact I wanted to have in it. Not what my title would be. Not what I’d be responsible for on paper. What I wanted to be true, because I’d been there.

I didn’t have a clean answer ready. That told me something. I’d spent plenty of time thinking about scope and outcomes, and not nearly enough time defining, on purpose, what impact was even supposed to mean.

That question matters more here than most places. I work for a state agency that serves the public directly. Whatever I do is going to land on real people with real needs, for better or worse, whether I plan for it or not. That was never the question. The question was what I was going to do.

I’m also following someone whose work here I respect, someone who moved things forward before I walked in. What he built is worthy of building on. But I’m not him. I have different specialties, different instincts, different blind spots. Continuing exactly what he built isn’t defining my own impact. It’s borrowing his. Being intentional means naming what I specifically bring, not just protecting what’s already standing.

Impact Isn’t a Feeling

It’s easy to let “impact” stay vague, a warm sense that the work mattered, without ever pinning down what it was supposed to change. Vague impact can’t be checked. You can feel like you had it and be wrong, or have it and never notice, because you never defined what having it would actually look like. Defining your impact means finishing the sentence: because of this work, what is different, for whom, and how would I know.

Impact for Whom

That “for whom” question does more work than people give it credit for. Impact on the org looks different from impact on the individuals in it, which looks different again from impact on the people the org ultimately serves. I’ve written before about client experience being a defining characteristic of everything I do, whether that client is the colleague in the next office or a member of the public. Defining your impact means picking, honestly, which of those you’re actually optimizing for in a given decision, instead of assuming they’re always the same thing.

What I’m Putting in the Ground

I didn’t answer the opening question on day one. I spent months here first, watching what was already working before I decided what to add to it. Two things were already strong enough to keep running exactly as they were: the drive to innovate, and the org’s own culture work. Carrying those forward isn’t a failure of intentionality. It’s choosing not to break something that wasn’t broken.

My predecessor and I are both well-rounded, but our strengths sit in different places. He knows software development and innovation. I know technology operations, technical architecture, and customer experience. That difference is where my own stakes come from, not from trying to be a better version of him.

So here’s what I’m naming now, knowing more will get added as I go. A crystal clear focus on client experience, internal and external both, from the products we deliver to how we communicate about them. Accessibility isn’t a separate initiative inside that. It’s part of it. And underneath both of those: the technology foundations, closing technical debt, getting to audit-ready, staying aligned with the state around us. None of that is visible to a client directly. All of it decides whether anything else holds.

There’s one more piece, and it’s a needle-mover for us as an org: bringing projects and initiatives, budgets, procurement, and contracts together into something we can plan, prioritize, and deliver against cleanly, instead of each one running on its own track. There’s already movement on it. Most of the work is still ahead.

Where I’ve Gotten This Wrong

I’ve optimized for impact on the org, a system running well, a process cleaned up, and told myself that counted as impact on people, without checking whether anyone downstream felt it. A well-run system that nobody notices getting easier to work with isn’t nothing, but it’s not the whole answer either. The gap between “I made something better” and “someone specific is better off because of it” is exactly the gap that vague impact lets you skip past.

Crux

Impact you haven’t defined isn’t impact. It’s a feeling you’re hoping is true. Naming who’s supposed to be different, and how, before you start the work is what turns a good intention into something you can actually check yourself against later.

Not every organization says it wants to continuously improve. I work in state government, and that phrase isn’t exactly in heavy rotation. But good leaders want something more specific than the phrase anyway: an organization that evolves to meet current and emerging needs, that looks forward instead of just maintaining, and that can thrive beyond their own presence in it. I’ve written before about allowing people to outgrow your org, our job was never to hire someone and keep them in the chair we hired them into. Growth at the organizational level is the same idea, scaled up: are you building something that can keep meeting the moment, and the next one, and the one after you’re gone.

That means asking a set of genuinely hard questions and actually committing to answering them, not just naming them out loud once: how do I level up. How do you level up. How do we level up. How do we grow and mature as an org. Those questions sort into three separate kinds of growth that all have to move together: the growth of individuals, the growth of the organization, and the growth of practices. Leave one out and the other two eventually stall too.

Growth of Individuals

“How do I level up” and “how do you level up” are the same question from two directions, and they’re what people usually mean by “growth,” full stop: are people getting better at what they do, taking on more, becoming more capable than they were a year ago. It matters on its own terms, not just as a retention tactic. An organization that only develops people it’s sure it can keep isn’t developing people. It’s hoarding them.

But individual growth in isolation has a ceiling. A team of people who are each getting sharper, working inside practices that never change, in an organization that never changes shape around them, hits a wall. Their growth has nowhere to go.

Growth of the Organization

“How do we grow and mature as an org” is the question that gets neglected because it’s uncomfortable to answer honestly: the organization itself, its structure, its capacity, its shape, has to grow too, or it becomes the ceiling every individually growing person eventually hits. New roles that didn’t exist before. Structure that reflects what the org actually does now instead of what it did three reorgs ago. Capacity added where the real bottleneck is, not where it’s politically easiest to add it.

An organization that stays structurally frozen while its people grow underneath it ends up with a mismatch: capable people with nowhere real to put that capability, doing the same job with a fancier title. That’s not growth. That’s a plateau with better morale for a while, and then worse morale once people notice.

Growth of Practices

“How do we level up” is the third question, the one I keep coming back to, because practices are the connective tissue between the other two. Practices, how the work actually gets done, how decisions get made, how problems get surfaced and fixed, have to evolve on their own track. This is the actual mechanism of continuous improvement: a retro that changes something, a process that gets simplified because it stopped serving its purpose, a habit the team picks up because the old way kept producing the same failure.

Growing individuals push practices to get better, because a more capable team notices more of what’s broken. A growing organization needs practices to evolve, because what worked at one size or shape stops working at the next. And practices that never grow quietly cap the other two anyway: the best people in the best structure still can’t outrun a broken way of working.

Why All Three, Together

None compensates for a missing one. Individual growth without organizational growth produces frustrated, capable people. Organizational growth without individual growth is just a bigger org running on the same skills it had before, expansion, not improvement. Either one without growing practices is hoping things get better instead of building the mechanism that makes them better.

What It Actually Takes

Naming the three kinds of growth isn’t the hard part. Committing to them is. In practice, that commitment looks like:

1. Asking the four questions out loud, on a real cadence. Not once, in a plan nobody reopens. Regularly, with actual people, in a way that expects an honest answer instead of a comfortable one.
2. Prioritizing this over the routine. Growth work competes for the same hours as the daily grind, and if it only happens when the calendar has slack in it, it never happens.
3. Examining what is against what could be. Not just patching what’s visibly broken, actually asking whether the current shape of the work, the org, the practice is the best available answer or just the familiar one.
4. Hearing feedback from all directions. Up, down, and sideways, from the people you manage, the people who manage you, and the peers who can see what neither of you can.
5. Making room for people to leave the chair they were hired into. If growing someone only counts when they stay in your org, that’s not commitment to their growth, that’s commitment to your retention numbers.
6. Changing the org’s actual shape, not just its language. New structure, new capacity, new roles, placed where the real bottleneck is. A new title with no new room to grow into is a consolation prize.
7. Treating a broken practice like a critical issue, not a known quirk. Not a manufactured emergency, manufactured urgency is its own kind of death for an org, but a real, named, prioritized problem. “That’s just how we’ve always done it” is the sound of practices refusing to grow, and it should bother you as much as a person or a structure that’s stopped growing.
8. Understanding and actually living your org’s core goals, not just being able to recite them. Mine is defining and owning client experience, whether that client is the colleague in the next office or a member of the public. It’s not one value on a list for me. It’s a defining characteristic of everything the org does.
9. Being willing not to be there for the outcome. An organization that only grows while you’re watching it isn’t actually built to thrive beyond your presence, which was the whole point of asking in the first place.

Crux

You don’t need the phrase “continuous improvement” to be doing the work it points at. You need the willingness to ask the four harder questions, and actually commit to answering them. The real test isn’t whether any one of them is being answered well. It’s whether all three kinds of growth are moving together, each one making room for the other two.

Dolly Parton died on August 25, at 80, after what her publicist described as a brief battle with cancer. Until this week, she was one of my last living childhood heroes. I never met her. I don’t have a personal Dolly story: no concert, no letter back, no Imagination Library book that showed up in a mailbox with my kid’s name on it. What I have is thirty-plus years of watching a woman get judged for exactly how she looked, sounded, and where she came from, and refuse, every single time, to get smaller or quieter to make the judgment stop.

That’s not really a post about Dolly Parton. It’s a post about what a role model is actually for, and why being willing to live your own truth, loudly enough that other people can see it, is one of the more generous things a person can do for everyone standing near them.

What Does a Role Model Actually Give You?

We use “role model” loosely, mostly to mean someone impressive. It’s more specific than that: someone whose existence proves a way of being is survivable, that you can do the thing, look the way you look, come from where you come from, and still end up respected, successful, loved. A role model doesn’t hand you instructions. They hand you proof, and the proof is the gift.

That matters most for the differences nobody can see from across a room. Neurodivergence is often invisible unless you choose to reveal it, or it surfaces in a way you didn’t choose. So, for a lot of queer people, is who they love, or who they are, or both, until they decide to say so or something says it for them. Invisibility can feel like protection. It can just as easily be a cage: a life spent managing what other people would think if they knew the whole picture. A role model who refuses to hide anything, in public and on purpose, proves you can succeed in the face of that judgment and opposition, not just survive it quietly.

She Never Hid the Real Thing

Dolly chose to live big: rhinestones, wigs, a voice and a look she picked on purpose and never dialed back, no matter who found it too much. Makeup and plastic surgery were more of the same, tools for looking exactly how she wanted instead of how she was handed. She talked about both openly instead of pretending the look was effortless:

“It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”

“I’m not offended by dumb blonde jokes, because I know that I’m not dumb. I also know that I’m not blonde.”

Underneath the wig was a woman of exceptional intelligence and drive. She wrote more than 3,000 songs, and when Elvis Presley’s manager demanded half the publishing rights to “I Will Always Love You” in exchange for Elvis recording it, she turned him down on the spot, in tears, and kept every bit of ownership. It cost her the Elvis cover and made her one of the highest-earning songwriters in country music history a few years later, when Whitney Houston recorded the same song. Another way she was out of her time: a woman marketed as a punchline, running her own business decisions better than the people trying to talk her out of them.

She didn’t come from money or privilege, either. Her breakout song, “Coat of Many Colors,” tells the origin story straight: a child in real poverty, mocked at school for a coat her mother had sewn from rags. She never traded that story in for a smoother one, even once she could afford to.

She Refused to Be Boxed In

She had an epic disinterest in being put in anyone else’s box, and a habit of building honest relationships instead. In 1974, she left mentor Porter Wagoner’s television show against his wishes to build her own solo career, and instead of letting the split curdle into a public feud, wrote him “I Will Always Love You” as a direct goodbye. It became one of the most successful songs ever written, and it started as a plain act of telling someone the truth.

Some of her partnerships were pure, unplanned joy. She and Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin became real friends on the set of 9 to 5, not a studio-manufactured trio, and the film’s theme song came out of Dolly tapping her own acrylic nails to find a rhythm. Some were plain business, done on her own terms: in 1986, she partnered with Herschend Family Entertainment to turn a small Smoky Mountains park into Dollywood, rather than going it alone. And her longest partnership was the quietest: she married Carl Dean in 1966 and stayed married to him for nearly 60 years, until his death in 2025. He avoided the spotlight completely, and by her own team’s account, “his love, support and consistency built an unshakable foundation for her.” Neither of them needed the marriage to look a particular way to anyone watching, just to be real between the two of them.

I’ve been building a small art project for my home office: a wall of Old Hollywood women I think of as dissidents, non-conformists, disruptors, women who dressed, acted, and lived exactly as they wished despite the criticism and the career limits it cost them. I treasure every one of them. Dolly earns a place on that wall and then some, doing all of it in full public view and turning the disruption into an empire instead of letting it end her career.

Living Her Truth So Others Could Live Theirs

Long before it was safe or common for a country star from East Tennessee to do so, she talked openly about the gay and lesbian family members in her own life, employed transgender staff, and told anyone who asked exactly where she stood:

“Why wouldn’t I stand up for everybody, for all people?”

That’s not a slogan. It’s the same principle that built the rhinestones and the theme park, applied to people instead of to herself: you don’t get smaller or quieter to make someone else’s judgment easier to sit with. Her own visibility bought other people cover to be visible too, family members, fans, and kids growing up in places a lot like the one she grew up in, who needed proof that this was survivable more than they needed anyone’s advice.

She’s the direct inspiration of a whole lot of drag performers, and she knew it: “If I hadn’t been a woman, I’d have been a drag queen.” In 2023, she found out that Austin drag performer Brigitte Bandit had testified against anti-drag legislation at the Texas Capitol while holding a children’s book about Dolly, open to a line about her big hair and makeup: some people might’ve thought it was too much, but she liked it. Dolly sent her a rhinestoned guitar. The same refusal to be made smaller, handed straight to someone else who needed it that week.

Giving Without Keeping Score

She didn’t come from money, and once she had it, she kept sending it back to the place and the people it came from. Her Imagination Library has given away more than 330 million free books to children, started because her father never learned to read. When wildfires tore through her home county in 2016, her My People Fund gave displaced families $1,000 a month and eventually $12.5 million in relief to her neighbors. She put a million dollars behind Moderna’s vaccine research. On giving, she put it plainly:

“I just give from my heart. I never know what I’m going to do or why I’m gonna do it. I just see a need and if I can fill it, then I will.”

She said flatly that she didn’t do it for attention, even though the attention found her anyway. By more than one financial writer’s math, she’d have died a billionaire if she’d kept more of what she made instead of giving so much of it away. She focused on what she cared about, mostly literacy and her community, and stuck to it for decades, without needing anything handed back.

Where I’ve Made This Harder Than It Needed to Be

My difference is the invisible kind. Nobody can tell I’m neurodivergent by looking at me, which has meant plenty of years spent managing whether anyone found out, and editing which parts of my brain got to show up at work. I’ve written before about being told I wasn’t “leaderly” enough by someone who wanted a personality I didn’t have, and about the cost of trying to conform to that picture instead of trusting my own. What I don’t always say is how much of that cost lands on other people too. Every time I’ve smoothed myself into someone else’s version of acceptable, I’ve quietly told everyone watching that the smoothing is the price of admission. Every time I’ve let the real version show instead, even when it wasn’t the safe choice, I’ve told them the opposite.

That’s the part of authenticity that isn’t about self-expression at all. It’s a public good. Someone has to go first and prove the real version is survivable, or nobody after them gets to believe it.

So what’s the payoff for any of it, the neurodivergence I don’t hide, the therapy I recommend without embarrassment, the flexibility I build into my team’s workplace, the parts of my life and community I talk about instead of keeping generic? Here’s one. I’d said out loud, more than once, that supporting gender diversity mattered to me. An intern took that as permission to tell me they were non-binary, and that they’d been too afraid to wear clothes that didn’t match the gender everyone assumed they were. I told them to dress professionally in whatever gender suited them, and to send anyone with a problem about it straight to me. Their eyes filled with tears.

That’s the whole mechanism, in one exchange. I went first. They didn’t have to anymore.

Crux

A role model doesn’t tell you who to be. They prove, just by existing in full view, that a particular way of being real can be respected instead of punished. Dolly Parton lived big and looked and sounded exactly how she wanted, refused to be boxed into anyone else’s category and built honest partnerships instead, and gave quietly to the people and causes she actually cared about without asking for anything back. None of it was performance. All of it was proof, for everyone watching who had a difference of their own to hide or a truth of their own to live, that the real version is survivable. Living your truth loudly isn’t vanity. It’s the only way anyone else gets that proof.

Not long ago, I was in a conversation about blame-free post-mortems. I mentioned that this is exactly what agile retros are for, same practice, different name, and got a quick correction:

“That’s for development.”

That’s the whole myth in one sentence. Somewhere along the way, “agile” got quietly redefined as something that belongs to engineering, instead of what it actually is: a quality, adaptive, lightweight, responsive, that a whole pile of toolkits (Agile, Lean, Kanban, systems thinking, design thinking, innovation practices, whatever your team ends up calling its own version) are all reaching for from different directions.

I’ve been aware of agile for ops for years, and I’ve used agile ceremonies, stand-ups, retros, card walls, short-term repeated planning cycles, to work through real issues across the orgs I’ve run, in teams that had never touched a line of code. The ceremony doesn’t care what industry you’re in. Evan Leybourn, co-founder of the Business Agility Institute, put it plainly:

“Despite emerging in the technology domain, there is nothing exclusively tech about Agile.”

That gap, between what “agile” is supposed to mean and what one offhand comment assumed it meant, is the whole subject of this post: what agility actually is, what it actually requires, and why it doesn’t stop mattering just because an organization gets big.

What Lowercase agile Actually Means

Strip away the frameworks and “agile” is just a word, and a useful one: adaptive, lightweight, facile. Able to change direction without a committee. Able to respond to new information instead of defending the plan you made before you had it. It’s a property a person, a team, or a whole company can have, the same way you’d say someone is agile on their feet. It has nothing to do with sprints.

What Capital-A Agile Actually Is

Agile, the proper noun, is a specific historical thing, for anyone who’s heard the term at work and never gotten a straight definition. In February 2001, a small group of software people met at a ski lodge in Snowbird, Utah, looking for common ground across several rival methodologies. What came out of that weekend was the Agile Manifesto, a values statement, not a methodology:

“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Responding to change over following a plan.”

Scrum, SAFe, and a small industry of certifications and consultants grew out of those four lines. Worth saying plainly: the values themselves aren’t perfect either, seventeen people from one industry wrote a statement, not scripture.

That’s the trap. The values were the point. The frameworks were just one way, among many, of trying to live them out.

Agile Doesn’t Own Adaptability

Agile isn’t even the oldest toolkit making this argument. Kanban and Lean both trace back to Toyota’s factory floor in the 1940s, decades before Snowbird, built on the same instinct: build only what’s needed, let the people doing the work fix what’s broken. Systems thinking and design thinking got there from completely different directions too, out of research labs and design studios, long before anyone was running a sprint.

Agile, Lean, Kanban, systems thinking, design thinking, and the broader pile of innovation practices are separate answers to the same question, not one family tree with Agile at the root. Which means the honest takeaway was never “go be more Agile.” Use whatever toolkit, from that pile or from somewhere else entirely, actually produces agility wherever you’re standing.

Where It Goes Wrong

Somewhere between 2001 and now, a lot of organizations bought the frameworks and skipped the values. This has a name: cargo cult Agile, running every ceremony without any of the adaptability the ritual was supposed to produce. You end up with a company that has stand-ups, retros, and story points, and still can’t change a decision once it’s been made, still treats “the plan” as more sacred than the customer standing in front of it.

Consultant Allan Kelly frames the fix as a shift in what you’re actually optimizing for:

“It might seem like a small semantic change to go from ‘agile’ to ‘agility’ but it is a change from ‘doing agile’ to ‘having agility.’ It is a move from ‘means’ to the ‘end.'”

The frameworks are a means. Agility is the end. You can hit the first without ever getting the second, and a lot of organizations have.

The Ceremony Was Never Really About the Code

Back to that comment: “that’s for development.” Take the blame-free post-mortem it was aimed at: a team gathers after something went wrong, separates the event from the people involved, asks what the process or system allowed to happen, and changes something so it’s less likely next time. That’s a retro, run rigorously, no finger-pointing. The name changes depending on who’s in the room. The mechanism doesn’t.

In my own ops experience, it’s never been just one ceremony:

• Stand-ups catch a breakdown between departments while it’s still small.
• Retros handle the moments that need the fuller blame-free treatment.
• Card walls give a shared view of what’s actually in flight, instead of what’s in someone’s inbox.
• Short-term, repeated planning cycles replace a single annual plan nobody revisits until it’s already wrong.

Different tools, same underlying case: any team that regularly surfaces problems out loud, makes work visible, and re-plans on a cadence short enough to respond to reality is doing agile for ops, whether or not anyone’s ever heard the word sprint.

This Isn’t a Software Problem, or a Small-Company Problem

None of this was ever supposed to stay inside engineering, and it doesn’t stop mattering once a company gets big. Stephen Denning’s The Age of Agile makes the same case for companies across sectors: small self-managing teams, coordination instead of a chain of approvals, leadership that facilitates instead of commands. I’ve made that leadership case myself, in my post on leadership agility: a leader who never builds adaptive capacity into their team just creates a brittle organization with one flexible person at the top.

McKinsey’s research backs it up at real scale: highly successful agile transformations saw roughly 30 percent gains in efficiency, engagement, and performance, and were three times more likely to land in the top quartile of their peers. Their playbook for HR, finance, and legal makes the same case one level down. None of it’s uniform, though: routine, low-uncertainty work benefits from being standardized, not made agile. Agility is a capability you build where the environment is genuinely uncertain, at whatever scale that shows up.

I’ve been on both sides of this trap myself, building processes, calling them agile, and watching them calcify into the exact heavyweight ritual the manifesto was written against.

What Agility Actually Requires

Strip away the frameworks entirely and what’s left is a practical test, four things I look for regardless of industry, team size, or whether anyone in the building has ever heard of a sprint:

1. People and results driven. The measure of whether something is working is the outcome and the humans producing it, not whether the process was followed correctly. Process is a means to a result, not a result in itself.
2. Purpose-aware. Every process, every ceremony, every sign-off should be able to answer a simple question: why does this exist. Knowing your why has to come before you build anything, because it’s the only thing that tells you when to stop building.
3. Minimum necessary process. More process is not more rigor. It’s drag. The right amount is the smallest amount that actually gets the result and protects what genuinely needs protecting. Minimum necessary isn’t a fixed number, either: a five-person team and a five-thousand-person company don’t need the same minimum, because real complexity multiplies real needs.
4. Avoiding theater. A step that exists for compliance, for a genuine sanity check, for making sure the right feedback actually gets gathered before a decision, is meaningful, and meaningful process is never waste, no matter how much of it there is. A step that exists so people feel like something official happened, with no compliance need behind it, no real check, no feedback it’s actually incorporating, is theater. If it’s not meaningful, it’s wasteful, no matter how small. The test was never big versus small. It’s real versus theater.

Points three and four together are the whole answer to “why does agility matter even at scale.” Scale doesn’t retire the test. It changes what passes it. At size, more people, more interdependency, more real money on the line, real compliance needs, real sanity checks, and real feedback loops genuinely multiply, which is point three. But every one of those steps still has to earn its place, which is point four, and that discipline doesn’t get to retire just because the org got big. What doesn’t change is the habit of asking, of every single step: is this real, and is it serving people, purpose, and results, or is it just weight the organization has gotten used to carrying. An organization that keeps asking that as it grows stays adaptive at scale. One that stops asking it just accumulates ceremony, and calls the accumulation maturity.

On Good and Bad Feedback

A supervisor once told me:

“You’re not leaderly.”

That was it. No example, no behavior to change, no coaching on what “leaderly” would even look like coming from me. Another time, a different supervisor told me:

“I don’t want you to do this because I tell you to, I want you to want to.”

Again: no room to bring my own experience, logic, or opinion into it. Just a demand that I arrive at her conclusion and feel good about it.

Both of those knocked me sideways at the time. It took years, and an awesome therapist (seriously, do not underestimate what a good one can do for you), before I understood what had actually happened in each of those rooms. The first supervisor had a narrow, specific picture of what a leader looks like, and I didn’t match it, so the problem became my personality rather than anything I’d actually done. The second wanted compliance dressed up as buy-in: not “here’s why I think this is the right call,” but “agree with me, and mean it.” Neither one was giving me feedback. They were giving me a mandate for who I should be, and calling it coaching.

Why This Is Harder If You’re Neurodivergent

If you’re neurodivergent, there’s a good chance some of this lands differently for you too, and it’s worth knowing the name for it: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, or RSD. Psychiatrist Dr. William Dodson, who popularized the term, describes it as close to the only emotional pattern found specifically in ADHD: extreme emotional pain triggered by perceived rejection, criticism, or disappointing someone, real or imagined. In his words:

“The pain is so primitive and overwhelming that people struggle to find any words to describe it.”

Cleveland Clinic puts it more clinically: the ADHD brain may not regulate pain-like activity the way other brains do, which is part of why rejection can hit disproportionately hard, and adults living with it are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, and loneliness on top of it.

Worth saying plainly: RSD isn’t an officially recognized diagnosis, and the research base is still thin (see this Psychology Today piece on what the actual evidence does and doesn’t support). I’m also not going to pretend it’s a full explanation for everything on this topic. I think it’s a mistake to reach for a diagnosis every time something is simply hard. But whatever you call it, the pattern is real for a lot of ADHD brains: perceived criticism, even mild, even well-intentioned, can register less like “here’s some input” and more like a five-alarm fire. Your body reacts before your brain has a chance to sort the signal from the noise. If you want more on this, ADDitude and CHADD both have solid, plain-language explainers, and CHADD in particular is a longstanding nonprofit clearinghouse for ADHD research and resources.

But it is a real factor in why this specific skill, telling apart meaningful feedback from toxic or unvaluable commentary, is genuinely harder for a lot of us. When everything arrives feeling like an emergency, “is this true and useful” and “is this just going to hurt” get tangled together fast.

Turns Out, It’s Not Just Me

It may (or may not) surprise you to learn that women get a much heavier dose of personality-based and manner-based feedback than men do, and there’s real data behind that, not just my own two data points.

Linguist Kieran Snyder analyzed 248 tech performance reviews and found that critical feedback showed up in 87.9% of women’s reviews, compared to 58.9% of men’s. The bigger gap was in what kind of criticism showed up: personality-based critique appeared in 71 of the 94 critical reviews women received, and in just 2 of the 83 critical reviews men received. The word “abrasive” alone was used seventeen times to describe thirteen different women. It never appeared once in a man’s review.

That was 2014. It hasn’t gotten better. A 2024 Textio study, also led by Snyder, found that 88% of high-performing women received personality-based feedback in their reviews, compared to 12% of high-performing men. High-performing women were also 76% more likely to receive negative feedback overall than high-achieving men, who received it only 2% of the time. Ten years and a different data set later, Snyder’s read on why hadn’t moved either:

“Men are mostly receiving feedback about their work… when you look at women, the positive observations are not generally about the work. They’re about the woman’s demeanor, personality, or disposition.”

Harvard Business Review found something similar looking specifically at developmental feedback: women were 1.4 times more likely than men to get critical feedback that was subjective rather than tied to a concrete outcome, the kind of thing that reads less like “here’s what happened” and more like “here’s how I feel about you” (Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, HBR). Separately, researchers Elena Doldor, Madeleine Wyatt, and Jo Silvester ran a computerized analysis of over a thousand pieces of workplace feedback and found feedback to women skewed toward how she communicates rather than what she’s building, treated her confidence (or lack of it) as a fixed trait rather than something coachable, and was, in the researchers’ own words, “less actionable and less effective” than what men in comparable roles received.

I don’t share this to excuse every time I’ve bristled at a critique. Plenty of the feedback I’ve gotten over the years was fair and I needed to hear it, personality-shaped or not. But it does mean I no longer treat “this stings and I can’t point to what I’d do differently” as proof that I did something wrong. Sometimes it’s proof that someone ran out of an actual thing to say and reached for a version of me instead. “Not leaderly” wasn’t a fluke. It was a pattern with a name and a body of research behind it, and I was just one more data point in it.

The Problem With Just Filtering It All Out

Here’s the trick, though: the answer can’t be to stop listening. If we want to be learning humans, we have to ingest feedback in order to improve. Some of it is going to be uncomfortable and still be correct. Some of it is going to point at a real gap, a real blind spot, a real thing we could do better, and our job is to hear that even when it stings. Shutting the whole channel down because some of what comes through it is garbage means shutting out the parts that would actually help you grow.

So the actual skill isn’t “let feedback in” or “keep feedback out.” It’s sorting.

What Good Feedback Actually Looks Like

Looking back at both of those supervisors, I can now name what was missing, because I’ve since had feedback that did have it:

• It’s about a behavior or a decision, not a personality.
• It’s specific enough that I could picture doing something differently.
• It leaves room for my own experience, logic, and judgment to be part of the conversation, not obstacles to overcome.
• It would still make sense to me even after the sting wore off.

What Bad Feedback Actually Looks Like

And the version that isn’t feedback at all, no matter how it’s dressed up:

• It targets who you are rather than what you did.
• It can’t be turned into an action, because there isn’t one. “Not leaderly” isn’t a to-do list.
• It asks you to override your own reasoning and just fall in line.
• It’s really about the other person’s comfort, preference, or narrow definition of “right,” not about your growth.

Who It Has to Come From

Content isn’t the only filter, though. Source matters just as much, maybe more. So before I even get to whether a piece of feedback is specific or actionable, I check it against four things:

1. It comes from someone I respect. Not someone I’m supposed to respect because of a title, tenure, or position. I’ve written before about the difference between the respect society tells you to hand out by default and the respect people actually earn through integrity, authenticity, and skill or knowledge applied and shared. Feedback inherits whatever kind of respect its source has. A title doesn’t buy credibility with me. Character does.
2. It comes from someone with a valid point of reference or experience. That doesn’t mean they have to agree with me, or have lived my exact experience. It means they have real standing to speak on the topic, even when what they say is hard to hear. Someone reasoning from inside relevant experience is worth listening to even when I don’t like the conclusion. Someone with no real basis for the opinion isn’t.
3. It comes from someone who supports me, or is at least neutral. I strictly limit how much weight I give feedback from people who have shown, over time, that they’re trying to damage me personally or professionally. Those people exist. It’s fine to see them clearly for what they are. Sometimes you can’t remove them from your environment, but you’re not obligated to treat what they say as truth once experience has already taught you otherwise.
4. It comes from someone who demonstrates wisdom, insight, or qualities I actually want to develop. If I wouldn’t want to become more like this person in some specific, nameable way, their opinion of who I should be carries a lot less weight.

Run a piece of feedback through those four before you even ask whether it’s specific or actionable, and most of it sorts itself fast.

And once something sorts into bad, disingenuous, or damaging and unconstructive: reject it. Don’t keep turning it over hoping to find value that isn’t there. Give it one brief, honest scan for a glaring truth buried inside. If you find one, keep it. If you don’t, jettison the rest. No lingering debate required.

Good Feedback Still Isn’t a Command

Here’s the flip side, though: passing the filter above doesn’t mean you owe someone the exact behavior they were picturing when they gave you the feedback. Good feedback has to be examined and considered. That part isn’t optional. But worthy of consideration and worthy of producing the specific result or behavior the other person wants, or demonstrated themselves, are two different things. You still have to do the work of figuring out where it fits for you: in your own style, at your own scale, in your own words. Taking feedback seriously means engaging honestly with what’s true in it. It doesn’t mean becoming a copy of whoever gave it to you. That’s the same trap as “not leaderly,” just wearing a nicer outfit.

This stuff is hard. It isn’t easy. Sorting through what to keep, what to reject, and what to keep but reshape into your own version, all at once, while your own brain may be actively lying to you about how much danger you’re in, is real work. It doesn’t get easier because you’ve named the categories. It just gets slightly more possible.

What Sorting Actually Looks Like

Here’s the most recent test of all this. In my last role, I got feedback that I had interacted in a way that “may not have been appropriate.” That was close to the whole sentence. I had to press, more than once, to get an actual example, a specific situation, and something resembling coaching.

Once I had it, I did the actual work: I grounded myself in my own values and reviewed my own behavior as honestly as I could. I came out the other side with three separate conclusions, and they weren’t all the same kind of conclusion.

1. There was one instance where I genuinely could have communicated better. I was running on brain chemical depletion (ADHD, overwork, and working while sick will do that to you), and something that should have gotten a beat of pause and an explanation came out sounding flip instead. That one was fair. That one was mine to own.
2. Some people don’t like direct communication. I can be aware of that and adjust my language depending on who I’m talking to. But I’m not going to stop communicating directly, and I don’t really want to. It’s one of the things that makes me effective.
3. Some people don’t like being held accountable, or being told plainly that something they did wasn’t correct. I can temper how I deliver that. I’m not going to stop saying it clearly, because if I do, I can’t fulfill my role.

Only the first one was actually feedback. The other two were preference, dressed up as feedback.

Praised for It, Then Punished for It

I’ve hit a version of this at several points in my career: I get praised for accomplishing things other people can’t, and then criticized for the exact qualities that made it possible. This isn’t just an Amy thing. It’s well documented, especially for high-performing women, and especially for those of us who are also neurodivergent.

Researchers Frank Flynn and Cameron Anderson ran a study, later popularized as the “Heidi and Howard” case, in which they gave people an identical account of a successful entrepreneur and changed only the name. Howard was rated likeable, someone people wanted to work for. Heidi, same résumé, same accomplishments, was rated selfish and someone people were less interested in hiring or working with. The competence didn’t move. The likeability did, purely on gender.

Leadership consultant Jennifer McCollum tells a version of this from her own career: after she won major results for a client through assertive, competitive tactics, a colleague described her as:

“A cupcake with a razor blade inside.”

Effective and unsettling, in the same breath, for the same behavior a man would likely have just been called effective for.

And for those of us who are also neurodivergent, there’s an additional layer. Researcher Dr. Damian Milton named this the double empathy problem: when autistic or otherwise neurodivergent people communicate directly and literally, the friction isn’t a deficit on our end, it’s a mismatch of styles that neurotypical listeners often read as rude or inappropriate simply because it’s unfamiliar to them. Direct isn’t the same as wrong. It just isn’t always what the room expects.

Put together: the qualities that get you praised for being effective are frequently the same ones that get you quietly punished for being difficult. That’s not a contradiction you’re supposed to resolve by shrinking. Eventually I concluded that my personal style and that particular environment weren’t well aligned, and I chose to go find a role where they were.

I’ve Gotten This Wrong Too, in Both Directions

In fairness, I haven’t always sorted this correctly, and I’ve failed in both directions, not just one.

There have been plenty of times I worked hard to extract value from feedback I should have just thrown away: sat with it, tried to find the fair kernel in it, gave it more of my energy and self-doubt than it had earned. And especially earlier in my career, there were times that went the other way: I was too attached to my own ego, or my own way of doing something, to actually let good feedback in and change based on it. Neither failure mode is the “safe” one. Over-ingesting bad feedback and refusing to ingest good feedback both cost me, just differently.

If You Can’t See the Difference Yet

Everything above assumes you can tell good from bad once you actually look for it. Some days, especially early on, you won’t be able to. If that’s you: talk to a coach, a therapist, or a mentor who can help you see what good feedback actually looks like, from the outside, when you can’t quite trust your own read on it yet. I mentioned it earlier and I meant it: an awesome therapist changed how I do this. There’s no shame in needing a second set of eyes for something this hard to sort out alone.

Crux

Not everything that hurts is wrong, and not everything that hurts is true. The work is telling those apart, and the test isn’t how much it stung going down. It’s whether, once the sting fades, there’s something specific and actionable left standing, something you could actually do something with. If there isn’t, that’s not feedback you failed to accept. That’s someone else’s discomfort, handed to you and mislabeled. And sometimes, once you’ve actually sorted it, the honest conclusion isn’t a personal action item at all. It’s that you and the room you’re in don’t fit, and it’s time to go find one that does.

“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.” – Anthony Robbins

Communication is hard. It’s hard enough when its with a person or small group, harder still when some members of the conversation aren’t invested or see things a different way. The larger the group, the larger the groups of disengaged individuals and the greater the number of viewpoints.

All of that being said, time and time again I encounter the same gaps to making communications the best they can be.

As a note, most of my experience is in technology – everything from outages to initiatives. But in my observation, this phenomena is not limited to my area, and may be more thoroughly considered in IT than in many other disciplines.

“Communication works for those who work at it.” – John Powell

Good communication takes time. It takes effort. It takes investment.

Sure, when you someone well you can shortcut some things, but the important things still require clarity and care.

When you are communicating broadly, you have even more work to do – first you need the recipient of your communication to know why they should care, and once that is sufficiently established to understand and engage with the message.

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw

It is natural when a person is communicating to start with their own perspective or what they find important. When the goal is to reach a large population, you need to flip this on its head — what is important to them? Why should they care? What is the benefit? How do they perceive the topic? What is the impact?

If you communicate from your perspective, chances are that you have spoken (or written, etc.), but you may not have communicated. If you did reach members of your audience, their takeaway might not be what you expected it to be.

“There is no communication that is so simple that it cannot be misunderstood.”― Luigina Sgarro

I cannot count the times a communication has come from me, my department, or another entity that had been looked at from multiple perspective, seemed clear, seemed well written….and then it went out and the deluge of calls and questions started. All of the reviewers have typically already been familiar with the message contents and did not see the lack of specificity, confusing language or jargon, or overlap between this and a similarly named thing in another part of the larger organization. You have assuredly seen this in your home life as well as your professional – your doctors and insurance, your utilities, your cell phone carrier, places you buy from, your municipality, and a hundred other entities communicate with you. Periodically it will absolutely go wrong. And you develop habits of mentally filtering out information from so-called “unreliable” sources that give you unhelpful or unclear information.

How can you be clearer and more directed for your audience? Almost immediately you encounter the next challenge: your audience is not a monolith. In fact, it isn’t really one audience at all.

 “Use different messaging for different groups to ensure your communications are relevant.” – Andrea Plos

In one recent project, we were preparing for the planned departure of one chief executive, and the arrival of another. We knew that both prior to the change and afterward there would be large personnel changes throughout the organization. Initially the team had a plan that had 2-3 communication messages and channels. I felt there were gaps so I asked that we do an exercise defining audiences. We used a little bit of journey mapping and some other techniques to walk through the skeleton timeline and tease out all the places where different people would need different messaging. We ended up with over 20 distinct audiences and a complex communication calendar ensuring that each group got the most relevant communication at the right time.

Most initiatives don’t need this level of differentiation. The initiative I’m referencing was multiple months and hundreds of person-hours of work produced.

Right now I am looking at a project where we are dealing with the public website, intranet, and individual intra-department recordkeeping and communications. After a look at the information architecture and current publications I found myself with my age-old question: who are these sites for? And why does the content not match the assumed answers?

“The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.” ― André Gide

I spent a little bit of time with my markerboard and defined 3 audiences and the types of information each requires, and noted examples for each – what I came up with seemed logical and obvious to me. And. In looking at the existing sites, the categories of information are not delineated in a way that seems to me to suit the audiences of the published sites.

According to my assessment, we need 3 or possibly 4 distinct datastores/sites depending on the capability of the tools, rather than the existing 2, and we need to fill some gaps where information is not published. Then we need to make this information discoverable, particularly for more occasional visitors.

This exercise reminded me of the work I had done with previous teams and why I had been so insistent on audience definitions. This circles back to the earlier point of differentiating communications.

This allows you to get the right information with the right context to the right individuals at the right time. All four of these are needed for the effective communication that leads to effective change management and to successful adoptions, and also allows clear crisis communications. Add with empathy and you have a recipe for success.

It’s also work. This kind of effort can seem huge. But I have leaned to ask “what is the cost of skimping on communications?” The answer is never good. It’s risk.

Now, here in the real world we are don’t have endless resources and we are not in a risk vacuum; some risk has to be accepted. You may choose to combine some audiences and call them “close enough” and we are all going to do our best. But trust me when I say one message will not fit all, and a wall of text full of if/thens is is not the differentiation you need. Invest time and effort up front, share templates when messages overlap, and keep the work well organized to allow for the contextual changes and nuances that tell your audience groups you mean them. You will minimize drama, get more engagement, and generally have smoother changes.

I will assuredly come back to the topic of communication and also audiences as they are part of my professional lifeblood. For now though, this is what I have.

Part of me was hesitant to write this as there are as many versions of an Agile leadership model (both capital and small a) as there are ways to implement Agile development or operations. These also vary in quality and meaningfulness, and some seem to be a new cover to old theory.

However, recently I saw the following infographic on LinkedIn and it got me thinking:

When I think about how I am and how I want to be as a leader and as a professional, many of my core behaviors and philosophies align closely with this model. I would say to overlook the quotes as some of them I find a bit problematic, but let’s look for a minute at the content.

• Quick Thinking Mastery
• Diverse-Decision-Making
• Continuous Learning
• Collaborative Action
• Strategic Problem-Solving
• Emotional Intelligence
• Reflective Leadership

I see these as critical for my leadership, and also for any leadership for whom I am to work. They are remarkably descriptive of my own long term approach. However I also see these as as qualities to develop within your teams at all levels. As I think about my most recent positions, I can see points where I, my partners, and my managers used some if not all of these as unspoken core values and worked to teach and value practices that allowed, encouraged, and empowered these.

I want to explore each of these items in future posts, but my first thought is that leadership needs to model these adaptive traits, but then also imbue these into your teams as values, skills, behaviors. If we as leaders are folowing a leadership agility model, but we are not also valuing it in our team than several things are going on: 1) diverse decision making will be less effective because people with important perspectives will not know how to engage, 2) you run the risk of building a non-adaptive org where only the leader can drive agility, which wastes talent. 3) we’re not adopting the spirit of agility and facile, adaptive organizations, we’re only valuing, centering, and developing ourselves. And this will lead to failure.

Your team – your partners, the org under you, your peers – are your success and you are a big piece of theirs. If you have read more here or on social media, you have heard this before – it’s our responsibility to create an environment where there are strong, growing professionals. These concepts let us do that while also creating maximum ability to deliver and succeed in our own orgs. People who can model the behaviors listed above will be better partners to business, better technologists, and better at successful execution — all in a place where they know they are trusted to succeed — and to make learning mistakes while being supported.

As professionals, we are often shown one model of what it is to be “professional” or “executive.” While many of us truly value diversity, the traditional model is built to look and behave within one particular frame – historically straight, cis, white, male, well dressed and coiffed, highly educated, neurotypical, and exhibiting the behavior patterns that are consistent with this. Even when we see diversity, what we often see is people fitting a large percentage of these demographics and mimicking others. Of course, there are exceptions, but despite a wave of pushback, this is still the common perception among those at top leadership levels.

There is also the idea, present in many cultures, that the individual that stands out will be cut down (“tall poppy” syndrome or “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down”) – depending on the cultural context one is raised in, this can be a very strong formative concept especially among women, the neurodivergent, and the highly intelligent.

None of this is new news, so what’s my point?

I have been on a search for a new role. I have listened to advice and received assistance from many quarters and it was not until today that I realized that the advice I was following was threatening my ability to be authentic.

A resume (C.V., whichever your profession requires) needs to be accurate. It needs to bring forward the important accomplishments, list qualifications, facts, figures, and for lack of a better term evidence. Ethical professionals do this as accurately and and honestly as possible. But in doing so it is possible to lose what makes a person exceptional and also what makes them authentic.

I am an empathetic leader. I care deeply. I am female. I am neurodivergent in ways that both challenge me and make me exceptional. I create teams and culture where people want to work and perform and that matters. Yes, I’m good at tech, I understand business needs analysis, I am capable of forecasting (pretty darn well), I creatively work with budgets and contracts and remove blockers. But what I really do is figure out what *people* need to be successful in the context of the environment, and what we together need to do to meet organizational goals. At all levels. And the way that I go about that makes me – and my teams and partners – able to course correct even the most challenging environments, create function out of dysfunction, and weather every storm and crisis, coming out better than we started.

I had allowed my documents to lose my personality and my values. I had allowed my core gifts as a professional to be genericized to fit the expected frame.

And then I received the important question: “I see your EQ in conversation – where is it here?” And it changed my thinking. I will not forget who I am. It makes me special, exceptional. And no, it does not always fit the frame, but that does not detract from me, instead it has enabled my success and enabled me to support the success of others. I will not give this up. And I will reflect it in my documents and everywhere I represent myself.

Professionals are best when they are allowed to be whole people. The best of us is in who we are as humans in the world. Our authenticity is core to who we are, and I cannot lead without it so why would I not reflect it?

References

• https://www.fastcompany.com/90732810/we-need-to-talk-about-why-we-still-see-ceos-as-white-men-and-how-to-challenge-that
• https://theglasshammer.com/2013/02/is-executive-presence-sexist/
• https://hbr.org/2024/01/the-new-rules-of-executive-presence
• https://www.cfar.com/evolving-what-it-means-to-exhibit-executive-presence/
• https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2023/09/19/mastering-executive-presence-through-a-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-lens/
• https://www.ideatovalue.com/inno/nickskillicorn/2021/01/tall-poppy-syndrome-vs-tall-weed-syndrome/
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathymillerperkins/2024/03/25/authenticity-at-work-how-to-balance-transparency-with-professionalism/
• https://hbr.org/2013/10/be-yourself-but-carefully
• https://daniellesax.com/blog/post/the-importance-of-authenticity-in-your-professional-life
• https://careerstonegroup.com/blog/81/Get-Real-and-Get-Ahead-Five-Steps-to-Professional-Authenticity
• https://medium.com/coaching-notes/what-does-being-professional-mean-anyway-notes-on-authenticity-39ad8b39a76b
• https://resources.businesstalentgroup.com/btg-blog/leadership-development-essentials-authenticity-professionalism

This topic is a little bit about management and leadership, and also recruitment, retention, performance, just simply being a good citizen in the larger industry and community, and being good to your people. For me, it’s a keystone to a healthy org and industry community and to who I am as a manager and leader (which are distinct, but that’s a different post).

Those of us who choose to be in the disciplines of management and leadership have chosen to take on a role for their staff and their organization. It’s our job to hire and maintain a staff of qualified individuals to perform a certain set of work.

Some organizations and “leaders” appear to think very transactionally about this. There is a concept that when you hire a person to do a job, the paycheck is enough, that you only care if they can do *that* job, that you don’t need to invest and grow in them. Also, hiring is expensive, so getting someone up to speed who has the exact skill set you need now and keeping them there as long as possible is what’s best for the org.

This is – in my opinion (and it’s my blog) – absolutely and unequivocally the wrong way to think about it. It’s tremendously shortsighted and limits not only the person but the organization, it has a high hidden cost, and leads to mediocrity and failure.

Now, there is some research and theory – most commonly you’ll hear Dan Pink – that paying someone well enough that money is not a problem is a huge motivator. And it is. But only because money issues are a distraction from the ability to do meaningful work. Now, I’m not 100% in on Pink’s theory, but only because I think “meaningful” is a term with many meanings…that’s part of what I’m getting at here (it’ll make sense).

What do we want as employers? We want performing teams and individuals. We want them to be effective, interested, and engaged. We want them to invest in our work and organization. We want them to do work that brings the org and its clients forward. We want their best work. We want a great pool of skilled people to choose from when we hire. We want to keep valuable people in the org.

I would argue that there’s some other things we should want, but these are pretty common and non-controversial.

Let’s deconstruct a bit.

Hiring

Hiring is pretty simple, right? You have work you need done, you write a job description, maybe an ad, you post it, you call some people, you have some interviews and you pick the person who is the closest to the job description. Easy Peasy.

Nope. Not at all. Now, I’m going to have to write another whole post on hiring processes and where we fail ourselves and our candidate pools, but let me focus on one aspect…

There are a lot of pieces to this, but in my experience and observation the best candidate is not necessarily the one with exactly the skills you need now. The best candidate is often one that is in the right direction with (depending on level) applicable or translatable skills and *a proven track record of learning and adapting* (or the strong potential). A hard working, capable person with the capacity to learn and think critically or problem solve is going to grow with you and your needs. Someone with curiosity and an understanding of the conceptual foundations and the “why” of what you’re doing will be the one who moves you forward.

But here’s the thing. This person will likely be phenomenal. But without some effort on your part they aren’t staying. Because even a big paycheck (assuming you have one to offer) isn’t everything, and if you’re not paying top end of market the other pieces matter even more.

Once You Have A Talented Person

Great! You made an awesome hire. So by traditional theory we want to focus them on the work we most need done and keep them in this role as long as possible right? Again, not so much.

Earlier, we talked about what we need as managers in our employees. We want investment and people’s best work. Why is a talented professional going to give us that if we put them in a box?

So what does the employee need or want? Well, people vary but here’s a few things:

• Meaningful support from management and team members
• Respect
• Room to learn, grow and develop into the job role
• Room to develop and learn beyond the original scope of the job
• The ability to do novel things
• Agency and a voice in the direction of their work
• Support in working toward (and sometimes developing) career goals
• The ability to learn from communities and resources beyond the company
• Over time, the right to be supported in achieving the next opportunity

Does money matter? Yes. Do the tools to do the job well matter? Yes. But it’s not the be all and end all. Work that is *satisfying* (meaningful to an individual) matters.

Employees often don’t stay forever. That person was only going to stay in that role until they outgrew it anyway. Might we have put the person on a path to outgrow it sooner? That’s possible. But that’s not a bad thing. That extra six months you might keep them is not going to be worth what it could have been if you were getting the best from the beginning.

Here’s the trick.

If you put the person in a box, they are less happy, they can feel the limits, they can feel the lack of support and growth. Which means they have no reason to give their best work. If you invest in the person’s growth then every day you are there, that growth benefits your org. Now obviously this is not unlimited. If you are at a technology company and the person is a developer and what they really want to do is play soccer professionally, there’s not much the job can do to allow them to develop in that direction. But to the extent it’s possible, professional curiosity and growth will benefit your team and your goals.

(Also, these things are just good and responsible management for non-toxic environments)

What Happens If (When) They Outgrow This Role?

Oh no, *panic* — our amazing hire might want to move on!

Ok, cool. So what’s next for them? They don’t have to tell us, nor take us up on assistance and coaching. But with enough trust, they likely will.

Is there a role within the org which suits their next goals? Are they well set up for it? If not, is there an option for making that possible? If you can make this work, you allow them to grow while retaining their organizational knowledge and (hopefully) goodwill.

There isn’t room for their next step in your org and isn’t likely to be soon? Help them leave. If you have the means to help them make connections, prep their materials, be prepared for interviews….do it. If they are ready to go, keeping them is soon going to become a losing proposition. Back to the fact that frustrated, unhappy employees are never going to give their best. Now your goal is improving your professional community, keeping a positive connection, and having them leave supported. Most of our specialities aren’t that big. You are going to talk to this person again. You may exchange knowledge, or they’ll recommend a great hire to you, or an important client relationship. You are building the reputation of you/your organization being worth working for. You get to watch them go forward and do the work you know they’re capable of. A former employee outgrowing you is tremendously gratifying and should be one of our goals.

Crux

Our job is not to hire someone and keep them in the chair (role) we hired them into. We fail ourselves and our organization this way. We limit creativity, innovation, and end up with a field of mediocre performers while real talent stays engaged or moves elsewhere.

Our job is to invest in the success of the team and the org, and one of the keys to this is investing in the individuals and their career directions. It’s how you get their best work now, and how you line them up to benefit your org and your industry over time.