• The Rollout Nobody Followed

• How the ADKAR Model Works

• Why This Matters for Leaders

• Putting ADKAR Into Practice: Worksheet & Mind-map

• The One Question: Which Stage Are We Stuck On?

• How This Plays Out in Real Teams

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

The Rollout Nobody Followed

A few months ago, I watched a fellow engineering manager roll out spec-driven development (SDD) across her team. SDD is the practice of writing a detailed spec before any AI-assisted coding begins, so the LLM has a clear contract to build against instead of a vague prompt.

She did the due diligence of sharing this new approach with her team in a team meeting. She explained why the old “just prompt and iterate” habit was producing inconsistent, hard-to-review code, and SDD was the way to go. In the meeting, her team was very receptive, and they seemed to be bought in.

Three weeks later, however, half the team was still skipping specs and prompting directly.

I remember her telling me over coffee that she thought her team was just resistant to the change. She thought that engineers didn’t want the extra upfront step, and were comfortable with direct prompting. So she sent another reminder to the team on their team Slack channel, and restated the ‘why’. But still, not much changed after that.

Eventually, she got what was missing. Her team wasn’t resisting the change - in fact, they agreed the new process made sense. They just didn’t know exactly how to write a good spec: what level of detail to include, how to scope it, what “done” looked like for a spec versus for code. Nobody had ever walked them through it.

She’d explained the why, but she never covered the how.

They weren’t resisting. They were stuck.

How the ADKAR Model Works

ADKAR was developed by Jeff Hiatt, founder of the research firm Prosci, in the early 2000s, based on Prosci’s studies of how individuals actually experience organizational change. He later expanded it in his 2006 book ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and Our Community.

The model breaks any successful change down into five sequential building blocks:

• Awareness — understanding why the change is happening

• Desire — wanting to support and participate in it

• Knowledge — understanding how to change

• Ability — having the skill to actually do it

• Reinforcement — sustaining the change so it doesn’t quietly reverse

The key insight isn’t the five words themselves, it’s the order.

You can’t build Desire without Awareness. You can’t build Ability without Knowledge. A team can be fully aware of a change, genuinely want it, and still fail simply because nobody built their skill to execute it.

Most change efforts don’t fail because people are against the change. They fail because leaders manage the first step and assume the rest will follow on its own.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Most managers are fluent in exactly one step of ADKAR: Awareness. We’re comfortable with the announcement: the all-hands, the Slack post, the deck explaining the “why.” What we’re far less comfortable with is everything after it.

The “I told them why, so they should want to” gap. Awareness and Desire are not the same thing. A team can fully understand why a change is happening and still not want to be the one to make it happen, especially if the change adds short-term friction to their workload with no visible upside for them personally.

The skills-vs-tools confusion. Knowledge and Ability get treated as interchangeable, but they’re not. Knowledge is understanding the new process in theory. Ability is doing it under real conditions: mid-sprint, under deadline pressure, with muscle memory that hasn’t formed yet. A single training session builds Knowledge, but it rarely builds Ability.

The “it seems to have stuck” trap. Reinforcement gets skipped entirely because, by the time you’d revisit it, the change looks like it’s working. Old habits don’t disappear the moment a new process launches. They fade slowly, and they come back the moment nobody’s watching.

Putting ADKAR Into Practice

For the rest of this article, we will focus our attention on putting the ADKAR model into practice in your own organization. As we do that, don’t forget to download the ADKAR Worksheet.

Use this to diagnose exactly which stage a specific change effort is currently stuck on, and map the right next action for that stage.

This worksheet is part of The Leader’s Resource Library, available to all paid subscribers to The Good Boss.

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If you prefer the standalone worksheet, you can download it from here.

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There’s a “scoreboard” in every organization. Not the Jira dashboards or the AI Tokens dashboards that you might be thinking.

This scoreboard doesn’t show up in your performance review. It’s not in any “handbook” or part of any HR onboarding.

But it shapes who gets promoted, who gets bypassed, and who wonders why nothing seems to move in their favor despite doing excellent work.

For years, I kept my head down and trusted that results would speak for themselves. But to my dismay, they didn’t, and it was frustrating for me.

To be clear, this article isn’t about “playing dirty”. It’s about learning to read the scoreboard, and playing smarter.

Here are 9 rules that changed how I navigate office politics.

1. Understand That the Scoreboard Is Real

Imagine two managers, both high performers on paper.

Priya delivers results quarter after quarter, but rarely speaks in cross-functional meetings. She does the work, writes the recap, and moves on. Rajan, same level, same output, but he consistently frames his team’s wins in terms the VP cares about. He shows up to the optional strategy session. He even sends a short “here’s what we learned” note after every milestone.

At year-end, Rajan gets the stretch assignment, while Priya gets feedback that she “needs to raise her visibility.”

The first step is accepting that the scoreboard exists, and that ignoring it doesn’t make you any better than or above others.

It just means you’re losing without knowing the score.

2. Know Who Actually Holds the Power

Every org has two structures: the one on the official org chart, and the one that actually runs things.

The org chart tells you who has the title, and who reports to whom. The real structure tells you whose opinion moves decisions, whose pushback kills proposals, and whose endorsement opens doors.

I’ve seen junior people with enormous “informal” influence, the one everyone trusts to read the room, the one the CEO always calls before a tough call. And I’ve seen senior leaders who have the title and none of the pull or weight you’d expect from them.

Mapping informal power is one of the most underrated skills in leadership. You need to look for:

• Who gets listened to when they speak, even without formal authority?

• Whose silence in a meeting signals something?

• Who do people go to for advice before a big meeting?

My suggestion: Draw this out on a piece of paper. Yes, I’m serious, and you also need to keep it updated as people move around. This is your real power chart.

3. Protect Your Reputation Like a Balance Sheet

In the corporate world, I believe that your reputation is a balance sheet. Every interaction adds or withdraws:

• You deliver on time: deposit.

• You overpromise and miss: withdrawal.

• You give someone else credit publicly: deposit.

• You take credit for shared work: withdrawal, and a big one.

One bad moment of taking credit, of talking behind someone’s back, of being unreliable when it mattered, and it takes a long time to undo.

The leaders who navigate politics well are almost always the ones people describe as “reliable” and “straight.”

You can’t build influence on a foundation people don’t trust.

4. Build Relationships Before You Need Them

Most people reach out to their relationships when they need something. It could be a favor, a decision, or a referral.

But that’s not relationship-building - that’s transacting.

Consider two directors going into a reorg.

Marcus spent years developing relationships across the org because he was genuinely curious about what other teams were working on. He grabbed coffee, shared articles, asked questions that weren’t about him. And guess what: when the reorg hit, three different leaders advocated for his team to stay intact.

Natasha went into the reorg with strong results and no internal network. Predictably, her team got scattered.

I’m always reminded of the age-old saying: The time to build the roof is when the sun is shining.

Build the relationships during the quiet stretches, when there’s nothing at stake. That’s when they become real.

5. Manage Up Without Becoming a Sycophant

There’s a fine line between managing up effectively and becoming the manager who just tells the boss what they want to hear, i.e., a sycophant.

The sycophant agrees with everything and optimizes for approval. This may work in the short term, but I’ve seen such managers eventually lose credibility with peers and eventually with the leader too, because leaders with good judgment eventually notice.

I know it isn’t easy, but here’s the formula that I’ve found to work well:

• Share frequent, short updates.

• Frame your work in terms of what they care about.

• Raise problems early, with options (don’t be seen as a complainer)

And when you disagree, say so directly, once, clearly, and then commit to whatever direction is chosen.

6. Choose Your Battles Like a Chess Player

Not every hill is worth dying on.

I’ve watched talented leaders spend enormous political capital fighting battles that didn’t need to be fought: a process they disagreed with, an organizational decision they couldn’t change, a colleague’s behavior that, in the grand scheme, didn’t matter.

I’ve been in that situation too, and I know it’s not easy in the moment.

But here’s the reality: every fight costs something, even when you win. You should spend that capital on the things that genuinely require your voice.

Here’s the 3-Question Test I use before entering any political battle:

1. Does this align with what I actually care about?

2. Do I have a realistic chance of changing the outcome?

3. Is the cost of winning worth it?

If the answer to any of these is no, you should just step back. Save your energy for the fight that actually matters.

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7. Credit Is Currency — Spend It Generously

One of the fastest ways to build political capital is to give it away.

I know that sounds counterintuitive, so hear me out…

When you publicly recognize someone else’s contribution, like in a meeting, in an email to leadership, in a Slack message, you signal something important: you’re not threatened by other people’s wins.

And that signal is heard by everyone in their subconscious.

Imagine two senior managers presenting the same team project to leadership.

• Anika says: “We pulled this off because of Leo’s insistence on simplifying the approach early. That call saved us three weeks.”

• David presents the same project: “I identified a key risk early and restructured the delivery plan.”

Leo remembers Anika forever, and the VP or senior leader notices who is building their team, and who is trying to collect credit.

Credit generosity is one of the highest-return political moves you can make, and it costs you nothing.

8. Read the Room Before the Meeting

The biggest political mistakes don’t happen in the meeting, they happen before.

Senior leaders call this “socializing an idea.” It sounds political, and frankly, it is.

Before any significant decision, proposal, or change request, talk to the key stakeholders individually first.

You’re doing this to listen, and to understand what they care about, where they might push back, and what framing will land. By the time you’re in the room, the room should already mostly agree.

They were pre-wired before the meeting started.

Pre-wiring sounds like extra work, and may feel manipulative. But it’s actually the thing that removes rework, misalignment, and the slow death of a good idea by a thousand objections.

If you walk into a meeting to get alignment, you’re already behind. Walk in to confirm it.

9. Stay Clean When Things Get Dirty

Office politics turns toxic when people start using it as a weapon: gossiping, undermining, taking sides in conflicts that don’t involve them, etc.

This is where I’ve seen smart leaders make career-ending mistakes. They think they’re playing the game well, but end up paying for it in the longer run.

When someone gossips to you about a colleague, don’t engage. When there’s an opportunity to take a shortcut that involves stepping on someone else, don’t do it.

The people who navigate politics well over the long run are the ones everyone trusts to play it straight.

Office politics isn’t dirty in and of itself. It’s up to you to play it well, with integrity.

Final Thoughts

The invisible scoreboard keeps running whether you pay attention to it or not.

The leaders who advance aren’t usually the ones who played the dirtiest. They’re the ones who understood how influence actually moves through relationships built in advance, through credit given generously, through reputation protected carefully, and through battles chosen wisely.

You don’t have to love politics to get good at it. You just have to stop pretending the scoreboard doesn’t exist.

In short: Learn the rules, play the long game, and stay clean.

💬 What’s the most important office politics lesson you’ve learned? Drop it in the comments.

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• The Deck That Almost Fooled Everyone

• The AI Confidence Trap Explained

• How AI Is Pulling Confidence and Competence Apart (The Three Shifts)

• Why This Matters for Leaders

• The One Shift: Assess the Thinking, Not the Output

• How This Plays Out in Real Teams

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

The Deck That Almost Fooled Everyone

A few days ago, our VP dropped a message in Slack asking for numbers to substantiate a new initiative we were considering.

Within an hour, our PM had responded with a polished deck. The deck had lots of data, just like what was asked: clean charts, lots of data points, and a compelling narrative.

I’ll be honest: my first reaction was impressed. The argument it made was convincing, but something inside me couldn’t settle just yet.

A few of the numbers didn’t quite match my intuition about what the data should look like. So I asked the PM a simple question: had he verified these numbers with the data engineering team?

Apparently, he hadn’t.

I took the figures to my data engineers, and what they found was an eye-opener. Data was being used to support interpretations it didn’t actually support. Numbers were cited without the context that would have completely changed their meaning. A few of the figures were just wrong.

What struck me most wasn’t that the PM had cut corners: he was responding quickly to a senior ask, which is exactly what you’d want someone to do. What struck me was how convincing the output was. If I hadn’t pushed, that deck might have sailed straight into a VP conversation and shaped a real decision. Nobody in the room would have known the foundation was shaky.

This is the risk that keeps me up a little more than it used to.

AI can produce a polished, confident, well-structured argument for almost anything, including things that aren’t true. And in a world where that capability is available to everyone on your team, the leaders who don’t learn to look past the polish are going to get burned.

This is what I’ve come to call the AI Confidence Trap.

The AI Confidence Trap Explained

The AI Confidence Trap is what happens when AI-generated polish creates the appearance of competence that isn’t fully there, and leaders and even individuals themselves mistake that appearance for the real thing.

To be clear, in most cases, the person using AI isn’t trying to deceive anyone. They’re doing what any sensible professional does: using the best available tools to produce the best possible output.

For most of professional history, the quality of someone’s written output was a reasonable proxy for the quality of their thinking.

• A well-written document usually meant a well-thought mind had produced it.

• A clear, confident recommendation usually meant someone had done the work to arrive at it.

• A detailed thesis usually meant the student or researcher had spent months on extensive research.

• A striking piece of visual art usually meant someone had spent years developing a craft.

Today, AI has broken that relationship.

• Now, a well-reasoned document might mean a well-reasoned mind… or it might mean a capable prompter and a powerful language model.

• A confident, comprehensive analysis might reflect deep expertise… or it might reflect a good template and fifteen minutes.

• A striking piece of visual art might mean years of developed craft… or it might mean a well-written prompt and a image generation tool.

The problem is: from the outside, these can look identical.

And this creates a new leadership challenge, which is the heart of the AI Confidence Trap:

How do you assess judgment, develop capability, and make good decisions about people when the primary signal you’ve historically relied on (output quality) is no longer reliably telling you what you think it is?

Read more

• The Confusion at the Heart of the Anxiety

• Why Scarcity Makes You More Valuable, Not Less

• What Becomes More Important, Not Less

• The Leaders Who Should Actually Be Worried

• What This Means for You

There’s a story going around, and you’ve probably heard it, and even told yourself a version of it.

Let’s face it: AI is getting smarter every day. AI tools are now writing the reports, summarizing the meetings, and even making recommendations to help you make decisions.

Slowly, the things that used to make a leader valuable are getting automated.

I want to push back on this, because I think the story is exactly backward.

The best leaders aren’t going to matter less in the AI era. They’re going to matter more than they ever have.

And the leaders who are anxious about this moment are usually the ones who were never really leading in the first place: they were managing, and calling it leadership.

Let me explain why.

The Confusion at the Heart of the Anxiety

Most of the fear about AI and leadership comes from a single confusion: mistaking management for leadership.

Let’s me clear that up:

• Management is the visible work. Think status updates, resource allocation, performance tracking, reporting, etc. It’s necessary and valuable, and, let’s be honest, a huge amount of it can now be done faster and better with the help of AI tools.

• Leadership is completely different. It’s the less visible work, such as building trust, making a hard call when the data is incomplete, and sitting with a team member in their worst week and making them feel like they still matter.

This is good news, not bad news, but only if you’ve actually been leading, not just managing.

Why Scarcity Makes You More Valuable, Not Less

Here’s a simple economic truth: value follows scarcity.

For the last few decades, “good management” has been relatively abundant. Most competent professionals, with enough training, could learn to run a status meeting, build a project plan, or analyze a dataset.

They still matter, but they’re more abundant and cheap.

Meanwhile, the deeply human skills: emotional intelligence, judgment under uncertainty, the ability to build trust, the courage to have a hard conversation, were always rare. They were just masked by how much time and attention management work was consuming.

Strip away the management noise, and what’s left is the real leadership signal. And in a world flooded with AI-generated output, the leader who can offer genuine human judgment, presence, and trust becomes not just valuable, but essential.

What Becomes More Important, Not Less

So what skills are more important now with AI taking over more of the management layer?

• Judgment. AI can give you ten well-reasoned options, but it can’t tell you which one is right for your specific team, your specific culture, and your specific moment in time. That call of weighing the human factors, the context, becomes more valuable precisely because there’s more information and less clarity.

• Trust. As more of the processes become automated and abstracted behind AI-powered dashboards, the leaders who can build genuine human trust become more valuable to the organization. Trust is now becoming one of the scarcest currencies in the workplace.

• Genuine connection. The more interactions get automated and run by AI-powered bots, the more people crave the real conversations. Imagine trying to solve a high-stakes issue over coffee with a colleague vs staring at the screen while chatting with a small chat window.

Check out my other post where I discuss these skills in a more detail:

The Leaders Who Should Actually Be Worried

All that being said, I won’t pretend everyone is safe. Some leaders should genuinely be worried.

These are leaders whose entire value proposition was built on the management layer.

• The ones who were really good at running the process, but never built real relationships.

• The ones who could produce the report, but never built the trust.

• The ones who confused being busy with being valuable.

I know that’s an uncomfortable truth, but I also think it’s an opportunity.

If you’ve been investing in the deeply human side of leadership all along, even when it felt less “productive”… congratulations! You’re about to be in the most valuable position you’ve ever been in.

What This Means for You

If you’re feeling anxious about AI and your role as a leader, here’s the reframe.

• Don’t ask: “What can AI now do that I used to do?”

• Ask instead: “Now that AI can handle the management layer, what does that free me up to actually focus on?”

Leadership was always the real job. Now, AI is just making it impossible to hide behind anything else.

💬 Do you find this reframe energizing or anxiety-inducing? Let me know in the comments.

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• The Manager Who Changed Everything (By Doing Nothing New)

• What the Hawthorne Effect Really Is

• How Observation Changes Behavior (The Three Layers)

• Why This Matters for Leaders

• The One Shift: From Watching to Trusting

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

The Manager Who Changed Everything (By Doing Nothing New)

A while back, I inherited a team that had a reputation for being disengaged.

The deliverables were late, and there were issues with the quality of the features being released. The previous manager had tried adding more structure, like more check-ins, more reporting, more visibility into who was doing what. But apparently, none of that helped.

I didn’t overhaul the process, but simply started being there, whether in meetings, working sessions, etc. My intent wasn’t to inspect or interrogate, but to ask questions, and just be present in the day-to-day.

Within a few weeks, I observed a change: the work quality picked up, and so did the energy in the team meetings. And I found myself wondering: was this me, or was something else going on?

The honest answer was: it wasn’t really me.

This is called the Hawthorne Effect.

What the Hawthorne Effect Really Is

The Hawthorne Effect traces back to a series of experiments conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at the Hawthorne Works, a Western Electric factory near Chicago.

Researchers set out to study whether changes in physical working conditions, such as lighting levels, break schedules, working hours, etc. affected worker productivity.

What they found surprised them.

Productivity improved almost regardless of what change they made. Whether you changed the lighting to brighter or dimmer, or changed the breaks to longer or shorter, the output still went up. The results were consistently positive, no matter the direction of the change.

The Hawthorne Effect, in its simplest form, is this: people change their behavior when they know they are being watched.

I do want to note that subsequent researchers have debated the original findings and their interpretation, and the data from those studies was messier than the clean narrative suggests.

But the core behavioral insight has helped up over the decades of organizational research and real-world leadership experience: attention shapes behavior. And once you understand that, you start seeing it everywhere.

Read more

• The Cover That’s About to Disappear

• Why This Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight

• The Crisis Isn’t AI. It’s What AI Reveals.

• How to Make Sure You’re on the Right Side of This

• My Honest Take: The Bottom Line

For years, there’s been a silent problem in leadership that nobody wants to talk about:

Remember the “leaders” who would run long meetings, track metrics, and respond to emails and Slack at impressive speeds? These leaders look busy, and sound competent.

But I’m sure you’ll agree with me that many of these managers were actually really poor leaders. So, what was really happening, you might ask?

AI is about to change that, or should I say, is already changing that.

The Cover That’s About to Disappear

Here’s what I mean by “cover.”

For decades, the “busywork” of management has provided a kind of camouflage. If you were constantly in meetings, constantly writing decks, constantly responding to emails and Slack, you looked like a leader.

Nobody had the tools, or frankly, the desire, to decouple “doing a lot of management tasks” from “actually leading people well.” The two got bundled together, and most organizations never bothered to unbundle them.

That bundle is falling apart. With AI tools, you can easily draft the report, summarize the meeting, build the project plan, and analyze the data.

What’s more: it’s often faster and more thorough than a manager who used to spend hours on it. I’ve come to rely on and trust these tools with every passing day, as I’m sure you have, too.

Why This Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight

Mind you, this isn’t a new problem. In fact, it’s an old problem that’s now impossible to ignore.

In your own experience, have you noticed…

• The manager who’s everywhere, yet adds little to no value to the organization.

• The leader who’s always “slammed” but whose team feels lost and directionless.

• The person who’s exceptional at producing the appearance of progress, but whose team’s actual trust, growth, and morale have been eroding the entire time.

As I said, this isn’t new.

We’ve all noticed the managers who are busy but not leading, who’re visible but not making an impact. We’ve just never had a clean way to prove it.

Today, AI is breaking that illusion because it’s about to produce the same outputs with minimal or no leadership behind it at all.

The Crisis Isn’t AI. It’s What AI Reveals.

To be clear, the “crisis” I’m talking about isn’t that AI is going to take away leadership roles.

I’m sure this is going to get uncomfortable in many, if not most, organizations.

Some leaders will discover, in a fairly public way, that they don’t have much left once their task list is automated and managed by AI tools. Some teams are going to realize that the person who looked like their ‘leader’ for years was mostly just... busy.

And some leaders, the ones who were doing the real work all along, the trust-building, the coaching, the hard conversations, the steady presence in difficult moments, are finally going to get seen for what they were actually contributing. Maybe even for the first time.

This is the real crisis:

Maybe it’s not even a crisis. It’s a relief.

How to Make Sure You’re on the Right Side of This

If this is making you uneasy, here are a few places to start:

• Audit your week. How much of what you did this week was task execution versus genuine leadership (e.g., coaching, hard conversations, trust-building, judgment calls)?

• Find the conversation you’ve been avoiding. If there’s a hard conversation sitting on your to-do list, that’s a clear signal of where you need to pay attention.

• Stop hiding behind “busy”. If your calendar is full but your team’s trust, growth, and morale are low or stagnant, you need to clean up your calendar and schedule your real priorities as a leader.

I don’t mean to scare you, but here’s me taking the action of sharing what needs to be shared with you:

My Honest Take: The Bottom Line

For years, “busyness” was a reasonable proxy for leadership impact, because we had no better way to measure it.

With AI, that proxy is disappearing, and what’s left is the only thing that ever actually mattered: whether you made the people around you better.

Some leaders have nothing to worry about, as they’ve been doing the real work all along, often without much recognition for it. Others, on the other hand, have a choice to make, and honestly, not much time left to make it.

💬 Be honest: which one are you? What are you doing differently as a leader with AI? Let me know in the comments below.

Leave a comment

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📺 Subscribe to The Good Boss YouTube Channel

• The Problem With “Smart” Leaders

• What Occam’s Razor Really Means

• How Complexity Creeps In (The Razor in Action)

• Why This Matters for Leaders

• The Razor Audit: Cut Before You Add

• How This Plays Out in Real Teams

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

The Problem With “Smart” Leaders

A few years into my leadership career, I noticed something uncomfortable about myself.

Every time a problem came up, my instinct was to add something.

• A new process to fix the coordination issue.

• A new framework to improve how we made decisions.

• A new meeting to make sure everyone was aligned.

• A new wiki or document to capture everything we’d agreed on.

And I remember clearly - I could justify every one of them at the time.

Simple things had become unnecessarily complicated. I realized that my team, the very people this was supposed to ‘help’, was now spending more time managing the process than actually doing the work.

I thought I was solving problems, but in reality, I was actually creating them.

They think that if something is too simple, it’s probably not right. There’s a centuries-old principle that cuts right through this.

It’s called Occam’s Razor.

What Occam’s Razor Really Means

Occam’s Razor is a principle attributed to the 14th-century philosopher and friar William of Ockham.

The original idea, roughly translated, is this:

In plain terms: when in doubt, go with the simpler explanation.

Simple is not always correct, but complexity has a cost: it has more assumptions, more moving parts, more things that can go wrong. The simpler explanation is usually easier to test, communicate, and act on.

And more often than not, it turns out to be right.

Scientists and philosophers have used Occam’s Razor for centuries as a guide for building theories and solving problems. But I’ve come to realize that the principle translates really well to leadership, because leaders face a version of this challenge every single day.

• Every time something goes wrong on your team, you have a choice: find the simplest explanation and address it directly, or reach for something more elaborate or complex.

• Every time you design a process, you have a choice: keep it lean and simple, or keep adding until it feels comprehensive.

• Every time you communicate a decision, you have a choice: say it plainly in simple words, or fill it with context and business jargon to add more ‘weight’ to it.

Read more

Let’s be honest about what’s happening.

AI is already writing your meeting summaries, drafting your performance reviews, and generating your project plans.

And let’s face it: it’s doing most of that pretty well.

And here’s what I have noticed: most leaders respond to this moment in one of two ways. They either panic, or they are curious and go deeper into the very things AI can never touch.

Why These Skills Get Neglected

Before we get to the five skills, let’s address the elephant in the room.

These aren’t “new” skills. They’ve been around for ages.

So why do most leaders neglect them?

Here’s my take: that’s because they don’t produce immediate, visible output.

• You can’t put “built trust with my team this week” in a status update.

• You can’t quantify the coaching conversation that changed someone’s trajectory.

• You can’t screenshot the moment a team felt genuinely safe to speak up.

And in a world that rewards visible productivity, the less visible work of real leadership gets pushed to the back of the queue.

Let’s talk about what that looks like.

1. Presence

I once had a manager who would check his phone every few minutes during our one-on-ones.

He was a great task master: he never missed a deadline, never dropped a deliverable. He never even skipped a meeting.

And yet, no one on the team felt seen by him.

Today, AI can schedule your one-on-ones, prep your talking points, and summarize the conversation afterward.

But it can’t be there.

• It can’t notice the pause before someone answers.

• It can’t sense the energy shift when someone is struggling.

• It can’t sit with discomfort without rushing to fill it.

Great leaders are fully present.

Most leaders I talk to either overlook or completely neglect this because presence is slow and time-consuming. You can’t scale or automate it. You can’t run it as a batch process.

💡The practice: In your next one-on-one, put your phone in your bag, close your laptop, and give the person your full, undivided attention. Just do that, and see what happens.

2. Courage

Here is something most leaders learn the hard way: the conversation you keep avoiding is usually the one that needs to happen most.

Today, AI can draft your feedback. It can suggest the right words, the right tone, the right structure. It can give you the full script, ready to go. But it can’t step into the emotional weight of a conversation with someone whose career, confidence, or sense of self might be impacted by what you say.

That requires courage, and courage can’t be automated.

I’ve seen leaders who were excellent at managing around difficult conversations: restructuring teams instead of addressing individuals, rewriting job descriptions instead of having performance discussions, going quiet instead of saying the hard thing.

In the short term, it looked like kindness. In the long term, it was the opposite.

💡 The practice: Identify one conversation you’ve been avoiding, and schedule it this week. You’ll feel uncomfortable, but that’s a sign that that conversation is important and needs to happen.

3. Sensing

When you look back at things, the data tells you what happened, but it almost never tells you why.

I once had a team that, on paper, looked like a high-performing team. We were delivering on track, and our engagement scores were also quite decent. We didn’t face many major customer incidents either.

But when I went into team meetings, I could sense the interactions that were polite but guarded.

I decided to identify what was going on, so I started having more informal conversations. What I found was the team was living in a culture of ‘quiet fear’ - they had learned that raising issues or problems was riskier than just hiding them.

This is one of the most underrated leadership skills: the ability to sense:

• To notice what people aren’t saying.

• To detect the early signals of disengagement or fear

• To mine for conflicts before they become crises.

💡 The practice: After your next team meeting, ask yourself: “What wasn’t said in that room? What was the energy telling me that the words didn’t?” Make that a regular habit.

4. Growing Other Leaders

Have you noticed this pattern: A high-performing leader gets promoted, but their team stays the same. The organization gets one better leader but loses the development engine that was making everyone around that leader better.

Real leadership development isn’t a program or a process. It’s a practice.

• It’s asking the right questions in the right moment.

• It’s holding someone to their potential even when they’ve forgotten what it is.

• It’s knowing when to challenge and when to support.

Today, AI can generate coaching questions, recommend development resources, and even simulate a feedback conversation.

And here’s why most leaders neglect it: developing others is slow, ambiguous, and the results are often invisible until much later. It’s far easier to just do things yourself.

💡 The practice: Pick one person on your team whose potential isn’t yet being fully realized. Make their growth a deliberate focus for the next 90 days.

5. Emotional Regulation

The world today is more complex and chaotic than ever. Markets are shifting, strategies are pivoting, reorgs and layoffs are happening.

Calm is contagious, and so is fear.

Today, AI can give you scenarios to consider. It can model probabilities at the detail level, and it can draft your communication plan for difficult announcements.

But it can’t provide the steady presence with signals your team is looking for in times of uncertainty. It can’t absorb the anxiety in a room and return it as confidence and calm.

The only challenge: it doesn’t have a ‘metric’, and it doesn’t show up in performance reviews. But it is also one of the few things your team notices, every single time.

💡 The practice: The next time you’re in a high-pressure situation, pause before you react. Take a deep breath and ask yourself: “What does my team need from me right now — information, or steadiness?” Likely, it’s the latter.

The Honest Summary

These five skills share a few things in common.

• They are slow.

• They are difficult to measure.

• They produce no immediate “output”.

And they are exactly what will make you irreplaceable in an era when everything measurable and outputtable is increasingly being handled by AI.

💬 Which of these five skills do you most need to develop? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

If you liked this post, you may like these other posts

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• The Meeting That Went Quiet

• What the IKEA Effect Really Is

• Why This Happens (The Psychology Behind It)

• Why This Matters for Leaders

• The One Shift: From Presenting to Co-Creating

• How This Plays Out in Real Teams

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

The Meeting That Went Quiet

A few years ago, I spent three weeks putting together what I thought was a genuinely strong team strategy.

I was exploring how my team could become an AI-native team, something that’s on the minds of most leaders today. After extensive research and analysis, including looking at what the best-in-class companies were doing, I put together a nice deck with the strategy so I could share it with my team.

On the day of the presentation, I walked into the room confident (and excited). As I went through the strategy, I looked for the energy in the room to lift to match mine.

To my dismay, I didn’t see any of that.

Some of my team members nodded, others asked a few clarifying questions. After the session, over the following weeks, not much changed on the ground, and I kept wondering what was missing.

I thought the logic was sound, but the team just… didn’t seem to care about it the way I did.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out why. And the answer had nothing to do with the quality of the strategy.

It had everything to do with who built it.

What the IKEA Effect Really Is

The IKEA Effect is a cognitive bias identified by behavioral scientists Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely in 2011.

Their research found something simple but profound:

The name comes from a very familiar experience. When you assemble an IKEA bookshelf yourself by following the instructions, tightening the screws, figuring out which piece goes where, you end up genuinely proud of that bookshelf. Maybe more proud than it deserves. You’d never feel that way about a shelf that arrived pre-assembled.

That’s the IKEA Effect in action.

Read more

Many of you have asked me over the years, in replies, in DMs: when I was going to start a YouTube channel.

Whenever I’ve been asked that question, my honest answer has been: I don’t know, maybe never.

Not because I didn’t want to, but because to me, writing felt safe, and video felt terrifying. Building an audience on Substack and Medium has been one of the hardest things I’ve done, yet one of the most rewarding experiences for me. And if I can be honest with myself - I wasn’t sure I had the courage to start over somewhere new, in a format that leaves nowhere to hide.

The YouTube Channel

The channel is for the same people who read this newsletter - practitioners, not theorists.

Whether you are a seasoned leader, an entrepreneur, or an aspiring manager, I think you will find some value there. As you know from my content, I specifically focus on the human side of leadership, and will continue to do the same there too.

I plan to post on YouTube at least every two weeks. I’m also hoping to bring in guest leaders down the road, so you can watch real conversations with people who are actually practicing, not just talking about it. If that's a format you'd enjoy, hit reply and let me know.

The First Video

The first video is about 9 Popular Leadership Rules that are Dead Wrong, the rules most of us were taught, repeated, and believed. The ones that sound reasonable until you're actually in the room trying to lead people.

Watch it here.

My Request To You

If this newsletter has ever been useful to you, I’d love your help now.

• Subscribe to the channel.

• Share the video with someone who’d find it valuable.

• And most importantly, please share your feedback! This is a new format for me, so any feedback you can share will be gold. Just hit reply to this email.

Best,

Gaurav

Founder, The Good Boss and Author, The Leader’s Playbook

• Two Teams. Same Tools. Completely Different Results.

• Why Most AI Adoption Stays Shallow

• The AI Culture Stack

• Why This Matters for Leaders

• Building the Stack: The One Shift

• How This Plays Out in Real Teams

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

Two Teams. Same Tools. Completely Different Results.

A few months ago, I was talking to two engineering managers in my company. Both of them had similar team sizes, worked on similar domains, and had similar AI tooling budgets.

One of them, Kevin, was buzzing with excitement. His team was using AI across the board, not just writing code faster, but rethinking how they approached problems entirely. They were running multiple experiments in parallel, something they wouldn’t have tried before. They were catching issues earlier through AI-powered automation tests. They were spending more time on the hard thinking, and less on the mechanical work.

Kevin told me that AI had fundamentally changed what his team was capable of.

The other manager, Vikram, was frustrated. His teams had the same tools, and a similar rollout, but the adoption in his team was thin. Some of his team members used them regularly, but most didn’t. And the ones who did were mostly using it for basic tasks such as drafting emails, generating boilerplate code, etc. - things that saved minutes, not hours. So, in the grand scheme of things, nothing in his team had fundamentally changed.

I’ve seen this pattern too many times. Two teams, same access, same tools, completely different outcomes. And almost every time, the difference isn’t the technology.

It’s what the leader built around it.

Why Most AI Adoption Stays Shallow

When most leaders think about AI adoption, they think about access.

They buy the tools, set up the subscriptions, and run a few lunch-and-learns. Some of them even share a few prompt templates on their team Slack channel.

And then they ‘wait’ for the transformation to happen.

But guess what: in a majority of cases, that transformation never happens. What they get instead is a small pocket of enthusiasts or ‘power users’. These are team members who would have figured it out anyway, and didn’t really need that nudge. But the majority of the team only dabbles occasionally and defaults back to how they’ve always worked.

And culture, in the end, is the leader’s job.

The teams that truly thrive with AI aren’t the ones with the best tools or the biggest budgets. They’re the ones where the leader has deliberately built something underneath the tools: a set of conditions that make deep, confident, thoughtful AI use possible.

I call this the AI Culture Stack.

The AI Culture Stack

Think of your team’s relationship with AI as a vertical stack of three layers, each one building on the one below.

Read more

A manager I know spent three hours last week writing a performance review.

He was careful with the language, balanced it with the feedback, and inserted specific examples to make it more grounded. Like many managers, he was a bit anxious over every sentence.

Then a colleague showed him how to do the same thing in four minutes with AI.

He laughed about it. But later, over coffee, he said something that stuck with me: “If we can do all that with AI, what exactly should managers be doing today?”

I think it’s a great question to ask ourselves, and something I’m going to try to answer in this post.

The Uncomfortable Truth About “Management”

If you think very objectively, a huge chunk of what we call “management” is information processing.

• Summarizing releases, actions, and notes.

• Tracking status, releases, operations.

• Writing down what was decided.

• Flagging what’s at risk.

• Reporting upward.

• Translating downward.

• and the list goes on.

For decades, this work was glued to the manager role because it required human time and human judgment to do it. Now, increasingly, it doesn’t.

• AI can summarize your team’s sprint.

• It can draft the stakeholder update, or the email to your leadership.

• It can flag the performance pattern before you notice it yourself.

• and a whole lot more.

So, we can now see a glaring gap in what we used to do, and what we should do. The way I look at it is this:

When I speak with leaders across levels these days, I find a subtle pattern in their take on AI:

Granted, that is a real skill, and it has genuine value.

But with AI, it is no longer scarce. And as the fundamental principle of value goes: value, in any system, flows to what is scarce, not abundant.

What AI Cannot Do

Now let’s be real - AI can’t do everything. After all, it’s ‘artificial’.

AI can’t sit across from Sarah on your team who is burning out, and know that what she actually needed is not a ‘performance plan’. What Sarah really needed was someone who could have a real, human conversation with her.

It can’t make a call with 70% information, own the risk publicly, and rally a team to move, knowing that a lack of decision costs more than a wrong decision later.

It can’t build trust. It can’t make your team members believe it will be right by them when they need that support.

Some people think of these as ‘soft skills’ and dismiss them as if they don’t matter.

But honestly, I think they are the highest-leverage things a leader does. They are also the hardest to develop, the hardest to measure, and the easiest to deprioritize because there was always an urgent email to answer or a Slack message to respond to.

Well, guess what: that excuse is gone now, thanks to AI.

The Distinction That Changes Everything

Here’s the fundamental distinction that I want you to understand:

To be clear, this is not a new idea.

The best leadership thinkers have been saying it for years: your job is not to “manage deliverables”, it’s to create conditions where people can do their best work. That’s what leadership really is.

But most organizations were too busy running the machine to actually operationalize that.

The good news is that AI is now running parts of the machine, which means you finally have to decide what you’re actually here to do.

Here’s my honest take: the managers who will struggle in the next two to five years are not the ones who can’t use AI tools. They’re the ones who can’t answer this question:

If the answer is “I’m not sure”, the next section should help you find out the answer for yourself.

Three Questions Worth Asking Yourself

Here is a simple reflective exercise. Take out a piece of paper (or your Notes app) and answer these questions, honestly:

• Do my team members come to me for tasks, or for judgment? There’s a difference between a manager whose team needs them to unblock tickets and a leader whose team needs them to help think through hard calls. Both are real, but only one is irreplaceable.

• Am I growing my team, or just managing their output? Output can be tracked, but growth takes presence, coaching, and the kind of human judgment that can tell when someone is ready for more before they ask for it.

• What would my team say I’m actually here for? This is more open-ended, but really - what does your team find most value out of your role as their leader? If you’re comfortable, ask them. If not, just write what comes to mind instinctively and honestly.

The Real Opportunity

If you ask me honestly about how AI impacts leadership, I’ll say it in one sentence:

For decades:

• The urgent crowded out the important.

• Status reports crowded out strategy.

• Shipping faster crowded out the coaching conversation that would have changed someone’s trajectory.

Over my 25 years in the corporate world, the best leaders I’ve known spent their time on the deeply human work: the coaching, the conflict, the clarity, the trust-building.

And it’s not that they didn’t have the administrative pressure or the release timelines. Of course they did. But they refused to let those pressures own them - they protected time for what mattered most.

The beauty of AI is that it is about to hand that gift of the most important parts of leadership to the rest of us. Now we have more time, and fewer excuses.

The question now isn’t whether AI will change how you manage. For sure, it will, and it already has. The real question is whether you’ll use the space it creates to finally lead.

💬 Let me know in the comments - what aspect of your role do you see changing with AI?

Leave a comment

If you found this useful, you might also like:

• 9 High-Value Leadership Skills That Will Make You Irreplaceable

• 7 Boring Habits That Will Transform Your Leadership

P.S. If you’re constantly juggling fires, tough decisions, and people issues, and you’re ready to bring more clarity, calm, and intention to your leadership, that’s exactly why I built The Ultimate Leadership Toolkit. This is the complete “plug-and-play” collection of 100+ resources, including Practice Worksheets, Framework Mind-maps, System Posters, and the full Leader’s Playbook. If I’m being honest, it’s the shortcut to the system I wish I had when I started.

You can explore the full system here and start using it today. Instant download, lifetime access.

You can explore the full system here and start using it today. Instant download, lifetime access.

👋 Let’s connect: LinkedIn · Substack · X

• A Meeting That Made Me Uncomfortable

• What We Were Taught Good Leadership Looks Like

• What AI Just Changed

• The Three Layers of Leadership

• Why This Matters for You as a Manager

• The One Shift: Audit Your Last Five Days

• How This Plays Out in Real Teams

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

A Meeting That Made Me Uncomfortable

A few weeks ago, I was in a leadership team meeting.

A senior manager was presenting his team’s quarterly review. He had prepared slides and talking points and done a great job summarizing the key wins and misses. Clearly, he had put a lot of hard work on it.

But as he wrapped his presentation, I started thinking…

I had done something similar the week before. I had prepared performance reviews, planned our team priorities, and summarized key takeaways from the past quarter. Except I hadn’t spent days on it. I had used AI, and what used to take me days took a couple of hours, max.

It was a similar output, but in a fraction of the time.

I looked around the room. These were smart, experienced leaders who had been in the industry for several years and in these leadership roles. And yet, so much of what they were doing, like the synthesis, the summaries, the decks, the documentation, was exactly the kind of work that AI now handles faster and better than any of us.

And what’s more, AI can arguably do these tasks better, with higher quality, and in minutes.

That question made me uncomfortable…

What We Were Taught Good Leadership Looks Like

For most of us, the mental model of a “good leader” was shaped by what got us promoted.

You were sharp, had answers, and could walk into a room, absorb a complex situation quickly, cut through the noise and make a confident call. You remembered things, connected dots others missed, and were typically the most informed person in the room.

These weren’t just your skills… they became your identity.

And for a long time, this model defined great leadership. In the pre-AI era, information was scarce, or harder to process, and analysis took time and effort. In that era, the leader who could synthesize complexity the fastest created real value.

While that era may not be over just yet, it is changing faster than most leaders want to admit.

What AI Just Changed

Many leaders I speak to think of AI as the ‘new tool on the block’.

I think that’s a very narrow way to look at it. AI is more than just a tool. AI is rapidly commoditizing the skills that used to define leadership competence, and that’s a big deal.

• Need to remember key information? AI can pull it up from its memory in seconds.

• Need to identify patterns across pieces of data? AI can do that better and faster than humans.

• Need to summarize last quarter’s decisions for a new stakeholder? A two-line prompt.

• Need to write a professional, impactful email to key stakeholders? Straightforward.

All these tasks are now table stakes, thanks to the power of AI.

And this has created a crisis for a specific kind of leader - the one who builds their confidence and credibility in being the most informed, analytical person in the room.

The Three Layers of Leadership

Here’s the framework I’ve been thinking about to make sense of this shift.

Think of leadership as a pyramid with three layers.

Read more

• When Good Intentions Go Wrong

• The Goldilocks Principle And What It Has to Do With Leadership

• The Three Zones

• Why This Matters for Leaders

• A Simple Calibration Technique

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

When Good Intentions Go Wrong

A few years ago, I had a senior engineer on my team - Chris - who was sharp, experienced, and someone who had been writing production code longer than some of his peers had been in the industry.

And I was checking in on him…. a lot.

It wasn’t because I didn’t trust him. I actually thought I was being a “good manager”. I wanted to stay close to the work, so I asked questions in every 1-on-1, and I even reviewed his designs before he shared them with the team. I shared my feedback.

I was involved.

Six months later, he came to me and said he was leaving. When I asked why, he said something I wasn’t expecting at all: “I feel like I’m not trusted to do my job.”

The opposite has also happened to me. I’ve watched a new hire who joined fresh from college go quiet for weeks because her manager gave her a project and disappeared. The manager thought he was empowering her by giving her full autonomy - no direction, no check-ins, no guardrails.

And guess what - the new hire felt less “empowered” and more lost.

Those were two situations. Two different managers, both well-intentioned, and both wrong.

Most leaders default to a style, and then apply it to everyone. That’s the problem the Goldilocks Principle helps you solve.

The Goldilocks Principle And What It Has to Do With Leadership

The Goldilocks Principle comes from a concept in science, particularly astronomy, where something has to fall within a certain range to work: not too hot, not too cold, but just right.

The Earth sits in the “Goldilocks zone” around the sun, where liquid water can exist, and life can thrive.

The fairy tale (that you may have read as a kid) captures the same idea: not too big, not too small. Not too hard, not too soft. The third bowl, the third chair, the third bed… just right.

When applied to leadership, the principle asks a deceptively simple question:

This sounds obvious, but in practice, it’s one of the hardest things to get right.

The Three Zones

Think of your leadership support as a dial that goes from one extreme to the other.

Read more

Many new managers believe that managing high performers would be the easier part of leadership. Early in my management career, I had the exact same belief.

After all, these were the people every manager wanted on their team: smart, driven, reliable, and capable of solving difficult problems with very little oversight. I assumed they would naturally require less support, less guidance, and less attention than everyone else.

Over time, I realized how wrong that assumption was.

Across two decades of leading engineering teams, platform initiatives, and large-scale technology transformations, I learned that high performers do not need “less” leadership. They need a very different kind of leadership.

Here are five leadership lessons I learned the hard way while managing smart, ambitious people.

1. High Performers Need Context, Not Control

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make with talented employees is over-managing them.

High performers generally do not resist accountability, but they do resist unnecessary control. The smartest people I have worked with rarely wanted detailed instructions on how to execute something.

I noticed this repeatedly while leading teams working on mobile and cloud platform initiatives.

Once strong engineers understood the strategic context and customer impact, they typically found better solutions than the ones I would have prescribed myself.

That experience fundamentally changed how I approached leadership. I stopped thinking of management as directing execution and started thinking of it as creating alignment and enabling ownership.

2. Recognition Matters More Than Most Leaders Realize

There is a dangerous assumption many managers make about high performers: because they appear confident and successful externally, they must already know how valuable they are.

In reality, many high performers operate under immense pressure that leaders rarely see. They handle the hardest projects, become the default escalation point for teams, and carry expectations that continue increasing year after year.

I have seen exceptional employees burn out not because the work itself was difficult, but because their effort started feeling invisible.

Leaders unintentionally stop acknowledging contributions because high performance becomes expected behavior. Ironically, the more reliable someone becomes, the less recognition they often receive.

3. High Performers Get Bored Faster Than Everyone Else

Many leaders believe compensation is the primary factor that retains top talent.

Compensation certainly matters, but in my experience, growth matters far more. High performers are usually internally driven people. They enjoy solving difficult problems, learning new skills, and pushing themselves into unfamiliar territory. The moment work becomes repetitive, stagnant, or overly political, their motivation begins declining.

Throughout my career, I noticed that the strongest employees consistently gravitated toward difficult and meaningful challenges.

During major platform modernization efforts, mobile initiatives, and cloud transformations, the most ambitious individuals were energized by uncertainty and scale. They wanted ownership, influence, and opportunities to build something impactful.

4. High Performers Need Air Cover More Than Advice

One of the most important leadership lessons I learned was that high performers often need protection more than advice.

Many managers assume their primary responsibility is helping with execution by coaching and advising.

As people become more effective, organizations naturally pull more demands toward them. Everyone wants their input, their participation, and their pulled in all directions.

One of the greatest gifts a manager can give a high performer is the ability to work deeply on meaningful problems without constant organizational interference. That’s the air cover they’re looking for.

5. High Performers Can Become Team Risks If Left Unmanaged

One of the most uncomfortable leadership truths is that not every high performer strengthens the team around them.

Some, whom I like to call “brilliant jerks”, weaken it.

I have seen extremely talented employees create unhealthy dynamics because leaders tolerated their problematic behavior in exchange for strong results.

This was one of the hardest lessons I learned as a leader because it forced me to rethink the relationship between performance and culture. Early in my career, I occasionally overvalued raw capability.

Over time, I realized that sustainable high performance requires more than individual brilliance. It requires trust, collaboration, and collective effectiveness, not individual brilliance.

Final Thoughts

Managing high performers is about channeling the potential without suffocating it. It is about creating a culture where everyone thrives and grows.

If you’re looking for a step-by-step system to build a high-performance team culture, you can check out The Ultimate Leadership Toolkit. It’s a simple, practical system, designed for leaders like you. Explore the full system and start using it today.

👋 Let’s connect: LinkedIn · Substack

• The Promotion That Backfired

• What the Peter Principle Really Says

• The Competence Cliff: Why Promotions Create New Incompetence

• Why This Matters for Leaders

• Putting the Peter Principle Into Practice

• The One Shift: Promote for the Next Role, Not the Last One

• How This Plays Out in Real Teams

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

The Promotion That Backfired

A few years ago, I made a promotion decision I was completely convinced was the right one.

Arjun had been on my team for three years. He was the kind of engineer every manager wants: technically sharp, always delivered on time, and the person others came to when they were stuck. When a senior engineering role opened up, his name was the first one that came to my mind. It felt like a no-brainer. So, I promoted him to that role.

Six months later, Arjun was struggling.

The new role required him to lead a small sub-team, drive cross-functional alignment, and make architectural decisions that involved trade-offs he’d never had to navigate before.

And the skills that had made him exceptional at the first thing weren’t the same skills the second thing demanded.

To be clear, he wasn’t failing because he wasn’t talented. He was smart, talented, and motivated. He was failing because I had promoted him into a role he wasn’t ready for, and I hadn’t done enough to prepare him for it.

What I experienced wasn’t just bad luck. I’ve seen countless managers repeat this over and over again. There’s a pattern behind it, and once you see it, you’ll start noticing it everywhere.

It’s called the Peter Principle.

What the Peter Principle Really Says

The Peter Principle was introduced by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book of the same name. The idea is deceptively simple:

Here’s what that means in practice. When someone does their job well, they get promoted. When they do the new job well, they get promoted again. This continues until they reach a role where they can no longer perform effectively. And there, they stay.

The uncomfortable implication is this: over time, most roles in most organizations end up being filled by people who are not quite right for them. And this isn’t because of bad intentions, but because of how the system works.

But here’s what often gets missed. The Peter Principle isn’t really about the people. It’s about the logic of promotion itself.

We promote people based on what they’ve already done, i.e., their past performance in their current role. But the next role is fundamentally different. It demands different skills, different thinking, and different behavior.

Past performance is a signal of what someone has done. It says very little about what they’re ready to do next. The problem is that most organizations use past performance as a leading indicator for future performance, which can be highly misleading.

The Competence Cliff: Why Promotions Create New Incompetence

Think of it as a cliff.

• On one side, your best individual contributor: someone who has mastered their craft, earned the trust of the team, and consistently delivered results.

• On the other side, the new role they’ve just stepped into: one that looks similar on the org chart, but requires an entirely different set of capabilities.

What got them to the promotion is rarely what they need after it.

This gap is what I call the Competence Cliff. And the bigger the jump between roles, the steeper the cliff.

The problem isn’t that people can’t develop these new skills. Most smart individuals can, and most eventually do. The problem is that we rarely prepare them for the cliff before they have to jump off it.

Why This Matters for Leaders

If you’re a manager or a leader, the Peter Principle isn’t just an interesting observation. You should think of it as a mirror.

Every time you make a promotion decision, you are either setting someone up to grow, or (unintentionally) setting them up to fail.

And most of the time, when someone struggles after a promotion, the blame lands on them. We say that they weren’t ready, or they couldn’t handle it, etc.

But the real question to ask is:

• Who decided they were ready?

• Who prepared them for it?

• Who supported them through the transition?

The cost of getting this wrong is real, and it shows up slowly, but surely.

• The individual loses confidence. Someone who was once a star performer now feels like they’re in over their head, every single day. That creates a persistent self-doubt that leaves a mark in their confidence and motivation.

• The team loses stability. A struggling leader creates confusion and instability. Team members start going around them, or disengaging, or leaving altogether.

• And the organization loses twice. Once when the high performer stops doing what they were great at, and again when the new role they’ve stepped into isn’t being led well.

The Peter Principle is a leadership problem, not a people problem. And that means it’s yours to solve.

Putting the Peter Principle Into Practice

For the rest of this article, we will focus our attention on putting the Peter Principle into practice in your own organization.

As we do that, don’t forget to download the following resources:

• Peter Principle Worksheet: Use this to evaluate your team members and assess their readiness for the next role, not just their performance in their current one. The worksheet walks you through prompts to map skill gaps, identify growth signals, and design the right support for each person’s transition.

• Peter Principle Mind-map: Use this as a quick visual refresher on the framework, and as a guide you can return to whenever you’re facing a promotion decision.

These resources are part of The Good Boss Practitioner resource library, available to all paid subscribers to The Good Boss.

⬇️ Already a member? Download these from your Resource Library.

The One Shift: Promote for the Next Role, Not the Last One

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I once walked out of a team meeting thinking… “That went surprisingly well.”

Everyone in the room agreed to what I had to say. There was no pushback, not even any difficult questions. I felt good about myself - I thought my team really trusted me as a leader.

But later that evening, one of my senior engineers, whom I had known for many years, messaged me privately. He mentioned that many of the team members actually did have concerns, they just didn’t feel comfortable raising them in the room earlier.

That took me a while to digest, but later I realized what was going on.

As leaders, we often assume that trust looks like agreement. But in reality, agreement can sometimes be just avoidance.

And over the years, I’ve realized that low trust rarely shows up through subtle behavioral patterns leaders often miss entirely.

Here are five of them.

1. Meetings Feel “Too Smooth”

This was the sign I missed in the team meeting I referred to earlier.

At first glance, smooth meetings feel like a leadership win. After all, by default, we don’t really like tension, conflict, or cross-questioning. And let’s face it: who doesn’t like the ‘nods’?

But the reality is that healthy teams are rarely as “smooth”.

One of the clearest signs of declining trust is the lack of honest disagreement.

Try asking “Any concerns?” and if all you hear is “Nope, all good,” you have something to worry about. People often stop disagreeing openly, even when they disagree internally. When there is a lack of trust, team members learn what feels “safe” to say, and what doesn’t, and once that happens, the meetings become performative.

Sometimes the calmest meetings are the most dangerous ones.

2. Problems Reach You Too Late

When teams consistently bring issues to you late, it’s rarely just a process problem. It’s often a trust problem.

A delayed escalation usually means someone spent time debating whether they should tell you yet, and there could be a lack of trust hidden in that debate.

Teams that don’t trust leaders often wait until the issue becomes unavoidable, or they’ve exhausted every option. They don’t trust how you will react, and they want to delay any emotional frustration or stress.

That’s why leadership reactions matter so much. How you react to your team’s problems teaches them what will feel safe to share next time.

3. Your Team Keeps Seeking Permission for Small Decisions

One subtle sign of low trust is excessive approval-seeking.

You notice that small decisions are getting escalated to you, and the team is hesitating to take independent action.

This could happen if the team doesn’t feel safe making mistakes, for not knowing how you will react if you find out. So they decide to take the safe route of asking first rather than making their own decisions.

I’ve seen highly capable employees become surprisingly passive under controlling leaders.

4. Nobody Gives You Honest Feedback Anymore

The higher a leader rises in the corporate hierarchy, the less truth he naturally hears.

Power changes communication, and people start filtering what’s safe to say, what’s risky, and what might create tension.

But behind the doors, the concerns don’t disappear - they’re still being discussed privately.

Trust is not measured by how respectfully people speak to leaders. It’s measured by how safely people can speak against them.

One of the strongest leaders I ever worked with had a simple habit during reviews and discussions. He would pause and ask - “Tell me what I’m not seeing.” That immediately lowered the risk of people speaking honestly.

Strong leaders don’t just tolerate feedback, they actively make it safer to give.

5. The Energy Changes When You Enter the Room

Watch what happens emotionally when you join a room or call. Do conversations suddenly become more formal, more cautious, less spontaneous?

Do people sound measured?

Teams that trust leaders relax around them, and don’t need to watch every single word they say. They’re not worried about predicting the emotional response of the leader.

When leaders become emotionally unpredictable, teams start being measured and careful around them, and that kills the trust in the team.

Building a High-Trust Team

A team that always agrees with you may not trust you enough to tell you the truth.

So, how do you build a high-trust team? If you’re looking for a step-by-step system to build trust, you can check out The Ultimate Leadership Toolkit.

It’s a simple, practical system you can use to build a high-trust team. Explore the full system and start using it today.

👋 Let’s connect: LinkedIn · Substack

• The Strategy Meeting That Went Nowhere

• The Hedgehog Concept: What It Is

• The Three Circles

• Why This Matters for Leaders

• Putting the Hedgehog Concept Into Practice

• The One Question That Changes Everything

• How This Plays Out in Real Teams

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

The Strategy Meeting That Went Nowhere

A few years ago, I sat in one of the most exhausting planning meetings of my career.

We had eight initiatives on the table. Each one had a sponsor, a slide deck, and a compelling argument for why it was critical. By the end of the session, we had agreed to pursue all eight. And predictably, everyone left the room feeling excited.

Six months later, we had made meaningful progress on exactly two of them. The rest had slowed, stalled, or just deprioritized. And the teams that were working on those initiatives were tired, exhausted, and frustrated. When I asked team leads what we were actually focused on, nobody could give me a clean answer.

And here’s what struck me: We had a bunch of smart managers and engineers, and we hadn’t failed because of a lack of effort, or talent, or even resources. We had never honestly asked ourselves: what are we actually best at?

That question, simple as it sounds, is one of the hardest things for a leader to answer with real honesty. And it’s at the heart of a framework that I wish I had known earlier in my leadership journey.

It’s called the Hedgehog Concept.

Ready to dive in? Let’s go!

The Hedgehog Concept: What It Is

The Hedgehog Concept comes from Jim Collins’ landmark book Good to Great, published in 2001. (and one of my all-time favorite leadership books, if I may add).

Collins and his research team spent years studying companies that had made a sustained leap from good performance to truly exceptional results, and trying to understand why. One of the clearest patterns they found was this:

The distinction comes from an ancient Greek parable, attributed to the poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

A fox is clever, fast, and always trying new approaches. It chases multiple strategies, adapts constantly, and is never short of ideas. A hedgehog, on the other hand, does one thing: It rolls into a ball, every time, and… it works.

Collins found that leaders and organizations that tried to be foxes, pursuing multiple strategies, chasing every opportunity, pivoting when things got hard, consistently underperformed. The ones that identified their one big thing and pursued it with sharp, disciplined focus were the ones that won.

The uncomfortable truth for most leaders, including myself, is that we are trained to think that more is better. More initiatives, more bets, more growth vectors.

The Hedgehog Concept pushes back hard on that instinct.

The Three Circles

So how do you find your one big thing?

Collins describes it as the intersection of three questions — what he calls the Three Circles.

Circle 1: What are you deeply passionate about?

This isn’t what you think you should be passionate about, or what looks good in a strategy deck.

It is what genuinely energises your team. What kind of work creates real enthusiasm, not just compliance?

This is important because passion is fuel. Without it, even the most talented teams eventually lose momentum.

Circle 2: What can you be the best in the world at?

This isn’t what you do today, or what you’re pretty good at, and what you have the genuine potential to be exceptional at.

Collins is deliberate about the standard here: not best in your industry, not better than last year. Best in the world.

Most teams, if they’re honest, will find that the list of things they could truly be the best at is much shorter than the list of things they’re currently doing.

Circle 3: What drives your economic engine?

For businesses, this is about profitability. For leaders and managers, the translation is broader: what creates the most value: for your customers, your organisation, your team?

You need to ask yourself the question: Where does the real impact come from?

The Intersection

The Hedgehog Concept is not any one of these circles. It lives only where all three overlap.

And here’s the harder part: anything that sits outside that overlap deserves serious scrutiny.

Why This Matters for Leaders

You might be thinking: this sounds like a concept for CEOs and executive teams, not for day-to-day managers.

But I’d push back on that.

The Hedgehog Concept is just as powerful, maybe more so, at the team level. In my decades of experience leading teams, I’ve seen the fox-like behaviour that Collins describes show up just as clearly in my and other teams in the organization.

Think about the last time your team’s roadmap got reviewed. How many items were added, and more importantly, how many were removed?

Most teams are much better at addition than subtraction. A new opportunity comes along, and it gets added. A PM asks for something, and it gets added. And before long, the team is stretched working on an endless backlog of work items, and nobody can articulate what the team is truly great at.

The Hedgehog Concept gives you a framework to push back on that behavior to seek clarity, not out of stubbornness. It helps you have the honest conversation that most leaders avoid:

There’s also another subtle benefit, and I’ve seen this play out in my teams many times. When your team knows their “hedgehog” (i.e, their one clear area of excellence), it builds their identity.

They know what they stand for, what kinds of work to lean into, and what to push back on.

That clarity is a key attribute of a high-performing team.

Putting the Hedgehog Concept Into Practice

For the rest of this article, we will focus our attention on putting the Hedgehog Concept into practice in your own organization.

As we do that, don’t forget to download the following resources:

• Hedgehog Concept Worksheet: Use this to work through the three-circle exercise for your team — map out what you’re genuinely passionate about, where you have the potential to be truly exceptional, and where your real impact lies. The worksheet includes step-by-step prompts to guide you through the full process, including how to facilitate this with your team.

• Hedgehog Concept Mind-map: Use this as a quick visual refresher of the framework. It’s also a useful visual to bring into team discussions when strategy conversations start getting noisy.

These resources are part of The Good Boss Practitioner resource library, available to all paid subscribers to The Good Boss.

⬇️ Already a paid member? Download these from your 📚 Resource Library.

The One Question That Changes Everything

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Most managers are trained to believe that leadership is complex. We talk about frameworks, models, systems, and strategic thinking.

And while all of that has its place, the reality is this:

Some of the highest-impact management moves are almost embarrassingly simple.

So simple, in fact, that most managers overlook them, not because they’re ineffective, but because they feel too basic to matter.

But here’s the paradox: The managers who consistently outperform others aren’t always the smartest or the most experienced, but the ones who do the obvious things consistently, and well.

Here are five such behaviors worth replicating.

1. Asking “What Do You Think?” (Then Actually Waiting)

Most managers feel the pressure to have answers.

So when someone brings up a problem, the instinct is to solve it, direct it, or fix it.

But try this instead: ask them: “What do you think?”

And then, just wait. Don’t jump in after two seconds of silence, or lead the answer, nudge them in any way.

Just wait.

At first, it might feel inefficient, or even uncomfortable. But something powerful happens when you do this consistently.

• People start thinking harder.

• They start owning decisions.

• They stop looking up for answers, and start looking within.

Simple question. Massive shift.

2. Ending Every Meeting with “Who Owns What?”

We’ve all been in those meetings.

The discussion is great, lots of ideas are generated, everyone nods, and feels productive. But then… nothing happens because no one is quite sure who is doing what next.

This is where one simple habit changes everything: Before ending any meeting, ask: “Who owns what?”

It sounds almost too obvious to matter, but I can tell you that this will kill the ambiguity that will otherwise lurk around in your team.

I like to use this simple structure:

• Owner – Who is responsible?

• Action – What exactly needs to be done?

• Timeline – By when?

It takes less than a minute, but it turns conversations into meaningful outcomes.

Without it, meetings create the illusion of progress. With it, they drive real meaning and momentum.

3. Repeating Back What You Heard

When you repeat back by saying something like “So what I’m hearing is…”, it can feel awkward at first.

I used to find it super awkward, too, and many managers I know skip it because it sounds unnatural.

But here’s the reality: Listening is not the same as understanding.

And in fast-moving teams, misalignment, if not addressed early, can end up being quite costly for the entire team or the business.

By simply reflecting back what you heard, you do three things:

1. You confirm alignment

2. You give the other person a chance to correct or clarify

3. You signal that you’re genuinely listening

And that last one matters a lot, especially for leaders.

In my experience, I’ve seen this habit surface hidden assumptions. You’ll be surprised how often someone responds with: “Actually, that’s not quite what I meant…”

It’s a small pause, but it prevents big problems.

4. Admitting “I Don’t Know”

Many managers avoid saying this because it feels risky. They feel it undermines their authority or confidence.

So instead, they hedge, or worse, they “pretend to know”.

But when you say “I don’t know,” you actually build trust, not lose it, because people are smart and good at detecting when something doesn’t feel authentic.

In contrast, leaders who acknowledge what they don’t know signal that it’s safe to speak up, question, and explore.

They provide space for others to share their own ideas, or to fill the gaps.

When a leader says, “I don’t know,” it gives everyone else permission to be real.

5. Following Up on Small Things

I used to be really bad at this early in my career. I wouldn’t pay attention to the small things, until I realized how much they mattered.

Then I started paying closer attention, and asking questions like:

• “Hey, how did that presentation go?”

• “Did you manage to resolve that issue?”

• “Were you able to get in touch with Robert?”

Individually, these moments don’t feel like much, but over time, they compound, and what they’re really signaling is: “I notice. I remember. I care.”

And that builds helps you to build lasting trust with your team.

And yet, I see so many managers who want to focus only on big updates, big milestones, big problems, and they miss the small moments.

They miss the small moments.

The Pattern Behind All of This

None of these moves or habits are complicated. They don’t need more time or authority.

But most managers don’td o them because they don’t feel powerful. They feel small, obvious, and worth skipping.

But when you look closely, they all drive the same three outcomes:

• Clarity – People know what’s expected

• Ownership – People feel responsible for outcomes

• Trust – People feel heard and supported

And those three things are the foundation of every high-performing team.

Building the Habits

So, how do you build those habits? How do you pay attention to the small moments to drive clarity, ownership and trust with your team?

That’s exactly why I built The Ultimate Leadership Toolkit.

It’s a simple, practical system designed to help you learn these habits, so you’re not just “reading” about leadership, but actively practicing it.

If this article resonated with you, this is the next step: Explore the full system and start using it today.

👋 Let’s connect: LinkedIn · Substack

• When Confidence Lies

• The Dunning–Kruger Effect

• The Confidence vs Competence Curve

• Using the Dunning–Kruger Effect in Your Team

• A Simple Rule That Will Change How You Lead

• Common Pitfalls (and How to Avoid Them)

• Final Thoughts

When Confidence Lies

A few years ago, I remember almost promoting the wrong person on my team.

Nila, a software engineer, was confident, decisive, and seemed like a natural leader. She was always ready with an answer, a convincing one, too.

But there was just one problem: She wasn’t very good at her core job, which was to write code. She was slow to design and implement features, and the quality of her work wasn’t the best either.

At the same time, one of my strongest software engineers - Sam - who was a coding superstar, was sitting quietly in the same team. Sam was thoughtful and skilled, but less confident than Nila. He would often second-guess himself.

During the annual calibration cycle, I was about to reward the wrong signal… confidence - until I (thankfully) realized the harsh truth in leadership:

Confidence is easy to see. Competence is not.

The Dunning–Kruger Effect

What I experienced in that moment wasn’t random.

There’s a pattern behind it. And once you see it, you’ll start noticing it everywhere in your team.

It’s called the Dunning–Kruger effect.

This idea came from research by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. They found something simple, but uncomfortable.

• People with low ability tend to overestimate themselves.

• People with high ability tend to underestimate themselves.

And this isn’t because of ego, but awareness.

• If you don’t know what “good” looks like, you assume you’re already there.

• If you do know what “great” looks like, you see how far you still are.

This creates a gap - the gap between confidence and competence.

The Confidence vs Competence Curve

You can think of this as a curve.

At the start, you don’t know what you don’t know, so your confidence rises fast. You learn a little, and it feels like a lot. You reach the peak of ignorance, with very high confidence but low competence.

Then, as you keep learning, reality hits, and your confidence starts to drop. Doubt starts to creep in, and your progress also slows. At the lowest level of confidence, you enter the valley of despair.

After that, something interesting happens. The “real” learning begins, and your confidence slowly starts to build again. This time, it’s grounded in knowledge, and you ascend the slope of enlightenment. Eventually, as you continue to build competence, you reach the expert level.

Interestingly, the expert-level confidence is typically lower than the level at the initial peak, and this gap is called the Confidence Gap.

In your team today, you like have people at all points on this curve.

But here’s the catch: confidence is loud at the start, and quiet in the middle, and that’s what tricks most managers.

Using the Dunning–Kruger Effect in Your Team

Understanding this bias is useful, but the real question is: how do you actually use this in your team?

For the rest of this article, we will focus our attention on putting the Dunning-Kruger Effect into practice in your own organization.

As we do that, don’t forget to download the following resources:

• Dunning-Kruger Worksheet: Use this to map your team members, and identify the patterns between confidence and competence. You will then start making better decisions about their performance and impact in your organization. The worksheet includes step-by-step prompts to guide you through the entire application process.

• Dunning-Kruger Mind-map: Use this as a quick visual refresher about the framework. You can also use it as a visual guide to help you when you need to practice the framework in your own situations.

These resources are part of The Good Boss Practitioner resource library, available to all paid subscribers to The Good Boss.

⬇️ Already a member? Download these from your Resource Library.

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