Leadership & Trust

There’s a word showing up everywhere in leadership conversations right now: performative. It’s usually said as a criticism. A way of calling out leaders who say the right things but don’t follow through. But in my work — and in my own experience — I’ve come to understand something the criticism misses entirely. Performative leadership…

Leadership burnout doesn’t usually announce itself. It builds quietly, in the gap between what you’re expected to carry and what any one person was ever designed to hold. Then one day you look at your calendar and feel it. You’ve got something due that actually requires you to think. Not respond, not review, not show…

When we presented the new culture code to the company, I remember feeling a strange combination of relief and uncertainty. Relief, because we had finally done what once felt impossible. We had taken something invisible and made it visible. We had defined trust behaviorally. We had created shared language, shared expectations, and a shared foundation….

In the last post, I shared how a simple assignment—to rewrite our culture code—uncovered something much deeper. The issue wasn’t integrity. It wasn’t effort. It was trust. More specifically, it was the absence of shared expectations that allow trust to function. By the time my project partner and I finished reviewing the survey results, it…

In my previous post, I shared the moment I realized something wasn’t right in our organization. Not because of a single dramatic failure, but because of a quiet, persistent dissonance between who we believed ourselves to be and what I was actually experiencing. For a long time, I assumed that dissonance was mine alone to…

I worked in my previous company for over 13 years, most of which were spent in leadership roles. It was a wonderful company—a true home for me for a long time. My colleagues and I did a lot of life together: marriages, divorces, children being born. It was a small, close-knit company, and I loved…