In this keynote address to the 2026 University of Illinois Web Con, Gies College of Business CIO Chris Tidrick explores how authentic leadership is built from the inside out—through aligning values with actions, showing up consistently, and putting people first. Drawing on personal experience and practical insights, he breaks down the core elements of integrity: authenticity, honesty, and a people-first mindset.

This session challenges leaders to rethink how trust is built—not through big moments, but through everyday choices, transparency, and compassionate directness.

Integrity isn’t a trait you claim—it’s a practice you live.

Some of the fractures are obvious. A loss that knocked the wind out of us. A mistake we still replay when our brains won’t quiet in the middle of the night. A relationship that didn’t survive a conflict where we stuck to our values. Other fractures are quieter. The comment from a previous boss we know was unjustified, but that still echoes. The new job we didn’t get. The way we learned, sometimes after enormous effort, that we are just not welcome in certain rooms.

Even the most successful among us fail to go unscathed.

For a long time, I thought the goal was to sand those edges down. To present the polished, decisive, visionary, and confident version. I needed to avoid any signs of being wounded. We’re conditioned to believe that wholeness looks seamless and strength is uncracked.

But that’s not real life — or real leadership.

The truth is we’re held together with something much more interesting than perfection. We’re held together with a weathered resilience and all the connection and respect we can scratch out of ourselves and the world. We patch ourselves with perspective, sometimes with professional coaching or therapy, and often with colleagues and friends who support us with honesty and accountability.

This may sound pessimistic, even sad.

It’s beautiful, actually.

The fractures are where we recognize each other — and connect.

When someone on our team hesitates before speaking up, we don’t just see a performance issue. If we’ve known our own hesitations, we see a human being calculating risk. When a colleague overreacts to feedback, we don’t immediately label them as difficult. If we’ve sat with our own bruised ego, we recognize the sting of rejection.

Our broken pieces are the bridge.

That’s the part of leadership we don’t talk about enough. We love strategy. We love vision. We love the clean lines of a five-year plan. But the real work of leading happens in the messy recognition that everyone in the room is carrying something. Old stories. Old fears. Old hopes that didn’t pan out the way they imagined.

Everyone in the room holds these things — including us.

We may think we’re being strong by pretending to be unfractured, but all that does is make us inaccessible.

Embraced imperfection is what creates safe passage for real connection.

I’ve had moments in my career where I felt the pressure to project certainty I didn’t fully possess. To be the calm, unwavering voice. And there are times when that’s necessary. Steadiness matters. But what I’ve learned is that steadiness doesn’t require sterility. We can be grounded and still admit, this is hard. We can carry authority and still say, I don’t have this completely figured out.

In fact, the leaders who have most shaped me were not the ones who seemed invincible. They were the ones who were integrated. They knew their cracks, acknowledged them, and led with an empathy born from having been there. I’ve also known leaders that never admitted any failings, and they were often miserable leaders to work for, creating cultures where people felt more like output than humans.

Acknowledging our broken pieces is clarifying. When we name the fracture, we stop tripping over it. When we understand the insecurity, we stop letting it run the meeting. When we recognize the old narrative — I have to prove myself or I can’t let anyone see me struggle — we can choose whether it still gets a vote in our decisions. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve fallen down as a leader as a result of trying to cover an insecurity about something I was lacking.

The journey toward being a whole human doesn’t erase the cracks, but aims to understand and integrate them and let them inform who we are as integrated leaders.

As I’ve thought about this topic, I discovered that there is a Japanese art called kintsugi where broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with gold. The cracks are illuminated, not hidden. The bowl is considered more beautiful because of its history, not in spite of it.

There is a way for us to incorporate the concept of kintsugi as leaders.

Our teams don’t need us to be flawless. They need us to be aware of what shaped us, what still triggers us, and how our unexamined fractures can unintentionally cut others. We also need to embrace the strength that came from surviving them.

When we embrace our own brokenness, something shifts. We stop expecting perfection from ourselves and from the people around us. We get curious instead of critical. We extend grace because we know how badly we’ve needed it. We create cultures where people can admit mistakes without fearing repercussion.

That’s resilient leadership.

The irony is that the path to wholeness runs straight through the cracks. The parts of us that feel the most jagged are often the parts that make us most capable of empathy, courage, and depth. They are the reason we can sit with someone else’s disappointment without flinching. The reason we can keep going after a setback. The reason we know that growth is rarely linear.

We are fractured in a million different ways, held together with resilience, grace — and yes, love. That’s the human condition, not tragedy.

And if we’re willing to acknowledge it—if we’re willing to embrace the broken pieces instead of pretending they aren’t there—we don’t just become more whole ourselves.

We become the kind of leaders other fractured humans can trust.

and I had a great conversation about this topic on our Candid Conversations on Leadership podcast.

Candid Conversations on Leadership

Episode 2.03: Leading Through Our Fractures

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3 months ago · Chris Tidrick

In reality, confidence is far more relational than we like to admit. It’s shaped over time through action, experience, and through feedback. Not just the formal kind, but the everyday signals we get about how we’re doing, whether we’re on the right track, and whether growth is possible without penalty. Confidence doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It’s formed in motion, in relationship with other people.

That’s why I think about confidence as a cycle. We take action. We receive feedback — explicit or implicit. We interpret what that feedback means about our capability. That interpretation shapes what we do next. When the cycle is healthy, confidence compounds. When it’s broken, confidence erodes, even in capable people.

For leaders, this cycle should matter deeply. We often treat feedback as a performance management tool. Something we deploy to correct behavior, improve results, or meet objectives. But feedback is also an emotional input. It tells people whether they are seen, whether they are safe, and whether effort and risk are worth it. The way feedback is given or withheld can either fuel confidence or quietly starve it.

This is why an idea shared recently by Eddie Francis on his For Our Edification podcast resonated so strongly with me. Eddie talked about “making constructive feedback the prize” in professional relationships. That framing is powerful because it reframes feedback as something we aspire to receive, not something we brace for. But that only works if we’re clear about what constructive feedback actually is.

Eddie defines constructive feedback as feedback that will genuinely help someone do what they do better. Not feedback that vents frustration. Not feedback that asserts authority. Not feedback that checks a leadership box. Feedback that serves the receiver. When feedback is experienced this way, clearly in service of growth, it stops feeling like a threat to confidence and starts feeling like an investment in it.

This applies just as much to leaders as it does to individual contributors. As leaders, we often underestimate how hungry people are for useful feedback. Silence rarely feels neutral. More often, it feels like ambiguity. And ambiguity is a breeding ground for self-doubt. When people don’t know how they’re doing, they fill in the gaps themselves—and they tend to be far harsher than any leader would be.

At the same time, poorly delivered feedback can be just as damaging. Feedback given publicly or in moments of emotional intensity doesn’t land as guidance. It lands as judgment. Which brings us to a critical condition for confidence-building feedback: safety.

Feedback only fuels confidence when it’s exchanged in a safe space and at the right moment. Safety doesn’t mean being soft or avoiding hard conversations. It means being intentional. Are both the giver and receiver in a frame of mind where learning is possible? Is the feedback grounded in respect? Is the goal improvement, not release or control? Without these conditions, even accurate feedback can shut people down. It’s best to ask for permission to give feedback to make sure it has the properly prepared landing zone.

Leaders often feel pressure to give feedback immediately, especially when something goes wrong. But immediacy isn’t always helpful. Sometimes the most responsible choice is to wait until emotions settle (yours and theirs) so the feedback can actually be heard. When someone is emotionally flooded, their nervous system is optimized for defense, not growth.

That same dynamic shows up on the receiving side.

Even in the healthiest environments, feedback can trigger defensiveness.

That’s human. Feedback challenges our self-image. It pokes at the story we tell ourselves about our own competence. But if we want confidence that’s resilient instead of brittle, we have to resist the instinct to immediately explain, justify, or push back.

Defensiveness short-circuits the confidence cycle. It turns potentially useful information into something to be survived or dismissed. And while that may protect our ego in the moment, it costs us growth in the long run. Confidence that avoids feedback isn’t confidence—it’s fragility.

It’s also important to say this directly: feedback isn’t the only thing that builds confidence. If it were, confidence would be entirely outsourced to other people. Experience matters. Mastery matters. Doing hard things, making mistakes, and discovering that you can recover from them matters. Confidence is built by accumulating evidence that you can handle reality as it is.

What feedback does is help us interpret those experiences. It calibrates confidence. It helps us understand what actually matters, what’s working, and what’s changeable. That role becomes especially important for people who aren’t naturally confident.

Not everyone starts from the same baseline. Some people move through the world assuming they belong unless proven otherwise. Others assume the opposite. For people who lack natural confidence, feedback can feel dangerous. One piece of constructive input can sound like confirmation of every private doubt they’ve carried — a spotlight illuminating their imposter syndrome.

Here, leaders have an outsized responsibility. When someone lacks confidence, vague or inconsistent feedback leaves too much room for negative self-talk to dominate. But harsh or poorly timed feedback can reinforce insecurity rather than growth. The work lives in the middle: clear, specific, development-oriented feedback that anchors people in reality. Not hype. Not flattery. Real, helpful perspective delivered with care.

For those receiving feedback confidence grows when feedback is treated as data, not a verdict. You don’t have to decide what feedback means about you in the moment. You can sit with it long enough to ask, “What part of this helps me get better?” and just as importantly, “What part of this doesn’t belong to me?”

Feedback is a gift, and sometimes people don’t know the right gift to give. You can always accept it, then not incorporate it if it doesn’t serve you well.

Over time, this is how confidence becomes grounded. Not inflated by praise. Not crushed by critique. Grounded in learning. Feedback accelerates that process when it’s useful, safe, and well-timed. Experience does the rest.

Which brings us back to the confidence cycle.

Action creates experience.

Feedback helps us interpret that experience.

Interpretation shapes belief.

Belief influences the next action.

Leaders shape the cycle through the feedback they give and the environments they create. Individuals shape it through how they receive, filter, and apply feedback.

When feedback is treated as a prize—something exchanged in trust and aimed at growth—it becomes fuel. It builds confidence that’s accurate, durable, and capable of withstanding challenge. And that kind of confidence doesn’t just make people better at their jobs. It makes them more willing to learn, stretch, and lead.

A metaphor keeps coming back to me: Social media as a giant aquarium where, instead of oxygen, we’re fed a steady supply of dopamine. It keeps us alert, stimulated, and engaged, but it also keeps us suspended in place, just comfortable enough that we don’t do anything that might disrupt the environment around us.

In this aquarium, everything is carefully controlled. The temperature is right. The water is clean. The glass is clear. We can see one another swimming by with our opinions, our outrage, our affirmations, and our certainty. It feels like freedom because we can move in any direction we want, but only within the boundaries of the tank. And like fish, we rarely question the water itself.

I recently watched a MasterClass on dopamine addiction with Dr. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation. So much of what she described about the chemical and physical reactions happening in our bodies as we anticipate the next hit felt real to me. I feel it on a daily basis.

She explains that dopamine drives anticipation and craving rather than pleasure itself. The build-up to a reward often feels more intense than the reward and why we feel restless, anxious, or empty when stimulation stops. In a world of constant high-reward cues, our brains become overactivated and then rebound into discomfort, and the cycle continues.

The anticipation driven by social media is architected to addict us. The dopamine matters. Dopamine isn’t satisfaction; it’s anticipation. It’s what keeps us checking, scrolling, and reacting. Social media doesn’t leave us fulfilled, but it leaves us occupied.

We’re almost informed. Almost connected. Almost ready to act.

That “almost” is the trap.

Aquariums are designed for stability, not transformation. They’re closed systems meant to minimize disruption and maintain equilibrium. Social media works the same way. You can express outrage, as long as it’s brief. You can signal empathy, as long as it’s frictionless. You can even call for change, as long as that call resolves itself into a post instead of a commitment.

Posting feels like action, and that’s the problem. It scratches the emotional itch without requiring follow-through. We get release without risk and affirmation without accountability. The aquarium rewards this behavior, so we keep swimming the same loops while telling ourselves we’re moving forward.

This is where it starts to matter for leaders. We’re not immune to this environment. If anything, we’re more vulnerable to it. Visibility feels like influence. Engagement feels like impact. Over time, it becomes easy to lead for the algorithm instead of for people, and to confuse being seen with making a difference. It’s easy to feel like a leader when your follower count increases, but who and what are we leading?

The dopamine loop also trains us to avoid discomfort. Real change is slow and often unrewarding. It involves tension, pushback, and long stretches where nothing happens at all. That kind of work doesn’t play well in a system optimized for instant feedback, so we default to reaction instead of reflection and commentary instead of commitment.

We end up busy, loud, and stuck.

We debate symptoms instead of causes. We rally around moments instead of building momentum. We substitute awareness for responsibility. And because everyone else in the tank is doing the same thing, it feels normal. Even virtuous.

The aquarium doesn’t silence us. It just keeps us stimulated enough that we never leave. And leaving is hard. It means fewer dopamine hits and more uncertainty. It means doing work that can’t be summarized or shared. But it also means access to something the aquarium can’t provide.

Real leadership needs fresh air for fuel. It doesn’t happen happen inside the tank. It happens in rooms without audiences and in decisions that don’t generate content. It shows up in conversations that are messy and unresolved, and in actions that cost something real. Leaders who step away from the dopamine drip regain agency. They choose substance over signal and action over performance.

I’m not arguing that social media is inherently bad. It has its place. It can connect us to people and ideas we’d not otherwise meet. It can teach us things. But the aquarium is not the ocean, and confusing the two has consequences. Our vision is narrow, our understanding of the real world is filtered.

The real question isn’t whether we’re in the aquarium. Many — maybe most — of us are. The question is whether we’re willing to notice when the water is keeping us calm at the cost of keeping us small, from being real leaders with real impact.

For me, keeping the aquarium metaphor front of mind is a reminder to regularly get out and breathe the sometimes messy, necessary air of reality.

Most of us don’t struggle because we lack empathy or because we don’t care about results. We struggle because we care deeply about both. We want to support our people and we want the work to matter. The trouble begins when one of those instincts crowds out the other.

This happens all the time for me. I’m naturally empathetic in some ways, not in others. I’ve got a natural ability to adapt during suboptimal conditions, so I can adopt a get over it and yourself attitude about a lot of things. At the same time, I’m easily moved by human stories of challenge. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve felt deep empathy for one of my team members because of some challenge they’re experiencing. I also need to fight the urge to roll my eyes when I feel like someone is being overly dramatic about something else. A lot depends on the frame of mind I’m in and how much pressure I’m under to get results.

Despite the difficulty of striking the balance, we leaders need to do the work to find it. Both extreme alternatives aren’t acceptable.

When empathy takes the lead without being anchored to clear expectations, it can slowly erode a team. It usually begins with good intentions. We notice stress, exhaustion, or personal challenges and respond by loosening deadlines, lowering the bar, or avoiding hard conversations. The goal is to be humane, but stretch too far and you’re left with ambiguity. Too much empathy makes everything relative. People stop knowing what success looks like. Standards become situational instead of shared. High performers begin to question whether their effort actually matters, while others feel a constant low-level anxiety because the rules of the game seem to change depending on the day.

Uncertainty is exhausting, even when it’s wrapped in kindness.

On the flip side, we sometimes respond to pressure by tightening our grip on expectations. Clear goals, clear metrics, clear accountability. In many environments, this approach is celebrated. It feels disciplined. Focused. Serious. And for a while, it can work. Work gets done. Targets are met. Meetings stay efficient.

But expectations without empathy have a cost, and that cost tends to surface slowly. People stop bringing their full selves to work. They do what’s required, not what’s possible. Creativity declines because risk feels unsafe. Burnout doesn’t announce itself; it shows up as quiet disengagement. We may mistake this for professionalism or resilience, but it’s often neither. It’s self-preservation.

The real challenge is that empathy and expectations are often framed as opposites, as if we have to choose one over the other. In reality, strong leadership requires holding both at the same time.

That tension isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system.

Empathy doesn’t mean removing expectations. It means understanding the conditions under which expectations can realistically be met. It means paying attention to capacity, not just output. It invites curiosity instead of assumptions. When we lead with empathy, we’re better equipped to ask the right questions: What’s getting in the way? What does support look like in this moment? Is this expectation still the right one given what’s changed?

Expectations, when set thoughtfully, are not the opposite of care. They are often an expression of it. Clear expectations reduce anxiety. They help people prioritize. They create a shared understanding of what matters. Most people want to do meaningful work and do it well. They want feedback that helps them improve, not vague reassurance that leaves them guessing where they stand. I’ve experienced this firsthand as my team has grown in size and our workflows have expanded in complexity. We took a pulse check early last year, and the top request from the team was more clarity. Not more understanding and support. Just more clarity around what work needed to be done.

Empathy isn’t about being nice. Nice becomes avoidance in the presence of challenge. We delay difficult conversations because we don’t want to cause discomfort. Over time, small issues grow into larger ones, and the eventual conversation becomes more painful for everyone involved. Clarity delivered late is rarely experienced as compassion.

At the same time, expectations can become a shield. It’s easier to point to metrics than to acknowledge fatigue. It’s easier to talk about deliverables than to notice morale slipping. But teams are made of people, not just outputs, and people don’t operate at a constant capacity indefinitely.

This balance becomes even more delicate during periods of sustained pressure. Growth, change, uncertainty, and limited resources all magnify whatever leadership tendencies are already present. When we default to empathy, we may overextend ourselves trying to absorb stress on behalf of the team. When we default to expectations, we may push harder and call it grit. Neither approach is sustainable for long.

What effective leadership asks of us is the ability to recalibrate. Balance isn’t something we set once and forget. It shifts with circumstances, seasons, and people. Some moments require grace and flexibility. Others require recommitment and clarity. The skill isn’t choosing the “right” side, but noticing when an adjustment is necessary.

That requires attention. It requires listening — not just to what people say, but to how energy changes in a room, how questions shift, how silence grows. It requires the willingness to name reality honestly, even when that honesty is uncomfortable.

Leading teams well means being willing to hold two truths at once:
we care about our people, and the work still matters.

It means setting clear expectations while remaining open to renegotiating how those expectations are met. It means understanding that compassion without clarity creates chaos, and clarity without compassion creates burnout.

Striking this balance is incredibly difficult. I live in the middle of this tension constantly leading a large team. I try my best to accommodate the challenges — both professional and personal — that the members of my team experience. Sometimes, it’s clear. A sick child. A mental health issue. A great personal opportunity. I’ll almost always say the work can wait in the moment. But the work can’t wait forever, so I have to decide on a daily basis where to give and where to expect. This varies person-to-person, situation to situation. There is no formula, as much as I might prefer one.

That tension never fully goes away. And maybe it shouldn’t. The moment leadership becomes too tidy, too certain, too one-dimensional, it stops being human. The work is in the balance — imperfect, shifting, adaptive, and deeply relational.

And while that work is harder than choosing a side, the balance is where trust is built and teams do their best work.

How’s it going?

He told me he liked the work. He was learning a lot. The people were good, too. Then he paused and added something that surprised me a little more than I expected.

The days are already starting to blend together. Monday feels like Wednesday. Wednesday feels like Friday. It’s just… the same.

Without thinking too hard, I smiled and said,

Welcome to adulthood.

It was meant to be light. A half-joke. A knowing nod from someone who’s been there. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized how much truth was packed into my flippant response. Because for many of us, that blending of days is one of the earliest signals that work is shifting from something we actively engage with into something we simply endure. Not because it’s bad. Not because it’s wrong. But because it’s routine.

Routines are not the enemy. They’re necessary. They give structure to our days and predictability to our lives. They help us be efficient, competent, and reliable. But over time, routines can quietly become ruts. What once felt grounding can start to feel confining. The edges blur and our energy fades. We stop noticing the days because nothing about them feels distinct anymore.

Today on my first morning walk of 2026, that thought was still rattling around in my head. I’ve got a few more days of winter break, but work is looming.

Did I have the mindset to come out of the gates running?

Winter arrived early this year — with the cold to match. The lakes near our house had been locked in ice for weeks. But after a week of warmer temps, the surface had finally given way. The ice had melted and the water was moving again, flowing freely, catching the light. It was a small shift, but it changed everything. And it struck me how closely that image mirrored how work often feels.

So much of professional life can feel like being trapped in the ice. Solid. Stable. Unmoving. We know the boundaries. We know the expectations. We know exactly how the days will unfold before they even begin. There’s safety in that, but there’s also stagnation. When nothing moves, nothing grows.

Most people don’t wake up one day and realize they’re stuck. It happens gradually. We get good at what we do, which is the point. But competence has a shadow side. When we stop being challenged, we stop being curious. When we stop being curious, we stop growing. The work becomes transactional. Time compresses. Weeks disappear without leaving much of a trace.

What makes this especially challenging is that being stuck doesn’t look like failure. Often, it looks like success. We’re busy. We’re productive. We’re meeting expectations. From the outside, everything appears fine. Inside, though, something feels frozen. There’s no forward motion, just repetition.

Open water, in contrast, is about movement. It’s about flow. It’s about feeling like what we do today matters in a way that is distinct from what we did yesterday. That doesn’t mean every day is exciting or easy. It means there is a sense of aliveness. A sense that our work is connected to purpose, learning, or contribution in a way that feels real.

Finding open water in our careers isn’t about escaping responsibility or abandoning routine. It’s about refusing to let routine be the whole story. It starts with awareness. Noticing when our days feel interchangeable. Noticing when we’re operating on autopilot. Noticing when we’ve stopped asking questions and started relying solely on answers we learned years ago.

From there, it becomes a practice of intentional movement. That movement might be internal before it’s external. Reframing how we see our role. Reconnecting with why the work matters to us personally, not just professionally. Allowing ourselves to care again, even when caring feels inefficient or risky.

There’s also courage involved. Open water can feel exposed. Ice is predictable. Flow is not. When we step out of our well-worn patterns, we risk discomfort. We risk failure. We risk discovering that something we’ve been clinging to no longer fits. But without that risk, nothing changes. We stay frozen, telling ourselves this is just how it is.

Leaders have a particular responsibility here. The way we experience work inevitably shapes how others experience it, too. When leaders treat drudgery as inevitable, it becomes cultural. When they model curiosity, growth, and meaning, those things become possible for others. The difference between a team that feels stuck and one that feels alive often comes down to whether open water is valued—or even acknowledged.

As I think about my son settling into this new rhythm of adulthood, I don’t want him to believe that blending days are the price of a stable life. I don’t want him to think that fulfillment is something you defer until nights, weekends, or retirement. I want him to know — and to see — that it’s possible to build a career that has structure without being frozen, routine without being lifeless.

The ice will always come. There will be seasons where work feels heavy, repetitive, or constrained. That’s unavoidable. But so is the thaw, if we’re paying attention. Open water is often closer than we think. It shows up when we choose movement over stagnation, curiosity over comfort, meaning over mere motion.

Adulthood doesn’t have to mean settling. A career doesn’t have to mean drudgery. Sometimes, it simply means recognizing when the ice has begun to crack — and having the awareness and courage to step toward the water that’s finally moving again.

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As the calendar turns and we collectively lean into a new year, there’s a natural temptation to think in terms of big resolutions. Grand changes. Clean slates. But breaking out of professional routine rarely requires a dramatic reinvention. More often, it calls for small, intentional shifts that restore movement where things have quietly frozen.

The new year is an invitation to interrupt autopilot. To pause long enough to ask a few honest questions. Where have my days started to blur? What parts of my work feel most mechanical? Where am I operating out of habit rather than intention? These aren’t questions meant to induce guilt or dissatisfaction. They’re meant to surface awareness.

You can’t change what you refuse to notice.

Meaningful change usually begins with reclaiming agency. Routines have a way of convincing us that our days are fully spoken for, that there’s no room to maneuver. But there is almost always more choice than we acknowledge. Choice in where we place our energy. Choice in what we say yes to. Choice in what we’re willing to challenge, revisit, or let go. Even small adjustments — how we start our mornings, how we engage in conversations, how we approach familiar work — can reintroduce a sense of movement.

The new year is also a chance to experiment, not overhaul. Instead of asking, “What do I need to change about my career?” a more useful question might be, “What’s one way I can work differently?” One new behavior. One new boundary. One new way of showing up. Momentum doesn’t come from perfection; it comes from motion. And motion creates feedback that helps us learn what actually matters.

There’s something powerful about aligning change with intention rather than obligation. New Year’s resolutions often fail because they’re rooted in guilt or external expectations. Breaking out of routine, on the other hand, is about reconnecting with meaning. It’s about choosing growth because stagnation no longer feels acceptable. That’s a much more durable source of motivation.

As we step into a new year, the goal isn’t to eliminate routine entirely. Structure will always be part of work and life. The goal is to prevent routine from becoming a cage. To stay alert to the signs of freezing. To look for places where the ice is thinning and movement is possible.

The water is there. It always is. A new year simply gives us a convenient moment to notice it — and to decide whether we’re willing to move toward it.

It occurred to me in that moment that stop signs aren’t really commands to stop forever. They’re pauses with purpose — reminders to take in what’s around us, check for risks, and then intentionally ease back into motion. That realization lodged itself in my mind, because it reflects so many moments in leadership when life hands us a sign and says:

Slow down. Pay attention. Proceed when ready.

The idea that stopping isn’t the same thing as quitting sounds obvious, but in practice it can feel surprisingly complicated. So many of us are wired for movement. Once we’re rolling, we don’t want to lose momentum. We don’t want to be the reason things slow down. We don’t want to feel like we’re drifting backward while everyone else speeds ahead. Stopping — even briefly — can feel like failure.

But stop signs aren’t failures. They’re safeguards. They’re perspective shifters. They’re invitations to transition from reacting to choosing.

Before going any further, let’s honor something important: stop signs that take the form of personal boundaries — ours or others’ — are not meant to be rolled through or gently negotiated. They are full stops. Non-negotiable. Meant to be respected every single time. Boundaries don’t ask us to proceed with caution; they ask us to adjust our behavior. They keep people safe, valued, and whole. There is no leadership without that respect.

But outside of those hard boundaries, most stop signs in leadership aren’t about blocking us; they’re about guiding us.

Leadership is full of intersections we don’t see coming. A reorganization. Shifting team dynamics. A talented colleague who suddenly withdraws. A project that inexplicably loses steam. A strategy that once worked beautifully and now falls flat. These pop up in our path — not to punish us, but to keep us from blowing into oncoming traffic.

I can think of plenty of times where my instinct, when something wasn’t working, was simply to press harder on the gas. Surely more effort, more intensity, more push would get things back on track. Except it didn’t. It rarely does. More speed in the wrong direction only gets you further from where you need to be. Stopping to pause long enough to understand the landscape has always been harder, but far more useful.

Stop signs tell us to look up from our point of focus and actually see what’s happening around us. Maybe there’s a blind curve we hadn’t noticed. Maybe another team is approaching from a different angle with ideas we haven’t considered. Maybe the road ahead is clear, but we aren’t. Maybe our team needs a moment of reassurance or clarity before moving forward.

The stop doesn’t solve anything on its own. But it creates visibility, and visibility is often what unlocks the next right step.

The funny thing is, in life and leadership, we’re sometimes tempted to treat stop signs in two extreme ways: we either slam on the brakes and never move again, or we treat them as gentle suggestions and do a rolling stop, barely glancing around before speeding ahead. Both approaches tend to backfire.

Lingering indefinitely at the intersection can look like overthinking, perfectionism, or fear of choosing the wrong route. We convince ourselves that if we just stay put a little longer, the answer will magically appear. Instead, we stagnate. Our team stagnates. And what was intended as a moment of safety becomes a self-imposed roadblock.

On the other hand, rushing the stop — only pausing long enough to check the box — means we miss the new information that could reshape our direction. We miss cues from people around us. We miss the subtle signs that the environment has changed and our old way of operating no longer fits.

The real magic is in the brief but intentional pause. The kind that’s long enough to see clearly, but not so long that we fear moving again.

This is where leadership earns its name. Because once we’ve paused, looked, and listened, something else is required: we have to go. Not recklessly. Not blindly. But forward.

The stop sign doesn’t invite us to build a house underneath it. It invites us to continue our journey with greater awareness. And that’s what many of our teams — and frankly, our own hearts — need from us. A willingness to slow down without giving up. A willingness to reflect without retreating. A willingness to reassess without assuming we’ve failed.

Stopping well is its own form of momentum.

The longer I sit with this realization, the more I think our leadership lives are less like highways and more like neighborhoods — full of intersections, full of potential hazards, full of opportunities to either connect with others or collide with them. Most of those interactions are made better by a thoughtful pause.

The moments where we choose to stop and look are the moments where emotional intelligence grows. Where empathy becomes possible. Where we notice the teammate who needs support, the blind spot we’ve been avoiding, or the path that’s safer and smarter than the one we were barreling down.

Stopping and then moving with intention is how we lead people to do the right things in the right way.

So the next time you feel halted in your path — by feedback, friction, change, or uncertainty — consider that maybe you’re not being told to quit. Maybe you’re being asked to pause, to check the intersection, to honor any boundaries you encounter, and then proceed with renewed clarity.

I’ve written a lot over the course of my life. At Notre Dame, I was a political science major and one logic class short of a philosophy minor. I’ve written online for more than two decades through a variety of blogs and other online media. But in January 2023 I took ChatGPT for a spin and very seriously wondered if anyone would ever find my writing valuable again.

Even though I found its writing style the equivalent of a high school student who just discovered adjectives, it was still an above-average writer with a seemingly endless stream of the world’s knowledge and expertise at its disposal.

Why in the world would I bother writing when anyone with an internet connection could just ask ChatGPT for the answers? Why would anyone want to read someone else’s writing — full of its quirks, wasted words, and perhaps questionable veracity — when they could just get a succinct and — mostly correct — answer from AI?

My own existential crisis as a writer paralleled the tremors rumbling through higher ed. What good was my insight if anyone could dial up the entire corpus of human writing in a matter of seconds? I stood in that writer’s block for months; that said, I did get through it.

In October 2023, a colleague found something I said insightful. She said, you should write about that. She didn’t say could. She said should. It wasn’t a complex concept. ChatGPT would have handled it like a pro.

But ChatGPT doesn’t generate without someone prompting. And that means so much knowledge and insight remains hidden away, awaiting the prompt. For now, generative AI is passive — as it should be. It basically regurgitates. Human writers have the potential to be proactive — to create that which hasn’t been created before and to bring information and issues to the forefront instead of waiting for the prompt.

I’m not writing textbooks. I’m taking stories from my lived experience and threading them through lessons learned from a 30-year career. Generative AI can’t do that.

I realized that there is still a need — and will continue to be a need for a human in the room. AI tools are at their most useful — and least harmful — when accompanied by a human whose domain expertise can prompt, guide, correct, and provide nuance on top of what the AI generates. When combined with this guiding human expertise, generative AI can accelerate creativity — and creation — in transformative ways.

About a year later, I was part of a panel discussion called AI and You: Partners in Productivity where we panelists shared the ways we were using generative AI with an audience of a few hundred business graduate students. Near the end of the Q&A, someone asked this question:

What’s the next big thing in AI?

My brain froze a bit because it feels like the companies and researchers creating AI don’t even know what’s next in AI.

The words that reflexively came out of my mouth:

The humans fight back.

So many of us continue to view AI through a threat-focused lens, worried about all the jobs AI will replace in our economy. That’s not an unrealistic view as we’re already starting to see that AI can perform many tasks as well or better than a human in a tireless way that is only limited by computing power and energy.

AI is disrupting the economy and there will be short-term negative impacts on certain classes of jobs. Just as the Industrial Revolution displaced many manual laborers, and computers took over clerical tasks, AI is automating a wide range of jobs. These changes will cause job loss and uncertainty for some, but they’re part of a broader pattern we’ve seen before, where new technologies initially displace workers and eventually lead to the creation of new opportunities and industries. In some domains, generative AI is approaching or even surpassing the performance of average knowledge workers, particularly in tasks involving pattern recognition and data analysis.

So does this leave us humans as an endangered — or underemployed — species?

Perhaps — if we sit back and just let AI stay in the driver’s seat.

But there is a more positive outlook on the future.

What if we leverage AI so thoroughly and intentionally that it allows us the freedom to fundamentally redefine what it means to be human?

That’s a pretty abstract question, so let’s explore what that could mean in more concrete terms.

I tend to find life more enjoyable when I embrace optimism sprinkled with a healthy dose of reality. What I’m about to present is optimistic.

When talking about AI, it’s understandably easy to sink into dystopian perspectives based on 100+ years of science fiction or more recent creations like the Netflix series Black Mirror or Pixar’s WALL-E.

We absolutely have to reduce the energy consumption and environmental impacts of AI. We need to mitigate the bias present in many AI-driven systems. We need to soften economic disruption through reskilling programs and transitional income supports. We need to resolve the issues surrounding copyright and content compensation. We should be concerned about the uncomfortable coziness between billionaire CEOs of AI companies and our government leaders, regardless of party. If we don’t figure out how to reduce the cost, we risk creating a new digital divide among learners and earners. There are obvious challenges here.

But AI is not going away, so I find it more productive to focus on how we make it work for us rather than Chicken Little our way into helplessness. The sky is not falling.

What can we do?

So let’s look at what AI can do for us as humans.

AI can do our mundane tasks for us.

What percentage of our jobs is made up of tasks we have to do, but we don’t add any unique value in doing them? These are the drudgery, the things that we dread doing — the repetitive bureaucracy, the process tasks, the same answer to customers, over, and over, and over. There’s a simple litmus test here. If AI (or automation) can do a task as well or better than you can, we should let the technology do it for us. A human existence without drudgery? Sign me up!

I host two different podcasts in my free time. The show notes, episode titles, and much of the social media promotion are done with AI, simply by feeding the automated transcripts into a custom GPT that writes and formats them. This allows me to focus on what’s important: making the content of the conversations as valuable as it can be. I spend my time identifying interesting guests, working on developing conversation questions, and editing the interviews – all places where my skills can add value.

AI can help us sort through options and consider alternatives more quickly.

How many of us can get stuck in analysis paralysis or overthink even the simplest choices? It’s true that some of us are terrible at making decisions, but in my experience that’s most often because of poor information. Generative AI gives you the world’s information at your fingertips in an interface that assists you in thinking through your options in an informed, sequential way that can be customized to you. I’ve built a custom GPT I call my Thought Partner. It is informed by my personal and team values and goals and trained to help me work through challenges in a conversational way. With AI as a partner, we can be better thinkers and problem solvers.

Here’s an example. Last spring, I found myself leading four major initiatives and seriously overcommitted. I asked my Thought Partner to walk me through the decision of which responsibility to drop. You can see it presents Key Considerations and a suggested approach.

I then asked it to dive deeper with questions about each role.

After considering these questions, I eventually made the decision to drop the two roles where others could take over.

Human expertise is more important in a world of ubiquitous AI.

Think about it. If AI can create good (even high) quality content on almost any subject on demand in a matter of seconds, then every human with a GPT can be an expert. Or can they? In a world where information is democratized like this, is anyone an expert? I believe we are going to witness a new dawn of expertise in the world, where humans who can combine the partner power of AI with their human intellect to synthesize, combine, and analyze will become the new mega experts.

AI can open our increasingly echo-chambered and misinformed minds.

I’m in the middle of reading Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion. The book was written in 2012, well before the onslaught of generative AI and hyper-partisanship. The divisions Haidt describes are even more pronounced today, appearing intractable. He notes that when attempting to bridge these gaps, “the persuader’s goal should be to convey respect, warmth, and an openness to dialogue before stating one’s own case. No matter how good our logic, it’s not going to change the minds of our opponents if they are in combat mode, too.”

Haidt’s work is relevant to generative AI. In fact, a recent study out of the Sloan School of Management finds that an AI chatbot had the ability to sustain tailored counterarguments and personalized in-depth conversations that reduced participants’ beliefs in conspiracies for months, challenging research suggesting that such beliefs are impervious to change. It’s possible here that the affability of AI is much better than humans at softening the approach, so the recipient lowers their defenses that previously blocked their openness to new information.

Learning and understanding are personalized.

Five years ago, if I wanted to learn something, I was at the mercy of the instructor’s perspective — whether that’s in a formal classroom environment or a YouTube video. In so many cases, I’d either tune out because I didn’t appreciate their teaching style or the topic was presented in a way that I didn’t understand. With AI as a partner, I can ask clarifying questions on a topic or ask it to explain things to me at different levels or from different perspectives. I can say I learn best this way, please use this instructional approach or complexity level with me. Instructors themselves can become more relevant by transitioning from content provider to facilitator of advanced synthesis and analysis. Just think about what that can do for the leveling-up of human knowledge and understanding.

We can have a safe place to practice.

Last year, I experienced a ChatGPT + virtual reality simulation for learning people management skills. In the scenario I chose, I practiced having a difficult conversation with an employee who’d been showing up late for work and missing deadlines. I put on the headset, fired up the simulation and an avatar named Travis pops up. Travis is an already agitated employee with ChatGPT for a brain.

I see you called this meeting, what’s it about?

I managed to walk Travis through the issues, check in to see if there’s something that’s getting in the way of his performance while making sure he understood our expectations.

As the simulation ended, Travis was more calm and agreed to do better with my support as his manager. Travis disappeared and the simulation then gave me feedback on how I’d done, noting that I offered a good balance of empathy and expectations.

I’ve had a ton of similar conversations with real people, and 30 seconds into this one it felt real.

I’d absolutely put a new manager in these types of simulations, rather than have them practice on real people. Just think about how many broken work relationships we could avoid if we had the ability to fail and learn safely.

Human creativity can soar.

Imagine what humans can do creatively if they are unburdened by the mundane tasks of life. Creativity in scientific discovery, writing, art, music, and education. AI will certainly replace some of the lower level creative tasks we do.

For example, all the images for this article were created by a custom GPT with DALL-E. As you can see, I specified the size, orientation, color palette and artistic style I wanted. Then I simply had to provide the text and it created images relevant to that section.

Does it matter that that image isn’t a hand-crafted work of art? No. Because it’s disposable. The time I would have spent crafting or finding an image was better spent in preparing what I was going to say. If we use AI appropriately, we create the time to do higher level things where human ingenuity and thought surpasses what AI can provide. It’s higher value and it’s more fulfilling.

We can have more time for genuine and intentional human connection.

Recently, I watched a TED conversation between technologist Kylan Gibbs and psychologist Brian Lowry. Lowry notes, what fundamentally makes us human is our connection to other human beings, our ability to engage with others. This is what excites me most about the advances in AI. If using AI allows me more time in my life to intentionally prioritize and create more and deeper connections with people — both professionally and personally — then AI fundamentally changes my capacity to be truly human. Our ability to connect, to collaborate, to love is so tethered by the limitations of time and space, why wouldn’t we embrace something that could significantly free us from those shackles?

We can work less.

Hear me out on this one. So much of the excitement about AI is focused on its ability to make us more productive by enabling us to complete our tasks faster. But what are we expected to do with all that saved time? We’re expected to work more. Our world — at least the world of capital-driven nations — is predicated on productivity and profitability. So AI is seen through a lens of profit and production.

Like all technology advancements before it, AI is never seen through a lens of human prosperity. I don’t mean prosperity as in material wealth, but prosperity more holistically in the form of human connection, fulfillment, and community well-being. What if the centuries of technological improvement are actually leading us to a place that is less production-focused and more connection-focused. Could we use the time that AI saves to work on our personal relationships? Could we dedicate more of our days to building community? Might AI free us to do the hard work on ourselves required to be better humans and citizens of this world?

Maybe, just maybe, the highest human purpose isn’t labor. Maybe it’s connection and community. Could AI do the work while we’re free to pursue a higher purpose? Is this some pie-in-the sky dream? Perhaps. But I encourage you to at least consider that AI’s highest value may not be enabling us to work more.

What about me?

Up to this point, I’ve been talking at a high level about how WE can leverage AI as humans. Now, I’d like to shift focus to how I’ve been using AI to be a better human. First I need to define what I mean by being a better human.

As a better human …

I’m more engaged.

I’m more willing to start.

I’m more self-aware.

I’m growing faster as a leader.

I’m more knowledgeable.

I’m a better writer.

… and I’m more open minded.

Let’s dive into each of these.

I’m more engaged.

This is primarily where the time savings from AI comes in. I think you can all understand when I say there’s a lot of administrative sludge in all organizations. Higher ed has its own special kind of sludge, and it can take an enormous amount of time – time that is better spent engaging in strategy, critical conversations, and decision-making.

I haven’t written a job description, committee charge, or administrative policy document from scratch since I first got ChatGPT. Before starting to write anything for work, I always ask, “has this been done by countless people across countless universities in the past?” That’s a good job for ChatGPT to take a crack at first. I always refine language and context, but there is absolutely no reason why we should be writing first drafts of these types of things anymore.

I will note that there’s an emotional aspect to this and I need to be careful where I use Gen AI in these administrative tasks. I have to consider the recipient of the output and their expectations. Last year, I decided to use ChatGPT to write performance evaluations for two of my managers as an experiment. I fed in their own self-evaluation and added a few lines of my opinion into the prompt and out flowed a beautiful evaluation. I thought they were great, and a lot more descriptive than I’d ever take the time to write.

To be fully transparent, I told my managers that I’d used AI and asked them to give me candid feedback. Their reactions? They hated the evaluations. They said it didn’t sound like me at all. They also expressed that the effort I would have spent writing their evaluations by hand was meaningful. It meant something to them that I took the time to reflect and articulate my thoughts. I’d missed that they saw the physical act of writing as real engagement – a gift to them.

So now I ask whether my manual completion of the task has value that’s separate from the output itself. It’s a little like a high school calculus class where it’s important to show the work.

I’m more willing to start.

I’ve taken a lot of personality and work-style assessments over the years. And they all point squarely in the same direction: I’m a big-picture thinker, strong communicator, engaged relationship builder – and a little mediocre at execution. It’s why I always say I can’t accomplish anything without my team. Getting things done as an individual contributor is my Achilles heel. I can procrastinate with the best of them when it comes to things that I don’t care deeply about but still must do.

AI is a jump start. Whether I prompt for ideas, an outline, or a first draft, AI is an easier first step toward getting things done. There’s something psychologically motivating about knowing that 30 seconds of prompting can get me ahead 30 minutes on my task.

I’m more self-aware.

This is where I get beyond productivity and into deeper meaning. Generative AI tools that save your prompts are really good at getting to know you, especially if your prompts are primarily related to you and your role. Just the other day I asked ChatGPT what I needed to work on and to take a pessimistic view. Its answer was a little too real. I think it’s worth sharing here.

You have a lot of ideas, but you might spread yourself too thin—jumping between leadership, AI, podcasting, strategy, and personal growth without going deep enough into any one area to make a lasting impact. You’re ambitious, but do you follow through on the big things that really matter?

As a leader, you seem thoughtful and strategic, but with a large team and competing priorities, are you truly setting a clear direction, or are you getting caught up in details that should be delegated? You’ve mentioned struggling with distractions—what if that’s not just about focus, but about avoiding hard, long-term decisions?

You care about inclusion and team culture, but are you doing enough to actively shape it, or are you hoping that being a “good leader” will make things fall into place naturally? Big shifts, like a reorg, need clear, decisive leadership—are you prepared to make tough calls even if they upset people?

You have strong insights on AI and leadership, but are you positioning yourself as a real thought leader, or just dabbling? If you want influence beyond your current role, are you taking enough risks to put yourself out there in a meaningful way?

None of this means you’re failing, but if any of it stings, it might be worth asking why.

Now, I’ve had multiple professional leadership coaches throughout my career and none of them have ever been quite that direct with me. There’s real value in having this kind of feedback to help build greater self-awareness. AI is good at seeing patterns that thread through my interactions with it.

I’m growing faster as a leader.

I’ve been leading large teams for 13 years. I’d give myself an above average score as far as leadership skill goes. I have a refined leadership intuition that has served me well. Despite this, there are times when my skill and intuition run into challenges I can’t surmount alone. I often call these my boulders. There are some of these boulders that even my coaches and confidants can’t help me move. Rather than suffer the fate of Sysiphus in a futile attempt to roll the boulder uphill, I’ll engage ChatGPT in a coaching exercise. I’ll describe the challenge and offer different ways I’ve tried to solve the problem. What I get back, without fail, is encouragement for what I have tried and additional ideas that I haven’t. I’d estimate that 70% of what ChatGPT gives me I’ve already considered, but there’s always a different take on things.

When we confront these boulders in our lives, we can think we’re the only one who’s ever faced this particular challenge. Chances are it’s not unique, and that someone has written about how they engaged the problem. If that’s the case, the Generative AI tools likely can surface that information for you – quickly.

While GenAI can still struggle with specific facts, it’s exceptionally good with what I call the squishy stuff. Things like dealing with difficult employees or strategies for engaging disinterested stakeholders. And it’s there 24/7 when you need it.

I am absolutely a better leader and manager because of this AI coaching.

I’m more knowledgeable.

I believe that I’m a better human when I have more data. I make better decisions, am more understanding, and feel more genuinely confident in and connected to the world. My wife playfully chides me when I pull out my phone to answer a question we have. I love knowing. Generative AI has taken this to entirely new levels. It not only provides answers, but it allows me to explore in my own direction. A Google search returns static documents. A Gen AI prompt allows me to ask for levels of specificity and verbosity – as well as follow up for clarification.

I’ll share a very personal example of this here. A year ago, I went through a battery of medical tests that had me seriously concerned for my long-term health. I used ChatGPT to interpret the lab results that were flowing into the healthcare app on my phone. The test results, written in highly technical language – were frightening. I had a much better understanding of what was going on by running the results through ChatGPT and asking it to explain them to me in layman’s terms. When the doctor visited to discuss, I was able to have a much better-informed discussion with them.

Thankfully everything turned out fine health wise, and I was a much better patient with this additional information.

I’m a better writer.

Generative AI makes me a better writer. I don’t use it for drafts or even outlines when I’m writing things that are uniquely mine. I actually shun ChatGPT when I’m in that intensely personal creative process. Once I’ve got what I think is a publishable piece, that’s when GenAI enters the room. I’ll feed the post through ChatGPT and ask it two critical questions:

Did I make any statements in this post that aren’t substantiated?

Do I make any logical leaps that may be confusing to the reader?

Depending on the answers to those prompts, I may add, remove or otherwise revise the article before publishing. AI can see these potential issues better than I can, because it doesn’t have my specific assumptions or understanding in its “mind”.

My writing and thought processes are definitely improved with these simple AI interventions.

I’m more open minded.

I can be strong-willed. I’ve carefully articulated a personal worldview with a solid underpinning in which I’m confident. That can make me less than open-minded when it comes to alternative viewpoints. I also believe that a lack of open-mindedness is what plagues our society. I’m part of the problem. So I’ve started to experiment with using an AI contrarian to question my beliefs and positions – or at least start to understand people who hold beliefs opposite mine. I can certainly confirm the results of the Sloan study I mentioned earlier. It’s much easier to “hear” opposing viewpoints when they’re not being screamed at you. It’s even easier to hear when it’s coming from what feels like a neutral place with the AI bot.

Here are a few examples of how this might work.

I prompted the AI Contrarian with the belief that we don’t need property taxes. Its response acknowledges my belief without telling me I’m wrong and then presents some reasons why I might rethink my statement. You can see it presents arguments like local government funding, prevention of wealth hoarding, real estate market stability, and fairness of tax burden.

I dig in and insist that we don’t need local government. Again, the bot offers reasons like essential services and infrastructure and lack of representation – all things that might make me rethink my opposition.

Later, when I change my mind and say we should have 80% property taxes, it lets me know that property taxes that high would kill investment, cause homeowners to leave, and drive up rents.

Another time, I prompted it with the belief that our large team needs standardized processes to succeed. It acknowledges that as a possibility and offers some of the drawbacks to strict process and then asks whether there might be other reasons we’re not successful.

I do have it restricted to accepted facts, so it won’t offer alternative facts popular in some circles today. For example, if I insist the earth isn’t round. The bot clearly tells me I’m incorrect.

It persists, even when I push deeper into the falsehood.

Now a funny thing happened after I’d created this prompt. On a recent flight, there was a man who got into a lengthy discussion with a flight attendant about whether the earth was flat or round. The flight attendant was polite, but adamant that we all know the earth is round. But he persisted. He asked how high you needed to be to see the curvature. I was pretty sure at our cruising altitude of 37,000 feet, you could notice it. But there were clouds that looked flat as far as the eye could see. I’ve never met someone who even questioned this, so I jumped at the opportunity to see how AI could help here.

When we landed, I hopped on ChatGPT and asked his question.

I shared the answer with him and he seemed to be inching toward the round earth party.

Then he said he was going to ask the pilots “at what point do you stop climbing up and start going down.” To my surprise, the flight attendants let him pop his head in the cockpit and I walked up the jetway, confused by his question.

Then it struck me. He was thinking you had to climb up the curvature and then start descending the other side, like a hill or roller coaster.

He was no longer around, but I was still curious what ChatGPT would say to him. So I asked, “how does a plane traverse the curvature?”

I wish I had a chance to talk more with him and see if these answers would have given him more confidence in the earth’s roundness.

At the very least, I learned a few more details that confirmed something I’ve believed for, well, ever.

So perhaps AI can help us change our own minds or just better understand those beliefs – and facts – we take for granted.

Final Thoughts

When you take all these things in combination, I feel confident that intentional use of AI has made me a better human.

At its core, this isn’t just a conversation about AI. It’s a conversation about humanity—about what we choose to prioritize as we integrate these technologies into our daily lives. We stand at an inflection point where AI can either be a force that diminishes our agency, creativity, and connection, or one that amplifies our best qualities and enables us to focus on what truly matters. That choice is still ours to make.

This is why I believe the most important role of AI isn’t to replace us, but to reveal to us what is uniquely human. It forces us to ask: What do we do that AI cannot? What does it mean to create, to connect, to lead, to innovate? How do we ensure that AI becomes an accelerant for human flourishing rather than a crutch for our complacency? These are not just theoretical questions—they are the defining challenges of our time.

So I challenge each of you, in your own work and lives, to think about AI not just as a tool for productivity, but as a catalyst for becoming better humans. Use it to strip away the noise and focus on the substance. Use it to deepen your curiosity and challenge your assumptions. Use it to create more space for relationships, for reflection, for the kind of meaningful work that fuels progress—not just at work, but in your life.

Because if we do this right—if we harness AI with intention, with wisdom, and with commitment to what makes us human—then perhaps the greatest outcome of this technological revolution won’t be that AI gets better.

It will be that we do.

I’d highly recommend you listen/watch the full episode as the entire conversation was as insightful as it was transparent and deeply vulnerable.

There’s one particular topic we discussed that I’d like to reflect more deeply on here.

About midway through the conversation, I ask Brooke:

You are now at the highest leadership position in our college and by definition furthest away from the front lines. I have found as I've moved up in organizations and get further away from the the work that's being done, that there's a loneliness that sets in, a disconnection that sets in. Do you sense that loneliness and how do you combat it? How do you deal with it?

Brooke’s response was direct:

This is a really lonely job. I think as I've moved from like leadership position to leadership position, they become more lonely. This one is really, really lonely.

She goes on to share that she deals with this loneliness by building trusting relationships with external mentors, cultivating close relationships (with appropriate boundaries) within the college, and engaging with other deans at peer institutions.

I asked this question because the loneliness that accompanies senior leadership has been top of mind for me recently, as our organization has just added an extra management layer necessitated by our growth. I’m now multiple layers away from many individual contributors on our team — and the disconnection I feel is real and challenging. I love connecting with the people who make up our organization, so this distance can be both frustrating and disaffecting.

As Brooke so candidly acknowledged, leadership can be an isolating experience. The further up the ladder you climb, the more difficult it becomes to stay connected to the day-to-day work and the people who make it happen. This distance can be disorienting, even for leaders who thrive on engagement and collaboration. But while loneliness in leadership is real, it is not inevitable. There are intentional steps we can take to combat it.

Prioritizing authentic relationships is key. As Brooke shared, fostering trusting connections—both within and outside the organization—can serve as an antidote to isolation. External mentors and peer networks provide invaluable perspective, a safe space for candid discussions, and a reminder that no leader is truly alone in their challenges. Within the organization, cultivating strong, open relationships with direct reports and other leaders can create a support system that balances professional boundaries with meaningful human connection.

We must actively seek opportunities to engage with our broader teams. One of the most effective ways to bridge the gap between leadership and individual contributors is to be intentional about presence. That doesn’t just mean showing up for formal meetings—it means finding informal moments to listen, engage, and understand what’s happening on the ground. Whether it’s through check-ins or coffee chats with people who don’t report to you, making personal connection a priority helps stem the disconnection. I use our biweekly in-person team lunches to make sure I sit next to different people each time.

Another important strategy is embracing vulnerability. Often, we as leaders feel pressure to maintain a composed, all-knowing persona. But true leadership is not about having all the answers; it’s about fostering a culture where questions, challenges, and even doubts can be openly discussed. When leaders share their own struggles—including the reality of loneliness—it opens the door for deeper, more authentic connections with others. Late in the episode, Brooke shares some things that not many people know about her to intentionally model this powerful connection-creating vulnerability,

Combating loneliness requires a shift in mindset. It’s easy to see distance as a barrier, but it can also be an opportunity. The space that comes with leadership can allow for more strategic thinking, a broader perspective, and the ability to empower others in new ways. When we lean into this shift—while maintaining a commitment to meaningful engagement—we can turn isolation into deeper impact.

Leadership will always come with its challenges, and loneliness is one of them. But it’s also a challenge that can be met with intention, connection, and a commitment to staying engaged. By fostering relationships, being present, embracing vulnerability, and reframing the role, we can not only combat the isolation but find opportunities in the distance.

Take this opportunity to reflect—how are you fostering authentic relationships within and outside your organization? What small but meaningful steps can you take to be more present, embrace vulnerability, and create deeper connections?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. How have you navigated the challenges of leadership loneliness? What strategies have worked for you?

Share Think. Feel. Lead.

There’s one place in particular a few miles west of town that I’ve returned to over and over. The gravel is deep and the road rises to reveal expansive skies. I can’t tell you how many spectacular sunsets and storms I’ve captured along this road.

A few weeks ago, I was heading back from some late afternoon errands when I noticed the clouds in the western sky were starting to glow. My happy place was calling and I made a beeline to … a road closed sign blocking me. The sun was setting and I couldn’t get to the place that I knew so well. The place where I knew how the sun angle hits. The place that guaranteed the success of a great shot.

ROAD CLOSED.

I’ll admit I felt deflated. Defeated. The thing I knew how to do so well wasn’t available. I shouldn’t have felt so disappointed. There were countless other roads staring down the same sunset. But none of those options were my tried and true, guaranteed success. I grabbed a few photos — of the sign — and turned back home.

So why am I sharing this story here on THINK.FEEL.LEAD.?

Because it’s an apt analogy for how we often get frustrated when our ways of leading that have always worked for us suddenly stop being effective.

We can be stubborn and insist on our ways — or we can examine how our conditions have changed, get out of our comfort zone, and adapt our leadership accordingly. In these moments, it’s important to be open to feedback, get curious and listen, and work to understand the root cause of the roadblocks. Our leadership approach may not be irreparably broken, but rather needs to evolve to meet changing conditions.

I don’t think the road closed sign I encountered was random. I needed the epiphany in this moment. My team has gone through a great deal of change. We’ve grown by 40% in the last year, gone through a significant reorganization that added layers of management and new leaders from outside the organization, and have had to respond to increasing demands from our clients. It hasn’t been easy or smooth and we’ve been plagued by some intractable bottlenecks that have impacted our productivity and team chemistry and morale.

Though the challenges, I leaned into many of my tried and true leadership techniques — attempting to move our team forward with mission-driven passion, radical transparency, and reality-tinged optimism — and even doubled-down, making sure I increased my intensity and focus.

Not the results we needed.

Just as I needed to find a new route to chase the sunset, I had to admit that I needed to change my approach and actively explore new possibilities.

What does this look like? A few things are starting to move us in the right direction.

• Defining clear goals: I’m working to provide real clarity of goals and objectives. I’ve always led with the belief that you hire great people and let them do their jobs, but the complexity of larger organization demands more coordination and structure in what that job entails.

• Listening to new voices: I’m listening intently to our new colleagues. They bring a fresh perspective into our team, unbiased from the way things have always been done. Encouraging them to ask why we do things a certain way forces us to articulate our rationale — and often reveals bad habits we didn’t know we had.

• Handing over the wheel: I’ve let myself more deeply trust the other leaders in our organization to develop solutions on their own. I don’t need to solve all the problems myself. I’m not the only leader anymore. Each leader has their own approach and ideas, and I have to give them space and patience to lead in their own way.

• Soliciting feedback: I’ve asked our leaders for feedback before acting on my instincts so that I get their perspective on challenges and opportunities. This is a huge challenge for me, because my instincts have always served me well.

• Letting people solve their own problems: I’ve worked to really listen to voices throughout the organization to identify the obstacles that are holding them back from success — even when the obstacle identified is one I created. Most individual contributors know how to solve their specific problems if given the space, time, and resources to do so.

• Demonstrating patience: I’m doing my best to give alternative approaches time to work. We tend to have a lot less patience with unfamiliar solutions if they don’t have immediate benefit. We have to resist the urge to pivot at the first sign of trouble. Sometimes all an idea needs is a little more time to work.

My leadership of our team is infinitely more important than getting the perfect shot of the sunset, so it’s even more important that I don’t get so focused on the tried and true that I put up my own road closed sign along our new paths to success.

What roadblocks are you facing in your leadership? Where might you be relying too much on the familiar, instead of exploring a new path forward?"

Share Think. Feel. Lead.

In Episode 10 of Candid Conversations on Leadership, Candice and I dive into the complex topic of accountability and how we motivate ourselves and our teams to be accountable. Working in an environment that doesn’t have a significant amount of extrinsic motivation, we work to build team cultures where people are intrinsically motivated to achieve success.

In Episode 8 of Candid Conversations on Leadership, we dive into the concept of feedback and how it’s a critical ingredient in healthy teams and organizations. Feedback is a gift to give and to receive when it is specific, timely, and delivered and received through a lens of growth and improvement. In this episode, we talk about this feedback framework and model it in action.

When people view us as naysayers, they stop seeing us as leaders. Instead, they see us as obstacles, and our ability to provide real leadership in our organizations is diminished.

The better approach is to lead with the presumption of yes.

I briefly touched on this concept in Episode 5 of the Candid Conversations on Leadership podcast, and I'd like to explore it in greater depth here.

When we lead with the presumption of yes, people see us as interested in making solutions that meet their needs. We are the ones who say let’s figure out how to make your idea a reality.

How does this work in practice?

• Dig into what the real need is. Often, our clients or customers come to us with both a problem and a solution in mind. However, the problem is what we need to understand deeply, because the solution they propose is often not the right one. Instead of saying no, that solution won’t work, we can say I understand what you’re trying to accomplish here and I think this is a better path forward.

• Don’t presuppose that costs and constraints are deal breakers. There is very little we can’t achieve, given the right resources. When someone comes to you with an idea, have an honest conversation about what it will take to make that idea reality — including costs, other resource needs, and possible delay in other projects. Let them decide whether they want to reallocate the resources. This says I want to help you, and this is what I need to make it happen.

• Force yourself to be creative. Even when an idea seems impossible given current constraints, the presumption of yes can force us beyond our initial hesitation and into a mindset of innovation and creativity. When we have a yes mindset, we think more broadly about possible solutions and avoid myopic thinking.

When we lead with the presumption of yes, we can build a reputation of being a solutions-focused leader who is intent on solving organizational challenges. This will open up so many more opportunities than being the resident naysayer.

What’s the next big thing in AI?

My brain froze a bit because it feels like the companies and researchers creating AI don’t even know what’s next in AI.

So I answered:

The humans fight back.

My quick, somewhat flippant answer got a combination of applause and laughter that I followed with these thoughts.

So many of us continue to view AI through a threat-focused lens, worried about all the jobs AI will replace in our economy. That’s not an unrealistic view as we’re already starting to see that AI can perform many tasks as well or better than a human in a tireless way that is only limited by computing power and energy.

AI is disrupting the economy and there will be short-term negative impacts on certain classes of jobs. Just as the Industrial Revolution displaced many manual laborers, and computers took over clerical tasks, AI is automating a wide range of jobs that require repetitive or data-focused work. These changes will cause job loss and uncertainty for some, but they’re part of a broader pattern we’ve seen before, where new technologies initially displace workers and eventually lead to the creation of new opportunities and industries. In some domains, generative AI is approaching or even surpassing the performance of average knowledge workers, particularly in tasks involving pattern recognition and data analysis.

So does this leave us humans as an endangered species?

Perhaps — if we sit back and just let AI stay in the driver’s seat.

But there is a more positive outlook on the future.

What if we leverage AI so thoroughly and intentionally that it allows us the freedom to fundamentally redefine what it means to be human?

That’s a pretty abstract question, so let’s explore what that could mean in more concrete terms.

• AI can do our mundane tasks for us. What percentage of our jobs is made up of tasks we have to do, but we don’t add any unique value in doing them? These are the drudgery, the things that we dread doing — the repetitive bureaucracy, the process tasks, the same answer to customers, over, and over, and over. There’s a simple litmus test here. If AI (or automation) can do a task as well or better than you can, we should let the technology do it for us. A human existence without drudgery? Sign me up!

• AI can help us sort through options and consider alternatives more quickly. How many of us can get stuck in analysis paralysis or overthink even the simplest choices? It’s true that some of us are terrible at making decisions, but in my experience that’s most often because of poor information. Generative AI gives you the world’s information at your fingertips in an interface that assists you in thinking through your options in an informed, sequential way that can be customized to you. I’ve built a custom GPT I call my thought partner. It is informed by my personal values and goals and trained to help me work through challenges in a conversational way. With AI as a partner, we can be better thinkers and problem solvers.

• Human expertise is more important in a world of ubiquitous AI. Think about it. If AI can create good (even high) quality content on almost any subject on demand in a matter of seconds, then every human with a GPT can be an expert. Or can they? In a world where information is democratized like this, is anyone an expert? I believe we are going to witness a new dawn of expertise in the world, where humans who can combine the partner power of AI with their human intellect to synthesize, combine, and analyze will become the new mega experts.

• Learning and understanding is personalized. Five years ago, if I wanted to learn something, I was at the mercy of the instructor’s perspective — whether that’s in a formal classroom environment or a YouTube video on the topic. In so many cases, I’d either tune out because I didn’t appreciate their teaching style or the topic was presented in a way that I didn’t understand because of gaps in my knowledge. With AI as a partner, I can ask clarifying questions on a topic or ask it to explain things to me at different levels or from different perspectives. I can say I learn best this way, please use this instructional approach or complexity level with me. Instructors themselves can become more relevant by transitioning from content provider to facilitator of advanced synthesis and analysis. Just think about what that can do for the leveling-up of human knowledge and understanding.

• Human creativity can soar. Imagine what humans can do creatively if they are unburdened by the mundane tasks of life. Creativity in scientific discovery, writing, art, music, and education. AI will certainly replace some of the lower level creative tasks we do. For example, the title image for this article was created in seconds with DALL-E. Does it matter that that image isn’t a hand-crafted work of art? No. Because it’s disposable. The time I would have spent crafting or finding an image was better spent in writing these words. If we use AI appropriately, we create the time to do higher level things where human ingenuity and thought surpasses what AI can provide.

• We can have more time for genuine and intentional human connection. In this insightful TED conversation between technologist Kylan Gibbs and psychologist Brian Lowry, Lowry notes, what fundamentally makes us human is our connection to other human beings, our ability to engage with other human beings. This is what excites me most about the advances in AI. If using AI allows me more time in my life to intentionally prioritize and create more and deeper connections with people — both professionally and personally — then AI fundamentally changes my capacity to be truly human. Our ability to connect, to collaborate, to love is so tethered by the limitations of time and space, why wouldn’t we embrace something that could significantly free of us those shackles?

All of these points are optimistic. I tend to find life more tolerable when I embrace optimism sprinkled with a healthy dose of reality. When talking about AI, it’s understandably easy to sink into dystopian perspectives based on 100+ years of science fiction or more recent creations like Netflix’s Black Mirror. We absolutely have to acknowledge the need to decrease the energy consumption and environmental implications of AI. We need to mitigate the bias present in many AI-driven systems. We need to soften economic disruption through reskilling programs and transitional income supports. But AI is not going away, so I find it more productive to focus on how we make it work for us rather than Chicken Little our way into helplessness.

At a recent AI conference, the morning presenter shared these two photos of the same street in New York City in 1900 and 1913. In the 1900 photo, the street is filled with horse-drawn carriages and one automobile. Forward to 1913, and one horse-drawn carriage is surrounded by a street filled with automobiles.

The presenter followed with a slide of a beautiful stallion at full tilt across a pastoral landscape with the words:

Are we the horse?

After sitting with this question over the course of the day, I had an answer during the conference wrap up.

We’re not the horse, because the horse didn’t invent the automobile. We invented AI, and unlike the horse, possess agency. We can choose our future in relationship with AI, both through individual intent and broader governmental, social, and economic interventions.

We have to be intentional and decisive about it. There are countless instances where humans have been too passive in how new technology impacts our lives. All one has to do is spend any time in a populated place — or often in our own homes — to witness the digitally-addicted droves, heads down, enthralled with the latest meme on their phones. In these moments, it’s hard to imagine humanity with a higher purpose enabled by technology.

It’s not too late to redefine ourselves and our future. AI may just provide us with the opportunity to redefine ourselves as a species and define what is means to be uniquely human. Perhaps it’s the next stage of human evolution.

We could be headed toward the dystopian floating screen pods of WALL-E or toward a new era of human creativity and purpose. I’m an optimist who believes in intention, not fate. The future is up to us.

In our conversation, I mentioned that I’m sometimes wary of diving into conversations on the topic because saying the wrong thing in today’s society can have negative repercussions both personally and professionally. Why even try when there’s a chance to get cancelled if you make a mistake? In the moment, Candice correctly pointed out that mistakes are opportunities to learn.

There’s more to it. In her podcast Conversations on Conversations, Sarah Noll Wilson paraphrases a quote from NYU Professor and speaker Minda Harts:

No one will benefit from your caution, but someone might benefit from your courage.

On the heels of my conversation with Candice, this quote landed fully in my heart. If I let my cautiousness of today’s society keep me from learning, then I’m actively supporting the status quo. If I’m a true proponent of diversity, equity, and inclusion, then I must have the courage to make mistakes and learn from them. I must also have the courage to learn before my ignorance becomes a mistake in the first place.

So how does this work in practice? As Candice and I discussed, we can’t expect our colleagues who are different than we are to constantly be the ones who educate us. It puts all the emotional labor on them and not us. So what can we do?

• Learn about these issues independent of the workplace. There is an abundance of material available via websites, podcasts, TED Talks, and books that can help you understand these issues. Do the heavy lifting and read, listen, or watch the work of countless experts in this area.

• Diversify your own information consumption and experiences. The best way to open your mind to new perspectives is to experience them regularly. One of the reasons diversity programs fail to have greater impact is because participants go right back into their homogenous lives after the program concludes. Exposure is education.

• Seek out a mentor. There are others just like you who are practicing DEI well. Their mentorship can help you navigate these issues from a space similar to your own.

• Do the hard work with people who are like you. You can learn together and lean into the nuance of these issues with people who have similar experience and challenges.

• Listen when your colleagues speak. If someone who is different than you gives you the gift of their story, listen intently to their lived experience. Value it with your attention. Listen to understand how their experience shapes their perspectives.

• Listen to feedback when someone corrects you. You’re going to make mistakes, and if you’re lucky, someone will correct you. Receive that feedback as a gift and value it by changing your future actions.

Doing the important work to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in our organizations isn’t simple or easy. But having the courage to learn — and possibly make a few mistakes along the way — is critical to its success.

In Episode 3 of Candid Conversations on Leadership, we discuss the leadership topic of self-care. Self care is important for leaders to improve productivity and avoid burnout or mental and physical health challenges. Candice introduces the mnemonic concept of DERPAT (Diet, Exercise, Rest, People, Attitude, and Time) to explain her self-care strategy. Chris talks about not making work-life a binary decision, compartmentalization, keeping stress appropriately scaled, taking care of his physical self, and being creative outdoors.

The first floor of our home had a simple layout — two sides divided by one wall, with a narrow hallway stretching from the front door to the kitchen and the dining room and living room on the other side. You could do laps around the downstairs — round and round and round and round. So I got the fantastic idea that I’d tie one end of a ball of kite string to a dining room chair and tie up the inside of the house. Round and round I went, faster and faster with each lap … er … wrap. One of the trips through the living room ended up just that — a trip — right into scissors that my older brother was using for some activity.

They say you’re not supposed to run with scissors.

They could expand that to include near scissors, and I still have the elbow scar to prove it.

Running with scissors is an idiom to describe reckless behavior — where the risk far outweighs the benefit. There is certainly a continuum of safety when it comes to scissors. You can leave them in the drawer locked away and be 100% safe, but that renders them useless. You can run with them — or into them as was my case — and that seems reckless.

How do we make the risk-benefit decision in between 100% safe and reckless? How do we get to a place where we’re jogging with scissors and feeling comfortable moving forward in the face of risk?

In my experience, that depends on who is making the decisions — an organization or you as an individual.

Let’s examine both aspects.

Making Decisions in Organizations

Decision-making in organizations, especially large ones, can be extremely cumbersome. We thankfully live in a world where most organizations aren’t dictatorships. Most decisions are a collaborative process involving multiple people. I work in higher education, where consensus-building and shared governance is considered a sacred value, so decision-making can be a very slow process. We often joke that 99-to-1 is a tie. That’s not a recipe that results in a menu full of fast decisions. So what can we do?

• Establish a decision-making framework so that you don’t have to decide how to decide at every decision point. I can’t stress this enough. This framework should define what decisions can be made independently at the various levels of your organization. This creates agency and autonomy throughout your organization and takes the process guesswork out of each and every decision. Just think about the amount of time you save when no one in your organization has to ask the question, can I make this decision on my own?

• Establish and continually update your stakeholder maps. Decisions in most organizations fall into a variety of categories, and each of those categories likely has a predictable set of stakeholders. Your stakeholders maps include the people who need to be at the table to help make the decision, the people who need to sign off on the decision, the people who need to be informed of the decision, and the people who will be impacted by the decision. If you keep your stakeholder maps up-to-date, you don’t have to spend time determining who falls into each category for every decision. An additional benefit to this approach is that it puts you one step ahead on your stakeholder communication plan after a decision is made.

• Make decision-data an integral part of your organizational culture. So much of what masquerades as risk in organizations is actually lack of data. We don’t know what decision to make because we don’t have enough information about the current state or to project the future. To make good, fast decisions, organizations must establish a culture where decisions are based on data and measures related to performance and outcomes — and the investment is made to put that data at the fingertips of decision-makers in real-time.

• Create psychological safety around risk-taking. Fear of failure can be a paralyzing agent when it comes to making decisions. If an organization or team lacks psychological safety where individuals fear making mistakes, those individuals will tend to take fewer risks in their decision-making. This can result in milquetoast decisions or an endless cycle of information gathering and discussion. All organizations make decisions that don’t result in the desired results. People make mistakes. If we have a culture of punishment for those mistakes, we subconsciously slow down all future decisions.

• Take an agile approach. Originating in software development teams, the agile approach suggests breaking any process down into smaller stages, each with its own feedback loops for faster iteration. If we apply this to decision-making, we break a big decision down into smaller parts, focusing on what needs to be decided first, acting, gathering feedback on the action, then making the next decisions. For many organizational decisions, the agile approach can lead to faster initial decisions, quicker action, and more flexibility.

Making Decisions as an Individual

As complex as organizational decision-making can be, I think people struggle more with the decisions they have to make as individuals. Whatever toxic combination of fear of failure, risk aversion, poor self-confidence, past experience, or lack of information causes this, so much of what holds us back as individuals is the inability to make decisions and move forward.

Here are a few approaches that have worked for me to accelerate my decision-making speed:

• Define your values and goals. Without a north star, it’s very difficult to find the right direction. One of the best ways to help make decisions is the litmus test of which option aligns most closely with our personal and professional values and goals. Not every decision we make has to align with these, but the big ones certainly do.

• Abandon perfection in your prediction. There are very few decisions in life that have the exact results we’ve predicted. Individual results will vary, so we shouldn’t put off a decision because we can’t predict all of the outcomes. If our decision results in actions that get us 80% there, that’s so much better than the 0% we’re sitting at right now. We can’t predict the future, so we need to stop trying to be fortune tellers.

• Gather just enough information. We’ll never have all the information, nor do we need all the information. One of the things that slows us down is not differentiating between what we need to know and what would be nice to know before making a decision. What we need to know is critical to mitigate risk. What would be nice to know is valuable if it’s at hand, but likely not worth delaying the decision over.

• Limit your options. Henry Kissinger famously said, the absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously. Walk into any grocery store in an America suburb or search for some generic item on Amazon and we’re presented with so many options, our brains can’t make sense of them. The abundance of options makes us seek more information. There are 56 different kinds of vegetable soup on this shelf. We immediately start reading the backs of the cans. There are 89 different laptop bags on Amazon. We’ll spend hours reading the reviews. Most of the options are simply useless distractions, so we need to be harsh in our filtering. Our filters can be our goals and values. They can be a list of certain must haves or don’t wants. But until we’re able to quickly filter down our options, we’re stuck in paralysis by analysis.

• Setting deadlines. It is remarkable how good we are at putting off decisions for one reason or another. I can make that decision tomorrow … next week .. next month … next year … never. We can change that completely by tweaking two words. I WILL make that decision tomorrow … next week .. next month … next year … NOW. Setting deadlines for decisions is critical for moving forward. When we give ourselves a reasonable amount of time to collect the information we need, consult with others, and think through a decision and then set a deadline to make the decision, we’re much more likely to make it. This also allows us to communicate with others who might be waiting on our decision. I’ll let you know by next Tuesday.

• Focus on benefits. While we should always consider the risks, if they are our primary focus, inaction will be our default. We’ll keep the scissors in the drawer. When we focus on what could go wrong, we lose sight of another important question. What is the cost of inaction? Not making a decision is actually making a decision. And that decision will have its own risks and costs. Instead of obsessing over the risks, we need to make sure we have the benefits of the decision clearly in mind.

• Ask for coaching. When I’m feeling stuck in a decision-making process, I always bring in reinforcements to help me think it through. Whether it’s my wife, a friend, or a colleague, having someone who knows how to ask me the right questions to work through the decision is invaluable. When someone coaches us, they’re not giving us the answer or making the decision for us. They are helping us find the decision within us by working through the obstacles we weren’t able to clear by ourselves.

I am slightly conservative by nature when it comes to decision-making. You’ll never catch me running with scissors. But through the approaches I’ve shared here, I’ve developed a quick enough professional and personal decision-making process to the point where I spend most of my life jogging with scissors, reaping the benefits of being decisive while still avoiding the risks of being reckless.

Unless they’ve specifically expressed an emotion in text, what do we use to create their tone of voice in our own heads? I believe we all install a default tone of voice for every bit of text we read.

If we know the writer well, we have a default tone of voice for that person based on previous interactions. If we feel they are directive most often, we’ll read their texts as directive. If they tend to engage with curiosity, perhaps we install an inquisitive tone of voice in their texts. If we don’t know the writer well, we use context clues — likely based on stereotypes — to form their default tone of voice. If someone is a leader of an organization, we might install a more authoritative tone of voice. If someone is a comedian, our brains add a little sarcasm. If someone comes from a specific group that we disagree with, we can install a default argumentative tone.

This happens subconsciously, so we don’t even realize we’re doing it. We read and react. We do more than react. We tend to overreact. If the default tone we install is negative, our defenses rise. If the default tone we install is positive, we may get overly effusive about the post. These emotions that rise in us prevent us from objectively assessing what they’ve written.

Our response — most often in the form of a text reply — can carry the emotions evoked by the default tone of voice we’ve installed on the original text. The original writer then installs their default tone of voice for us on our reply and provokes their own corresponding emotions. As you might imagine and we witness often, the whiplash of back and forth emotions escalates quickly. These interactions often leave us frustrated, hurt, and walking on eggshells. We can have the most honorable intentions with our post, but worry how it will land.

We see this everywhere on social media, particularly with hot button political or cultural topics. Several years ago, I stopped discussing politics or other sensitive issues online because I realized how futile (and bad for my mental health) it was to discuss serious topics via text. It almost always resulted in either emotionally disrespectful arguments or echo chambers of agreement. Neither of these end results serves much purpose.

These patterns aren’t exclusive to social media. Since the pandemic disrupted our in-person workplaces, our communication at work has become increasingly dominated by text. While email has been around forever, remote work led to the ubiquity of platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams. There’s not a day that goes by where I don’t see hundreds of text-based conversations fly across my Teams feed. I think most of us in knowledge economy jobs can relate.

While we may not be discussing the hot-button topics seen on social media, our work conversations can suffer from the same effects of default tone of voice. I often see quick escalation of emotions among my colleagues and the frustration that results. It’s a result that very rarely occurs if we hop on a video call or get together in person to discuss the same topic. Adding in the advantage of actual tone of voice and non-verbal cues, we rarely get into it the way we can in text conversations. I’d estimate that more than three quarters of the interpersonal conflict that occurs on our team is a direct symptom of falling into the default tone of voice trap. It creates a nasty cycle of overreaction and eggshells.

So how do we fix this?

Get to know each other better. My team has had incredible growth since 2020, which means that more than half of the team has never worked in person with their colleagues. Simply working alongside someone allows you to learn who they are and develop trust. Trust breeds the benefit of the doubt. Since remote work has so many more benefits that we don’t want to lose, we must find ways to build this knowledge and trust of each other without being in the same space. This can take the form of in-person social events, retreats, and virtual teambuilding exercises.

Build a culture of clarity and feedback. On healthy teams, coworkers feel comfortable asking questions of clarification and giving their peers specific, constructive feedback. If someone reads a text post that creates a negative emotional response, we should encourage asking for clarity. Can you help me understand why you’re asking us to do this? Your post makes it sound like this is the only alternative; is there room for other opinions here? If the post feels aggressive, team members should be encouraged to provide that feedback. I read your post and it felt critical of my work. I would appreciate if you could use a different approach in the future. If you’re authoring the initial post, you can be proactive in soliciting feedback. Is there anything here you need more detail on? Is there anything I’m missing as we consider this?

Jump on a video call. One of the most surefire ways of breaking the spiral of a misunderstood text conversation is to press pause and transfer the discussion to a video call (or in person) so you can add tone and body language. Hey, I think I’ll have a better chance of understanding what you’re asking if we jump on a call. So let’s press pause here and reboot at 3?

Assume good intentions. This one goes such a long way to nipping the negative cycle in the bud. If we assume that our colleagues are communicating in good faith and for the betterment of the team, that can help us modify the default tone of voice our brains hear. How would I read this differently if I was convinced it was written with my and our team’s best interests at heart?

Be explicit and open with tone. If you need to make a post that you feel could be sensitive to others on the team, make sure you use words that indicate your tone. Instead of stating something directly, you could indicate curiosity. I’ve noted that we are currently using this process. Could someone help me understand how this is the most efficient way of accomplishing our goal? I have some ideas on how we might improve it. They are … Some might suggest the use of emoji can offer a more palatable approach, but I’ve found that no emoji can take the place of words to explicitly communicate tone. Don’t let emoji stand in for emotion.

Provide context. Always lead with the why. If you’re going to ask others to change the way they currently do something, they need to understand the reason. This can be presented in a way that honors the current process while explaining why a change is justified. I understand that we’re currently doing X because of Y. However, there’s additional context that’s now true and I’d like to suggest we take a new approach.

The remote nature of our workplaces and the technology-connected nature of our world means that the dominance of text communication is here to stay — warts and all. It’s up to each of us to intentionally break the boil of those conversations that end up in overreactions and eggshells. We must bring more context and grace into our text conversations and know when a conversation needs the experience of fuller human connection.

We released Episode 2 of the Candid Conversations on Leadership podcast this week where discuss the leadership topic of prioritization through the lens of learning to let the right things go.

There are times when we think we’re superheroes and can do more things than are humanly possible. We have our jobs, our families and friends, our passions, and ourselves to serve and it can be overwhelming to look at the unending list of things to do and emotions to manage. The only way to focus on the most important things is to let the right things go. I share the concepts of 1) speaking truth to power to align resources with expectations, 2) developing goals for alignment, 3) managing the tyranny of the urgent, 4) focusing on internal improvements that you can control, and 5) managing your response to other’s people’s urgency. Candice shares her perspective on 1) keeping the important things in the air while juggling, 2) aligning priorities with personal values and goals, and 3) turning rejection into redirection.

We invite you to subscribe to the podcast at https://candidconversations.link. We’ll be releasing new episodes once a month.

We love to have you as a listener and always welcome your feedback.

Candid Conversations on Leadership is available on Amazon, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.