Level Five Associates

A manufacturing president I interviewed for The Power of Being All In told me that finding people was no longer his hardest problem. Keeping them was.

When I asked what steps he had taken, he did not talk about pay or the job market. He took me back to 2017, to the year his team worked out that they had not been giving their leaders the basic skills to succeed.

I see this often. When performance slips during a period of real change, we look straight at the person, at their effort and their attitude and whether they are still the right fit. Sometimes that read is correct, but more often that person is being held to a standard written for a version of the job that no longer exists, and nobody went back to revalidate it when the operating tempo moved.

This week in All-In Adaptive Leadership Insights I write about how to tell those two situations apart, and what I would do before sitting down for the performance conversation. Why Good People Struggle When Everything Changes is linked in the comments if you want to take a read.

I'd love to hear whether you have ever found a performance problem that turned out to be a clarity problem. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

I used to tell myself I was just being thorough.

Standing over someone's shoulder, double checking work I had already handed off, calling it attention to detail. It wasn't. It was insecurity, and it was costing me the very team I was trying to build.

Micromanagement rarely announces itself as a weakness. It shows up looking like diligence. Then initiative quietly disappears, every decision waits on your calendar, and the people with the most options are the first ones to leave.

I've watched what happens when a Culture of Compliance never becomes a Culture of Commitment, and I've paid for it myself in turnover and in trust.

If you want to go deeper on this, Why Micromanagement Is a Failure of Leadership is linked in the comments.

I'd love to hear about a time someone trusted you with more than you thought you were ready for.

Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

Most leaders believe they are good listeners. Most of them are wrong.

Not because they don't care about their people. They do. But somewhere along the way, they started confusing hearing with listening. They learned to look attentive while mentally drafting a response. They got good at waiting for the pause rather than receiving the message.

Listening is the third principle in Robert Mixon's Big 6 Leadership Principles®, and the good news is that listening is a skill, not a personality trait. It is a discipline, and like every discipline worth having, it can be built deliberately.

We've just released the Listen Workbook and Facilitator Guide as part of the premium content library on Robert's Substack, All-in Adaptive Leadership Insights. The link is in the comments.

What's one listening habit you've seen make a real difference in a leadership team? Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

Most people don't realize a two word text can land as an insult.

I've watched leaders do this without knowing it. They fire off "nice job" between meetings, feel good about it, and move on. Nick Morgan's research found that a short compliment like that gets read as sarcasm sixty percent of the time.

The closing article in the Listen series teaches something I call the Two-Second Rule. It gives the other person room to finish, gives you a beat to think instead of react, and tells them what they said mattered enough to make you stop.

It sounds small. Try it for twenty-one days and watch what changes in how the people around you communicate.

If you want to go deeper on this, Effective Listening in the Information Age is linked in the comments.

I'd love to hear about a time an instant reply cost you more than a pause would have. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

In 1991, I had a plan, and I was proud of it.

My staff saw the enemy massing exactly where I intended to attack. They told me to adjust.

I didn't listen.

We crossed open desert into his strongest position. The battle ended in a draw, and given the mistake I made, we were lucky to get even that.

What stuck with me wasn't the battle. It was what came out in the After-Action Review afterward: the plan was never the problem. My refusal to adapt to it was.

That's a harder lesson to learn than it sounds. Stubbornness and decisiveness feel exactly the same in the moment. You usually can't tell them apart until the cost shows up.

I'd love to hear about a time you had to adjust a plan you'd already committed to publicly. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

The link to the full article is in the comments.

Enjoy the journey!

When John Rowe became CEO of Aetna, he didn't walk in with a new strategy. He walked the floors. Sought out people at every level. Asked what they saw. Wrote it down. The restructuring that followed worked because people had already been heard.

I built a model around that kind of visit, and it holds up in any organization: go to where the work happens, ask questions you don't already know the answers to, keep the notebook, and never interrupt.

The notebook is the piece leaders skip, and it matters most. It turns a conversation into proof that what someone knows is worth keeping, and it turns the senior person in the room into the student.

Respect only exists once it becomes something people can see.

If you'd like to dive deeper, this week's All-In Adaptive Leadership Insights, The Holder Model: Listening as Respect is linked in the comments.

I'd love to hear about a time a leader's questions, or their notebook, told you that you mattered. Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!

The first report you get on a problem is almost always incomplete, and sometimes flat wrong. That's not a communication failure on your team's part. It's just how information moves under pressure.

The mistake most leaders make is reacting to that first report as if it were the final word, and punishing the person who brought it for getting it wrong. What you're punishing is speed, the very thing that made the warning useful in the first place. Do that once, even quietly, and you've taught your whole team to sit on bad news a little longer next time.

I'd love to hear about a time bad news reached you late because someone was afraid to bring it sooner.

Leave a comment below and let's talk about it.

The link to the full article is in the comments.

Enjoy the journey!