Don’t take a Zoom call from a hospital bed.
I did. Twice, in fact; that’s how many times running too hot for too long has landed me there. Gown on, IV in, camera on anyway. I told myself that was strength. Leaders push the pressure down, bottle it up, and keep showing up no matter what. That’s the job, right?
Wrong. That’s just fumes. And your people breathe them in whether you mean for them to or not.
I told this story from a stage in front of 1,500 people at the EOS Conference this year, and the room gave me a standing ovation. Not because it was polished. Because most leaders in that room were carrying some version of it, and nobody says it out loud.
So, let’s say it out loud.
Here’s what I tell my team, on repeat, until it stops surprising them: I don’t want to hear the good stuff. I want to hear the growth stuff.
Good stuff feels like a compliment. Growth stuff feels like a punch. Most people can’t tell them apart in the moment, even when they come from the same mouth, in the same sentence, thirty seconds apart.
Most leaders only ever get the good stuff. Not because their teams are dishonest. Because somewhere along the way, the leader made honesty too expensive for anyone to spend.
So, I ask for the growth stuff. Out loud, in meetings, with my family, on the days it’s convenient, and on the days it isn’t. Then I sit still long enough to actually hear it instead of defending myself out of it (easier said than done).
Good stuff is comfortable. Growth stuff is useful.
Every leader I know keeps a drawer full of fixes. A new scorecard. A new hire. A new system. If we can just get this one thing right, we’ll finally get there.
The real question is shorter than any of that, and it takes more humility: is the issue me?
That’s hard to admit. Most people are convinced they’re plenty self-aware; I’ve seen research pin the real number at closer to one in ten. Most of us are steering the organization by a mirror that’s showing us a different car than the one we’re actually driving.
That’s the nature of a blind spot. You cannot see it. If you could, it wouldn’t be a blind spot.
I think about this every time I see a truck sticker that reads “This vehicle makes wide right turns.” Read that closely, and it’s a warning dressed up as an excuse: I didn’tsee you, so I crushed you. Sorry, not my fault; that’s just who I am.
That excuse doesn’t hold up for a truck. It holds up even less for a leader. The fix is inviting someone into the blind spot on purpose; someone who’ll tell you the truth when you’re changing lanes and something’s in the way you can’t see.
Here’s my newest blind spot, and it involves AI (because if it’s efficient, it’s helpful, right?).
I’d gotten efficient at staying connected. So efficient that I scheduled automated texts telling the people I love that I loved them. Six a day, reliably delivered, right on time.
Then one day it backfired, while sitting next to my wife, on a flight to Peru for our anniversary; timing is everything.The WiFi kept turning off and on, and every time it did, her phone lit up like a Christmas tree; “Just about to take off, I love you” followed by “Landed safely, I love you” (or something like that that sounds much more loving and meaningful). The journey of shame and emotion felt longer than the 14-hour flight ahead of us…
I’d automated intimacy, and told myself that meant I cared. Turns out I’m not alone; one recent Workday survey found that a third of people who lean on AI at work almost never have a real, non-work conversation with a colleague anymore; there’s more filtering happening than on a Millennial Instagram feed. We’re getting remarkably good at looking connected while quietly disconnecting; it’s like a 2020s version of MySpace’s top 8 friends, but without the music.
You can’t automate presence.
If automating connection is the disease, the cure sounds almost too simple: show up as a person, not a system.
Vulnerability builds trust in a way nothing else does. Barely one in five employees say they actually trust their leadership, and that number should bother every CEO reading this. Trust isn’t built by lowering the bar. I still expect 100 percent of performance for 100 percent of pay. What changes is what surrounds it: a culture where people can tell you the truth, including about you, without risking their job to do it.
The data backs the trade too. Teams with high psychological safety blow past their targets. Teams without it consistently fall short. Google’s research puts the gap at more than 30 points on the same metric. High standards and high safety run on the same track.
Here’s the ceiling that actually matters: your organization will not outgrow you. It will only ever be as healthy as the person running it.
Gallup has found that roughly half of U.S. workers have left a job at some point specifically to get away from their manager. Not the paycheck. Not the mission statement on the wall. The person.
More often than we admit, the better opportunity your best person is chasing is a healthier leader, not a better title.
The scorecards, the systems, the new hires; keep them. They matter.
None of them will resolve a problem that is, at its root, you. Get honest with yourself. That’s the whole assignment.
I’m not writing this because I’ve solved it. I’m writing it because I hit my ceiling in a hospital gown on a Zoom call, and the fix wasn’t a better process. It was admitting the process was never the problem.
Don’t be like me. Be like the version of you that’s actually done the work.
You are your organization’s growth ceiling. The market isn’t. Your competitors aren’t. Your systems aren’t. And that ceiling moves the moment you decide to stop protecting it.
Let’s Talk
People want YOU. Being present is a gift, and you can’t automate it.
If this resonated, there’s more where it came from. I talk about the inner ceiling everywhere, from small leadership teams to stages of 1,500 people, and I wrote The Inner Ceiling because one keynote was never going to be enough room to cover it properly.
Book me to speak at your next event, or grab a copy of the book if you’d rather start with the growth stuff on your own time.
If this resonated, imagine what he can do in a room full of your leaders. Invite him to your next event.