Dear Dispatch Reader, I can still see the hallway outside my office. It was another eighty hour week, and there were people lined up waiting to talk to me. Every one of them was bringing me a problem that was theirs to solve. They did not want my help thinking it through. They wanted me to take the accountability for it. I remember being frustrated. Then I remember the thought that landed underneath the frustration, which was considerably less comfortable. This was not something they were...
17 days ago • 6 min read
Dear courageous leaders, I have been thinking lately about the difference between a team that is quiet and a team that is safe. They can look identical from the head of the table. In the quiet team, the meeting runs smoothly. People nod. Decisions get made without much friction. The leader leaves feeling aligned. However, the Analysis person has stopped raising the medium and longer-term strategic questions no one wants to hear, the Connection person has stopped naming what team morale looks...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Dear courageous leaders, A few weeks ago I sat in on a leadership team that was, by every visible measure, aligned. They wanted the same outcome. They liked each other. They were not fighting. And they were completely stuck. Watching them, I kept thinking about how often this is the real shape of organizational friction. So often, what happens is not about opposing goals or bad intent. Rather, the challenge emerges from a room full of capable people moving clumsily in the same direction, each...
2 months ago • 5 min read
Dear courageous leaders, Maya could hold a room like no one I have worked with. She walked into every meeting and made people feel seen. She remembered the thing your daughter was going through. She drew in the quiet person at the edge of the table. She could take a tense room and warm it in about ninety seconds. And she moved fast. She saw opportunity early and said yes before anyone else had finished weighing it. People wanted to be near her leadership. That was real, and it was a gift. She...
3 months ago • 8 min read
Dear courageous leaders, Joan had a plan. And she was about to spend a year of her team's trust to carry it out. She came to a coaching session a few weeks ago ready. Sharp, prepared, principled. Exactly the leader you want building strong systems and holding a high bar. She was going to walk into her next team meeting and move the work to a more rigorous level of analysis. She was right that the team needed to get there. The destination was correct. The instinct was sound. And it was going...
3 months ago • 5 min read
Dear Whole Leader, A few of you have written to me in the last week or two with a version of the same question. Paula, what does it actually mean to lead well in a moment like this one? The pace is faster than it has ever been. The pressure is real. AI is changing the floor under our feet faster than we can read about it. What is the work that actually matters now? It is a fair question. I have been sitting with it myself. I want to give you my honest answer, and then I want to walk you into...
4 months ago • 6 min read
Moving On in an Accelerating World Dear courageous leaders, I want to name something I see often, and almost never hear talked about directly. Leaders who have done the work. Who have sat with hard questions, named their patterns, clarified what matters, and built genuine insight about themselves and their leadership. And who still, somehow, cannot move. Not because they lack information. Not because they lack commitment. But because the goals they are carrying feel like weight rather than...
4 months ago • 6 min read
Dear courageous leaders, I have been sitting with an image all week. A rippling pond. This past week was Holy Week for me, the days leading into Easter Sunday. I have been working through the Pray 40 prayer challenge on Hallow, a 40-day Lenten journey that drew its daily inspiration from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. If you have not read it, I want to simply say: it is one of the most complex, demanding, and beautiful captures of the human condition I have ever encountered. I...
5 months ago • 8 min read
Dear courageous leaders, I have been sitting with something lately. Not a crisis. Not a dramatic failure. Something quieter and, in some ways, harder to name. I am watching leaders I deeply respect lose their footing. Not because they lack skill or commitment. Not because they do not care. But because the pressure has been sustained long enough that something inside has started to drift. The urgency is real. The stakes are real. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, how I am leading gets...
5 months ago • 5 min read