Half a Bubble Out Blog

Harvest is a Season, Not a Lifestyle

michael@halfabubbleout.com (Michael Redman) — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:00:00 GMT

ISSUE #024 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

A leader I know said this on a call last week:

“My greatest tension is between my family and my business. My task list got so big I’m defaulting to sacrificing time with my family, skipping pickups, working from eight to eleven.”

Then, a beat later, something deeper came out:

“I’m thinking it’s up to me because God can’t help and I got to do all the work and I’m disconnected from how good He is and how much He can provide.”

Now, that second one is the real diagnosis. The first one is just the symptom.

I hear some version of this from almost every founder I work with. The pressure is real: costs are up, margins are tighter, and being profitable is harder than it’s been in a long time. There really is more to do than there are hours in the day.

But the answer is not to work harder.

We’ve quietly mistaken the grind for a strong work ethic. They are not the same thing.

A grind mindset says every day is harvest, every hour is critical, every minute belongs to the business. That’s not work ethic. That’s a slow sentence to burnout, a missed marriage, and kids who grew up while you were heads-down.

If you actually want a healthy company AND a healthy marriage AND healthy kids AND a healthy you, there’s a different path.

1. Partner with God First

The deepest issue is not your calendar. It’s the lie underneath the calendar that is telling you it’s all on you.

Scripture says God is the author of work itself. He designed it.

It says that God works too and He is always at work. He didn’t just design it to be punishing. He designed it because He’s a worker and He is good, therefore, His “kind” of work is Good.

He wants to partner with us. We were never meant to work outside of our relationship with Him.

Your job is to operate inside the envelope of what is actually yours to carry, not what was never yours to begin with.

Your business is one subsystem of a full-life ecosystem. Treat your company like the whole ecosystem and the other subsystems start to fail.

2. Work in Rhythm, Not in Grind

The Universe and everything in it runs on cycles. There is no part of how God designed the world that runs at 100% all the time.

Agriculture gives us the clearest picture. Four seasons. Each one has a job.

Spring is preparation and planting. You ramp up. You break ground.

Summer is steady work. Water, watch, maintain. You put in your hours, then you stop and you eat dinner with your wife and your kids.

Harvest is the intense season. The fruit is ready and the window is short. You work from sunup to sundown. You work 12 and 15-hour days. In the old days every person in the family played a role; the older kids out in the field with you, the little ones carrying water to the workers or keeping the smallest from wandering off so the adults could keep going.

Only in the modern age have we shifted away from this, and lost touch with the rhythms of agriculture.

This is how families have lived for most of human history. There’s no shame in a harvest season. It’s the part of the year that funds every other part.

Winter is rest and pruning. The plants pull back. The farmer plans. There’s more space at the table. More space for family and marriage and maybe even hobbies.

Then the cycle starts again.

But here is the line nobody draws clearly enough:

Harvest is a season. It is not a lifestyle.

The grind says every day is harvest. The truth is, harvest is supposed to end. Then winter comes. Then you rest. Then spring comes and you start again.

If your business has been in permanent harvest for two years, that’s not a strong work ethic; it’s unsustainable and ultimately starves the future of your company.

It’s appropriate right here to say that, hopefully, you understand this is a metaphor to look at your business. There are things to learn from the rhythms of agriculture that we can apply to our business.

We need to make sure that we are taking time to work, time to rest, and regular time to invest in the core relationships in our world.

It’s not fair to think that if I just work hard now, there’ll be plenty of time later

Every season of a child’s life is different, and it changes. Each season is important for the next. They look to us as parents to pour into them, to care for them, and to equip them for a world they will eventually go out and work in.

I remember sitting in a room of about 40 or 50 entrepreneurs one day in the middle of a hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I listened to a man stand up and say that one of the things he was working on was helping marriages be a priority and something each person invests in.

He focused on his business in his first marriage, with the idea that if they just worked hard enough for five years, they would be set for the rest of their lives and would be able to enjoy each other and all of the fruits of their labor.

Before he hit those five years, his wife said, “I’ve had enough of being ignored,” and she left him.

I’m going to put one more cherry on top of this. Kids don’t care how much you give them or how quality the time is if the time is rare and all you’re doing is giving them gifts to make up for not spending time with them at all.

Frequency with your children is important. Quality is also important, but frequency is more important than being perfect.

3. Be Shrewd About What You Work On

When you’re working, work on the right thing.

Eighty percent of your energy should be focused on the one critical thing for this season of the company. Not all twenty-three items on the list. The one that, if you got it right, would lift everything else.

It turns out that knowing what to choose to work on is one of the highest skills of running a business. Knowing what the most important thing is, the next most important thing, and bringing all the resources needed to accomplish that, and doing that over and over again.

That’s shrewd, and it actually seems very counterintuitive to most people.

It turns out that focusing on one or two things at a time and then moving on to the next and the next and the next over the long haul will accomplish far more than working on 5, 10, 15, or 20 different things at the same time and moving all of them forward.

The lie is that the more you try to push forward, the more you’ll actually accomplish.

And when you’re thinking about being shrewd, think about this: build tractors whenever possible.

The agricultural revolution didn’t happen because farmers worked harder. It happened because somebody built a tractor and one person could do what ten used to do.

Same principle in your business. Some of the work in front of you equates to the harvest itself. Some of it is building the thing that will multiply every harvest after it. Know the difference and weigh your hours accordingly.

The Real Answer

A healthy marriage, a healthy family, and a healthy company at the same time is possible. It’s not produced by just working harder though.

It’s produced by partnering with God, working in rhythm with how He designed the world, and getting shrewd and being wise about what you actually work on when you do work.

The leader on my call started to see it when he named the lie underneath. He was disconnected from how good God is and how much He provides. That’s where the answer starts.

Not in another planner. Not in another productivity hack. In the honest moment of letting God carry what was always His to carry, and learning to work in seasons instead of in a permanent grind.

Harvest is coming. Then winter. Then spring. Trust the cycle. He designed it.

If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.

Until next time,

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

And God bless,

Michael

Great Testimonials Aren't Collected, They're Crafted

michael@halfabubbleout.com (Michael Redman) — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:00:00 GMT

ISSUE #023 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

I am, by most reasonable measures, weirdly obsessed with kitchen gadgets.

I own two sous vide machines, from different brands, and there's a story behind that. I have Cutco knives I bought back in college, and I still talk about them today - thirty years later - to anyone who will listen. I get genuinely excited about most cool kitchen gadgets. And I have strong, possibly unreasonable opinions about can openers.

Stay with me here. There's a point coming.

When I'm looking at buying something for the kitchen, I read reviews. If it's under twenty dollars, I want to know if it's junk or surprisingly good. If it's over twenty dollars, I want video reviews, I want to see chefs I respect using it, and I want input from people I trust personally. I don't think I'm unusual in any of this. I think most of us do the same thing, whether we're buying a can opener or a car.

Now, about that can opener.

You'd think a can opener doesn't matter. It's the most boring item in the kitchen drawer. But the ones I grew up with in the seventies were awful - thin metal handles, tiny turning knobs that hurt your hand, and a charming habit of slipping, breaking, or refusing to grip the can at all.

So when I look at can openers today, I have opinions. I want a big handle. I want a big turning knob. I want the thing to work the first time, every time, for ten years.

And here's what's fascinating. On Amazon, within the same price range, you can buy a can opener that is junk, decent, or surprisingly excellent. I can tell which one it'll be before I click "buy" - because the reviews tell me everything.

Every one of those reviews is a testimonial.

We Are Surrounded by Testimonials

We live inside a constant stream of testimonials. We always have, but the volume now is staggering.

Apple customers rave about Apple products.
Yeti owners advocate for Yeti the way I once advocated for whatever band I was into in 1997.
Traeger owners become evangelists. Not customers. Evangelists.
Cutco knife owners (I’m one of them) will corner you at a dinner party.
Dyson users somehow become emotionally invested in a vacuum cleaner.

We trust reviews. We trust referrals. We trust the chef we follow who casually shows the brand of pan she's using. I have a friend named Carrie who is an extraordinary home cook. When she cooks, it is delightful and almost always interesting, with a little surprise tucked in somewhere. Cooking comes up often when we talk - recipes, ingredients, technique, seasonings, the difference between one cut of meat and another. She has never once told me what equipment to buy, but over the years she has shaped how I think about food. That is its own kind of testimonial; the slow, trustworthy kind that builds between people who actually know each other.

We are surrounded by testimonials. And as consumers, we instinctively understand their power.

Here's the contrarian observation:

Most business owners and leaders understand the power of testimonials when they're acting as consumers, but they fail to make the connection back to their own business. They fail to intentionally create testimonial-worthy experiences in their own companies.

What is a Great Testimonial?

I bought my first sous vide machine more than twelve years ago.

I bought it because of testimonials. Articles. YouTube videos. Chefs I respected. I didn't personally know anyone who actually owned one, so eventually I took the risk and bought it. And it changed how I cook.

My filets come out like butter. My salmon converts people who say they don't like salmon. I can take a cheap cut of meat and make it taste expensive, with very little effort - just the right tool, the right technique, and a little patience. I now own two machines because I sometimes cook two different things at once for the same meal. The first brand, sadly, went out of business. I would have bought a dozen of theirs.

And now I'm that guy. I tell anyone who will listen. I tell our dinner guests. I'd tell you right now if you were sitting across from me. I'm a walking testimonial, not because someone asked me for one, but because the product genuinely transformed how I cook for the people I love.

This is the part most business owners miss.

A great testimonial is not a marketing artifact. A great testimonial is evidence of transformation.

People talk about things that genuinely improve their lives. Always. It’s not a marketing trick. It’s a feature of being human. Transformed people naturally become advocates, witnesses, and storytellers. People trust transformed people.

Here is the trap most businesses fall into:

They get reactive about testimonials. They build a product, sell a service, and then somewhere down the line they realize they need testimonials for the website or the next sales asset. So they go ask for them. Usually awkwardly. Usually too late.

The reactive approach treats testimonials as a marketing problem.

The intentional approach treats testimonials as the natural byproduct of an extraordinary customer experience.

Two completely different operating systems.

The difference comes down to one question:

Most companies ask: "How do we deliver the product or service?"

The best companies ask: "How do we transform the customer's experience?"

Transformation can mean a lot of things. Eliminating a recurring frustration. Creating real delight in an ordinary moment. Increasing the customer's confidence. Saving them time. Making something easier. Improving reliability they can count on for a decade. Solving a stubborn problem better than anyone else has.

A mediocre company sells can openers. A remarkable company obsesses over the experience of opening a can - smooth, frustration-free, durable, reliable, surprisingly satisfying ten years in. Same product category. Wildly different operating philosophy. And only one of those companies is going to have customers who corner strangers at dinner parties.

This is not manipulation. This is craftsmanship. This is thoughtful, strategic leadership applied to the work of building something genuinely worth talking about.

The Progression That Earns Testimonials

Here is something worth noticing. Before a testimonial becomes a polished testimonial, it first shows up as customer feedback and customer research.

The full progression looks like this:

You intentionally create a transformational experience.
You listen carefully to how customers respond.
You refine the experience based on what you hear.
The testimonials begin to collect themselves.
Customers become enthusiastic advocates.
Word of mouth compounds, and the business becomes more stable, more consistent, and more resilient over time.

Great testimonials are not collected. They are earned.

Both sides win in this model. The customer wins because their experience genuinely improves - their life is a little easier, a little better, a little more delightful. The business wins because testimonials get easier to collect, feedback becomes valuable research, products and services improve faster, referrals increase naturally, and word of mouth begins to compound.

There is an older parallel here worth considering.

The story of Christianity spreading across the ancient world was not, in any sense we would recognize today, a marketing story. It was a transformation story. Lives changed. People who had encountered something real could not stop telling others what had happened to them. The early movement spread through transformed people sharing what they had personally experienced - witnesses, in the original sense of the word.

It’s a reminder that the dynamic at work in any genuinely transformational experience is a deeply human one. People naturally share what meaningfully changes them.

That is true of faith. It’s true of friendships. It’s true of a sous vide machine. It’s true of a leadership coach who finally helped someone see themselves clearly. It’s true, in a smaller way, of a really well-made can opener.

The shape of the dynamic is the same. Real transformation is worth talking about.

The Question We Should Be Asking

I have to be honest about something.

We could all remember to do this better, including myself. It’s easy to get heads-down on delivering the product and forget that delivery is not the goal, transformation is. It’s easy to ask for testimonials when what we should be asking is, what kind of experience are we actually creating?

So here’s a question worth holding up to your own business this week.

When someone asks your customers what they think of your company, your product, or your service, what do you hope they say? And, more pointedly: what would they actually say right now, if no one was coaching them?

The goal is customers who light up. The goal is the answer that begins with, "Oh my gosh, this company is amazing - let me tell you what they did for us."

That does not happen by accident. It happens by design.

Satisfied customers stay. Delighted customers recruit.

Build something worth talking about, and the talking takes care of itself.

If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.

Until next time,

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

And God bless,

Michael

Has Your Leadership Suffered from Syndrome 27?

michael@halfabubbleout.com (Michael Redman) — Sat, 23 May 2026 14:00:00 GMT

ISSUE #022 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

I want to tell you a story about the most confident I have ever been in my entire life.

It didn’t end well. For my ego, anyway.

It was the early 1990s. Kathryn and I had been married just over a year. We were living in Colorado Springs - beautiful weather, blue skies, the kind of afternoon that makes you feel like life had conspired in your favor.

I was on staff at a church, working as a youth pastor. And I was, if I’m being completely honest with you, absolutely killing it.

Or so I thought.

I remember walking from the parking lot across a patch of grass toward our apartment. I had a literal skip in my step. Life was good. Work was good. Marriage was good.

And somewhere in the middle of that walk, a question popped into my head: Where could I grow? What could I be doing better?

I actually thought about it. I genuinely tried to come up with something.

Nothing.

Not a single area. Not one thing I needed to improve. I was 27 years old and I had, apparently, arrived.

Within two steps, I had a second thought - and this one stopped me cold: If I can’t think of a single place where I need to grow, that’s probably a problem.

Kathryn and I have told that story many times over the years. We were among friends when we eventually gave it a name: Syndrome 27.

What Syndrome 27 Actually Is

Syndrome 27 isn’t garden-variety confidence. It’s the full, unshakeable belief that your logic, your answers, and your solutions aren’t just good - they’re the best.

And if you doubt that, the evidence is right there: just look at my life. Everything I touch turns to gold. I didn’t just figure some things out. I figured it out. All of it. At 27.

Which means the rest of the world doesn’t need to teach me anything. They need to ask me to teach them.

Let’s be clear about what that actually is: it’s arrogance. Full stop. It’s pride and cockiness at a level that is, by definition, hubris.

The real trick, the reason it’s so hard to catch, is that it doesn’t feel like that from the inside. Not even a little.

From the inside, it feels like clarity. You walk around with this quiet certainty that you’ve got it figured out. You don’t always say it out loud. You don’t have to.

But when someone brings you a problem, you don’t ask questions. You don’t try to understand what’s really going on. You just tell them how to solve it.

Because you already know. You come across like you have the answer for everything and it doesn’t matter how friendly or nice your tone is.

I was genuinely well-liked. Incredibly nice, and incredibly arrogant, all at the same time. That was just one of my “small” flaws people had to deal with.

And the people most susceptible to Syndrome 27 aren’t the weak, undisciplined leaders. They’re the strong ones. The confident ones. The ones who are, by any reasonable measure, actually good at what they do.

Success doesn’t just reward them - it blinds them.

Sound Familiar?

As you’ve been reading this, I’m guessing someone came to mind. Maybe it’s a young employee who has an answer for everything before you’ve finished asking the question. Maybe it’s one of your kids.

Maybe it’s just someone in your world who is talented, likable, and absolutely certain they have it all figured out.

Go ahead and smile. It’s okay. You might even be giggling a little at yourself right now because there’s a decent chance you suffered from an occasional bout of Syndrome 27 when you were younger too.

Most of us did.

For some of you, it was obvious. You were out front, vocal, and certain. For others it was quieter. You weren’t going to argue or fight.

But if someone got into a serious conversation with you, you could explain - very clearly, very calmly - exactly who was right, who was wrong, and why. Same syndrome. Different personality.

Most of us can laugh at that younger version of ourselves. There’s a safe distance there.

It Doesn’t Stay in Your 20s

Here’s the part that’s harder to laugh at: Syndrome 27 isn’t restricted to our 20s. To be fair, the name is a bit tongue-in-cheek.

For most people, the years and experiences that accumulate after 27 become their own antidote. Life has a way of teaching us, sometimes gently and sometimes painfully, that we’re not always right.

But Syndrome 27 isn’t just an ailment of youth. If we’re not careful, it can pop up at any point in life - like a resurgence of an illness you thought you’d left behind years ago.

You get older, and suddenly it’s back. You go to the doctor and say, “Why did that happen?” And he just shrugs and says, “Oh, sometimes that can happen.”

Syndrome 27 is the same. Prolonged success has a way of bringing the blindness back. The longer things go well, the easier it is to start believing they’re going well because of you.

Your instincts. Your decisions. Your leadership. And slowly, quietly, the same blindness settles back in. Just with better clothes and a longer track record.

Now, I want to be clear about something. I’m not saying that growing in your skills, your knowledge, and your leadership competencies doesn’t matter. It does.

If you’ve worked hard, studied, grown, and built real expertise, you get to take some credit for that. That’s not Syndrome 27. That’s earned.

But here’s what one billionaire said in a recent interview that stuck with me. He said most people don’t understand that success - real success - is a combination of preparation, skill, and hard work mixed with luck and fortuitous opportunity.

You could have done everything right and it still doesn’t work. You could have made any number of different decisions and still come out ahead.

There’s a humbling truth in that, if you have the eyes to see it and the ears to hear it.

And as we get older and wiser, one of the most important things we learn is how much we need perspective we cannot give ourselves. You cannot read the label from inside the bottle.

We are too close to our own lives, our own companies, our own decisions to always see them clearly. The leaders who thrive over the long haul are the ones who build wise counsel around them.

People who can see what they cannot, who will say what others won’t, and who keep them honest about the gap between where they are and where they think they are.

Three Honest Questions

So how do you know if you have it - now, today, at whatever age you’re reading this?

Here are three honest questions. They’re not complicated. But don’t blow past them.

1. When did you last change your mind about something important?

Not a small preference - a real belief about how you lead, how you communicate, or how your business actually works.

If you can’t remember something you learned that changed your opinion on something significant, that’s worth paying attention to.

2. Who in your life tells you the truth?

Not the people who just encourage you - everyone needs those. I mean the people who care about you enough to push back.

The ones who you know have your best interest at heart and are still willing to say, “I think you’re missing something here.” If you don’t have anyone like that close to you, Syndrome 27 may be silently at work.

3. Are you growing, or are you just doing?

There’s a difference between being busy and getting better. A lot of leaders are extraordinarily busy. Fewer are genuinely becoming sharper, more self-aware, and more honest about their own patterns.

Busy is easy. Growth costs something.

The Good News

The good news - and there is good news - is that recognizing Syndrome 27 is the cure for it.

That’s actually what happened to me on that patch of grass. The moment I realized I couldn’t think of a single area to grow, something inside me said, “That’s a problem.”

I didn’t walk away unchanged. I walked away aware. And awareness, it turns out, is where everything starts.

That doesn’t mean the growing is easy. It isn’t. But you can’t grow in a direction you can’t see.

The recognition comes first. Everything else follows from there.

I think about that 27-year-old version of me walking across the grass, completely certain he had it all together. I want to go back and have a good-natured laugh with him.

Not because he was a bad leader. He wasn’t. But because the certainty that he’d arrived was going to cost him - and it did, more than once, in ways he couldn’t see coming.

The best leaders I know share one thing: they never fully believe they’ve arrived. They stay curious. They stay open. They stay a little unsettled - not anxious, but honest about how much they don’t yet know.

That posture doesn’t weaken you. It’s what keeps you sharp for the long haul.

If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.

Until next time,

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

And God bless,

Michael

The Hiring Myth of "Hit the Ground Running"

michael@halfabubbleout.com (Michael Redman) — Sat, 16 May 2026 14:00:00 GMT

ISSUE #021 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

Why the expectation that sounds like a high standard is actually setting your organization up to fail.

A few weeks ago I was at my favorite Starbucks - the one between my house and the office, managed by a friend of mine I've known for the better part of twenty years. She introduced me to a new team member who had just transferred in. Already trained. Already experienced. She had worked at four or five other Starbucks locations and knew every part of the job.

I ran into that same barista again this week and asked how it was going.

"It's different here, and it’s hard," she told me. "Everything is different. The way the team handles stress. The rhythm of the store. The busy times and when the rushes are."

She wasn't complaining. She was just being honest.

"I know how to make the coffee. I know the system. But every store has its own culture, its own personality, its own way of doing things."

I let that sit for a minute.

This is one of the most recognized brands in the world. The training is standardized. The menu is the same. The equipment is the same. And yet a fully skilled, fully experienced employee still needed real time to integrate into a new location.

So here's the question I want you to sit with: If that's true at Starbucks, why would your organization be any different?

— — —

Leaders hire for a reason. Usually several reasons at once. You're overloaded and need relief. You're behind and need capacity. You see an opportunity and need to move. Whatever the specific pressure, the underlying message in the phrase "I need someone who can hit the ground running" is almost always the same: I need someone to carry real weight quickly, because we're already stretched thin.

That's not a bad instinct. It's actually a legitimate and understandable one.

But "hit the ground running" has become one of those phrases leaders use to describe a real need while accidentally building a process that undermines the very outcome they're after.

It sounds like a high standard. It's actually a low-quality shortcut dressed up as a high expectation.

That's the contrarian argument I want to make today. And I think if you'll stay with me through three sections, you'll come out the other side seeing your next leadership hire - and maybe the one you already made - in a very different light.

The False Assumption: Competence Does Not Replace Context

When leaders say they want someone who can hit the ground running, the desire underneath that phrase is real and legitimate. They want a capable person who can carry meaningful responsibility without constant hand-holding. They want to stop being the bottleneck. They want relief.

But underneath that desire is an assumption that rarely gets examined: that a highly capable person needs minimal onboarding to succeed; and that experience transfers cleanly from their previous organization to yours.

The research on this is some of the most sobering data I've come across in years of studying leadership and organizational health.

A nine-year study out of Princeton tracked more than 1,000 top-performing analysts at 78 different firms. These were genuine stars, consistently high performers with track records to prove it. What happened when they moved to a new firm? The probability of remaining a top performer dropped by nearly 50%. And that decline persisted for at least five years. (Boris Groysberg, Chasing Stars, Princeton University Press — 9-year longitudinal study, 1,000+ analysts, 78 firms)

Not because they lost their skills. Not because they became less intelligent or less motivated. But because high performance is co-produced between the individual and a specific organizational system - the colleagues, the processes, the culture, the decision-making norms, the relationships. When you hire someone away from another organization, you import the person. You do not import the system that made them effective.

That finding is consistent with what multiple independent sources show about senior leader failure rates: roughly 40-47% of leaders fail or significantly disappoint within 18 months of being hired. External hires fail at about 1.4 times the rate of internal promotions. (DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2021; Heidrick & Struggles analysis of 20,000 executive placements — converging estimates from independent sources)

Here's the practical implication: the more different your organization is from the one this person came from - different in structure, culture, size, product, leadership style - the harder the integration and the higher the risk. Context is not a nice-to-have. Context is the environment in which competence either flourishes or fails.

Competence is critical. Absolutely. But if competence is the foundation, context is the multiplier. And most leaders are hiring for the former while neglecting to build the latter.

— — —

The Real Investment: The First 90 Days Are Not a Tax

When you hire someone, especially into a leadership role, there are actually two distinct things you're hiring for. The first is job competency: can they do the work? The second is culture fit: can they operate effectively in your environment? You can screen for both in the interview process, but only intentional onboarding builds the second. Culture fit doesn't arrive on day one, no matter who you hire or how much experience they bring.

I've watched this play out so many times across so many organizations that it almost has a script.

A leader identifies a real need - a department that isn't functioning, a gap in capacity, a role that would unlock the next level of growth. They go through an interview process, often with multiple people involved, and they land on someone who looks strong on paper. There's genuine organizational hope around the hire. And then, almost immediately, the wheels start coming off in ways nobody anticipated.

The expectations for the role were never clearly defined in writing. The specific skills required for this leadership position in this organization were never fully articulated. The new leader operates from a set of assumptions about how authority works that don't match the culture they've walked into, leaning on positional power where the organization runs on relational trust, or vice versa.

And the senior leader who should be driving the onboarding? They're pulled toward the next urgent thing, which is almost always the reason they made the hire in the first place.

Nobody owns the integration. And a leader who could have succeeded, who had real capability, never fully connects to the culture. The department stays stuck. The organization absorbs the cost quietly, often for much longer than it should.

I've seen this in manufacturing companies and nonprofits, in professional services firms and family businesses. The details change. The script doesn't.

The research confirms exactly why this pattern is so common and so costly. When senior leaders fail, the cause is almost never technical incompetence. According to research involving more than 500 senior executives, 68% of leadership failures come down to politics, culture, and people - not capability. 65% of failed leaders cite cultural misfit as a primary factor. 69% point to a poor grasp of how the organization actually works - the unwritten rules, who really makes decisions, how things actually get done. (McKinsey 2018 executive transition research; Egon Zehnder 12th International Executive Panel, 500+ senior executives)

The failure isn't fully the person. It's the gap between the person and a system that was never intentionally built to integrate them.

Onboarding is the process. But the goal is something deeper than a completed checklist. The goal is a leader who is deeply integrated and genuinely rooted in your culture, in your team's trust, in the unwritten rules of how your organization actually works.

There's a phrase I heard recently that I can't stop thinking about: slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Going fast out of the gate feels like urgency. It feels like action. But when it comes to leadership integration, speed in the short term almost always creates the exact chaos leaders were trying to escape.

The leaders who invest in a slower, more intentional start - who define success clearly, build genuine understanding of the culture, and establish trust before cranking up accountability - are the ones who get to speed faster in the long run.

Onboarding isn't HR bureaucracy. It isn't hand-holding. It's organizational architecture. And when you skip it, you're not saving time. You're borrowing against a debt that will come due at the worst possible moment.

— — —

The Stakes: A Leadership Hire Is Never Just an Additional Employee

Before I make the final argument, I want to give you an analogy that I think puts the stakes in the clearest possible terms.

A heart transplant is one of the most complex procedures in modern medicine. Nobody wheels a donor heart into the operating room and says, "Let's just get this in there and get going, this person wants to get on with their life."

There is an extensive evaluation process before a single incision is made. Is the recipient healthy enough to receive the heart? What is their body size and frame? Does the recipient have a strong support system to help them with the recovery? What is the condition of the donor heart? Does the match make sense?

A friend of mine went through this last year - a big man, tall and broad-shouldered, a water polo player in college - and the medical team specifically needed a heart large enough for his frame. The match had to be right before anything else could happen.

Then comes the surgery itself: meticulous, precise, nothing rushed. Then the immediate post-operative period - close monitoring, anti-rejection medications, watching carefully for what the medical team can influence but cannot fully control.

Then a graduated process of stepping back: from daily hospital visits, to weekly, to monthly. From supervised rehabilitation to independent exercise. From restricted activity to building real strength. Six months to a year before a transplant recipient is truly operating independently. And after all of that? Often years of vitality that weren't available before, because the process was done right.

A leadership hire is a transplant. The match matters enormously - the more different the environment they're coming from, the more careful you need to be. The onboarding is the surgery and the recovery: detailed, attentive, and not something you rush because you're impatient to see results. And if the integration fails, if the leader is effectively "rejected" by the organizational body, the damage doesn't stay contained to that one person or that one role.

A leader who never gets rooted creates friction throughout your organization - in morale, in communication, in trust, in how your team executes day to day. And the research on what that actually costs is significant. Failed leadership transitions correlate with 20% engagement loss across the affected team and 15% performance drops in the business unit. Teams led by leaders who transition successfully, by contrast, are 90% more likely to meet their three-year goals, with meaningfully lower turnover risk. (McKinsey executive transition research)

I learned this the hard way myself. Years ago, when HaBO was growing rapidly - 400% in a matter of years - we desperately needed help. We hired someone for what amounted to a COO-light role in our ten-person company. She came from an organization of 2,000 people, with large budgets, multiple support staff, and systems built to support her way of working. She claimed the experience. On paper, it looked like it could work.

What I didn't fully understand at the time was that her high performance at the previous company was deeply tied to that company's specific environment. She knew how to operate within those people, those systems, that culture.

None of that translated into our world. Three years - and significant financial and emotional cost to Kathryn, to me, to our staff - passed before we finally made the decision we probably should have made two and a half years earlier. I gave too much benefit of the doubt for too long. And the price of that was real.

The evidence-based expectation for a senior leader to reach full impact, by the way, is six to twelve months minimum - not ninety days. Less than 30% of executives receive any structured integration support at all. That gap between what the research says is needed and what most organizations actually provide is where the failure lives. (Egon Zehnder 12th International Executive Panel; Watkins/Gabarro leadership transition research)

The leaders who build enduring organizations don't just hire talent. They build environments where talent can become effective. That means defining success clearly and building realistic systems and expectations to get people genuinely up to speed.

It means transferring the organizational nuance that nobody writes down - the unwritten rules, the real decision-making process, the relational dynamics that determine whether someone succeeds or fails.

It means coaching them early, being clear about who owns what, and earning the right to hold them accountable before you actually do.

Not because you're lowering standards. Because you're sophisticated enough to know that talent alone doesn't build organizations. Intentional integration does.

— — —

I ran into that barista again this morning. She's figuring it out. A few weeks in, still finding her footing with the team, still learning the rhythm of this particular store. But she's getting there, not because someone gave her a manual, but because the people around her are paying attention.

The question was never whether she was capable. She clearly is. The question was whether the context would support her.

That's the question I want you to carry into your next hire.

You have poured yourself into building this organization. Whatever the pressure you're under right now - whether you need relief, or you need growth, or you need to repair something that's broken - this is one of the most important investments you can make.

You may not have done it well before. Most leaders haven't. It's not something that gets talked about enough, taught enough, or taken seriously enough in the world of small and mid-sized business.

And if you don't feel equipped to build this well on your own, get some help. That's not a weakness. That's wisdom. Because the leaders who build organizations that last aren't just good judges of talent.

They're builders of environments where talent can thrive.

If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.

Until next time,

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

And God bless,

Michael

You're Already Trustworthy. That's No Longer Enough

michael@halfabubbleout.com (Michael Redman) — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:00:01 GMT

ISSUE #020 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

The Post-Trust Era: Why the Leaders Who Already Value Trust Have to Go to the Next Level

One of my entrepreneurial friends, who has been running a successful company for over 30 years, said something to me recently that stopped me cold:

"It's just harder to make a buck these days," he said. "Our company's doing well, but you just have to work so much harder to make a dollar."

The look on his face told the rest of the story - a quiet exhaustion, and something just beneath it that felt like discouragement. He wasn't complaining. He was just being honest about something real.

I knew exactly what he was talking about.

What he was describing isn't just an economic trend or a market cycle. It's something deeper and more pervasive. We are living through what we have known as the Post-Trust Era for several years now, a significant and measurable collapse of trust at every level of society.

Trust between individuals. Trust between employers and employees. Trust between customers and the companies they buy from, or could buy from. Trust in institutions, in government, in the systems we once assumed would hold.

This isn't just an American phenomenon. It's global, and it's accelerating.

The forces driving this aren't hard to identify, even if we haven't connected them all into one picture.

Social media has fractured the shared reality we once took for granted.
Political infighting has made institutional trust feel naïve.
High-profile leadership failures - in business, in government, in the church - have made skepticism feel not just reasonable but wise.
And now artificial intelligence is adding an entirely new layer of uncertainty.

AI-generated photographs, videos, and content have become sophisticated enough that people are genuinely questioning whether what they're seeing is real. That's not paranoia. That's a rational response to a world where the line between authentic and fabricated is harder to find every single day.

And it is costing us directly, on the bottom line.

Acquiring new customers is harder and more expensive than it used to be. It's not just competition or market noise, though there's plenty of both. It's that your prospective customers have been promised the world by too many companies that didn't deliver.

They tried the diet that was supposed to change everything. They bought the software that was going to solve the problem. They hired the consultant who guaranteed results. And too often, they were let down.

So now, before they say yes to you, they need more time, more proof, more reassurance - and that costs you more money to provide.

It's not only happening outside your walls either. Inside your organization, trust is under pressure too. Finding employees you can genuinely rely on - not just people who are honest and ethical, but people you can trust with complexity, with judgment calls, with the hard situations - is increasingly difficult.

That means slower decisions, less initiative, more management overhead, and margins that quietly erode as a result.

If you lead a nonprofit, you feel this differently but just as acutely. Even donors who believe in your mission are asking harder questions before they give. Trust has to be earned at a level it never did before.

Here's the thing though - if you're the kind of leader who is still reading at this point, you almost certainly already value trust. You've built your reputation on it. Your team knows where you stand. Your best customers came back because they believed in you. Trust isn't a foreign concept to you. It's something you've practiced and protected for years.

But here's the honest and difficult truth:

The trust that got you here isn't sophisticated enough for the world we're in now.

The Post-Trust Era doesn't just demand that leaders be trustworthy, it demands that they become masterful at building trust. Strategically. Intentionally. At a level of depth and complexity that most leaders, even great ones, haven't had to develop before.

This isn't about starting over or questioning your integrity. It's about going graduate-level in one of the most important leadership competencies of our time.

The leaders who win the next decade aren't learning trust from scratch - they're the ones already committed to trust who are willing to master it at a whole new level of depth and strategy.

That's what this article is about.

Section 1: The External Cost - It's Costing More to Get a Customer or a Donor

Let's start with a number that should stop you cold.

According to a 2024 PwC Trust Survey, 90% of executives believe their customers highly trust their company. The actual number of customers who say they do? 30%. That's a 60-point gap between what leaders believe and what's actually true in the marketplace.

And if you're thinking, "That's probably the big guys, not me," you're likely right that you're more trusted than Amazon or a Wall Street bank. But the gap between what you think your trust level is and what it actually is? That's probably alive and well in your company too.

This matters because trust is now a direct line item in your customer acquisition costs, even if it doesn't show up that way on your P&L.

When people feel uncertain, the question they're asking isn't "what's the best option?" It's "who can I trust?" And when they can't answer that clearly, they often don't decide at all, or they stay where they are, not because it's the right choice, but because it's the known one.

People will stick with a familiar problem over an unfamiliar solution they're not sure about.

If you haven't given your prospective customers signals that are clear enough and strong enough to cut through that uncertainty, their inaction isn't indifference. It's a trust gap you haven't yet closed.

Your prospective customers have been burned. They've bought the product that promised to change everything and didn't. They've hired the vendor who guaranteed results and disappeared. They've tried the service that sounded exactly like what they needed and walked away disappointed.

So now, before they say yes to you, even if you're the real deal, they need more time, more proof, more touchpoints, and more reassurance than they ever did before.

That's not a sales problem. That's a trust deficit in the marketplace that you are paying to overcome, whether you know it or not.

For nonprofits, the dynamic is slightly different but equally real. Donors aren't just asking whether they believe in your mission. They're asking whether they believe in you; whether their money will actually be used the way you say it will.

In a Post-Trust Era, even well-run organizations with strong track records are working harder to earn what used to come more naturally.

The marketplace is not going to get less noisy. The broken promises from other companies are not going away. The only variable you control is how deliberately and strategically you build trust with the people you're trying to reach.

Section 2: The Internal Cost - Distrust Inside Your Company Is Quietly Killing Performance

The external cost is the one founders feel most visibly. The internal cost is the one doing the quieter, deeper damage.

Gallup reported in 2023 that only 21% of U.S. employees strongly agree they trust their organization's leadership.

Read that again. One in five.

Which means if you have 20 employees, statistically, only about four of them deeply trust the direction you're setting and the decisions you're making. The other sixteen are operating with some combination of uncertainty, skepticism, or quiet disengagement, and that shows up every single day in the speed of your organization, the quality of decisions being made, and the initiative people bring - or don't bring - to their work.

Finding people you can genuinely trust with complexity is getting harder. It's not primarily a question of honesty or ethics; most people aren't trying to steal from you or lie to you.

The deeper question is whether you can trust someone with a hard judgment call, a difficult client situation, or a decision that has real consequences. That kind of trustworthiness - the kind that shows up under pressure - is rarer than it used to be, and every founder who has been in business for more than a decade knows it.

But there's another dimension of internal trust that doesn't get talked about enough, and it's the one that lives closest to home: your own.

We’re living and leading in what researchers call a VUCA world - volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The signals are noisier than they've ever been. The feedback loops on major decisions are longer.

Ted Koppel - one of the most respected journalists in American history (and if you're not sure who Ted Koppel is, he was a news anchor and reporter for over 60 years, the most honored journalist in ABC News history, winner of 43 Emmy Awards, 12 DuPont Columbia Awards, and 8 Peabody Awards, needless to say, he was kind of a big deal; and if you do know who Ted Koppel is, you already know why this matters) - said in a recent interview that he now sources from roughly 20 different outlets just to try to piece together what's actually happening in the world.

If Ted Koppel is struggling to get a clear read on reality, what does that mean for the rest of us - especially those of us running companies and managing people at the same time?

What this creates for leaders isn't a lack of confidence exactly. You still have your instincts. You still have your experience. You still form opinions and make calls.

But there's a new layer of uncertainty underneath the decision that wasn't there ten or fifteen years ago. You make a strategic move and you genuinely don't know - not just whether it will work, but whether you'll even be able to tell if it's working for another 12 to 18 months. The world shifts again before the last decision has had time to prove itself.

That's not weakness. That's the honest experience of leading well in a complex world.

But it is a new kind of pressure on your inner game, and it's one that most leaders are carrying quietly and alone.

Section 3: The Opportunity - Leaders Who Build Trust as a Skill Will Win the Next Decade

Here's where the story turns.

Gallup's research shows that U.S. confidence in big business currently sits at just 16%. Confidence in small business? 70%. That's a 54-point structural trust premium that you, as a founder or owner of a growing company, already carry into every room you walk into.

Your prospective customers, your potential employees, your community are already more inclined to trust you than they are to trust the Fortune 500. That's not nothing. That's a genuine competitive advantage that most small and mid-size business owners have never consciously leveraged.

But here's the critical question: are you building on that advantage deliberately, or are you just hoping it holds?

Because the leaders who will truly win in a Post-Trust Era aren't the ones who are passively trustworthy. They're the ones who treat trust as a leadership competency; something to be studied, developed, and practiced with the same intentionality they bring to their financials or their sales strategy.

Trust at this level isn't just about keeping your word or having good values, though those are the foundation. It's about:

Understanding how trust is built and broken in complex organizations.
Knowing how to rebuild it when it cracks.
Developing the kind of self-awareness that closes the gap between how trusted you think you are and how trusted you actually are - that 60-point gap that is costing companies real money right now.

This is exactly where great leadership development and executive coaching become not a luxury but a strategic investment.

The leaders who are winning aren't just good people with good intentions. They are people who have committed to growing their inner game with the same rigor they bring to their business strategy.

A great coach doesn't tell you to trust yourself more. They help you see what you can't see - the blind spots in how you're showing up, the gaps between your intent and your impact, and the specific places where trust is leaking inside your organization and out.

The most valuable thing a coach gave me wasn't a framework. It was an honest mirror.

In a world where complexity is accelerating and the cost of distrust is rising, the leaders who invest in becoming masterful at building trust - internally with their teams and externally in the marketplace - will have an advantage that compounds over time. Their people will perform better, stay longer, and bring more of themselves to the work. Their customers will return, refer, and require less convincing. Their organizations will move faster because trust, as Stephen Covey observed, is the hidden multiplier of speed and cost.

Conclusion: The Invitation

We are not going back to a high-trust world by default. The erosion is real, the data is clear, and waiting for the culture to sort itself out is not a strategy.

But you are not starting from zero. You never were.

You've already built something worth trusting. You've already proven, over years of showing up and doing what you said you would do, that you are the kind of leader and the kind of company worth believing in. That foundation is real.

What the Post-Trust Era is asking of you now is to go deeper. To grow from a leader who is naturally trustworthy into one who builds trust intentionally, strategically, and with greater self awareness. To close the gap between how you see yourself and how your employees and customers actually experience you. To develop your inner game with the same seriousness you've always brought to your business.

The leaders who win the next decade aren't learning trust from scratch - they're the ones already committed to trust who are willing to master it at a whole new level of depth and strategy.

That's the invitation. And it starts with being honest about where the gaps are.

If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.

Until next time,

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

And God bless,

Michael

The Hidden Cycle Reshaping Your Business

michael@halfabubbleout.com (Michael Redman) — Sat, 02 May 2026 14:00:00 GMT

ISSUE #019 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

Welcome back.

Do you ever feel like what people call random isn’t really random… and that history seems to repeat itself—but we don’t quite see the pattern while we’re in it?

There’s a pattern in history that shows up every 80 to 100 years, and it has a lot to say about what’s happening in our world right now.

And it’s not theoretical. It’s history, and it can help your leadership and your business right away.

Over the next three weeks, I want to do something a little different. Instead of focusing on one isolated leadership idea, we’re going to zoom out and look at a different mega trend each week.

Because there are bigger forces at play right now. Forces that are shaping your business, your team, and your decisions whether you’re paying attention to them or not.

This week, I’ll start with the first of three major trends.

And I don’t say this lightly:

If you miss what’s happening underneath the surface right now, you’ll keep trying to lead today’s world with yesterday’s assumptions.

Let’s Put This In Context.

By the 1840s, the Industrial Revolution was reshaping everything. Moving economies from farms to factories almost overnight.

Then in the 1940’s, the world was coming out of World War II. Entire industries were rebuilt, global power shifted, and millions of people had to relearn how to live and work.

It felt like a fresh start.

Now, eighty years later… we’re in another kind of reset.

Not identical. But familiar in a deeper way.

Because throughout history, there’s been a pattern, an 80 to 100-year cycle that quietly reshapes economies, institutions, leadership, and culture.

Most people don’t see it while they’re in it.

But it explains why certain seasons feel stable… and others feel like everything is shifting at once.

We’re in one of those shifting seasons right now.

What This Looks Like Right Now

Before we talk about the cycle itself, let’s talk about what you’re probably already experiencing.

Because this isn’t theoretical.

It’s showing up in your business, your team, and in your own leadership in ways that are hard to fully explain, but easy to feel.

Things that used to work don’t seem to work the same way anymore. Strategies that felt solid a few years ago now feel like they have a shorter shelf life than you expected.

In fact, one of my friends who has owned a successful marketing firm for over 30 years, stopped me at Costco the other day.

We were just catching up, talking about business, life… the usual.

And at one point he paused and said,
“You know what? Business is going okay… but it’s just a lot harder to make a buck now than it used to be.”

He’s not failing. He’s not doing anything wrong.

But something has shifted.

And if you’ve been leading for any length of time, you’ve probably felt it too.

It’s not just that things are changing. It’s that they’re changing faster, and with more moving parts than we’re used to managing.

You have more variables to consider. More consequences to think through. And less certainty about which decisions will actually work out the way you expect.

At the same time, the pace hasn’t slowed down, it’s accelerated.

Technology is evolving in real time; faster than most people can keep up with. AI isn’t coming someday… it’s already reshaping how work gets done today, how value is created, and what roles even matter anymore.

And underneath all of that, your people feel it too.

There’s more uncertainty in the room. More quiet pressure. More questions that don’t have clean answers yet.

And whether it’s said out loud or not, they’re looking to you for something steady.

Let’s identify what’s actually going on here.

When volatility and complexity increase, it drives uncertainty and ambiguity about what’s actually going to work.

And when that happens, the old playbooks start to break.

The reality is, what got you here won’t get you there. Not in a season like this.

Leadership is getting more complex… whether we’re ready for it or not.

The 80-100 - Year Cycle (Explained Simply)

So what is this cycle we’re talking about?

At a high level, there’s a pattern that tends to show up about every 80 to 100 years.

Here’s what happens.

Every one of these cycles starts with a generation of people going through a period where everything gets disrupted.

Think about my grandparents’ generation.

They lived through the Great Depression… and then World War II.

The economy collapsed. The world went to war. And when it was over, people had to figure out how to rebuild almost everything. How to work, how to lead, how to organize life again.

Out of that kind of disruption, new systems get built. New institutions. New ways of doing business. New ways of leading.

And for a while, those systems work really well.

The 1950s are a good example.

The world settled down. Families were building their lives again, businesses were growing, and there was a sense that things just worked the way they were supposed to.

The building of suburbia is a great example of that. Rows of similar houses, driveways, lawns, and neighborhoods that all looked and felt the same. It was efficient, structured, and orderly.

Things made sense.

But over time, things started to shift.

By the 1960s and 70s, they started to feel more social tension. Culture’s changing. Expectations changing. And life just kept getting more complex, and less predictable.

Everything was still working… but you could tell something’s different.

And then you move into the decades after that.

Growth, expansion, technology, globalization.

For many of us, that’s the world we grew up in. A world where things weren’t perfect, but they were understandable. You could make decisions and feel like you had a decent shot at being right.

Until you couldn’t.

Because eventually, the system reaches a point where it doesn’t hold together the same way anymore. And another period of disruption begins.

That’s the cycle.

It’s not exact. It doesn’t run on a perfect clock. But it happens often enough that when you step back… you start to see it.

And that matters for two reasons.

First, it helps you understand where you are.

It gives you context for what you’re experiencing right now—why things feel more unstable, more complex, and harder to predict than they used to.

Second, it becomes a tool.

A way to step back and get perspective.

Because when you can see the pattern, you’re not just reacting to what’s in front of you. You’ve got a little distance. A little clarity.

It changes how you think, how you make decisions, and how you look at your team and your business.

You start asking better questions. You start thinking longer-term. You start leading with more intention instead of just reacting to pressure.

And this is where it matters for you as a leader.

Because when you’re inside one of these shifts, it doesn’t feel like a “cycle.”

It just feels like things aren’t working the way they used to.

It feels like more pressure. More uncertainty. More complexity without a clear playbook.

But when you understand the larger 80-100 year cycle, something shifts.

You stop thinking, “This is just a tough season.”

And you start recognizing it as a transition—

a major transition… a once-in-a-hundred-years kind of transition.

From one way of operating… to another.

That doesn’t make it easier.

But it does make it clearer.

It gives you context.

It’s like going from a flat, 2D picture to suddenly seeing the whole thing in 3D.

You’re not just reacting anymore. You can actually see what’s happening.

And that changes how you lead.

Because leaders who can see the shift make different decisions. They invest differently. They build differently. They lead differently, not because they’re guessing better, but because they understand the season they’re in.

And by the way—

That's what wisdom is.

It’s really about making the right decisions based on the season you’re in.

What This Means Going Forward

So what does this actually mean for you?

If we’re in one of these major transitions, then two shifts are happening at the same time.

The first is external.

The world itself is changing faster than most people are prepared for.

We’re already seeing it.

AI isn’t something coming five years from now. It’s already reshaping how work gets done today.

What used to take hours now takes minutes. What used to require a team can now be done by one person with the right tools.

Entire roles are shifting. Entire industries are being redefined in real time.

And this is where most people underestimate what’s happening.

They think this is just another wave of technology.

It’s not.

This is exponential.

Which means the pace of change doesn’t just increase… it accelerates.

The rules didn’t disappear… they just stopped working the same way.

And that creates a gap between how fast the world is changing and how fast people are adapting.

The second shift happening at the same time is an internal shift. If the world is getting more complex, then leadership has to get more complex too.

In a world like this, where things are moving faster and less predictably, you don’t always have the luxury of waiting until everything is clear. The window to make decisions is often shorter than you want it to be. And the answer isn’t to try and slow everything down. You can’t.

The answer is to grow your capacity. To think at a higher level, to handle more complexity, and to see more, faster, and more clearly. Because when your capacity grows, you don’t need as much time to get to clarity. You can move faster, without becoming reactive.

That’s what this season demands: leaders who are stretching how they think, how they see systems, and how they make sense of what’s happening around them. The goal isn’t to avoid complexity. It’s to become the kind of leader who can handle it.

This means something most people don’t like: you don’t get the luxury of clarity first. You have to lead without it.

That doesn’t mean you wait. It means you make the best decision you can with what you have and move forward.

Over time, the goal isn’t to eliminate that tension. It’s to get better at navigating it—to think more clearly and decide more wisely, even when things aren’t fully clear.

Because in a season like this, that’s the job.

Leading Through a Transition

This is why understanding the cycle matters.

Because this isn’t just a hard season. It’s not just a tough market or a strange moment in business.

You’re leading through a transition, a shift that only happens every 80 to 100 years.

The kind of shift that reshapes how people work, how businesses operate, and how leadership actually functions.

And whether you realize it or not, you’re already in it.

So the question becomes: How are you going to lead in it?

Some leaders try to hold on to what used to work. They preserve it, extend it, protect it, and for a while, that can look like stability.

But over time, it turns into resistance.

And eventually, irrelevance.

Other leaders recognize what’s happening.

They don’t panic. They don’t rush.

Instead, they grow. They adapt. They expand how they think, how they lead, and how they make decisions.

Ultimately, they understand something most people miss:

You don’t move through a transition like this by holding on to the past. You move through it by becoming the kind of leader change requires.

That’s not automatic.

It’s a choice.

And in a once-in-a-hundred-year transition like this, it’s a choice that matters more than most.

So here’s the question:

Are you trying to protect what used to work… or are you becoming the leader this season actually requires?

If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.

Until next time,

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

And God bless,

Michael

Why Some Partnerships Last And Others Slowly Fall Apart

michael@halfabubbleout.com (Michael Redman) — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:00:00 GMT

ISSUE #018 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

Kathryn and I were invited into an upper-division university class last week to talk about marketing and leadership. We spent time talking about principles - things that don't change, even when everything around them does. In a world where people chase tactics and trends, it was refreshing to stay grounded in what actually lasts.

The conversations were good and the questions were thoughtful, but one question at the end stuck with me.

A student asked, "How have you and your wife been able to work together for 23 years?"

It's a question we've heard a lot over the years. Usually it comes with some version of, "I could never do that."

Sometimes it's said jokingly. Sometimes it's said seriously. But underneath it is almost always the same assumption - that working together as a married couple is supposed to be difficult, if not impossible.

What made the question land even more is that this week Kathryn and I are celebrating our 33rd anniversary.

Here's what I've come to believe: most people have it backwards.

They assume marriage makes business partnership harder. In our experience, when you build it right, marriage removes the escape routes that exist in ordinary partnerships. You can't avoid hard conversations indefinitely. You can't quietly disengage without it showing up somewhere else. The accountability structure that feels like pressure is actually an advantage if you're willing to use it.

The same is true in any serious partnership. A co-founder. A business partner. A leadership team that has to make hard calls together.

The reason Kathryn and I have been able to work together this long comes down to a few decisions we've made consistently over time, decisions most people either don't make, or don't make consistently enough for them to matter.

The first decision is this: We make the big decisions together

When it comes to major choices - risk, direction, investments - we decide them together. That means we both own the decision and we both carry the outcome.

There have been times when those decisions were uncomfortable, times when the path forward wasn't obvious, and one of us felt more confident than the other.

In those moments, it would have been easy for one of us to take the lead and the other to defer. That's often what happens in partnerships - one person becomes the driver, the other the passenger.

But going along is not the same as agreeing.

And when one person is driving and the other is just along for the ride, the problem shows up later. If the outcome isn't what you hoped for, the person in the passenger seat has a natural place to put that frustration.

We decided early on not to operate that way. If it's a big decision, we both engage in it. We both wrestle with it. We both agree to it.

If something doesn't work, there's no second-guessing and no blame. There's no, "this was your idea." There's no quiet resentment building because one person feels pulled into something they didn't fully choose.

When decisions aren't truly shared, the consequences aren't either. One person ends up carrying more of the emotional weight, and that imbalance compounds over time.

That's where friction starts - not in the moment, but in the months and years that follow.

You may not like the outcome, but it's hard to resent each other when you chose it together.

This is true in marriage. It's equally true with anyone you're building something with.

The second decision is this: We know our lanes and we stay in them

Over time, we've gotten very clear on each other's strengths. There are areas where Kathryn is stronger, areas where I am stronger, and areas where we're both capable.

The discipline is what happens next. We don't just recognize those strengths, we defer to them. We decide who owns what.

There are things I could do that Kathryn does better. There are things she could do that I do better. And there are plenty of things we could both do reasonably well.

But "reasonably well" isn't the goal. Clarity is.

Early on, we didn't always have that clarity. We both stepped into the same decisions, the same conversations, the same responsibilities. Not out of control, but out of habit or urgency.

An example of that would be how we managed the team. Sometimes Kathryn would ask an employee to do something when they already had an assignment from the person supervising them. She didn’t mean to confuse people, she was just working on a project and she wanted some help and that person was closest to her.

And almost every time, it created friction. Not loud conflict, just subtle tension. A sense that something was slightly off.

Two capable people stepping into the same space doesn't create strength - it creates noise.

It leads to overlap, second-guessing, and unclear accountability. And when ownership isn't clear, everyone feels responsible, and at the same time, no one really is.

That's exhausting. And it's one of the most common things I see in business partnerships and leadership teams - two capable people doing the same job with half the clarity.

We've learned it's better to have one person clearly responsible than two people partially involved.

That doesn't mean we don't communicate. It means when something is owned, it's actually owned.

Respect isn't just recognizing someone's strengths. It's trusting them enough to get out of their way.

The third decision is this: We deal with things when they're small

That's the goal, anyway. Life isn't always that clean, and we don't do it perfectly. But we don't avoid hard conversations, and we try not to let frustration sit for long.

Part of how we do that is simple, but not easy - we give each other the benefit of the doubt.

When something feels off, the first move isn't to react. It's to ask: "Did you mean this, or did you mean that?"

We've both had moments where something was said that didn't land right. The natural response is to interpret quickly and react.

But what you think someone meant is often not what they actually meant.

So we slow it down. We ask for clarity. We make sure we understand what was said, the intent behind it, and the context before deciding how to respond.

Because most frustration doesn't start with bad intent, it starts with misunderstanding.

Part of that is how I choose to see her. I love and respect Kathryn deeply. So when something feels off, my first assumption isn't that she meant something wrong, it's that I'm missing something.

That changes how I respond. It slows me down. It moves me toward understanding instead of reacting.

We also have a simple rule we've tried to live by: don't let the sun set on your anger.

In practice, that means we don't go to bed angry when something needs to be worked through. If something is off, we come back to it and deal with it, even when it would be easier to avoid it.

There have been plenty of nights where that meant staying up longer than we wanted.

Sometimes it meant deciding together that we would come back to it the next day when we weren’t exhausted, but it was a plan, not a “letting it go.”

Because "letting it go" usually just means "letting it sit." And what sits doesn't stay small.

We keep short accounts. We don't let things build into something bigger than they needed to be.

Because most relationships don't break from one big issue, they break from a thousand small ones left unresolved.

I've watched that happen in businesses too. Not from one blowup, but from a hundred small frustrations that nobody wanted to address until they couldn't be ignored anymore.

That student thought they were asking about marriage.

What they were really asking was why some partnerships last and others slowly fall apart.

The disciplines that have kept Kathryn and me working well together for 33 years aren't unique to marriage. Shared decisions. Clear lanes. Short accounts. They apply to any partnership worth building.

The question isn't whether it's possible. It's whether you're willing to operate that way.

Are you building your partnerships this way - or just hoping they hold?

If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.

Until next time,

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

And God bless,

Michael

The Right Room & the Power of Proximity

michael@halfabubbleout.com (Michael Redman) — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:00:00 GMT

ISSUE #017| THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

Last week I spent two days in Cambridge with a small group of experienced business leaders brought together by my friend, Ryan Levesque.

We weren’t there casually. This was a mastermind - an intentional space where each of us came prepared to put our business on the table. One at a time, we each had about 30 minutes in what’s called a “hot seat.”

You present what you’re working on, where you’re headed, what you’re wrestling with. And then the room goes to work - questions, pushback, perspective, insight.

When it’s done well - and this room did it well - you walk away with something rare: focused, intelligent input on your business, your decisions, and your reality.

There’s a reason this idea has been around for centuries. There’s wisdom, and even safety, in a multitude of counsel. Trying to go it alone isn’t just hard. It’s often unwise.

That’s one of the main reasons I was there. Not just to contribute, but to be sharpened.

Because the quality of the questions matters. Good questions don’t just give you answers. They help you see what you couldn’t see on your own.

And over those two days, as we worked through each business, a few things started to stand out. Not theories - observations. Things I heard, saw, and experienced that stuck with me.

So I want to share three of them with you.

1. There’s Still Real Power in Being in the Room

One of the things that stood out to me right away was how much it mattered that we were actually in the room together.

Not on Zoom. Not sending emails back and forth. We were sitting across from each other, listening in real time, fully engaged in the conversation. And it changed things.

In a virtual setting, even with the best intentions, it’s easy to drift. You can turn your camera off, check a message, step away. Someone walks into your office and pulls your attention. It’s not just that your attention drifts - it’s that, over time, it’s almost expected. We’ve all settled into it.

You can be present… without really being present.

That doesn’t happen when you’re in the room.

When someone is in the hot seat, everyone else is sitting there with them - listening, asking questions, taking notes. If you’re not paying attention, it’s obvious. And honestly, it’s a little uncomfortable, because in that setting, it doesn’t just look like distraction.

It looks like you don’t care.

That’s easier to hide on Zoom. There’s no real eye contact. No shared physical space. You’re one small square among many, and it’s easy to fade into the background.

But in the room, even a small shift gets noticed. Where your eyes go matters. Whether you’re engaged is visible. And because of that, the level of presence goes up, not because everyone suddenly became more disciplined, but because the environment demanded it.

And if I’m honest, it wasn’t just the environment. It was the investment.

Everyone in that room had made a decision to be there. Time, energy, money - none of it was insignificant. In a season where time matters more than almost anything, we had all chosen to step away from our businesses to sit in that room together.

That creates something.

There’s an unspoken expectation: this matters. What we’re doing here matters. What you say matters. The questions matter. And you can feel it.

You don’t want to waste the opportunity or other people’s time. You show up ready - not just to talk, but to listen, to think, and to engage. There’s a level of trust in that.

I’m trusting you to take this seriously. And you’re trusting me to do the same.

And that combination - environment and investment - is what changes how people show up.

2. The Right Questions Change Everything

The second thing that stood out to me was the quality of the questions.

Not just the answers, the questions.

When you put your business in front of a room like that, you realize pretty quickly that the real value isn’t just in what people tell you to do. It’s in how they help you see.

Someone asks a question you hadn’t considered. Or comes at your situation from an angle you weren’t looking at. Or presses on something that didn’t quite hold up.

And you feel it.

You feel where your thinking is clear… and where it isn’t.

That happened over and over again.

People weren’t just giving advice. They were asking thoughtful, direct questions that exposed gaps, assumptions, and blind spots - sometimes things you didn’t even realize you were carrying.

And if you were willing to sit with it - if you didn’t rush to defend or explain - it was incredibly helpful.

But there was another layer to it that I didn’t expect.

There were moments where a question exposed something I assumed was a weakness. Something I hadn’t handled perfectly. Something I even felt a little embarrassed to say out loud.

I remember thinking, this is where I’m about to get corrected.

But that’s not what happened.

The response from the room was almost the opposite.

“Look at what you actually did.”
“Look at what you learned.”
“Look at how that positioned you.”

What I thought was a weakness… wasn’t.

It was a strength I hadn’t seen clearly.

And it wasn’t just me. That dynamic played out again and again with the others.

And it shifted something for me.

I realized that while we can think we are strong in an area when we really aren't the opposite is also true.

We can sometimes think we have a weakness and yet it turns out that it’s a strength.

And sitting there, it became clear:

Most leaders can think well when they’re asked the right questions. The problem is, we don’t always ask them.

We move fast. We make decisions. We push forward. But we don’t always stop long enough to ask, or be asked, the kinds of questions that sharpen our thinking.

So we end up solving the wrong problems - or solving the right problems in the wrong way - not because we’re incapable, but because we’re working from an incomplete picture.

And that’s hard to fix on your own.

It’s even harder if you’re not around people who are willing to ask you the kind of questions that make you stop, think, and see more clearly.

3. You Don’t Hit a Strategy Ceiling - You Hit a Personal One

The third thing that stood out to me had less to do with strategy… and more to do with the leader.

As we worked through different businesses, different challenges, different pivots, a pattern started to emerge.

It wasn’t just about what people were doing. It was about how they were handling it.

Some leaders could sit in the tension of not having a clear answer yet. They could take in feedback without reacting. They could hold multiple perspectives at once. They stayed steady, even when things got uncomfortable.

Others struggled more - not because they weren’t capable, but because the pressure showed up in how they thought, how they responded, and the decisions they made.

And what made it stand out even more was this:

These weren’t inexperienced leaders. These were people who had built real businesses, navigated growth, made hard decisions, and in many cases, done it more than once.

And yet, every single person in that room had walked through something significant.

Not just in business.

In life.

Moments they didn’t plan for. Situations they couldn’t control. Outcomes they couldn’t fix.

And you could feel it.

There was a humility in the room. A groundedness. Not a “we’ve got this figured out” kind of confidence - something deeper.

They didn’t believe they were bulletproof. They didn’t act like every problem had a solution.

They had learned, through experience, that some things don’t get solved.

They get endured. They get navigated. They get lived through.

And very few people do that well on their own.

Part of what I was seeing wasn’t just individual strength, it was what happens when you put leaders like that in the right environment, around the right people, over time.

And somehow, that changes you.

It builds something underneath the surface.

Depth. Stability. Roots.

I found myself sitting there more than once thinking, this is a sacred moment.

Not because of anything dramatic, but because of what was present in the room - honesty, humility, perspective, and people who had been through enough to know what actually matters.

And it reminded me:

When things get uncertain… when the ground shifts… when you’re being asked to rethink what you’ve built…

Your business doesn’t just need a better strategy.

It needs a leader who can handle that moment.

Because at some point, every leader runs into something they didn’t plan for, something that doesn’t have a clean answer.

And in that moment, what matters most isn’t what you know.

It’s who you are and whether you’ve built the kind of depth that allows you to stay grounded, think clearly, and keep moving forward.

Because in the end:

Most leaders don’t hit a strategy ceiling. They hit a personal one.

Which means your business will eventually grow to the level your leadership can sustain - and not beyond it.

Closing

I’ve thought about that weekend a lot since I got back.

Not just the ideas. Not just the conversations.

But the feeling of it.

Being in a room where people were fully present, where the questions mattered, where the answers weren’t rushed, and where there was enough honesty and humility to actually see things clearly.

That’s rare.

And it’s easy to underestimate how much that kind of environment shapes us.

Because most of us are moving fast - making decisions, solving problems, trying to keep everything moving forward.

But we don’t always stop long enough to ask:

Are we in the kind of environments that actually make us better?

Are we around people who will challenge how we think and help us see what we can’t see on our own?

Are we developing the kind of depth that allows us to handle what comes next?

Because at some point, it won’t just be about your strategy.

It will be about you and whether you’ve built the kind of leadership that can sustain what you’re trying to grow.

So here’s the question:

Where do you need to change your environment… so you can become the leader your business actually needs?

Until next time,

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

And God bless,

Michael

Are You Aware of the Stress You’re Carrying & What It’s Doing to Your Leadership?

michael@halfabubbleout.com (Michael Redman) — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:00:00 GMT

ISSUE #016| THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

I remember listening for my dad’s footsteps when he came home. Not because I knew I’d done something wrong… but because I didn’t know what version of him was walking through the door.

Some days were fine. Some days weren’t. And you could feel the difference before a word was ever spoken. Your body would tighten. Your guard would go up. You’d brace for what might happen next.

But that wasn’t my only experience growing up.

When I spent time with my grandparents, it was completely different

When my grandfather walked into the room, there was a sense of peace. He was steady. He was present. He enjoyed people. He created an environment where you could relax, where you could try, where you could fail - and it was okay.

You didn’t brace.
You settled.

And I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was experiencing two very different kinds of leadership.

I didn’t have language for it then. But I do now.

That wasn’t about discipline or personality.

It was about presence.

Leaders carry something into every room they walk into, and whether they realize it or not, everyone else feels it.

And in every leader I’ve ever worked with or observed, some version of one or the other is present.

The Real Issue Most Leaders Miss

Most leaders think they’re leading through pressure - the pressure of business, the market, the economy, the team, the decisions, the constant complexity of running a business and a life.

And those pressures are real.

But they’re not the real issue.

In reality, they’re leading from whatever is happening inside them.

Because what’s inside you doesn’t stay inside you.

It becomes the experience of everyone around you.

Because our inner game determines our outer game.

Leadership Is Not Neutral

Leadership is not neutral. It transmits.

People don’t just hear your words, they feel your state. They can feel tension, anxiety, defensiveness, urgency… or calm, clarity, and confidence. Children feel it in their parents. Spouses feel it in each other. Teams feel it in their leaders.

People sense peace - or the lack of it.

Over time, they respond accordingly. They lean in or they shut down. They engage or they withdraw. They trust… or they protect themselves.

What a Non-Anxious Presence Actually Is

For years, we’ve used a phrase to describe the kind of leadership that creates stability instead of tension: a non-anxious presence.

It’s not passivity. It’s not detachment. And it’s not pretending everything is fine.

A non-anxious presence is being fully aware of reality… without being controlled by it.

It’s the ability to stay grounded, clear, and steady, even when things are difficult. You’re aware of the pressure. You feel what’s real. But you’re not driven by it.

And that changes everything.

This Isn’t All or Nothing

It’s important to understand this clearly.

This isn’t an all-or-nothing concept.

Very few leaders are completely reactive all the time. And very few are perfectly calm and steady no matter what happens.

Most leaders live somewhere in the middle.

They’re doing pretty well. Things are stable. They’re leading with a reasonable level of clarity and confidence. And then something happens - a comment, a decision, a challenge they didn’t expect.

A button gets pushed.

And in that moment, they don’t act, they react.

Their emotions move first. Their thinking follows later. And before they’ve had a chance to regain clarity, they’ve already said something, decided something, or set a tone that shifts the entire room.

Most leadership breakdowns don’t come from constant dysfunction.
They come from moments of reactivity.

A Continuum Most Leaders Don’t See

Reactive and creative leadership aren’t two boxes you fall into. They exist on a continuum.

Every leader moves along that spectrum - sometimes daily, sometimes moment to moment.

At one end, leadership is primarily reactive - driven by pressure, fear, control, or the need for approval. At the other end, leadership is primarily creative - grounded in clarity, purpose, and awareness.

But this continuum is not evenly distributed.

Research shows that roughly 80% of leaders operate primarily from a reactive orientation, meaning more often than not, they’re influenced by internal pressure. About 15–20% operate more from a creative orientation, where they’re grounded and intentional more often than reactive. And a very small percentage - around 5% - operate at a higher level of maturity, where reactivity is still something they’re aware of, but it never defines their leadership and rarely rises to the surface in a way that impacts others.

So when we say “most leaders are in between,” we don’t mean evenly spread.

We mean most leaders move along the spectrum, but within a relatively narrow range, not in wide swings. And for most, that range sits more on the reactive side of the spectrum than the creative side.

Where This Shows Up

Some leaders carry a low-level tension most of the time - slightly defensive, slightly on edge, carrying more pressure than they realize. It’s not extreme, but it’s consistent, and over time it becomes the emotional climate of the team.

Others are generally steady and grounded, but get thrown off when something hits a deeper trigger. When that happens, the shift is noticeable. The volatility shows up quickly, and the environment changes with it.

Both patterns matter.

Because in both cases, what’s happening internally is shaping what everyone else experiences externally.

What Actually Changes

The goal isn’t perfection.

The goal is to extend your baseline of peace and strength - longer, steadier stretches that hold under pressure.

Less time being driven by your emotions. More time leading with awareness, clarity, and intention. Less volatility. More stability.

And as that shift happens, your leadership changes.

Your thinking gets clearer. Your decisions improve. Your communication strengthens. Trust builds faster. Conflict becomes more productive. Your team feels safer - and people do their best work in environments where they feel safe.

You also attract different people.

Grounded leaders attract grounded people. Clear leaders attract capable people. Stable leaders build stable organizations.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

This isn’t just about personal growth. It’s about performance.

When a leader operates from internal pressure - even subtly - it impacts everything: decision-making, relationships, execution, and culture. Over time, that pressure spreads.

Emotions are contagious. Negative states spread quickly, but so do calm, confidence, and clarity.

When a leader develops a non-anxious presence, they don’t spread pressure.

They create stability.

And that stability becomes the foundation for everything else to work.

How This Actually Develops

This doesn’t happen by trying harder in the moment.

It happens by doing the work outside the moment.

A non-anxious presence is not a technique. It’s a developed capacity.

It starts with self-awareness by understanding your reactions, triggers, and patterns. It requires a commitment to growth and a decision that you’re not going to stay where you are. It involves doing the deeper internal work of processing what drives your reactions, not just managing the symptoms.

And for most leaders, it requires coaching.

Because it’s difficult to see your own patterns clearly from the inside. It’s hard to read the label from inside the bottle.

Most leaders don’t have an information problem. They have an awareness and application problem.

And this is one of the clearest places where that shows up.

What’s Really at Stake

This isn’t just about your leadership. It’s about your life.

It affects the quality of your relationships, the health of your company, the environment your people experience every day, and the kind of leader you become over time.

Because success without internal stability comes at a cost.

And eventually, that cost shows up somewhere.

The Decision Every Leader Has to Make

At some point, every leader has to decide:

Will I carry pressure into every room…or will I create stability?

Because whether you intend to or not, you are one of the strongest emotional forces in your organization.

Your Turn

What do people experience when you walk into the room?

And more importantly…

What are you doing, intentionally, to become a leader who brings peace, clarity, and strength into every environment you step into?

Until next time,

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

And God bless,

Michael

Why Coaching Accelerates What Hard Work Alone Cannot

michael@halfabubbleout.com (Michael Redman) — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:00:00 GMT

ISSUE #015| THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

Over the last 35 years, I’ve had a front-row seat to something I can’t ignore.

I’ve seen leaders get the help they needed and navigate challenges they didn’t think they could overcome.

And I’ve seen leaders just as capable stay stuck in the same patterns for years.

Same level of effort. Same level of intelligence. Very different outcomes.

I’ve seen some build thriving companies, healthy teams, strong families.

And I’ve seen others lose those same things - not because they didn’t care or lacked ability - but because something underneath it all never changed.

That difference has stayed with me.

Because it raises a hard question: What actually allows a leader to grow?

We’ve never had more access to leadership information - books, podcasts, conferences, frameworks. And yet, a lot of leaders are still stuck.

Not because they aren’t working hard. Not because they don’t care.

But because growth doesn’t come from more information. It comes from what actually changes you.

If you’re reading this, you’re already doing more than most. You’re thinking about your leadership, trying to improve, investing time to grow. And still… there are probably areas where you feel like you should be further along. You know more than you used to, but you’re not always seeing the level of change you expected.

Most leaders don’t have a knowledge problem. They have a blind spot and application problem.

Blind spots aren’t just gaps in knowledge. They can be beliefs you don’t question, patterns you’ve normalized, or weaknesses you’ve learned to work around.

And the tricky thing is, our brain is incredibly good at convincing us we’re seeing the full picture.

It does it with our physical eyesight. Do you know that we all have a blind spot in our eyes, and we don’t even notice it? It’s true. It occurs where the optic nerve leaves the back of the eye.

And our brain does the same thing with how we see ourselves.

For most leaders, there are very few places where they can be fully honest about what’s really going on. Their team reports to them. Their investors may have expectations. Their peers are often competitors. Even at home, the dynamics are different.

So they filter. They manage. They carry it.

And over time, that limits what can actually be seen and addressed.

When I look back on my own life, some of the most meaningful growth I’ve experienced came from people who stepped into my life and helped me see what I couldn’t see on my own.

Mentors. Coaches. Teachers. A Scoutmaster when I was young.

You can’t see yourself clearly from the inside. You don’t always know what matters most right now. And even when you do, you don’t always execute on it consistently.

So you keep learning.

But your leadership only changes incrementally.

A coach stands outside the frame you’re in and helps you see it.

What makes coaching different is the relationship.

There’s a level of trust that develops where a leader can finally say what’s actually true - and you can hear what’s actually true - without it being filtered through politics, hierarchy, or consequence.

Information expands your thinking. Coaching changes your behavior. A book can show you what to do. A coach helps you actually do it.

Books can inform you. Coaching can transform you.

Why coaching accelerates growth

Clarity. Focus. Application.

Clarity - You begin to see what’s actually holding you back - your patterns, your assumptions, your blind spots.

Focus - Instead of trying to improve everything, you work on the one thing that will create the most impact right now.

Application - You don’t just learn, you practice, adjust, and build new habits over time.

That’s where real growth happens.

And when that kind of growth happens, it doesn’t stay contained.

Your team feels it. Your communication shifts. Your decisions get better. Your culture starts to change.

Because leadership always cascades.

There’s also a practical reality here.

The return on coaching isn’t theoretical.

Across thousands of organizations, leadership coaching consistently produces measurable results, often several times the investment.

The research consistently shows that learning alone rarely leads to sustained behavioral change, suggesting only a small percentage of people - often cited around 10 to 15 percent - are genuinely self-aware, even among high performers. Which means most of us are operating with a limited view of what’s actually driving our behavior.

Leaders gain insights, frameworks, even motivation, but without something more, very little of it actually sticks.

When coaching is added, the ability to apply what’s been learned increases significantly, often by several multiples. And more importantly, the change lasts. In some cases, measurable change is still present 12 to 18 months later.

That’s not surprising.

Because when a leader changes, everything changes.

I’ve seen this over and over again.

Leaders who are smart, driven, and committed, who have already built something meaningful, but are stuck on something they can’t quite solve.

It might be culture.
“How do I clean this up without blowing everything up?”

A key employee.
“How do I give them the best chance to succeed and know when it’s time to let them go?”

Or growth.
“How do we actually get to the next level without breaking what’s already working?”

Or just the pressure of it all.

Leaders who say:

“I knew this was hard, but I didn’t know it would be this hard.”

And what’s interesting is, most of the time, they’ve already thought about these problems. Read about them. Talked about them. Tried to work through them on their own.

But they’re still stuck.

Then something shifts. An AHA moment occurs.

They say something out loud they haven’t said before.
They see a pattern they hadn’t seen.
They recognize what’s actually driving the issue.

And once that happens, things start to move.

Decisions get clearer.
Conversations get more direct.
The team responds differently.

Not because they learned something new.

But because they finally saw what was already there.

The outcome? Leaders who are stuck get clarity. Leaders who are scattered get focused. Leaders who are carrying too much alone finally have someone to process with, think with, and grow with.

And over time, they don’t just learn more.

They become different.

Let me say this plainly:

You can read your way into better ideas.

But most people cannot coach themselves into meaningful transformation.

A small percentage can.

Most cannot.

Your leadership matters. The work you’re doing matters. It matters to your family, your team, and the people you serve.

And leadership, done well, doesn’t just produce results.

It produces clarity, traction, and a sense that your effort is actually building something meaningful.

For most leaders, the next level of growth doesn’t come from learning more.

It comes from working with someone who helps you see clearly and change intentionally.

Where are you still trying to grow on your own… when what you really need is someone to help you change?

If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know.

That’s it.

Until next time,
Keep learning.
Keep growing.
And God bless,

- Michael