Exceptional and Exhausted — Newsletter Series #1 On the paradox at the heart of people-pleasing leadership — and what it actually costs. There is a paradox at the heart of exhausted people-pleasing leaders that deserves to be said directly. The people who are best at making everyone...
The Diary of a People-Pleaser — Series #2 On people-pleasing, societal conditioning, and the slow cost of a pattern I mistook for a virtue. Nobody told me the people-pleasing pattern was a problem. Why would they? Everything around me confirmed it was the right way to be....
The Diary of a People-Pleaser — Series 1 This is a people-pleasing director diary. Not the polished version. The Tuesday afternoon version — the one where I write what I actually noticed, what I actually felt, and what I got wrong before I got it right....
The people-pleasing pattern — and the overdelivering it produces — is one of the most reliable routes to early career success. It gets rewarded, promoted, and mistaken for exceptional leadership. Until the point where it becomes the ceiling rather than the foundation. This piece is...
Why People-Pleasing Directors Miss Out on Promotion? In most cases it is not capability. It is not effort. It is not even visibility, although that is usually part of the conversation. It is that the very strategy that built the career, working harder than everyone else,...