You complain that your team won’t take initiative. Then someone finally does, and you pick it apart in front of the whole room.
You hate being interrupted all day. You also answer every single Slack ping the second it lands.
Same pattern. Different leader. This one’s for the moment you catch yourself building the case against your team, again.
Every leader does this, Dawn included. Something breaks, and the mind goes straight to how do I fix them. They don’t take ownership. They’re too sensitive. They won’t decide.
Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes the staffing problem is real. But after 24 years of this work, Dawn keeps watching the same thing happen. The leader in the room is quietly training the exact behavior she can’t stand. Answer every ping instantly, and you’ve taught your team that interrupting works. Pick apart the one time someone showed initiative, and you’ve taught everyone the safe move is to wait and ask.
This isn’t an invitation to spiral into what’s wrong with me. That’s self-flagellation, not leadership. It’s an invitation to get curious about your own hand in the pattern before you finish the complaint.
In This Episode
- Why the leader who hates being interrupted might be training her team to interrupt her
- The founder who wanted initiative, as long as it looked exactly like her own
- One question to ask yourself mid-complaint, before you decide your team is the whole problem
The Tool
Before you finish your next complaint about someone on your team, ask yourself this:
What am I doing, allowing, rewarding, or avoiding that might be helping this situation continue?
Four verbs. That’s the whole tool. Save it. Screenshot it. Ask it out loud in your next one-on-one, or just to yourself in the shower.
Try This This Week
Next time you catch yourself mid-complaint about someone on your team, stop before you finish the sentence. Run the four verbs. Doing, allowing, rewarding, avoiding. Pick the one that’s true. Write down what you notice.
Resources
- Leadership and Self-Deception (Arbinger Institute) — the book that shaped how Dawn thinks about this exact blind spot, for anyone who wants to go deeper on how leaders collude with the behavior they can’t stand.
- Work with Dawn: Free Range Thinking, Inc. — if the four-verb question surfaced something worth working through with a coach.
Related Episode
- 207 | Why Trying to Be a “Good Leader” Won’t Help You Lead Better and the 4 Questions That Will
- 203 | The Bottleneck Isn’t Your Team. It’s What You Haven’t Been Willing to Say Out Loud
- 206 | Why “If I Don’t Do It, Nobody Will” Is Hurting Your Leadership
- 198 | You Don’t Have a Burnout Problem. You Have a Dependency Problem
- 191 | Why Smart Founders Still Answer 11 PM Calls: The Hidden System Failure Making You the Bottleneck
Send this episode to a leader you know who’s white-knuckling the same complaint about her team right now, and let her have the same fifteen minutes of (uncomfortable) growth.
Chapters:
- [00:00] The Jackass in the Room Might Be You
- [00:01] The Complaint Every Leader Makes, Including Dawn
- [00:02] Two Stories: The Interrupter and the Initiative Killer
- [00:03] Your Team’s Behavior Is Feedback, Not the Verdict
- [00:05] The Four-Verb Question That Changes Everything
You hate being interrupted all day, and you answer every Slack ping the second it lands. That’s not a coincidence. That’s training.
