“What if my best people simply leave?”
A few days ago, I was coaching the head of a country organization. She leads a commercially driven business with ambitious people who want to serve customers, grow the business and get things done.
But too often, headquarters makes their lives harder: bureaucracy, poor processes, slow decisions, functions that create obstacles instead of removing them.
Her people see what could be possible — and how much energy they waste fighting things that shouldn’t be this difficult.
I listened for quite a while. Then I said:
Stop making this sound better than it is.
Some things are seriously dysfunctional. Your people know that. Calling it a “challenging environment” doesn’t reassure them. It tells them you are unwilling to name what everyone can see.
Leadership sometimes begins with telling people the truth.
This is where we are. This isn’t good enough. It will take time to change. And getting through this will demand something from us.
We talk a lot about empathy in leadership. Rightly so. But the longer I work with leaders, the more convinced I am that protecting people from uncomfortable reality is not empathy. It is the opposite of taking them seriously.
Real transformation requires both urgency and agency. Threat alone creates defensiveness or cynicism.
Urgency without agency creates helplessness. Vision without reality creates cynicism.
So I asked her:
What if the adversity itself became part of your vision?
Not: Headquarters will fix everything. Not: Everything will be fine.
But:
We know what we are up against. We will fight to change what needs changing. But we will not wait for the system to become perfect before we become excellent.
Research on collective efficacy shows that people persist differently when they believe their actions, together, can make a difference.
That is not optimism. It is agency.
Churchill understood this in 1940. He did not create resolve by minimizing the threat. He named its gravity — and connected it with what people could do together.
The circumstances didn’t improve. What changed was the question:
Who will we be in the face of them?
Now look at your own organization.
What are your people already seeing that you are still trying to make sound better?
Maybe you know exactly what it is.
The conversation you keep postponing. The problem everyone sees but nobody names. The uncomfortable truth you keep packaging into acceptable language.
What would change if you simply said it?
Naming reality is only half the job.
Can you then give people a reason to believe that what they do next still matters?
Leadership is looking at reality without blinking — and creating the conviction that you can still shape what happens next.
Tell people the truth. Then give them a reason to believe they can do something about it.