Back in October of 2023, I was going through what some would call a “spiritual awakening.” Something I can only describe as being awake during surgery.

I had just spent 12 months cleaning up our business, which is a cute way of saying I spent a year being held accountable to every mistake I’d made, every good decision I’d executed poorly, and every problem I’d ignored until I couldn’t anymore.

Then I packed up my life and moved to another country. Somewhere between rebuilding my life and figuring out who I was on the other side of it, I found out I might owe the IRS $500,000 in back taxes.

Awesome.

So, things were going well.

But despite feeling like I had been redlining for months, none of that was the part I lost sleep over.

It was having to look at the trail of decisions I had made as a leader and reckon with the fact that some of them had hurt people.

I became completely consumed by everything I had gotten wrong: the customers we disappointed, the calls I should have made differently, the burnout the team around me experienced, and, even more painfully, the pedestals I fell off that I didn't even know people had put me on.

I became so fixated on understanding my role in every bad outcome that eventually, I found a way to make myself responsible for all of them. Every conflict became something I should have prevented, every mistake something I should have caught, and every person I disappointed someone I should have done better by.

At first, I thought this was accountability. I thought this level of self-examination was what good leaders did—and to some extent, it is.

But there's a point where taking responsibility for your part insidiously mutates into taking responsibility for the whole damn thing. Whatever that line is, I crossed it.

I got so lost in the sauce of “taking responsibility” that I stopped distributing responsibility accurately.

I defaulted to looking at myself first. If someone wasn't performing, had I trained them well enough? If a standard wasn't being met, had I communicated it clearly enough? If something fell through the cracks, what hole in the process had I failed to catch?

And when someone failed to communicate, do their job effectively, or take action, I became far more concerned with where I had failed them than where they had failed to take responsibility for themselves.

Instead of making me a better leader, it damn near disabled me from leading at all.

As leaders, we're told to take responsibility. Go first. Look at yourself before you point the finger. If something happens under your leadership, assume it's your fault.

And for the most part, I agree. It's advice that has made me a better leader.

But without context, it's also advice that can completely fuck with your understanding of where your responsibility ends and another adult's begins.

Because take it literally enough and you'll convince yourself that if you could just communicate better, lead better, listen better, anticipate more, become more self-aware and make fewer mistakes, you could create an environment where nobody around you would ever have a legitimate reason to feel disappointed, misunderstood, uncomfortable, or unsafe.

In other words, you'll convince yourself that if you become good enough at leadership, you can somehow become fucking perfect.

And when perfection becomes the standard, every negative experience another person has becomes evidence that you failed.

They didn't speak up? You hadn't made it safe enough. They misunderstood you? You hadn't communicated clearly enough. They didn't meet the expectation? You hadn't set it clearly enough. They avoided the difficult conversation? You hadn't created enough space for it.

Follow that logic far enough and there is no longer another adult in the equation. Their agency disappears entirely while your responsibility becomes infinite.

A leader is responsible for creating the best conditions they reasonably can for people to speak, disagree, contribute, make mistakes, tell the truth and succeed.

They are not responsible for what another adult chooses to do inside those conditions.

And those conditions will never be perfect because you will never be perfect.

You will communicate something poorly. You'll have a bad reaction. You'll miss something you should have caught. Someone will misunderstand you. Someone will disagree with you. Someone will feel uncomfortable with a decision you've made. Someone will be disappointed in you despite your best efforts.

Welcome to being in relationship with other human beings.

Your job is not to eliminate every possible reason another person might experience discomfort. Your job is to do your part well.

Make honesty safe. Invite disagreement. Ask for feedback. Communicate your expectations. Own your mistakes. Repair what you've actually broken.

Then let other adults be responsible for theirs.

Because if another adult requires you to create perfect conditions before they can speak honestly, exercise agency, or take responsibility for themselves...

What are we doing here?

You were never going to be able to create that for them anyway.

You can make the door safe to walk through. You cannot make it perfect enough that someone will finally choose to walk through it. And you sure as hell cannot walk through it for them.

None of this absolves you from getting exceptionally good at what is yours to own.

And as a leader, a massive part of that is how you communicate.

Finding the words when the conversation matters. Saying what you mean clearly. Setting expectations before you're pissed they weren't met. Navigating disagreement without making a bigger mess trying to clean it up.

You can't control what another person does with what you say. You can control how well you learn to say it.

And that's exactly what Well Said is about.

It's our first-ever live communication workshop, built to help you find the words, say what you mean clearly, and handle the conversations that actually matter.

We’ll be capping the number of spots when registration opens. If you want to be one of the first to know when it does, join the Well Said waitlist here.