Ten months inside a $300M consumer business taught me—or confirmed—more than I expected. Here's what stuck.

Change is hard

It's one thing to say you want change. It's another thing to be what changes.

When a CEO tells me the organization "doesn't get" their vision, my first question is no longer about the organization. It's this: how much are you willing to change?

I learned this as a young lieutenant. I went to my company commander to complain that a subordinate hadn't done what I ordered. He smiled and asked me one question. Were the orders as clear as you think they were?

They weren't.

Leadership is all about YOU—but not the way some leaders think it is

It's about how YOU communicate. How much YOU actually listen, and hear where people struggle rather than where you assume they struggle. How much YOU truly delegate, versus holding people accountable for decisions YOU made for them, on a timeline YOU set, without YOU allocating the resources to deliver.

Most people will climb Everest if you prepare them for it

They won't all summit. But they'll try hard, and they'll give you everything they have.

What people won't do is climb Everest in flip-flops, a t-shirt and shorts. And they're right not to.

If you can't see that, the problem isn't the team. You'll be permanently disappointed, because your expectations are disconnected from reality. Saying so isn't a lack of ambition. It's realism.

Worse, nobody buys in. People spend their energy covering themselves, because they know the target is impossible and they'd rather not lose their job over the belief that having a vision and talking about it is enough to make it happen.

So yes, it's all about you

How you build consensus behind goals that are ambitious and achievable. How you make clear that the success will be theirs and the failure yours. How you welcome doubt and hard questions.

How you show up in a better mood than you actually are, because leading and inspiring is the job.

Nobody pays a C-level salary to solve manager-level problems. Your job is to take the complex, ugly stuff, and to make sure it comes up as rarely as possible.

And it is mostly about how you show up when things break. Your team needs to know that when it gets bad, you will step in and steer them through the storm, and do it with a smile.

If none of this resonates and you're in a leadership role, we think about leadership differently. That's fine. I like my way better. :-)