Who Pays the Price

Who Pays the Price

At least three times during my 10 years leading a bioscience association, I scheduled our AGM and our annual gala within ten days of each other.

Every time, it made sense on paper. The right venue became available. The board dates aligned. The membership would turn out. Good intentions, every single one.

And every time, we spent two weeks running like crazy people.

When we were in the ugly middle of it, I would look at the calendar, look at my team, and say out loud: who is the idiot who scheduled this?

They always knew the answer. So did I.

I was trying to serve everyone. The board needed the AGM at a specific point in the fiscal year. The membership showed up better in certain seasons. The venue had one opening and we took it. Every decision had a reason. Every reason felt legitimate in the moment.

What I wasn't asking was the bigger question: who is going to carry this?

Not me. I was managing the decisions. My team was absorbing the consequences.

During those ten-day stretches, reports that were supposed to go out by end of day went out a few hours late. Sometimes the next morning. To anyone on the outside that might have seemed minor. To my team it wasn't. They had standards. High ones. Ones I had helped build. And the schedule I had created made those standards impossible to meet.

They didn't complain. Not really. They just kept trying to hit the bar anyway. And quietly, every time they couldn't, it cost them something.

That's the part I didn't see clearly enough until later.

Wanting to be all things to all people sounds like generosity. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it is just an inability to disappoint anyone in the room at the expense of the people who aren't in the room when the decision gets made.

Your board is in the room. Your membership is in the room. The venue availability is in the room.

Your team is not in the room. Their capacity is not in the room. The cost of saying yes is not in the room. But they should be.

That's the gap. And it's a gap leaders create more often than we admit.

Eventually we moved the gala to the spring. Less competition for attention, more breathing room for the team, better conditions all around.

It was the right call. My team would tell you it took too long for that lesson to take effect.

And they would be right.

If this resonated, I want you to know this isn't just where my thinking lives. It's where my work lives too.

This fall I'm running two workshops designed around exactly this idea, that awareness is the beginning, not the end. One is for leaders ready to shift from managing their teams to coaching them. The other is for emerging leaders who want to build their self-awareness and communication skills before the stakes get higher.‍

You can find them at 321tippingpoint.com. Take a look.

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