Why I care about the “why”.
My first boss out of college was brilliant. She was also passionate about two things: telling people what to do, and making sure every cell in her spreadsheets was exactly the same size. Resizing those cells was my entire job for six months. I never found out why.
She was good at giving directions. She was terrible at explaining how her directions connected to the goal. That’s when I learned that leaders who skip the “why” make failure more likely for everyone around them.
Two decades later, after leading teams on high-visibility, no-fail missions, I’ve seen the same pattern from every side. Good people get hired into the wrong seats. Teams stop doing the right thing because they keep getting punished for it. Restructures get used to avoid one honest conversation.
None of that is fixed by gut feel. It’s fixed by understanding how people actually behave, especially under pressure, and designing around it. That’s what I do now, using Hogan assessments, team diagnostics and the tradecraft I learned in intelligence work.
I was raised on the plains of South Dakota and live in Maryland. I’m a published author, a martial artist, a tabletop gamer and a father of five.
