Author: Team Simon

Nobody Told You This Was Destroying Your Team’s Trust

Posted on July 20, 2026May 22, 2026 by Team Simon

We don’t lose our team’s trust in one big moment. We lose it in the quiet ones. The decision we made without explaining why. The direction we changed without context. The “no” we gave without a reason.

Here’s the thing most of us were never told: our team has no access to our intentions. They only have access to our behavior. So no matter how much we care, no matter how solid our reasoning, the only thing that actually builds trust is what we do and what we say in the moment.

When we go silent, our team fills in the blank. And the story they write is almost never generous. Silence reads as secrecy. A “no” without explanation reads as “your input doesn’t matter here.”

The effects of low trust in leadership are profound. Paul Zak’s research at Claremont Graduate University found that employees at high-trust organizations report 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, and 76% more engagement than those at low-trust companies. The single biggest driver of that trust? Transparency from leaders about direction and reasoning. Not annual town halls. Not a values poster in the break room. The small, consistent habit of explaining our thinking.

Our team’s nervous system is running a calculation we can’t see. Neuroscientist David Rock’s SCARF model identifies certainty as one of five core social needs the brain monitors constantly. When certainty disappears, the brain treats it like a physical threat. Performance drops. Collaboration shrinks. People stop contributing fully because some part of them is busy scanning for danger.

We can fix this. And it costs almost nothing.

We narrate our thinking in real time, especially when the answer is no. We don’t need a lengthy speech or a formal explanation. Something as simple as: “Here’s the context I’m weighing, the trade I’m making, and what I’m protecting for the long game.” That’s it. The team may not love the decision. But they understand it. And understanding is where trust begins.

The moments that matter most are the ones that feel least significant. The quick pivot in a team meeting. The project that quietly gets shelved. The hire that doesn’t happen. These are exactly the moments where one sentence of honest context transforms “what is going on here?” into “okay, I see it.”

The leaders who build the deepest trust aren’t always the ones who make the best decisions. They’re the ones whose teams always understand why.

Leadership takeaway: Before your next team meeting, think of one decision you’ve made recently without explaining your reasoning. Find 60 seconds to share the context. One sentence. Offered consistently. That’s the smallest move with the largest return.

The Leadership Habit That’s Making Your Whole Team Worse at Their Jobs

Posted on July 13, 2026May 22, 2026 by Team Simon

Most of us were taught a version of leadership that looks like this: stay steady, stay certain, always appear to be one step ahead. Project confidence even when we’re unsure. Show strength especially when we’re not. Because if the leader looks uncertain, everyone else will panic.

It’s understandable advice. And it quietly does a lot of damage.

When we only ever show certainty, we send an unspoken message that travels fast: uncertainty is not acceptable here. And when uncertainty is not acceptable at the top, it doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. People stop admitting what they don’t know. They stop asking for the help they need. They start managing appearances instead of solving problems, performing competence rather than building it.

We think we’re creating confidence. We’re actually teaching people to hide.

Amy Edmondson’s decades of research on psychological safety show consistently that the single most powerful thing a leader can do to encourage honest, high-quality thinking from their team is to model what she calls “leader inclusiveness.” That means visibly demonstrating that not knowing something is not only acceptable but expected. Teams where leaders ask genuine questions, acknowledge their own gaps, and openly request input consistently outperform those where leaders perform certainty.

A 2021 study in the Academy of Management Journal found that when leaders expressed uncertainty and asked for input rather than projecting false confidence, team members reported significantly higher engagement, were more likely to raise concerns proactively, and generated more creative solutions to complex problems. The act of the leader not knowing, offered with composure, unlocked thinking that the performance of confidence had been suppressing.

Composure is the key word here. This isn’t about falling apart in front of our team. It’s about saying, calmly and clearly: “I don’t know how to solve this. I need your help.” That sentence, delivered steadily, does something remarkable. It signals that not knowing is survivable here. That asking for help is a sign of good judgment, not weakness. And when people believe that, they start telling the truth about what they actually don’t know, which is the only way hard problems ever get solved together.

There’s a practical dimension worth naming, too. When we always have the answer, our team stops developing theirs. They bring us problems because they’ve learned we’ll solve them. Over time, the thinking that should be distributed across the team concentrates in us, which is both a bottleneck and a fragility. Research by Anita Williams Woolley at Carnegie Mellon found that the teams with the highest collective intelligence weren’t the ones with the smartest leaders. They were the teams where thinking, questioning, and uncertainty were most evenly shared.

Admitting what we don’t know and asking for help while we’re still in the middle of it is one of the most genuinely confidence-building things a leader can do. For our team, and for us.

Leadership takeaway: In your next team meeting, bring a real problem you haven’t solved yet. Say out loud: “I don’t know the answer to this and I need your thinking.” Then listen. Watch what happens to the room. That one moment of honest uncertainty will do more for your team’s engagement than a dozen polished presentations ever will.

Why Your Team Keeps Good News Coming and Bad News Hidden

Posted on July 6, 2026May 22, 2026 by Team Simon

Most of us have said it. In team meetings, in one-on-ones, in onboarding conversations: bring me problems early. My door is open. I want to know.

And we mean it. We genuinely do.

But then someone does bring us a problem. They walk in on a Tuesday afternoon with bad news about a slipping timeline or a number that isn’t going to land. And something shifts in the room. Our posture tightens. The questions get sharper. The conversation ends with that person feeling, somewhere beneath the surface, like they made a mistake by speaking up.

Nothing explicit gets said. Nothing has to be.

Nobody else in the office misses it.

Within a week, what gets reported starts to change. People bring polished problems, solved problems, or no problems at all. The messy, early-stage, still-fixable issues that we actually needed to know about stop arriving. We think we’re getting an accurate picture. We’re getting a curated one.

Amy Edmondson’s foundational research on psychological safety at Harvard Business School found that teams surface problems, errors, and concerns consistently only when they genuinely believe doing so will be met with curiosity rather than consequence. And that belief forms not from what the leader says about openness, but from what the leader does the moment bad news actually arrives.

The signal gets sent in seconds. A tightened jaw. A question that sounds more like an accusation. A move to “how did we let this happen?” before “what do we do next?” These aren’t dramatic betrayals. They’re micro-signals. And our teams read them with extraordinary accuracy.

Naomi Eisenberger’s research at UCLA shows that social threat, including the threat of judgment or blame, activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. When people associate speaking up with that experience, the instinct to self-protect takes over entirely.

So here’s what we can do instead. When something goes wrong and every eye in the room turns to us, the most powerful response is also the simplest. We say: “We have a problem. You are not the problem.” Then we name the issue clearly, describe the impact honestly, and move straight to next steps.

That sequence does something specific. It separates the person from the failure. It models the belief that problems are shared information, not individual indictments. And it teaches everyone in the room, not just the person in front of us, what happens here when the truth gets told.

Do this consistently, and people start bringing us the real version of things. Earlier, messier, and more honestly.

Early truth is the only kind we can act on. And we only get it when people genuinely believe it’s safe to tell it.

Leadership takeaway: The next time someone brings you bad news, pause before you respond. Take a breath. Lead with curiosity, not consequence. Try: “I’m glad you told me. Let’s figure this out together.” That response, repeated consistently, will change what your team believes is safe to say.

You Don’t Have to Be Perfect. You Just Have to Do This.

Posted on June 29, 2026May 22, 2026 by Team Simon

Few leaders simply announce, “I come first.” But over time, the pattern does it for them.

It’s rarely one moment. It’s the accumulation. The high-profile project we kept because it interested us, while we handed off the difficult one. The meeting we left at five when the team was still grinding through a deadline. The budget conversation where somehow the cut landed everywhere except on us. None of it gets announced. All of it gets noticed.

Our team’s brain runs one question on a loop, mostly beneath the surface: does this person actually care about me? And it answers that question not through what we say, but through what we do when it costs us something.

Jamil Zaki’s research at Stanford shows that perceived leader empathy, specifically the belief that a leader will act in our interest when something real is at stake, is one of the strongest predictors of team loyalty, psychological safety, and willingness to take risks. When the answer to that question keeps coming back as no, trust doesn’t explode. It quietly closes the door.

The move that changes this isn’t grand. It doesn’t require a speech or a new initiative. It requires one quiet sacrifice, made early, with no announcement and no expectation of credit.

We cover a shift for a teammate who is burning out. We pass the high-visibility project to someone who needs the stretch more than we do. We take the difficult stakeholder call instead of delegating it down. We absorb the budget hit before it reaches our people’s tools or their training.

Simon has written about a principle drawn from military culture: leaders eat last. Not because it looks good. Because the act itself, repeated consistently, teaches something no speech ever could. The best military units aren’t bonded by capability or charisma. They’re bonded by the accumulated evidence that this person will spend themselves for me when it matters.

A study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that leader self-sacrifice, even in small and symbolic forms, significantly increases team trust, cooperation, and willingness to go beyond what’s formally required. The effect was strongest not when the sacrifice was large, but when it was visible and consistent.

When our team’s brain finally records “this person puts themselves second for me,” everything shifts. Engagement deepens. People stop doing the minimum and start doing what actually needs doing.

They’ll run through walls for a leader they genuinely believe will do the same. We can’t manufacture that. But we can earn it, one quiet and uncelebrated act at a time.

Leadership takeaway: This week, find one moment to put your team before yourself. Don’t announce it. Don’t wait for credit. Just do it. That single act will teach your team more about who you are than any speech ever could.

You Get the Behavior You Measure. Here’s What Most Leaders Are Measuring Wrong.

Posted on June 22, 2026May 22, 2026 by Team Simon

Our team reads the scoreboard every single day. Not the one on the wall. The one embedded in every metric we track, every review we give, every conversation about performance we’ve ever had.

When everything comes back to numbers and deliverables, our team receives a message that’s impossible to misread: results are what matter here. So they optimize for results. They make the short-term choice because the long-term one never shows up on the dashboard. They cut the corners that can be cut without being seen. They learn, over time, that how something gets done is irrelevant. Only whether it gets done.

We think we’re driving performance. They’re experiencing a culture where results matter and people don’t.

Research by Dan Ariely at Duke University has shown repeatedly that when extrinsic metrics dominate a culture, intrinsic motivation, the kind that produces real creativity, discretionary effort, and loyalty, gets systematically undermined. People stop asking “what’s the right thing to do?” and start asking “what will I be measured on?” Those are very different questions. They produce very different behavior.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination theory, which has shaped decades of organizational psychology, found that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the three core conditions for sustained high performance. Of these, relatedness, the felt sense that our contribution connects to something meaningful and that the people around us see more than our output, is the most frequently neglected. When it’s absent, performance becomes transactional. People do what’s required, and nothing more.

The practical move here isn’t complicated. We add one metric, just one, for the behavior we actually want to see. Peer-nominated recognition, where team members formally acknowledge a colleague who lived a core value. The quality of after-action reviews, measured by the depth of honest reflection rather than the tidiness of the summary. The percentage of risks flagged before they became crises, tracked over time. And we attach a small, real reward to it. Not necessarily a bonus. A mention in a team meeting. A written note. Something that makes the behavior visible.

Research on organizational culture by James Heskett at Harvard found that culture change follows scoreboard change. When leaders begin measuring what they say they value, not just what’s easy to quantify, behavior shifts within weeks. Not because people suddenly believe in the values. Because they can now see that acting on those values will be noticed.

Culture is values plus behavior, and behavior follows what we measure. When we measure what we say we value, something shifts. People start to believe we actually mean it. And when people believe we mean it, they start to act like it too.

That’s where real performance begins.

Leadership takeaway: Look at your team’s performance metrics right now. Ask yourself honestly: do these measure what we say we value, or just what’s easy to count? Pick one behavior that matters to your culture and find a way to make it visible and rewarded. Add it to the scoreboard. Watch what your team starts doing more of.

Why Your Team Stopped Taking Risks

Posted on June 15, 2026May 22, 2026 by Team Simon

Think about the last time someone on our team did something that cost them something. Maybe they pushed back on a bad idea in a room full of senior people. Maybe they flagged a risk nobody wanted to hear about. Maybe they tried something genuinely new, took a real swing at it, and it didn’t land.

We noticed. And chances are, we said nothing.

It felt fine. There were other things on the agenda. Acknowledging it seemed unnecessary, maybe even a little awkward. And so the moment passed, and we moved on.

Here’s what our team learned from that: doing something brave isn’t worth the social risk.

Albert Bandura’s social learning theory, one of the most replicated frameworks in psychology, holds a straightforward principle: people repeat the behavior that earns belonging. They observe what gets noticed, what gets rewarded, what earns recognition, and they calibrate accordingly. In a culture where only errors attract attention, people learn fast that the safest move is invisibility. They do exactly enough to stay out of trouble, and not one thing more.

Research by Francesca Gino at Harvard Business School found that employees in organizations where courageous behavior, including speaking up, flagging problems, and trying new approaches, was visibly recognized were significantly more likely to repeat those behaviors and reported higher levels of engagement and commitment. The recognition didn’t need to be formal or elaborate. What mattered was that it was specific, prompt, and visible enough to be witnessed by others.

That specificity matters more than most of us realize. “Great job today” does almost nothing. What changes behavior, in the person receiving it and in everyone who witnesses it, is something precise. Not just what they did, but why it mattered. “When you flagged that risk before it became a crisis, you protected the entire team. That’s exactly what we mean by putting the work above the politics.” That sentence does three things at once: it names the behavior clearly, it connects it to a value, and it teaches everyone watching what this culture actually rewards.

Carol Dweck’s research on growth mindset at Stanford adds something important here. Teams and individuals develop a growth orientation, the belief that effort and risk-taking lead to improvement, when the attempt itself gets recognized, not just the outcome. When we acknowledge the courage of the try, separate from whether it succeeded, we signal that this is a place where it’s safe to reach. That signal, repeated consistently, reshapes what people believe is possible for themselves and for the team.

We scan for the moments that cost someone a little social capital. We stop for them. We name them out loud, specifically and promptly. We’re not just recognizing one person. We’re teaching the whole room.

The moments we walk past teach just as loudly as the ones we stop for. We get to choose which ones we let go.

Leadership takeaway: This week, catch one moment of courage on your team and name it out loud, specifically and in front of others. Connect what they did to why it mattered. That 30-second act will do more to shape your team’s culture than any values workshop ever will.

One Simple Leadership Skill Nobody Teaches (But Everyone Needs)

Posted on June 8, 2026May 22, 2026 by Team Simon

Picture the last time someone on your team genuinely frustrated you. Maybe they missed a deadline without flagging it. Maybe they pushed back on a decision in a way that felt personal. Maybe they seemed checked out, and you couldn’t figure out why.

Chances are, your brain went straight to a verdict. They’re being difficult. They don’t care enough. They’re not cut out for this.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s just how brains work. We’re wired to assess situations quickly and move on. But in leadership, that reflex costs us more than we realize. Every time we jump to a conclusion about someone, we close a door. And sometimes, as leadership coach Andrea Garfield explains to Simon in a series of lessons on active listening inside Leaderful, we slam it.

The antidote is curiosity. And the good news is that it’s a skill we can build.

The Trap Most Leaders Fall Into

Here’s what most of us do when we listen to someone we disagree with. We listen to answer one question: do I agree with this? We’re evaluating the argument, building our rebuttal, deciding whether this person is right or wrong. We think we’re being discerning. What we’re actually doing is making the conversation about us.

Andrea calls this the judgment trap, and psychology backs her up. Attribution bias research shows we’re wired to explain other people’s behavior through the lens of their character rather than their circumstances. Someone acts out and we conclude they’re difficult, rather than asking what might be driving the behavior.

The shift Andrea recommends is deceptively simple. Instead of asking “do I agree with this,” we ask: “what is going on for them?” That one question moves us out of the courtroom and into genuine contact with another human being. We don’t have to agree with what we hear. We just stay open long enough to understand what’s actually happening, which is almost always more complicated than our first instinct suggests.

Why We Should Start Small

Most of us make the mistake of trying to practice curiosity in our hardest relationships first. We go straight to the colleague who consistently frustrates us, the conversation we’ve been dreading, the dynamic that’s been broken for months. We try to do the advanced work before we’ve built the muscle, and then we wonder why it feels impossible.

Andrea’s advice is to start somewhere the stakes are lower: with coworkers we don’t know as well, with acquaintances, with lower-stakes conversations. Research on emotional regulation shows our capacity for perspective-taking drops significantly when we’re activated. We build the skill in calm water so it’s available in the storm.

“Think of it like training for a marathon,” Andrea says. “You don’t start with 26 miles. You start with one, and then two, and then five. Curiosity works the same way.”

The Exercise That Changes How We See People

For the moments when curiosity feels hardest, Andrea offers one simple exercise. After a difficult interaction, we sit down and write 20 different reasons why someone might have acted the way they acted. Not 20 reasons we agree with. Just 20 possibilities, however creative they need to get.

The first five come easily. The next five take some thought. By 15, something starts to shift.

“Most people find that around number 12 or 13, they write something that stops them cold,” Andrea says. “Something that makes them think: oh. That actually might be it. And suddenly the whole situation looks different.”

Research on perspective-taking confirms it. Generating multiple explanations for someone’s behavior reduces emotional reactivity and increases our willingness to engage constructively. The verdict we arrived at so quickly starts to look like one interpretation among many.

“There’s a lot here that has nothing to do with me,” is how Andrea describes the feeling that follows. “It makes a lot of sense.”

That realization frees us to respond thoughtfully instead of react defensively. Curiosity doesn’t ask us to abandon our judgment. It just asks us to delay it long enough to see the full picture.

That’s not weakness. That’s the whole job.

The Three Words That Make Recognition Actually Stick

Posted on May 7, 2026May 6, 2026 by Team Simon

“Great job today.”

We’ve all said it. We’ve all meant it. And most of the time, it evaporates before the person we said it to even makes it back to their desk.

Not because we didn’t mean it. But because vague praise, however warmly delivered, doesn’t teach anyone anything. It feels good for a moment and then it’s gone. And we wonder why recognition never seems to land the way we hope it will.

The recognition and renewal conversation is something different. It’s specific. It names a behavior. It connects what someone did to the culture we’re all trying to build together. And then it does something most recognition completely skips: it invests in where that person wants to go next.

Here’s the difference in practice. A colleague pauses a meeting to invite pushback before a decision gets locked in. We could say “great move today” and move on. Or we could say: “When you paused the meeting to invite dissent before we locked the plan, you protected us from a decision we’d have regretted. That’s exactly what ‘seek the truth over speed’ looks like in real life.”

Everyone in earshot just received a masterclass in what this culture actually rewards. And the person we’re speaking to now has a clear, concrete picture of what they did and why it mattered, not a warm feeling that fades by Thursday.

Simon describes this as “targeted instruction disguised as gratitude.” And Albert Bandura’s research on social learning explains why it works so well. Humans learn primarily through observation and imitation. Specific, visible recognition doesn’t just teach the person receiving it. It teaches everyone watching. One moment of precise praise becomes a cultural data point that the entire team files away.

The renewal half is where most leaders stop short. Before we wrap up, we ask one more question: “Where do you want to stretch next, and what would make that feel possible?” That question sends a signal that we care about their growth, not just their output. We’re not cataloguing a past win. We’re investing ahead of the next one.

Then we close with one small, concrete commitment, something either of us will follow through on this week. Not “let’s keep this conversation going.” An actual thing. A name, a meeting, a door we’ll open.

Specific praise becomes a blueprint. Renewal turns today’s win into tomorrow’s courage.

And “great job today” becomes something someone actually remembers.

How to End an Argument That Refuses to End

Posted on May 6, 2026May 6, 2026 by Team Simon

Here’s a meeting most of us have been in. Two smart people, both with good intentions, stuck in a disagreement that somehow keeps circling back to the same place. Everyone in the room can feel the loop. No one knows how to break it.

Usually we push through. Someone concedes, or the clock runs out, or a senior person picks a side and we move on. The decision gets made. But the disagreement doesn’t actually go away. It goes underground, where it does slower and more expensive damage.

The alignment conversation is how we break the loop before it forms.

The insight at the center of it is this: most debates that go in circles aren’t really about the options being debated. They’re about the absence of a shared standard. When two people argue from their instincts, from what feels right to each of them, they’re not actually evaluating the same thing. They’re arguing from different, usually unstated, criteria. And no amount of persuasion will close that gap, because the gap isn’t in the argument. It’s in the foundation beneath it.

The alignment conversation resets that foundation before the debate begins. It sounds like this: “Before we go further, let’s agree on what we’re both trying to serve here.” And then we name it, specifically. “Our job is to make this feel immediately usable for a first-time customer. That’s the filter we’re both applying.”

Now the options have a referee. And neither person had to lose the argument to get there.

Simon draws on philosopher James Carse’s idea of finite and infinite games to explain why this works. Finite players fight to win. Infinite players ask which choice best serves the cause over time. The alignment conversation is how we invite a room full of finite-minded humans to play the longer game, together.

And the research supports why this matters so much. Google’s Project Aristotle, one of the most thorough studies of team performance ever conducted, found that the greatest predictor of high-performing teams wasn’t talent or experience or even strategy. It was psychological safety, the belief that we can raise a dissenting view without being punished for it. When disagreement stops being personal and starts being purposeful, that safety grows. People say the true thing instead of the safe thing. And better decisions follow.

The next time a meeting starts looping, try this before the next round of debate. Stop the conversation. Name the shared purpose you’re both trying to serve. Make it specific. And then hold both options up against that standard together.

The argument doesn’t disappear. It just finally has somewhere to go.