Roll For Insight

Tag: psychological safety

  • 28 Years Later: Leadership Lessons From a World That Just Won’t Stay Fixed

    28 Years Later: Leadership Lessons From a World That Just Won’t Stay Fixed

    I didn’t expect to walk out of 28 Years Later grinning like I’d just seen the year’s best comedy, but here we are. The movie is bleak and brutal in all the ways you’d expect from a sequel to 28 Days and 28 Weeks Later, yet every so often it throws you a lifeline: a Swedish soldier cracking deadpan jokes, or the sudden introduction of the Jimmies—the tracksuit-clad hooligans led by Jimmy himself, who was introduced in the opening scene and then gone for basically the entire film until the Jimmies dropkicked their way into the finale like they’d been promised a spin-off and were fully prepared to beat the producer with folding chair until they got one. It’s a weird, awesome blend of relentless despair and absurd comedy, the kind of tonal whiplash that makes the whole thing feel like a fever dream.

    That’s the heart of Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky’s theory of adaptive leadership. Their big idea is that the hardest problems we face aren’t “technical”—the kind you solve with a known fix, like calling IT when your monitor won’t turn on. The hardest problems are adaptive, where the rules themselves have changed and no one has the answer. When rage zombies overrun London, it doesn’t matter how much you know about first aid protocols or where to find bottled water. You’re making judgment calls in the fog,. trying to figure out the difference between survival skills and suicide notes dressed up as wisdom. 

    What the movie shows us—and what Heifetz & Linsky emphasize—is that leadership in these moments isn’t about heroically swooping in with the solution. It’s about holding people together long enough that solutions can emerge. That’s why the Swedish guy’s humor works as more than comic relief. He’s practicing a form of situational leadership (Hersey & Blanchard, 1969): shifting his approach based on the immediate needs of the group. Sometimes he’s lightening the mood, sometimes it’s played as dead serious. Either way, he’s paying attention to what the team needs in that exact moment.

    It’s easy to dismiss comic relief as just nonsense, but think about your own life. In the middle of a tense family dinner, there’s always that one relative who cracks a joke about the mashed potatoes being weaponized. In a D&D session, it’s the bard who pipes up with a one-liner when the dragon’s about to eat the cleric. At work, it’s the person who points out that the coffee is strong enough to strip paint. You roll your eyes, but everyone relaxes just enough to keep going. That’s adaptive. Humor buys the group another five minutes of cooperation before somebody snaps.

    And then there’s Jimmy. He starts by losing everything—family, friends, any shot at normal—and then ghosts the movie for what feels like forever. Just when you’ve forgotten him, he blasts into the last scene with the narrative subtlety of a golf club through a plate-glass window. It’s ridiculous and perfect. Because how many times in your own life have you seen the “forgotten” person, the one everyone assumed was out of the picture, suddenly reappear like they were hiding in the ceiling tiles, ready to drop down and steal the spotlight? The Jimmies represent the survivalist version of what a lot of groups become after too much upheaval: a stitched-together tribe of rituals, slang, and inside jokes that don’t make sense to outsiders but function as glue for insiders. They swagger like they’re in control, but under the surface, you can tell they’re improvising as much as anyone else.

    This is the piece leaders often miss. We love the myth of the solitary figure who knew the path all along. In reality, most progress comes from people stumbling forward, testing half-baked ideas, and then acting like it was intentional afterward. As Peter Northouse puts it in Leadership: Theory and Practice, adaptive leaders tolerate ambiguity and resist the urge to slap a quick fix on what’s really a systemic wound (Northouse, 2021). That’s as true for a ragtag survivor gang as it is for a PTA board that just realized their big fundraiser is scheduled for the same weekend as homecoming.

    I think back to my own experiences in warehouses and delivery networks. There were plenty of times when the corporate “solution” was nothing more than a PowerPoint full of buzzwords. But at the ground level, the only reason things kept moving was because frontline teams invented their own processes—borrowing equipment, making ad hoc spreadsheets, redesigning workflows with sticky notes and duct tape. From the outside, it looked chaotic. From the inside, it was the only way to survive. That’s adaptive leadership.

    Another thread the movie pulls on is resilience. When characters keep going after loss, or keep fighting when it’s clear they’re outmatched, that’s resilience theory in action (Luthans, 2002). You see the same thing in a burned-out sports team that still shows up to practice, or in a group of friends who keep making movie night happen even after everyone’s schedules have collapsed into chaos. The Jimmies aren’t admirable because they’re powerful; they’re admirable because they’ve found a way to keep showing up—even if it means vanishing for two hours and then reappearing like they just respawned from a glitch in the Matrix.

    And let’s not overlook psychological safety. Amy Edmondson (1999) describes it as the freedom to speak up, take risks, and fail without fear of punishment. In 28 Years Later, every group that survives does so because they’ve built just enough trust to admit fear and share ideas without instantly fracturing. That’s why you’ll never see a solo hero in this franchise succeed for long. The moment someone tries to go lone wolf, they’re either eaten, abandoned, or left clutching their ideals while the world moves on. Survival is a group project. The same is true whether you’re planning a heist, running a campaign, or trying to survive a school group project where half the team ghosts after the first meeting.

    So what does this mean if you’re not dodging infected hordes? It means that if you’re waiting for perfect information before you act, you’ll get eaten. The people who make it through adaptive challenges—whether it’s a viral outbreak, a corporate restructure, or your trivia team trying to win without a single person who knows geography and realizing too late that confidence does not, in fact, equal knowledge about state capitols—are the ones willing to experiment, pivot, and sometimes fail loudly in front of others. You don’t survive by clinging to the manual; you survive by writing the manual as you go, then tearing it up when the situation changes.

    That’s the lesson I didn’t expect from a movie where people’s faces explode in fountains of rage-blood: leadership isn’t about having the cure. It’s about helping people stumble forward together, half-blind and bleeding, like we’re all extras in someone else’s zombie movie. 

    References:

    • Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. (2002). Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading. Harvard Business Review Press.
    • Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K. H. (1969). Life cycle theory of leadership. Training and Development Journal.
    • Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.
    • Luthans, F. (2002). Positive organizational behavior: Developing and managing psychological strengths. Academy of Management Executive, 16(1), 57–72.
    • Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and Practice (9th ed.). Sage.
  • The Rules Changed, But We Just Forgot to Tell You

    The Rules Changed, But We Just Forgot to Tell You

    Nothing makes people question your leadership faster than realizing the finish line they’ve been running toward just got picked up and moved. This is the organizational version of telling a kid they can have dessert if they finish their vegetables, then halfway through the broccoli deciding they also need to clean the garage and mow the lawn first. The dessert was never the point. The goal was to keep them occupied until you could figure out how to get out of your own chores.

    In corporate life, this usually shows up when leadership makes a promise they didn’t fully think through. The intent might have even been noble at first — “Hey, we’ll make sure everyone gets a fair shot at promotion.” But when the sign-up sheet fills faster than expected and the people who actually have to conduct those evaluations start sweating about their workload, suddenly there’s a brand-new hoop to jump through. A leadership assessment. A timed test. An extra round of manager sign-off. And here’s the kicker: fail that extra hoop and you don’t just miss your shot — you don’t even get told what you did wrong, so you can fix it next time.

    From the outside, this reads less like “streamlining the process” and more like “we realized how much work this would be for us, so we invented a filter to thin the herd.” There’s no transparency, no feedback, and no sense that the people in charge remember they promised you something in the first place. Which brings us to the real damage: it’s not the inconvenience that kills morale. It’s the unspoken message that your leadership’s word is provisional. Conditional. Entirely dependent on whether it still suits them to keep it.

    If you’ve ever run a game of D&D, you know exactly how this plays out. You tell your group that if they defeat the Big Bad Evil Guy, they’ll hit Level 10. This is the campaign’s driving goal. Every plan, every detour, every questionable alliance with shady NPCs is about gearing up for that final fight. Then, right before the big showdown, you say, “Actually, before you can fight him, you’ll need to pass this riddle challenge. Fail, and you can’t try again until next year. Oh, and I won’t tell you what answers you got wrong.” At best, the players feel blindsided. At worst, they start suspecting you never really wanted them to succeed in the first place. And once players stop trusting their GM, the game stops being fun. They’ll still show up — sunk-cost fallacy is a hell of a drug — but the spark’s gone.

    And here’s where leadership theory has been screaming warnings for decades. In transformational leadership, one of the core jobs of a leader is to inspire people toward a shared vision through consistency, trust, and integrity (Bass, 1990). If the vision changes, you bring your team along for the why, the how, and the what’s-next. But if you just quietly rewrite the playbook mid-season without telling anyone, you’ve broken what Rousseau (1995) calls the psychological contract — that unspoken agreement between leader and team about what each side owes the other. Once that’s broken, even the most committed, high-performing people start conserving their energy. Not out of spite, but out of survival. They’ve learned the rules can change without warning, so why go all-in?

    There’s a way to fix this without torching morale, but it requires humility and a little bit of courage. If you truly can’t honor the original path you laid out — whether because of volume, budget, or your own failure to anticipate demand — transparency is your only way out. Spell out what’s changing, why it’s changing, and how people can still succeed under the new system. Give feedback, even if it’s just “You scored lower on decision-making under time pressure — here’s where to practice.” If you have to thin the candidate pool, do it in a way that still respects the original promise, even if it means spreading things out over a longer timeline. Otherwise, you’re just selecting for the people most willing to tolerate frustration, which is not the same as selecting for the people most capable of leading.

    The rules can change — life’s unpredictable, and leadership is about adapting. But if you want your people to keep showing up with full effort, the one rule that can’t change is this: when you say something matters, it has to keep mattering, even when it’s inconvenient for you.

    References:

    Bass, B. M. (1990). From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision. Organizational Dynamics, 18(3), 19–31.

    Rousseau, D. M. (1995). Psychological contracts in organizations: Understanding written and unwritten agreements. Sage Publications.

  • The Feedback That Was Actually a Trap: Weaponized Coaching and the Illusion of Development

    The Feedback That Was Actually a Trap: Weaponized Coaching and the Illusion of Development

    There’s a moment in bad D&D campaigns when the GM grins too much. You know the look. The party just triggered something, maybe opened a door they weren’t supposed to, or used a clever workaround to bypass some elaborate puzzle, and the GM, instead of rolling with it, tilts their head and says, “Interesting.” That’s the moment you realize you’ve made a mistake. Not in the game. In trusting the GM. Because that smile? That’s the “this is going in the kill box” smile. And the only reason your character’s still breathing is because the plot isn’t done punishing you yet.

    That’s what fake coaching feels like in the workplace.

    It starts off warm. Encouraging. Your boss says they’re “invested in your development” and want to “help you grow.” It’s like they just pulled you aside in the tavern and offered you a side quest. You feel chosen. Important. Maybe this is it—your chance to level up, to finally get out of the hell that is middle-tier oblivion where your talents are wasted and your coffee goes cold before you remember where you left it. But instead of getting a magic item, you get assigned a “stretch project” with no guidance, no resources, and no context. And somewhere around hour fourteen of trying to decode the office spreadsheet equivalent of ancient dwarven runes, you realize: this wasn’t a gift. This was a test. And you are not supposed to pass it.

    This is what I call development theater—the illusion of mentorship with none of the substance. It’s the kind of thing that looks amazing in a quarterly report. “We’re committed to employee growth,” they’ll say, while quietly tossing people into career quicksand and blaming them for not building a ladder. And the worst part? You can’t even prove it. Because technically, they did coach you. They gave you feedback. They offered you opportunity. They gave you rope—just enough to hang yourself artistically, in the break room, next to a printout of last year’s mission statement.

    The TTRPG version of this is the GM who swears they’re “collaborative,” then turns every piece of your backstory into a trap. You tell them your character once abandoned a sibling in a burning village? Great. Now the final boss is the sibling, and no, you don’t get a redemption arc, you get stabbed with a flaming pitchfork while the GM does a bad voice and says, “This is what you deserve.” You thought you were building a narrative. Turns out, you were providing raw materials for a vengeance fantasy they’ve been workshopping since their sophomore year creative writing class.

    But let’s go back to the office. Because this isn’t just bad management—it’s a strategy. It’s called plausible deniability leadership. It’s what happens when someone wants you gone, but doesn’t want to look like the bad guy. So instead, they offer you “growth.” They suggest “areas for improvement.” They ask you to “stretch beyond your comfort zone,” while quietly collecting screenshots and calendar invites like evidence for a crime they’re planning to report after the fact. You’re not being coached. You’re being turned into a cautionary tale.

    And you start to notice it, too late. You start wondering why your emails are getting ignored. Why projects get reassigned without explanation. Why every compliment you get sounds like it came from an AI that only read the first paragraph of your résumé. You start to feel like you’re being haunted by a ghost version of your reputation. Like someone filed a secret report that says you’re “difficult to work with,” and now everyone’s treating you like a cursed item—technically useful, but risky to equip.

    Leadership theory actually has a name for the good version of this: Individualized Consideration, one of the pillars of Transformational Leadership (Bass & Riggio, 2006). That’s when leaders offer feedback and development tailored to each person’s goals, strengths, and needs. But there’s a dark mirror to this: Pseudo-Transformational Leadership (Bass & Steidlmeier, 1999), where the tools of mentorship get twisted into performance theater. It’s the difference between helping someone grow and using the language of growth to justify pushing them out. The difference between a GM saying, “Let’s explore your character’s fears,” and a GM saying, “Hey, I noticed your character’s afraid of drowning, so I made all the dungeons water now.”

    And no, it’s not just one bad boss or one bad GM. This happens in systems where psychological safety—the foundation of trust and learning on any team—is treated like a luxury add-on (Edmondson, 1999). The moment people start to feel like feedback is a setup, they stop trying. They shut down. They play it safe. They stop asking questions, stop offering ideas, stop rolling with disadvantage unless absolutely necessary. And then leadership turns around and says, “Why don’t we have more innovation around here?”

    Here’s the wild part: most of the time, the people doing this think they’re being kind. They think that by softening the truth, or sugarcoating the failure, they’re protecting you. They don’t realize that fake feedback is worse than silence. That pretending to help while secretly preparing your exit is like handing someone a parachute made of spaghetti. You’re not saving anyone. You’re just putting on a show before the impact.

    So here’s how we do it better.

    If you’re in charge of people—at a table, on a loading dock, in a customer service team in a crumbling office park built entirely out of sadness and reused drywall—then ask yourself: Is this feedback meant to help this person? Or is it meant to protect me from looking like the bad guy later? Because that’s the line. That’s the moment when you decide whether you’re going to lead with integrity or script a fake redemption arc just to cover your own plot holes.

    Be honest. Be clear. If someone’s not meeting expectations, tell them—with support, with context, with a plan. Don’t dress it up in “opportunities for growth” if what you really mean is “we’re already interviewing your replacement.” If you’re a GM and a player is being disruptive or needs to shift how they engage at the table, don’t write it into the story like some kind of Saw-style morality lesson. Talk to them. You are allowed to be direct. You are allowed to be kind without being vague. You are allowed to be uncomfortable if it means being real.

    Because people know. They always know. The party knows when the GM has it out for them. Employees know when they’ve been moved to the short bench. And when trust breaks—when the coaching turns out to be a trap, when the feedback was just foreshadowing—it doesn’t just ruin one person’s experience. It poisons the whole table. It tells everyone else that growth is conditional. That failure is fatal. That support is a trick.

    And once people believe that, you don’t get innovation. You don’t get loyalty. You get silence.

    You get a campaign where nobody tries anything bold. A job where nobody brings up new ideas. A team that’s still technically alive, but spiritually checked out, like NPCs waiting for the next cutscene.

    So if you’re going to be a leader, be one. Don’t hand people a torch just to light their fuse. Don’t offer them a side quest when you’ve already decided how the story ends. And don’t call it feedback if it’s really just foreshadowing.

    We already know the trap is coming. The only question is whether you’ll pretend it was part of our development plan all along.

    Citations:

    Bass, B. M., & Steidlmeier, P. (1999). Ethics, character, and authentic transformational leadership behavior. The Leadership Quarterly, 10(2), 181–217.

    Bass, B. M., & Riggio, R. E. (2006). Transformational Leadership (2nd ed.). Psychology Press.

    Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

  • You Don’t Need to Know Everything—Just Stop Faking It

    There’s a particular kind of boss that’s worse than just a micromanager. It’s the kind who micromanages badly—hovering over tasks they don’t actually understand, second-guessing decisions with no context, inserting themselves into workflows like a toddler grabbing the steering wheel from the backseat. At least a competent micromanager might know what they’re interrupting. But this flavor of leader doesn’t know the work, won’t admit it, and compensates by managing through vague questions, performative stress, and ominous calendar invites titled “Touch Base.” If you’ve never had a boss like that, congratulations on your peaceful life. The rest of us are still flinching every time someone asks if we “have a minute.”

    I’ve worked under those managers, and—cards on the table—I’ve been one, too. Not in the mustache-twirling villain sense, but in the more common and less cinematic way: I got put in charge of something I didn’t totally understand, so I backed off too far because I didn’t want to come across like a dumbass. That’s the inverse version of the same mistake. Instead of meddling, I ghosted. I figured giving people space was the respectful thing to do, when what they actually needed was presence. Not command. Not control. Just the sense that I was there, paying attention, invested, and ready to help.

    Running a team without understanding their work is like Game Mastering a system you’ve never read. You might be able to fake it for a session or two. Maybe you’ve got the vibe down—narrating like Matt Mercer on half-speed, throwing in enough “roll for initiative” moments to keep everyone entertained. But sooner or later, your players are going to do something mechanical. They’ll try to shove a goblin off a bridge, or cast a spell that interacts with a system you didn’t prep, or—God help you—start asking about grappling rules. And now you’re scrambling through the Player’s Handbook like it’s a cursed tome, bluffing your way through it while everyone quietly starts texting under the table. Because nothing kills trust like a GM who pretends to know things they clearly don’t.

    Leadership theory has a name for this balancing act: Situational Leadership. Hersey and Blanchard laid it out in the late ’60s, but the idea still hits. It says your leadership style should adapt based on how competent and confident your team is at a given task. Some people need direction. Others need support. Some just need you to get out of the way and let them work. But the only way to figure that out is to actually know where they’re at. And that requires something micromanagers and absentee leaders alike tend to skip: asking questions and listening to the answers.

    Most micromanagers don’t think they’re micromanaging. They think they’re doing due diligence. Staying informed. “Driving results.” But what they’re actually doing is disrupting Self-Determination Theory—a cornerstone of motivation research that says people thrive when they feel autonomous, competent, and connected. Micromanaging undercuts autonomy. But if you also don’t know the work, it undercuts competence too—yours and theirs. You’re not just in the way; you’re actively creating friction, the same way a GM does when they override the bard’s plan just because they didn’t understand how Bardic Inspiration stacks.

    And on the flip side, disappearing because you don’t understand the work doesn’t help either. That just makes people feel unsupported, especially when things start going sideways. It’s the equivalent of a GM saying, “Well, that’s what your character would do,” and then zoning out on their phone while the players roleplay around them. Sure, you’re not interrupting, but you’re also not engaged. You’ve become the leadership version of ambient tavern music.

    So how do you do it better?

    You get curious. You name what you don’t know. You ask your team what they need from you today, not just what they needed when the project started. You ask, “What am I doing that’s helpful?” and brace yourself for the silence that might follow. You sit with it. Then you try again.

    You stop treating questions like traps and start using them like torches. You stop assuming that being “the boss” means you have to be the expert. And you realize that your credibility doesn’t come from having all the answers—it comes from helping the people who do their best work.

    If you’re running a campaign and you don’t know every mechanic, that’s fine. But don’t fake it. Bring in a co-GM, hand off to someone more familiar with the system, or prep more next time. In the moment, the best thing you can do is own it. Say, “I don’t actually know how this rule works—can you walk me through it?” And suddenly, you’ve transformed from an authority figure faking competence into a leader modeling collaboration.

    When you’re a leader and you don’t know the work, your job isn’t to disappear. And it’s not to overcorrect by smothering your team with bad advice. Your job is to learn just enough to be useful, to ask the right questions, and to create an environment where people feel like they can do their thing without you pretending to be the expert on everything. Because when people know you’ve got their back—not their keyboard—that’s when trust actually starts to build.

    And the next time you do have to give direction, it won’t sound like interference. It’ll sound like support.

    Citations:

    Deci, E.L., & Ryan, R.M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.

    Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K.H. (1969). Life cycle theory of leadership. Training & Development Journal, 23(5), 26–34.

  • You Can’t Lead by Sucking the Joy Out of the Room: A TTRPG Guide to Negative Leadership

    You Can’t Lead by Sucking the Joy Out of the Room: A TTRPG Guide to Negative Leadership

    There’s a particular kind of emotional exhaustion that settles in when your Game Master thinks being in charge means being right all the time. It starts slow–your character’s little backstory never gets acknowledged, your clever ideas get waved off with a smirk and a house rule, and pretty soon you’re just rolling dice and getting your turn over with as little friction as possible. You used to be excited to play. Now you’re mostly just tracking hit points and trying to survive the session. It’s not that you don’t like the game. It’s that the person running it has made the table feel like a minefield. 

    I’ve had day jobs that feel exactly like that. 

    What I call Negative Leadership shows up in real life the same way it shows up in bad tabletop campaigns. It’s not always loud or theatrical. It’s a mindset. A controlling, defensive, brittle approach to being in charge. It’s the manager who talks like a GM who’s memorized every line of the module but hasn’t noticed that half the players are disengaged. They think “leadership” means quoting the rulebook and punishing deviation. They treat innovation like it’s cheating and feedback like it’s a charisma check they can refuse. 

    I’ve worked across a bunch of different environments–logistics, operations, customer service–and while the industries changed, the vibe of a bad manager never did. You try to bring something to the table, and they act like you’re violating canon. I once stayed late to help a new hire finish up a shipment–just helping out. Next day, I get pulled aside for “disrupting the process.” In another job, a manager pinned dollar bills to his office wall from bets he won against his own staff, like we were all stuck in some sad, corporate version of Tomb of Horrors. Nobody said anything, but we all saw the message: this place runs on ego checks. 

    What makes it harder is that most of these leaders don’t see themselves as the problem. They think they’re enforcing standards. That they’re the only thing holding back the chaos. But treating your team like a bunch of unruly NPCs doesn’t build order–it builds resentment. Calling someone “not great with people” doesn’t begin to cover it. It’s more like they see empathy as a homebrew mechanic they don’t trust. 

    Frederick Herzberg’s Motivation-Hygiene Theory puts a fine point on it: the stuff that demotivates people isn’t the same stuff that inspires them. You can have health benefits, free snacks, and an end-of-week XP bonus, but if your boss treats you like a barely tolerated raccoon who wandered into the breakroom–something to be monitored and controlled–you’re not going to stay motivated. You’ll stick around, maybe, but your heart won’t be in it. It’s like showing up to a dungeon crawl where the GM never lets you explore. You’re not playing–you’re just rolling to comply.

    And like any bad GM, the truly corrosive managers rarely blow up in obvious ways. It’s not all dramatic yelling or slamming doors. It’s a slow bleed: a joke that lands too hard, a change in protocol with no explanation, a public correction that wasn’t necessary. I once got called out for parking a training vehicle “the wrong way,” even though it was the safest available option. The response wasn’t, “Let’s talk through it.” It was, “Rules are rules.” No context, no conversation. Just pure authoritarian DM energy. 

    Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y explains this kind of behavior. Theory X leaders believe that people are fundamentally lazy and need to be coerced into productivity. So they act like GMs who run every session like a power fantasy–one where players can’t be trusted to make good decisions, so every path is railroaded and every choice is an illusion. And when the team stops engaging, these managers see it as proof. “See? They only work when I’m watching.” Yes, because you’ve made watching feel like surveillance, not support. 

    The wild part is, I came into all those jobs wanting to contribute. I had ideas. I saw things that could be improved. I wanted to play the game well, not break it. But when your every move gets treated like a challenge to the GM’s authority, you eventually just stop rolling. Not because you don’t care, but because the consequences for trying feel too steep. 

    The worst leadership I’ve experienced didn’t look dramatic. It looked polite. Measured. Controlled. And deeply suffocating. You could ask questions, sure–but only once. And only if they were easy. The mood in the room said: Don’t make waves. It’s the difference between a campaign where the players feel powerful and one where they feel watched. Some leaders don’t know the difference. 

    What makes it worse is that these kinds of leaders often believe they’re respected. What they’re actually seeing is compliance dressed up as loyalty. It’s players nodding at the table because they’ve learned what happens if they don’t. Google’s Project Aristotle found that the most successful teams aren’t built on competence alone. They’re built on psychological safety–on people knowing they can speak up without getting wrecked by an attack of opportunity. Negative Leadership squashes that before the first session’s even over. 

    So what’s the fix? It’s not handing over the GM screen to chaos. It’s leading like someone who actually wants the party to succeed. Bernard Bass called this transformational leadership: building people up, not boxing them in. Sharing the story. Listening to the table. Trusting your team to be more than background flavor. 

    And here’s the kicker–any of us can drift into Negative Leadership if we’re not careful. All it takes is a little pressure, a little stress, and a little too much certainty. Suddenly, you’re making decisions to protect your own authority instead of supporting the people at the table. You’re no longer the GM guiding the story–you’re the final boss in someone else’s burnout narrative. 

    Leadership isn’t about being the smartest person in the room or holding the most lore. It’s about making the session better because you were there. If people feel freer, braver, and more creative when you’re gone, you’re not leading–you’re just running a game they can’t wait to finish. 

    And no one brags about surviving that campaign.

  • If You Think Leadership Is About Having All the Answers, You’re Probably the Problem

    If You Think Leadership Is About Having All the Answers, You’re Probably the Problem

    One of the first things I tell every new hire class is that they should ask as many questions as they want, and they should never feel weird about it. I explain that when they do, one of three things is going to happen. The first is that I’ll just give them the answer. I’ve been doing this long enough that sometimes I know the thing they’re asking about, and I’ll just give it to them straight. The second is that I’ll give them my best guess. I’ll say something like, In my experience, usually the best practice is this…” or “Here’s what most people in the industry do.” And the third is that I’ll tell them who else to talk to–because sometimes I’m not the right person to answer it. Maybe it’s a technical question with the app or some strange behavior with the hardware, in which case, a seasoned veteran out there actually doing the job in the wild is the best resource. But I’m never going to bluff or fake it. Not because I’m some sort of saint, but because I’ve worked under those kinds of people before. The ones who fake their way through every question, who have to be right all the time, who treat leadership like it’s just being the biggest brain in the room. And I’ve seen how much damage that mindset causes. 

    For some reason, a lot of us go into leadership thinking our job is to have all the answers. That’s the myth we’ve been sold. That the leader is the one who knows everything, who sees further than the rest of us, who walks into the meeting like a prophet and drops solutions on the table. It’s a comforting fantasy, especially when the stakes are high. But in practice, this kind of leader becomes a bottleneck. They kill collaboration. They build teams that are afraid to speak up, afraid to ask questions, and worst of all, afraid to think. The moment people on your team start believing that their value lies in saying nothing and deferring to the person in charge, you’ve lost. 

    I used to feel that pressure too, like my credibility depended on always having the one right answer locked and loaded at all times. But pretending to know everything doesn’t make you more credible. It makes you brittle. And brittle things tend to break when real pressure hits. Overconfidence in leadership, according to Entrepreneur, especially during crises, “can cross the line into the danger zone,” where authenticity gives way to ego and collaboration goes to die. 

    Over time, I’ve come to believe that one of the most important things a leader can say is, “I don’t know, but let’s find out.” Not as an escape hatch, but as an invitation. It tells the team that they’re allowed not to know either. It invites curiosity. It tells people that we’re here to learn together, and that finding the right answer is a shared responsibility, not a solo act for the boss. And weirdly enough, research backs this up. A recent meta-analysis found that when leaders express uncertainty instead of faking confidence, people actually trust them more and think they’re more competent. It’s one of those satisfying little paradoxes: the moment you stop pretending you’ve got it all figured out is the moment people start believing in you. 

    But if your default mode is always to have the answer, whether you actually do or not, you’re going to train your team into silence. And worse, you’re going to stop learning. One of the easiest traps to fall into is mistaking your authority for omniscience. But leadership isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about making sure the smartest ideas in the room have space to be heard. In my case, that often means handing the question off to someone who’s seen more edge cases, who’s driven more miles, who’s figured out a solution to that weird glitch I’ve never seen. I’d rather point someone to the best resource than try to impress them with some half-informed answer. That’s not humility for its own sake–it’s efficiency. 

    There’s a popular quote from Google’s Project Aristotle research that’s showing up in a lot of leadership seminars lately: the single most important factor in high-performing teams is psychological safety, which is the basic idea that people do their best work when they know they won’t be shut down, shamed, or penalized for speaking honestly, taking risks, or owning up to mistakes. And nothing destroys psychological safety faster than a leader who punishes questions, shuts down feedback, or reacts defensively to being challenged. Those leaders don’t build strong teams. They build echo chambers. And echo chambers can be quiet, not because everything’s working, but because no one’s talking anymore. 

    I’ve seen both kinds of leadership up close. I’ve had bosses who responded to every issue with a kind of rehearsed confidence. I even had one boss whose philosophy was, “Never let them see you sweat.” And I’ve had leaders who said, “That’s a great question. Let’s think through it.” The difference in team culture was night and day. One team was rigid and anxious, always waiting to be told what to do. The other was flexible, collaborative, and surprisingly resilient under pressure. The second team didn’t succeed because the leader had all the answers. We succeeded because the leader made space for us to ask the right questions. 

    That’s how I try to approach my own leadership now. I still prepare. I still try to be informed. But I don’t cling to the illusion that I’m supposed to know everything. I tell people what I know, I share what I’ve seen, and I point them to better experts when needed. I treat questions not as tests of my competence, but as chances to model how we figure things out. And when someone brings something to my attention that I hadn’t thought of? I thank them. Because that’s what we’re here to do–build something smarter than any one person could build on their own. 

    Leadership isn’t about having all the answers. It’s about guiding people through complexity without pretending the path is always obvious. It’s about saying “Let’s figure this out together” and meaning it. Because the moment you stop pretending to be the answer key is the moment your team finally gets permission to start solving problems with you.

  • Your “Open-Door Policy” Isn’t Working

    Your “Open-Door Policy” Isn’t Working

    Every toxic workplace has at least one thing in common. Someone in charge who proudly says, “My door is always open.” 

    They love saying it.
    They say it to new hires, to seasoned employees, to anyone brave or naïve enough to raise a concern. 

    And on paper it sounds great. An open-door policy! Transparent! Supportive! Efficient!

    Except it’s not. 

    Becaus here’s what never gets said out loud:

    If the room is full of tension, no one wants to walk through the door. 

    I’ve worked in environments where the person saying “my door is always open” was the same person we all tried to avoid. Where people kept mental tallies of how many days they could go without speaking to upper management. Where the only think “open” about the door was how wide your ass would get handed to you if you walked through it with a complaint. 

    That’s not access. That’s a trap. 

    An open-door policy doesn’t work if the culture around it tells people

    • You’re soft for speaking up.
    • You’re disloyal for involving HR. 
    • You’d better fix your attitude before you bring anything to leadership.

    That’s not leadership. That’s control with a smiley face sticker on it. 

    If you want people to actually talk to you, if you want to be the kind of leader people trust, you have to earn it with more than a catchphrase. You need to create an environment where people believe they’ll be heard, not punished. Where they know the risk of speaking up won’t outweigh the benefit of staying quiet. 

    That starts small. 

    It starts with how you react the first time someone tells you something uncomfortable. 

    It starts with how you treat the person who brings you bad news. 

    It starts with who you listen to, and who you dismiss. 

    I’ve seen “open-door policies” weaponized by managers who just wanted to avoid union pressure. I’ve seen leaders say “come to me with anything” and then roll their eyes in the breakroom when someone actually does. And I’ve seen great ideas die in silence because nobody wanted to be the one who “made it weird.” 

    You don’t need a policy. You need a presence. 

    And if you’re not getting feedback, it’s not because everyone’s happy. It’s because the door may be open, but nobody feels safe walking through it.

  • What My Worst D&D Session Ever Taught Me About Psychological Safety

    What My Worst D&D Session Ever Taught Me About Psychological Safety

    You can learn a lot about leadership by watching what happens when it’s done badly, especially at a D&D table.

    Years ago, I joined a campaign run by a GM who pitched it as gritty, dark fantasy. Think Game of Thrones but with dice. We all nodded eagerly. Sure, dark fantasy. Why not?

    But then things got weird. Fast.

    It wasn’t long before “gritty” turned into “gratuitous.”  The GM introduced a villain who wasn’t just evil, he was deeply, awkwardly inappropriate. Every interaction was loaded with uncomfortable innuendo, forced humor, and themes that didn’t just cross lines, but pole-vaulted over them

    The first few sessions, the table laughed nervously. It felt safer than speaking up. We thought it was just a misstep. Surely it would get better. But it didn’t. Instead, session after session, we sank deeper into discomfort. People stopped making eye contact. Jokes dried up. Roleplaying felt awkward, like navigating a social minefield. 

    And nobody said anything. 

    After one particularly uncomfortable session, a player quietly texted me, “I don’t know if I want to come back.” Neither did I.

    The problem wasn’t that the GM was trying to push boundaries.. Plenty of great stories explore dark or mature themes thoughtfully. The real issue was that he never checked in. He assumed we were fine with the tone he’d chosen because we hadn’t explicitly said otherwise. Silence, he thought, was consent. But silence was just confusion and discomfort wearing a polite mask.

    This happens in workplaces, too. Leaders set a tone, sometimes unintentionally, through the jokes they tell, the way they handle conflict, or how they respond (or don’t respond) when someone crosses a line. And employees, like players, pick up on cues fast. If speaking up feels risky, most people won’t. They’ll just quietly check out, waiting for the campaign (or the job) to end. 

    Psychological safety isn’t about protecting feelings. It’s about creating an environment where people feel safe enough to speak up when something feels wrong or off or uncomfortable. Great GMs and great leaders both understand this. They watch the table carefully. They notice body language, hesitations, awkward silences. And instead of pushing blindly forward, they pause. They ask. They adjust. 

    That campaign ended abruptly. Players drifted away until there was nothing left but a few awkward goodbyes in the group chat. And while I wish we’d said something sooner, the truth is the responsibility to create safety always lies first with the person in charge. 

    So here’s the hard-won wisdom. 

    If you’re running the table (or the team) your job isn’t just to tell the story or set the direction. It’s to make sure the people in front of you feel safe enough to tell you when the story isn’t working. 

    Otherwise, you risk losing more than a few sessions. You risk losing trust entirely. And once that’s gone, the game’s over, whether you’re ready or not.