Leadership Lessons from Parenting, Part Three I want to talk about a song from Frozen II. Not that one. Everyone remembers "Let It Go." It's triumphant, it's cathartic, it became inescapable for about three years and is still playing on a loop somewhere in a minivan right now. It's Elsa's song — a moment of release, of breaking free, of finally refusing to shrink. It's a great song. It's also not the one that kept showing up in my coaching sessions. The one I mean is quieter, less likely to appear on a greatest hits playlist, and almost certainly unfamiliar to anyone who hasn't sat through the sequel. It's called "The Next Right Thing." And it's Anna's. That distinction matters more than it might seem. Elsa vs. Anna Elsa has powers. Ice, snow, magic — she is genuinely extraordinary, and "Let It Go" is her claiming that. Anna doesn't have powers. She has heart, and stubbornness, and deep love for the people around her. She is, in many ways, the more human of the two — the one who shows up not because it's her destiny, but because she can't imagine doing anything else. And in the second film, Anna finds herself in the darkest moment of the story. She's alone. She has no map. She can't see what's ahead. Everything she thought she knew has fallen away, and the full picture of what comes next is simply not available to her. She's not frozen because she lacks capability. She's frozen because she's trying to solve the whole problem before she'll let herself move. So she does the only thing she can: the next right thing. Not the plan. Not the five-year vision. Just one step — the one directly in front of her. The Leaders Who Freeze I think about Anna's moment often when I'm sitting with a leader in transition — in the middle of an organizational restructure, a career inflection point, a team crisis, a season of profound uncertainty. They don't freeze because they're not capable. They freeze because they're trying to see the whole path before they'll take a step. Because they've been conditioned to have the answer, to project confidence, to lead from certainty — and right now, certainty isn't available. What's available is the next right thing. And it's enough. The full picture rarely is available in the moments that matter most. The leader who waits for it before moving isn't being strategic — they're being stuck. And stuck, dressed up as planning, can look like a lot of things: endless analysis, another stakeholder conversation, one more round of data. But underneath it is usually this: I'm not sure it's safe to move yet. It almost never becomes safe. You move anyway. You do the next right thing. What "Next Right Thing" Actually Means It doesn't mean impulsive. It doesn't mean underprepared. It means narrowing the field deliberately. Instead of asking what's the right path through this entire situation , asking what's the one thing I can do today that moves this forward? Sometimes the next right thing is a conversation you've been avoiding. Sometimes it's a decision you've already made but haven't announced. Sometimes it's asking for help — which, for high-performing leaders, is often the hardest step of all. It's the step that's available to you right now, with the information you have right now. Not the step you'll be able to take once everything is clearer. In coaching sessions I often ask: If you knew you couldn't fail, what would you do tomorrow? The answer is almost always the next right thing. The thing they already know. The thing they've been waiting for permission to do. You don't need more certainty. You need to take the step. Why the Sequel I know. Most sequels don't earn it. Frozen II does — and not because of the spectacle, though it delivers on that too. Because it does something the first film didn't quite get to: it lets the quieter, less magical character carry the weight. Anna's moment of paralysis and then forward motion is the most honest depiction of leadership under pressure I've seen in an animated film. Not a sweeping act of power — just a person alone in the dark, choosing to move. The best leadership frameworks come from the places we'd least expect to find them. Sometimes it's a Disney sequel. Sometimes it's a conversation with a five-year-old about a driver with a potty emergency. The wisdom is the wisdom, wherever it shows up. Bennett Strategic Leadership works with executives, chiefs of staff, and high-performing leaders who are ready to lead from a different place. If something here resonated, you're in the right place.
Leadership Lessons from Parenting, Part Two My daughter and I have a joke. When someone cuts us off in traffic, before either of us can say anything, one of us says it: "Potty emergency." We don't know that. We can't know that. But we've made it our default — and somewhere along the way it stopped being just a joke and became a genuine habit of mind. Give people the most generous explanation that's plausible. Not because they've earned it. Because it's a better way to move through the world. There's actually a name for the cognitive error we're working against when we do this. Psychologists call it the fundamental attribution error — our tendency to explain other people's behavior with their character, and our own with our circumstances. When we cut someone off, we were running late. When they cut us off, they're just rude. It's one of the most common cognitive biases in existence, it's almost entirely unconscious, and in a leadership context it is enormously expensive. What It Looks Like at Work Once you know what to look for, you see it constantly. T he teammate who's short in Slack. Not "difficult" — three deadlines deep with context you can't see. T he stakeholder who goes dark on your email. Not "disengaged" — possibly buried, possibly waiting on someone upstream, possibly having a week that has nothing to do with you. T he leader who cancels 1:1s three weeks in a row. Not "doesn't care about you" — possibly underwater in ways nobody's said out loud yet. I n each case, the data point is the behavior. The attribution — the story we construct about what it means — is something we add. Quickly, confidently, and usually without realizing we've done it. A nd once the story is in place, it's sticky. We stop asking questions because we think we have the answer. We respond to our narrative about the person rather than the person in front of us. T hat's where trust starts to erode — quietly, without anyone naming it. Why This Bias Is So Hard to Catch The fundamental attribution error isn't a failure of intelligence. It's a feature of how human cognition works. W e have access to our own internal states — our exhaustion, our stress, the context around our choices. We don't have access to anyone else's. So when we explain our own behavior, we naturally reach for situation. When we explain someone else's, we reach for character — because character is all we can see. T he problem isn't that we do this. The problem is that most of us don't know we're doing it. I n a leadership context, this matters enormously. Because the leader who has decided someone is "difficult" or "checked out" or "not coachable" has stopped being curious about them. And without curiosity, there's no real relationship — just a performance review waiting to happen. The Replacement Habit I've watched leaders shift this in real time, and it almost always starts with the same move: replacing the assumption with a question. N ot a loaded one. Not "is everything okay?" in a tone that implies it isn't. Something simpler and more direct: " This is what I'm noticing. What can I do for you?" I t names the observation without the judgment. It hands the floor to the other person. And it signals something that most leaders underestimate: that you're paying attention, and that you're curious about the real answer. T hat small sentence builds a surprising amount of trust. Because it treats people as whole humans with context you can't see — rather than characters in a story you've already written. T he three-question reset I use in coaching sessions: W hat do I actually know? (just the facts, just the behavior) What am I assuming? (the story I've added on top) What would I need to ask to find out? (the question that replaces the conclusion) I t takes thirty seconds. It changes the conversation that follows. Curious, Not Judgmental — Every Time The FAE isn't something you fix once. It's something you catch, over and over, for as long as you're leading people. T he leaders I work with who are best at this aren't the ones who never make the attribution error — they do, we all do. They're the ones who've developed enough self-awareness to notice when they've already written the story, and enough discipline to pause before acting on it. C urious instead of judgmental. It's a decision, every single time. A nd it turns out it's one of the most trust-building decisions a leader can make. Bennett Strategic Leadership works with executives, chiefs of staff, and high-performing leaders who are ready to lead from a different place. If something here resonated, you're in the right place.
Leadership Lessons from Parenting, Part One There's a phrase my husband and I have said to each other since our daughter was a newborn. On the hard nights, the unreasonable mornings, the days when she couldn't tell us what was wrong and just... couldn't: "She's not giving us a hard time. She's having a hard time." It gets harder to remember the older and more capable she seems — as if "grown up" meant "unaffected." As if competence were the same thing as being fine. It isn't. And somewhere between the pediatrician visits and the board meetings, I started to notice that this wasn't just a parenting lesson. It was a leadership one. The Managed Version Most leaders I work with are extraordinary at managing themselves. They show up prepared. They keep their voices steady. They don't bring their hard weeks into the room — not visibly, anyway. What that means in practice is that the people around them — peers, direct reports, managers — are almost always responding to a managed version of the person. The one that's held together. The one that's holding it together. And when that version starts to crack — when someone goes quiet in a meeting they usually dominate, or snaps in a debrief, or misses something they never miss — we do what humans do: we make it mean something about them. She's checked out. He's losing his edge. She doesn't care anymore. We explain behavior with character. It's fast, it's confident, and it's almost always incomplete. What's Actually Happening The chief of staff who's suddenly curt in the debrief isn't indifferent. She's spent the week absorbing everyone else's bad news, and nobody has thought to ask how she's doing. The executive who goes quiet in the strategy session isn't disengaged. He's been up half the night with a sick parent and hasn't told anyone at work — because work isn't where you say that. The high performer whose output quietly starts slipping isn't coasting. She's at capacity for the first time in her career and doesn't know how to say it, because she's never had a capacity problem before. None of that excuses poor behavior. A leader still has to address what's showing up. But how you address it — the lens you bring to that conversation — changes everything about what's possible on the other side of it. Curious leaders create the conditions for honest conversations. Judgmental ones teach people to manage their image more carefully . The Habit That Changes the Conversation Generosity before assumption isn't naïve. It's strategic. W hen you approach a shift in behavior with "what's going on for you?" instead of "what's wrong with your work?" — you open a door that most leaders keep closed by accident. People learn, quickly, whether it's safe to tell the truth at work. They're watching what happens when someone does. A leader who leads with curiosity — who extends grace before drawing conclusions — builds a different kind of team. Not a team that performs for the leader. A team that works with them. T hat's the distinction that matters most. And it starts with a small, deliberate act of restraint: not assuming you already know why. What I Tell Myself My daughter is five now. She still has hard days — they just look different than they did at two. The reasons are more complex. The feelings are just as big. A nd I still have to remind myself: the behavior in front of me is information, not a verdict. She's communicating something she doesn't yet have the words for. My job isn't to shut it down. It's to help her find the language for what's underneath. I 've said almost those exact words in coaching sessions — to chiefs of staff, to VPs, to executives who were carrying more than anyone could see and had never been asked to put it down. T he capacity for grace doesn't diminish with seniority. If anything, the stakes get higher. The higher you go, the more your response to a struggling team member ripples. T rust isn't built in the good weeks. It's built in the moments when you could have assumed the worst — and didn't. Bennett Strategic Leadership works with executives, chiefs of staff, and high-performing leaders who are ready to lead from a different place. If something here resonated, you're in the right place.
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