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.
Let's start with what perfectionism actually is — because it isn't what most people think. It's not high standards. High standards are healthy, clarifying, and motivating when they're communicated well. Perfectionism is something else entirely. It's the belief that your worth is contingent on flawless execution. That good enough is never quite good enough. That the gap between where you are and where you should be is a moral failing, not a human condition. And here's the part that doesn't make it into most conversations about perfectionism: it doesn't just cost you. It costs the people around you — often more. What Perfectionism Takes From You The personal cost is real and worth naming. P erfectionism slows you down. Not because you're thorough — thorough is a skill — but because the bar keeps moving. You finish something, and instead of feeling complete, you feel exposed. What did you miss? What could someone criticize? You revise, reconsider, and sometimes quietly shelve the thing entirely rather than risk putting something imperfect into the world. P erfectionism keeps you out of the present moment. You're always slightly ahead of yourself — anticipating the critique, managing the perception, scanning for the gap. The meeting you're in becomes secondary to the meeting you're already rehearsing in your head. P erfectionism is exhausting in a way that's hard to explain to people who don't experience it, because from the outside it often looks like excellence. Nobody sees the cost. That's part of what makes it so hard to put down. A nd perfectionism, left unchecked, becomes a moving goalpost. No matter how close you get, the standard shifts. The kick is always just short — not because you lack the ability, but because the target won't stay still. The effort required to keep chasing it takes everything you have, leaving nothing for the relationships, the creativity, and the long-term thinking that actually move the work forward. What Perfectionism Takes From the People Around You This is the conversation that happens less often. And it's the one that matters most. W hen a leader operates from perfectionism, the people around them feel it — even when nothing is said explicitly. The standard in the room becomes unstated and unmeetable. People start to manage their image rather than do their best work. They edit themselves before they speak. They bring you the polished version of ideas rather than the rough ones — which means you never get the thinking that happens before the polish, and that thinking is often where the best things live. P erfectionism in a leader creates a particular kind of silence. Not the silence of people who have nothing to say. The silence of people who have learned it isn't safe to say it imperfectly. T here's a version of this that's even harder to see: the perfectionist leader who is generous and well-intentioned, who isn't critical or harsh, who would be genuinely surprised to learn that their team is holding back. The standard doesn't have to be spoken to be felt. People are remarkably good at reading the room. If you only light up when something is done exactly right, they notice. If your feedback always finds the one thing that could be better, they notice. If you redo work without explanation, they notice. W hat they conclude — quietly, privately, without ever saying it out loud — is that they're not quite enough. That the bar is somewhere they can't quite reach. That the safest move is to wait until they're sure before they bring anything forward. T hat's what perfectionism costs a team. Not in any one dramatic moment — but slowly, steadily, in the accumulated weight of all the things that were never said. The Three Levels I think about this through a framework I've been developing with a collaborator, and it goes like this: T here are three levels at which we can operate: right, fair, and perfect. R ight is the baseline. Most people know what the right thing is. The right call, the right move, the right thing to say. It doesn't take extraordinary effort to access — it takes honesty. F air is harder. Fair means being right consistently — applying the same standard to yourself that you apply to others, to this situation that you applied to the last one. It requires discipline and self-awareness, and most leaders who are doing well are operating here. P erfect is something else entirely. Perfect is heavy. Perfect is lonely. And perfect — this is the part worth sitting with — makes everyone else feel less than. N ot because you intend it. Because the gap between where you are and where they are becomes the room's defining feature. The goalpost keeps moving — and their kick will always fall short, not because they aren't trying or they’re not talented, but because the target was never in a fixed place to begin with. What Presence Does Instead Presence is the antidote — and it works in both directions. W hen you are truly present, you are not performing. You're not managing the perception or scanning for the flaw. You are in it — with the people in the room, with the conversation that's actually happening, with the moment as it is rather than the moment as it should be. T hat shift — from performing to being present — levels the playing field in a way that nothing else quite does. It signals safety. It says: you don't have to be perfect here. I'm not. And in that signal, something opens up. People bring more. They risk more. They trust more. P resence is a form of service. When you choose to be present — fully, without the performance — you are giving something to the people in the room. Your attention. Your realness. Your willingness to be in it with them rather than above it. W e have more chances to do this than we realize. Micro-moments of genuine attention and connection, spread across every meeting, every conversation, every exchange. The question isn't whether the opportunities exist. They always do. T he question is how willing you are to take them. The Shift Worth Making Letting go of perfect isn't about lowering your standards. It's about changing what you're optimizing for. P erfect optimizes for the absence of flaw. Presence optimizes for connection, trust, and the kind of psychological safety that lets people do their best work — which, it turns out, is far more valuable than flawless execution. T he leaders I admire most are not the ones who never make mistakes. They're the ones who are present enough to catch them, honest enough to name them, and grounded enough to move forward without it costing them their confidence. T hat's the version of leadership that people remember. Not the perfect meeting. The moment when you were real. W hen perfectionism is stealing, presence is serving. A nd I'm here for that. 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.
