Retired Air Force Lt Col. Now I teach first-time managers the leadership nobody trained them for. Host, The Leader's Mindset. Las Vegas.
Las Vegas
Joined August 2014
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Last month you were the best performer on the team.
This week you're the boss. Nobody handed you a manual.
Here's the trap: the exact skills that got you promoted are not the skills that make you good at this job. And if nobody tells you that, you'll spend your first year doing everyone's work except your own.
Gallup found that companies pick the wrong person for the manager job 82% of the time. Eighty-two percent. Usually not because the person is bad, but because they got promoted for the old job and given zero training for the new one.
If that's you, you're not failing. You were set up without a map.
Here's the map.
THE MULTIPLIER SHIFT
Your success used to be what you produced. Now it's what your team produces. Completely different game.
Rule of thumb: if only you can do a task, your job is to teach it, not keep doing it.
When I became a flight commander I had to stop being the sharpest operator in the room and start making everyone else sharper. Hardest adjustment of my career.
So be honest — what are you still doing yourself this week just because you're faster at it? That's not leadership. That's you being the bottleneck. Sit with that for a second.
THE FIRST 1-ON-1 SCRIPT
Sit down with each person and ask three questions. What's going well? What's getting in your way? How do you like to be recognized?
Then listen. Twenty minutes of listening in week one buys more trust than twenty decisions in month one.
SET THE STANDARD OUT LOUD
New managers assume people know what "good" looks like. They don't.
Say it plainly: "Good means the report is done, checked, and on my desk by Thursday at noon."
A standard in your head is just a secret you're grading people against.
PRAISE IN PUBLIC, CORRECT IN PRIVATE
Recognize wins where everyone sees them. Handle mistakes one-on-one, door closed.
Get it backwards — correct someone in front of the team — and you lose the room in a single meeting.
DELEGATE THE OUTCOME, NOT THE STEPS
In the military we call it commander's intent. Give the result and the standard, not every step.
"I need 30 calls made by Friday, every one logged." Then let them own the how. You'll get their best thinking instead of their compliance.
BONUS: GUARD YOUR CALENDAR
Your day will get eaten alive by "got a sec?" Block 30 minutes every morning for your own priorities before the team wakes up.
And remember the rule — if it's on the calendar, we can only move it, not delete it.
That's the map nobody handed you.
If you're in your first year of managing people, tell me which one you're running this week.
Onward and Upward 🚀
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Made a new friend at Nevada the Entrepreneurial last night.
The AAA20 Group team are good friends of Vegas Startup Scene, and the Electrify Nevada cohort pitches were a highlight.
Full recap on this week's episode.
#VegasStartupScene #LasVegas
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You got promoted for being the best at the job, and nobody mentioned that this is exactly why the new one is going badly.
The skill that earned the title is the same skill that stops you doing the work the title describes. You are fast, you are accurate, and every time something matters you take it back.
Good maps for this already exist. Kevin Eikenberry's delegation levels are the one most managers meet first and they are worth reading. What they do not solve is the one task you will never hand over, because handing it over feels like the moment you stop being good at anything.
So here is the narrower cut I use.
Name it. Not the ten things you are too busy for. The one you keep because you are genuinely the fastest person in the building at it.
Hand over the decision, not the task. Giving someone the work and keeping the judgment is a longer way of doing it yourself.
Let the first version come back worse than yours, and do not quietly fix it at 10pm. That is the move that teaches a team the handover was theatre.
What you are protecting is not the quality of the work. It is the daily proof that you are still good at something, and the new job will not hand that out for months.
Onward and Upward 🚀
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Most first one-on-ones fail in the same direction: the manager talks for forty minutes and walks out thinking it went well.
Today's clip is tactic two of four from this week's Leadership TTP. Take your two agenda lines and turn them into three questions you ask out loud.
What is going well that I cannot see.
What is slowing you down.
What do you need from me.
Then stop talking and start listening.
The principle underneath is Andy Grove's, from High Output Management: the one-on-one belongs to the person you are meeting with, not to you. Worth saying plainly, because most managers who run a good one are running Grove's idea without knowing whose it is.
What I would add is why these three and not three others.
The first admits out loud that your view is partial, and that admission is what makes an honest answer to the other two possible at all.
The second asks for an obstacle rather than a complaint, which is a much easier thing to hand a new boss.
The third turns the meeting into something you owe them, so they leave holding a commitment from you instead of a task list.
And then the part people drop: the silence. Not a pause. A full stop. Most managers fill it inside four seconds because it feels like the meeting has stalled, and that is exactly where the real answer was about to go.
Onward and Upward 🚀
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Someone just gave notice. Don't backfill yet. Dr. Rosalind Cohen: take the pause and ask whether you still need the role, and whether you need it the way it is today.
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The age gap is not your problem. Pretending it isn't there is.
I was a flight commander with people who had been doing the mission longer than I had been alive. Nobody was rude about it. It was just there, every time I opened my mouth.
What worked was not acting senior. Acting senior reads as insecurity to anyone who has been around long enough to have seen it tried before.
What worked was asking better questions than anyone had asked them.
"Walk me through why it works this way today."
That one sentence does two jobs. Either I learn why not to touch the process, or I earn the right to change it. Both beat arriving with a plan nobody asked for.
The instinct when you are younger than your team is to prove you belong in the chair. It is the wrong instinct. Experience in the room is not a threat to your authority. It is the whole reason you have a team instead of a task list.
And the move that costs the most: apologizing for it. The second you say "I know I'm young," you have handed everyone permission to treat that as the issue.
Your job is not to out-experience them. It is to point the experience at the right problem.
Onward and Upward 🚀
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Teams almost never break over the conflict itself. They break over the four weeks before anyone names it, while everyone quietly adjusts around the thing nobody will say.
Today's clip lays out a two-minute reset script. It borrows from the Air Force debrief, and that origin is worth saying plainly, because a debrief was never designed to make anyone feel better. It existed so a crew could say what actually happened while the details were still accurate, and then fly again the next day.
Name the specific event, not the pattern. Say what you observed, then stop. Ask what they saw and wait longer than is comfortable. Agree on one change with a date attached.
Here is the move I would emphasize: the two-minute ceiling is not a productivity gimmick. Length is what converts a correction into a wound. Run it long enough and it stops sounding like a reset and starts sounding like a case somebody has been assembling for a month.
Most managers who are good at the first two steps never get to the third, because they already know what happened. Asking anyway is the entire difference between a debrief and a verdict.
Onward and Upward 🚀
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Your top performer is getting punished for being good. The low performers don't produce, so guess who picks up the slack? Kyle Patrick Smith on The Leader's Mindset.
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Nobody warns you that a promotion is partly a grief. The work you were best at belongs to someone else now, and the job that replaced it produces nothing visible for weeks.
Today's clip is about the switch from tactical to strategic. Here is the part I would add to it.
The reason new leaders keep doing the tactical work is not laziness or control. It is that the tactical work is the only part of the day that still returns a clear verdict. You did the thing, the thing is done, you were good at it. Strategy gives you no such receipt for a long time.
So the honest question is not "am I delegating enough." It is: what am I reaching for when I need to feel competent today?
And the one almost nobody asks: who on my team still measures their own worth by the exact job I just stopped doing? They are listening to how I talk about it now that I do not have to do it.
Get that wrong and strategy reads as contempt from a floor above.
Onward and Upward 🚀
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Your best people aren't leaving for money. They're leaving because they stopped growing. If they can't picture year two with you, they'll picture it somewhere else.
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Say "I was wrong" before you have to.
That is the whole tactic in today's clip and it closes the week for a reason, because it is the one that feels like it costs you something.
The instruction is deliberately small. Name one minor thing you got wrong this month, unprompted. Not in a crisis, not under pressure, not after somebody else surfaced it. On an ordinary day, out loud, about something that does not matter very much.
New managers read that as spending authority. It is the exact opposite, and the mechanism is calibration. An admission nobody forced out of you is the only evidence your team has that your assessments carry information. If you have never been wrong out loud, then "this is good work" is a noise you make rather than a judgment anyone can act on.
The clip puts the rest of it plainly, and I would not improve on it. Respect is not being liked. Make one visible decision. Do the unglamorous thing. Keep your small promises. Defend your people publicly. None of those require anyone to like you first.
Respect gets built in public, in small pieces, on purpose.
Which is exactly where the week lands. Every tactic since Monday has had the same shape underneath it: do the thing while it is still cheap, rather than when it is forced out of you at the worst possible moment.
Lead before you have to.
Onward and Upward 🚀
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Two people on your team stopped talking to each other three weeks ago. You found out last Tuesday.
You stepped up to lead and walked straight into your team's burnout and conflict, plus your own. The comfortable explanation is that those two have a personality clash and you have a mediation problem. It is almost never that.
When a team is running at full load, conflict is the first thing that breaks. Not because anyone changed, but because the slack that used to absorb a short answer on a Thursday afternoon is gone. Two people who were fine in March are not fine in October and nothing about either of them is different.
So the order of operations is the whole thing. Load before lecture.
Read the load before you read the person. Count what each of them is carrying right now against what they carried six months ago. If it is meaningfully more, you are looking at capacity rather than character, and a feedback conversation at that moment makes everything worse.
Cut one thing, publicly. Not a promise to look at priorities. One specific thing the team stops doing, with the name of whoever approved stopping it, said where everybody hears it. Subtraction is the only message people actually believe, because it is the only one that costs you something.
Put your own recovery on the schedule like a shift. If yours is the one load nobody is permitted to reduce, you have just taught the entire team that the rule is decorative.
Get the order wrong and you convert a capacity problem into a trust problem, which is a far more expensive thing to own.
Onward and Upward 🚀
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A coworker once wrestled the boss's son to the ground, opened his paycheck, and walked straight into his father's office with it.
That is the story in today's clip. Kevin Voisin was the one on the floor, working minimum wage in his family's Louisiana oyster plant, and the raise that followed took him from $4.25 to $4.50. Those are the numbers in the clip, not mine.
It lands as comedy. It is actually one of the cleanest examples of advocacy I have come across, and here is what I take from it.
The person being underpaid is almost always the last one who can say so. For the owner's kid it was merely awkward. For nearly everyone on your team it is career risk, which means the silence you are reading as contentment is just a rational calculation.
Advocacy is a specific act. It is saying the thing out loud, to a person with the authority to fix it, on someone else's behalf, when you gain nothing by it. Sympathy in the break room is not a weaker version of this. It is a different thing entirely, and everyone involved knows the difference.
And twenty-five cents was never the point. Being seen accurately was, and it stayed with him long enough to tell the story decades later on a podcast.
So: who on your team would never raise it, and when did you last look?
Lead before you have to.
Onward and Upward 🚀
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The weekly staff meeting is where good teams go to wait their turn. Everyone reports upward, nobody decides anything, and the one person who needed ten minutes gets four.
Today's clip makes a straight swap: replace it with a daily stand-up. Worth saying where that comes from, because it gets passed around as if someone invented it on a podcast. The daily stand-up is a Scrum practice, from Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, and it was built to do one job.
What makes it work is the constraint, not the standing.
Fifteen minutes, same time every day, ending on time even mid-sentence. The hard stop is the feature.
Three questions each: what moved yesterday, what moves today, what is in the way. Nothing else.
Anything needing a real discussion gets named and taken offline with the two people who actually belong in it, rather than performed for nine.
And no status theater. If an update exists only so the manager feels informed, it belongs in writing where it costs nobody anything.
Here is what I would add, because it is the part that changes how you think about cadence. The cost of a weekly meeting was never the hour. It is that a blocker found on Monday afternoon waits six days to reach the person who could have cleared it over coffee. Meeting frequency is a latency setting.
Lead before you have to.
Onward and Upward 🚀
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