As I’ve mentioned previously, last month I was at the Support Driven EU Summit in Amsterdam (which sounds like some sort of arduous trek, but was only a train ride for me. And I am still not over how delightful it is that Amsterdam is just like 40 minutes away), and it was genuinely the most fun I have had at an industry event in years. I usually attend these things for the hallway conversations and come home moaning about the presentations. Not this time. Well played, Support Driven.

Nearly every talk touched AI in some way. Implementations. Ethics. Vendor promises versus vendor deliveries, which at this point is a genre unto itself. And before I go any further: I love these people. They are doing right by their teams and their customers, and nothing below is shade at anyone or anything that was said on that stage AT. ALL. What the talks DID do was rattle something loose that I have been turning over ever since I got off the train. A blog is nothing if not a place to put the things rattling around one’s head, so here we are.

My lukewarm Hot Take: the single best thing you can do with AI in a support organisation, for your customers AND your people, is to make it the Drafter of Things.

The drafter. Not the responder. Not the decider. Not the autonomous agent bravely fielding your customers’ problems while your team updates their CVs in the next room because they Know What’s Coming.

Drafter. That one word is carrying a lot, so let me explain.

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

A support team produces a frankly absurd volume of writing. Knowledge base articles. Help center content. Escalation write-ups. Post-mortems. QA reviews. Coaching notes. And then, you know, the answering-customers part that is the actual job that everyone thinks is all that they do. All of it competes for the same limited hours, which is why the same person who writes a brilliant article on Tuesday may come up with absolute rubbish on Friday (for which I give absolutely zero judgement. Friday me is not the best of contributors either. See ref: this potentially rubbish article that is only going to be posted today [Friday] by some literal miracle).

I am a firm believer that, despite my deep dislike of a blank white page, the bottleneck is not actually the ideas part. At least not in these environments. In the business world, the bottleneck is in the throughput. The bandwidth. There is simply exponentially more that needs writing than there are hours in which to write it, and I am willing to put cash money down that every leader reading this just nodded, possibly without noticing.

THAT is the specific and very unsexy problem where these tools genuinely shine. The filling of those blank pages. So why not let the plagiarism machines produce the first draft of nearly everything that doesn’t require creativity? Everything from articles prompted by sudden spikes in tickets to draft replies to customer questions. And then there’s the QA process, where the machine can do something no human team has ever had the hours for: look at EVERY interaction and flag the outliers, top and bottom, for a human to actually review. Ask any support leader how much of their queue gets QA eyes on it today. I’m not going to actually ask you to check, because I already know. It’s guaranteed to be less than 5%. Which, yes. That’s still statistically significant, but . . . damn.

And now we must arrive at the part where somebody may start yelling:

What we need . . . what we MUST have . . . is also a human who reads every single word before it goes anywhere. Every article. Every reply. Every. Single. Fucking. Word.

I know. I KNOW. “Ash, you have just described AI with a human-shaped bottleneck. Also, you swear too much.” And I grant that this is exactly how it looks. And damn straight I do. But I am going to hold my ground, for two reasons: one about your customers, and one about your people.

The customer reason first. Every one of us has now been on the receiving end of machine-written text that was technically correct and emotionally wrong (or technically wrong AND emotionally wrong. It can be two things!). We all know the voice, and our customers do too. When a customer discovers mid-conversation that they have been talking to a machine (and again they absolutely DO discover it), the damage goes well past “this answer was wrong” and lands somewhere around “this company lied to me”. And that, of course, is even assuming that the answers being provided are completely accurate and hallucination free. Which they won’t be. This is only one person’s experience both as an implementer and consumer of AI support bots, but there has yet to be a bot created that can actually recreate the human support experience as we’ve been promised.

And then there’s the people reason. The pitch that goes along with most of these tools is headcount. Specifically less of it. The same (or more) output with fewer people at a lower cost. Just look at the savings! Please sign here. For most organisations this is not only a false economy, it could really be called a bait-and-switch (and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, the trends are starting to show). The throughput gains may very well be real, but between the errors, the customer frustrations, the lack of bi-directional customer feedback, and the absolutely insane cost increases . . . those throughput gains are completely eaten.

Instead of capitalising on the supposed gains from AI implementations by terminating staff that are now supposedly redundant, the smart way to use those gains is by realising that you now have a team that finally has TIME. Time in which to use their product expertise to fix the processes or help articles instead of having to muscle through “the long way” because nobody has ever had time to figure out another way. Time to coach or train up to be tier 2 / 3 / Jr. Dev employees . . . because there WILL be tickets that a chat bot cannot resolve. And as a call back to the above, it’s not like they won’t be busy, I still strongly believe that they should be reading EVERY WORD that the AI generates before it gets sent out. To check for accuracy and the human factor™.

In the interest of full transparency I have to disclose that I run my own working life this way. I have an AI assistant (”Zelda”, so named after the Librarian of the Neitherlands in “The Magicians”. I welcome your judgement) that I work with every single day. It has never once published anything of mine itself, and anything it HAS created has been to my specifications and I have rewritten just about every word of it (and nobody who has ever worked with me is surprised by a single thing I just said. I’m told that I can be . . . particular . . . with my writing. Judgers) But to be clear, that’s not a failing on Zelda’s part, it’s this exact arrangement working as I’ve described. The draft gets me off of a blank page, which is exactly what I need. I couldn’t even imagine sending its words out as mine unread . . . and my inbox matters considerably less than our customers’ do.

So . . . I call this the Drafter Principle. The machines can own the first draft. But a human HAS to own everything after it. It’s what ensures that we, as humans, can maintain more of a handle on . . . well . . . us. And our future. It allows for an enormous amount of improvement: it creates more output, more consistency, dramatically less time staring at empty documents, and so much more; but it also allows for the human beings that make up the fabric of these companies to continue to exist, and maybe even with a better quality of life.

Don’t make me Butlerian Jihad this thing. I WILL pull this car over.

The “should we use AI in support” question was settled a while ago, whether we like it or not. You are using it, or you are about to be. The only question with any juice left is where the human sits, and my answer is: at the end. Every. Single. Time.

AI drafts everything. A human sends everything.

That is the entire message. Everything else is implementation detail.

Not wrote an article for it. Not pasted a link into a chat while quietly praying. Read it. The way a customer would read it. Starting from a problem, hoping to find a way out.

If your answer is anything other than a pained “Uhhhhhh . . .”, congratulations, you are in a vanishingly small club and you may spend the rest of this article feeling smug. Everyone else, come sit by me. I’ll even bring some snacks. No (extremely hypocritical) judgement over here. I have built support organisations from nothing, I have preached the gospel of self-service to anyone who would stand still long enough, and I have ALSO shipped a knowledge base, felt enormously proud of it, and then not meaningfully looked at it again until something was on fire (I may as well get the phrase “Do as I say, not as I do” . . . uhm “did” tattooed somewhere. It comes up A LOT).

I keep coming back to this topic though. The knowledge base is the only part of a support operation that scales for free. I know, right? Crazy talk. When did YOU last encounter something that was free? Every other improvement has an ongoing bill attached. More agents cost salary. Better tooling costs licences. Coaching costs hours, every week, forever. A good article costs you once, and then it answers the same question ten thousand times without a sick day or a bad mood. Nothing else in the entire support world has that return profile.

And yet. AND YET. We still let them rot.

So let’s talk about why, because the reasons are remarkably consistent. I have inherited, audited, or rebuilt support functions at companies of wildly different shapes and sizes, and the same three failures show up every single time. EVERY time.

Nobody owns it. The typical knowledge base was created in a burst of enthusiasm by somebody who has since changed roles, changed companies, or changed careers entirely. It has been updated ever since by “whoever has a minute”, and I regret to inform you that nobody has a minute. The result is articles from three product versions ago sitting directly beside the one written last Tuesday, with nothing to tell your customer which is which.

They find out, of course. The hard way. Once.

In my humble (but right) opinion, an out-of-date article is worse than no article at all, because a missing answer may frustrate the customer but it will still send them to the queue. It may annoy or overwhelm you, but look at it as a reason to update things. It’s what we do! But a wrong answer walks them confidently into a wall. Now they may not trust ANY of your articles, including the good ones. You didn’t lose one answer, you lost the whole library (”trust”, as I find myself repeating in about every third thing I write, is the entire game. If you lose it that early, why even take the field?).

Your customers do not speak product. This one stings because the work was actually done. The article exists. It is even accurate, which as we just covered is a small miracle. But it was titled and written by the person who built the feature, in the language of the person who built the feature. You called it “Configuring authentication token rotation”. Your customer is typing “why do I keep getting logging out”.

Those two people are describing the same problem and they will never EVER find each other.

Whenever I start with a new team, one of the first things I ask for is the search data from whatever platform hosts their help content (oh dear saints and all the little fishies, let them have configured their help center to properly collect the data. And I’ll do a dance for the ones that integrated into other systems!). But specifically I want to see the dead ends. Searches that returned nothing, and articles that customers read immediately before contacting support anyway, which is a customer telling you, quite politely, that your article did not do its one job (and less politely that your article SUUUUUUUUCKED). Every platform on the market collects this. A lot of folks don’t configure it and almost nobody looks at it. Which makes Ash sad.

Go pull yours up. Seriously. I’d say I’ll wait, but if it’s not configured then we might be here a while . . .

That reaction you are having right now? I have watched it land on a lot of faces, and it is always the same short journey: from “oh no” to “well, THAT explains a few things.”

It was written by experts, for experts. The curse of knowledge is a real, documented thing: once you understand a system deeply, you lose the ability to remember what not understanding it felt like. So the article gets written by your most knowledgeable person (sensible!), and comes out complete, precise, technically flawless, aaaaaaaaaaand COMPLETELY useless to a stressed customer at 11pm who just wants to know why the doowacky won’t do the thingy the way they think it should. It MUST be broken!

The fix is almost embarrassingly simple: before a new feature goes live, the article needs to be ready. And before the article goes live, someone who did NOT write it has to solve a real problem using only that article. Not proofread it. USE it. If they cannot, the article is not done, which means that the feature isn’t either!

So, in the immortal words of John Oliver: What can we actually DO about all of this?

One thing, and I promise it is not exciting: we treat the knowledge base like a product instead of a pile of documents. Products have fancy things like owners, roadmaps, and usage data that a human reviews and acts on. The moment a knowledge base gets those three things, it starts getting better every month instead of quietly degrading. I have personally seen this play out enough times that I no longer consider it a theory.

The concrete version that I have seen work goes thusly (how’s this for solid next steps, eh?):

Get yourself a product owner with actual time. One person accountable for the health of the library. When an article has not been reviewed in a set period, or the product changed underneath it, or the data says customers are bouncing off it, that person gets a nudge and has the hours to act on it. Since this is someone’s real job function, they are both empowered to spend the time AND to chase down the people who they need to action on it. Pretending it can happen “in the gaps” is precisely how we all got here.

A feedback loop from the queue. When agents keep answering the same question, the reflex needs to NOT be to just shrug and keep trying harder. It needs to be to ask specific internal troubleshooting questions: Does an article exist? Can a normal human find it? Can a normal human read it? Is it factually correct? If yes to all of the above, why are these humans not finding it? Fix whichever one or more failed, as part of the normal work.

Two audiences, two formats, two repositories. Your customers need explanations. Your agents, thirty seconds into a live chat, need answers. Those are different documents that happen to share facts. Teams that serve both audiences with one set of articles end up serving neither, and the agents quietly build a shadow library of personal notes instead . . . which is how an organisation ends up with fifteen slightly different versions of the truth. I tend to call the public-facing one a help center and the internally-facing one a knowledge base, but you do what’s right for your team!

None of this is glamorous. I’m not going to say that nobody gets invited onto a conference stage to talk about their article review cadence (because I saw that Write the Docs is coming up, and I’m willing to bet that those folks are TOTALLY going to be talking about this exact topic! I love my writing nerds). But a knowledge base that is actually cared for is going to lower contact volume, help your reps, and give customers the thing many (most? Dare I say all?!) of them actually prefer . . . solving the problem themselves without talking to anyone. That’s the good stuff. That’s the whole point of self-service.

But somebody should own it. They NEED to own it. Which means they should have actual, real time to own it.

So that’s it. That’s the entire strategy. It fits on a sticky note. I said that it was free at the beginning of my article . . . and I lied. I do that sometimes, apparently. It is not free . . . and pretending it was is actually how we all ended up with libraries nobody reads, and with an article named after the thing your customers are not doing. Don’t do that.

It’s storytime.

Back in October of 2025, I took my first proper vacation in . . . honestly, I have no idea how long! I was in a good place though. I was enjoying working with my client, my kids were thriving in the new country, and my long-distance on-and-off again partner had flown out all of the way from Phoenix for a visit. It was the perfect time to go introduce folks to one of my favourite cities: Paris, France.

By the way, I am going to pepper this whole post with photos from this trip. Because a) I LOVE Paris, b) I so rarely get a reasonable excuse to share stuff like this, and c) this is my blog. If you don’t like it, get your own! 😉

So I took the week off and when I got back on that Friday, my phone started BLOWING. UP.

This is, as they like to say, not a Good Sign.

Without getting into too many details, changes were happening with my client and nobody knew for sure what they would mean. Just that there were going to be a lot of them.

Fast forward several months and the good news is that I was lucky. I managed to weather those changes for quite a while, and I flatter myself in thinking that I helped to influence things at least a bit in making the lives of my coworkers easier as they went through uncertainty that I have had to experience myself.

The not-so-good news is that the luck didn’t last. About a month and a half ago, they let me know that they were not going to be renewing my contract. I wasn’t at all surprised, there was a lot of redundancy in this process and they have a really fantastic person in place doing what I am also really fantastic at! They were kind enough to put me on garden leave, which has allowed me some breathing room.

I have taken some time to spend with the kids, do some of the chores around my flat that kept ending up on my “I’ll take care of that someday” list, and just generally exist . . . which I don’t think I need to tell you folks how necessary that is when you work on this level!

I am now going to be deliberate about what comes next.

I know what kind of work I have enjoyed deeply (and what I’m good at), and what I would rather hold off on for a while.

If you are a founder (or know someone who is) and you’ve hit the point where your customer team is creating actual friction rather than just background noise, I would genuinely love to talk to you about it. I’m not looking to pitch you, I’m not the kind of person to even HAVE a pitch deck. Let me have 20 minutes of your time, and maybe we can find a solution. You can find the myriad ways to contact me right here (including setting up a call on Calendly!).

And this goes for everyone! If you find that you could use some help with your customer team (support, success, experience, account management, etc), I would love to chat. I may not be a great fit, but I probably know someone who would be!

And in the meantime, keep your chin up, everyone! We’ll get through all of this together. 💪

When I come into the various organisations with which I work, one of the things that I am commonly struck by is the near-universal relationship with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators, which I am using interchangeably in this article with “metrics”) that most folks have. Not just within whatever Customer-facing department I may be working with, but throughout the company as a whole.

Sidenote: I am telling you all of this because it is only fair that I be clear throughout this series where I am coming from. Biases and all that, yah?

Time and again when I am speaking with new teams or leaders at a company and being asked to turn around a set of metrics (because turning around metrics is literally always part of my initial remit), when I ask WHY these metrics are important at all or why it’s important that they be a certain number, the answer is . . . worrying.

Most often it’s in the realm of “because that’s what upper management told us to track” from team members. And “because it’s industry standard” from upper management. Occasionally it’s “because our investors / parent company want(s) to see these numbers”, which is comparatively refreshing, if frustrating in its own ways. I have only once or twice had someone give me a thought-out reason for the metrics they were tracking, and while I didn’t agree with them, at least this person had put in the time and effort.

I am well aware that this is a HOT hot take, but I am going to go out on a limb and say that 90%+ of all KPIs and metrics that exist within CX organisations globally are what I like to call “vanity metrics”.

The Vanity Metric

What is a vanity metric? Well, the name is pretty much on the tin.

It is a metric that is being tracked (or probably more accurately reported upon) solely to make the person, the team, the department, or the organisation as a whole look good. It’s being reported out of pure vanity.

Now I am drawing a line of difference between tracking and reporting on purpose. Because tracking things can allow us to make sure that we’re not slipping into some abyss (and more on that later in the series!), but if you are even able to brag about a metric that is and has continued to stay high then you are probably focusing on the wrong things, my friends.

As a perfect example of this, if you have a problem with your customer contacts going hours or even days without being answered, you will want to resolve that. That’s when you start tracking “Time to First Response” (TFR) and start implementing fixes to bring that down. As you make progress, report on it. Sing it to the world! Great job.

But! If you’ve never had an issue with TFR OR if your struggles with it are in the past, why is this even a discussion point? I’ll tell you: vanity.

The Three Flavours

There are, broadly, two to three types of metrics that a customer-facing team leader is going to have to deal with.

You have productivity metrics at the team level. You have productivity metrics at the individual level. And then you have customer sentiment metrics.

I’m going to spend the rest of this article on the sentiment ones, because the productivity ones are a whole separate conversation (and they are coming, no worries). But I want to name all three first, because I see people treating all three as interchangeable and they’re distinctly not. Not only do they measure entirely different things, they serve entirely different purposes, and what you can DO with each of them is completely different.

There are a ton of different thought pieces out there that like to pretend that there are a variety of niche sentiment scoring profiles that are “up and coming” or something, but in the CX world, the three scoring systems that you’re going to encounter everywhere are:

• CSAT (customer satisfaction score)

• NPS (net promoter score)

• CES (customer effort score)

You are probably familiar with all three (though CES still has some work to do in getting attention. I’ll chat that one up first), and you probably track at least one of them. Sadly, there is also a better-than-average chance that you are either being held accountable for one of them as a leader, or are holding your team or team members accountable for one of them.

And if that’s the case: Stop it. Bad leader. No cookie.

Customer Effort Score: AKA, Ash’s “Favourite”

Let’s start with the one I have the least problem with, which is CES.

Customer effort score asks the customer to rate how difficult it was to get their answer or to get their problem solved. It can be on a scale of one to five or one to seven, depending on who built or is providing your survey software. But that’s it. That is the entirety of the question.

But here is why I find it useful: it’s something that we as CX professionals actually have a stake in. If effort scores are high, it means customers are working too hard to get help. Maybe the knowledge base is a maze or missing key articles. Maybe the ticket deflection system is directing people into the void. Maybe the answer to a genuinely simple question requires three transfers and a form. Those are things a CX leader can do something about. On paper. Knowledge bases can be improved. Deflection flows can be double-checked or redesigned. Common requests can be engineered to require significantly less . . . well . . . effort.

CES gives you a signal you can act on that, depending on your organisation, allows you to move the needle properly and take ownership.

Do not, however, confuse “useful signal” with “something to bonus your reps on.” It is not that either. I’ll get to why in a moment.

CSAT: The Astrology of Customer Metrics

Now. CSAT.

Customer satisfaction score. The metric that nearly every CX leader I know is responsible for, reports on, agonises over, and in many cases, has their team members’ variable compensation tied to (voluntarily or otherwise).

I will try to put this in a way that won’t shock the delicate sensibilities of too many people:

CSAT as a metric is hot garbage.

Sorry! Sorry. That clearly didn’t hit the right tone. Let me try again:

CSAT as a metric is an attempt to put numbers to a customer’s feeling and then apply it to people who had nothing to do with that feeling, thus rendering it almost entirely void of quantitative value. Also, it’s hot garbage.

I am, genuinely, a great big hippie. I have nothing against intuition, against the soft and unmeasurable, against things that resist quantification (ask me about astrology sometime. I have Opinions). But when we start getting into uncontrolled environments with questionably written surveys and the goal of capturing how someone feels without being able to even be sure they understand what they’re being asked, we aren’t rising to the level of discussing astrology. We’re stuck in the mud of Magic 8 Ball levels of reliability.

The tragedy of CSAT is that any particular representative could do absolutely everything right. The entire TEAM could do everything right. The customer could be getting fast, accurate, genuinely kind resolutions to genuinely complex problems that make me want to write poetry in praise of the answers.

But if that customer, I dunno:

• Had a fight with their partner that morning

• Got stuck in traffic on the way to work

• Got their coffee order wrong (or spilled it!)

• Is fundamentally the sort of person who finds the “completely satisfied” option on a five-point scale to be philosophically irresponsible

. . . then everyone is getting a low score. Not because anything went wrong. Because life is full of noise that has nothing to do with your team.

And it runs the other way too! A customer who has warm feelings about your brand, or just had a really good day, or has a natural tendency toward generosity, is going to give you a high score even when things were objectively mediocre. That’s me, BTW. I am the guy who is like “Service was slow, food was cold, prices were insulting. 5 out of 5 stars.” Too much time in the service industry, I suppose!

So you end up with a metric that captures, in roughly equal parts, the actual quality of the interaction, the customer’s emotional state before the interaction, the weather, and the general chaos of human existence. And all of that is BEFORE we even start talking about the bad news that reps and teams sometimes have to deliver to customers that is rarely their fault but that nonetheless upsets the customer.

So. Which one of those is your team responsible for?

Right.

And yet, and this is the part that makes me want to *gently* put my head through a wall some days, we attach it to individual reps as either a bonus item or a bonus disqualifier. I’ve seen representatives PIPed because of CSAT. We make people’s livelihoods dependent on a number that is substantially determined by factors that have nothing to do with them.

NPS: More like NYP. Not Your Problem, am I right?

Net promoter score asks a customer: “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend this company to a friend or colleague?”

Notice what that question is asking. It is asking about the COMPANY. The entire company. Whether the product delivers on its promise, whether the pricing feels fair, whether the last three features released were actually useful, whether the CEO said something embarrassing on a podcast last month, whether a competitor just launched something better. All of it.

And then, in many organisations I have worked with, this score lands in the CX leader’s lap.

As the voice of the customer, I genuinely understand it. CX sits closest to the customer, so there is a logic to saying “you should be gathering this data, quantifying it, making sure the business understands what customers are actually saying.” That makes complete sense, and I’m not challenging it.

But being responsible for gathering it and being responsible for the results are two entirely different things, and treating them as the same thing is one of the most consistent structural mistakes I see in how companies think about their customer teams.

Whether a customer would recommend a product to their network is a company-wide result. It reflects almost every decision that is made in product, sales, engineering, marketing, and in leadership. A CX department, team, and cadre of reps can be extraordinary (patient, knowledgeable, warm, effective) and if the product has a bug that has been open for six months, or the refund policy is restrictive, or the function of the product was entirely oversold . . . that NPS number is going to suffer.

So What Would You Say We Should Actually Do Here?

Weellllllll . . . I’m not gonna lie, that part is coming.

First I have to tell you about the insanity that is the other two kinds of metrics first!

But as a spoiler (because I DO love spoilers), the short answer is that I don’t fuckin’ know.

Not because I don’t KNOW know. But because the right answer is going to be specific to you. And you. And you.

But we’ll figure it out together, yah?

I assume that my talk was a lesson in taking care of your body and classifying public speaking as heavy machinery (because, along with driving forklifts, one should definitely not try and deliver speeches if the medication bottle has a “do not operate heavy machinery” warning). I say “I assume” because I don’t particularly remember it, besides actively telling everyone what was going on. Because: Transparency.

The point is: Don’t be bouncers kids. Practice good ergonomics. And no, you should NOT try and do a flip. There are no winners in that one. Also, here’s the actual article for those who may have missed the point of it while I was talking about . . . whatever . . . on Thursday! 😂

If we haven’t met yet, hi. Welcome. My name is Ash and I am a sort of CX fixer.

I am the guy who gets called when there either isn’t a customer-facing team (or set of operations processes, or any other number of missing things) or, if they are there . . . something has gone wrong. REALLY wrong.

I have been doing this for pushing twenty years; walking into organisations where the Thing is broken, underfunded, or starting from zero, and being handed the keys. And sometimes, walking through that door for the first time, I have indeed thought: “Oh dear god, what have I gotten myself into? Is this what hell looks like?”

To be clear, most of the teams that I work with are traumatised, not hostile.

There is a difference and if you do not understand it, you might end up spending months making things worse while believing you are fixing them. Hostility means the team has decided that you specifically are the problem. Trauma means the team has learned over the months or years that things just don’t get better. That speaking up gets you nowhere, and that the most rational thing to do is to stay quiet, do the work, and protect yourself.

These folks have been through things before you arrived that are all going to impact their relationship with you. It might have been leaders who made big promises that were not (and could not have been) delivered. Decisions that were made above their heads or in spite of their protests, or even without their knowledge. Reorgs. Redundancies. Improvement initiatives launched with fanfare and abandoned six weeks later. The team remembers all of it.

And then here we all come, walking through the door as the new face of the exact same organisation that made those decisions, the most recent in a long line of new promises. The resentment, the suspicion, the low-grade hostility that you feel rolling off of the team? We’re not imagining it, but it’s also not about us either. We just happen to be wearing the uniform.

The problem is that fixing it is going to take a hot minute and that if we’re not careful, the low trust levels will hide. Low trust doesn’t always look like what it is. It can look like cooperation and acceptance.

That’s what catches a lot of us out. We go to hold our first all-hands, we share our vision, say all the right things, and everyone . . . just nods. Nobody pushes back. Nobody challenges anything. No one volunteers a contrary idea or asks an uncomfortable question.

“They understand everything,” you think. “I’ve already won them over.”

We have not, alas, won them over. What we are seeing is fawning.

I’m not going to dive too deep into this (mostly because I’m in no way qualified to do so), but there is a framework from trauma psychology: fight, flight, fawn, or freeze. When people feel unsafe, these are the responses available to them. Teams in low-trust environments almost never fight - it costs too much, they rarely flee - they need the job, and they can’t really freeze - the nature of work prevents that. What they do is fawn. They tell us what they perceive we want to hear. They smile and nod. They agree in the meeting and say nothing in the corridor. Sound familiar?

Please remember that this is not malice. Caution has just been trained into them because it feels so much safer. Before you say “but I would never make them feel unsafe”, I know. Of course you wouldn’t. But in all honestly, neither would the person before you. None of us are monsters. That is kind of the point.

So there are two things we cannot do when we inherit a team like this.

The first is demand trust. The best we can do is ask for it. We can explain why people should give it. We can make our case. And the team will listen politely and continue fawning, because people who have learned not to trust do not un-learn that by being told to. The harder we push for it, the more they pull back. I have done this. I have watched the team get more polite in proportion to how hard I was trying to break through, and I missed it for about three weeks before someone I trusted told me plainly what was happening. It is exactly like the movie version of a new stepdad who cannot understand why the kids are not warming to him. The relationship is not repairable on the timeline he has in his head, and it isn’t repairable on any specific timeline that we have either.

Because the second thing we cannot do is speed it up. I know. Timelines exist. The quarter has goals. The VP is watching. Trust, unfortunately, does not care. We have to pour the concrete foundation and let it set. If we try and build on it before it sets, the whole structure is going to fall in.

The only path is to behave consistently enough for long enough that trust becomes possible again.

How?

I’m so glad that you asked.

Make honesty the way. I believe in radical honesty with my teams. The kind that includes saying “I cannot share that yet” instead of giving a softened, half-true version of the thing. People who have been in low-trust environments are finely calibrated for detecting bullshit. They will catch you in a half-truth far faster than you think and way WAY faster than you would like. An honest “I cannot tell you this right now” is infinitely better than a vague answer that falls apart under scrutiny. One untruth (and active lie or a lie by omission), and you are back at square one.

Make your promises smaller. Every leader walks in wanting to make big promises. Do not. Make promises you can keep in one week, and then keep them. “I will find out and let you know by Friday.” Then . . . you know . . . actually do that. Find out, and let them know, by Friday. The accumulation of these tiny followed-through commitments is what trust is actually built from.

Make decisions visible. Anything that affects the team, announce it promptly, clearly, and in writing. Not after the fact. Not as a rumour. Not buried in a monthly all-hands. The people on your team have experienced too many decisions that happened to them without warning. Show them a different pattern.

Make fairness demonstrable. The same rules for everyone, and most especially for yourself. If you hold the team to a standard you do not hold yourself to, they will notice. They always notice. Fairness has to be public, not just intended.

I know, right? None of this is complicated. It’s almost disappointingly simple. And even more upsetting, all of it is slow.

Trust rebuilds over weeks and months. Sometimes it does not rebuild at all. We do everything right and some people have been through too much and they leave, or stay quietly checked out, and there is a version of this work where that outcome is the best you can achieve.

Our job is not to be trusted. Our job is to be trustworthy long enough for people to realise that we are, in fact, worthy of it. The trust is theirs to give. All we can control is whether we deserve it.

That is the whole message, really. The rest is just the work.

I have not lived in Glasgow in an uncomfortably long time, but I still remember what the week surrounding this day felt like DEEP in my bones.

While I lived there, I worked as the head door steward (head bouncer) for a relatively well known Irish pub in a fairly nice part of town called Jinty McGuinty’s (RIP, Jeanette 😭).

Most nights were fairly chill, though with the occasional bit of sectarian chaos, some football stars pissing in the corner, and the equivalent of drunken fratboys deciding that the absolutely WOULD NOT be welcomed out of the door by the American thrown in to keep things lively. But it was generally just students rubbing shoulders with presenters from BBC Scotland. The normal hospitality chaos that I could handle by myself or with one or two others.

Then St Paddy’s would roll around.

I am serious when I say that I had to hire just about everyone I knew that was willing for at least that day and ideally those surrounding it. Everyone. Because it didn’t matter how “not Irish” someone might claim to be the rest of the year. It didn’t matter how complicated their feelings were about (as Flogging Molly called it) “The Old Free State”, or politics, or history, or any of the messy stuff that comes with identity. They would be absolutely God. Damned. if they would be caught dead drinking in a Scottish pub on that day. They might as well go and drink with the English at that point, if they’re not in a proper Irish pub (these are direct quotes, before you come after me)!

They might not be in Ireland. They might not even really want to consider themselves “Irish” anymore. But in those moments, they had the most human instincts of all. They gathered with their people, they sang the old songs, and they remembered the things that made them . . . them.

I think about that a lot, especially now, living far from the places that shaped me, watching the world get weirder by the hour, and trying to build something that still feels human for myself and my children.

Community is such an ephemeral thing. It’s not something I’ve ever been good at creating, much less maintaining. I’m the epitome of “How does an introvert make friends? An extrovert finds them and forces them to be friends.” But joking aside, it is not some sort of social accessory. Community is how we survive distance. Grief. Repression. It’s how we resist the quiet slide into “just keep your head down” as a way of life.

Relevant to today, diaspora is not just nostalgia. It is a built-in network. Working the crowds those . . . UGH many years ago at Jinty’s . . . I saw it over and over again. Men and women who had clearly never met before finding instant camaraderie through a shared story. Did that story also include an approximate keg’s worth of Guinness? Each? Yes, yes it did. But the foundations were in the shared background and the mutual stubborn refusal to become isolated, even when geography (and sometimes . . . often? . . . governments) would really prefer that you did.

I appreciate the community I have managed to keep long distance. And I appreciate the community we have been building here. I appreciate the people who check in . . . DESPERATELY so. I am aware of how awful I am at such things! The people who show up for both myself and my terrible children, and the people who remember your name and said terrible children’s names, and what you said you were worried about last week (sidenote: look at that grown-ass man who just yesterday was a little boy and how he’s trolling his sister by shoving his face in front of hers. I couldn’t be more proud! *sniff*).

On our side, please know that no matter where you are, we bleed for you. For all that is going on in your world. Because I have no doubt that no matter where you are, it is . . . not great. And I hope everyone reading this knows that too. If we only protect “our own,” we are not building community. We are building a smaller circle to stand in while the world burns.

So . . . with all of my rambling I say: Put on your greens, sing the songs (I recommend Flogging Molly, if that’s not clear), and raise your glasses to toast your friends and those who cannot be here. And if you are out drinking, be kind to your door staff, and don’t drink and drive.

But also remember what the Irish diaspora has always known: you can leave home, but you do not leave who you are. And none of us can ever leave our responsibility to resist, even from our new homes.

Happy St Patrick’s Day. Sláinte mhór . . . and take care of each other.

I have a truly love-hate relationship with my birthday.

Which is apropos because it is in a single-digit number of days from today.

Love, because who doesn’t appreciate having a day where they get cake, presents, and a whole bunch of well-wishes from folks?

And hate because it is within 10 days of one of the largest holidays in the western world and not only have I not gotten any (and I do mean ANY) of the above on more than one occasion, I have also had the whole spectrum of horror, including those embarrassing parties where only two people show up and have even been dumped (though yes, I almost certainly deserved it).

“So? What’s the point?” I hear you ask.

The point is that, just like me with my pity party about my birthday, everyone likes to feel seen, appreciated, and safe in their world.

That includes the people who work for you.

The instrument of our own destruction.

When we talk about “safe” work environments, the conversation often drifts toward customers, deadlines, or external pressure. And those things matter! For sure. But they are not what can quietly break a team. What does the real damage usually comes from inside the house.

From us. Leadership. WE are the problem.

• It’s the poorly delivered criticism that feels personal instead of corrective.

• It’s the job uncertainty disguised as “keeping people sharp.”

• It’s micromanagement that communicates a lack of trust.

• It’s “just giving feedback” that somehow only shows up when something goes wrong.

• It’s holding people to standards that were never communicated.

None of this may look overly dramatic in isolation, which is why it can be so dangerous . . . it accumulates.

I have watched capable, motivated representatives slowly shrink in environments like this. They will stop asking questions, offering ideas, or even raising red flags for fear of standing out. They do exactly what is asked and nothing more, because doing more has proven risky.

And then leadership wonders why initiative has disappeared.

Be the safe place.

Remember that internal safety is not about protecting people from expectations. It is about protecting them from unnecessary fear.

In their place of work, I don’t believe that anybody should be afraid:

• About being publicly embarrassed.

• About being judged instead of coached.

• Of losing their job over a single mistake.

• Of a manager monitoring every move they make.

Fear can be a powerful tool if you want automatons for a short period of time, but you cannot build accountability on top of fear. You can force compliance, sure. But ownership requires trust, and trust requires consistency.

Where I have seen things fall apart is when leaders expect perfection and when it fails they resort to harsh and sometimes public criticism. Good leaders still give hard feedback. They still hold people responsible for outcomes. They still make tough calls when someone is not meeting the bar. The difference is that the feedback is about the work, not the person. Negative feedback is delivered privately. The expectations are stated plainly. The process is not a mystery.

In a chaotic job, provide order.

One of the most stabilizing things you can give a team is predictability in how you lead.

Create an environment so that your agents know what is coming. If someone does well, they know that they’ll be acknowledged for it (and the topic of how they’ll be recognized is a topic for a whole other post!). If they miss the mark, they know how it will be dealt with. If they raise a concern, they know that it will be taken seriously,

And perhaps most importantly, if there is change coming, they know and trust that they will hear about it from you absolutely as soon as possible.

This kind of environment does not happen by accident. It requires self-actualized leaders to manage their own impulses. Those urges to react emotionally or to try and control everything in your domain . . . we all have them, and I am no exception! But those instincts serve no positive purpose and long term it will only harm your employees and your relationship with them.

Playing for keeps.

Here’s the thing: We all also need to constantly remember as leaders that there is a power imbalance any time that we are working with our team.

A passing comment that I genuinely forgot five minutes after I said it stuck with a rep for literally YEARS. I know because when I ran into her at a mutual friend’s wedding, she brought it up. I had been a BABY supervisor and was not . . . great at it. I still cringe at the memory of her telling me about this and the clear pain in her eyes.

Whether it be a word said in frustration, in anger, or even just a sarcastic remark dropped in a meeting, careless communications can permanently change how safe someone feels in speaking up. Not just for a while, not just in your team. For years. Forever.

Leadership behavior is amplified, whether we like it or not.

Last bit, I promise.

Back to the birthday analogy one last time.

The reason those moments sting is not the lack of celebration. It is the realization that the space you thought was safe was not. That the people you expected to show up did not.

Workplaces can create that same feeling far more often than we, as leaders, realize.

If you want teams that take ownership, tell the truth to power (us) early, and actually care about outcomes, we have to look inward first. Build an environment where people are safe from erratic leadership, unclear expectations, and needless fear. Hold them accountable inside that structure. Coach them there. Expect excellence there.

Also?

Remember their damned birthdays. It’s one day.

From the applicant’s side, hiring teams never respond (even with form rejection messages) to the well-crafted and personalized resumes and cover letters that everyone has been told to create for each job. From the hiring side, there is a constant deluge of applications that are not at all relevant to the role. Teams fall behind even when they sincerely want to hand review everything.

This has created a kind of arms race. Applicants use AI tools to create their materials, and hiring teams use AI tools to review them. I have even heard stories of two AI avatars showing up to screening interviews, which immediately makes me think of those Alexa vs Siri videos.

Add to those frustrations the reality that even if you do get past the resume review, you face an often labyrinthine interview process where the end can shift or disappear entirely. Theories abound that this is caused by a practice called “phantom” or “ghost” job posting, where companies post and interview for jobs they have no intention of filling.

The companies that have taken an active interest in making their hiring process simple, human, and ethical have become known quantities in the job market. Their Glassdoor ratings are off the charts and people beg for referrals. I know because I have both worked at and built teams for some of these companies. A conscious recruiting process pays off in droves.

Bring Solutions, Not Just Problems

I am coming at this as a leader (and sometimes applicant) in the business world. Like many other leaders, I am sometimes a hiring manager, which means I have at least some say in how hiring practices go. If I am willing to do extra work and spend a bit of political capital, I can make things better and I am breaking with convention to give my ask at an awkward 1/3rd-ish through the post:

Do the extra work. Spend the political capital. Make things better. For everyone.

So . . . what do you say? Are you willing to join me in tackling what feels like a completely systemic problem? LFG!!!

For the record, I do know that on a global scale, there is only so much we can do. We cannot force LinkedIn to not suck. We cannot single-handedly make an entire industry of recruiters and HR professionals change their hiring practices.

Although if you happen to be an HR professional and, or, recruiter and you are reading this, please, for the love of all that is holy, reach out to me. I am not mad at you. You are doing what you can, and I know you are just as frustrated as the rest of us. Let us work together to fix this.

But even if we cannot fix the entire ecosystem, there is a lot we can do inside our own organizations.

Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen

When you are scoping out your hiring process, take a step back and ask yourself: how many people really need to be involved in making this decision? And the corollary, how many interviews do we actually need?

I get it. Everyone wants a say. Your CEO. Your team leads. Every stakeholder who has ever or will ever share a meeting with this role. They all want to make sure the applicant can both do the job and fit in with the company.

The problem is that when a horde of decision makers all have a vote, at least two things are guaranteed to happen:

First, the process becomes convoluted and confusing. It slows to a crawl for applicants, who get interview fatigue. Great applicants who have the experience that you are looking for are far more likely to simply move on if they feel like you are jerking them around. Wouldn’t you?

Second, internal folks start getting attached to “their choice” and get upset if you do not pick them. Office politics might be human nature, but it is not a great way to make thoughtful decisions and isn’t doing your new hire (or yourself!) any favours.

So why not trim down the hiring committee?

Keep it lean and focused. Include enough people with relevant insight to give feedback and ensure a comprehensive review, but not so many that the process drags out forever.

My own preference is a maximum of three interviews:

1. The initial screen. I will often do this myself as hiring manager. I give an overview of the role, make sure expectations are aligned, and screen for the true must-haves.

2. The team interview. This can focus on cultural fit, technical depth, or both. It can be a single member of their future team or a panel, depending on the situation. The applicant gets a sense of their coworkers-to-be and vice versa.

3. The outside opinion. This might be someone in the C-suite, a key stakeholder, or another leader. It is a final vibe check and a chance to spot anything the core group might have missed.

That is it. No five (or . . . ugh . . . 10!) stage panel gauntlet required.

Free Labour With Extra Steps

I could not forgive myself if we did not talk about the “practical exercises” that have also been growing more and more ubiquitous over the last several years.

Raise your hand if you have gone through a hiring process, done the big exercise, and then been turned away. Later you find out through the grapevine that your exercise was used by the company anyway.

Most of us who have been around for a minute or two have a story like this. If you go through enough application processes, it will eventually happen to you as well. I could write an entire article about this alone and how to handle it (And maybe I will someday. Imaginary personal assistant, add it to the list!).

For now, let us stick with what we can control on the company side.

The TL;DR: Simply do not do this. Any of it. Free labour = Bad.

Do not assign projects that could in any way be used to further the goals of your company. If you absolutely must check an applicant’s ability to do something, ask them to do an exercise that tests only that skill.

Give them a handful of clearly fake tickets to respond to. Ask them to walk you through an abstract problem or scenario. Have them talk through how they would structure a plan, instead of actually building the full thing. Have them give an extemporaneous talk with a “direct report” who just did something REALLY bad (or really good!).

Do not ask them to present a roadmap for a “fake department” that just happens to share all of the same needs and metrics as your real one. Don’t ask them to create a capacity forecast given “sample data”. And no, you absolutely should not ask them “what their 30, 60, 90” day plans are for the team once they start. Geez.

Now if there ARE some work product-related projects that you really would like to see them complete, there are ethical solutions! There are companies that pay applicants for their time once they reach the practical stage. They narrow their candidate pool to one or two people, then show equal respect for the candidates’ time and knowledge by paying a fair amount for the project that lines up with the salary band.

You would be shocked how quickly word gets around. Companies that treat candidates with that level of respect and ethics are absolutely talked about in hushed, reverent tones.

So What Else?

There is so much more we can do to make the hiring experience better. Under the “misc” category, I would throw out a few more basics:

• Publish all salaries up front. Whatever reason you think you have for not posting the range, it will cause problems later. Transparency is always key.

• Be responsive. Every applicant tracking system on the market has built in and customizable templates. Take an hour, set them up, and use them to let people know when they are not moving forward. And do it quickly! Nobody needs a notice 2 months later that they didn’t get the job. They already figured that out on their own.

• Scope your roles well. We have all seen the memes: “Entry level role, 5 years of experience, and a PhD in a similar field required. 20 dollars an hour.” Try not to become that meme.

At the end of the day, hiring is an exercise in trust. Trust in yourself, in your co-workers, and in the person you are inviting into your company. There are things you can do to minimize risk, but you are always going to be flipping a coin to some extent.

Given that reality, why torture yourself and your candidates with a terrible experience?

Dispense with the fucking around and get to the finding out. You are going to be so much happier, and, like I said earlier, your reputation will thank you.

We’ve all met that one person who’s phenomenal at their job. The one who keeps everything running smoothly, never misses a deadline, and who knows every system inside and out. Then that someone, somewhere, looks at them and says: “You know what? You’re great at doing this job. Let’s make you a manager of other people doing this same job. TOOOTALLY the same thing, right?”

And that’s usually where the trouble begins.

Because you see, being good at your work doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be good at managing other people who do that work. It’s a completely different skillset, and no matter what the memes might say, it’s not one that anyone is born with! It’s about task competence, sure. But it’s also about empathy, delegation, and the ability to keep calm when someone’s Slack message starts with, “Hey, do you have a sec?” 😳

What to Look For

When I’m scanning for potential leaders, whether it’s on a team I’m building or a client I’m advising, I’m not looking for the person who’s loudest in meetings or the first volunteer for projects, that doesn’t ever disqualify people -- some of us have the ADHD and need love too!

In general, what I’m looking for is a sort of “steady heat.” No flash. No noise. Just a quiet consistency that inspires confidence even though they’re not “in charge”.

Yet.

A few signs of spark to watch for on your team:

• They naturally mentor. You’ll notice people go to them for help, not because they’re told to, but because they listen well and don’t make others feel stupid.

• They don’t panic. Even when things go sideways, they don’t add to the chaos. (I once had a rep who, during an outage that included some internal coms, calmly got up from their desk and walked around making sure that everyone knew what the updates were and what they should be doing. That’s leadership right there)

• They communicate up and down. They can distill a problem in ten seconds for leadership, or walk a new teammate through it in detail . . . and know when each approach is needed!

• They are fundamentally curious. They start asking questions about why things happen, not just how to fix them.

What to Avoid

The trickier part, of course, is identifying the false positives. People who seem like they may be the perfect leaders-to-be, but they either aren’t ready or interested.

None of these should be fully disqualifying, but it’s still good to watch out for:

• The Hero Complex. They want to solve everything personally but can’t or won’t delegate. These folks have a tendency to burn out and can block others from growing. Coaching can often help, but not always.

• The Manager Enthusiast. They want the title but not the responsibility. You’ll hear: “I just feel like I’m already doing the job anyway.” Again, not always, but you might end up with someone who breaks their team rather than growing it.

• The Rule Follower. Some argue that this is the perfect protege, until you realize that you need someone who will make judgment calls in gray areas. You need folks who are able to know what rules to preserve and which can (and should) be bent or even broken.

Leadership is an attitude, not a milestone. It’s curiosity under pressure. It’s patience with imperfection. It’s showing up when things suck.

So the next time you’re building a team or succession plan (more on that soon!), look for the people who make others better without trying to. Those are your rising stars.

See you Space Cowboy . . .

Some books make me cry.

And I don’t mean a single, stoic, manly tear that comes to one’s eye or something.

No, full on shoulder heaving, soul-cleansing sobs.

Why? Because they speak to the human condition. They reveal truths that are deep within all of us. And Sir Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch is one of the best of those. A story about one of the most flawed-yet-in-the-act-of-being-redeemed characters I have ever read, Samuel Vimes, through a series of misadventures, interacting with his younger self and dealing with the grief over the fact that you can’t change the mistakes of the past because that would too irrevokably change who and what you are now.

Plus, there’s Vimes INCREDIBLE sense of reality:

I’m sharing all of this with you because a) there is a “revolution” that occurs on the 25th of May, so it’s a bit of a holiday, and b) because there are two excellent messages for anyone who is building a team (there are actually so SO many more really amazing lessons in this book. I should do a whole series of posts that teach “Forget about Zen, Sam Vimes and the Art of Leadership”):

1. Mistakes will always be made. In your life. In your business. With your team. It isn’t about not making them or going back and undoing them. It’s about learning from them and doing better in the future.

2. Lofty ideals are amazing. They capture the imagination and give people things to dream about. HAVE THEM. But make sure you also have a tangible goal or two, because you can’t eat lofty ideals.

If you find yourself curious, the City Watch part of the Discworld novels are well worth the read and start with “Guards, Guards!”. Despite definitely being adult books, I’ve read all of them outloud to my kids and I genuinely feel like these books have helped to make the kids into the honest and fair-minded people that they are today. 12 out of 10, would recommend.

So given my fervor for flexible work arrangements, you can probably guess my feelings about the recent trend of companies who had promised a remote work setup only to yank those benefits away like a proverbial rug. It's not just a disappointment—it's a straight-up bait-and-switch. It's a breach of trust. It's, frankly, complete and utter bovine excrement.

(Pssst: That means:)

Now, don't get me wrong, I respect a company's right to dictate its operational structure. If a business believes that having its employees under one roof will boost productivity or foster a stronger team culture, that's their prerogative.

I mean . . . they’re wrong.

And study after study after study says so.

But they have the RIGHT to be wrong. It’s extremely easy and understandable to want to return to the familiar after something as upsetting as the COVID pandemic, and even more so when making a move like that could save your company millions of dollars and potentially some decision makers somewhere their jobs, at least on paper.

I get it! We all do.

However, there is some problem with that math. If you as a company have committed to keeping your workforce remote, you have a responsibility to follow through and employees remember things like this. Employees take these promises seriously. They make life-altering decisions based on these commitments. They might move out of expensive city centres to more affordable or tranquil areas. They might adjust their work-life balance, spending more time with family or pursuing personal interests. They might have HAD families based off of the idea that they would be able to spend time that they wouldn’t have been able to if commuting and locked in a cubicle farm all day. They might even turn down other job offers, ones with similar promises of remote work.

So when you, the company, suddenly decide to claw back that promise and insist everyone return to the office? That's not just reneging on a deal. That's messing with people's lives. It's about as ethical as you can get. It’s upending whole swathes of peoples’ entire lives and forcing them to choose between you and themselves.

A Call to Accountability

Call me reactionary, but I believe that companies that are engaging in this kind of bait-and-switch tactic need to be called out. They need to understand the gravity of their actions. They need to realise that their broken promises have real-world and real-life consequences for their employees and their reputations.

In a world where corporate responsibility and transparency are (oh dear god please) increasingly being valued, these companies risk alienating not only their workforce but also their customers. After all, if a company can't keep its word to its employees, can it be trusted to deliver on its promises to its customers?

The Way Forward

My message to companies considering such a move: Don't be that guy.

Don't be the employer who jumps all over short-term convenience rather than long-term trust. Don't be the corporate equivalent of the shady used car salesman, promising one thing and delivering another.

If you've committed to remote work, stick with it. If circumstances force you to reconsider, engage in open dialogue with your employees. Explain the situation. Explore alternatives. Look for compromise. Be transparent, be respectful, and above all, be honest.

We live in a rapidly changing world. Remote work is no longer a perk or a promise—it's a necessity for many, a lifeline. Companies that understand this, that respect their commitments and value their employees, are the ones that will thrive in the future.

In short, don't bait-and-switch. Don't be a purveyor of bovine excrement. Be better. Because your employees—and the world—deserve better. In the words of the man himself, Wil Wheaton: Don’t be a dick.

I'm Ash Rhodes. Thank you SO much for joining me. It has been a busy week, so let's jump right in, shall we?

I find beginnings to be extremely auspicious and this is no exception. I have never written on Substack before, and the last time that I consistently wrote opinion pieces for public consumption was . . . wow . . . about 7 years ago! That's a hot minute, isn't it?

That doesn't mean that I have stopped having them, or that I have stopped writing. Only that I haven't been sharing them with the public at large. I have mostly figured that there were plenty of voices out there clamoring for attention, and did the world really need another one?

"Yes, self," which is what I call myself when I'm feeling particularly introspective, "The world DOES need to hear your voice."

And let me tell you why.

Recently, some discussions that I've participated in have lead me to the realization that if you don't speak up and add your voice to the positions that you support, you may be (inaccurately) thought to not care. Or, worse yet, thought to support a different position. Your passions or positions or JOB may lose out simply by default!

Let me explicitly say that I realize how easy it would be to think that I am making a case for political involvement here. I hear it! Allow me to say that I’m explicitly not making any political statements here. However, I am also NOT making a case against your own political involvement . . . It’s the exact same principle! Make your voice heard or else you won’t be counted.

But in all seriousness, I am and will be very much talking about what I'm an expert in.

Remote work.

Customer Experiences.

Leadership at scale.

All the things that you're going to be reading about here, and more!

So in short, I am here to make some cases to you, Oh Reader. To coach and to guide folks who are new (or not new!) to this chaotic work life and to get us all off of the starting line and on to that Step ONE together!

Talk soon!