Managing people is hard. It is one of the most complex, emotional, high-stakes jobs you can take on, and most people get thrown into it with little more than a title change and a hearty handshake from your higher ups. There’s a secondary rant in here somewhere about how utterly ridiculous that is and it’s no wonder there are SO MANY terrible managers out there, but today is not that day.

Today I want to acknowledge the sudden culture shock of managing.

LinkedIn briefly introduced “collaborative articles”, which were questions that anyone could answer. They wound up abandoning the feature, but I enjoyed responding to them with my own brief mental health focused rants. I also only had 750 characters and no options for gifs, so this is WAY better. :)

So let’s get into it.

If you are sending emails at 11 p.m., your team assumes they should be too. If you cancel vacation, they cancel theirs. If you brag about how little sleep you get, they start believing exhaustion is part of the job description.

You don’t need to say it directly, because your behavior does all the talking. And what it is telling people is that burnout is the standard here. That is not leadership, it is negligence, and I don’t want you to be surprised when you suddenly find yourself on a team with a whole lotta burnout.

A lot of leaders are deeply uncomfortable not knowing something. Somewhere along the way, they got the message that leaders should always have a plan, always have an answer, always be ten steps ahead. So they start faking it, bluffing their way through conversations and isolating themselves in ivory towers, convinced they have to project certainty. They keep pretending they have all the answers, like some kind of shitty Merlin without the cool dragons or the magic.

It’s trendy and cool for companies to look like they care about their people.

You know the drill. There’s a cool yoga app stipend and a Slack channel full of cutesy self care memes. Someone in HR announces “we’re prioritizing wellness this quarter” and suddenly there’s a soothing pastel-colored slide somewhere about breathing exercises.

It all looks nice on a recruiting page. It also does nothing to fix the actual problems that drive people out the door.

Let’s start with something simple and true: You are not a machine. You are a person with limits, feelings, off days, high-energy streaks, family stuff, weird brain fog, creative bursts, and that one week a month where everything feels 20% more difficult and stressful. You are human. Beautifully, frustratingly, gloriously human.

So why do so many companies act like you're a robot?

LinkedIn briefly introduced “collaborative articles”, which were questions that anyone could answer. They wound up abandoning the feature, but I enjoyed responding to them with my own brief mental health focused rants. I also only had 750 characters and no options for gifs, so this is WAY better. :)

So let’s get into it.

Burnout doesn’t always crash in like a tidal wave. Most of the time, it’s a slow leak—quiet, sneaky, and easy to dismiss until it’s taken over everything. One day you’re on top of your to-do list, and the next you’re staring at your screen, wondering why you can’t make yourself care.

It doesn’t happen all at once. It builds.

Let’s talk about how burnout really shows up and how to spot it before you’re completely drained.

Some weeks….or months don’t feel like leadership, they feel like pure triage. Your brain is juggling too many things. There are deadlines slipping through the cracks, people asking for your input on seven unrelated things, if you hear the Slack three knock sound ONE MORE TIME you’re going to WHIP YOUR LAPTOP OUT THE WINDOW, and you still haven’t figured out what’s for dinner. You’re not running at peak strategic energy, you’re just trying to get to Friday in one piece.

And yet, the team still needs you. YOU, not as a task manager, but as a leader. So what does leadership look like when you’re deep in the weeds?

Let’s start here: advocating for yourself doesn’t make you a jerk. It makes you a person with boundaries, needs, and goals. That’s just a normal part of being a human being. But I get it, some of us were taught that asking for more is pushy, or that having needs makes us "difficult." So we bite our tongues, downplay our accomplishments, and hope someone notices and rewards us for being quiet and chill and agreeable.

Spoiler alert: THEY DON’T. And you will ENDLESSLY frustrate yourself if you live your life this way.

In theory, processes are supposed to make work easier. They bring order to chaos, create consistency, and make sure nothing falls through the cracks. A good process should remove friction, not create it.

But here’s what actually happens in most companies: processes pile up over time. One team adds a new approval step. Another adds a form. Someone decides everything needs to go through a weekly meeting. And before you know it, the process is the problem.

You ever notice how a company can be full of incredibly smart, talented people… and still get completely stuck? Stuck in their thinking. Stuck in their decision-making. Stuck in endless loops of “we’ve always done it this way.”

It’s not because they aren’t capable, it’s because it’s almost impossible to get true outside perspective when you’re inside the system. And that’s where things start to break down.

Before I ever worked in tech or started Threadsmith, I studied psychology. I didn’t know, at the time, how useful that would wind up being in my daily life. But, as part of my studies, I came across the works of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, famously known for coining what’s known in pop psychology as the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

At the time, I thought, surely that can’t be accurate for all experiences of grief. And maybe, for some, it’s not, but in all of my experience either personally experiencing grief or being with people going through it, she was definitely onto something.

Let’s set the record straight: coaching isn’t just about giving advice. If it were, every TED Talk would turn people into experts overnight. You could watch a YouTube video and I’d be out of a job. Luckily for me, I suppose, that’s not the case.

Coaching is about unlocking potential, shifting mindsets, and helping people see (and act on) what they’re truly capable of. It’s about transformation, not instruction.

Change is inevitable. Markets shift. Tech moves faster than your IT team can say “mandatory update.” Leadership reshuffles. Some consultant somewhere declares the next big thing and suddenly everyone has to drop what they’re doing to “get aligned.”

The companies that survive are the ones that adapt. Change is good!

I mean, realistically, it sucks, but you can make it not suck.

At The Threadsmith Group, we help leaders turn uncertainty into opportunity by guiding their teams through change with confidence, clarity, and purpose.

Every company says they want collaboration. Every team wants to work smoothly together. Absolutely no company on the planet is like “yeah we hate collaboration and we love it when people don’t communicate”. And if they do, wow, yikes.

Coaching is an entirely unregulated industry. There’s no single central board or governing body. There’s no “higher power” you can go to for someone’s coaching license to get revoked if they wind up causing some kind of harm in your life. You can take a weekend course and call yourself a coach or you can take no course at all and call yourself a coach. That’s not shade, it’s just facts.

If you’ve ever worked somewhere that leadership and product weren’t aligned, you know how messy it gets. Leadership is out here talking big-picture, revenue, ARR, acquisition. Product is in the weeds with users, tech debt, and what can actually be built without setting the whole codebase aflame. When those worlds don’t line up, deadlines slip, priorities shuffle weekly, and everyone burns out.

Strategy is only as good as execution.