What Leaders/Managers Can Learn from Being Mortal
Dominic managed a product team whose flagship feature had been "two sprints from done" for the better part of a year. He knew, privately, that the underlying architecture could not support what leadership had promised customers. But every status meeting he presented a green dashboard and a slightly revised date, because telling his VP the truth felt like admitting he had mismanaged the team. His engineers grew quietly exhausted patching a design nobody wanted to say was wrong. When a major client discovered the feature did not work as advertised, the scramble cost the team weeks of trust-rebuilding, two resignations, and a public apology that could have been an internal course correction ten months earlier, if Dominic had simply said out loud what everyone closest to the work already knew.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Ask what's actually true before the deadline asks for you
Most teams have a version of the truth everyone privately holds and a version that makes it into the status report. Closing that gap early, while there is still time to change course, is the manager's real job, even when it means delivering an uncomfortable update before anyone above you is asking for one.
A manager keeps a project "on track" in every update until the gap between the report and reality becomes too large to hide, and the eventual correction costs far more than an earlier one would have.
In your next status update, name one risk you have been softening, and ask your team what they think the honest timeline actually is.
Protecting the team from bad news can cost them their agency
Shielding a team from difficult information, like a shrinking budget or a client's real concerns, can feel protective, but it also removes their ability to plan, adapt, or make informed choices about their own work. Safety framed as "don't worry them with it" often means the team loses ownership over decisions that affect them directly.
A manager withholds a reorg rumor to avoid causing anxiety, and the team learns about it from someone else, losing both the information and their trust in their manager at once.
Before withholding a piece of hard news to protect the team, ask whether you are protecting them or protecting yourself from a harder conversation.
Manage the person's whole workload, not just their ticket count
An employee is not just their open tickets or their quarterly targets. They have workload pressures, career goals, and personal circumstances that shape how much they can actually take on, and managing only the visible output misses what is actually driving someone's performance up or down.
A manager pushes a burned-out employee toward one more deadline without ever asking what else is on their plate, and loses them to resignation instead of a manageable adjustment.
Ask each direct report, at least once a quarter, what they need more or less of to do their best work, separate from any single project.
Make the call together, and keep making it
Good leadership decisions, about staffing, scope, or direction, are rarely made once and finalized. They are made together with the people closest to the work, revisited as new information arrives, and adjusted without treating the earlier choice as a failure. A leader who invites honest input at each turn, rather than deciding alone and defending it afterward, builds a team that trusts the process even when the news is hard.
Sometimes honesty about a project's real state conflicts with a team's need for stability going into a hard stretch. Resolve this by separating the truth of the situation from the tone of your response to it: you can be candid about the risk while still being clear and steady about what you will do next, rather than choosing false reassurance to avoid short-term discomfort.
Name one thing, honestly
What honest update have you been holding back from your team or your own manager, and what is it costing you to keep holding it?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
Ask each direct report, at least once a quarter, what they need more or less of to do their best work, separate from any single project.