What Leaders and Managers Can Learn from Make It Stick
You spend a lot of time transferring things you already know into other people's heads — a new process, a strategic priority, a way of giving feedback — usually through a slide deck, a memo, or a well-run meeting where everyone nods along. The nodding is the problem. People leave the room feeling like they understood the new process, and so do you, but that shared feeling of clarity is a poor predictor of whether anyone can actually execute it differently on Monday. Leaders who mistake a smooth meeting for real understanding keep re-explaining the same thing every quarter, wondering why it never sticks.
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
Notice when a smooth rollout isn't a real one
A well-received all-hands presentation feels like proof the message landed. It usually only proves the message was easy to follow while you were the one talking. The fluency illusion shows up here as leaders confusing audience comprehension in the room with an ability to act differently once the room empties.
A manager delivers a clear, well-liked presentation on a new expense policy, everyone nods, and three weeks later half the team submits reports the old way because nobody actually tried applying the new rule while the manager was there to catch it.
After your next process rollout, don't ask "does this make sense" — ask two team members to walk you through how they'd handle a specific edge case, and see what actually comes out.
Make people retrieve it, not just hear it
Asking someone to restate a decision or apply a new guideline to a real case in front of you reveals far more than watching them nod during the explanation. It also strengthens their memory of it more than another round of clarification would, even though the exercise feels slower and more awkward in the moment.
A leader rolls out a new prioritization framework in a single well-prepared meeting, answers every question thoroughly, and then discovers a month later that the team is still ranking projects the old way because no one was ever asked to actually use the new framework on a live decision.
In your next 1:1, instead of re-explaining a recent decision, ask your report to explain it back to you in their own words and apply it to a current project.
Spread reinforcement out and mix the scenarios
A single training day, however good, produces a skill that fades fast. Revisiting a key practice — giving feedback, running a difficult conversation — across several short sessions over weeks builds something sturdier than one long session ever could, and mixing different scenario types in practice builds judgment that transfers, rather than a script that only works for one situation.
A leadership team does one intensive day of manager training on difficult conversations, feels confident afterward, then handles the next real conflict clumsily because the training never got revisited or varied beyond the original role-play.
Turn one annual training day into four shorter sessions spread across the quarter, each using a different type of scenario than the last.
Connect new practices to what your team already knows
New management practices stick fastest when you tie them explicitly to situations your team has already lived through — a past reorg, a project that failed for a specific reason — rather than presenting them as generic best practice. When a rollout goes sideways, treat it as information about where the gap actually was, not as a verdict on the team's competence.
Spacing feedback sessions out over weeks can clash with a team's appetite for one clean, finished-feeling training day. A workable middle ground is to keep the single kickoff session but commit publicly to short follow-up check-ins, so people expect the reinforcement rather than experiencing it as extra work.
Name one thing, honestly
What's one process on your team that everyone can describe but almost no one can actually execute correctly under pressure?
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
Turn one annual training day into four shorter sessions spread across the quarter, each using a different type of scenario than the last.