What Leaders/Managers Can Learn from Passages in Caregiving
Marcus took over a three-year systems migration in its exciting first month, when the team ran on adrenaline, late nights, and the thrill of building something new. He led that way for the whole project: constant urgency, daily war-room stand-ups, praise reserved for visible heroics. Eighteen months in, the work moved into a long, unglamorous maintenance stretch, fixing edge cases, supporting existing users, waiting on other teams. Marcus kept demanding the same wartime pace. His steadiest engineers, the ones actually keeping the system running, began transferring out quietly, one by one. He was blindsided in their exit interviews, insisting nothing had changed, when in fact almost everything about what the work required from him had.
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
Naming what stage this team or project is actually in
A launch stage rewards urgency and visible heroics. A maintenance stage rewards patience, quiet reliability, and recognition of unglamorous work that rarely gets applause. A crisis stage rewards decisive, transparent communication above all else. Leaders who keep running launch-stage energy through a maintenance stage exhaust the people who are actually sustaining the work, then wonder why steady performers start leaving for less demanding, better-recognized roles elsewhere.
A manager keeps calling emergency meetings and rewarding visible firefighting long after a project has settled into routine operation, training the team to manufacture crises for attention.
Ask your team directly, once a month, what stage they think the work is actually in, and compare their answer to yours.
Getting help that matches where you are, not where you started
Early in a role or project, a leader mostly needs information and validation that the plan is sound. Later, the same leader may need help managing burnout, navigating a layoff, or having a hard conversation about scope. Continuing to seek only tactical, how-to advice once you're facing a people or morale problem means missing what would actually help.
A manager brings a team-morale crisis to a project-management mentor and receives scheduling advice for a problem that is actually about trust.
Before asking for help, name the actual problem type, tactical, emotional, or political, out loud first.
Preparing the team, and yourself, for what's coming
It is tempting to assume the current team, budget, or momentum will hold steady. Leaders who prepare their people early for a coming transition, a reorg, a handoff, a slower season, reduce the shock when it arrives. Preparing honestly does not mean alarming people; it means naming likely changes plainly, before they become surprises that erode trust.
A leader hides a likely restructuring until it's announced, and the team's trust in every future update quietly erodes.
Identify one likely change in the next six months and mention it plainly in your next team update, even without full details.
Meaning in the long unglamorous middle
It is easy to measure a leadership stint only by its final metrics, whether the project launched on time, whether the numbers hit target by the deadline. But most of what a leader actually builds, trust, a team's capability, a culture that survives your departure, forms during the long ordinary middle, not the launch or the closing report. Noticing that growth while it is happening, not only in a retrospective, is part of the job.
Preparing your team honestly for hard changes ahead can undercut the steady optimism a team needs to stay engaged day to day. Resolve this by separating audiences and timing: keep daily work focused and confident, while sharing honest, calibrated previews of likely change through smaller conversations or one-on-ones, so foresight does not have to come at the cost of morale.
Name one thing, honestly
What would you do differently this week if you admitted, honestly, which stage your team is actually in right now?
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
Identify one likely change in the next six months and mention it plainly in your next team update, even without full details.