Photo by KoolShooters.
Last week, we ran a morning business rave. This wasn’t even our first morning business rave. We started Pulse a few years ago as a home for unstructured/experimental community programs. Not really management training. Not quite leadership development. More like the stuff that gets in the way of great work. The ill-defined, work-adjacent things where conventional wisdom falls short.
There was the time we conducted annual, career-changing performance reviews for 60 strangers. And the time we had 80 folks complete a mad-libs to prove that you don’t need an MBA to engage with strategic planning. See? Told you. Morning. Business. Rave.
Our most recent Pulse was about setting up next year. We had people start by sketching out what would make for an amazing 2026. The just-manifest-it, laws-of-attraction people are all over this file. You have to visualize what you want to have happen. That’s the first step to making it real. But then we added another layer.
You’ve got your visualized/ideal future year, now write down the blockers. The places you think you’re likely to trip up. Any constraints that make the idealized version impossible.
Not only could people anticipate the bang-ups and hang-ups, they could pinpoint ’em with shocking accuracy. From an entire year away. This is not because we were hosting a morning business rave for psychics. Though that would be rad. It’s because even as we’re setting up something ambitious, we can often spot the things lurking in the shadows that are going to get in the way.
Raves for psychics
Bosses, you can already see where this is going. Right now, as we write this, you’re in planning sessions for the coming year. Either prepping for them (if you’re late) or disseminating what’s been decided (if you’re early). Wherever you are in that process, it’s some version of this: stare down the coming year and set up ambitious targets.
Maybe, maybe, you’re asked to spend time on the W and T in your SWOT. In some ways that’s a version of asking what’s going to get in the way. But in most orgs, the core planning happens around the grand pronouncements. Even though bosses can often accurately predict which new initiatives will fail. Which execs are likely to bounce. And whether anyone will bother to read or implement the recommendations from the external consultants.
A beautiful plan that doesn’t anticipate hardship or hiccups is why New Year’s resolutions fail more than they succeed. It’s nice to articulate that you want to go to the gym more. There’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s different than having an answer for how you’ll find the time in your already-packed calendar.
Articulating an amazing 2026 is an important first step. The next step is to deal with the stuff that’s going to get in the way. This is true for morning ravers. And bosses, it’s true for you as you work to set up an amazing year for your organizations.
Feelings about feelings
Look, we’re not saying being psychic isn’t cool. It’s super cool. It’s just that if you can see the failure coming a year ahead of time. If you made eye contact with your work bestie when the thing was announced. Or lit up the private slack channel with hilariously ironic gifs. Or went home and talked to your partner, or friends, or dog, about how unrealistic this was. We’d like to gently suggest that you have a different job than just enduring it.
And like, we know. It’s not really in your sphere of control. You’ll do your part, your team will do their part. The problems you can see aren’t over here, they’re over there. With that team’s refusal to engage. Or that executive’s insistence on ludicrous “stretch goals” and magical thinking. Or the CEO’s obsession with hiring people from Apple.
And still. Emotions are information, and you’ve got feelings about how next year is going to turn out. You’ve got information that the org needs, because otherwise they’re gonna step on a rake that you can see, and maybe the rest of us can’t. And we get it. Sometime, a while ago, some manager told you that you were too negative, and so now you’ve got feelings about your feelings, too. Like, are you allowed to feel skepticism? And if so, are you allowed to express skepticism?
Can we start by just calibrating it? Negative beliefs are often framed as absolutes. He always. She’ll never. That team sucks. The CEO can’t. In terms of turning your feelings into information, the first helpful thing to do is some excavation on what’s behind them. Always and never are very rigid, but they are phrases that point to a pattern — what is that pattern? Where has it happened in the past and why do you think it applies here? And why does that pattern have you so pissed off?
Your mileage may vary, but a lot of patterns in organizations, a lot of the places where projects die or bad decisions get made, boil down to differences on two fundamental questions that all leaders need to answer.
The first is: how do we work together? How much risk can we take, and are some risks better than others? Who should be consulted ahead of decisions and who just needs to be informed? What are our values, and where do they show up in the way we do our work?
The second is: how do we see the world? Who are we here to serve? How do we figure out what they need from us? What bets are we making, and what signals do we trust to tell us when we’re getting it right or wrong?
When you are out of alignment with someone else at work — a peer, your boss, the CEO, the board — about one or both of these questions, it’s hard to do great work. It’s hard to give your all on a plan that doesn’t make sense to you. It’s hard to defend that plan to your team when you can’t defend the way that plan was made. And so it’s tempting to throw up your hands, roll your eyes, and disengage. But if disengaging works so well, then why do those patterns of disagreement still have so much heat?
There are better feelings than I told you so
We don’t know how else to say this except to say it. In our experience working with thousands of leaders, the most effective way to address those differences in leadership is to find some time, one on one, to talk it through.
Your misalignment might be cleanly in one camp or the other, but honestly we often find it’s a mix. People who see the world very differently than you often communicate and make decisions differently, too. But you can still try to bridge those gaps in good faith:
How do we want our teams to work together? How do we want to work together as individuals? What would amazing look like? How do we want to challenge each other when that needs to happen?
Do you see what I see in terms of patterns of risk, here? And why does that risk feel okay to you when it doesn’t for me? I can’t see a way to get this thing done with our current resources/capacity/morale, can you talk me through how you’re seeing it?
Your person might not engage, especially if it feels like a trap, but most of the time they will. Most people show up to work wanting to do a good job. They don’t want to be in fights with their colleagues. They don’t want to work on projects that will fail. They might be the authors of their own misfortunes, for sure, but rarely on purpose. Can we grab 20 minutes to talk through how we want 2026 to go? They might say no, but they’ll probably say yes.
And anyway it’s worth the risk. When people, or teams, have an issue working together and then work to resolve it, you don’t go back to neutral. You tend to be closer afterwards. Because you’ve recently talked about not-superficial shit. That doesn’t mean you’re in perfect agreement on everything. It just means you understand each other better.
From that place, your job — every leader’s job — is to adjust the plan if necessary, and then figure out how to get it done. The creativity, resourcefulness, communication, exploration, and motivation of a group of people to accomplish things in the world — is the whole point. It’s what we pay you for, bosses. A team that has hard conversations, and then builds on those to do amazing things, is just about as good as it gets y’all. 2026 can be a year where you do those amazing things. And you’ve still got a few days left in 2025 to have the conversations that will get you there.
— Melissa & Johnathan
