Someone owns a project. Someone owns a deadline. Someone is responsible for a result. When the result doesn't happen, the conversation turns to accountability.

Before asking whether someone was accountable, I think there's a more basic question: could they actually influence the outcome?

I've seen people held responsible for work that depended on a decision they couldn't make, information they didn't have, another team they couldn't direct, or a system that wasn't working properly. The responsibility was assigned to them. The conditions required to fulfill it weren't.

That's where accountability starts to break down.

There's responsibility on the employee's side, too. If you agree to own something, you own the commitment. You need to understand what you're agreeing to, and when you see that something necessary to deliver it isn't there, you need to say so.

I've learned that one myself. I have a tendency to see something new, decide I can figure it out, and say yes before I've fully understood what that yes requires. Sometimes the instinct is useful. Sometimes it means I've agreed to something without understanding all the variables attached to it.

The organization has a responsibility too: make sure the person accepting the work understands what they're responsible for, and has a reasonable ability to influence the result.

That distinction has mattered throughout my career, because I've seen how differently work moves depending on whether the operating structure is clear.

Early on, I worked with a project manager who'd built an extremely detailed operating spreadsheet. It was Excel. Nothing sophisticated about the technology. What made it work was how the work had been organized. The deliverables were clear. Dependencies were visible. Responsibilities were understood. There were defined points for escalation, and the project manager had the authority to move the work forward.

It worked because the people using it understood how the work was supposed to move.

I've seen the same principle hold with modern work-management platforms. I've also seen those same platforms become elaborate places to store information nobody actually uses.

When I look at an operating system, I ask how much I can learn from it without needing a person to interpret it for me. If I have to ask someone where a project stands, piece together updates from conversations, or wait for a presentation to tell me what's happening, the system isn't doing its job. Not everything can or should be automated. There will always be context that requires judgment. But the basic state of the work shouldn't depend on someone's memory, and I've seen what happens when it does: the operations person becomes the connective tissue. They chase updates, remember conversations, reconcile conflicting information, track dependencies, and explain status to leadership. Over time, that person becomes the place where the organization stores knowledge that should have lived in the system itself. You shouldn't have to find the person who remembers the story to understand what happened.

When that person leaves, the organization loses more than a resource. It loses part of its institutional memory.

That's the beginning of what I think of as a corporate lobotomy: when too much of an organization's knowledge, context, and history lives inside individual people instead of inside the organization itself.

This isn't just an information problem. It affects how work actually gets delivered.

Projects are rarely linear. One team finishes something so another can start. A decision unlocks the next step. A delay in one place creates a problem somewhere else. If a project is going to miss a deadline, the system should surface that before the deadline arrives. That means visibility into dependencies, capacity, and progress, so problems can be seen while there's still time to act. And the person responsible for the work has a responsibility to raise the flag when they know a commitment is at risk.

The system gives you the quantitative picture. The person gives you the context. You need both.

When a project misses, I look at both. The system shows what happened in the work: when something moved, what depended on it, where the schedule changed, what decisions were made. The person explains what the system can't: what they knew, what they were waiting for, what changed, what they understood their responsibility to be.

I've seen people blamed for outcomes they didn't control. I've also seen people fail to deliver work they absolutely owned. Those are different conversations.

If someone has clear direction, understands what they own, has the authority to act, has access to the information and resources they need, and agrees to the commitment, then they're accountable for delivering it. If something changes, they have to raise it. If they repeatedly fail to deliver what they agreed to under reasonable conditions, that becomes a performance issue.

The first two instances should be coaching conversations, documented as opportunities to address the behavior and clarify the expectation. If the same failure happens a third time, there should be a consequence.

The organization doesn't need to teach someone how to be accountable. That belongs to the individual. What the organization needs to do is make sure accountability is attached to something the person can reasonably influence.

Good operating systems make that easier to see, and that's the whole point. You don't manufacture accountability through more meetings, more reporting, more oversight. You build a system that shows the work, shows where it stands, and shows the moment it stops moving. Then accountability isn't something you have to go looking for. It's just visible.

That's controlling the controllables: not pretending everyone can control everything, but making sure the things people can actually influence are never hidden from view, theirs or anyone else's.

I’ve spent a lot of time watching how decisions move through organizations.

I’ve seen it in large companies with three-year strategic plans and layers of matrixed leadership. I’ve also seen it in startups where everyone is moving quickly and the operating model is much less formal. The environments are different, but the organizations that work well have something in common: the work doesn’t stop because one person isn’t available to make the next decision.

That distinction has changed how I think about decision-making.

We tend to treat it as a leadership trait. We praise leaders who can make difficult decisions and criticize leaders who hesitate. But the more I look at how organizations actually operate, the less I think decision-making belongs to any one person.

Decision-making is an organizational capability.

The question isn’t whether a particular decision was right or wrong. We rarely have enough context to make that judgment from where we sit in the organization, and that isn’t the problem this essay is trying to solve.

The question is whether the organization has a structure that allows decisions to happen at the right level, with the right information, through the right people, so that work can continue.

An organization can communicate constantly and still be unable to move. There can be meetings, emails, calls, Slack messages, presentations, and recaps. Everyone can be talking about the issue and have access to the information, yet the same topic returns to the table the following week.

Sometimes the person with the authority to decide simply isn’t ready to make the call. That’s fine. The problem is when nobody knows that, because the people downstream are left guessing whether they should wait, escalate, or move forward. That uncertainty creates work of its own. Instead of advancing the work, people spend time trying to figure out where the decision stands and what they’re actually authorized to do.

Research into organizational decision-making has identified unclear decision rights, overlapping responsibilities, and unnecessary escalation as sources of organizational friction. McKinsey’s work on decision-making argues that organizations need clarity around who has the authority to make a decision and when that decision should be escalated.

When decision-making becomes a bottleneck, people adapt. Some find a way around it — they make the best decision they can, build the workaround, and keep moving. Sometimes that’s exactly what an empowered team needs to do. Sometimes it creates a decision that was never actually authorized. Others stop, because they don’t believe they have the authority to move, or because they don’t want to own a decision they weren’t authorized to make.

Neither response tells us much about the employee. One person has learned that the safest way to get work done is to make the decision and deal with the consequences later. Another has learned that the safest way to work is to wait. Both can exist in the same organization. When they do, productivity becomes uneven: one team keeps moving while another sits on a decision, and a project advances until it reaches the one issue nobody is authorized to resolve. The deadline moves, the conversation restarts, and the organization spends time managing the lack of a decision instead of doing the work.

If too many decisions have to travel upward, the organization creates a queue. That may be manageable when a company is small, but it gets harder as the organization grows. Large organizations don’t function because the CEO personally makes every consequential decision. They function because decision-making is distributed across the organization. Information moves upward so leadership can understand what’s happening. Strategy and direction move back down so the people doing the work understand where the organization is going. The decisions required to execute that strategy happen throughout the organization, and most of them should be resolved without requiring senior leadership intervention. There will always be decisions that need to move upward. The point is that not everything should.

Bain’s RAPID framework distinguishes between the people who recommend, agree, perform, provide input, and decide. The value of that distinction is that it separates participation from ownership — being involved in a decision doesn’t mean you have the authority to make it. That distinction sits at the center of decision architecture: where decisions belong, and the conditions people need to act within that boundary. That starts with trust, but trust alone isn’t enough. The person making the decision needs the authority to act, enough context to understand what they’re deciding, and the resources to carry it through.

If something falls within my scope, I should be able to resolve it. If it exceeds my scope, I should know where it goes next. If the next person can resolve it, the decision should stop there. If it genuinely requires executive attention, it should reach the executive with the information necessary to make the call. The goal isn’t to eliminate escalation — it’s to make escalation intentional.

Empowerment is more complicated than telling employees to “take ownership.” You can give someone responsibility for an outcome while withholding the authority required to influence it — that’s accountability without control. The same problem exists when authority is delegated but isn’t recognized by the rest of the organization: someone may have been told they can make the decision, but if everyone else keeps waiting for the CEO, the delegation hasn’t actually changed how the organization operates. McKinsey’s research on employee empowerment makes a similar point — giving people decision rights isn’t enough. They need the capability, tools, context, and guidance to exercise those rights effectively.

There’s another part of empowerment that gets discussed less often: the team has to trust the leader, too. If I’m trusted to make a decision, I need to know my leader has my back if the outcome isn’t what we expected. That doesn’t mean there are no consequences. It means a reasonable decision made within someone’s authority becomes a lesson when it doesn’t work, rather than an opportunity to find someone to blame. It also means giving the team credit when things do work — a leader who takes credit for everything reinforces dependency on the leader, while one who shares credit builds the organization’s capacity to operate without them.

Without that reciprocal trust, people protect themselves. They escalate decisions that should stay where they are, wait for permission, and spend more time figuring out what leadership wants than figuring out what the work requires. The organization gets slower without necessarily getting safer.

The leader’s job is to build an organization that can make decisions without needing the leader to personally make all of them. Information can roll upward without every decision rolling upward with it. Strategy can roll downward without every tactical decision needing to come back up for approval. People need to understand what they own, where their authority ends, and what happens when something exceeds it.

Documentation matters here, too. A decision needs to be visible enough that the organization doesn’t have to reconstruct the same conversation the following week. But documentation alone isn’t closure — people have to understand what was decided, who owns the next step, and what happens from there. That doesn’t mean every decision needs to be immediate. Some require more information, some require deliberation, and some carry consequences significant enough to warrant senior leadership. What matters isn’t speed for its own sake. It’s movement.

A well-designed organization will still have roadblocks, disagreements, and competing priorities. The difference is that one roadblock doesn’t stop the entire engine — there’s enough decision-making capacity distributed throughout the organization to keep other work moving. While one issue is being resolved, other teams can keep executing within their authority. When something genuinely requires escalation, it has a defined path to get there.

The measure isn’t whether every decision is fast or whether every decision produces the desired outcome. The measure is whether the organization has the capacity to keep moving while decisions are being made.

Organizations routinely ask employees for ownership, accountability, initiative, engagement, and productivity. Those expectations have to be supported by the operating system. You can’t ask people to take ownership while repeatedly preventing them from acting. You can’t hold someone accountable for an outcome without giving them the authority to influence it. And you can’t build a scalable organization around the assumption that one person will always be available to make the next decision.

What I keep coming back to is this: leadership isn’t about making every decision. It’s about creating the conditions in which people can make decisions at the appropriate level — with enough context to make them, enough authority to act on them, and enough support to own the outcome. Decision-making is an organizational capability, and the strength of that capability determines how much work an organization can actually move.

Honesty is reactive. You ask me a question, I answer it truthfully, or I tell you I don’t know. Transparency is anticipatory. It means that if I already know something is changing—and I know it’s going to affect you—I don’t wait for you to ask. You shouldn’t have to discover something I already knew was relevant to your life.

A lot of organizations think they’re being transparent when they’re actually just being honest on a delay. That gap is where people start filling in the blanks for themselves, and eventually, trust gets harder to maintain.

The announcement is not the communication plan

One organization I worked for went through seven reorganizations in three and a half years. The pattern was always the same: a Friday afternoon announcement telling you who you’d report to Monday morning. By the time you walked in, the organization had already moved around you.

Technically, that’s communication. There was an announcement. The new structure existed on paper. But being told the outcome on Friday isn’t the same as being walked through the change. There was no context for why it was happening, how responsibilities were shifting, or what the transition was supposed to look like. We got the outcome and were expected to figure out the rest. After a while, the uncertainty about what the announcement even meant became harder to sit with than the reorg itself.

Compare that to a large technology migration I worked through elsewhere. We knew months out. There was a T-minus plan running alongside a communication plan. Departments got what they needed, when they needed it, and the updates didn’t stop once the change went live. It wasn’t flawless, but there was very little friction because nobody found out about the change by living through it.

The difference wasn’t the size of the change. It was whether communication was treated as a single event or something that had to continue throughout the change.

“I don’t know” is a complete sentence

I’ve said some version of “I don’t know why that happened. I’ll go find out” more times than I can count—over late payments, broken systems, decisions still in flight. It’s uncomfortable to say and uncomfortable to hear. The temptation is always to fill the silence with something reassuring instead.

I’ve given in to that temptation. I’ve handed someone an answer because it was what they wanted to hear, and then had the situation change and that answer come back on me. The damage isn’t just a second communication problem. It’s that the person now has to decide whether they can believe you the next time. I’d rather say “I don’t know yet” and mean it than manufacture certainty I don’t have.

Showing information isn’t the same as giving it

At one organization, town halls featured graphs of company performance with no underlying numbers attached. Eventually someone asked the obvious question: “Then why the fuck are you showing us the graph?” The answer was that the company was required to show the graph but not required to disclose the numbers behind it.

The information had technically been shared. Nobody in the room understood what they were looking at. This is where a lot of corporate transparency breaks down. We treat the distribution of information as if it automatically produces understanding. An email goes out, a slide gets presented, a town hall happens, and because something was communicated, the box gets checked. Whether anyone understood it is a separate, usually unasked, question.

When transparency becomes a bottleneck

I’ve also seen the opposite failure: too much upward communication, to the point that people stopped making decisions without checking whether the CEO already knew. A small call could become a problem if the wrong person was surprised by it, so people learned to escalate before they acted. Eventually, communication itself became the bottleneck.

That taught me the limit on all of this. Employees don’t need to know everything leadership knows. Some things aren’t mine to share. Some decisions are still being worked through. Transparency doesn’t mean total access. It means the people who need to act on something aren’t left to guess at it.

What I believe now

What I hold myself to now is pretty simple. If I know something is going to affect someone, I try to tell them before they have to ask. If I don’t know the answer, I say that. And if someone has to make a decision, I want to make sure they actually understand what they’re deciding.

I’ve been on every side of this—the employee left in the dark, the manager forced to relay something I didn’t fully understand, the leader who should have said something sooner, the oversharer who said things that weren’t mine to say. None of that adds up to a formula. It adds up to this: not everyone needs to know everything, but the people who have to act need a shared and accurate picture of what just happened and what comes next.

That’s a lower bar than most companies claim to clear.

Most of them still don’t clear it.

The fix isn't less governance. It's understanding what the work needs before you design the system around it.

Enterprise governance sets the boundaries: legal, regulatory, financial, cybersecurity, privacy, safety. PMO governance sits closer to execution: accountability, decision rights, intake, escalation. It should establish the guardrails. It shouldn't become the workflow.

I learned this managing creative operations and traffic. A project came in through a creative brief. Leads assigned a writer and a graphic designer, who worked in parallel through review, iteration, proofing, production, launch, and measurement. What mattered wasn't the number of steps. It was that everyone knew the handoffs: how long each stage should take, where the work went next, how much padding we'd built in to absorb normal variation. I didn't have to ask where we were. I could look at the workflow and know. That's the difference between visibility and reporting: the state of the work is visible as a byproduct of the work, not a narrative someone builds about it.

We kept the automation light-touch by design. Finish a concept, upload it, name it, tag the version, send it to review. The system routed and notified. The lead signed off. The next trigger moved it forward. The value was never the technology. It was that the technology removed work.

I learned the opposite lesson later, at an organization running Teams, SharePoint, and a handful of tools that didn't talk to each other. The new systems didn't eliminate work. They added a place to add work: more procedures, more reports, more stops. Technology had been added; the work hadn't been redesigned. That's the trap: digitize the existing process, and employees still do the work, but now they also maintain the platform, reconcile it against something else, and report out of it. One question before you buy anything: does this remove a step, or add one?

Capacity is the other half of the system. Realistic cycle times require knowing how much work the team can absorb: productivity analysis, once built on timesheets and spreadsheets. [Today that's AI, Excel, Tableau, or Power BI; name whichever you actually used.] Tools change. The principle doesn't: know the system's capacity before you decide how much work to put through it.

That gave us a right of refusal. At capacity, we could send work to a vendor instead, based on timing and lead time. A 24-hour rush a vendor could turn in 24 hours didn't need to blow up the internal workflow. We could scale up or down with seasonality. The team still owned delivery; they just had the authority to manage the capacity behind it. Capacity is a design constraint, not a character flaw. An overloaded system doesn't get fixed by telling people to work harder. It gets fixed by reallocating, reprioritizing, outsourcing, automating, or saying no, before the whole team is underwater.

That's also what reporting should be for. If a three-day stage takes five, I don't need a weekly narrative explaining it. I need the deviation itself to surface, so I can investigate: an alert, an escalation, a bottleneck review, a root cause. That's what buys you bandwidth: managing exceptions instead of running the machinery.

Governance follows the same logic, calibrated to what can actually go wrong. Manufacturing needs guardrails around safety and delivery risk. Technology needs them around cybersecurity and data. Different bumpers for different gutters. But governance can also overshoot: reading team chats for sentiment, inferring mood, demanding documentation to prove work happened. That's surveillance, not governance. The goal isn't knowing everything about the people doing the work. It's making the work visible enough that they stop having to explain it.

Which is the rule I keep landing on: figure out what the work needs before you design anything. Not the framework first, not the software, not the dashboard. Start with the work: what enters the system, who touches it, where the handoffs are, what capacity exists, what the team can decide without escalating, what actually requires governance. Then build the smallest system that answers those questions.

I've watched people produce more than expected when the system around them was built to let them succeed. I've also watched good people get buried in stopgaps and redundant reporting. That's not a people problem. It's a system problem, and it's solvable.

If the process was working, the problem must be the people. If the people were capable, then the process must be broken. If something was not getting done, somebody was not doing their job.

That explanation works right up until it does not.

What happens when the people are capable and the process is technically sound, and the work still doesn’t work?

That’s when you must start looking at everything around the people and the process.

I learned that lesson slowly. In 2014 and 2015, I became so obsessed with figuring out whether problems were caused by people or process that I earned my Six Sigma Yellow Belt, Green Belt, and Black Belt. I wanted to understand how to find the problem, prove the problem, and fix the problem. I learned how to dig deeper than the initial answer, how to talk to the people actually doing the work, how to follow a process through its handoffs, and how to find the workarounds hiding underneath the documented version of how something was supposed to happen.

I also learned something I didn’t particularly enjoy learning: a good analysis doesn’t give you authority. It gives you information.

You can spend weeks talking to the people doing the work, tracing what happens instead of what the process says should happen, following failures upstream and downstream, and figuring out where the workarounds began. You can find the pattern, explain why it’s happening, name the risks, and recommend that, based on everything you can see, makes sense.

And then someone else gets to decide what happens next.

Sometimes they know something you don’t. Sometimes you don’t have full visibility. Sometimes there are constraints you can’t see from where you are sitting. And sometimes they decide you think is completely wrong.

That was difficult for me because I’ve always been a pattern person. I see connections. I see where one problem is creating another problem three steps downstream. I see the workaround nobody documented and the behavior everyone has quietly accepted because it’s easier to keep doing it than to fix whatever created it in the first place.

But pattern recognition isn’t omniscience.

I didn’t always have the full picture, and recognizing that gave me a lot more respect for the leaders I supported. They were making decisions with information and constraints I didn’t always have access to. It didn’t mean I agreed with every decision. It meant I understood that being right about a process didn’t automatically make my recommendation the decision.

That realization led me somewhere else. I started noticing that “people or process” was often a convenient way of talking about problems that were much larger than either one.

A process can be perfectly reasonable on paper and impossible to execute with the resources available. A capable team can fail because a decision was made upstream without anyone considering what would happen downstream. A company can announce a major change and genuinely believe it has communicated appropriately while the people responsible for carrying it out are trying to figure out what just happened.

Sometimes nobody is lying. Sometimes nobody has the whole picture.

The people making the decisions may have information the people doing the work don’t have, while the people doing the work are seeing things the people making the decisions can’t. There is a gap between those two perspectives, and that gap is where a lot of organizational dysfunction lives.

I started noticing another piece of it in something that seems almost harmless on the surface: volunteering.

Early in my career, I was the person who raised her hand. If there was something I didn’t understand, I wanted to see how it worked. If another department was testing something, I wanted to be in the room. If somebody needed a beta tester, I was in. I wasn’t doing it because I had extra time. I did it because I was curious, and curiosity was one of the ways I figured out where I fit.

Every new assignment gave me another piece of the organization to understand. I learned how the work moved, where it got stuck, who depended on whom, and why the people doing one job often had no idea what the people doing the job next to them were dealing with. I was building breadth without really thinking about it.

At the time, I just thought I was learning.

But over the years, I watched volunteering change.

As organizations became leaner and people became increasingly constrained, volunteering stopped being entirely about curiosity or professional development. It became a capacity mechanism. The person who had proven that they could run an analysis was asked to run another one. The person who could build the deck was asked to build the next deck. The request was usually reasonable in isolation. The problem was what happened cumulatively.

You didn’t want to be the person who wasn’t a team player when everyone else was overloaded. You didn’t want to hear that your reluctance to help showed a lack of leadership. So, you did it.

Then you did it again.

Eventually, the thing you had volunteered to do became part of how the organization understood your role.

That’s where something changed.

Competence became a tax.

The better you were at absorbing work, the more work you became capable of absorbing. And people notice that. They learn what gets rewarded, what gets questioned, and what gets quietly added to their plate because somebody knows they’ll figure it out.

This is one of the reasons I don’t think you can understand workplace behavior by looking only at what people are told to do. People pay attention to what happens. If the person who stays late is considered committed, people learn that staying late is part of commitment. If the person who identifies a problem becomes known as difficult, people become more selective about which problems they bring forward.

You can write all the values you want on the wall, but people learn the culture by watching what happens to people.

And then they adapt.

That’s what humans do. Give a team fewer people and they’ll redistribute the work. Change the process and someone will find a workaround. We are remarkably adaptable, and that adaptability is both one of the great strengths of an organization and one of its greatest risks.

A resilient employee can make a broken system look functional. A capable team can absorb an enormous amount of organizational dysfunction without the organization ever having to fully experience the consequences of that dysfunction. The customer still gets the deliverable. The deadline still gets met. From the outside, everything appears to be working.

Inside the system, people are holding the whole thing together with workarounds, extra hours, undocumented knowledge, and an increasingly sophisticated understanding of what they can change without asking permission.

The people become the shock absorbers.

Once an organization learns that its people will absorb the shock, it becomes very easy to keep generating it.

That’s when I started asking a question that seemed obvious to me and wasn’t always obvious to everyone else:

What are we taking away?

If we’re adding a new governance process, what are we removing? If we’re adding another reporting requirement, what responsibility is coming off the person’s plate? If we’re asking people to reconcile three different systems, what part of their existing work are we expecting them to stop doing?

The hours must come from somewhere.

If someone already has primary, secondary, and tertiary responsibilities and you add three more responsibilities, you haven’t created capacity simply by calling the new work governance, accountability, or transformation. You’ve taken capacity from somewhere else.

People will figure out where to take it. They’ll work later, skip something, create a shortcut, or find a workaround that makes the new requirement possible without actually changing the underlying work.

Then the organization looks at the numbers and wonders why quality has started to decline.

This is how you end up tracking the tracker. You create a system to measure the work, then you need to reconcile the measurement, and eventually people are spending so much time proving that the work is happening that they have less time to actually do it.

Measurement matters. Accountability matters. Governance matters. But they have a cost, and when we keep adding things without taking anything away, the cost doesn’t disappear.

It gets absorbed by the person doing the work.

That’s the work around the work.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with staffing. You start with a certain amount of work and a certain number of people. Then people leave, but the work doesn’t necessarily leave with them. The deadlines remain. The clients remain. The institutional knowledge disappears, but the expectation that the work will continue doesn’t.

So, the remaining people absorb it.

Then leadership wants more visibility, so more reporting gets added. More reconciliation gets added because nobody trusts the reporting. Eventually, the people doing the work aren’t just doing the work anymore. They are carrying an increasingly elaborate system designed to prove they are doing the work.

Those are two different jobs.

This is one of the places where organizations can fool themselves about capacity. They look at the number of people and the number of projects and calculate whether the math works, but the math often doesn’t include everything surrounding the project. It doesn’t include the reporting, the meetings, the workarounds, the time spent figuring out who owns something because the organizational structure changed, or the cognitive load of constantly adapting to whatever changed the week before.

That work is real, even when it isn’t represented in the staffing model.

The same thing happens after layoffs. We tend to focus on the people who leave because they’re the visible consequence of the decision, but there is another group sitting inside the organization: the people who stay.

They have to figure out what happens to the work, who owns the projects, who takes the relationships, who knows how the process actually works, and who absorbs the responsibilities that used to belong to the people who are no longer there.

The people who leave absorb one kind of shock. The people who stay absorb another.

And then they adapt.

Eventually, adaptability becomes the job. Not something you use to perform your job, but the job itself: adapting to whatever the organization just did.

That can work for a surprisingly long time, until it doesn’t. Quality starts to suffer. People become more cautious about speaking up. They stop believing that communicating a problem will actually change anything. They start protecting their time and their options. They do what they’re asked to do, but they’re less willing to absorb everything that isn’t explicitly theirs.

And eventually, some of them leave.

Then the organization replaces them, and the cycle starts again.

This is why I think we have to be careful about the way we talk about organizational dysfunction. The data can be there. The analysis can be there. The risks can be communicated, and the recommendations can be made, and still nothing changes.

That doesn’t necessarily mean leadership is stupid. It doesn’t necessarily mean leadership doesn’t care. It doesn’t necessarily mean the analysis was wrong.

Organizations make decisions inside constraints that aren’t always visible to the people doing the analysis. There are budgets and timing and competing priorities. There are decisions that have already been made before the people responsible for executing them are told. There are leaders balancing things the person sitting across from them cannot see.

That’s part of the complexity.

But there is another side to it.

If you repeatedly ignore the signals coming from the people closest to the work, eventually those people stop sending signals. Not because the problem disappeared, but because they learned that raising it doesn’t accomplish anything.

And that is a dangerous point for an organization to reach, because the absence of information can look a lot like the absence of a problem.

It isn’t.

At some point, we have to stop asking whether the problem is the people or the process.

If the people keep changing, the process keeps changing, the reporting keeps increasing, and the same problems keep finding their way back into the room, then maybe we’re looking at the wrong level of the system.

The problem isn’t necessarily the person doing the work. It isn’t necessarily the process they’re following. It may be the environment those two things are operating inside: the decisions being made upstream, the constraints being created somewhere else, the information that isn’t reaching the people who need it, and all the additional work being layered on top of the work we’re actually trying to accomplish.

For years, I thought my job was to find the broken piece and fix it. What I eventually realized was that sometimes there isn’t one broken piece. There is a system that has accumulated so many compromises, workarounds, and competing demands that everyone inside it is compensating just to keep it moving.

And when enough people are compensating for a system, the compensation starts to look like the system itself.

That’s when it becomes difficult to see what’s actually broken.

Because the work is still getting done.

The deadlines are still being met. The reports are still being produced. The problems are still being solved.

Until you finally ask the question nobody has been asking:

What if the people aren’t failing the system? What if the system has been relying on the people to keep it from failing?

For most of my career, I understood what it meant to work until the work was done. I didn’t watch the clock. I watched the work.

I wasn’t trying to keep up with the Joneses.

I was trying to learn the playbook.

I studied other women.

The hair. The shoes. The poise. The demeanor. The attitude. The facial expressions. The way they walked into a room. The way they spoke to men. The way they occupied space.

It didn’t come naturally to me.

For as long as I can remember, the women I looked up to were corporate women. Women who were taking positions men had traditionally held and making them their own.

I was a little girl in the late 1980s watching Working Girl, Baby Boom, and 9 to 5. I watched Sigourney Weaver. Diane Keaton. I watched women who had careers, offices, ambition, money, power.

I wanted that.

My father made sure I understood early that I was supposed to aspire.

I remember saying maybe I would be a secretary.

He immediately corrected me.

You don’t want to be a secretary.

You don’t want to be a nurse.

If you’re going to be a doctor, be the doctor.

If you’re going to be a teacher, be the principal.

If you’re going to work in an office, be the guy in the corner.

So I learned.

I learned how to climb.

I learned how to perform.

And somewhere along the way, I became very, very good at it.

I also became a grinder.

I worked in New York City. I worked hard and played hard. I remember those years everyone is nostalgic about now—the early and mid-2000s, when we’d go from the office to the gym to happy hour without ever going home.

We were all still in our office clothes.

The suit came off. The workout happened. The makeup got touched up. The suit went back on.

Then we went to the bar.

That was life.

And I didn’t question it because everyone around me was doing the same thing.

This was adulthood.

This was ambition.

This was what successful women did.

Except I was also a deeply creative person.

And I learned something much later than I should have:

Corporate America doesn’t necessarily reward creativity.

It rewards creativity when creativity produces something the organization can monetize.

A creative idea that doesn’t drive a market, a demographic, a revenue number, or some other measurable outcome is often just noise.

That was difficult for me to reconcile.

Because I loved the work.

I loved figuring things out.

I loved analysis. I loved systems. I loved building roadmaps and seeing how all the pieces connected.

I didn’t hate working.

I hated the performance around working.

And then I had a child.

In 2019, while I was pregnant, I started hearing the whisper.

Slow down.

My body was telling me.

My mind was telling me.

Slow down.

Then the pandemic happened.

And I couldn’t.

Not because I didn’t want to.

Because I didn’t know how.

I wasn’t equipped for slowing down.

I was equipped for survival.

So I kept going.

Eventually, I became a completely different person.

I was trying so hard to keep everything together that it felt like I was holding my entire life together with a bobby pin.

At any moment, everything could collapse.

I was managing a house of cards.

I had a demanding career. I was going through a separation. I was raising a four-year-old. I was building a new relationship. I was navigating family problems. I was dealing with my own health.

I was trying to be everything to everyone while barely recognizing myself.

And I was exhausted.

Not I need a vacation exhausted.

I mean the kind of exhausted where you realize the person you have become is no longer the person you recognize in the mirror.

Then we came out of COVID.

And something changed.

I watched everyone start putting the costumes back on.

The suits.

The offices.

The commutes.

The meetings.

The performance.

And I remember thinking:

Why are we doing this again?

For a lot of people, returning to normal was comforting.

For me, it was impossible.

I couldn’t unsee what I had seen.

The pandemic had stripped away the illusion that all of this was necessary.

And when the world started putting the illusion back together, I couldn’t convince myself to believe it anymore.

I still tried.

Because that’s what I knew how to do.

And then came 2023.

2023 was the year everything started coming apart.

Not one thing.

Everything.

Piece by piece, the life I had been holding together with a bobby pin started unraveling.

And the work was the final straw.

Being pushed out wasn’t the beginning of the story. It was the last thing that happened after an entire year of things falling apart.

By then, I was already exhausted. Already questioning everything. Already realizing that the way I had been living wasn’t sustainable.

And somewhere in that year, I started doing something I had rarely done before.

I started counting.

Not just the hours I was being paid for.

Billable hours.

Non-billable hours.

The work that technically counted.

The work that somehow didn’t.

The calls.

The preparation.

The follow-up.

The administrative work.

The things that had to get done whether anyone considered them work or not.

The number kept climbing.

I was working roughly 60 to 65 hours a week.

And at the same time, I was trying to raise a child.

There were calls while my child was asleep.

Calls while my child was awake.

Moments when my child had to occupy herself because I had to work.

I was constantly trying to figure out how to manage both.

Work demanded more.

Motherhood demanded more.

Life demanded more.

And there was only one of me.

I kept trying to make the math work.

Eventually, I realized the math was the problem.

There weren’t enough hours.

And I couldn’t keep sacrificing myself to make the numbers work.

That was when something finally broke.

Not my ambition.

Not my ability to work.

The belief that this was the only way to work.

So when the final piece fell, I didn’t rebuild the house of cards.

I walked away.

It wasn’t some beautiful, cinematic moment of enlightenment.

It was more like the final push.

The kind of push where life stops whispering and starts yelling.

But looking back, I don’t think it happened to me.

It happened for me.

Because I needed to stop.

I needed to be a mother.

I needed to be a partner.

I needed to be a person.

I needed to figure out who the hell I was underneath all the roles I had accumulated.

And here’s what surprised me:

I didn’t become less ambitious.

I didn’t stop caring about excellent work.

I didn’t stop solving complicated problems.

I didn’t stop building systems.

I didn’t stop doing analysis.

I didn’t stop creating roadmaps.

I just stopped believing I needed a conference room to prove that I could do those things.

I eventually realized I didn’t necessarily need to work in corporate.

I could work corporate adjacent.

I could take everything I had spent decades learning and apply it without living inside the machine.

And I did some of my best work that way.

My best analysis.

Some of my best roadmaps.

Some of the clearest thinking I’ve ever done.

And I did it without needing to become someone else first.

That was the revelation.

The work was never the problem.

The performance was.

Today, I work from home in the Upstate of South Carolina.

I’m often barefoot.

I’m usually wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

Sometimes it’s Doc Martens.

Sometimes it’s Harley boots.

That’s about it.

There was a time when my shoes had to match my purse, which had to match my belt, which had to match my suit.

I had an entire visual language for being a successful woman.

Now I can sit barefoot in my house and build the same analysis I would have built in a conference room wearing a Hugo Boss suit.

And the analysis doesn’t know what I’m wearing.

Neither does the system.

Neither does the roadmap.

Neither does the strategy.

The work is still good.

Maybe better.

Because now I’m not spending half my energy performing the role of the person doing the work.

I’m just doing the work.

At 47, my metrics are different.

Twenty years ago, success was about climbing.

More money.

More responsibility.

A bigger title.

A better office.

A more impressive resume.

Now I measure something else.

Energy.

Time.

Where I spend it.

Who gets it.

What gets it.

My career is no longer my identity.

And that’s probably the biggest shift of all.

I used to think that becoming the woman in the corner office meant I had made it.

Now I think making it means having enough ownership over your life that you can decide what the corner office is worth to you.

For me, it wasn’t worth it.

And maybe this is the part I couldn’t have understood when I was that little girl watching Sigourney Weaver and Diane Keaton.

I thought I was watching women become powerful.

What I was really watching was women learning how to occupy a world that wasn’t necessarily built for them.

So I learned how to occupy it, too.

I learned the language.

I learned the clothes.

I learned the rooms.

I learned the politics.

I learned how to walk into a room full of men and make myself impossible to ignore.

I learned how to build the strategy, run the transformation, solve the problem, and then explain to everyone else why the problem existed in the first place.

I became the woman my younger self was looking for.

And then, somewhere along the way, I realized I didn’t need her anymore.

Not because she was wrong.

She wasn’t.

She got me here.

She taught me how to fight.

She taught me how to think.

She taught me how to work.

She taught me how to take up space.

But she also taught me that I had to keep proving that I deserved the space I occupied.

I don’t believe that anymore.

I don’t need the suit.

I don’t need the office.

I don’t need the title.

I don’t need to be the first one in and the last one out.

I don’t need to be exhausted to prove that I care.

I don’t need to perform ambition for anyone.

I can still build the system.

I can still see the pattern.

I can still walk into chaos and find the structure underneath it.

I can still do the work.

I just get to decide what the work looks like now.

At 47, I don’t want the corner office.

I want the corner of my own life.

And that, it turns out, is a much better place to sit.

I learned the playbook.

I know it by heart.

I just don’t need to play anymore.

Today you are a daughter. One day you will be a mother.

I heard those words countless times growing up.

Usually after I had talked back.

After I had questioned something.

After I had driven my mother absolutely crazy.

It wasn’t said with anger.

It was said with certainty.

One day you’ll understand.

One day you’ll have a daughter just like you.

One day you’ll realize why I’m telling you this.

As a little girl, I thought it was a warning.

As an adult, I realized it was an inheritance.

Not an inheritance of recipes.

Or jewelry.

Or family traditions.

An inheritance of expectations.

When I was nine years old, I thought the women around me were extraordinary.

They seemed capable of everything.

They worked.

They cooked.

They cleaned.

They raised children.

They cared for aging parents.

They volunteered at church.

They hosted every holiday.

They remembered every birthday.

And somehow, they always looked put together.

Their hair was done.

Their makeup was on.

Their clothes were pressed.

Looking overwhelmed wasn’t part of the role.

Looking back now, I realize they weren’t extraordinary.

They were simply women.

My mother.

My aunts.

My neighbors.

The women at church.

Women doing what the women before them had done.

I thought I was watching extraordinary people.

What I was really watching were ordinary women carrying extraordinary expectations.

As a little girl, I couldn’t see the weight.

I only saw the performance.

At nine years old, I didn’t know what the women around me carried.

I didn’t know which ones had cried themselves to sleep.

I didn’t know which marriages were held together by obligation instead of love.

I didn’t know which women stayed because leaving wasn’t financially possible.

I didn’t know which ones endured disrespect because there were children to raise.

I didn’t know who had spent eight hours standing on a factory floor before coming home to cook dinner.

I didn’t know who had spent the day teaching other people’s children before coming home to teach their own.

I didn’t know who had spent the day caring for patients in a hospital before coming home to care for everyone else.

I didn’t know who quietly sacrificed pieces of themselves so the rest of us would never notice what it cost.

I only knew what I could see.

Dinner was on the table.

The house was clean.

Church clothes were see certainty.

It wasn’t until I became an adult that I realized those women weren’t performing magic.

They were absorbing the cost.

And because they absorbed it so well, I never knew there was a bill.

There was another lesson I learned early.

Everything I did reflected on my mother.

If I misbehaved, no one said,

“Look what Zaira did.”

They said,

“Look what Margarita’s daughter did.”

My actions weren’t mine alone.

They carried my mother’s name.

One day, if I became a mother, my children’s actions would carry mine.

I wasn’t raised simply as an individual.

I was raised as a representative.

That changes how you move through the world.

Your home reflects you.

Your children reflect you.

Your manners reflect your upbringing.

Your appearance reflects your family.

Your choices become someone else’s reputation.

The women in my family didn’t teach these lessons because they wanted to burden me.

They taught them because they believed they were preparing me.

The same expectations had been handed to them.

The women in my neighborhood reinforced them.

The women at church reinforced them.

The women in our community reinforced them.

No one ever handed me a checklist.

No one ever sat me down and explained what a good woman should be.

They didn’t have to.

I learned by watching.

There was an unspoken scorecard.

No one talked about it.

Everyone knew it existed.

How clean was your house?

How respectful were your children?

What were you feeding your family?

Did you remember everyone’s birthday?

Did you show up for everyone else?

Did you look put together?

Notice what wasn’t on that list.

Your title.

Your promotion.

Your salary.

Your career.

My career was admired.

But it wasn’t the measure of whether I was a good woman.

It was a nice accomplishment.

The real measure was everything else.

Years later, I would understand why.

The women who raised me came from a generation that often had fewer choices than I did.

Many worked because they had to, not because they were pursuing careers.

Some depended financially on husbands who didn’t always deserve their loyalty.

Some endured circumstances they couldn’t easily leave.

Yet every morning they got up, got dressed, went to work, came home, cooked dinner, raised children, showed up at church, cared for aging parents, celebrated birthdays, and somehow convinced the rest of us that this was simply what women did.

They weren’t trying to create impossible expectations.

They were surviving the lives they had.

Without realizing it, they passed both their resilience and their expectations to the daughters who watched them.

That is the invisible weight.

Not the work.

The expectation.

The belief that a good woman should somehow carry it all.

We often talk about patriarchy as though it exists somewhere outside of us.

My experience was more complicated than that.

The expectations I inherited weren’t reinforced only by men.

They were lovingly passed from one generation of women to the next.

Not because they wanted us to suffer.

Because they wanted us to be prepared.

My grandmother’s generation fought for the opportunity to work.

My mother’s generation proved women could work and care for a family.

My generation inherited the expectation that we would excel at both.

We added careers.

We added ambition.

We added independence.

But we never removed the older expectations.

We simply stacked new ones on top.

When I hear the words “Hija eres, madre serás” today, I hear them differently.

Not as a warning.

Not even as a promise.

I hear them as the quiet passing of an inheritance.

The women before me handed me strength.

Resilience.

Devotion to family.

An unwavering sense of responsibility.

They also handed me an ever-growing definition of what it meant to be a good woman.

As a little girl, I accepted that inheritance without question.

Like most children do.

I simply watched.

And I learned.

Some days I do.

Some days I don’t.

Some days I feel like there’s a spotlight on me. Other days, I feel like I’ve been completely dismissed.

Maybe that’s just part of getting older.

Or maybe it’s something much bigger.

The older I get, the more I realize I’m not the only one asking this question.

I have a friend who spent nearly twenty years at the same company. Twenty years of loyalty. Twenty years of accumulated knowledge. Twenty years of learning how to navigate one organization.

Today, he’s trying to figure out how to become hireable again.

Think about that for a second.

Twenty years ago, LinkedIn barely existed. AI wasn’t rewriting résumés. Applicant Tracking Systems weren’t filtering candidates before a human being ever saw their name.

The rules changed while he was busy building a career.

I have another friend who reinvented himself completely. He left one profession, became a truck driver, built his own company, and was finally finding his footing.

Then COVID happened.

The business disappeared.

He started over.

Found another job.

Then another layoff.

Today, he’s documenting his weight-loss journey online while trying to figure out what comes next.

I know someone else who spent years helping build a company only to be told, “Thank you for everything. Your position ends in two months.”

The company even asked this person to help transition the work before leaving.

Different industries.

Different people.

Different stories.

The ending always feels strangely familiar.

At first, I thought these were isolated incidents.

Then I started looking backward.

In 2007, I watched senior executives—people I respected—being escorted out of the building in the middle of the day. Boxes packed. Offices emptied. Careers that seemed permanent suddenly weren’t.

Two years later, I found myself caught in a fifth round of layoffs.

At the time, I was only twenty-eight.

I told myself it was just the economy.

Just bad timing.

Just another corporate restructuring.

Looking back now, I wonder if those weren’t isolated events at all.

Maybe they were early signs of a much larger shift.

Some people planned for uncertainty. They had savings, investments, or enough runway to weather unexpected changes.

Others didn’t.

Today, we’re surrounded by people who aren’t just unemployed.

They’re disappearing.

Not because they lack talent.

Not because they stopped contributing.

But because somewhere along the way, they stopped being counted.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures unemployment by counting people who are actively looking for work. If someone wants a job but stops searching, they are no longer included in the headline unemployment rate. Instead, they’re classified as being outside the labor force. The government also tracks “discouraged workers” separately—people who have stopped looking because they don’t believe jobs are available for them.

That’s an important distinction.

Because someone can desperately want to work and still disappear from the statistic most of us hear every month.

We’re talking about unemployment.

We’re talking far less about the people who quietly stopped believing the search would lead anywhere.

Maybe that’s why this feels different.

This isn’t just my story.

It’s my friend’s story.

It’s another friend’s story.

It’s the executive who spent decades building a career.

It’s the entrepreneur who had to reinvent himself.

It’s the experienced professional trying to prove they still belong in a world that seems to value novelty over experience.

Different lives.

Different industries.

The same question.

What happens when the world stops valuing the very experience it once told us to spend a lifetime building?

This isn’t just about unemployment.

It’s about institutional memory.

It’s about what happens when organizations lose decades of experience faster than they can replace it.

It’s about children watching their parents reinvent themselves every five years and wondering if there is such a thing as a stable career anymore.

It’s about a generation that kept its side of the bargain, only to discover the bargain itself had quietly changed.

I started writing this because I thought I was asking whether I had become invisible.

Now I think I’ve been asking the wrong question.

The better question is this:

How many people have we stopped seeing?

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