The Inbox

A colleague said to me offhandedly, man, you’ve been through it. She meant it as recognition. And I received it that way, for a moment. And then I turned the coin over. If I had been through it, I had also put others through it. Not because I was the source of the dysfunction. But because I was standing in the middle of it, and things were flowing through me whether I intended them to or not.

I inherited teams that were already broken before I arrived. Not broken in the ways that get named in performance reviews, broken in the ways that never make it into documentation. People placed in roles as political solutions to someone else’s problem. Situations I could not resolve without creating a larger detonation that had nothing to do with the work.

And then there was the mandate. I was asked to complete a capital campaign built on projected capacity. Readiness had never been considered. The prospect pool was alienated, a critical variable left out of the equation entirely. I said to my president: this, as it stands, is not possible.

I made a deal. I would bring the campaign to successful completion. In exchange, I would launch a mini-campaign, $5M, an entirely new area, an entirely new purpose. Something I believed was actually achievable.

That is how it works sometimes. You don’t always get pushed in. Sometimes you negotiate your way there.

There was a copy deck sitting in my inbox the day I made that deal. It would stay there for three days.

There were ones I could count on. The ones who showed up, got it done, carried the mission without being asked twice. The load-bearers.

I learned to create time in motion. Hey, walk with me. A few minutes in the hallway, side by side instead of across a desk. It was the best I could offer and I knew it.

But the more the structure failed, the more I turned to them. The walk-with-me moments got shorter. The ask got bigger. I didn’t pile onto them intentionally. I piled onto them because they could take it. Because something had to keep moving.

Reliability is not capacity. The people you lean on most have not yet shown you their limit. Until you push too hard. Until they finally do, by leaving.

The dysfunction doesn’t distribute itself evenly. It finds the strongest people in the room and concentrates there. And the leader, me, let it.

The good ones always leave. They know their worth even when they can’t name what’s happening. They feel it before they can say it.

I know because I had been there. I had been the one saying, you are asking the impossible of me.

Years later, I learned that one of my direct reports had said to my boss, in a private conversation she felt compelled to share, this is not Keira’s fault. She wasn’t saying it to me. She was saying it in a room I wasn’t in. Protecting me when I didn’t know I needed it. When I couldn’t thank her. When it was already too late to do anything with it except receive it.

She couldn’t name what it was. But she knew what it wasn’t.

I cannot be held accountable for a metric if I do not have the authority to do what needs to be done to hit it. I cannot navigate a system with fractured communication by design.

But that’s exactly what I was asked to do. And in the trying, I became part of what was broken below me.

I used to say it on the train, at the end of another impossible day. No matter what I do. No matter how hard I work. No matter what I accomplish. It is simply never enough.

That’s the mechanism nobody names. You don’t have to be cruel to cause harm. You just have to be depleted inside a system that keeps moving the finish line and calling it leadership development.

They needed decisions. Not big ones. Sometimes just, approve the copy. Review the design. Talk through the script before the donor call. Review the alumni board presentation. Am I hitting all the strategic pillars?

Simple things. Things that were mine to give.

But I was waiting on a colleague. Waiting on the call back from the chair of the board. Waiting on a system that was not going to move.

So the copy sat. The design waited. The donor call happened without the conversation we should have had first. The presentation went to the board unreviewed. And they absorbed it. Because they were loadbearing.

Until they weren’t anymore.

The copy sat in my inbox. Not because I didn’t care. Because there was always something that couldn’t wait ahead of it. The call to the chair of the campaign committee. The board situation. The thing that was on fire.

So I pushed it off. And in the pushing off, the message was delivered whether I meant to send it or not.

Your work is not important.

It was. It was fundamental. It was the thing that actually moved people, raised money, built relationships. I knew that.

And I still let it sit.

That’s the part that stays with me. Not the big failures. The inbox. The copy that deserved my attention and got my delay instead.

I knew the work mattered.

And I still let it sit.

Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Earn the silence.