The Quiet Cost of Leadership

I went to bed last night somewhere between feeling like a success...

...and feeling like a failure.

The strange part is that I wasn't really either.

Or perhaps I was both.

Yesterday was my wife's birthday.

The goal was simple.

Give her a quiet day.

Keep the kids with me.

Let her rest.

Celebrate together that evening.

Simple plans.

Until work started.

At first it was just a low rumble.

An email.

A question.

An escalation.

Nothing unusual.

Then another.

And another.

Before long, my calendar had become little more than a collection of rapidly assembled meetings, conversations, and decisions.

One team was already at full capacity for the sprint.

New work kept arriving.

Stakeholders kept insisting their work was the priority.

Leadership kept getting pulled higher and higher up the chain.

One thing that has frustrated me for some time is how quickly people jump straight to vice presidents when things become uncomfortable.

There is an entire layer of directors between those conversations.

People whose job is to help.

People ready to engage.

People who actually enjoy solving these kinds of problems.

Being copied on an email isn't the same thing as engaging someone.

This time, at least, I was in the room.

From where I sat, the Scrum Master and Product Owner were doing exactly what they should have been doing.

Listening.

Negotiating.

Holding the process.

Trying to help everyone understand the simple truth that priorities require prioritization.

Not everything fits.

Not everything gets done.

Every "yes" eventually requires a "not yet."

That isn't failure.

That's planning.

The difficult part is that everyone naturally sees only their own lane.

Their project.

Their deadline.

Their emergency.

Meanwhile, shared services like Analytics are trying to keep every lane moving at once.

Sometimes it feels less like steering a boat...

...and more like being the rudder, the sails, the navigator, and the lifeguard all at the same time.

Normally that would have been enough.

Yesterday had other plans.

One of my managers had a family emergency.

His wife had been admitted to the hospital.

And yet there he was.

Logging in from a hospital room.

Trying to make sure work kept moving.

Trying to make sure his team was okay.

I've sat in those hospital rooms before.

I understand why he did it.

Sometimes work feels more stable than uncertainty.

Sometimes solving problems is easier than sitting beside someone you love while you wait for answers.

I understand it.

I also hate that I understand it.

Thankfully, today he is exactly where he should be.

Home.

With his wife.

Family first.

Always.

Meanwhile, my kids were doing everything they could to help me.

Sneaking out of my office before video meetings.

Turning the television down.

Keeping each other occupied.

Being patient.

Being understanding.

They were incredible.

But some things slipped.

Zoey hadn't made her mom's birthday cake.

The younger kids hadn't made birthday cards.

The gifts still weren't wrapped.

The clock kept moving.

At the same time, I had started two new college classes.

Tuesday is always my school day.

I have a standing rule for myself.

If I'm going to stream Tuesday night, I need to have the week's coursework substantially finished first.

Normally that feels like discipline.

Yesterday it felt like escape.

Not because I wanted to avoid work.

Because for the first time in weeks I found myself genuinely excited by every assignment.

Usually one class captures me.

This term...

Both of them do.

Reading didn't feel like homework.

It felt like curiosity.

That's a gift.

By the time work ended...

The classes were finished.

The meetings were over.

The fires were mostly contained.

And all I could think about was everything we hadn't gotten done for my wife's birthday.

So we fixed what we could.

The kids made cards.

Zoey set everything up to bake the cake first thing this morning.

That's her tradition.

Her way of saying, "I love you."

I wasn't about to take that away from her.

Dinner was wonderful.

The kids were happy.

The conversation was easy.

The birthday was good.

Or so everyone kept telling me.

Later that night I opened OBS.

Immediately...

Errors.

Missing media.

Broken paths.

Alerts that no longer existed.

Videos gone.

Audio missing.

Everything that makes my stream... my stream.

Gone.

Or so I thought.

For an hour and a half I quietly spiraled.

No yelling.

No panic anyone else could hear.

Just me...

...trying to solve one more problem after a day filled with solving everyone else's.

Then I remembered something embarrassingly simple.

Restart.

Over the weekend, while reorganizing my office, my NAS had been unplugged.

When everything came back online...

It hadn't.

Not completely.

While I was desperately searching for missing files...

The storage quietly reconnected.

The files had been there all along.

I simply wasn't looking at them anymore.

One reboot later...

Everything returned.

Exactly as it should have.

Sometimes experience works against you.

I spent ninety minutes chasing complex explanations for a problem that would've been solved by the first lesson every IT technician ever learns.

Turn it off.

Turn it back on.

Maybe yesterday conditioned me to think every problem required a complicated solution.

Sometimes...

It doesn't.

The stream happened.

Short.

Quiet.

Exactly what I had left in the tank.

Before bed my wife smiled.

She told me she'd had a wonderful birthday.

That she'd been able to rest.

That she'd enjoyed the day.

I needed to hear that.

And somehow...

I still crawled into bed feeling somewhere between success...

...and failure.

One of the quiet costs of leadership is that you slowly stop measuring your days by what went right. Instead, you remember the things that almost went wrong. The birthday cake that wasn't ready. The cards that weren't finished. The meeting that stole another hour. The bug that almost cost you everything. Meanwhile, the people around you remember something entirely different. A birthday they loved. A father who stayed present. A husband who cared enough to worry about getting it right. A leader who stayed calm while everyone else felt the storm. Maybe that's the lesson. We rarely experience our own lives the way the people who love us do. Sometimes the kindest thing we can do is believe them when they tell us we did okay.

Much love.

Stay safe.

Wash your damn hands.

See you Friday.