Things Leaders Do

Reactive leaders become proactive by protecting one hour a week to step back, read the week’s signals, and act early on one problem. After the last episode, a listener emailed Colby Morris with a confession: they were pretty sure they were the reactive leader he’d described. They understood the problem. What they wanted was the how. This episode answers that email with the weekly habit Colby uses...

An underperforming manager who is good with people still has to be managed on the work, closely and with a date, no matter their title. The email was three sentences long. A customer Colby Morris's team had kept for years was done, and he already knew whose desk he was walking to. He had seen it coming three months earlier, in a one-on-one with a vice president who reported to him. The reason...

After an acquisition, new leadership judges your team by the numbers that move, not by how hard everyone looks like they're working. That's a tough shift if you built your reputation on hustle. Colby Morris tells the story of Jason, a manager who reported to him right after his company was acquired. Jason was the hardest-working, best-liked guy in the building, and he couldn't survi...

Change fatigue means your team isn't resisting change, they're tired of it, and how leaders hand change down decides whether it gets worse. It's Monday morning, and a manager named Dana gets an email from her VP with the subject line "Exciting Update." It's the fourth big change her team has been handed this year. She forwards it with "FYI, new process starts the...

The best way to give your boss bad news is early, before you have the fix, because bosses can handle bad news but not surprises. In 2006, Ford's top leaders put up green status charts every single week while the company was on its way to a seventeen billion dollar loss. Then one executive put up the first red chart, and what his new CEO did next changed the company. Colby Morris walks through...

When a call isn't working, figure out whether it was a bad decision, bad luck, or bad timing before you fix it. Each one needs a completely different fix, and fixing the wrong one makes things worse. Three hours into a major system go-live, Colby Morris watched the whole thing start falling apart, and he had to make the call. Was it a bad decision? And if it was, which one: the decision to sw...

In the first 30 days after an acquisition, your job is closing the gap between the questions people are asking and the answers anyone is giving them. Colby Morris calls it the Answer Gap. The deal closes in an afternoon. The people take a lot longer. And while leadership is working through slide thirty-one of the integration plan, the breakroom is writing its own version of what happens next, and...

Gen X keeps getting passed over because we built careers as the fixer, and boards promote vision, not maintenance. Colby Morris calls it the Tactician Trap, and there are four ways out of it. The average American CEO is now 61, a full decade older than in 2000. The Boomers held the top seats longer than anyone planned, and now that they're letting go, the torch is going straight to Millennial...

When you're forced to deliver a performance rating you don't believe in, don't defend it and don't hide behind the system. Split the number from the truth: hand off the company's rating cleanly, tell the person the real thing that number can't hold, and make sure the review is never the first time they hear where they stand. Colby Morris calls it The Split. Forced ran...

When you're promoted over your former peers, the job is to redraw three things on purpose: the relationship, the standard, and your own support system. Colby Morris calls it The Redraw, and it's the difference between a promotion that sticks and one that quietly falls apart inside ninety days. Here's what nobody warns you about. The day you got the title, the line between you and yo...

Why does my boss ignore my ideas? Usually he isn't ignoring them, he just never heard them the way you meant them. In one workplace study, 81% of leaders said their people have an easy way to give feedback, while only 44% of employees said they actually have a voice. Your boss almost certainly thinks his door is open.  And you're on your fourth attempt to get somebody to care about a sta...

How do you handle a conflict with a coworker who doesn't report to you? Go to them directly, before your boss, and make it the two of you against the problem instead of you against each other. Most leaders were never taught this one. There are shelves of books on managing your team and managing your boss, and almost nothing on the sideways conversation with a peer, where you have no authority...

Why do Gen X leaders keep clashing with younger employees? Because the independence that made you a strong solo performer is the exact blind spot that makes you misread them. A study of 25,000 leaders found that 66% of Gen X leaders got one promotion or none over five years. You are the people everyone leans on and nobody credits, and that same instinct to keep your head down and handle it yoursel...

Why do well-structured one-on-ones still feel empty? Usually because the leader is supplying both the structure and everything that goes inside it. This one is for any leader who runs consistent, organized one-on-ones and still walks out knowing nothing new.  Colby Morris makes the contrarian case that your structure probably isn't the problem, and gives you a simple split for fixing what is:...

Why does a good team end up with broken processes and a quietly toxic culture? Usually because the leader stopped listening long before anything visibly broke. In this episode, Colby Morris introduces The Feedback Blackout, the three-stage slide by which honest information stops flowing up to a leader until the operation breaks and the leader blames the system instead of the silence. The broken pr...

Why do leaders keep putting off the hardest decisions? Because "I'm thinking about it" is almost always a cover story for something else. Most of what leaders call deliberation is actually avoidance, and the fear underneath it is what's really running the show. Research from the American Psychological Association found that roughly 75% of adults report ambiguity about the futur...

How do you actually build psychological safety on your team if you're a Gen X leader? Not by being softer. By being deliberate in the five seconds that matter. The traits that made you a strong leader (resilience, "figure it out," low tolerance for excuses) are the same instincts quietly shutting your team down. A 2024 McKinsey survey found only 26% of employees believe they work in...

How do you know if your top performers are about to quit? You watch for the five signals — and you fix the management pattern that's pushing them out. Gallup's Q4 2025 data found 51% of U.S. workers are either actively looking or watching for opportunities — the highest since 2015. Most leaders assume it's their underperformers in motion. It's not. It's their A-players. An...

How does a Gen X leader manage up to a younger boss? Not by fighting the dynamic — by offering your experience as a gift instead of asserting it as a flag. CareerBuilder found that 53% of workers age 45 and up are reporting to a younger boss right now; 69% if you're over 55. This isn't a coming trend — it's the normal arrangement in the American workplace today. And most Gen X leade...

Research from Notre Dame says more than 80% of workers are holding back at least one tough conversation at work. So when leaders DO finally have those conversations, they're walking in with the wrong goal — trying to win them. In this episode, you'll learn: Why "winning" the tough conversation is the move that actually loses you the team The 30-year-old Harvard research that ge...

You don't have time for the people you're leading because you're spending hours on tasks that AI could handle in minutes. Leaders using AI save 40-60 minutes daily, yet only 26% of employees use AI weekly despite 91% of businesses adopting it. The AI Efficiency Framework (Colby Morris) recovers lost time through: Interactive Prompting (asking AI to ask clarifying questions before an...

AI anxiety, particularly FOBO (Fear of Becoming Obsolete), affects 75% of employees concerned AI will make jobs obsolete. Nearly 55,000 U.S. job cuts were directly attributed to AI in 2025. The Five Irreplaceable Skills Framework (Colby Morris) addresses this through: doubling down on human capabilities AI cannot replicate, becoming the translator who interprets AI output for specific contexts, ow...

Seventy-seven percent of CHROs lack confidence in their leadership bench strength. Meanwhile, 40% of middle managers are planning their exit. Your leadership pipeline isn't empty because of a talent problem—it's empty because you're burning out your current leaders before they can develop. In this episode, you'll discover: → Why the gig economy changed everything about middle m...

Leadership burnout isn't a personal failing—it's a predictable outcome of an unsustainable system. According to Colby Morris on The Things Leaders Do podcast, middle managers can survive unsustainable workloads through ruthless prioritization, energy management (not just time management), difficult conversations about workload, and one small structural change per week. Research-backed in...

Use a five-part framework to communicate decisions effectively: Start with why (explain the problem you're solving), explain what's changing and what's not, address obvious concerns upfront, tell people what happens next, and invite questions then actually answer them. Most decision communication fails because leaders announce decisions without providing context or addressing concer...