Happy Q3 and/or New Fiscal Year!This first half of the year has felt like a bit of a blur, but also has been so very full. And this June gave me a small taste of the insanity parents face at the end of the year- my niece had her first dance recital ad her 3K stepping up ceremony and my nephew graduated Pre-K (I unfortunately had to miss the ceremony due to a fridge that stopped working— but did make the post-ceremony festivities). Apparently, their pre-K had a “senior week” which I found adorable though I wasn’t the one running around getting him themed outfits. To those with kiddos- bless you. I hope you are getting some rest (though likely not with summer vacations).

I’ve got a few summer plans coming up, including finally sitting for my ICF certficiation and completing my Astro certification (yes, I love astrology- and have some ideas about astrology and leadership formulating currently). I also have a trip to London and Bath. I’ve been before but always welcome any good recs so send them my way!

What are you up to? Rest? Travel? I’d love to know.

Every Fourth of July I post the same James Baldwin quote: "I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” At this point it's basically a seasonal tradition for me.

This year, though, I found myself thinking not just about America, but also organizational culture.

You see, I'm working with a social impact organization right now on its culture of feedback, and it's made me wonder what Baldwin's idea actually looks like inside a team. Criticism as an act of love sounds clean in theory. It gets more complicated when you really respect the other person. Or know they're going through some big life challenges. Or it's the third time you've brought something like this up and nothing seems to change. And it feels different from the receiving side.

Here's the mistake I see organizations make over and over: they treat pushback and "not a team player" as the same thing. But they're not.

Someone naming a misalignment because they care about where the work is headed is doing something fundamentally different from someone who's decided the relationship is adversarial and approaches every conversation through that lens. Leaders don't get into trouble because people disagree with them. They get into trouble because they stop asking what kind of disagreement they're looking at.

I've been in meetings where someone raised an issue that made half the room roll their eyes. You could almost feel everyone thinking, We're really doing this again? I've learned to put my own frustration aside and get curious.

Why is this still coming up? What's underneath it? Are we hearing the same concern for the tenth time, or are we finally hearing the concern we've been talking around?

More than once, the answer was that we'd never actually resolved the issue. We'd deferred it, assumed everyone was aligned, or solved the surface problem without addressing what was underneath. It wasn't the tenth complaint. It was the first real conversation.

I've been on the other side of it, too.

After years of watching leadership pendulums swing back and forth in education, there were times I couldn't hear a new concern for what it was. Someone would raise a completely fair point—or revisit an issue we'd wrestled with years before—and I'd hear the last battle instead of the conversation in front of me. That's unresolved history dressed up as a personnel issue.

One of the advantages of consulting is that I walk into organizations without the history everyone else is carrying. It's striking how often two people describe the exact same interaction completely differently. One sees someone who cares deeply about the mission. The other sees someone who's impossible to work with. Before I decide what's actually happening, I usually want to know what happened six months ago.

That distance has helped me separate the signal from the noise. I came up with three questions I still use before deciding whether someone is the problem—or whether the organization has one.