People Still Matter (1 of 3)

Fired Up, Then Let Down

Everything is moving toward AI and automation, and it is easy to believe you can run a team from a dashboard. This is a three-part case for why staying close to your frontline matters now more than ever.

During an FGD a while back, one of the agents asked me a simple question. What is the future of the account.

On the surface it was a normal question. But something in how he asked it did not sit right. It felt like a stand-in for something else. So I kept asking.

This agent was good. Genuinely good. Strong with technology, C1 language, sharp instincts, the kind of person you notice without having to look hard. And he was not chasing anything. He was not in anyone’s office asking about promotion.

Leadership came to him. Unprompted. They told him he was being lined up for a promotion because he was that good.

Then they took it back. The client changed direction for the LOB he supported or something.

Later they came again. A different move this time, a possible supervisor role. He let himself believe it a second time.

Then they took that back too. A hiring freeze.

Here is what that sequence did. A highly motivated contributor turned into someone who just clocks in. He is still good at his job, the skill did not go anywhere. But the part of him that cared beyond the minimum is now gone… and that is on leadership. Not on him.

I do not know what the approach was supposed to be. If they wanted to retain him because he was excellent, then keep your word. If there was nothing concrete to offer, then do not dangle the one thing you cannot deliver. Dangling promotion is the lazy way to motivate someone. There are other ways to make a good person feel valued that do not require a promise you might have to break.

I would never have known any of this from a dashboard. His numbers were still fine. Nothing about him would have shown up as a problem in a report. The only reason I found out was because I was sitting in a room with the frontline, and because when he asked a vague question, I asked more.

That is the whole point of staying close. The most important things happening to your people rarely announce themselves. You have to be near enough to feel when a simple question is actually carrying something heavier.

More on that in this series.

#TeamLegendary#BPOEvolution#PragmaticLeadership#NextGenCX#FutureBPO#LGDR

You Dont Always Need ROI

A LONG time ago, I asked to attend an AI conference. I was a senior leader running future-focused programs, and part of my mandate was to stay at the forefront of where technology was heading. The event was directly relevant. I explained why.

The response was that I would need to put together an ROI document.

That was a completely reasonable ask. It is standard practice, it is what good governance looks like, and I understood the logic behind it. I want to be clear about that before I say anything else.

I did not fight it. I also did not go. I ended up watching YouTube recaps of the event instead. 😂

That was likely on me. I could have pushed. I could have built the case and connected the dots for them. I did not, and I own that.

Recently I asked to attend another one. Similar event, similar cost, similar reasoning. The answer came back almost immediately. Approved, go for it.

That speed was not carelessness. The judgment had already been done. The space was understood, the reasoning was clear, and the trust was already there.

Here is what I keep thinking about.
The outputs were not that different. I got good ideas from the YouTube recaps. I got good ideas from the event I attended. If you scored both on a spreadsheet, you might call it a wash.

What was completely different was everything the spreadsheet could not capture. One left me discouraged. The other left me energized, connected to people I would never have met otherwise, and feeling genuinely good about the whole thing.

No ROI document has a field for that.

There is no line item for a senior leader who quietly stops asking. No metric captures the difference between someone who feels trusted and someone who learned that the effort of asking is not worth it.

There is such a thing called VOI. Value on Investment exists because ROI leaves out morale, engagement, and trust.

Process matters. I am not arguing for throwing it out. I am saying the friction a request carries should reflect what is already known about the person asking and what is actually at stake in the answer.

What is a leader worth when they feel trusted? What does it cost when they stop asking?

Trust your people. Especially the ones who have already proven they deserve it. That trust comes back to you in ways no report will ever capture.

#TeamLegendary #LeaderPragmatips #PragmaticLeadership #LGDR

Take A Chance on You

About one year ago I walked away from a role that I worked really hard to attain. I had a team that I built and loved and they loved me back, I think. People who cried when I left, so there’s that. I was really conflicted.

I left anyway. The inspiration was gone. The environment had stopped helping me grow. The stress had started outweighing the reasons to stay. So I took a gamble on something new and for the first time in a long time, I prioritized myself.

It did not work out.

The environment was not what I hoped, the chemistry was just wrong. And so we move on filled with lessons.

Here’s the beauty of it, in God’s perfect plan and timing, this situation led me back to mentors I had admired and respected for years.

And it placed me alongside a team of people, some of whom I have worked with before but have now become beyond impressive. Solutions oriented. Problem solvers. People who make hard work feel worth it.

I am happier and more fulfilled now than I have been in a long time.

The work is still difficult, because what work isn’t. But it is meaningful. It is future focused. We are not protecting an old way of doing things or talking about what to cut. We are building what comes next.

I am almost scared to lose it. That is how good it feels.

So here is what I would tell anyone reading this. When you stop feeling it, when the environment is draining you and the reasons to stay run thin, it is okay to take the gamble.

Things can work out.

But not on their own. You have to be a good person.

You have to work hard. Stay true to your values, never compromise on that. Life is too short.

You have to build a reliable network that will actually have your back when you need it.

And even then, nobody is coming to save you. You still do the heavy lifting yourself.

Do that, and take the leap, and you might land in one of the best and most fulfilling chapters of your life.

That is where I am now. And everyone deserves to feel like this.

#TeamLegendary #LeaderPragmatips #PragmaticLeadership

Notes from SuperAI (3 of 3): Security Is About to Get Personal

One idea at SuperAI deserves more airtime than it got. Security.

The uncomfortable truth is simple. The attacker only needs to win once. You have to defend everything, every time. They have to find one opening. That math has always favored the attacker and AI is about to tilt it further.

Anything in the cloud, in your systems, in your processes that can be hacked with AI will be. Powerful open models that anyone can run without guardrails are going to reshape the security picture over the coming year. One practical suggestion from the floor: reduce your dependence on the cloud where you can, and keep more of what matters local.

That part sounds bleak. Here is the part that does not.

Every one of those threats is a job. Someone has to verify. Someone has to validate.

Someone has to defend against the bots and the fake agents flooding in. Someone has to be the human in the loop who catches what the machine misses and confirms what the machine claims.

For all the talk about AI eliminating work, this is the opposite. A whole category of human work is opening up around trust, and it will only get bigger. Checking. Confirming. Securing. Judging what is real.

The people who lean into that now, who build the skills to verify and secure and validate, are going to be in demand in a way most people are not seeing yet.

The threat is real. So is the opportunity sitting right next to it.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

Notes from SuperAI (2 of 3): No One Has It Figured Out

Here is the most reassuring thing I took from the biggest AI event in Asia. Nobody actually knows what they are doing.

Not the founders. Not the labs. Not the people on stage with the polished decks. Everyone is experimenting, trying things, watching what happens, and adjusting. The confidence you see in the headlines is mostly assembled after the fact.

That is not a knock on anyone. It is how every major shift has always worked.

The mistake is thinking you need to have it all figured out before you move. You do not. You need to start, stay close to what happens, and adjust in real time. Pivot when the situation calls for it instead of holding course just because it was the plan.

The capability keeps revealing itself as you go. You discover what is possible by doing, not by planning. Nobody at that event mapped out where they would be three years ago and arrived there on schedule. They moved, they learned, they corrected, and the path appeared underneath them.

So if you are waiting to feel certain before you start, you will be waiting a long time.
Start. Stay close. Adjust. That is the whole game right now.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

Notes from SuperAI (1 of 3): You Can Build Almost Anything Now

You can build almost anything now. The infrastructure, the capital, the talent, the dependency. The things that used to stand between an idea and a working product have mostly dropped away.
You still need resources. Just not at the scale that used to stop people before they started.

That sounds freeing. It also takes away your excuses.

When the barriers were high, you could blame the barriers. No budget. No engineers. No infrastructure. Those are mostly gone now. What is left is the part nobody wants to admit. Most people do not actually know what problem they want to solve.

My favorite line at SuperAI was this. Stop looking for glamorous things to build. Find a real problem and solve it.

One of the richest companies in the world sells hangers. The ones hotels put in your closet. Not exciting. Not visionary. Nobody is giving a keynote about hangers. But someone looked at a boring, real problem and built an empire solving it quietly while everyone else chased the impressive version.

The constraint now is not access. It is attention. What are you actually willing to look at long enough to solve.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR

Make No Apologies

I was rewatching The Greatest Showman this weekend. I am not even sure why.

That movie should not have worked. Weak opening weekend. Mixed reviews. No franchise behind it. Original songs in an era where everything is built on existing IP. By every measure that studios obsess over, it was set up to disappear.

It became a phenomenon instead. People watched it again and again. They carried the songs around for years.

What it offered was simple and universal. You either felt unseen, wanted to belong or wanted your life to matter. Millions of people sat in those seats and one or all three just hit them.

Here is why it hit me this weekend.

We are living in a strange time. AI is everywhere. Work feels more disconnected than it used to. People are quick to judge and quicker to reduce each other to a number. A headcount. A line on a spreadsheet. Someone who can be optimized or restructured out of the picture.

And in the middle of all that, it is easy to start believing you are replaceable. That the parts of you that do not fit neatly into a job description or a performance metric do not matter.

I want to push back on that.

You have failed at things. You have been passed over, overlooked, and doubted. Maybe told in ways both loud and quiet that you were not enough. Whether we admit it or not, it leaves a mark.

But none of it cancels out the thing that is actually true. There is something only you bring. A way of seeing and leading and caring that no other person can replicate and no algorithm can reproduce. The world has spent a lot of energy lately trying to convince people they are interchangeable. They are not. You are not.

The movie worked because it reminded people that the parts of themselves the world rejected might be the exact parts that made them extraordinary.

So whatever you are carrying right now, whatever did not work out, whatever is making you feel small. You are still here. You still matter and you will be just fine.

Be brave enough to be exactly who you are. Your best version is still coming.

#TeamLegendary #LeaderPragmatips #PragmaticLeadership

Where Did The Humanity Go?

A friend of mine was fired on Christmas Eve.

Not January 5th or sometime after the holidays. Christmas Eve. Administratively it would have made zero difference to wait. The outcome would have been identical. Someone simply decided that the conversation could not wait a few more days and let it land on one of the most significant days of the year.

There was no performance plan. No documentation. No factual case. Just a “mismatch in priorities” or whatever language makes a cold decision sound procedural.

I want to be fair. Leaders have the right to change direction, restructure, and decide a role no longer fits. I am not arguing against any of that.

I am asking where the decency went.

Another friend has given a company more than 20 years. A new leader came in, they did not get along, and now she is being managed out. That is a prerogative too. But here is what bothers me. They are going after her on attendance. A senior leader at her level should not be measured by hours in the office? It should be against goals and deliverables right? I guess you go for attendance because her actual output gives you nothing to stand on? Never mind that she works on weekends or that she works from home when not in the office. Attendance was simply the angle that required the least honesty.

A third friend was let go over badly timed leave. The leave filed in advance was to attend his child’s graduation. It conflicted with an important client visit. And somehow choosing the graduation became evidence of a lack of commitment to the company?

I was raised by leaders who believed Value Creation was the entire point. You did not earn respect through hours in a chair, emails sent, or reports generated. You earned it by creating something real. I am fortunate to still work for a leader who measures me that way today.

So when I see people treated like this, it offends me deeply.

Here is the part leaders need to sit with. You never fully know what someone is carrying when your decision lands on them. The person you let go on Christmas Eve might have been holding their life together by a thread you could not see. A badly timed blow, delivered without care, can hit someone at the worst possible moment of their life. That is not a threat. It is the weight of the power you hold whether you acknowledge it or not.

Businesses exist to make money. I get that. None of what I am describing would have cost a cent more to do with decency.

You can make the hard call and still protect the person’s dignity. You can end a role and still let someone keep their holiday, their milestone, their truth. You can change direction without abandoning your humanity on the way.

The world is hard enough right now. In a time of AI, automation, cost cuts, and constant pivots, the one thing that should never be optimized away is basic human decency.

Lead with it. Especially when it would be easier not to.

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I Almost Kept Running

During my afternoon jog I passed this canal and took the first photo. Nothing special. A drainage ditch with murky water, weeds, and construction rubble on the banks. I kept moving.

On my way back the sky had changed. I noticed a cool photo op as the sun was setting. I waited. Got lower to the ground with my phone.

Same canal. Same water. Same weeds. Same rubble. Same power lines. BUT… Different light. Different angle. Different photo entirely.

To be clear I am not talking about blind positivity here or false perceptions. The canal is still murky. The weeds are real. The rubble didn’t disappear just because the sky turned orange. Nobody is pretending otherwise. What changed was the light. And the decision to still be standing there when it arrived. And the willingness to get a little closer to the ground.

A lot of people make one assessment and walk away. They decide what something is, file it, and move on. The drainage ditch gets labeled and forgotten. They never come back at sunset.

I think about this with teams, accounts and people. How many times has a leader written something off based on the first look? The flat light, the unflattering angle, the rough edges showing and missed entirely what was possible with more time, more patience, or a different angle.

This applies to yourself too. The version of you that feels stuck, unrecognized, or overlooked right now may just be the first photo. Same person and potential. Different light is coming. Change your angle. Choose your timing. And when the moment arrives, be close enough to the ground to actually catch it.

Some of the best things I’ve seen in my career looked rough the first time I saw them. A struggling account. A team nobody believed in. A program that looked like a drainage ditch.

The canal didn’t earn that sunset. It just stayed there long enough for the light to find it.

I’m glad I waited to witness and capture it.

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Zero Imagination

AI doubled my output. Maybe tripled it in some areas. Faster research. Cleaner thinking, my creativity has also improved. Better work in the same number of hours. I am still me. Just more of me.

So when I hear a company announce AI-driven layoffs and call it transformation, I do not buy it.

Because here is what AI actually does. It creates capacity. More from the same people. More speed. More quality. More bandwidth to go after things that were previously out of reach. That capacity belongs in the growth column.

Companies like Nvidia got this right. They started with chips. AI made their teams more capable. They did not stop at the savings. They moved into automotive. Into robotics. Into industrial AI. Into infrastructure across multiple continents. $68 billion in a single quarter. That is what happens when leadership asks what more is now possible.

Some companies are doing the opposite. Record productivity gains on one slide. Thousands of jobs cut on the next. And somewhere in a boardroom, someone is calling that a strategy.

Calling it transformation is a bit of a stretch, isn’t it? Leaders who do that have run out of ideas in my opinion.

I am one person. AI made me faster, sharper, and more capable. I did not respond by doing less. I went deeper. Took on more. Moved into things I previously did not have the bandwidth for. I know five other real Leaders with the same story.

If you lead a team right now, here is the question worth sitting with…

With everything AI can now do for your people, what is the biggest thing you have been putting off because you did not have the capacity?

You probably have the capacity now. The question is whether you have the will to use it.

Use the capacity. Build something bigger than the quarter. Have a bit more imagination.

#TeamLegendary #BPOEvolution #NextGenCX #FutureBPO #LGDR