I want to tell you a story about one of the worst hires I ever made and the lesson I almost missed because I was too busy wanting to be right.

Early on at Gym Launch, we had a team lead who was consistently missing targets. Not by a lot, but enough that it was noticeable and irritating to say the least, lol. The team under her was underperforming, communication was sloppy, and a few people had come to me flagging issues.

Because of this I had already written the narrative in my head: she's not cut out for this, she doesn't have the skills, she sucks. I was ready to move on from her and call it day.

Before I made the final decision I remember thinking to myself I needed to eliminate ANY ambiguity or chance I was wrong, so I decided to have one more conversation. This time, instead of going in with my conclusion already made, I asked one question I hadn't asked before: "What's your list of priorities right now now? Walk me through your week."

Boy did I feel like an ass after asking lol.

She had been absorbing work from two other departments that had inexperienced leaders and teams who were coming to her for help. She was spending 60% of her time on things that weren't even her job, things nobody had asked her to do but that would have fallen through the cracks if she hadn't picked them up and ABSOLUTELY would have messed up the business.

The reason her team's numbers were slipping wasn't because she lacked drive, intensity or ‘skill’. It was because she had MORE intensity than almost anyone on the team she just aimed it at problems that were not hers to solve and I couldn't see because I hadn't bothered to look.

I almost fired one of my best people. Not because the data was wrong, but because my interpretation of the data was wrong. I saw the symptoms and skipped straight to judgment instead of getting curious about the cause.

That moment taught me something I now think about almost every single day: The quality of your leadership is determined by the quality of the questions you ask BEFORE you form an opinion.

Here's what I've learned, and I've seen this play out across every company I've touched: most leadership mistakes don't come from a lack of intelligence or even a lack of caring. They come from a lack of CURIOSITY. We see something that doesn't look right and our brain does what brains do, it fills in the story. And almost always uncharitably in their favor…

Someone misses a deadline? They must not care enough.

Someone pushes back in a meeting? They must have an attitude problem.

Someone goes quiet for a week? They must be checked out.

We form the conclusion FIRST and then look for evidence to confirm it. And the frightening part is you will always find the evidence because that's how confirmation bias works.

The moment you decide someone is the problem, everything they do looks like proof.

The best leaders I've ever worked with, the ones whose teams consistently outperform and whose people would follow them anywhere, approach these situations differently.They don't assume the worst and wait for people to prove them wrong. They assume the BEST and let the facts talk them out of it. Not out of naivety but out of fairness.

That is when my commitment to the motto ‘Tough but fair’ was born.

When something goes sideways on your team, a project misses, a launch doesn't hit, a process breaks, the instinct is to find what went wrong. Which usually means finding WHO went wrong. But the leaders who actually fix things don't start with blame. They start with "What happened here that I don't understand yet?"

They treat the bad situation as information, not as an indictment.

When your first move is judgment "Why didn't this get done? Who dropped this?" people learn to hide problems. They learn to manage your perception instead of managing the work. And then you end up exactly where I was with that team lead at Gym Launch: making decisions based on a story you wrote in your own head instead of the reality that's right in front of you that you’re too caught up in your own story to see.

Two things that help me catch this:

1 - Ask yourself what story you’re telling yourself. At some point this week, someone on your team is going to do something that frustrates you. Before you respond, pause and ask yourself: "Am I reacting to what actually happened, or am I reacting to the story I'm telling myself about what happened?" If you're being honest with yourself, most of the time it's the story. Replace the story with a question. Instead of "they don't care" try "what would make a smart, capable person do this?" That reframe has saved me from more bad decisions than I can count and prevented me from being a complete asshole. And when I am a complete asshole its usually because I don’t ask myself this.

2 - Model the response you want your team to have. Remember what I've told you before, nothing you say will ever be louder than what you DO. If you freak out when things break, your team will learn to hide anything and everything that breaks. If you get curious when things break, your team will learn to surface problems early. Your reaction to bad news IS your culture.

This week, when something doesn't go as planned, before you do anything else, say out loud: "Okay, help me understand what happened." Watch what that does to the team or your PEER (thats very common as well)

The bottom line is this: Bad situations are inevitable but bad interpretations are optional :P The leaders who consistently get the best from their people aren't the ones who never face problems, they're the ones who face every problem with the assumption that there's something they don't know yet.

Curiosity is not a personality trait. Just like candor, just like communication, just like everything else I've talked about in here, it's a SKILL. And it's one of the highest-leverage skills you can build because it changes the quality of every single interaction you have with your team.

Your people deserve leaders who see the best in them first and let the evidence guide them from there.

Leila

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