Scott McBride

I hear this all the time. If I could just take a real vacation, or cut my schedule back, I'd finally have margin.
I don't think that's true anymore.

A lighter calendar was never going to fix it, because the real cost was never the schedule.

It's what's happening underneath it.

Every one of us has a natural way we'd operate if nobody was watching, and an adapted way, the version we've trained ourselves to be at work.

When those two sit close together, work feels sustainable.

But when there's a real gap, when you've spent years being a version of yourself that doesn't come naturally, it costs you.

Quietly, and every day.

I look at my own life through this lens now, and at the strongest people around me.

That gap between who they are and who they have to be at work is exactly where the exhaustion lives.

You can't fix what you can't see. So start by asking about it.

It might be the most important conversation you have all quarter.

Where's that gap showing up in your own life right now?

We came here for team training. The training wasn't even the best part.

I'm filming this from a beach in Cococay, in the Bahamas, out here doing a corporate retreat with some genuinely wonderful friends of mine.

We've had a great week, on the ship, on the sand, running real team development.

But if I'm honest, just enjoying each other was the best part of the whole trip. I say this to every leader I work with.

A team that actually likes being around each other will outperform a team that's just technically skilled, every time.

If you want to talk through what this could look like for your own team, I'd love to help you brainstorm it.

Or come find me here. That part's pretty epic too.

A client ran his best employee's data through AI to decide a promotion. He might as well have shaken a magic eight ball.

The answer came back clean. Pros, cons, a recommendation.

Honestly, a lot of it I would've said myself.

But it couldn't tell him this person comes alive in a room and goes quiet in a spreadsheet.

It didn't hear the hesitation in his voice last month. It didn't know his family just moved.

It's not only promotions either.

I'm watching leaders run hiring and firing decisions through AI the exact same way. Same blind spot, different stakes.

I keep coming back to this: that's not far from shaking a magic eight ball for a real decision.

Promote him. Don't. Fine for a party trick. Nobody would actually bet their team on it.

AI will give you the information every time. It will never give you the understanding.

I use it too, for the data. But the call on your people still belongs to you, because you're the one who actually knows them.

When was the last time you let a tool make a call that was really yours to make?

Here's a stat that stopped me cold the first time I saw it.

Close to half of clients don't feel like their advisor actually understands them. Half.

I think about that a lot when I'm coaching advisors, because the fix isn't complicated. You don't have to be twice as good as the advisor down the street.

You just have to be a little better at making people feel understood, and you've already separated yourself from half the field.

For a lot of clients right now, it's basically a coin flip. Feel like a transaction, and they leave the second someone quotes a better number. Feel understood, and they stick around for decades.

I don't think that's a soft skill. I think it's the whole game.

You can't control the market. Whether the person across from you feels understood is entirely on you.

What's one client relationship where you know you could close that gap?

I'll be honest. Leadership got lonely for me at the top.

Full team. Business partners. A calendar that never had a gap in it. And still, no one I could actually say the hard things to.

My team couldn't carry it. My partners had their own stake in it. So I held it myself, for longer than I want to admit.

What changed it wasn't another book or framework. It was one person on the outside.

Someone who'd been in the trenches, understood what I was carrying, but wasn't tied to my business. No agenda except me.

That's the whole value, most of the time. Not more frameworks. One person who can see clearly on my behalf, because they're not standing where I'm standing.

What's the hard thing you're carrying right now that you haven't said out loud to anyone?

I was leading a seminar recently and asked one of the leaders in the room to do something a little uncomfortable.

Name the top three ways you want your team to communicate with you. Then name the top three ways to guarantee you'll lose them.

She had both lists in about ten seconds flat. She knew exactly what worked on her and exactly what shut her down.

Then I asked her team the same question. They didn't really know, not with any confidence. They always know a little. They're never totally right.

That gap, between what your team thinks they know about you and what's actually true, is the gap I think most of us live in without realizing it. The real work is shrinking it.

Everyone on your team has that same list running in their head right now, the buttons that work and the ones not to push.

Most have never said it out loud, because you've never asked.

Try this: ask one question this week. "What's the best way to communicate with you, and what's the fastest way to frustrate you?"

You'll learn more from that one honest answer than a year of guessing ever taught you.

What would your team say if you asked them today?