Leadership After 5

People love to say "that's not the hill I'm willing to die on." For me, there's always a hill. That's what happens when you're that convinced about the work you do.

In this episode, Kim talks about what it feels like when the work you believe in gets called the soft stuff. The quiet kind of depletion that doesn't show up as a breakdown, just as small things that total up until you're sitting in your car asking why am I even doing this. What it costs to keep bringing the clear answer to people who won't move. And the question underneath all of it: how do you stay in the game without running yourself into the ground?

Kim gets into:

• Why depletion is quiet, and why that makes it harder to catch
• What happens when your work is treated as a luxury instead of a necessity
• Why "pick your battles" doesn't work for people who can't stop caring
• Using your purpose to know when to push, when to stop, and when to pivot
• The difference between a hindrance and a circumstance, and why we confuse them when we're tired
• Five signs it's time to go, and two signs you just need rest

If you've been carrying something nobody's helping you carry, this one's for you.

This is the first Leadership After 5 episode recorded with a guest.

Kim sits down with Lance Lamoreaux, a leadership professor who recently completed his doctorate in organizational development and leadership, to talk about metacognition, or thinking about your own thinking. Lance makes the case that the leaders who operate at an elite level are not the ones who react fastest. They are the ones who can pause, notice what they are thinking, and choose what happens next.

Lance walks through four steps:

1. Become aware of your thoughts
2. Recognize that you have a choice
3. Reframe
4. Take action

He explains how practicing these four steps strengthens your thinking, builds your capacity, and helps you lead at your best.

A team member sits down and says three words: "I'm at capacity." Watch what happens in your body in the next three seconds, because that reflex is the whole problem.

Most leaders do one of three things. They clear the plate before understanding what's on it. They agree, sympathize, and then change nothing. Or they quietly decide it's a performance issue. All three skip the only step that matters: diagnosis.

In this episode, Kim breaks down why "at capacity" is a symptom rather than a verdict, the four different things people actually mean when they say it, and the four questions that tell you which one you're dealing with.

Also in this episode:

• Why four of Gallup's five leading burnout drivers point back at leadership, not workload
• The difference between challenge stress and hindrance stress, and why identical hours produce opposite outcomes
• How your strongest collaborators end up carrying an invisible second job
• What a 1990 innovation theory reveals about the real cost of handing someone their next project
• Why the third question in the diagnostic is a lie detector aimed at you
• How to lead this conversation when you're running on empty yourself

Research referenced: Gallup (2018), LePine, Podsakoff & LePine (2005), Cross, Rebele & Grant (2016), Leroy (2009), Cohen & Levinthal (1990).

[Apologies for any mispronunciation of names]

Leadership After 5 is for the leaders still thinking about it after the workday ends.

There will never be a good time to hold a problem employee accountable. Not next quarter, not after the reorg, not once things calm down.

But that's not usually why we wait.

In this episode, Kim tells the story of an employee she knew was a problem, documented as a problem, and still did not confront. The reason wasn't cowardice. It was evidence. She had never once seen accountability actually work in that organization, and she drew the rational conclusion.

She also corrects the ending she's been telling for years. The situation eventually resolved, but not through process, and not because of anything she did. It resolved because the employee finally upset the right person, and then the organization did what organizations do: moved the employee somewhere else and called it handled.

What you'll get: why hesitation is usually a design problem rather than a character problem, how to tell the difference between waiting and building a record, why documentation is a test of your own judgment and not just ammunition, and the three moves that leave you ready when the arbitrary moment arrives.

You keep getting left off the invite, and it's not an accident. In this episode, Kim goes deeper on professional FOMO, the need some leaders have to be in every meeting, every conversation, every room. But this one isn't really about the invite. It's about why the invite never comes.

Kim breaks down what the research actually says: workplace FOMO is less about missing information and more about the fear of relational exclusion. It runs hottest in people whose sense of identity and belonging is running low. And it predicts burnout, not performance. Meanwhile, the trust research is clear that consistency is what earns you the seat, right down to the bottom line.

The hard truth at the center of this episode: if your inconsistency reads as a risk, people will not take that risk. They won't mitigate around you. They will avoid you altogether.

Kim closes with three things you can do about it: know who you are, come prepared or pull back, and grade yourself after every meeting.

The invite isn't the problem. The invite is the symptom. Consistency is the cure.

You have been in the room where everyone knows the right call and nobody will make it. That is not a process problem. That is insecurity, wearing a business suit.

In this episode, Kim breaks down what insecurity actually looks like at the top, and why it has almost nothing to do with a leader protecting the organization. It's a leader protecting themselves from it. When the question quietly shifts from "what's best for the mission" to "what keeps me safe," decisions stall, credit flows up, risk flows down, and your best people learn to stop sticking their necks out.

People are the currency. How they treat each other is the load-bearing wall. Insecurity at the top puts a crack in that wall and hangs a picture over it. This one is about taking the picture down.

Leadership After 5. New episodes for the leaders still thinking about it after hours.

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Look around right now. The trust is low and the fear is high, and you can feel it everywhere from the headlines to your own hallway. In this episode of Leadership After 5, Kim takes the trust deficit we're all sensing in the wider environment and brings it home to where it quietly does the most damage: inside our organizations.

How do you actually know your team trusts you? And if that trust is already slipping, can you rebuild it on purpose? Kim walks through a four-step path for doing exactly that, from stepping back and naming the real elephant, to gathering the right table, to getting an honest diagnosis, to building a plan and telling people the truth about it the whole way through. Skip that last part, and the rest was just performance.

This one is about the cost of low trust, the obligation that comes with leading, and the one question worth asking before the week gets away from you: what does your trust meter actually read right now?

Nobody warns you about this part. When the mentor who guided your whole career retires, the hard part isn't that they can't help you anymore. It's that you realize you never built your own judgment. 

In this episode, Kim gets honest about the years she lost sitting still after her mentor left, the Olivia Dean lyric that finally woke her up, and why an executive coach is a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have. A mentor gives you answers. A coach builds the muscle so you become your own pair of safe hands.

The better your work gets, the more people show up wanting a piece of it. Most of them mean well. Some of them don't, and the hard part is they can look exactly the same.

This episode is about the opportunist. The person who studies how to look like your friend, says the perfect thing at the perfect moment, and positions themselves right next to your success the second there's something to gain. I get into how to tell the loyalist from the opportunist, why your decency is the exact thing they count on, and the tells that give them away before they cost you.

This isn't about trusting no one. It's about discernment, the kind that protects your good work and the people counting on you. Because a lack of vigilance doesn't stay contained. It turns into confusion, then chaos, and sometimes it takes the whole thing down.

Trust isn't a feeling. Trust is time. Make them earn it.

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Most leaders don't hold back because they lack vision. They hold back because they've read the room and understood the consequences of going too far.

In this episode of Leadership After 5, Kim introduces one of the most underexplored and least discussed dynamics in organizational leadership — the tempered leader. The one who can see exactly what the organization needs. Who believes in the work deeply. Who has the capacity and the conviction to do something significant — and who operates every single day within constraints most people around them cannot fully see.

Backed by research on fear based leadership behavior Kim unpacks what political capital actually costs, what the system quietly punishes, and what being tempered does to a leader over time — including the Golem effect and why constrained leadership can produce the exact opposite of what a leader intended.

This episode is not about bad leadership. It is about the leader who is still ready. Still holding the vision. Still waiting for the chain to loosen.

If you have ever felt the bark yanked back before it could land — this one is for you.

Stay ready.