Happy New Year, Leaders! We are kicking off 2026 with a "power bomb" episode. If your plan for this year is simply to "be better," Tammy has some tough love for you: Better is not a strategy. Stopping the wrong behavior is.

In Episode 115, we aren't adding to your to-do list. Instead, we are identifying the five anchors weighing down your leadership and eroding your team's trust. If you want to be taken seriously in every room you enter this year, it's time to put these habits in the rearview mirror.

1. The Busyness Trap: Why being in every Slack thread and meeting doesn't make you indispensable—it makes you a bottleneck.

   • Tammy's Sandbox Truth: "Leaders create clarity; managers create motion; exhausted people create chaos."

   • Power Question: What are you still doing that your position should have outgrown by now?

2. The "Sugar-Coating" Habit: How vague feedback and "just circling back" emails are actually courage issues that create resentment.

   • Tammy's Sandbox Truth: "Unspoken expectations become resentment every single time."

   • Power Question: Who are you protecting by not naming the problem, and what is it costing the organization?

3. Managing for Consensus: Why alignment actually comes after direction, not before it, and how seeking total agreement is outsourcing your leadership.

   • Tammy's Sandbox Truth: "Alignment comes after direction, not before it."

   • Power Question: Where are you waiting for permission instead of taking responsibility in leadership?

4. Hiding Behind the Shield: Why "HR said so" or "that's just our culture" is an abdication of your authority.

   • Tammy's Sandbox Truth: "Leaders don't outsource accountability. They own it."

   • Power Question: What are you blaming instead of owning right now?

5. The Autopilot Routine: Why the version of you that worked in 2022 is officially under-qualified for the challenges of 2026.

   • Tammy's Sandbox Truth: "If you don't upgrade your inner work and get in touch with who you are as leader, what you're here to do, no skill set will save you. Upskill you on the inside first. Lead yourself well before you lead others."

   • Power Question: How are you intentionally evolving how you think, not just what you do?

Listen to this episode to get the full details on your "Sandbox Truths" and "Power Questions" for each of these five steps. Let's make 2026 the year you stop sabotaging your own momentum.

Check out the artwork mentioned in this episode: davidwightglassart.com

Merry Christmas 2025! In this special holiday episode, Tammy J. Bond shares a powerful message on the "gift of who you are." As we sprint toward the end of the year, it's easy to focus on quotas and wrap-ups, but the most impactful gifts you can give your team cost nothing. Tammy breaks down four essential "gifts" every leader should offer this season to restore hope, spark courage, and set a transformational tone for 2026.

• The Power of Being Truly Seen: Tammy shares a personal reflection on why seeing the person behind the production is a leader's greatest honor—especially when life feels like a "struggle bus."

• The Gift of the "Exhale": Learn the one powerful question that helps your team drop their shoulders, release the weight of 2025, and step into the new year with a clean slate.

• Encouragement as a Strategy: Why caring for your team isn't "soft"—it's a tactical move that builds braver, more accountable, and clearer-communicating employees.

• Presence Over Perfection: Forget the glossy end-of-year speech. Tammy reveals her 90-Second "Real Talk" Framework to affirm your team and future-cast their success in 2026.

Your presence is the gift that multiplies. You don't need all the answers; you just need to be consistent, clear, and caring.

From the Leadership Sandbox family to you, Merry Christmas!

As we round out 2025, leaders are facing a series of "this-or-that" choices: Control vs. Empowerment, Stability vs. Agility, Automation vs. Humanity. Tammy J. Bond argues that the real superpower for 2026 isn't choosing one—it's holding the space for "Both-And." This episode explores why managers are "drowning" in complexity and how the "Yes, And" framework—Tammy's personal philosophy—can transform paralyzing tensions into opportunities for growth. Learn how to stop "reloading the dishwasher" for your team and start building a culture of trusted productivity.

• The Struggle is Real: The Center for Creative Leadership identifies the top tensions as juggling people vs. results and leading change vs. managing complexity.

• The Micromanagement Trap: With managers overseeing nearly 3x as many people as they did a few years ago, the default response to stress is often to "tighten the screws."

• The Cost of Control: Global engagement has slipped to 21%. When you seek more approval and create less autonomy, you create a "why bother?" culture that leads to quiet quitting.

To bridge the gap between control and empowerment, initiate these three dialogues before the new year:

1. The Ownership Ask: "What decisions are you ready to own so I can step out of the way?" (Define the boundaries and metrics together).

2. The Mirror Moment: "Where am I over-controlling you?" Invite honest feedback and define actions to shift that control.

3. The AI Soul Search: "How will we use AI as a 'team member' without losing the soul of our company?" Co-create rules that keep the process human-centric.

Before 2025 ends, identify one thing you currently control that you can release to your team.

If you can't find one thing, ask yourself: Is this about risk, or is it my ego? Identifying your "rate-limiting step" is the first move toward becoming a "Both-And" leader.

Remember, empowerment doesn't need to be chaos. It's freedom inside a clear framework.

December isn't just about holidays; it's the most emotionally loaded month for your team—full of stress, burnout, and falling engagement. Tammy J. Bond challenges leaders who treat this month as a "survive and hope January is better" exercise. That approach already sets up Q1 for failure. This episode reveals the high cost of manager burnout and provides the necessary shift in mindset and three essential conversations leaders must have before December 31st to clear the "Workplace Sandbox" and transition into a high-performance 2026.

• The Engagement Crisis: The global cost of lost productivity is staggering, and manager engagement is falling, directly impacting your team's energy.

• The Burnout Driver: Employees are running on fumes due to unspoken expectations and the endless cycle of urgent, last-minute demands. Leaders who ignore this are setting their teams up for failure and turnover.

• The Core Problem: If you have unspoken expectations in December, you are causing unnecessary fatigue. The thoughtful energy you put into your people now will dictate the success of the new year.

• Deloitte Launches 2024 Global Human Capital Trends Report – Press Release

To use year-end pressure strategically, you must initiate three focused conversations:

1. The Year-End Truth Conversation: Move past the formal review and initiate simple, straight talk about what worked and the resources needed.

2. The Capacity Conversation: Address "Energy Zappers" and decide what you're willing to let go of to protect long-term human performance.

3. The Next Year's Promise Conversation: Clarify Q1 priorities and identify the specific behaviors that will be rewarded, setting a clear tone for the new year.

Leaders, you must be truth tellers. Stop squeezing out one more project and start having the focused conversations that transform your team from running on fumes into a firestorm of Q1 success.

AI is here, but so are human emotions. Tammy J. Bond highlights that implementing AI is not just a technical deployment; it's a massive disruption to your team's identity, sense of security, and self-worth. The core challenge for 2026 is leading the emotional side of automation, as your team is both hopeful and terrified. This episode exposes how leaders are currently dropping the ball with silence and lack of guidance, offering a playbook to intentionally build trust and human sustainability around AI usage.

Leaders are often failing to implement AI well because they ignore its impact on three fundamental human needs:

1. Certainty: Workers fear for their job security (up to 52% are worried about AI's impact).

2. Competency: The automated work challenges their sense of self-worth and ability to perform their role effectively.

3. Control: People feel a loss of autonomy when a new, vaguely understood tool takes over parts of their process.

Ignoring these fears creates camouflaged conflict in the workplace, manifesting as passive resistance, quiet quitting, and overcompensating perfectionism (driven by fear of obsolescence).

The Problem of Silence: With 40% of workplaces lacking AI usage guidelines, employees read a leader's silence as, "My leader doesn't know what they're doing," eroding trust and increasing anxiety.

Your opportunity is to stop letting fear write the rest of your organizational story and actively transform your culture around AI.

1. Name the Change: Clarify what AI is and what it is not here to do, not just for the company, but for each position at the granular level.

2. Clarify Expectations: Define what is acceptable and unacceptable to use AI for. Set clear performance measures and expectations for the outcome if misuse occurs.

3. Invest in Skill Building: Provide training not just on the tool, but on the skill of prompt verification and critical assessment of AI output.

You must articulate to your team: AI is here to augment you, to enhance you, not to erase you. Reinforce the need for human judgment for the final output. The human is still responsible for the answer, even if the tool provided the initial data.

Tammy's challenge is to push pause and get the team involved in co-creating the AI strategy:

• Ask the Fear Question: Sit down with your team and ask: "What about AI really scares you the most right now?"

• Identify 'Dumb Work': Ask: "Where do you see that AI could remove some of the repetitive work we do so that you can do more of what you're brilliant at?"

• Co-Design an Experiment: Pick one process this month and work with your team to co-design a small AI experiment to increase familiarity and comfort.

The Bottom Line: If your people cannot say out loud what they are afraid of, AI will quietly run your culture from the shadows. Lead the human side of automation.

In this quick Thanksgiving episode, Tammy J. Bond challenges the notion that gratitude is just a holiday tradition—it's a leadership strategy. She shares that leaders often get stuck in a "scarcity loop," focusing only on what is not working yet. This episode provides four quick points to help leaders shift their perspective from lack to presence, turning gratitude into a proactive force that expands positive outcomes and boosts team performance.

• The Scarcity Loop: Leaders commonly focus on the "yet's" (what they don't have yet, who's not performing yet), leading to a perception of lack. This scarcity loop expands what you don't want to see.

• Flip Your Focus: Flip the script by focusing on the "yet." Acknowledge the positive basics (e.g., "I'm grateful Frank shows up on time every day") and then shift to what you want next. What you focus on expands.

• Shift from Missing to Present: Do not focus your attention on what's missing. Shift your thinking to what is present and what you do have. This perspective shift attracts more of the positive into your field of vision.

• Gratitude as a Strategy, Not a Tradition: Gratitude should be a constant practice. When you focus on the positive around you, you can even find a "best gift attribute" in an underperformer, simply by shifting your attention from what is frustrating to what is present.

Before the holiday distractions take over, pause for 30 seconds and ask yourself this powerful question:

"What is here that I have been too busy [distracted] to appreciate?"

Take time to breathe in gratitude—not resentment, frustration, or fear. Always remember, leadership isn't something we're born with, it's something that we grow into.

Happy Thanksgiving! Remember that gratitude is a leadership strategy. What are you focusing on today, leader?

Passive aggression is the emotional sabotage dressed as politeness that is silently draining your team's energy and trust. Tammy J. Bond pulls back the curtain on this pervasive workplace toxicity, revealing that leaders who ignore it aren't keeping the peace—they're preserving the problem. With over 50% of employees reporting being targeted by passive aggression, this episode provides direct, no-fluff strategies for leaders and middle managers to confront this "camouflaged conflict" and restore health to their teams.

• The High Cost of Avoidance: Passive aggression is leadership quicksand. Over half your team may be spending mental energy decoding tone and mannerisms instead of focusing on their jobs.

• The Source of Passive Aggression: It's not about conflict; it's about control. Passive aggressive individuals avoid direct confrontation but use sarcasm, silence, or "forgetfulness" to pull strings and be the master puppeteer.

• The Leadership Leak: Passive aggression is cowardly communication in leadership's clothing.Ignoring it rewards avoidance and reinforces the toxic pattern. Leaders must stop rescuing people from discomfort and start coaching them through it.

• Coaching vs. Dictating: Workplace coaching is not the "point, shoot, and tell" style. True coaching is being curious, asking questions, and evoking answers that help people up-level themselves.

• Directness is Respect: If you are serious about creating a sandbox where adults talk to one another, you must teach the team that healthy directness is respect, not rudeness.

You don't tiptoe through the tulips; you call the behavior what it is.

1. Name It and Claim It: Do not over-explain or accuse. Simply name the specific behavior you observe and tie it back to a core value. Example: "I'm noticing sarcasm when we talk about deadlines. Help me understand what's really going on, because sarcasm is not one of our espoused values."

2. Model Clarity and Accountability: Use the clear, simple framework of the SBI+E Model (Situation, Behavior, Impact, and Expectation) for a straightforward, behavioral conversation.

3. Set the Boundary and Hold It: The only way to stop the "leak" is to confront it. Document it, discuss it, and model how to clean up the conflict.

If your leader is the passive-aggressive player, don't accuse them directly. Bring the clarity back to them:

1. Expose the Behavior, Not the Person: Present the situation and the unaligned behavior you've noticed on the team.

2. Ask for Their Strategy: Ask the leader, "How would you go about approaching these behaviors when they have the impact that's causing others to shut down?"

3. Gain the Framework: Let the passive-aggressive leader give you the expectation and solution, then use that framework to present the required behavioral changes.

The next time a coworker drops an "I'm just kidding" that lands like a knife, don't laugh it off. Push pause, take a breath, and ask your next best question. Leadership is about keeping everyone accountable.

Tammy J. Bond fires up the microphone for women leaders, challenging the pervasive habit of over-apologizing in professional settings. She argues that frequently defaulting to phrases like "I'm sorry, but..." or "This might not be the right time, but..." causes your apologies to show up louder than your actual leadership, draining your credibility and inviting doubt. This episode confronts the conditioning that leads women to wait to be invited instead of owning the room and provides a power move to replace apologies with confident, conscious confrontation.

• The Apology Drain: Unnecessary apologies soften your voice and teach the room to doubt you, reducing your credibility right before your "mic drop moment."

• The Real Reason Women Apologize More: Studies show both men and women apologize about 81% of the time when they agree something is an offense. However, women judge more situations as apology-worthy because of their heightened emotional awareness and ability to read the room. Apologizing is a sign of noticing, not a sign of weakness.

• The Cost of Over-Apologizing: You are donating your credibility and putting doubt in place of confidence with your team.

• The Power Move: Leadership presence means stepping in, being willing to confront—consciously, contagiously, and confidently—without apology.

• Owning the Room: Men walk in and own the room; women often sit back and wait to be invited. It's time to own your voice and your space.

Stop apologizing for being direct, confident, bold, or clear. Save your "sorry's" for real harm you've caused.

1. Replace the Apology: Instead of starting with "I'm sorry, but..." or "I know we're almost out of time, but...," reframe your statement to be clear and convicted.

   • Old: "I'm sorry to interrupt, but I have a question about the budget."

   • New: "Hold a minute. I want to bring up something about the budget before we run out of time."

2. Acknowledge, Don't Apologize (for stepping on toes): If you suspect you were overly direct, acknowledge the potential impact, but do not apologize for your assertiveness.

   • Statement: "I acknowledge that was very bold. Let's talk about how you feel about that."

   • Goal: You thank them for bringing it to your attention and ask how to make it different next time, ensuring you are not apologizing for being bold.

Ladies, stop apologizing. Start leading with conviction, confidence, clarity, and connection to the purpose of your conversation. Who are you not to?

In this quick, yet critical episode, Tammy J. Bond tackles a fundamental leadership challenge: ensuring you have the right people in the right seats on your organizational "bus". Prompted by a leader struggling with under-delivery (not under-performance), Tammy challenges the common impulse to start with people. Instead, she provides a strategic framework to audit your organization, starting with the needs of the business before assessing the talent you have. This episode is imperative for leaders planning their success for the upcoming year and looking to replace disfunction with intentional structure.

• The Performance Gap: If team members are doing "solid work" but lacking creativity or "anything extra," the problem likely isn't the person's effort—it's the position's fit or a lack of clarity from the leader.

• The Strategic Bus Audit: Don't start with the Who (people). Start with the What (the seats/positions needed) to achieve your goals.

• What: Define the positions, expectations, and goals required for the next level of growth.

• How: Determine the model or required competencies for success in those seats.

• Who: Then look at your team members to see who possesses the qualities and qualifications to fill the defined seats.

• Hope is Not a Strategy: Relying on the hope that someone will "figure it out" or move on is like "throwing a dart blindfolded." Action is required to align people with position expectations.

• Beyond the Resume: Many leaders hire based on the resume, not the heart or true organizational need. Hiring for impressive qualifications without clearly defining the position leads to mismatched talent.

• Audit Your Team's Energy: Use the Working Genius Model (by Patrick Lencioni), or similar tools, to discover what parts of the job give your team members energy versus what leaves them feeling frustrated. Align their roles to maximize energy and momentum.

• Know Their Place on the Bus: Ask your team members what they want more of, what they want less of, and what truly lights them up about their job.

• The Avoidance Trap: If you're avoiding the conversation, you're wearing the avoidant behavior hat. You must have the conversation to clarify how the individual can win at their current position.

Leader, lead yourself well first. Get your expectations clear. Be intentional about taking your organizational "bus" apart and putting it back together based on the needs of the growth model, not the people you currently have. You might discover your bus should become a spaceship! (Discover Derek Gorse's artwork - spaceman art reference from episode)

What other bold conversations would you like to know how to navigate? DM Tammy on LinkedIn, Instagram, or share in the comments if you're watching on YouTube!

Chapters00:00 Assessing Team Dynamics and Leadership Roles 08:19 Identifying the Right Seats on the Bus 09:34 The Importance of Intentional Leadership Conversations

Leaders, you might call it flexibility, but your team calls it chaos. Tammy J. Bond cuts through the "hybrid fantasy" that believes simple Slack chats can replace connection, clarity, and collaboration. She exposes the silent culture split created by hybrid models, arguing that failure is rooted not in location, but in disconnection and unstable leadership. This episode provides the strategic framework for leaders to start intentionally engineering trust to make hybrid work successful.

• The Hybrid Fantasy: The belief that a few Zoom calls and Slack channels can organically thread connection and clarity is false. Studies show this level of casual connection does not suffice.

• The Culture Split: Hybrid work creates division. Office workers resent remote workers (assuming they work less), and remote workers feel invisible and disconnected from impromptu "hallway decisions."

• The Core Problem: Hybrid teams fail because of disconnection, not location. Leaders often confuse visibility (screen time) with actual productivity and meaningful engagement.

• The Unstable Wi-Fi is You: "It's not the Wi-Fi that's unstable in their work environment, it's your leadership connection to them."

• The Danger of Over-Accommodation: Leaders often say yes to every schedule to "keep the peace," under-communicate, and mismanage accountability, leading to performance issues and the language of assumption ("I thought you meant," "I assumed").

• Friendship is Not a Strategy: Leader, you haven't changed you yet. Simply offering a hybrid model won't work if you haven't sharpened your own leadership skills in setting clear expectations.

1. Re-establish Shared Rhythm (Not Just Scheduling): Replace random meetings with rituals (e.g., Monday Momentum check-ins, Friday Feedback sessions, a 30-second Praise Celebration). Use communication tools for quick, bottom-line check-ins, not endless dialogues.

2. Define Outcomes, Not Hours: If you are measuring success by online status or screen time, "you're running a daycare, not a business." Clarify what "done well" and "complete" looks like, using the simple SBI+E Model (Situation, Behavior, Impact, Expectation) for performance feedback.

3. Rebuild Connection Intentionally: Hybrid trust must be engineered on purpose. This involves celebrating small wins out loud, pairing up office/remote partners, and creating non-meeting connection moments (like a remote "Drink and Think").

4. Stop Letting Convenience Replace Courage: You must have the bold conversations. Ask what's working/not working, and if a hybrid worker claims higher productivity, tie it to an objective desk audit of project updates, timelines, and KPIs. Shut up and listen, then ask the next best follow-up question.

Your job this week is to define the rules of your Hybrid Sandbox before chaos defines them for you:

1. Audit your team's rhythms.

2. Clarify expectations in one single conversation. Have your team email you back what they heard you say and what you can count on them for.

3. Create one connection moment that does not involve another meeting (e.g., a team "drink (coffee/tea) & think" session).