John Engels

If you cannot disappoint people, you cannot lead them with clarity and honesty. It's not that you go around trying to disappoint people. It's that doing what makes sense, having the important conversation, and making the hard decision, will inevitably disappoint your boss, direct reports, adult children, parents, and spouse. Most of us know this in principle. In practice, three forces make it remarkably hard to do. 1. Delusion: What people ask for is not always what serves them A physician...

Infants enter the world wrapped tightly in their mother's arms, nurse and bottle-feed their way into chubbiness, and spend their first years under vigilant eyes, protected from real and imagined dangers. An intense desire to protect and defend the helpless child does not end with infancy. It can get out of hand. For many, the tendency to over-care has become an unthinking habit. Parents suffocate their children through worry, unsolicited reminders, unreasonable expectations, unwanted...

Here is a tension that most leaders never face: How is it possible to care too much and not enough, at the same time? It sounds contradictory. But it's one of the most common failure patterns in leadership, coaching, and parenting. Understanding it might be the most important thing a helper of any kind can do. When Caring Becomes a Problem A popular presentation we've given over the years explores what we call unexamined helpfulness: the kind of caring that unintentionally undermines the...