The Cost of And

I am sitting on a plane at the moment with Susana and Delilah flying to Northern California. We are going with friends to the Delta to ride on their boat for a day then heading to Napa to spend time with our clients and friends for the Bottlerock festival that takes over the valley during Labor Day.

Now I am not a super nosy person, but the people in front of me have been talking most of the flight about their jobs. One works for a healthcare company and the other used to do events in the Tony Robbins organization but has switched to planning events for an executive networking group. Eventually the events person began talking about making the difficult choice at the prompting from her husband to slow down and focus on having a more balanced life. She stopped drinking, changed jobs, lost weight and was mid 7 minute monologue when she started saying things about boundaries, choosing her family, and how that became more important to her than the huge cost she had been paying to be successful. It was on that statement I stopped playing my matching game on my phone and opened the notes app to start writing this.

I fundamentally at my very core believe in the word "and." I love that word. It is so much more inclusive than the word "or." I don't believe in success OR balance. I don't believe in health OR career. I guess I just really don't believe in limits being self imposed on oneself. I prefer success and balance, health and career, humans and AI.

I took a philosophy class in college 800 years ago and I think what I did above is called a slippery slope argument. Going from A - B then B - C then skipping from C - Z. My good friend Nate Julson who took the class with me would probably be laughing reading this.

Why did I jump to career to humans to AI? Well, I remember writing playbooks for my company Trace3 probably 15 years ago now and one of the sections in the book was called Leverage and Let go. At this point in history smartphones were just coming out, Apple naming a product iPad was being laughed at, and mp3s still mattered. Because of that, Leverage and let go wasn't about technology. It was about the common mistake both leaders and employees make when they try to do more but feel it starts to destroy their work life balance. I don't remember my exact words but they must have been something like this: becoming more valuable to your company is very often not about doing more, it is about creating more opportunity.

I remember giving a promotion to a very important person in one of my orgs and instead of being excited, she looked seriously concerned. I asked why and she said that if she took the newly created position and the people that worked for her did her current work, she worried she would no longer be as valuable. She said if she made this move and the company didn't grow, her job wouldn't be secure and she wouldn't be the one getting called out as a badass on our weekly calls anymore. In other words she was fighting the promotion.

So I told her I understood and let her know I would promote one of the all stars on her team over her and give that person the opportunity to focus on creating more growth as her new boss. She bristled and said that would of course be unacceptable because she was the best person for the new role. I sat back and smiled at her.

I told her my job and asked her if she wanted to join me in pursuing it. My job was to create more opportunities for the team to grow. I wanted the team growing to align with the company growing. But I wanted it to be clear how the two growth paths paralleled each other. I admitted that there is definitely danger if either group stopped growing. In fact, with both people and companies, a lack of growth is normally at the core of all the real problems. As a CEO that had lost a company during a macro economic shift I explained how I understood the worry more than most could even comprehend. To combat this, I explained that I needed my best to have their head above the trees thinking strategically about how to navigate macro and industry trends/tremors so we could find opportunity in crisis and accelerate during good times.

She had been with me long enough to watch our growth and believe if it continued and she didn't challenge herself to grow, she could end up feeling left behind. She knew how pelotons and breakaways worked. How a small group breaking away from the pack to lead would cause the peloton to notice and try to chase. It is the job of the breakaway to show the team what is possible. As scary and risky as that feels when you are in a job you are crushing, it is what leaders must do.

She asked how would it affect her work life balance. But before it even left her lips she smiled. She knew that I only worked 4-5 hours a day and the company was growing at almost 100% year over year for the past 4 years. She repeated to me something I constantly talked about - the stress might be a little higher cause the stakes at each level are higher, but how many hours you work is a direct reflection of how strong your team is combined with your ability to leverage and let go. And in that simple moment she understood how important it was to ME that she be elevated to rise.

I was leveraging and letting go as well. I was modeling it with her.

By the way. Her name is Genevieve and she is a badass. She applied this model with Lauren, and Amber, and Scott, and Jess, and everyone else on her teams.

She has stress as all good leaders that care about their companies and teams do. But the cost of her success is a direct reflection of her ability to hire well, explain the why of what we do effectively, and let her badass team figure out the how.

She goes to the gym everyday. She picks up her daughter from school most days. Our companies continue to grow each and every year even in tough markets. The focus isn't on the leaders squeezing every dollar possible from the business. That would be an "or" decision versus an "and." We define success as something that creates more opportunity for our business and teams running them.

We hire not to delegate duties but instead to elevate our current team members.

There are times there is a cost to our success, little bottlenecks that are hard. But usually those are brief moments in time.

So now we jump forward to 2026 and leverage and let go means something I couldn't have imagined. It isn't a tool for our teams. It is a chance to connect and leverage one of the most competent partners each person on our team can use to create more opportunity, work more efficiently and effectively, and have even greater balance in their lives. I will argue it can even bring greater peace AND enjoyment due to its ability to enable your work to be so much deeper and comprehensive.

In the same way getting promoted felt threatening and like venturing into the unknown unprepared, AI can feel scary. It can feel like it is going to take you job or leapfrog you. And it can. In the same way Genevieve had a choice to stay in her current role or breakaway to lead and create more opportunity or sit and get passed over, AI is there waiting to see what you will do with it. It enables, accelerates, and if connected with correctly can create so much hope for the future. Get to know it, leverage its value, realizing it is an amazing opportunity for you to promote yourself. You don't need to wait for a company or boss to promote you. Leverage it and give yourself permission to breakaway from the pack. It is the first time in history you have that choice. It isn't about someone else passing you over anymore. That may be the scariest thing. It isn't you OR AI in the workplace OR at home. It is AND. and it is up to you how to measure the cost of how you choose to move forward.