LinkedIn Post Example: Hard Leadership Decision

After 15 years in leadership, here's what I've learned: • People don't leave companies, they leave managers • Culture eats strategy for breakfast • The best leaders are the best listeners • Vulnerability is a superpower Leadership isn't about being in charge. It's about taking care of the people in your charge. Agree? 👇 #leadership #management #culture

I fired my best engineer last year. She was brilliant. Shipped faster than anyone on the team, caught bugs nobody else saw, and genuinely cared about code quality. But she refused to document anything. New engineers would ask her questions and she'd say "just read the code." After two junior devs quit within four months, both citing the same thing in their exit interviews, I had to make a call. I gave her a 60-day plan. She met every technical goal and ignored every collaboration goal. So I let her go. Our velocity dropped 30% for two months. Then something happened: the rest of the team started shipping features that they'd been afraid to touch before. Ownership spread. Documentation improved. By month four we were faster than before. The hardest leadership decisions aren't about underperformers. They're about high performers who make everyone else worse.