When "Good Enough" Becomes "Never Enough" Back in college, I took an FPGA Design course that assigned brutal weekly homework. Pages of digital logic problems, code to write, waveforms to document, test cases to verify. I was terrible at time management and procrastinated constantly. One week, desperate and out of time, I asked my professor a simple question: "What do you actually need to see to know I understand this material?" His answer surprised me. Usually, he just wanted to see a waveform showing the input and output with a brief explanation of why it was correct. Not the full problem set. Not all the documentation. Just proof I understood the concept. I started doing half the assigned work and getting the same grades as students who completed everything. They were furious with me. But here's what stuck with me: the written assignment and the actual requirement were two completely different things. Most students assumed they needed to do...

  The promotion conversation I wasn't expecting I thought the one-on-one was routine. My team was performing well. Projects were shipping. People were growing in their roles. I'd been working toward the Sr. Manager promotion for months. Then my boss said it. "You can't be promoted to Sr. Manager because you've never fired anyone." The words hung in the air between us. I don't remember my exact response, but it was something like "So I won't be promoted because I'm good at leading my team?" What I wanted to say was much sharper. What I thought later, driving home, was even worse. I walked out feeling like I'd discovered an artificial ceiling. Like the rules of advancement had suddenly changed. My team's results didn't matter. The projects we shipped didn't matter. The people I'd developed didn't matter. Apparently, what mattered was checking a box on some invisible management scorecard: "Has terminated an ...

They quit the day we handed them the performance improvement plan. Not after a few weeks of trying. Not after we'd worked through the documented concerns. The same day. They walked out of that meeting, resigned, and I never saw them again. I drove a good person out of the company. Not because they couldn't do the work. Because I overwhelmed them with so much feedback that improvement became impossible. Let me show you two versions of this story. What actually happened, and what I should have done instead. Timeline 1: What Actually Happened We promoted one of our junior managers to senior manager when the original leader retired. They were great at execution. A solid doer. They knew the work inside and out. On paper, it made sense. But a senior manager role isn't about doing the work anymore. It's about leading through others, setting direction, measuring success across the whole team. They'd never built those skills. The problem showed up immediately. We'd...