Some years ago, Kerry Siggins was sitting in her office when her COO said something that stopped her completely. He told her she was erratic. That she was the problem. That she was hard to work for. She did not argue. She thanked him, asked for time, and then got to her car as fast as she could. What followed was not a leadership lesson. It was a breakdown, and then, slowly, a reckoning. This episode stays inside that experience. The moment the feedback landed. The identity threat underneath it. The tension between arming up and spiraling. And the question her husband asked that cut through all of it: take what's true and let the rest go. Kerry walks through how she chose to examine the word erratic. Not because it felt fair, not because the feedback was delivered well, but because it was specific enough to act on and honest enough to matter. From there she describes what it actually looked like to change: three deep breaths before every meeting, giving her team explicit permission to call her out, building external accountability around a behavior she had been rewarded for her whole career. The conversation underneath this episode is one Kerry has been having for years, about the gap between how leaders see themselves and how their teams experience them, and what it costs when that gap is never closed. Her new book, Talk With Trust, opens with this story. It goes further into the conversations that leaders are avoiding and the trust that gets built when they stop. To learn more, visit http://kerrysiggins.com Both of Kerryโs books, The Ownership Mindset and Talk With Trust, are available on her website.
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