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The Leader Who Endures Everything Is Teaching Their Team to Do the Same. | FREE
Wednesday, April 29, 2026 11am - 12pm
The behavior in your team that frustrates you most — where did they learn it?

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"Unlearning Doubt ... asks you to look clearly at things that are easier to explain away. The pattern you’ve been calling a misunderstanding, the silence you’ve been calling professionalism, the self-doubt you’ve been calling humility."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"Life is hard. Work is hard. And I believe the most reliable person in your corner is you. So protect that. Fight the mental battles worth fighting. Keep a moat around your identity. Nothing can breach it unless you lower the drawbridge yourself."

Read and watch: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"Notice where silence has taken hold — in yourself and in the people around you. Notice where questions have stopped being asked.

That’s not a team that’s running smoothly. That’s a team that’s learned to be careful."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"In the process of unlearning doubt, self-protection is not a retreat. It’s a strategy. Stop spending energy on people and systems that aren’t going to move. Save it for yourself — for... the life that exists outside of this workplace."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"Psychological safety... means responding to your own mistakes, gaps, and feedback the way a fair, clear-headed person would — with curiosity and data, not judgment and assumption."

Read more and watch the video: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"When you notice someone going quiet who used to engage, that’s a signal. It may mean something they tried to contribute didn’t land the way they hoped. It may mean a response...taught them that speaking up wasn’t worth the cost."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"And despite what’s often implied, toxicity is rarely about one or two difficult people. It’s systemic."

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"...human behavior is shaped by immense complexity. Each person arrives at work carrying a lifetime of experiences, and when we truly consider how unique those experiences are, it becomes easier to understand why we don’t always mesh in the workplace.."

open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"This is one of the most disorienting uses of power at work — and as a manager, it’s worth understanding from both directions. It may be happening to you. And it may, without deliberate attention, be something you’re doing to your team."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"When clarity lives upstream and stops there, the people downstream are left filling in the gaps on their own."

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"... the gap usually isn’t about you. It isn’t about something you did or didn’t do. It’s a structural problem — and structural problems require structural solutions, not personal ones."

Read more and watch the video: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"The middle manager position can feel like being caught in a vice — pressure from the executive team above, pressure from employees below, and not enough information or support from either direction to do the job the way you want to do it."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

The Gap Gets Filled With Self-Doubt This week: Unlearning Doubt.

"Sometimes it’s more subtle than that — a slow, quiet exclusion that’s hard to name and harder to prove. Either way you’re left working with less than you need, & the gap gets filled with self-doubt."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"Learning to separate your own experience and your own identity from the environment around you is a skill. It’s one of the things we’re working on this week as part of Unlearning Doubt."

Read more and watch the video: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Series Introduction: This Is What Doubt Looks Like When It's Been Installed This week, we’re continuing the work of Unlearning Doubt.

"We’ll look at confusion and narrative control: how the story shifts, who benefits from the revision, and how to stay anchored in your own experience when the version being repeated no longer matches what you lived."

Read more: elizabetharnott1.substack.com/p/series-int...

Power Doesn't Care About Your Intentions This week we’re continuing Unlearning Doubt.

"I didn’t know why he behaved that way — and I didn’t need to. What mattered was whether there was anything valid in what he said. Anything that actually warranted self-doubt. There wasn’t."

Read more about how Power Doesn't Care About Your Intentions.

open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Your Doubt May Not Be About You This week we are continuing the journey of Unlearning Doubt.

"In workplaces, we often find ourselves...assigned to a department where a supervisor, manager, or colleague is a prolific critic of what we do, how we do it, and how it turns out. Little by little, we start believing their mistrust in us."

Read more: elizabetharnott1.substack.com/p/your-doubt...

When the Whole Team Is Struggling, Everyone Pays — and Everyone Can Help We started this week with a simple question: what happens when it’s not just you?

"Difficult work environments are not rare. They are not the exception. And the harm they cause is real — physically, psychologically, professionally. That harm doesn’t stay with one person. It multiplies...But so does the opposite."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"Whether you’re a manager or an individual contributor, you have more influence over your environment than it sometimes feels like you do. Kindness — to yourself and to the people around you — is one of the most accessible tools you have."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Put Your Mask On First: Self-Care for Managers in Hard Environments You’ve heard the airplane instruction: put your own mask on before helping anyone else.

When a manager neglects their own wellbeing, it shows up... in communication that’s reactive instead of clear, in a team that’s afraid to report problems because the manager is already visibly overwhelmed, in progress that stalls..."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Being Real is a Skill. Here's How to Use it. As we’ve spent this week talking about teams, one theme kept surfacing for me: the value of being real.

"I’ve known people throughout my career who greet everyone the same way, every single day. Always outstanding. Always loving life...No one feels outstanding every day, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help you, and it doesn’t help the people around you."

open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"Preparation is how you become fluent in your own workplace. It doesn’t eliminate the hard moments. It just means you’re ready when they arrive."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

When Your Staff Is Afraid of You and You Don't Know Why “I want her out of my department.”

"When you are a manager, people talk about you... That’s not a betrayal. It’s a natural consequence of having authority over people’s livelihoods."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

When Shared Misery Becomes Its Own Trap When people go through intense stress together — shared pressure, difficult dynamics, the kind of workplace experience that grinds you down over time — they often bond over it.

When the difficult experience is prolonged, the bond itself can become part of what keeps you stuck... Leaving starts to feel like abandonment. The venting, the solidarity, the constant processing — it becomes its own kind of pull.

open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"Every day at work may be hard right now. But the job is not the whole picture, even when it feels that way. Widening the lens, even briefly, even imperfectly, is a way of reminding yourself that you are larger than the environment you’re currently in."
Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Managing a Struggling Team When the Conditions Are Already Against You This one is personal.

"Before anything else, I want to name something directly: you cannot build a high-performing, consistently competent team without adequate training, support, and time for people to develop."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

Surviving a Toxic Team Without Becoming Part of the Problem There’s a particular kind of pressure that doesn’t get talked about enough: the pressure to participate when your own team starts turning on itself.

"I hadn’t yet learned some things that took me years to understand. That not everything needs to be exposed...That personal circumstances shape what people are capable of at any given time...and how someone else was doing their job was not my business."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

"Whether you lead a team or contribute to one, the capacity for compassion, empathy, and self-understanding lives in you. When you strengthen that from the inside, something shifts — not just for you, but for the people around you."

Read more: open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...

When Your Team Agrees With Everything, Something is Wrong. There are leaders who are well-intentioned, doing their best to show up for their teams and coming up short in ways they can’t quite identify.

"...the experience of being a leader who genuinely wants to hear from their team & can’t seem to get anyone to open up. It’s more common than you might think. It’s worth sitting with, because the discomfort of not knowing is actually useful info."

Read more:

open.substack.com/pub/elizabet...