The People Side Is Where Execution Usually Breaks
Summer officially kicked off in our house, which means Betty started two weeks of tennis camp with her cousins, I got back to three workouts this week, and we spent Friday and Saturday at the Barn, where Betty helped give a bath to the mini horse with the other young riders. Very casual. Very adorable. Very much the kind of experience that makes a parent start calculating the long-term implications of a child falling in love with horses.
I also had my first executive coaching call with my Chief coach, Callan Blount Fleming, (who is a BADASS) and my monthly The Children’s Movement Fresno (TCM) board meeting. That is where this week’s leadership idea really showed up.
TCM is in a transition season: very few staff, a new board, and an excellent interim contractor carrying a lot. I have been pushing our board to slow down and make a real plan based on clear goals for sustainable staffing, funding, and programming, because the people side is not separate from the work. It is where the work either becomes possible or fails before it ever gets a chance.
A staffing plan is not just an org chart. A funding plan is not just a spreadsheet. A programming plan is not just a calendar. All of it depends on real humans having the clarity, support, trust, authority, and capacity to carry the work forward.
So let’s start there.
TL;DR Leadership
This week’s idea comes from the Harvard Business Review article, “Are You Meeting the Needs of the People You Lead?” by Mark van Vugt, Xiaotian Sheng, and Wendy Andrews. The useful part is this: leadership does not usually fail because leaders forgot to care, communicate, or try hard enough. It often fails because leaders misread what their people actually need from them in the moment.
That is a very different diagnosis, and honestly, a more useful one.
Most leaders I know are not sitting around thinking, “How can I make this harder for everyone today?” They care. They are trying. They want the work to move. They want their people to do well. They want the organization to be healthier, clearer, and more effective. But good intentions do not automatically create good leadership.
Sometimes a leader offers encouragement when the team actually needs clarity. Sometimes they offer autonomy when the team needs direction. Sometimes they offer a bold vision when people need fairness. Sometimes they offer empathy when what people really need is a decision. Sometimes they offer another meeting when everyone needs someone to name the real issue out loud.
This is where the people side gets mislabeled as soft. It is not soft. It is structural.
The HBR article argues that people evaluate leaders based on whether those leaders are meeting specific needs. The researchers name six: protection, fairness, vision, expertise, affiliation, and status. In plain English: Do you help people feel safe enough to do the work? Do your decisions feel fair? Do people know where we are going? Can they trust your judgment? Do they feel like they belong here? Do they feel seen, valued, and able to grow?
That is not a personality test. That is execution infrastructure.
When those needs are not met, the work does not just feel worse. It moves worse. People hesitate. They guard information. They wait for direction that never comes. They question decisions. They stop bringing ideas forward. They work around each other instead of with each other. They nod in meetings and then slow-walk the work later because something underneath the conversation still does not feel clear, fair, safe, or worth trusting.
Then leaders look around and call it a follow-through problem. Sometimes it is. But often, follow-through is where the people-side breakdown finally becomes visible.
That is why this matters so much in seasons of transition. When an organization is growing, shrinking, rebuilding, merging, hiring, losing staff, changing direction, or trying to stabilize after chaos, people are not just asking, “What is the plan?” They are asking, “Are we okay? Do we know what matters? Who is actually holding this? Will decisions be fair? Can I say the hard thing here? Is this leader paying attention to what this will actually require from us?”
And if leaders answer those questions poorly, or never realize people are asking them, even a technically solid plan can stall.
This is the part I kept thinking about after the TCM board meeting. It would be easy to rush straight into the visible work: staffing structures, fundraising strategy, programming decisions, board development, timelines, and deliverables. All of that matters. A lot. But if we skip the people side, we will build a plan on top of exhaustion, ambiguity, and hope. And hope is lovely. Big fan. But hope is not a staffing model.
A sustainable plan has to account for the humans carrying it. Who has capacity? Who has context? Who needs protection from overload? Who needs clearer authority? Who needs to be brought into the conversation earlier? Where are expectations implied instead of named? Where are people doing heroic work because the structure has not caught up yet?
Those questions may sound less urgent than “What are we doing next?” They are not. They are often the questions that determine whether “what we are doing next” actually works.
This is true inside teams too. A leader may think the team needs inspiration, but the team may need fairness. A leader may think the team needs trust, but the team may need expertise. A leader may think the team needs warmth, but the team may need clearer expectations. A leader may think the team needs accountability, but the team may need protection from too many competing demands.
This is where leadership gets humbling, because the thing you are best at offering may not be the thing your people most need right now. That is annoying. Deeply. Especially for leaders who have a strong default style. The visionary leader keeps offering vision. The relational leader keeps offering support. The decisive leader keeps offering speed. The empowering leader keeps offering autonomy.
None of those are bad. They are just not always the medicine.
A good leader does not only ask, “What kind of leader am I?” A better question is, “What do my people need from me right now so the work can actually move?”
That question changes the conversation. It moves leadership from performance to diagnosis. It moves culture from vibes to conditions. It moves execution from “Why won’t people follow through?” to “What are we asking people to carry, and have we created the clarity, trust, authority, and support to make that possible?”
That is where meaningful work gets unstuck. Not because leaders become perfect. No one has time for that, and also no. But because leaders get more honest about what the work is actually asking of people.
If your team is stuck, do not only look at the plan. Look underneath the plan. Where do people need protection? Where do they need fairness? Where do they need vision? Where do they need expertise? Where do they need belonging? Where do they need recognition or room to grow?
The people side is not a distraction from execution. It is where execution either breaks down or becomes possible.
One move to try this week
Before your next leadership meeting ends, ask this: What do our people most need from us right now for this work to move well?
Not what do we wish they needed. Not what is easiest for us to offer. Not what sounds best in a leadership book. What do they actually need right now?
Then pick one place to respond more clearly. Maybe people need a decision that has been floating too long. Maybe they need a fairer process. Maybe they need clearer authority. Maybe they need protection from another good idea becoming one more unpaid debt on their capacity. Maybe they need you to stop softening feedback until it becomes fog. Maybe they need to hear where the organization is going and why it matters.
The answer does not have to be dramatic. It does have to be honest. Because the people side is not separate from the work. It is where the work becomes real.
Still Good in the World
This week’s good thing comes from Good Morning America, and it is about Rose Diggs, a mother in Georgia who has opened her home to more than 300 foster children.
More than 300. I had to sit with that for a second.
Her children nominated her for the surprise, and one of the young women she fostered described her as “granny” and called her a beautiful sunflower. That is the kind of detail that gets me because it says so much more than a number ever could.
This is not just a story about one woman doing a very big, very generous thing. It is a story about what it means to make people feel held again and again and again.
A child comes into your home needing safety, belonging, consistency, food, clean sheets, a ride, a boundary, a laugh, someone who knows their name, someone who remembers what they like, someone who does not treat their need as an inconvenience. And Rose Diggs kept opening the door.
That is the kind of good I want to keep noticing. Not because the world is simple. It is not. But because there are still people who decide that love can be practical. That care can have a front door. That belonging can be built one child, one meal, one bed, one ordinary act at a time.
That feels worth carrying into the week.
Fuel for the Week
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou
Leadership is human and humans feel. Let’s keep that top of mind.
Until next week, go move the good work,
Nikki
Sources
Good Morning America: Rose Diggs story about opening her home to more than 300 foster children.
