Hey, it's Laura and Jason.
Welcome to Issue #10 of The Weekly UNLOK, where human potential meets organizational performance.
ON PEOPLE: LAURA
My son Miles was up to bat in the final inning this past weekend, and his team was behind.
And I was on the edge of my seat....in that nervous/anxious type of way.
I’ve watched Miles play baseball for many years now. I know his stance. I know his body language.
And right there, in that moment, I could see the weight of the whole tournament sitting on him.
In the end, they didn’t win. They took fifth place after five days in Chicago.
After we got in the car, I watched Miles get emotional. He was disappointed, sad, all the things. He was holding back tears.
30 minutes later, I watched him slam two hamburgers at the team dinner, laugh with his friends, and just be a kid.
And I thought: THIS. This is the thing I try to describe to leaders every single week. This right here. The bounce back.
Because Miles didn’t lose his belief in himself on that field. He lost a game.
Those are not the same thing. And somewhere between the tears and the team dinner, he figured that out on his own. At 14 years old.
I’ve spent 20 years sitting across from executives who struggle with that same distinction.
People who are smart and talented… who collapse a little every time a client says no, a quarter comes in soft, or a presentation lands flat.
If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking “I should have known better” after a setback, you know exactly the feeling I’m describing.
The loss seems like evidence. A loss that proves you’re not good enough, that you don’t belong, you're not quite cut out for this...
The problem is that it sounds completely rational, and that’s what makes it dangerous.
The game here isn’t about pretending the loss doesn’t hurt… it’s about knowing the loss is not the verdict.
I watched a thirteen-year-old figure that out in real time, and to me, that mattered more than winning the dang tournament.
ON PROCESS: JASON
As a leader, I’ve spent my entire career modeling the type of environment I get to belong to.
I was given real projects, real ownership, and real authority to act. So I passed that along, almost without realizing it. It’s just how we did things.
But things go wrong, they always do.
Whether it’s with business teams or baseball teams, the game is the same.
Giving people authority without building the conditions to catch them when they use it is just a setup.
You’ve handed them the wheel and removed the guardrails.
When the car goes off the road, do they learn to drive better, or do they learn that the road isn’t safe?
Sometimes we get half of this right. We’re good at clarity, clear expectations, defined roles, and genuine ownership.
The other half is the part we sometimes forget when the ‘$h#t hits the fan’.
What do you do when someone takes that ownership and makes a call you wouldn’t have made? Especially when it costs you something meaningful.
When things go sideways, what does the response look like? Does it become learning, or a verdict?
If you haven’t built and planned for that part before something goes wrong, you don’t have it when you need it.
The next time we want them to take ownership, they’ll be running a calculation…. “If I take a swing here and miss, what happens to me?”
If the answer they land on is uncertainty, they’ll stop swinging, and the organization loses out on their talent.
And the part that Laura described in her section… when a person doesn’t feel supported when they miss, that miss can become damaging personal evidence.
Evidence that they’re not as good as they thought. That they don’t belong in the room. That they should have known better.
So what does it look like to build for when things go sideways?
Three areas worth examining in your own organization.
- First, do people know what they truly own before something goes wrong? If the boundaries of their authority are unclear going in, a bad result doesn’t just sting, it creates doubt about whether they were ever supposed to make that call at all. Clear is kind.
- Second, how mistakes get processed. Is there a consistent practice for separating what happened from what it means about the person? A direct conversation has two jobs: what do we understand now that we didn’t before, and what does that change going forward? Without both, you get either a debrief that goes nowhere or a correction that lands as criticism.
- Third, whether your response to failure is visible to the whole team, not just the person who made the call. People are watching how you handle mistakes long before they make one themselves. The conditions you build aren’t just felt by the person in the hot seat. They’re felt by everyone around them.
The environment you create either holds people when they miss, or it doesn’t. That’s the game.
YOUR TURN
From Laura: Think about the last time a setback made you question whether you belonged in the room. Was that the loss talking, or was it the verdict you handed yourself? Those aren't the same thing. And one of them isn't true.
From Jason: Think about the last time something went sideways on your team. Was your response to that moment building the environment, or gently dismantling it? (Most leaders don't know the answer until they ask the people on their team.)
We’re here for the ripple effect ✨,
Laura & Jason
P.S. - Have a story to tell? Reply back and let us know. We're collecting more evidence from those who have lived it.
BEFORE YOU GO: HOW WE CAN HELP
FOR COMPANIES: Most organizations treat setbacks as people problems. They're performance design problems first. UNLOK helps leadership teams build the conditions to learn from loss and convert it into forward motion. Book a strategy call.
OR... [Take the free self-assessment →]
FOR INDIVIDUALS: Laura works with a small number of leaders personally on exactly the inner game work described above. Book an activation session and let’s get into it.