How Your Stress Is Leaking Onto Your Team
- Jul 7
- 3 min read
Over a year ago, our dishwasher started leaking. Not every time, but maybe once in ten runs. Sometimes it led to a big puddle on our hard wood floors and sometimes it was a smaller drip. It was annoying, but it wasn't a crisis. I hoped it would just go away, and my husband I think was in the same mindset, and so we let it ride.
But of course it didn't go away. One day our neighbors knocked on our door because they had a waterfall coming through their ceiling. We looked at the dishwasher mid-cycle and saw a small leak, and it hit me that it had never once occurred to me this might be a problem for someone else (and not just us).
That's exactly what happens in leadership. We leak our stress, our fear, the pressure we're carrying, and we tell ourselves that how we’re acting was warranted. “The situation was urgent”, “I had to be direct”. “It's fine, they can take it, that’s what they get paid for”, are just some examples of how you might blow off your own behavior.
Except every time you operate from a place that comes from some kind of irritant and don’t go back to address your behavior, you're not just having a bad moment, you’re leaking your unresolved shit. By doing so, you put people on alert, and they are left wondering if it'll happen again tomorrow - in other words do they have to put up walls of self protection.
In the case of my dishwasher, my unresolved ‘ish was the frustration that I needed someone else to help me identify the problem and then address it. I didn’t want to ‘put my life on pause’ to fit this in, and maybe I didn’t want to ask my husband to help me find a solution for this. I did all this even though I know from experience that the small issues almost always lead to bigger problems, and taking preventative action is ALWAYS best.
The leaks rarely blow up all at once. They're kind of like death by a thousand cuts. The tension with your boss you hope just fades on its own. The way you snap before an important meeting and take it out on your team. The thank you you forgot to say, the good morning you skipped.
None of it feels like much at the moment, but I’m reminded of the metaphor of a plane that’s one degree off course. If a plane is just one degree off course, it lands somewhere completely different than planned. The same is true for how we show up in life. A small daily drift compounds into someone your team doesn't fully trust anymore. It compounds into why you got passed over for a delicate job, or why the room goes quiet when you walk in.
Back to the dishwasher situation. We felt TERRIBLE that our neighbors now had a situation to fix on their hands. We immediately scheduled a plumber to come. And of course we overpaid, because we needed the diagnosis fast and didn't want to make our neighbors' problem worse. Thank goodness for their grace!
Onto the good news; now we have a new dishwasher which is so much quieter, and even has a quick cycle. Imagine if we took care of this earlier? I would have had an upgraded experience this whole time.
Leadership works the same way. The repair conversation you're avoiding, the relationship with the crack in it, the moment you know you weren't your best self, none of that gets easier by waiting for it to go away. On the other side of that repair however, is something better than before: more trust, more respect, and a team that knows you'll take responsibility when you get it wrong.
This is what I get into on the latest episode of The Unlock Lab. I call it the leaky faucet of leadership, and I walk through three questions that will help you find your own leaks before they cost you something bigger.
Do you feel like you’ve got a flood already that you don’t know how to fix? If so, for the love of running dishwashers (because NO ONE wants to hand wash), please reach out because this is precisely what I’m here for. I may not have a plumber bone in my body, but I sure as hell know how to help you get out of hot water.
If this landed for you, please like, rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen. And if someone you know comes to mind, trust your intuition and send this email along to them.
Stay Feisty and Fabulous,
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