Jason LeDuc

Retired Air Force Lt Col. Now I teach first-time managers the leadership nobody trained them for. Host, The Leader's Mindset. Las Vegas.

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

Last month you were the best performer on the team.

This week you're the boss. Nobody handed you a manual.

Here's the trap: the exact skills that got you promoted are not the skills that make you good at this job. And if nobody tells you that, you'll spend your first year doing everyone's work except your own.

Gallup found that companies pick the wrong person for the manager job 82% of the time. Eighty-two percent. Usually not because the person is bad, but because they got promoted for the old job and given zero training for the new one.

If that's you, you're not failing. You were set up without a map.

Here's the map.

THE MULTIPLIER SHIFT

Your success used to be what you produced. Now it's what your team produces. Completely different game.

Rule of thumb: if only you can do a task, your job is to teach it, not keep doing it.

When I became a flight commander I had to stop being the sharpest operator in the room and start making everyone else sharper. Hardest adjustment of my career.

So be honest — what are you still doing yourself this week just because you're faster at it? That's not leadership. That's you being the bottleneck. Sit with that for a second.

THE FIRST 1-ON-1 SCRIPT

Sit down with each person and ask three questions. What's going well? What's getting in your way? How do you like to be recognized?

Then listen. Twenty minutes of listening in week one buys more trust than twenty decisions in month one.

SET THE STANDARD OUT LOUD

New managers assume people know what "good" looks like. They don't.

Say it plainly: "Good means the report is done, checked, and on my desk by Thursday at noon."

A standard in your head is just a secret you're grading people against.

PRAISE IN PUBLIC, CORRECT IN PRIVATE

Recognize wins where everyone sees them. Handle mistakes one-on-one, door closed.

Get it backwards — correct someone in front of the team — and you lose the room in a single meeting.

DELEGATE THE OUTCOME, NOT THE STEPS

In the military we call it commander's intent. Give the result and the standard, not every step.

"I need 30 calls made by Friday, every one logged." Then let them own the how. You'll get their best thinking instead of their compliance.

BONUS: GUARD YOUR CALENDAR

Your day will get eaten alive by "got a sec?" Block 30 minutes every morning for your own priorities before the team wakes up.

And remember the rule — if it's on the calendar, we can only move it, not delete it.

That's the map nobody handed you.

If you're in your first year of managing people, tell me which one you're running this week.

Onward and Upward 🚀

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

https://t.co/mwjEXsVG7D

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

There is a decision sitting on your desk that you have moved three times this month. It is not a hard decision. It is an unfinished one, and unfinished things get heavy in a way finished ones never do.

Today's clip runs three techniques for deciding faster. The one I would steal first is the OODA loop — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — which Colonel John Boyd built for fighter pilots who did not have the option of thinking it over.

Here is the move I would make with it: before you decide anything, pick the date you will check whether you were right.

That one step changes what the decision is. With a review date, it is a draft. Without one it reads as permanent, and permanent things are terrifying to sign. So you leave it on the desk, where it quietly costs you more than a wrong call would have.

You will not have more information next Tuesday than you have today. You will only have less time to use it.

Onward and Upward 🚀

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

The appreciation you feel but never say does absolutely nothing.

Tell your best people, specifically and often, that you see them. Recognition is the cheapest retention tool there is, and almost nobody uses it.

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

@jorgjansen That’s the slippery slope. Once we make the exception once it gets easier and easier every time

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

Most new managers get handed a bad manager to learn from. Some get handed nobody at all.

That is what it is like when an organization stands up an entire management layer at once - a plant that opens, a hospital that opens, a company that promotes a whole director tier in the same month. Everybody above you is new to the job too. No veteran down the hall whose habits you can borrow, and no playbook, because the playbook gets written by whoever happens to be standing there.

The instinct is to wait for the standard to come down from somewhere. It will not. And while everyone waits, each of you quietly invents your own version, and eighteen months later the place has nine different ways of running a one-to-one and no idea how it got them.

So write it yourselves. Pick one, write it, argue it.

Pick the single mechanic that has to be the same across all of you - how a handover gets documented, what goes in a one-to-one, what gets escalated and to whom. Write the first version and circulate it unfinished, because a polished document invites silence while a rough one invites edits. Then meet to argue about where the rule broke this week instead of giving each other status updates.

The advantage nobody mentions: a layer with no veterans also has no bad habits. You are the first draft of it.

Onward and Upward 🚀

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

https://t.co/kfx5aFXQxL

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

The conversation you are avoiding is costing you the wrong person.

In today's clip, Bill Benjamin of the Institute for Health and Human Potential makes a point that reorders the whole problem: when a performance issue goes unaddressed, the people who get most frustrated are your best ones.

That cuts against the instinct. Avoiding the conversation feels like a kindness aimed at the person underperforming. It is actually a bill you are sending to everybody else, and your strongest people get the largest share of it, because they are the ones absorbing the slack, re-checking the work and staying late on the Thursday.

They also have the most options. So the order of departure is exactly backwards from what the avoidance was supposed to protect.

And they will not tell you. Your best people rarely complain about a colleague, because complaining about a peer looks political and they know it. What they do instead is stop volunteering for work that involves that person, stop proposing the project that would need them, and go quiet in the meeting where it would come up.

Name the problem your team has been working around for more than a month. Ask who has been absorbing it, and how long you have been counting on that. Then have the conversation inside two weeks.

Addressing it is not the hard part. Admitting what it has already cost is.

Onward and Upward 🚀

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

@jorgjansen It’s really difficult. A lot of new standards fall apart when an urgent situation comes along and a leaders says “let it slide just this once”. Pretty soon letting it slide becomes the new normal. It takes dedication and commitment even when it’s hard.

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

https://t.co/IArvrKGpZq

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

Your best person had a bad month and you called it the seasonal slump. Everybody nodded, because everybody wanted it to be true.

In today's clip Raquel Durden names what actually happened, and it is not the calendar.

The seasonal explanation is attractive because it asks nothing of you. It is temporary by definition, it blames no one, and it comes with a built-in end date, so the correct response is to wait. It converts a signal into weather.

A dip that really is seasonal has a shape: it shows up across the team, it tracks the calendar, and it lifts on schedule. A dip that is something else is specific to one person, started on a date you can almost name, and does not lift.

Three checks before you accept the story. Who else dipped - if nobody did, it is not the season. When did it start, the actual week, and what happened that week: a reorganization, a project reassigned, a peer promoted, a promise that quietly expired. And which fell first, the output or the engagement.

That third one is where the time is. Engagement moves before output does, so by the time the numbers slip you have already lost weeks you could have used.

Then say the dip out loud, with the date, and ask what was going on then.

Onward and Upward 🚀

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

https://t.co/nQev1dMRvy

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

Your friends on the team still text you the way they always did. You answer the way you always did. Nobody has done anything wrong, and the game is already rigged.

From the inside, nothing happened. From the outside: two people heard about the change at lunch on Tuesday, everybody else heard it in the Thursday meeting, and a decision got settled over coffee that the rest of the team would have had to request a meeting to influence. Nobody was excluded on purpose. They were excluded by geometry.

Your team is not tracking your intent. They track inputs and outputs - who knew first, whose idea survived, who gets the benefit of the doubt. When the pattern points the same way three times, people stop making the case for their own work. That is the part you never see, because what you lose is something that never gets said.

So close the side door. Move work conversations out of one-to-one channels before you answer them. Announce decisions in one place, at one time, to everybody, with no previews as a favor. Say the rule out loud once, to the whole team, friends included. And watch whose names fill your informal calendar, because the pattern exists whether or not you meant it.

You lose the easy shorthand. The alternative is a team that decided the outcome before the meeting started.

Onward and Upward 🚀

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

@urtimesheet Great advice!

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

"I'm fine" is the most common thing a manager hears and the least information they ever get.

The fix takes about eight seconds. Name what you noticed, then ask one open question.

Skip "are you okay." That question has exactly one socially acceptable answer and everybody knows what it is. Name the observable thing instead: you have been off camera the last three stand-ups and you usually drive those. Your replies have gotten a lot shorter this week. You passed on the Harper account, and that is not like you.

Then: what is going on with that? And then the hard part, which is silence. Let it sit. The first answer is the polite one. The second answer, the one that shows up after four or five seconds of nothing, is the real one.

Naming it first works because it proves you were paying attention before you asked. "Are you okay" asks somebody to volunteer into a vacuum, and volunteering is risky. "I noticed this" tells them the thing is already visible, so explaining it costs almost nothing.

Three things I would hold to. Observation, never interpretation - people defend against verdicts. One thing, not a list, because a list is an ambush. And do not solve it in the same breath, or you have told them the point was closing a ticket.

Onward and Upward 🚀

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

@urtimesheet Sometimes we just have to be patient and let that silence hang there until we get an answer.

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

Full episode: https://t.co/M9M817LybZ

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

Most leaders I talk to are trying to solve an anchor problem with a bigger engine.

More hours. More headcount. More optimization of the thing they're already good at. And the boat barely moves — because the drag was never coming from the engine.

Kevin Voisin put a frame on this that I keep coming back to. He coaches across five areas — fitness, faith, family, finance, fun — and his rule is that the lowest one sets the ceiling for all the others. Not the average. The lowest.

Which explains a pattern I've watched for years: the founder whose revenue and training log both look great, whose home life is quietly underwater, and who responds by working harder on revenue and training. Of course nothing improves. The anchor is still down.

Here's the move I'd make, and it's smaller than people expect. You don't have to turn your worst area into a strength. Take it from bad to neutral. That's it. Neutral doesn't drag.

Most leaders skip it because neutral isn't a win you can post about. It's just the thing that lets everything else finally move.

Onward and Upward 🚀

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

https://t.co/7wKqVPk8bX

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

On Friday they were your friends at lunch. On Monday you are their boss. Most people handle this by hoping nobody brings it up, and that is the one approach guaranteed to lose both.

Here is what happens inside the silence. Your friends keep treating you the way they always did, so they hear things first. Everybody else watches that and quietly concludes the outcome was settled before the meeting started. And your friends are getting less of you than they used to and cannot say so, because now it would sound like angling for special treatment.

Nobody behaved badly. Everybody is worse off.

Three moves I would make in the first two weeks.

Say it out loud, to the whole team and again to the friends: the working relationship changed on Monday, the friendship did not, here is what changes and what does not. Fifteen awkward seconds buys about six months.

Move the decision into the room. When a work conversation starts in a private message, move it before you answer it. The side door is not something you open on purpose. It is something you forget to close.

Keep the friendship on its own clock - off hours, off topic, actually protected. The common failure is not favoritism, it is dropping the friendships to look impartial. That costs the relationships and buys nothing, because nobody was grading you on distance.

Onward and Upward 🚀

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

https://t.co/7OV8OAHAlR

[Jason LeDuc @leducleadership]

A rigid team does not argue with you. That is exactly the problem.

The rigidity is almost never the people. It is a rule they inherited. Somebody got burned once, a policy went up, and three years later the team is still enforcing a decision whose reason has left the company - and they are the ones who look inflexible to the customer.

You find out by noticing what stops arriving. Nobody brings you the awkward client request. Nobody mentions that the process adds a day for no reason. Silence reads like alignment right up until the week it does not.

So pick one rule your team enforces every week and ask who made it and what it was protecting. If nobody can answer, it is a habit wearing a policy's clothes, and you should say that out loud.

Then do the expensive part. Give one person permission to tell a client no this week, and back them in public when they use it. Teams do not learn flexibility from what you say about it. They learn it from the first time somebody tested it and found out whether you held.

Onward and Upward 🚀