Would your team hire you?

Years ago, in my agency days, I took on a job most people avoided. I'd lead account teams that were struggling. Morale was low. The client was frustrated and threatened to leave. Account staff were updating their résumés.

My goals were simple:

The first thing I did when joining teams was ask each team member:

“What's your role on the team, and how does it map to your career ambitions?”

Some people weren't sure what their role was. Some knew their role but couldn't see how it helped them grow. A few needed a different account altogether.

We made changes. Some stayed at the agency but went to other accounts. Some left altogether. We built a couple of brand-new roles. But most of the time, we kept both the team and the client intact.

Back then, all I had was a question and the discipline to listen and act on the answer.

I think about those teams a lot right now. Today, I'd add a second question, one leaders need to ask themselves: if the roles were reversed, would my team hire me? The stakes are just higher.

A lot has changed in a short time

We’re midway through the 2020s. The global pandemic, geopolitics, and generative AI have and are impacting our lives.

Any one of those in a generation would be a lot. We’ve lived with all three over the course of a few years.

No matter how you feel about the events of this decade, your team carries it into their work whether you talk about it or not.

The pandemic took things we haven't fully gotten back. Relationships frayed. And a whole generation lost months, sometimes years, of the reps the rest of us took for granted.

Speaking of generations, for years, headlines have pitted Boomers against Gen X and everyone against Gen Z. Social media turned the vitriol dial up. The research doesn't justify this toxic divide.

Many of them are now walking into their first jobs, still learning the unwritten rules of professional life.

To be fair, so did we. We just had more time and more in-person examples to learn from.

My (hot) take is people are people. Understand but don’t generalize eras. Lead the person in front of you, not the year they were born in.

What matters, wherever your team sits, is trust. And whether people know what they're supposed to be doing.

Your life at work is your life at home

You've heard of work-life balance and work-life blend. I see something bigger happening in almost every room I walk into.

Your life at work and your life at home have become the same life.

When your Slack ping and the text from your kid's school land 30 seconds apart on your phone's home screen, you've felt this. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index found that 40% of people online at 6:00 a.m. are already reviewing email, and meetings after 8:00 p.m. are up 16% year over year.⁴

Many of us are also raising kids and caring for parents at the same time. AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving count 63 million family caregivers in the U.S., and 6 in 10 of them are working.⁵

So, people bring all of it to work, impacting stress, confidence, and connection. A 2023 U.S. Surgeon General advisory reports that about half of U.S. adults experience loneliness, and that a lack of social connection can raise the risk of early death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.²

I look at well-being through a wide lens:

• Mental
• Physical
• Financial
• Career
• Social
• Community

Right now, every one of those areas is under pressure at the same time.

And too many of us still treat them as separate topics. Or we don't talk about them at all. We act as if people can switch off the rest of their life from 8 to 5. They can't. Neither can you.

Leaders are carrying it too

We don't say this out loud enough: leaders are tired.

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 found that manager engagement fell to 22% in 2025, down from 31% in 2022. Gallup estimates low engagement cost the world economy about $10 trillion. Leaders also report more stress and more loneliness than the people they lead.¹

To date, AI has not helped. In Korn Ferry's Workforce 2026 survey of more than 16,000 employees, 52% said AI tools increased the number of tasks expected of them, and 61% feel like they're doing the work of more than one role.⁷

Why does this matter? Leaders play a major role in your team's experience.

Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement.⁸ And in a Workforce Institute at UKG survey, 69% of employees said their manager affects their mental health as much as their spouse or partner does.⁹

So, when HR rolls out open enrollment, a new policy, or a new AI tool, you're the one who makes it make sense. If you don't translate it, it gets lost.

The Reverse Hire Test

All of this is leading up to tenure and next chapters. People don't stay put anymore. The median U.S. worker has been with their current employer 3.9 years. For workers 25 to 34, it's 2.7 years.⁶

People move. They job-hop. They come back.

Sometimes they come back as your boss, or your client.

So, here's the question I want every leader to think about:

That's the Reverse Hire Test. I've watched this test play out repeatedly through my career.

One of my earliest moments I experienced this at Chasing the Sun was a random Tuesday morning. I was picking up my mom to go to an appointment when I received this email:

The sender was someone on a team I managed in the late 2000s. We were friendly during our time together but rarely talked after I left to my next agency.

Sure enough, that one email led to one of the most significant partnerships I've had to-date.

I didn't even know they knew I launched my company.

But they had been following along, remembered how well we worked together, and trusted me to help solve a problem. The roles had reversed. Someone I once managed was now deciding whether to hire me.

I often hear leaders say, “I don't need to be liked. I just need to be respected.” I understand the instinct. I'd push back. There are about 8 billion people in the world. If I don't like working with someone, I have plenty of other options, no matter how much I respect them.

When I say liked, I mean trusted. Kind, clear, and consistent. That leaves plenty of room to say no, set a high bar, and hold people to it. Doormats need not apply.

The data agrees.

The best leaders I know live in a way people want to emulate. Their teams watch how they show up, how they follow through, and how they treat people who can do nothing for them. Then they think, “I want to lead like that.” That's how I define a great leader today.

There's a line from Ted Lasso I come back to often. When A.F.C. Richmond public relations lead Keeley Jones is nervous about leaving to start her own firm, the team's director of football operations Leslie Higgins tells her:

Great leaders grow people who are ready to leave. That's exactly why those people want to work with them again.

Bring the Reverse Hire Test to your leadership team →

Judgment is the new advantage

Which brings me to AI. I'm getting more requests than ever to talk about how to lead in the AI era.

My answer may surprise you.

It's not “we need to get back to basics.”

It's “we need to define ‘what are basics?’”

You can get a decent answer to almost any question in five seconds. Deciding which answer is right for this team, this client, and this moment still takes judgment. And judgment comes from experience and empathy.

The research points the same way.

The leader's job in the 2020s is to build healthy, confident, and connected teams who think for themselves, and to model the judgment you want them to use.

The SHINE Model: 5 moves for leading in a new era

My mission is to help people shine in the family room and the board room.

SHINE is how you pass the Reverse Hire Test. Here's how you can shine today.

Each one comes with an action you can start this week.

Start from the truth about your team: One team member is sorting out care for their dad, another is three months into their first job and quietly wondering if they belong, a third is running on five hours of sleep with their newborn.

Some days, they don't even know what's most important.

Seeing the whole person means you stop pretending life pauses at 8:00 a.m. It also means dropping the assumption that everyone knows the unwritten rules. Whatever you believe about how we're “supposed” to work together, your team doesn't all share it. Set a baseline. Say the norms out loud. Do it with respect and skip the condescension. In one program I led for PR teams, participants started writing down their team's unwritten rules. Several put the idea to work the same day.

Strength comes from vulnerability, and vulnerability takes strength. Your team won't say “I'm overwhelmed” or “I don't know” until you say it first.

Harvard's Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”¹² That belief gets built one leader moment at a time. When you admit a mistake, you give everyone else permission to admit theirs.

Humble leaders also invite people to manage up. When someone has too much going on, the fix usually starts with a conversation. You can automate a lot of things right now. This one must be human, early and often.

Healthy teams are clear on what the team does, who does what, and why it matters. Gallup found that only 46% of U.S. employees strongly agree they know what's expected of them at work, down from 56% in 2020.¹³ That means more than half your team may be guessing.

There are plenty of role-clarity tools out there, like a RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) chart. Draw the chart, then keep talking about it, as a team and one-on-one.

I love giving people a forum to share what their day looks like. “Why is Maria always on the road?” “Why is Sam so buried this month?” Context turns frustration into understanding. And keep repeating the why behind your goals. People forget. So do leaders.

We severely under-communicate. Healthy, confident, connected teams communicate with the reader in mind. Before you hit send, ask yourself: if this person only has five seconds to read my Slack message or email, what do they need to know? What do I need from them? And why now?

This is also where your expectations live. People like and respect leaders who are kind and crystal clear at the same time. Kindness without clarity leaves people anxious. Clarity without kindness leaves them afraid. You need both.

And remember your role as translator. When a new benefit, policy, or tool comes down from HR or the executive team, your team should also hear it best from you. Add the context. Answer the question they might be thinking: “What does this mean for us?”

Judgment grows from experience and empathy, especially when stories are scenario-based and provide a lot of context. Share your experience out loud. Walk your team through how you made a hard call, including what you weighed and what you got wrong last time.

Empathy is the other half. The empathy map I use with teams takes about 15 minutes. Think about someone you're trying to build a relationship with. What are their goals? What influences them? What are they afraid of? What do they hope for? The answers to those questions will go a long way into maintaining healthy relationships with your teams and customers.

Exercising judgment also means protecting your team's availability. I teach one simple habit. When something new lands on your plate, say, “Happy to take this on. What should I deprioritize?”

Start small, and start this week

On a cold, dark, rainy December evening in 2007, I started what became a 150-pound weight-loss journey. I started with breakfast. One thing I could control. Fewer mochas and scones. Then I moved to the next thing, and the next.

Leading a team through the 2020s works the same way. Gartner found that making change a small, recurring routine is 3x more effective than the big, inspirational push.¹⁴ I saw this with a national insurance company that chose a year-long series of talks over one big event. The changes that stuck were small. Teams got more mindful about how many meetings they held, and people checked in with each other more authentically.

October is National Work and Family Month, and World Mental Health Day lands on October 10. It's a great month to begin.

So, pick one letter of SHINE. Just one. Try its move this week. Next week, add another.

The 2020s have forever redefined where and how we work. The leaders who thrive will remember and contextualize the basics, be vulnerable and clear, communicate with care, and use good judgment.

Lead that way, and three weeks, three months, or three years from now, when the roles are reversed, the people on your team will want to hire you.