Thank You!

Happy last day of Q3. Before you close the books, one story about seeing.

There’s an executive I worked with who had become, quietly, the person her organization had given up on. Not fired, not confronted. Worked around. You know the shape: the meetings rerouted, the compensating structures, the sentences that start with “well, you know how she is.”

As part of our work, she got a written report. Her patterns, named specifically, with the evidence laid out. Not a 360 with scores. A document that described, in plain sentences, what it was like to work with her.

She read it and said, “Remember the movie ‘The Sixth Sense?’ That’s how I felt reading this. Like, I see dead people, like it was there all along. I never saw it until I read this report.”

If you don’t remember the movie: the character who says that line has been dead the whole time, and everyone around him knew except him. She chose that reference herself. I didn’t point out how precise it was. I think she knew.

Here’s what happened next, because this story has a next. She did the work. Slowly, then visibly. A few months in, her CEO pulled her aside into a conference room to tell her that people were coming up to him, unprompted, saying they could see the change. She’ll remember that conversation for years, I’d bet, down to the time of day. That’s what it’s like when the story an organization tells about you gets rewritten out loud.

The pattern I want you to take from this isn’t about her. It’s about the years before the report. She’s smart. Self-aware, even, by most measures. Every signal was available to her the whole time: the rerouted meetings, the careful colleagues, the feedback softened into uselessness. She couldn’t see it because nobody can see it. From inside a pattern, the pattern just looks like the world. It takes the thing written down, specific and unhedged, to make it visible. And once it’s visible, it can’t be unvisible.

Q3 ends today. Somewhere in your company, and possibly in your mirror, there’s a version of this: a pattern everyone can see except the person inside it, priced into every meeting, costing you quietly. Q4 will inherit it intact. Patterns don’t observe fiscal calendars.

If something in this week’s newsletter described a pattern you’ve suspected but couldn’t name, that’s exactly what Executive Triage is built for. One conversation. One pattern named with enough precision that you can’t unknow it. 90 minutes, an eight-page brief, $3,500. cynthiacorsetti.com/executive-triage

This week’s read: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. Goldsmith’s whole thesis is that success delusions are load-bearing: the habits that got you the job are the ones quietly capping you. His list of twenty habits reads like a mirror. Most people find three of theirs in the first ten pages. Find it here.

She kept the report in her desk. Still there.