The Whole Person

I updated my LinkedIn profile today to add something that has been missing: my sabbatical.

This past weekend weekend, we celebrated our youngest daughter's 20th birthday and then found out we unexpectedly lost a close family member on the same day. Moments like that have a way of making the incomplete feel urgent. I am not waiting for that feeling to fade.

So I am reordering everything correctly today.

The work has always been visible. The results, the scope, the roles — all accounted for. The person behind it had values and ethics that the people who worked with me knew well. I just never advertised it. That changes today. I am putting myself wholly out there, sabbatical included, because the whole person is what shows up to do the work.

And here is what that person believes after 30 years of building, scaling, and leading inside complex organizations: the people closest to the work know more about what is broken, what customers actually need, and what would fix it than most executives ever will. They live it every day. They feel the friction. They hear the customer directly. They know exactly where the process falls apart and why.

Most organizations systematically ignore that intelligence. Not maliciously. They just build structures that filter it out before it ever reaches the people with the authority to act on it.

I have spent my career doing the opposite. Getting close to the people doing the work. Creating conditions where what they know actually moves. Where taking a risk feels safer than staying stuck. Where the customer experience improves because someone finally trusted the person closest to it to fix it.

I did not fully understand the imprint that left until this year.

When you are working, feedback is noisy. People have agendas. Proximity distorts things. But this year I was not working, which meant when people reached out, there was nothing in it for them. No open roles, no budget, no favor to return. Just people who wanted me to know that something shifted for them because of time we spent together. That they finally took the path that felt right. That they saw something in themselves they had not seen before.

That is the only performance review that has ever meant anything to me.

Taking this year did not slow me down. It sharpened me. I built things I would never have had the bandwidth to build. I coached people who did not report to me and had nothing to offer me in return. I developed frameworks I had been carrying in my head for years but never had the space to pressure test. And I got clearer on my own strengths than three decades of full time work ever allowed.

That is what deliberate time does. It does not create new abilities. It reveals the ones that were always there.

Which is exactly why it belongs on my resume and my LinkedIn. Not as a gap to explain. As a chapter that earned its place.

Human first. Results because of it, not in spite of it.

That whole person is who shows up to solve the hard problems.

The profile is getting updated to reflect all of her.