The writing is the reel

A few months after I started at Airbnb, I hosted one of my first offsites.

My title then was Program Manager, which tells you very little about what I actually did for the next 8 years. I built the Behavioral Analysis function inside Trust and Safety. I led the Black employee resource group for several years. I built out Org Design and Professional Development for the wider PM org. I built a sponsorship program. I wrote communications for executives. I ran a go-to-market project in Ghana. Along the way, half a dozen offsites, company-wide events every year, panels I put together and panels I sat on.

None of this was in my job description but I kept reaching outside the boundaries of the title. I couldn't resist, because every one of those projects was a people problem dressed up in a business costume. What leaders were actually asking me for, whether or not they had words for it, was to read the dynamic at play, name it, and solve it. That strategy worked on an intern in their first corporate experience and on an executive about to address the company, which is how I ended up doing both.

At some point I stopped treating that as a side effect of my curiosity and started focusing on high achievers on purpose. The strategies that launched their success are not the same as what's required once you reach certain echelons of power. They've also often been given the same standard leadership advice, you know, work hard, stay focused, be disciplined. This is not helpful to an overachiever. They need someone to explain the machinery that drives their behavior, and that the challenges they're experiencing, while tough to navigate, are predictable in their manifestation, biologically speaking.

So that is what the method does. I take the behavior down to a mechanism. Procrastination in someone who thinks fast is usually an overloaded system throttling itself. Prioritizing feels unbearable because if your reputation was built on handling everything, you are being asked to give up a piece of who you are. Once people see the underlying dynamic at work, they stop treating their own exhaustion as a character flaw and start treating it as a system they can modulate. That is when they really get a sense of agency to change their experience.

Here is the inconvenient part and none of that is visible from outside Airbnb. I have no speaker reel, most of the specifics are not mine to disclose, and nobody films the offsites. What I do have is the writing. When I write about perfectionism, or rest, or why success feels hollow, I am doing the exact thing I did in those rooms: naming the pattern until people recognize themselves in it. The platform changed but the skill is the same, and my writing is the reel.

I speak on high performance and its costs, on why leadership pairs break, and on treating relational skill as a technical competency. Keynote, panel, or fireside. If you are producing something and that is the conversation you want in the room, let's talk.