When Deanna Cantrell took over as chief, she inherited something nobody wanted to talk about — a broken employee. Labeled. Shelved. Written off like a book nobody checks out anymore. She could have let him collect dust. Instead, she asked her command staff a question.
“If we loved him once, can we learn to love him again?”
But before anyone could answer, she asked another one.
“Who is his sergeant? Who is his lieutenant?”
The hands went up. And the room got uncomfortable fast. Because Cantrell wasn’t just asking about the broken employee. She was asking about the leaders who watched it happen. He didn’t start out this way. Somewhere along the line the organization broke him — and the people closest to him either missed it or let it slide.
We fire coaches when the team doesn’t perform. But we almost never hold middle managers accountable when the people under them quietly fall apart. We label the employee the problem and we move on.
Cantrell didn’t move on. She told her command staff she never wanted to hear his nickname again. He had earned that nickname — not because of who he was, but because of who the organization had allowed him to become. Every label has an origin story. His was poor leadership and zero intervention. She was clear: the next time they discussed him for a position, he would be described differently.
That’s not a him issue, she said. It’s a leadership issue.
She made a decision. Clean slate. Full stop.
They gave him a project. Trusted him with something that mattered. And he delivered.
But here’s what got me thinking. Cantrell’s employee was loud about it. He was disgruntled enough that the command staff had no choice but to notice. He made sure of it.
Most of them don’t make noise.
I received an email recently from someone who heard me speak. He had applied for the same types of positions within his organization over and over again for more than a decade. Passed over every single time. He joked that statistically, he should have been selected by accident at least once. A few of the people chosen over him didn’t last — let go for things he said he would have never done or even thought of.
He’s not bitter. He’s not loud. He’s not making anyone’s life difficult.
He described himself as empty inside. But when I pushed back on him, he clarified something important.
That’s how people saw him, he said. Not what he believed.
He told me the reason he kept applying for promotions had nothing to do with title or money. It was because at the lowest point in his career, a supervisor broke him. Made him feel worthless no matter what he did. Not just him — several others. And he decided he wanted to be the antidote to that. The leader who made people feel valued for their strengths instead of punished for their weaknesses.
He knew he’d be one of the few who thought that way.
The organization kept passing him over. And in doing so, they unknowingly kept that leader away from every person who needed him.
He has three years left until retirement. He’s already done the math on overtime. Already thinking about what he wants to be when he grows up. Already counting the birthdays and holidays and weekends he’ll get back when he’s finally free.
He wrote to me: I have lost all desire to even come to work. Not because of the workload or the mental and emotional fatigue of the job itself. But the burnout of the internal politics and the culture.
He’s still showing up every day. Doing the job. Invisible.
Nobody is having a meeting about him. Nobody is asking “can we love him again” because nobody noticed he left.
Not everyone on your shelf put themselves there. Some of them were put there by someone with a title.
Here’s why nobody goes first. It feels like losing. When someone has been difficult, checked out, or bitter, extending trust before they’ve earned it back feels like surrender. Like you’re rewarding the wrong behavior. Nobody wants to be the one who blinks.
And if you go first and it doesn’t work — that’s on you. It’s safer to leave them on the shelf and call it a performance problem.
But safe doesn’t build anything.
And here’s the brutal truth — he’s in your organization right now. Maybe not with three years left. Maybe with twenty. Quietly doing the minimum. Quietly checking out. Quietly waiting for the clock to run out on a career that should have meant something.
Daniel Pink will tell you that people need three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. What Cantrell understood that Pink doesn’t say out loud is that somebody has to extend those things first. You don’t wait for a checked-out employee to earn their way back. You go first. That’s not weakness. That’s leadership.
Give them a project. Trust them with something real. Remind them their contribution matters.
But you can’t do any of that if you don’t know they’re gone.
So before you ask, “Can we love him again?” — ask yourself if you even know who you’ve lost.
Because some of them have been gone for a long time.
And they’re still showing up anyway.
🖤 Onward and upward,
Kristen
P.S. I wrote this for you. Tell me if I’m hitting the mark — or missing it entirely. kristen@kristenziman.com
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” –Rainer Maria Rilke
