The Unexpected Outcomes of the Great Flattening (02/17/2026)

Happy Tuesday!

I’ve been helping leaders and their organizations for a long time. And over those 30 years, never has the uncertainty and opportunity been as great as it is today. We need to look back and understand, but we need to look forward too – and I’m not sure most people are doing enough of either one.

In other words, the turbulence of the present is keeping people from looking beyond (or behind) the moment.

Increasingly, that is what I see myself being able to do for you. To not just inform, but to influence. To help you see windows into the world that you are missing, too busy to notice or perhaps are a bit afraid to acknowledge. I think I am doing that for you in this issue, and I know that is what I am doing on Thursday with our webinar for all of you who are charged with helping leaders in your organization grow and succeed.

I promise you will find this webinar enlightening and empowering. I encourage you to join and have others who care about the leaders in your organization join us too.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

You are Remarkable!

Kevin 😊

Unravelling the Past

I’ll be taking the Christmas lights down from my house this week. I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you that, because in my mind they should have been down in early January, not in the second half of February.

Because I have done this for many years, I can tell you two things with certainty.

I will be careful about how I organize them and will carefully place the strings of lights in a box. And I will still be frustrated in November when they seem all tangled when I try to put them up again.

This whole experience reminds me of one sort of almost equally unavoidable consequences we have with other humans – conflict. Thankfully, we can and do straighten most of them out easily, but sometimes we find ourselves in conflicts with others that seem as tangled as my Christmas lights will be in November.

The only way I will be successful in getting those lights strung and hung will require me to slowly and carefully unravel the frustrating and messy light strings. And the only way we can resolve conflict is to look back at what happened and unravel our missteps, miscommunications, and misunderstandings first.

I can’t bring light to the eaves of my house before I look back at what I did previously and unravel it. And you can’t bring ease and success in your relationships in the future until you unravel what got messy in the past.

In both cases, it might not be fun for a bit, but the results for the future are worth it.

The Unexpected Outcomes of the Great Flattening

You may not have heard it called The Great Flattening, but chances are you’ve seen and noticed it. In the last few years, for a variety of reasons, organizations have reduced the number of middle managers, leaving those remaining with more people reporting to them. There are downstream consequences to this decision – not all intentional or immediately obvious. But as time passes and since the “flattening,” more of consequences are becoming problems.

Fewer leaders and levels of leaders can help with some of the initial goals of the decision, like creating agility and empowerment, but it is causing other challenges. Fewer leaders means…

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