What Good Leadership Actually Looks Like. A Story About Mental Health, Trust, and Teams.
Hello World (Room 1570) & Virtual
A few years ago, I was standing on a bluff near my home. I had decided I was done. Two days later, I checked myself into the psych ward at the VA hospital.
I’m a DevOps engineer at UW-Madison and a US Army veteran with seven combat tours. The PTSD didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. But this talk isn’t really about that. It’s about what happened next.
My leadership team handled it right. Not from a playbook, but in the ways that actually mattered. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when a team has built something real, where people actually matter, and that doesn’t stop being true when things get hard.
Every team has someone carrying something heavy. Most of them are carrying it quietly. This talk is about what it looks like when a team gets it right, and what any of us can do to be that for someone else.