What Sobriety Taught Me About Leading People

I've Been Sober Since 2012

I put that in my professional bio. On purpose.

A lot of people have told me that's a strange choice. That it's too personal. That it might make people uncomfortable or change how they see me professionally.

That reaction is exactly why I do it.

I started working at 13. Put myself through college. Spent 33 years building teams, managing hundreds of people, conducting over 3,000 interviews. I've sat across the table from candidates at Amazon as a Bar Raiser. I've fired people and promoted people and watched careers accelerate and collapse.

And I can tell you with certainty: the most important thing I ever did for my leadership wasn't a management course, a book, or a promotion. It was getting sober.

Not because sobriety is inherently noble. But because recovery requires you to build the exact skills that make someone a genuinely exceptional leader. Skills that most management development programs actively train people away from.

The Leadership Program Nobody Signs Up For

Here's what recovery actually demands of you.

Radical honesty. Not the comfortable kind where you tell the truth when it's easy. The kind where you look at yourself clearly, admit what you've done, and say it out loud to another person without softening it.

Asking for help. Consistently. Without shame. As a practice, not a last resort.

Owning mistakes completely. No partial apologies. No "I'm sorry you felt that way." No burying the real story under context and explanation.

Sitting with discomfort instead of escaping it.

Now read that list again and tell me it isn't also a description of what the best leaders do.

Most leadership training goes in the opposite direction. It teaches people to project confidence even when they're uncertain. To present polished answers in ambiguous situations. To appear decisive, composed, in control. The implicit message is: if you show weakness, you lose authority.

Recovery taught me that's completely backwards.

What Vulnerability Actually Does to Trust

Early in my leadership career, I performed strength. I had the answers. I drove decisions hard. I didn't share uncertainty because I thought it would undermine my credibility.

I was managing people, but I wasn't leading them.

The shift happened slowly. After I got sober, I started applying the same honesty in professional settings that I was learning in personal ones. I started saying "I don't know" when I didn't know. I started telling my team when I'd made a bad call and exactly why it was a bad call. I started asking for input before I'd made up my mind, not after.

Something unexpected happened. People started trusting me more, not less.

Here's why that works. When you perform confidence you don't have, people can feel it. They may not be able to articulate it, but they sense the gap between what you're presenting and what's real. That gap erodes trust quietly and steadily. You look composed. You have the answers. And somehow, people are never quite sure they can count on you.

When you're honest about uncertainty, the gap disappears. What you see is what's real. That's when trust becomes solid.

The 1:1 Is Where This Plays Out

I've had thousands of one-on-one conversations with direct reports over my career. The ones that actually changed things had one thing in common: I was willing to go first.

If I wanted someone to tell me what wasn't working, I had to be willing to say what wasn't working from my end first. If I wanted someone to admit they were struggling, I had to be willing to tell them about a time I had struggled.

This isn't a technique. It's not a tactic you deploy to seem relatable. It's a genuine willingness to be honest about your own experience before you ask someone else to be honest about theirs.

Recovery taught me this in the hardest possible way. You cannot ask someone else to be honest if you're still performing. You go first, or the conversation stays on the surface forever.

The leaders who run 1:1s as status updates are missing the entire point. Your direct reports are not going to tell you the real thing until they believe it's safe. And they won't believe it's safe until you've proven, repeatedly, that you can handle the real thing.

That proof starts with you going first.

Asking for Help Is a Leadership Move

This one is counterintuitive for a lot of people, especially people who got promoted because they were individually excellent.

The story most high performers carry into leadership is: I'm here because I had the answers. If I start asking for help, people will figure out I don't belong.

That story will destroy your effectiveness.

When I ask a team member for their input on a problem I'm working through, two things happen. First, I often get a genuinely better answer than I would have reached on my own. Second, I've just told that person that their thinking matters to me. Both of those things are valuable. The second one is often more valuable than the first.

Leaders who ask for help build teams that solve problems. Leaders who perform self-sufficiency build teams that wait for instructions.

I learned to ask for help in rooms where my life depended on it. That lowers the psychological barrier considerably. If I could ask for help with the hardest things I've ever faced, I can certainly ask a smart colleague what they think about an organizational challenge.

Why I Put It in My Bio

I include my sobriety in my professional bio because it's true and because it matters.

It's part of who I am as a leader. Not separate from it, not despite it. The honesty, the directness, the willingness to own failure without excuse, the ability to sit with a hard conversation and not flinch. Those things came from somewhere. Recovery is a significant part of where they came from.

I also include it because I think the taboo around it is wrong.

Millions of people in the workforce are in recovery. Many of them are exceptional, high-functioning professionals who carry something meaningful: the experience of having rebuilt themselves from a hard place, using skills that most people are never forced to develop.

That's not a liability. That's a background that creates a particular kind of leader.

And frankly, when someone tells me my sobriety makes them uncomfortable in a professional context, that tells me something useful about whether we're aligned on what honest leadership actually looks like.

The Leaders Teams Actually Trust

I've interviewed thousands of people. I've watched leaders succeed and fail at close range for three decades.

The leaders teams follow without reservation are not the ones who had the best answers. They're the ones who were honest about when they didn't know. The ones who owned it when they were wrong. The ones who asked for help and meant it.

Those leaders are rare. Most people are still performing strength they don't always have, hoping no one looks too closely.

Recovery forced me to stop performing. That turned out to be one of the most professionally significant things that ever happened to me.

Vulnerability isn't the opposite of strong leadership. For a lot of people, it's the thing they're missing most.