Your Leadership Remote Has Too Many Buttons

Ever wish your leadership came with a “universal remote”? The kind that actually works… instead of the one where you push a button and hope for the best. Because nothing says “effective leadership” like accidentally turning on subtitles in Portuguese.

Leadership shouldn’t feel like using a TV remote with 50 buttons when you only need three. You’re just trying to turn up the volume, but instead you’ve changed the input, opened the settings menu, and somehow enabled picture-in-picture. That’s not your fault. That’s bad design.

Don Norman (The Psychology of Everyday Things) helped me to see that our leadership design speaks before we do. If it’s clunky, confusing, or overloaded, it tells people, “This is going to be hard.” In leadership, your design is the unspoken playbook your team reads every day. If it’s not built for clarity, you’re asking them to fumble through options instead of getting to the point.

Kim Scott (Radical Candor) shows me what happens when leadership design fails. If your team has to guess how to give feedback, ask for help, or challenge you, ... they’ll just stop. Not because they don’t care. Because it feels like they're pressing the wrong button every time. Radical Candor is the “quick access” button. It allows you to care personally, challenge directly, and make the path to an honest conversation obvious.

Great leadership IS great design. It's Clear, Intuitive, and Human-Centered. The best leaders don’t keep adding more buttons. They give people the right ones and make sure they know exactly when to press them.

Question for you: If your leadership remote only had three buttons, what would they be?