December isn't just about holidays; it's the most emotionally loaded month for your team—full of stress, burnout, and falling engagement. Tammy J. Bond challenges leaders who treat this month as a "survive and hope January is better" exercise. That approach already sets up Q1 for failure. This episode reveals the high cost of manager burnout and provides the necessary shift in mindset and three essential conversations leaders must have before December 31st to clear the "Workplace Sandbox" and transition into a high-performance 2026.

• The Engagement Crisis: The global cost of lost productivity is staggering, and manager engagement is falling, directly impacting your team's energy.

• The Burnout Driver: Employees are running on fumes due to unspoken expectations and the endless cycle of urgent, last-minute demands. Leaders who ignore this are setting their teams up for failure and turnover.

• The Core Problem: If you have unspoken expectations in December, you are causing unnecessary fatigue. The thoughtful energy you put into your people now will dictate the success of the new year.

• Deloitte Launches 2024 Global Human Capital Trends Report – Press Release

To use year-end pressure strategically, you must initiate three focused conversations:

1. The Year-End Truth Conversation: Move past the formal review and initiate simple, straight talk about what worked and the resources needed.

2. The Capacity Conversation: Address "Energy Zappers" and decide what you're willing to let go of to protect long-term human performance.

3. The Next Year's Promise Conversation: Clarify Q1 priorities and identify the specific behaviors that will be rewarded, setting a clear tone for the new year.

Leaders, you must be truth tellers. Stop squeezing out one more project and start having the focused conversations that transform your team from running on fumes into a firestorm of Q1 success.

AI is here, but so are human emotions. Tammy J. Bond highlights that implementing AI is not just a technical deployment; it's a massive disruption to your team's identity, sense of security, and self-worth. The core challenge for 2026 is leading the emotional side of automation, as your team is both hopeful and terrified. This episode exposes how leaders are currently dropping the ball with silence and lack of guidance, offering a playbook to intentionally build trust and human sustainability around AI usage.

Leaders are often failing to implement AI well because they ignore its impact on three fundamental human needs:

1. Certainty: Workers fear for their job security (up to 52% are worried about AI's impact).

2. Competency: The automated work challenges their sense of self-worth and ability to perform their role effectively.

3. Control: People feel a loss of autonomy when a new, vaguely understood tool takes over parts of their process.

Ignoring these fears creates camouflaged conflict in the workplace, manifesting as passive resistance, quiet quitting, and overcompensating perfectionism (driven by fear of obsolescence).

The Problem of Silence: With 40% of workplaces lacking AI usage guidelines, employees read a leader's silence as, "My leader doesn't know what they're doing," eroding trust and increasing anxiety.

Your opportunity is to stop letting fear write the rest of your organizational story and actively transform your culture around AI.

3 Essential Steps for AI Implementation:

1. Name the Change: Clarify what AI is and what it is not here to do, not just for the company, but for each position at the granular level.

2. Clarify Expectations: Define what is acceptable and unacceptable to use AI for. Set clear performance measures and expectations for the outcome if misuse occurs.

3. Invest in Skill Building: Provide training not just on the tool, but on the skill of prompt verification and critical assessment of AI output.

You must articulate to your team: AI is here to augment you, to enhance you, not to erase you. Reinforce the need for human judgment for the final output. The human is still responsible for the answer, even if the tool provided the initial data.

Tammy's challenge is to push pause and get the team involved in co-creating the AI strategy:

• Ask the Fear Question: Sit down with your team and ask: "What about AI really scares you the most right now?"

• Identify 'Dumb Work': Ask: "Where do you see that AI could remove some of the repetitive work we do so that you can do more of what you're brilliant at?"

• Co-Design an Experiment: Pick one process this month and work with your team to co-design a small AI experiment to increase familiarity and comfort.

The Bottom Line: If your people cannot say out loud what they are afraid of, AI will quietly run your culture from the shadows. Lead the human side of automation.

In this quick Thanksgiving episode, Tammy J. Bond challenges the notion that gratitude is just a holiday tradition—it's a leadership strategy. She shares that leaders often get stuck in a "scarcity loop," focusing only on what is not working yet. This episode provides four quick points to help leaders shift their perspective from lack to presence, turning gratitude into a proactive force that expands positive outcomes and boosts team performance.

• The Scarcity Loop: Leaders commonly focus on the "yet's" (what they don't have yet, who's not performing yet), leading to a perception of lack. This scarcity loop expands what you don't want to see.

• Flip Your Focus: Flip the script by focusing on the "yet." Acknowledge the positive basics (e.g., "I'm grateful Frank shows up on time every day") and then shift to what you want next. What you focus on expands.

• Shift from Missing to Present: Do not focus your attention on what's missing. Shift your thinking to what is present and what you do have. This perspective shift attracts more of the positive into your field of vision.

• Gratitude as a Strategy, Not a Tradition: Gratitude should be a constant practice. When you focus on the positive around you, you can even find a "best gift attribute" in an underperformer, simply by shifting your attention from what is frustrating to what is present.

Before the holiday distractions take over, pause for 30 seconds and ask yourself this powerful question:

"What is here that I have been too busy [distracted] to appreciate?"

Take time to breathe in gratitude—not resentment, frustration, or fear. Always remember, leadership isn't something we're born with, it's something that we grow into.

Happy Thanksgiving! Remember that gratitude is a leadership strategy. What are you focusing on today, leader?