Hi, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm specializing in helping leaders and organizations crack their activation codes, finding the simple tweaks to enhance both performance and engagement.

So years ago, I listened to this interview with a researcher who had just written a book on traffic,

like literal traffic, cars, highways, you know.

And to write this, he had done a deep dive into thousands of traffic reports over the years

to better understand what causes these mysterious jams that, at least here in the U.S.,

we seem to encounter constantly.

In the interview, he told the host, and I'm paraphrasing here from memory, that while his publisher

made him titled the book, Traffic Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us,

what he really wanted to title the book after doing all this research was idiots because ultimately over 90%

of the time according to him that's what causes traffic one person does something careless

and literally everyone else on the road suffers the consequences it always stayed with me it was

funny and honest and pretty revealing but But I'm not a traffic reporter.

My jam is activating teams.

So where am I going with this?

Well, I see a clear parallel in a lot of the workplaces where I'm hanging out.

As in, I step into a workplace where I'm seeing chaos or overwhelm or lack of collaboration

or pick your pain point.

And when I look under the hood of what's causing it, so much of the pain can be traced back to a small handful of senior leaders

who don't realize how much chaos they are inadvertently creating. It's like they're causing

traffic jams at work. Now, I'm not calling anyone an idiot. That is not great for my business. So maybe I'd call

my book difficult stakeholders. Like with bad drivers, we can't control them, so we need to learn to

navigate safely around them. Let's talk today about some of the tough stakeholder behaviors that we

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