The Turtle and the Thousand Cuts
Early in my executive career, people called me the Iron Maiden.
I had earned it, honestly. Tough, decisive, unflinching — the person who walked into the burning building and made the call nobody else wanted to make. In the rooms I came up in, showing emotion was a liability, so I built the armour thick and I wore it well. It worked, too. For a while.
Many years later, I was given the nickname of “turtle”. Hard shell, soft centre. Still hard to knock over, still willing to make the brutal call when it’s needed. But I’ve stopped pretending there isn’t a whole human under the shell. That shift from Iron Maiden to turtle is the biggest change I’ve made as a leader, and I can point to when it started.
I was part of a company that bought six businesses in eighteen months. Every one of them came with a restructuring. New org chart, new redundancies, new “synergies” to go capture. If you’ve never lived inside a company doing this, here’s what it feels like from the floor: the ground never stops moving under you.
We called it integration. The people living it called it something more accurate. Death by a thousand cuts.
They were right. It wasn’t one hard, clean reset that let people grieve and move on. It was a slow drip. A team gone this month, a function absorbed the next, a familiar face missing every few weeks and no announcement about where they went. People stopped putting themselves into anything, because they’d learned that whatever they built might get dismantled in the next round.
And here’s the part I still can’t quite forgive.
While we were cutting people by the hundred and lecturing everyone about being lean, we were quietly still paying for one executive’s golf club membership. And another’s NBA season tickets.
Think about what that does to a workforce. People always know. They know precisely what gets protected and what gets cut, and no amount of town-hall language about “difficult but necessary decisions” survives the fact that someone in accounts payable lost her job while someone upstairs kept his courtside seats. You can’t message that away. They can see it.
So I went to the North America CEO and said it out loud. The thousand cuts had to stop. Not the hard decisions — sometimes you genuinely do have to cut, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of cowardice. But the drip had to end. And the golf membership had to be the first thing gone, because you cannot ask people to sacrifice while you’re visibly refusing to.
Now, the old version of me would have walked in with a cost-benefit analysis. Built the business case, quantified the attrition risk, made it airtight on the numbers. That’s what the Iron Maiden did.
But that wasn’t a numbers conversation, and some part of me had finally figured that out. It was about fear. About fairness. About what people can actually hear when they’re scared for their livelihoods, which is almost nothing. Because fear inside a company isn’t a mood you deal with at the edges. It’s an operating condition. Frightened people don’t innovate. They don’t take the risk, don’t raise their hand, don’t tell you the truth about what’s actually broken. The fear becomes the thing in the way — and you can’t budget your way around it if you won’t even name it.
He listened. Somewhat. A few things changed, not enough of them, not fast enough. I left many months later.
I don’t tell that story as a win, because it wasn’t one. I tell it because it’s when I understood that the armour I’d spent so many years building was the exact thing that would’ve stopped me from saying what needed saying. The feelings weren’t a distraction from the business problem. They were the business problem. And I could only see that clearly once I was willing to lead as an actual human instead of a shell.
I see this everywhere now, once you know to look for it.
A leadership team knows a strategy is dying but nobody says so, because someone senior is welded to it and disagreeing feels like a personal attack. So everyone nods and the company drives off the cliff politely, right on schedule. Or two good executives start with a real disagreement about direction and three meetings later they’re not fighting about strategy anymore, they’re fighting about whether they respect each other — and the actual decision never gets made. Or a whole workforce hears “transformation” and just freezes, because the last three transformations came with layoffs and now every change lands as a threat.
We call these strategy problems. Communication problems. Performance problems. And sure, they are. But mostly they’re emotional problems, and you cannot fix an emotional problem with a better slide.
The armoured leader can’t touch any of it. You can’t name a fear you refuse to feel yourself. You can’t build trust from behind a shell. The Iron Maiden gets you compliance. She does not get you the truth — and the truth is the only thing you can actually fix anything with.
Here’s where people get nervous, so let me be clear about it. Becoming a turtle did not make me easier on results. It made me better at getting them.
The thing that actually kills struggling companies isn’t disagreement. Healthy organizations argue all the time. It’s when the disagreement stops being about the work and starts being about identity. The second “I think you’re wrong about this” turns into “the fact that you’re wrong tells me who you are,” facts stop functioning. Now the evidence against someone’s position isn’t just inconvenient, it’s a threat to their standing and their sense of self, so they dig in, everyone gets more certain, and you end up with a room full of smart people drowning in data and learning nothing from any of it.
That company, six acquisitions deep in eighteen months, was stuck exactly there. The real question underneath had quietly stopped being “are these the right cuts” and turned into “are we the good guys or the bad guys.” That’s a brutal question to answer honestly while everyone’s busy defending the answer.
Empathy is what breaks it. When you can lead as a whole human, when you can actually say “I know this is frightening, and here’s what I don’t have figured out yet”, you take identity off the table without taking accountability off it. A mistake stops being a verdict on who someone is and goes back to being information about what to do next. If I have to prove I’m a good leader, every mistake is evidence against me, and I’ll fight it tooth and nail. If I’m just trying to become a better one, a mistake is data. That’s the whole difference, and the soft centre is what makes the hard accountability something people can actually survive.
I’m not telling you to process the entire emotional life of your organization before every decision. The turtle keeps a shell for a reason. There are still moments that call for cold, unsentimental force, and I can still bring plenty of it.
But the leaders who get the results everyone claims to want are the ones who know when to lead from the shell and when to lead from the centre. Who’ll name the fear in the room instead of pretending it isn’t there. Who cut their own golf memberships before they ask anyone else to give something up.
It took me an Iron Maiden’s worth of years to become a turtle. My only real regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. The armour kept me safe. But it was the soft part, the part I spent years hiding, that finally made me any good at this.
