The Goldfish — The Leaders in Our Neighborhood

You’ve met this leader. You might be sitting in their Monday morning standup right now.

It starts the same way every week. “Alright team, here’s what we’re focused on this week.” And they lay out three or four priorities with real energy, real conviction. The team writes them down. They adjust their calendars. They start moving.

By Wednesday, something’s shifted. A conversation with their boss. An email from a client. A LinkedIn article that sparked an idea. And now the priorities are different. Not adjusted — different. Thursday’s standup has a new list. The old list isn’t acknowledged. It just… doesn’t exist anymore.

I coached a director — we’ll call him Terrence — whose team had a name for this. They called it “the Monday reset.” Every Monday, whatever they’d been working on was up for renegotiation. Not because the strategy changed. Because Terrence had a new thought over the weekend.

When I asked his team about it privately, one of them said something I’ll never forget: “I stopped writing things down. There’s no point. Whatever he says Monday will be different by Thursday.”

That’s not a team with low motivation. That’s a team that’s been trained to stop caring about direction because direction doesn’t stick.

The Goldfish doesn’t think they’re inconsistent. In their mind, they’re responsive. Agile. They’re the leader who reads the environment and adapts. That’s what good leaders do, right?

Not like this.

There’s a difference between responding to new information and resetting every time you get new input. Agility means adjusting your approach while holding the destination steady. What The Goldfish does is change the destination every time the wind shifts. The team is rowing hard — they’re just rowing in a new direction every week.

I told Terrence: “Your team isn’t underperforming. They’ve just learned that effort doesn’t compound. Why build on Monday’s work when Thursday’s priorities will make it irrelevant?”

He looked surprised. “I thought I was keeping us nimble.”

“You’re keeping them dizzy,” I said. “There’s a difference.”

What it’s like to live next door to The Goldfish.

Exhausting. But not the kind of exhausting that comes from too much work. It’s the exhaustion of wasted motion. You put in real effort on something Monday, and by Friday it’s been replaced by something else. The work you did doesn’t get acknowledged as wasted — it just disappears, like it never happened.

Over time, the team develops a survival strategy: they wait. They learn not to act on Monday’s priorities until they see if those priorities survive to Wednesday. Which means nothing happens until midweek. Which means the team looks slow. Which makes The Goldfish frustrated about execution speed. Which makes them change direction again. Another loop.

If this sounds familiar — if you just recognized your own Monday morning standup — here’s the thing.

The instinct to respond to new information is a good instinct. But at your altitude, your team needs a steady signal more than they need a fast one. They need to know that what they’re building this week matters next week. That effort compounds. That direction holds.

Try this: before you change a priority, ask yourself one question — “what happens to the work my team has already done?” If the answer is “it gets thrown away,” you need a very good reason to make that change. Because every time you reset, you’re not just changing direction. You’re spending your team’s trust.

And trust, once you’ve spent enough of it, doesn’t reset on Monday.

The question on the porch:

If your team had to describe your priorities from two weeks ago — could they? Would their list match yours? If you’re not sure, that tells you everything.

The Leaders in Our Neighborhood is a series about the patterns we all recognize — in the people we work with, and sometimes in ourselves. If something here hit close to home, that’s not a problem. That’s a starting point.