06/15/2026
You can usually tell when people stopped fully trusting somebody’s direction.
Everything starts slowing down around them.
Suddenly people start checking everything twice.
Teams wait longer before moving.
Even simple announcements stop sounding fully settled to the room.
Nobody says this out loud at first.
But after a while people stop building confidently around the direction because they are waiting to see if it changes again next week.
A lot of founders think reputation comes from results alone.
Sometimes it comes from whether people believe your decisions actually hold.