The other day, I caught myself getting frustrated over something relatively small.
A message hadn’t landed the way I intended. Something had been handled differently than I expected, and honestly, it didn’t make much sense to me.
My immediate reaction wasn’t curiosity.
It was judgment.
“They’re not paying attention.”
I’ve been leading people long enough to know that this reaction is incredibly common. It’s also usually wrong.
When something goes sideways at work—a missed deadline, a misunderstanding, an incomplete task—our brains naturally try to explain what happened. Unfortunately, we often explain it by assigning motives to other people.
We tell ourselves stories.
“They don’t care.”
“They weren’t listening.”
“They should have known better.”
The problem is that by the time we’ve told ourselves that story, we’ve already stopped looking for the truth.
Over the years, both in air traffic control and in leadership roles outside the operation, I’ve learned that most breakdowns don’t begin with bad intentions. They begin with misalignment.
Someone heard something different than what was said.
Someone prioritized one task while assuming another could wait.
Someone made a decision based on incomplete information.
Someone was operating under constraints that nobody else understood.
In other words, the issue usually isn’t character.
It’s clarity.
One of the most useful leadership assumptions I’ve adopted is simple:
Assume good intentions until patterns prove otherwise.
That doesn’t mean ignoring mistakes. It doesn’t mean avoiding accountability. It simply means that before assigning motive, I try to understand what actually happened.
Because the moment we assume bad intent, the conversation changes.
Instead of asking questions, we start building cases.
Instead of learning, we start defending.
Instead of solving the problem, we begin protecting ourselves.
I’ve seen leaders create unnecessary conflict because they reacted to what they believed happened rather than what actually happened.
The reality is that most people want to do good work. Most people want to contribute. Most people want to succeed.
But wanting to do good work and understanding exactly how to do good work are not always the same thing.
That’s where leadership matters.
Great leaders remain curious long enough to uncover the truth.
They ask questions such as:
What did you hear?
What were you trying to accomplish?
What information did you have at the time?
What constraints were you working under?
Where do you think the communication broke down?
Those questions often reveal something surprising.
What initially looked like a people problem was actually a communication problem.
What looked like carelessness was actually confusion.
What looked like resistance was actually competing priorities.
Of course, not every problem is a clarity problem.
Sometimes accountability is necessary.
Sometimes performance issues are real.
Sometimes people repeatedly choose behaviors that damage the team.
But those situations reveal themselves through patterns, not isolated moments.
One mistake tells us very little.
Patterns tell us almost everything.
As leaders, our responsibility is to know the difference.
In high-pressure environments, assumptions are dangerous. Whether you’re managing aircraft, leading a team, or running an organization, decisions based on assumptions rarely end well.
Clarity requires curiosity.
Curiosity requires humility.
And humility often begins by assuming that the other person is trying to do the right thing.
The next time friction shows up, pause before creating a story.
Ask yourself:
Am I reacting to what actually happened, or to what I’ve decided it means?