I've been rethinking Step Zero

I'm in Atlanta this week for a PDMA conference, and on Thursday I walked around the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. Most of it is closed, and the sign in front of the house where he was born says it's closed because of an ongoing emergency.

There's a lot of construction going on and not a lot of people working on it. I read some of King's words, recorded a video on my phone, and at one point broke off mid-sentence to say hello to a bee. The video's below, bee included.

What I was turning over on that walk is the thing I've been working through all year. I've been rethinking Step Zero.

If you're newer here, Step Zero is this blog and newsletter, and it's also a belief: before you can teach or learn any framework, any step one, two, three, four for anything in your life or your work, you have to become the right kind of person to do it. That's true whether you're helping engineers figure out what software to build or trying to get your health in order, and it's especially true in leadership. There's a chaotic, messy, hard-to-define process of becoming that comes before any neat progression of steps.

I started working on that idea earlier this year. I wrote the blog and the newsletter, I made videos, and I've been writing a book, What a Leader Owes Their Team. But the more I wrote and thought and prayed about it, the less Step Zero lined up with what I actually believe, both the name and the principle.

The palatable version

Over the course of this year I've had to admit something to myself. Step Zero was my attempt to make a message more palatable to people who might not agree with the heart of it.

The heart of it is this: the very first step, the whole act of becoming, is that we seek Jesus and He transforms us.

I know good people who aren't Christians. But to become a person who's equipped to do all the things I think humans are truly capable of, and to do them wisely and in a healthy way, with healthy boundaries, I think we have to become that person. And I think it's the Spirit that transforms and heals us.

So I'm changing my approach a little. I'm working on an idea I might step into next year, and I might spin down Step Zero, both the website and the concept.

I keep having conversations where what I really need to do is point someone to Jesus – to minister to them, pray for them, support them, and hold space for them to seek God and hear from Him. And as we do that, our ability to lead our teams, to think deeply about problems, and to differentiate ourselves so we can hold space in a non-anxious way all flows out of an identity rooted in Christ.

If you lead a team, you already know what that last one looks like in practice: staying steady in a tense room so the people around you can think. That steadiness has a source.

Frankly, that's a scary thing to say in the technology and business world, and I don't know how it's going to land. But the more I've worked through this, the less I can see any other way that's true, and I want to give people the truth.

Back on that walk in Atlanta, reading King's words, I kept thinking about the type of person we need to be and the values we need to hold so that we can serve each other. For me, that flows from Christ.

What I'm not doing yet

I'm not taking any action yet. I'm not taking the website down, and I'm not starting something new. I've been planning for 2027, and this is one of the things rolling around in my head as I think through what I might launch in January.

This is going out everywhere I post, LinkedIn included, which might be a little risky. I'm curious how you react to it, whether you're a believer or not.

It's where my head and my heart are right now.