Be the leader you’d actually want to text on a bad day.

Authority that is only available for good news is not much use to anyone. What people quietly measure is whether they could bring you a mess without it becoming a bigger mess, and that gets decided long before anything goes wrong, by how you handled the last small thing. If the answer is no, you find out last and at the worst time.

Think about who you would text at eleven at night and why: they do not panic, they do not lecture, they reply. Do one of those well this week. React calmly to one piece of bad news, and skip explaining what they should have done.