A balancing act all leaders must grapple with is the short-term benefit of moving fast with minimal drag from a personally curated “Team Yes,” versus the long-term satisfaction that comes from building a diverse team that will simultaneously challenge, support, and push the boundaries of your current state positions and thinking.

Your personal self evaluation should take precedence over the self evaluation that is required as part of your annual performance review at work. In doing so, you’re making it clear to yourself that your personal performance and well-being takes priority to what is happening at work. All too often, work takes precedence, we get stuck on the hamster wheel, and we’re left personally unfulfilled.

Are you feeling disengaged or ‘stuck’ at work? Does it feel like you’re trudging through mud and that the light in your eyes has dimmed? From my own personal experience, it can be very difficult to pinpoint the root cause of these feelings and it’s even harder to break through to an improved state of well-being and engagement.

Second, here’s a reminder to hiring managers everywhere to hire veterans. Why? Veterans are resilient, they know how to persevere, they understand collaboration and teamwork, they’ve acquired valuable skills from one of the best training and human development organizations on the planet.

Operating in the absence of organizational clarity means that unwritten rules and ad hoc processes become the norm. Since nothing is codified and communicated, the organization’s culture becomes one of firefighting and crisis management. Fiefdoms are established, job protectionism flourishes, and information about what’s really going on is traded like state secrets.

Far too often, when confronted with a challenge, we talk. We talk to deflect. We talk because we don’t know what else to do. We talk to release nervous energy. To make matters worse, when we start talking, we usually start relaying a story of a similar challenge that’s happened to us. The individual who’s going through the challenge doesn’t want to hear about our suffering or similar situation, they want to be heard.