The Humility of the Spreadsheet
I’ve been in enough leadership meetings to know that a spreadsheet can be a powerful tool. It can track budgets, measure outcomes, and, if you’re not careful, drain the very soul out of a room. If you’ve ever tried to motivate a team of smart, tired people with a pivot table, you know what humility feels like. It’s the quiet realization that your perfectly crafted formulas don’t account for the messy, unpredictable, and deeply human parts of the work.
And that’s where the good stuff starts.
I grew up in the Midwest, where humor isn’t so much a performance as it is a utility. It’s the oil that keeps the gears from grinding, the gentle nod that says, “I see you, this is hard, and we’re in it together.” We learn early on that taking your work seriously is different from taking yourself seriously. The former is about competence; the latter is a fast track to becoming the guy everyone avoids at the potluck.
There’s a certain kind of leader who believes their job is to be the hero of the story. They have the vision, they make the tough calls, and they expect the team to fall in line. I’ve never found that particularly inspiring. It’s lonely at the top, they say, but I’ve always thought that if you’re lonely, you’re probably doing it wrong. The best leaders I know aren’t trying to be heroes; they’re just trying to be human in the story.
They’re the ones who can laugh at their own quirks. They’ll admit they once tried to fix a morale problem with a memo or thought a new coffee machine would make up for a brutal quarter. That kind of self-awareness is a gift. It doesn’t undermine authority; it builds a bridge. When a leader can say, “Well, that didn’t work,” it gives everyone else permission to be imperfect, too. And in that space, real innovation happens. No one ever came up with a brilliant idea when they were terrified of being wrong.
I think of it like teaching my boys to fish. One of them loves it. He’ll sit there for hours, patient as anything, watching the line, asking questions about lures and weather patterns. The other one? He could not care less. He’s there because I’m there, and he’d rather be skipping rocks or poking around in the mud. My job isn’t to force them both to love fishing the same way. It’s to create a morning where one kid gets to feel the thrill of reeling something in, and the other gets to feel like it’s okay to be bored sometimes — and that we’re still spending time together. It’s about finding a little joy in the mess, even when the mess includes a tangled line and a kid who’s already asking when we can leave.
That’s what humor and humility do. They’re not distractions from the serious work; they’re the tools that make the work possible. Laughter is the shortest distance between two people. It’s the pressure release valve that lets out the tension before it builds into something corrosive. And humility is the quiet confidence that you don’t have to have all the answers. It’s the understanding that the collective wisdom of the team will always be greater than your own.
In the end, the work matters. It matters deeply. But the spreadsheet will never be the whole story. The real story is written in the moments of connection, the shared laughter after a long day, and the quiet grace we give each other when things don’t go according to plan. It’s about building something meaningful, together, with people you respect. And if you can do that, well, that’s a metric worth tracking.
