Ask Ovell, PO Box 150336, Grand Rapids, MI (2026)

07/20/2026

Eliminating middle management saves money in the short term and costs you your leadership pipeline in the long term.

82% of boards are planning to reduce headcount by cutting middle management layers over the next three years. (Korn Ferry CEO & Board Survey)

The business case looks clean on paper. The downstream consequences tend to stay out of that same conversation.

Middle managers are where frontline employees learn what leadership looks like in practice.

They're having development conversations, catching problems before they escalate, and helping their teams connect daily work to organizational direction.
When you remove that layer to get leaner, you remove the environment where your next generation of leaders was developing.

That gap surfaces three to five years later when the organization is asking where the senior leadership candidates are and why the pipeline feels empty.

Sustainable organizations manage costs and protect the conditions that allow people to grow into the leaders the organization will eventually need. Treating those as competing priorities is where the long-term damage starts.

Does your organization have a clear plan for developing leaders without that middle layer?

07/14/2026

The best leaders I've worked with treat feedback as an ongoing conversation.

I've sat in enough organizations to recognize the pattern. The annual review happens, the conversation is cordial, people leave with a general sense of how things went, and six months later nothing has changed. Managers wonder why performance isn't improving. Employees wonder why no one said something sooner.

When feedback only lives in a scheduled conversation once a year, people spend twelve months without the clarity they need to grow.

The leaders who genuinely develop their people build an environment where honest feedback travels in both directions, regularly, and every meaningful interaction becomes an opportunity to help someone get better.

That work is something I go deeper on in The Big House. If you want to explore the framework, you can grab a copy here:

➡️ https://askovell.myshopify.com/products/the-big-house?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_camp...

What does feedback look like on your team — ongoing or once a year?

07/09/2026

You can outwork everyone around you and still get overlooked.

Talented people stay stuck for years, delivering results consistently, while leadership struggles to describe what they're doing or where they're going. A few patterns drive this:

→ Your name sits out of the room. When decisions get made, that conversation happens without your name coming up. Strong work has to connect to a person to move someone forward.
→ Your wins stay invisible. Leadership fills in the blanks themselves when your contributions lack a clear picture, and they rarely fill them in your favor.
→ Growth conversations stay hypothetical. When nobody has explicitly said what you're ready for, your manager may have no idea you're prepared for something more.
→ Results sit in silence. Assuming your work will speak for itself means leaving your career in someone else's hands with no guaranteed outcome.
→ The ask stays unspoken. Clarity about what you want has to come from you first, because nobody advocates for something they don't know you need.

Hard work fills a role. Everything else determines whether anyone notices you're in it.

Which of these patterns resonates most with where you are right now?

Got a question about your career, leadership, or the future of work? You better ask somebody!™️

07/06/2026

Getting defensive after hard feedback is human. Staying there is a choice.

When critical feedback stings or feels unfair, a few practices help:

→ Separate the delivery from the message. Feedback doesn't have to come wrapped perfectly to contain something true. Ask yourself what's accurate before deciding how you feel about how it was said.
→ Ask one clarifying question before you respond. "Can you give me a specific example?" moves you from something vague to something you can act on, and signals you're genuinely engaged in the conversation.
→ Give yourself time before responding in writing. A day's pause gives your best thinking a chance to surface.
→ Close the loop once you've acted on it. Letting the person know what you did with their feedback builds trust with leadership over time.

Handling hard feedback well is a skill worth developing intentionally. The professionals who do it consistently turn difficult moments into forward movement.

What's the hardest part of receiving feedback for you?

Got a question about your career, leadership, or the future of work? You better ask somebody!™️

07/02/2026

The exit that blindsided leadership had a trail that started months earlier.

Month 3, contributions go unacknowledged. By month 6, that person stops raising their hand in meetings. By month 8, the resume is updated. By month 10, they're interviewing. Leadership finds out after the offer is accepted and calls it a surprise.

Retention is the pattern of decisions leaders make every day: whether to acknowledge someone's contribution, invest in a real development conversation, or notice when a strong performer starts going quiet.

Replacing a single employee costs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary. (SHRM) The financial case for early investment is clear, but the more important signal shows up long before the cost appears on a spreadsheet.

Three signals worth watching:
→ The person who used to drive ideas forward goes quiet in team meetings.
→ A high performer who worked ahead of deadlines starts meeting them exactly.
→ Someone who was engaged and easy to reach becomes harder to connect with.

Leaders who keep their best people catch these signals early, stay curious about what their people need, and advocate for them consistently enough that leaving never becomes the answer.

What early signal changed how you lead, and what kept someone on your team?

06/29/2026

For the first time on Ask Ovell, I'm the one with the question.

The Ask Ovell platform gives people a place to bring real career and leadership questions. Someone submits a question, I answer it. That's been the format, and today I'm flipping it.

What changed how you see leadership? What took too long?

For me, it was understanding that earning a title and earning trust happen on completely different timelines. The authority arrives on a specific date. The trust builds through how you show up, and that process starts over every time you step into a new role.

Please drop your answer in the comments.

06/25/2026

Every formal workplace complaint started as a smaller problem someone chose not to address.
85% of employees experience workplace conflict. 72% of organizations have no formal process to resolve it. (SHRM, 2026)

The pattern repeats in organization after organization: an interaction goes sideways, no one says anything, two people work around each other, the team feels the shift, and months later someone files a formal complaint. A single conflict that escalates to that point averages $160,000 and 318 days to resolve. (Speakwise, 2026)

Only 30% of leaders feel confident managing conflict effectively. (SHRM) That confidence gap is where escalation lives.

A few practices shift the pattern:
→ Name tension as soon as it shows up. A brief, direct acknowledgment of friction is far easier to navigate than a formal complaint six months later.
→ Model what resolution looks like. Leaders who handle disagreement openly set the standard for how their teams handle it everywhere else.
→ Build a pathway people can find when they need it. When the route to resolution is unclear, tension goes quiet, and quiet tension compounds.

Fostering civil discussion creates conditions where disagreement happens productively and tension gets addressed before it becomes a case.

Where have you seen this handled well, and what made it work?

06/23/2026

The pay gap you just discovered didn't start the day you found out about it.

Fair compensation is one of the harder conversations to initiate, and clarity is the goal. Building your case well starts with a few things:

→ Gather your data before you say a word. Document your responsibilities, results, and tenure, then research external salary benchmarks for your role and experience level.
→ Request a private meeting focused specifically on compensation. Give it space separate from any regular check-in.
→ Frame the case around your value. "Based on my contributions and what the market supports for this role, I believe my compensation should be adjusted to X" carries more weight than citing what someone else makes.
→ If they cite budget constraints, ask for a specific timeline and summarize the conversation in a follow-up email. Shared accountability works both ways.
→ Know your next move before you walk in. If the answer stays unclear or keeps getting delayed, that's information worth having.

Pay gaps persist in silence. You have every right to break it.

What made you finally speak up, and what shifted?

Got a question about your career, leadership, or the future of work? You better ask somebody!™️

06/19/2026

Grand Rapids has always known how to celebrate Juneteenth.

This city was honoring June 19th long before it became a federal holiday. The community shows up, carries the history, and reminds everyone that what was won then and what still needs to be built now are part of the same story.

Growing up here, across the street from MLK Park, I understood that connection early. Freedom declared and freedom experienced are two different things. The distance between them shows up in hiring decisions, in who gets developed, in who gets paid equitably, and in who gets passed over without explanation.

Juneteenth is worth celebrating fully. It's also a moment for leaders to look honestly at what equity looks like inside their organizations and what it will take to get there. The best organizations build equity into their daily decisions and treat this work as the ongoing commitment it is.

Happy Juneteenth, West Michigan.

What does this day mean to you, and what are you carrying forward?

06/15/2026

When managers disengage, the teams below them follow.

Gallup's 2025 data: manager engagement dropped from 30% to 27%, with the steepest declines among managers under 35. Since 70% of team engagement is tied directly to the manager (Gallup), that number cascades through the whole organization.

The organizations closing this gap are asking three questions:

→ Are your managers getting feedback, or only giving it?

Feedback systems get built for individual contributors while the managers doing the developing receive none on how they lead. A one-way feedback loop is a disengagement pipeline.

→ Do your managers know what good leadership looks like here?

The answer they need is a specific one. Standards shift between organizations, and what developed someone into a strong leader at one company transfers only partially at best. Managers who are struggling are often working hard inside a standard no one articulated to them.

→ Is there a real development path for managers?

A performance review and a development path are two different investments. Building one for managers with the same intentionality as the one for individual contributors changes what's possible on your teams.

The visual attached to this post maps out how that decision tree plays out.

What would you change first? What's holding organizations back?

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