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A middle manager sits in a 1:1 with their boss. They nod along to strategic priorities they already know are unrealistic. The deadlines dont match the staffing plan. The new initiative competes with the last top priority. The team is already stretched thin. But the manager doesnt say itnot plainlybecause honesty can be misread as incompetence, negativity, or a lack of readiness for the next level. Two hours later, that same manager is in a team meeting projecting confidence about those same priorities. They translate contradictions into something coherent, reassure direct reports who are already anxious, and say, Well figure it out, while privately wondering how. Later, at lunch with peers, they compare notes on workload and shifting expectations. Everyone laughs in that awkward were fine way. No one admits theyre drowningbecause even peer relationships can feel political when resources are scarce. Heres the question were not asking: Who can middle managers actually be honest with? In too many organizations, the answer is: no one. Thats not a personality problem or a resilience issue. Its a design issueone I call Organizational Latchkey Syndrome: a workplace reality where middle managers are handed responsibility and expected to figure it out with limited authority, limited support, and limited psychological safety. As a licensed psychotherapist, I see this pattern constantly: organizations demanding emotional intelligence from people inside emotionally unintelligent systems. Its like asking someone to practice healthy attachment in a relationship that punishes vulnerability. And because middle managers are the emotional and relational bridge between strategy and execution, Organizational Latchkey Syndrome doesnt just burn people out. It quietly breaks culture. Why middle managers cant be safe in any direction Middle managers are often told they need more EQmore empathy, better communication, stronger coaching skills. And yes, EQ matters. But middle management already demands a high level of emotional intelligence. The problem is that many organizations ask for high-EQ performance from managers while building systems that make it risky to tell the truth. This is a high-EQ role inside a low-EQ system. Upward: They perform competence Safety is conditional. You can raise concerns, but only if theyre packaged correctly. You can push back, but only if you already have political capital. You can speak candidly, but only if you can guarantee a solution. In many work cultures, the emotional subtext of leadership is: Bring answers, not complexity. So managers learn to manage impressions instead of surfacing realityand self-protection replaces reflection. Downward: They perform steadiness Middle managers are expected to provide stability for their teamsespecially during change. Theyre asked to maintain morale, protect psychological safety, coach performance, and hold space for stress. But many managers dont have full information, which means theyre asked to create clarity they dont possess. So they buffer uncertainty, absorb pressure, and make it make sense. Thats leadershipand its costly. Emotional labor without recovery becomes emotional depletion. Sideways: They manage scarcity In a healthy organization, peers are where managers can exhale. In many organizations, scarcity activates competition. When budget, headcount, or executive attention is scarce, peer relationships become strategic. Managers perform camaraderie while privately feeling isolated. Everyone says theyre busy, but no one says, Im not okay. Put those directions together and you get the most under-acknowledged reality of modern middle management: they are organizationally isolated in the role designed to connect everyone else. Organizational Latchkey Syndrome is an execution problem If we treat middle management isolation as a wellness issue, well respond with wellness solutions: a workshop, a coaching module, a reminder to take PTO, encouragement to set boundaries. Those supports can help individuals. They dont fix the system. When people feel psychologically unsafe, they shift into self-protective mode. They share less, ask less, challenge less. And when your middle layer goes into self-protective mode, the organization pays the price. Heres what breaks: 1) Feedback stops traveling upward. When managers cant be honest about capacity, risk, or contradictions, senior leaders make decisions on partial information. Risks surface late. Surprises multiply. 2) Innovation stalls. You cant access your most creative, strategic thinking in survival mode. And managers cant model psychological safety they dont experience, so teams learn to keep their heads down. 3) Execution quietly breaks. A manager gets handed three top priorities, each requiring full-time focus. They know the team can realistically handle one, maybe two. So they say well figure it out and watch their team burn out trying to deliver the impossible. Execution erodes in missed deadlines, quality slips, and people quietly opting out. As one reader put it in response to my last article: being in the middlemanaging up, down, and sidewayscan make psychological safety nearly impossible when each side has competing priorities that weigh you down. That isolation isnt a side effect. Its a design flaw. What manager-safe spaces actually look like If middle managers are isolated by design, then support has to be intentionalnot assumed. A manager-safe space is any structure where managers can tell the truth early without it becoming a performance liability. Heres what works in practice: 1) Peer cohorts that are truly confidential. Same-level managers (not direct competitors), clear confidentiality norms, a consistent rhythm, and facilitation. The goal is simple: a place to say, I dont know, before that becomes burnoutor resignation. 2) External coaching that doesnt report back. A protected space to process the role and name what cant be said inside the normal system. If coaching feeds into evaluation or succession planning, it stops being safe. 3) Executive sponsorship that actually covers them. Cover means a senior leader who protects the messenger, backs early risk-flagging, and names tradeoffs publicly so managers arent left absorbing the fallout alone. 4) Clarity on decision rights. If managers dont have authority, stop evaluating them as if they do. Define what they own, what they influence, what requires escalationand commit to not second-guessing decisions after the fact. The litmus test Can your middle managers tell the truth early without consequences? Can they say This isnt resourced, I need help, or I dont agreeand still feel trusted afterward? If the answer is no, you dont have a training problem. You have a design problem. Unil middle managers have real coverclarity, capacity, and communitymany will keep doing what latchkey kids do best: theyll figure it out alone. This is Organizational Latchkey Syndrome in full effect. And its entirely fixable.But survival shouldnt be the standard for your culture. And it cant be the foundation for your leadership pipeline. The question isnt whether theyre resilient enough to keep going. The question is: how much longer can they sustain it? And what will it cost your organization when they cant?
Category:
E-Commerce
Spend any time on social media, and its only a matter of time before one genre of content starts hitting your timeline: Someone telling you they make a fortune by doing something that sounds absurdly easy. (And that you can, too.) Maybe they (kind of) show you how to design and sell your own sweatshirts or notebooks, a venture that supposedly earns them five figures a month. Or maybe they tell you about how they started a $100,000 business with no inventory. Whatever the enticing story is, the ending is usually the same: they offer to teach you how to do the same. And who would say no to easy money? Get-rich-quick how-tos have existed foreverand more recently, side hustles have become a hallmark of American existence. According to SurveyMonkeys 2025 Workplace Culture and Trends survey, 72% of U.S. workers either already have a side gig or are considering picking one up. That might explain why the past few years have flooded platforms like Instagram and TikTok with get-rich-quick guides, many of which seem to carry nearly identical talking points. These social media solopreneurs supposedly make incredible money by working only two to three hours a day, and theyre generous enough to share their wisdom with you. But how is anyone supposed to separate the legitimate techniques from the scams and the flops? Enter: the side hustle reviewer. A TRY GUY FOR SIDE GIGS The stated purpose of side-hustle review accounts is simple: they test out money-making schemes so you dont have to. The people behind them are basically business guinea pigs who flip phones on Facebook marketplace and design T shirts that are print-on-demand (in which a third party creates the shirts the side hustlers design after a customer makes the purchase) on platforms like Redbubble and Shopifyall to see if they can actually make a buck. Other side hustles could include posting product videos on Amazon, or starting a newsletter. Often, theyll break down how much money they made, and sometimes, theyll even walk you through the fine print of the trade. This might sound altruistic on its face, and it can be. But in a way, its also its own kind of side hustleone that, like all the others, comes with its own business incentives. Few people know this better than Ryan, the 40-year-old tech worker behind Side Hustle Review. (He keeps his surname private to protect his full-time job.) Thanks to his 229,500 followers on TikTok and 473,000 on Instagram, Ryan says that sometimes, side-hustle platforms approach him with a simple offer: if he promotes their ecosystem, theyll give him a cut of every paid sign-up he generates. Unfortunately, he adds, many of these platforms take would-be hustlers money without ever actually making money for them. In light of these offers, Ryan openly admits he could start an evil arc, exploiting viewer trust for personal gain by endorsing bogus money-making platforms. I’m not saying I would, he says, but the fact that that could happen makes me go, I do have something very precious here. Thats why he always turns these offers down. Its not just sketchy courses, either. When asked to name the weirdest side hustle hes ever tried, Ryan dished on one he actually hasnt tried: selling images of his feet. (Although hes never uploaded a foot photo himself, he has received emails from less-than-ethical platforms asking him to share an affiliate link with his users in exchange for a cut of their sign-up fees.) [Users] pay the money to post their feet pictures thinking they’re going to make the money back, and they never do, he says. At the same time, some of the ideas floating around on the internet are totally legitimate. SEPARATING WHEAT FROM CHAFF The demand for the kind of service Ryan and other side-hustle reviewers provide is clearly there. The internet is rife with online courses and guides that claim to explain how to set up various businesses in exchange for a few hundred (or thousand) dollars. Ryan says he receives 80 to 90 DMs per day from viewers who want him to review this or that course, which is part of why hes begun work on a site called review.courses. He hopes the site could grow into a sort of Yelp! for side hustles, where users can post their own reviews. As Ryan points out, the price tags some courses carry are incredibly high, especially for a product with no real regulatory body. Some can range from $5,000 to $8,000. When you go to buy a $2,000 laptop, how many reviews do you watch? Ryan asks. Ten, 15, 20 before you make your purchase? None of this exists for courses that teach you how to operate an online side hustle, and the ones that tend to go viral the fastest offer people what they most want: easy money. Some of these courses are complete cash grabs, Ryan saysthey could be extremely vague, AI-generated, or copied straight from a guide the creator themselves previously purchased from someone else. Once you buy the thing, it’s trash course, trash content. WHEN SIDE HUSTLE REVIEWING BECOMES THE SIDE HUSTLE With the right strategy, Ryan says, you can make good money by creating, say, a print-on-demand T-shirt empire. Same goes for dropshipping, where you sell products without any actual inventory by purchasing the items from a third party after someone hits Place Order. When asked which side hustles viability actually surprised him, Ryan called out user-generated content: brand-related media created by social media users instead of the companies themselves. This could include product review videos, including Amazon on-site videos (product videos that anyone can post onto product pages in exchange for a cut of the commission if a customer makes a purchase after watching). Ryan was also pleasantly shocked by how easily he found success creating a newsletter, a scheme hed thought for sure must be a scam. I get a 40% open rate, he says with audible surprise. I guess people do want more emails. And yet, it turns out that reviewing side hustles is more profitable than the hustles themselves. While Ryan cited $5,000 in gross revenue from testing in 2024, he made $35,000 from Side Hustle Review. That said, 90% of the latter income came from sponsorships, a revenue stream hes since ended to preserve editorial independence and trust. I find every sponsor comes to me with desired sales outcomes, he says, which really easily pushes me into becoming more of a salesperson. Given the direction corporate America has taken side hustles seem bound for continued expansion, and their growing popularity is an ever-present sign that many workers, mistrustful of large companies, are bracing for a big shift. While some side hustlers are hedging their bets against an uncertain economy, others might be working to compensate for the bite inflation has taken out of their pockets. And the rest, Ryan figures, probably just want some disposable income. Regardless of the reason, he says, I think were all feeling a bit of a squeeze.
Category:
E-Commerce
As Anthropic and OpenAI duke it out with Pentagon matters, Cowork capabilities, and model launches, its important to remember that technology is not the goal. It is a means to an end. Its value comes from helping people solve daily problems and giving them one less thing to think abouton a global scale. However, people must first realize theres a problem and understand how technology can solve it before AI can make a meaningful difference.When things click, its always a matter of consumer education, which leads to expanded adoption, which in turn leads to society-wide impact (in that order). Each step can happen swiftlyor take months or years to complete. This patterneducation first, adoption next, transformation lastrepeats across sectors. Its also a tale as old as (human) time. The lesson from past cycles like the cloud and mobile web: The best AI-powered systems wont be the ones with the highest investment totals or most bells and whistles; they’ll be the ones with tech that unceremoniously makes real-world processes faster, cleaner, cheaper, and more resilient. Technology adoption at scale isnt an overnight phenomenon; its a signal that technology has crossed a threshold from curiosity about “the new thing” to daily driver. AI has tremendous potential, but we in the tech world have lost the plot on making this matter for real people. Ive been fortunate enough to see this cycle play out a few times in my career. For example, when I worked on the first iPhone, it was impossible to predict a future powered by dating apps, ride-sharing, mobile payments, or social media. Now, its hard to remember a time before we could run our lives through our phones. Our breakthrough was delivering an ecosystem once the tech was powerful enough and the world was ready. Because of the backbone we created, new platforms emerged that allow people to leave their wallets at home and conveniently pay via their phones, or tap a button to get a ride. Once consumers realized the power and ease of solving real-world problems with a swipe or tap of their fingertips, adoption took off like wildfire. The same principle was true when we built the first Nest thermostat. From the beginning, the goal was to apply technology to make energy more efficient, from both a capacity and cost standpoint, for households and regular people. We talked about building AI-powered devices that could understand human behavior and adapt accordingly. We had the vision, but needed AI to advance in order to make progress technologically possible and developmentally practical. For example, a popular, seemingly humble feature like package detection on a Nest doorbell camera took nearly a year to develop. The models were heavy. The hardware was constrained. The development cycles were long. We were crawling toward a clear goal with hundreds of hurdles in our way. By the time we perfected computer vision over the course of more than a year, consumers understood the problem that Nest was solving and how adopting the system would help them reduce utility costs while using energy more efficiently. It was at this point that the transformation at scale couldand didhappen. But it takes more to scale meaningfully than shipping innovation and pushing updates to consumer devices. You need to combine the latest technology with the level of consumer interest to solve the problems we face on a daily basis. At Millthe food recycler company I now runwe started by focusing on households, helping people manage food scraps and deliver them back into the food system, one kitchen at a time. That phase mattered. Education that leads to behavior change always comes first. People must realize theres a system-wide problem and understand why it exists before tech can help solve it. Food waste, for example, is an industrial problem. Grocery stores discard millions of pounds of food every day. Behind every supermarket is a loading dock crowded with dumpsters and compactors that are consuming space, energy, and laborand these valuable resources end up getting sent to a purgatory of methane production. Developing an enterprise-grade, AI-powered food waste system at Mill, and seeing it adopted by major players like Amazon and Whole Foods Market, is a signal that weve entered a new phase. Its clear that reducing food waste isnt just about nudging individual habits. Its not just about putting last nights lasagna in the right bin. Its about removing entire classes of waste from the system. Artificial intelligence makes that possiblenot because its flashy, but because its finally reliable, affordable, and fast enough to operate at scale in the physical world. With the iPhone, smart devices like Nest, and now AI, perspective matters. But above all else, tech leaders need to keep in mind that we must be solving real problemsnot generating tech for techs sake. Progress in this physical era of AI requires logic and restraint as much as ambition. Fortunately, weve been here before. The internet was speculated to become a Wild West of lawless virtual worlds and digital avatars. It became a functional tenant of digital society, grounded by email, maps, commerce, and communicationmundane tools that solved ordinary problems at an unprecedented scale. The story of AIs next chapter is steeped in precedent. Hype will fade. Models will commoditize. Launches will grow quieter. What well hopefully be left with are AI-powered systems that work to solve everyday problems while improving life in the physical world, rather than distracting from it.
Category:
E-Commerce
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