The Friendship Circle Kansas City is part of a global organization built around one purpose. Creating friendships and support for children and young adults with special needs, and for their families. Kansas City is one of the newer chapters in that global network.
Almost a year ago, I said something out loud that I thought was harmless.
I’d been talking with the guy who runs Friendship Circle KC, which he co-leads with his wife. I told him maybe a 5K could raise some awareness. Just an idea. The kind of thing you toss into a conversation and move on from.
He didn’t let me move on from it. Great idea, he said. You can lead it.
Congrats. I was the new program manager for a race I’d never run and never built.
Here’s why I didn’t say no. I have wanted to give back for years. Really give back, not the version where you write a check once a year and call it done. I never found the thing that pulled at me enough to build something around it. Then three and a half years ago I started running, and running became part of how I think about myself now. I’m a runner. That’s not a hobby I do. That’s an identity I carry.
And I already loved this mission specifically. Over a decade ago, someone I knew personally connected me with the Friendship Circle chapter in New Jersey. They asked me to talk with them about the importance of social media marketing, and I gave a presentation on it. That was over ten years before Kansas City ever had a chapter. So when this came to me, it wasn’t random. Running was already mine. And my older daughter, who is heavily involved and passionate about Friendship Circle, had given me a reason to love this exact cause years before I ever became its program manager.
Suddenly I wasn’t just supporting a cause I believed in. I felt personally responsible for whether Kansas City’s first year of this event succeeded, starting with my own kid watching how I handled it.
I had never managed a race. Not once. I run races. I track my splits, I study my cadence, I weigh my food, I track my macros, I let my data guide my outcomes. None of that prepared me for the other side of the starting line. A business plan to write. A proposal to pitch. Sponsors to chase down, companies came through with money and goods, gift cards, water, bananas, electrolytes. Permits. Insurance. Working with the local police department and public works to get the course marked off on public streets so every participant is safe. A budget with more line items than you’d guess unless you’ve done this before.
Obviously I wasn’t doing this alone. I was lucky to work with a genuinely passionate and highly motivated team of individuals who love this community, love the work they are doing, and loved doing really great work of getting runners registered, while I worked on executing the details. Whatever this event became, it became that because we operated as One Team focused on the purpose and mission of The Friendship Circle.
But it was personal too. I did not want to disappoint. Not an abstract audience. Something I’d finally found, after years of looking, that mattered to me.
We were originally set to run this race in May. Registration was soft. And here’s a truth I’ve seen play out in the corporate world more times than I can count. We come up with ideas that don’t work. We fail. Sometimes we fail fast and we suture it up quickly. Sometimes we let it bleed out far longer than it should, because we don’t have the discipline to cut it off when the signal is already clear. May was a moment to choose which one I was going to be.
I made the call to cancel May and postpone to a future date. That was a tough call. A disappointing one, to Friendship Circle KC, and to my daughter, who had been helping me plan this event and attend meetings from the beginning. But the reality was it wasn’t looking good, and I’d much rather go large or go home, as they say.
We postponed to today. For a fairly young chapter, with no track record to point people toward, the chances of getting a big turnout were not in our favor, and it was never going to fill itself through momentum alone. That’s just what year one looks like.
I held on to one piece of advice from one of my favorite business books, Raving Fans, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles: don’t aim for a satisfied customer. Aim to give people an experience so good that they become advocates for you without being asked. I decided that even if year one stayed small, we were going to give every runner an experience worth talking about, a reason to come back next year at 1% more and bring a friend when they did.
Then, about a month out, the numbers started to surge day after day. In the final stretch before the race, registration jumped again, with plenty of it from people who decided at the last minute that they wanted to run and signed up the week of the race. There was no clean spreadsheet explanation for how a first-year event, in a brand new chapter, with soft numbers a month and a half out, ends up here. Sunday morning, 250 people hit the pavement. A small festival built around the race itself. Men, women, and kids of every age, some running, some walking, all covering the 5K and the 1K together.
I tell you this story as a lead-in because it is not just a feel-good story; it is also a business story, whether or not there’s a race in it. The moment I got handed ownership of an idea I only meant to suggest is the same moment that happens every time someone gets promoted into a job they weren’t fully ready for. The call I made in May, choosing to fail fast instead of letting a bad turnout bleed out quietly for months, is a discipline plenty of leaders talk about and almost none of us practice when our own name is on the outcome. And the team that got runners registered while I was still deciding whether to postpone again is the same team every leader has, doing the work that makes the leader’s decisions look right after the fact.
There are three lessons for all of us as leaders that I took away from leading this event. All of them already happened in the story I just told you. Here’s what each one looks like once you pull it out and hold it up against how you lead your own team.
Building Toward Community
A high-performing organization runs on community.
A community forms around a shared mission and a shared set of values. People choose to show up. They opt into a standard because the standard means something to them. They respect each other’s distinct roles, and they pull toward an outcome larger than any one person in the group.
That is what got a team of volunteers to spend their days chasing down sponsors for a race none of them were being paid to run. That is what got a brand-new chapter, with no track record, to the starting line with 250 people on it. Nobody on that team was there because they had to be. They were there because the mission gave them a reason to show up.
Build toward that, and you stop needing to manage people into participation. They participate because what you built is worth it.
Fail Fast, Suture Quickly
In business, we talk a lot about ideas that don’t work. What separates leaders isn’t whether an idea fails. Most do, at some point, in some form. What separates leaders is what happens the moment the signal is already clear.
Some of us fail fast. We look at the numbers, we make the call, and we cut the loss before it grows into something bigger. Some of us let it bleed out instead. We keep the underperforming initiative alive out of hope, or pride, or the discomfort of telling someone it isn’t working, and the slow bleed ends up costing more than the fast cut ever would have.
May was that test for me. The registration numbers told a clear story, and the story wasn’t good. I could have kept the date, hoped for a late surge, and risked delivering a lukewarm event. Instead I made the call. Cancel May, reset, come back stronger in August.
That decision cost something real in the moment. It disappointed people who were counting on the original date. It meant telling my own daughter, who had been in the meetings with me from the beginning, that the thing we’d been building together wasn’t ready yet. Fail fast doesn’t mean fail painlessly. It means choosing the smaller, earlier pain over the larger, deferred one.
The leaders who struggle most aren’t the ones who make bad calls. They’re the ones who already know the call needs to be made and keep finding reasons to delay it.
Empowerment: The Third Leg of the Cycle
We’ve talked before in the Gold Standard Leadership Lab about the Golden Leadership Cycle. Reinvention. Resilience. Empowerment.
In Episode 5: Empowerment Isn’t a Strategy. It’s a Privilege, we broke down how real leadership never runs on titles or top-down control. Empowerment is the daily practice of creating conditions in which other people can step forward and lead with their own confidence, not yours.
I keep coming back to the idea of the spark. A leader doesn’t have to be the fuel, the structure, and the finish line all at once. A leader supplies the initial spark. That one sentence- maybe a 5K could raise some awareness- was a spark. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t a budget. It was just enough heat to get something moving.
What happens after the spark is where empowerment lives. My job, once the idea caught on, was to build the structure underneath it and then hand pieces of that structure to people who would treat it as their own. The team that got runners registered, that chased down sponsors, that handled details I never would have thought to track, took that spark and built something out of it that I couldn’t have built by myself.
You cannot manufacture buy-in through compliance. You build it by giving people room to step into what they’re good at. Once someone sees their piece of the work moving the needle on something that matters, you no longer need to remind them. They take it and run.
Creating the Ripple Effect
An empowered community sets off a chain reaction that extends beyond what you can see from where you’re standing.
In Ep. 12: From Ripples to Waves, we talked about how small, intentional leadership choices generate outward momentum that outpaces the choices themselves.
When a leader shows up with clarity and real investment in the people around them, the impact doesn’t stop at arm’s length.
Your core organizers catch the mission first. They stop treating the work like a checklist and start treating the outcome like something they personally have a stake in.
Your extended circle, the volunteers, the participants, the sponsors, feels that energy and passes it along. They invite people. They tell their own networks. The invitation multiplies without you touching it again.
And the wider community, the people watching from outside the immediate effort, recognizes something built on real substance. That recognition is what turns a single event into something people trust the next time you ask them to show up.
In Ep. 25: The Power of Giving, we talked about leadership being measured by what you give away. Time, energy, belief. That investment creates a wave that keeps moving after you’ve stopped pushing it.
The Raving Fans principle applies here directly. Treat your first cohort like they matter more than the numbers suggest they should, give them 1% more than they expected, and the numbers eventually catch up to how you treated them.
Practical Questions for Your Leadership
How do you see the people on your team? Not what you call them out loud in a meeting. What you privately believe they are to you and to the mission. That belief shows up in how you delegate, how you correct, and how much room you give someone to fail and try again.
Are you controlling outcomes or making room for empowerment? Step back from the tactical layer and give your people room to own what they’re responsible for.
What mission are you inviting people into, and did you find it or did it find you? Both paths work. Neither one excuses you from carrying it once you’ve said yes.
Action Step for This Week
Pick one project on your desk right now. Find the person on your team who has been operating strictly in execution mode, doing the work without owning the outcome.
Hand them the whole deliverable. Give them the objective, give them the resources, and step back.
Watch how they carry themselves once they know you trust them with it.
Key Takeaways
The moment you’re handed responsibility for something you only meant to suggest is often the real beginning of a leadership story, not a footnote before it.
Soft numbers in year one of anything new aren’t a warning sign. They’re the baseline you’re supposed to be building from.
A leader supplies the spark. The team builds the fire. Neither one works without the other.
Give people an experience worth talking about and they come back with someone else next time. That principle from Raving Fans holds true whether you’re running a business or a 5K.
How you privately see your team shows up in every decision you make about how much room to give them. Treat them as people worth building a mission around, and they will build it with you.
