I'm always looking for a good leadership lesson in the midst of normal, everyday, mundane life. I'm afraid I found one the last two weeks right outside my front door.

We live in a small HOA neighborhood with narrow streets — so narrow there's no real street parking. People try anyway, half a vehicle up on the sidewalk, half on the street. It's a fire hazard waiting to happen, which is probably why our HOA is notorious for threatening violations on anyone who parks there. There are guest spots scattered through the neighborhood, but that's a story for another post.

This summer, it was time to seal the streets. Since the streets are maintained by the HOA and not the city, our property management company handled the coordination. And to be fair, the plan looked solid on paper: an email with maps, instructions, even color-coded directions for how to enter and exit the neighborhood while the work was underway. Clear plan. Should have been simple execution.

Until the contractors showed up a day early and started without telling anyone. They were halfway through Day One's work before the property management company even found out. Cue a flurry of frustrated back-and-forth emails — and, in the middle of it, homeowners and renters were told: don't drive on the freshly sealed side of the street for 24 hours, use the other side instead. They'd come back the following week to finish the second side.

Here's what those two days actually looked like: mayhem. Cars driving on the wrong side, undoing the work as it dried. The mail truck — the actual mail truck — drove straight through the barricaded section to maintain the normal route. As they say, "Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night," apparently, but somebody forgot to loop in the mail carrier about neighborhood paving.

I watched it happen again the second week and found myself defaulting to the obvious: I guess people just don't read their email. But then leadership guru John Maxwell's line came to mind, the one I quote often — "everything rises and falls on leadership." So walking to the grocery store tonight (since I couldn't drive my own car out of my own driveway because of said paving), I asked myself what was actually going wrong here. A few things stood out.

The first is that the second week was worse than the first — which is the real tell. Whatever the property management company tried after Day One clearly hadn't worked, and yet their fix for Week Two was… the same thing, again. Another round of emails. No one from the company on-site directing traffic. No flyers on doors for the people who don't check email. When your first attempt at communication fails, doubling down on that same channel isn't persistence — it's a refusal to diagnose the actual problem. Leaders circle back and find a different approach; they don't just repeat the last one louder.

The second thing is that an announcement isn't the same as preparing people for change. This is where my PROSCI change management training from years back keeps surfacing in my head. Their framework, ADKAR, walks people through change in five stages: Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement. An email is, at best, an attempt at Awareness. It says nothing about why the change matters (Desire), doesn't confirm people actually understood the plan (Knowledge), and does nothing to help them follow through in the moment (Ability) or stick with it once the frustration set in (Reinforcement). We got one stage out of five and called it a communication plan.

And that points to the third thing, the one underneath the other two: when people aren't complying, the instinct is to blame the audience. If only the owners forwarded the email to their renters. If only people read more carefully. If only they followed the rules. I get the frustration — but that instinct has it backwards. When a message isn't landing at scale, that's not a receiver problem. It's a communicator problem. The job of a leader isn't to issue the correct instructions and then be disappointed when reality doesn't comply — it's to create clarity in the middle of chaos, however many times and however many different ways that takes.

We didn't get that these last two weeks, and the cost is concrete: most of the work that was done is now damaged and will likely need to be redone, later this summer or next year. Somebody pays for that — either in deferred community projects or in higher HOA dues. That's what a failure of leadership actually costs, even in something as small as street sealing.

It's the same dynamic in a Fortune 500 company, a small business, or a little neighborhood in Mill Creek. While the size of the organization changes, the leadership principle doesn't. So here's the question worth sitting with: What are you doing as a leader to communicate and lead people through change — not just once, but until it actually lands?