The Adaptable Chameleon Podcast

José Fernando Costa
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  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Weekly

Figuring out how to become a COO while enjoying the process.

  1. 6d ago

    #103 Your Good Ideas Are Overloading Your Team

    Your team has a new tool, a new process, and the same pile of unfinished work. Every change promised improvement. So why is delivery getting worse? Good ideas compete for the same time and attention. Learning a tool takes work before it saves work. And telling everyone to copy a successful team means little if you don’t understand what makes that team succeed. This episode explores how leaders turn improvement into overload and how to stop. We discuss protecting a chosen priority, making room for the cost of adoption, and finding working examples whose conditions you can reproduce. The challenge is deciding what to pursue, what to postpone, and what people need to make the change work. Before you announce another improvement, what will you take off your team’s plate? Connect with José Fernando Costa- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jos%C3%A9-fernando-costa-397137153/- Medium: medium.com/@villager1598- Substack: substack.com/@villager1598

    #103 Your Good Ideas Are Overloading Your Team

  2. Sep 21

    #102 Your Effort Isn’t Proof Your Leadership Works

    You’ve offered coaching, pushed for better performance, and sent the team through training. What changed? Good intentions can keep a manager busy while the same problems persist. Coaching becomes pressure when someone hasn’t agreed to it. A lack of direction gets mistaken for a lack of motivation. Training attendance becomes proof of learning while the work shows no improvement. This episode explores what makes support useful: finding the cause of a performance gap, getting agreement on the work that change requires, and judging learning by what people do. How do you hold people accountable without treating every struggle as an attitude problem? When does helping become interference? And what evidence would show that your effort made a difference? Connect with José Fernando Costa LinkedIn: ⁠linkedin.com/in/jos%C3%A9-fernando-costa-397137153/⁠Medium: ⁠medium.com/@villager1598⁠Substack: ⁠substack.com/@villager1598

    #102 Your Effort Isn’t Proof Your Leadership Works

  3. Sep 14

    #101 Make Your Work Easier to Challenge

    Good work depends on being willing to hear what is wrong with it. But useful criticism rarely happens by accident. Ask someone for vague “thoughts” and you get whatever observation comes to mind. Let friendship make disagreement uncomfortable and weak work passes without challenge. Test an idea only against the assumptions that created it and you can prove yourself right while missing the problem that will break it later. This episode explores how to build better scrutiny into everyday work: asking questions that produce actionable feedback, separating criticism of the work from judgment of the person, and searching for evidence that could prove your decisions wrong. The goal is not more criticism. It is better criticism, aimed at the right thing, early enough to change the outcome. Connect with José Fernando Costa LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jos%C3%A9-fernando-costa-397137153/Medium: medium.com/@villager1598Substack: substack.com/@villager1598

    #101 Make Your Work Easier to Challenge

  4. Sep 7

    #100 What deserves the time of your team?

    Leadership breaks down when movement is mistaken for progress. A busy team can still be wasting weeks. One strong result can create false confidence. A quick yes can break an earlier promise. A reversible choice can drown in discussion, while a sound proposal dies under the weight of slides. This episode examines the judgment required to decide what deserves action, attention, and commitment. It explores how to separate repeatable performance from favorable circumstances, expose the cost hidden inside each new priority, and match the depth of analysis to the consequences of being wrong. It also makes the case for stopping work that has no clear purpose and replacing promises with proof people can inspect. The goal is not to move at any cost. It is to stop wasting effort on decisions that evidence, clear trade-offs, and a small real-world test could settle.

    #100 What deserves the time of your team?

  5. Aug 31

    #99 Stop fixing people, fix the system

    Most team problems look like people problems. Someone isn’t collaborating. The team ignores the process. Two leaders are fighting over resources. Communication keeps getting lost. Delivery slows down and everyone asks for more people. But treating the visible behavior rarely fixes what created it. Leadership means looking beneath the symptom. What incentives are people responding to? What process exists only inside someone’s head? What problem are two people trying to solve while they argue over competing positions? What decision is getting buried underneath unnecessary context? Where is existing capacity being wasted before more capacity gets added? This episode explores how leaders can stop reacting to symptoms and start designing better conditions for their teams. Because people adapt to the systems around them. Incentives shape behavior. Documentation creates consistency. Clear communication creates action. Shared problems turn opponents into collaborators. Better use of existing capacity can remove bottlenecks before another person ever needs to be hired. Before asking people to behave differently, look at what you have built around them.

    #99 Stop fixing people, fix the system

  6. Aug 24

    #98 When everyone agrees on different things

    Teams rarely fail because nobody is working. They fail because people move with different definitions of the work, different interpretations of the decision, and different standards for what counts as done. The result looks like progress. Products ship. Meetings multiply. Proposals get explained. Deadlines get met. Underneath that activity, nobody has confirmed that the work serves a purpose, that everyone understands the same thing, or that the quality leaders advertise matches the quality they approve. This episode examines how assumed alignment turns ambiguity into bloat, rework, resistance, communication silos, and weak output. It exposes why more explanation and more meetings can preserve the failure, then explores what leaders must do instead: test what people understand, connect those who hold the missing context, define the work and its purpose, and make standards visible through decisions. If the work depends on everyone filling the gaps alone, the organization isn’t aligned. It is gambling that private assumptions will produce the same outcome.

    #98 When everyone agrees on different things

  7. Aug 17

    #97 Silence Is a Signal Too

    Every team is reading its leader. Not the org chart, not the strategy deck, but instead the small, repeated signals about what actually gets rewarded, defended, and repeated around here. This episode digs into the quiet distance between what leaders intend and what their teams receive. A manager privately calls someone's work excellent, then says nothing until the annual review, and wonders why initiative faded. A request goes out wrapped in language that sounds precise and means nothing, and four days disappear into decoding it. Someone volunteers to coordinate, builds the tracker, assigns the work, and never once touches it — then discovers the team has quietly chosen a different person to follow. A proposal gets full backing in a one-on-one and no defense at all in the room where it dies. A change initiative gets relaunched under a new name, again, while the one team that made the last version work goes unexamined. The through-line: teams don't act on what they're told, they act on what they observe. Recognition withheld is instruction. Vagueness is a tax someone else pays. Support that evaporates under resistance teaches a lesson that lasts far longer than the meeting. We look at where those signals leak, why good people stop volunteering, and what it costs to close the gap between stated intent and visible behavior.

    #97 Silence Is a Signal Too

  8. Aug 10

    #96 The wrong metric stayed green

    Some of the most expensive decisions in a working week don't look like mistakes. They look like diligence. You hold the standout application until the full shortlist is ready, because judging everyone on the same information is the fair thing to do. You put a senior technical voice into the room where commitments get made. You keep four things moving instead of sinking an hour into the one that's stuck. You make the case so completely that nobody in the room can argue back. None of it flags as an error. That's the problem. The bill shows up two quarters later, in a metric nobody connects back, charged to a person who wasn't in the room. This episode gets into the mechanics of that delay. Why a reviewer's presence can manufacture confidence without creating control, and leave everyone reasonably assuming someone else caught the risk. Why silence is never neutral — it's the only information the other side has about you, and they read it. Why switching tasks changes what's on your screen but not the state you're in, so the frustration you earned somewhere else lands on whoever asked you a fair question next. Why being right and being effective come apart faster than most competent people expect. And why goodwill reliably converts into more work long before it converts into more authority or more money — and what has to be named out loud for that to change. The common move: stop adding people, meetings, and controls on top of a gap, and close the gap instead. That conversation is harder, slower, and about ownership rather than calendars. It's also the only one that removes the failure.

    #96 The wrong metric stayed green
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Figuring out how to become a COO while enjoying the process.

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