What's on Your Team's Plate?

I love lollies and chocolate. That first bite is an instant hit of joy. My brain lights up, my mood lifts, and for a few minutes, I feel fantastic. My willpower isn’t great either – I once demolished a six-pack of Curly Wurlies a colleague gave me in under five minutes (👋 hi Bek). It felt amazing at the time… until it didn’t. The sugar high faded, and I felt sluggish. If I repeat the cycle enough, the long-term consequences undo the short-term pleasure — just ask my FitBit scales!

Compare that to a week of eating well. At first, it feels hard – resisting the snacks, planning meals, holding myself accountable. The payoff is slower to arrive. But after a week or two, the benefits compound. I feel clearer, more energised, more resilient. The results last far longer than the fleeting buzz of a chocolate bar.

This tension between instant gratification and sustained wellbeing isn’t just about food. It’s also a perfect analogy for how I think about leadership.

Sugar Hit Leadership

A “sugar hit” style of leadership is when a manager barks orders, makes the decisions, and drives immediate action. It feels good in the moment: there’s clarity, speed, and a sense of progress. Metrics may even spike.

But, like sugar, the effect is short-lived. The team becomes dependent on the leader’s constant direction. Ownership evaporates. Initiative shrinks. The inevitable crash arrives – disengagement, brittle delivery, or firefighting because people only ever did what they were told.

It’s tempting to reach for sugar hit leadership because it works now. But over time, it leaves teams unhealthy.

Slow Nutrition Leadership

By contrast, “nutrition leadership” takes patience. It’s the style where you listen, nudge, ask questions, and give people room to experiment – even if that means mistakes.

Progress feels slower. Sometimes it feels like nothing is moving at all. But the results accumulate in a more meaningful way: teams learn, adapt, and build resilience. Just as healthy eating builds lasting energy, this kind of leadership builds lasting capability.

The real test is sustainability. A team led through slow nutrition may not produce the flashy, instant spikes of progress, but over months and years, they consistently grow stronger.

Think, Ted Lasso.

The Long Run and Brute Force

There’s another angle to this analogy I’ve learned first-hand. Sometimes I go for long runs while still eating poorly. I can try to brute force my weight loss through sheer effort, but it doesn’t get me closer to my real goals. My times stagnate, my weight doesn’t shift, and I feel like I’m fighting against myself.

Teams can fall into the same trap. They brute force progress by pushing harder or by going through the motions of process without real intent. I’ve seen teams doing every agile ceremony by the book – stand-ups, retros, planning – but treating them like a checklist rather than a means to learn and adapt. As Sooner Safer Happier warns, it becomes Cargo Cult behaviour: copying the form without grasping the purpose.

Sure, the team covers the distance – ceremonies are ticked off, velocity charts are filled in – but the underlying issues remain. Without a healthy foundation, brute force only delivers surface-level wins, while deeper goals – such as sustainable performance, resilience, and morale – stall.

A healthy team understands the purpose of those ceremonies. They adapt them, remix them, or drop them entirely in favour of practices that actually serve their context. Running harder won’t fix a bad diet, and blindly following process won’t build a great team.

Metrics Don’t Lie

Another reason I like this analogy is that in both health and leadership, metrics tell the story.

• In weight management, calorie counting and training logs expose the gap between what we want to believe and what’s really happening.
• In engineering teams, delivery metrics – cycle time, throughput, quality signals – do the same.

The sugar hit leader can’t escape the long-term data. Quick wins show up fast, but so does the drop-off. The nutrition leader may not see immediate spikes, but the slow, steady progress is visible if you track the right measures.

The lesson is to be guided by more than just today’s feelings. Both our bodies and our teams respond to consistency, not shortcuts.

Resisting the Temptation

I’ll admit, sometimes I still reach for the sugar hit. Both literally and as a leader. It’s human to want the quick fix – to solve the problem myself, to dictate the solution, to get the rush of speed.

But I’ve learned the aftertaste isn’t worth it. What feels satisfying in the moment often makes things harder tomorrow.

The harder path – saying no to shortcuts, trusting the process, guiding instead of dictating – is what builds lasting health. Whether it’s my body or my team, the real reward is resilience.

Final Thought

In the end, leadership is a lot like health. You can snack your way through with sugar hits and still limp across the finish line. Or you can build discipline, balance effort with nutrition, and achieve goals that last.

One approach makes you dependent on the next rush. The other makes you stronger for the long run.

So the next time I’m tempted to grab a block of chocolate – or to tell a team exactly what to do – I try to remind myself: the quick win isn’t the real win. Sustained health, whether for me or my team, is the only thing that endures.