Leadership Beyond the Office | Role Reversal Part 4

Let me tell you something about dishes.

You can do them every single day. You can scrub, dry, load, unload, organize the cabinets, and wipe down the counters, and nobody says a word. If you're lucky you're grabbing dishes from the counter and not from every table around the house.

Some don't say a word, not because they’re ungrateful but because they simply didn't notice. We often assign tasks to others in our minds without ever speaking them out loud. Well I do this, so of course, they do that. Sound familiar?

The silliest part, when they do the task, we think, "Good, they did their job." How wild is that?

And that’s when it hit me: This is what invisible work feels like. I immediately felt ashamed, realizing how much "invisible" work my partner, the team, and others had done that I'd never seen, let alone acknowledged (if you are reading this and one of those, sorry for not acknowledging and thank you!)

Before stepping away from my job, I had never truly seen the mental load my wife was carrying. Groceries. Scheduling. Pickups. Remembering birthdays. Keeping the house, and the energy in it, running.

When I became the one folding laundry at 10am, or packing lunches the night before, I didn’t just get frustrated, I started feeling forgotten.

And in that quiet space, with rubber gloves on (I do love a good pair of rubber gloves lol), I found a leadership truth no spreadsheet ever taught me:

If you only reward visible wins, you miss the heartbeat of your team.

In business, we celebrate the closers, the big dealmakers, the top-line numbers. But we often overlook the everyday behaviors that make those wins possible.

Here’s what the dishwasher taught me about leadership:

• Delegation isn’t just handing things off, it’s noticing what people are already carrying, and helping balance the load.

• Presence means showing up fully, even when the task isn’t glamorous. Sometimes wiping the counter is more powerful than sending another Slack message.

• Power isn’t about control. It’s about shared ownership. When everyone sees themselves as a steward of the team’s success, magic happens.

I used to believe leadership was about celebrating the big wins to drive momentum. One of my go-to lines at the end of each month, after a close, was: "Congrats, but it's not the buzzer beater!"

Now I realize leadership is about recognizing every impact. Especially the ones we’ve been trained to overlook. So next time you walk past the kitchen sink at the office or at home, ask yourself:

Who’s been doing the dishes?

And more importantly, have you acknowledged them and said thank you?