Hard to work with
My first leadership lesson looked like this: as a junior engineer I had an abysmal quarter or two. My manager asked me what was going on. After I gave them an assessment of the situation, they said that they believed me and went to bat for me.<p>Because of that manager's trust and belief in me even in the face of irrefutable evidence that I was doing poorly, I immediately became fiercely loyal to that manager and the organization, and I wanted to work harder for them.<p>I'm no 10x engineer, but any time I get frustrated with someone else's poor output, I think about this.