WHAT GROWING UP IN BULGARIA TAUGHT ME ABOUT LEADING

I moved to the United States from Bulgaria when I was twelve.

Nobody explains to a twelve-year-old the specific texture of the cultural shift they're about to experience. You just arrive, and you watch, and you try to figure out how things work here by observing the things that don't work the same way they worked there.

The thing I noticed first about American professional culture — years later, once I was actually in it — was how much energy went into managing feelings.

The Culture I Came From

In Bulgaria, the dominant social register is direct.

People there are not unkind. In fact, some of the most generous, loyal people I've ever known are Bulgarian. But professionally, they operate on a different axis. Expectations are high and excuses are low. When someone falls short, they're told. When a decision is wrong, that's said plainly. The feedback arrives without the lengthy preamble of American professional communication — the setup, the softener, the careful framing before the actual point.

I didn't understand this as a feature at the time. It was just how things were. I didn't notice the directness the way you notice it when it's gone.

I started noticing it when it was gone.

The American Professional Culture

American corporate culture, at its best, produces something genuinely valuable: psychological safety, collaborative energy, the sense that ideas can be put into the room without the person who offered them being diminished.

At its worst, it produces something else: a collective agreement to not say the true thing, in the interest of preserving the feeling in the room.

The zombie initiative. The leader who knows the project is pointless, whose team knows the project is pointless, whose skip-level knows the project is pointless, and everyone smiles and tracks the metrics anyway. The feedback conversation that never quite says what it means. The performance review that rates someone three out of five and tells them they're doing well. The standard that exists in the employee handbook and nowhere else.

This is not a conspiracy. It's the emergent behavior of an organizational culture that has, over time, decided that being liked is safer than being clear.

What the Outsider Sees

When you grow up outside a culture and then move into it, you develop a specific kind of perception: you notice what insiders take for granted.

The insider doesn't see the water they're swimming in. The outsider does, because they remember what the other water felt like.

What I noticed, as someone who came in from outside: how much organizational communication was not actually communication. How much of what passed as leadership was performance — the appearance of accountability without the substance. How many of the things that got said in meetings were not the things that people said to each other afterward.

And how much damage this caused. Not in dramatic ways — in slow, quiet ways. Drift. Deferred correction. Problems that grew from small to large because the system didn't produce the honest conversation that would have stopped them early.

The Thing I Had to Learn

Here's the part that complicates the narrative.

When I got into leadership, I overcorrected toward the warmth model. The directness I had internalized from a Bulgarian upbringing felt, in American professional contexts, like harshness. So I softened it. I adopted the patterns I saw around me. I became, in my written communication especially, much more diplomatic than my natural register.

And I watched myself produce the same problems I was observing in others.

The gap between what I said and what I meant created exactly the ambiguity that allowed drift to develop. My preference for warmth in the short term compounded into harder conversations in the long term. The feedback I softened and deferred became the culture problem I then had to reverse.

The lesson, eventually: directness and care are not opposites. You can hold both. The failure mode is not having too much of one or the other — it's believing they're mutually exclusive when they aren't.

The clearest leaders I've worked alongside were both. Direct enough to name the true thing, without ceremony. Warm enough that the true thing landed as care, not criticism.

That's the balance I'm still trying to get right.

Why I Wrote the Book

I wrote Leadership Isn't Personal because I spent years watching organizations repeat the same mistakes — not because people were incompetent, not because they didn't care, but because the dominant leadership culture discouraged the honest diagnosis of why things weren't working.

The book is my attempt to provide that diagnosis. Not diplomatically. Directly.

Not because directness is always comfortable. Because the indirect version — the softened version, the version calibrated toward not making anyone uncomfortable — is the version that keeps broken systems running longer than they should.

Expectations are high and excuses are low. That's not a harsh worldview.

That's a respectful one.

The people you're leading deserve to know what you actually expect from them.

The least you can give them is clarity.