Quiet Committing: George Pesansky Of Myblendedlearning.com On The Five Commitments High Impact Leaders Make & Keep To Themselves Daily
An interview with Karen Mangia
Extend the Golden Hour. Identify any outcome you consider a win and ask, “What were the root causes of my success?” You cannot sustain what you cannot explain. Knowing the root causes of what helps you, your team, or organization win means you can extend the period of success and have wins more frequently.
As part of our series about “Quiet Committing: The Top Five Commitments High-Impact Leaders Make & Keep to Themselves Daily,” we had the pleasure of interviewing George Pesansky.
George Pesansky is the author of Superperformance: 8 Strategies to Reach Full Potential for Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization (Fast Company Press, 2025). Over three decades, George has coached operators, engineers, and executives in industries such as paper, steel, packaging, adhesives and hospitality to build utility; clarity on what, how, and why, so teams consistently create value. A former U.S. Army officer, he leads MyBlendedLearning.com and founded Capacity2Care a nonprofit encouraging professionals to donate their talent not just their time.
Thank you for making time for our visit. What was the first job you had, and how did that job shape the leader you are today?
Early in my career, I served as a U.S. Army Officer. The experience cemented two habits that still shape my leadership: making the standard visible, because you can’t sustain what you can’t explain and listening, learning, and understanding the work from the perspective of your team. If you can’t define what “good” looks like, you can’t spot an anomaly; and if you can’t spot an anomaly, you can’t improve. That is why I protect focused time for improvement every day.
We’re talking about quiet quitting in this series. What’s the greatest lesson you’ve learned from a job you decided to quit?
On July 4th, 1993, at Ft. Stewart, Georgia, my M1 tank crew won top gunnery in the squadron and that same day I chose to leave the military. I realized the experiences in my future would likely not be as valuable as those in my past. Leading a team directly engaged in creating value is the greatest experience a leader can have. The further we get from that experience, the more noise we introduce. Many people believe senior leaders hold the most power, but influence is filtered through layers of interpretation. The more time leaders spend directly creating value with teams, the more they learn about the work and how to improve it.
Employee engagement is top of mind for most organizations. How do you define an engaged employee?
An engaged employee has what I call “utility” — the ability to execute and the autonomy to influence the outcome. In practice, that means having clear outcomes and success standards for their role (the what), teachable and repeatable systems (the how), and an understanding of why their work matters and how anomalies impact customers and the business (the why). They have agency within guardrails to solve problems and run small experiments, and they show visible energy displaying a prevention mindset that surfaces anomalies early and helps make the work one standard better each day.
Say more about your Employee Engagement portfolio. What’s working? What’s not working? And what are you piloting now to address the Quiet Committing trend?
What’s working is our Golden Hour practice; understanding the root cause of success during any period of ideal performance. Extending the duration and increasing the frequency of these periods creates a winning record. The direct engagement with where value is being created, also called Gemba walks are very effective; by going where value is created and listening first, learning, and understanding the work, we can lower the temperature caused by the friction of waste and frustration. Our Improvement Factory philosophy helps us run fewer, better projects with visible outcomes that help us sustain results. Most organizations make improvement much more complicated than it needs to be. It is like any factory, with a culture, capacity, cost, and customers. Our goal is to create high-value outcomes; when we start thinking of it in a practical, not theoretical way, we dramatically increase the quantity and quality of the outcomes.
What’s not working? If everything is important, then nothing is important. The “Improvement Factory” has finite capacity; picking the priorities and measuring the outcomes helps select priorities and adjust them over time.
What are we piloting now? The deliberate minute, encouraging individuals, teams, and organizations to take a time out every day to make a deliberate commitment to improving, sustaining, or supporting a specific outcome.
As goes the leadership, so goes the team. How do you hold leaders accountable for their own level of engagement?
One of the most common patterns I have experienced is leaders being engaged in what matters to them, believing this engagement is all-purpose. Teams need to know you understand and support their execution of a vision. Engagement is not your pet project or the time and effort you are pouring into your priorities. Engagement is listening, learning, and understanding the team’s perspectives. Asking leaders to grade their own engagement on a project or initiative from the perspective of a team member is a powerful exercise.
The first phase of the pandemic ushered in the phenomenon called The Great Resignation, where employees left organizations to pursue greater meaning and purpose. Then came The Great Reshuffle, where employees left organizations to pursue promotions, pay, and perks. Now we’ve entered a third phase, Quiet Quitting, where employees are deeply disengaged. What do you believe to be the key drivers of Quiet Quitting?
The key driver, in my opinion, is the shift from “we” to “me,” and it started long before the Great Resignation. When I entered civilian life in the 1990s, I transitioned companies after only a few years at my first. My father, who rarely ever passed judgment on my decisions, made his opinion clear to me. He worked 42 years in the same company and largely the same location. He explained, “free agents can make a little more earlier in their career, but when you need reputation and loyalty, they will be sorry.” His words encapsulate a generational gap. He stayed with one company, focusing on loyalty and building a reputation; he was a company man committed to the “we.” This is the fundamental driver. Although there are many who still embrace the commitment to the “we,” more are really thinking about the “me” first — their personal needs and ambitions. Quiet Quitting is the natural evolution of this trend, preserving individual needs in an environment where organizations are more often not rewarding loyalty or respecting reputation. We all have to take care of ourselves.
What do you predict will be the next phase in the evolution of the employer/employee landscape?
I expect a radical shift in the next 24 months. I call this coming phenomenon Quiet Mastery where knowledge becomes a commodity due to the introduction of AI tools. Your utility, the ability to execute with specialized skills, will be what creates value. The gig economy will expand into the skill economy, where it will no longer be what you know, but what specialized capability you have mastered. The rise of skills-based marketplaces will transform traditional CVs and résumés, which have already been hollowed out by AI tools. I also predict that portfolios of demonstrated capability, not experience on paper, will change how the relationship begins.
What leadership behaviors need to evolve to improve employee engagement in a sustainable way?
There is a rather simple fork in the road: ask yourself, is the team aligned with our shared purpose and goals? Do we have clarity on the outcomes and definition of success? If the answer is yes, we know “what” needs to be done and “why.” Your role as a leader now is to listen, learn, and understand “how” you can improve the circumstances of execution. This is the difference between micromanagement (dictating the “how”) and “my leader has my back” collaboration. If the team is not aligned on the What and the Why, don’t waste any time on How it is pointless since our direction is unclear. We must start with alignment.
Change requires commitment and happens one choice at a time. What are the top five commitments you make and keep to yourself daily that have a material impact on those you lead?
- Extend the Golden Hour. Identify any outcome you consider a win and ask, “What were the root causes of my success?” You cannot sustain what you cannot explain. Knowing the root causes of what helps you, your team, or organization win means you can extend the period of success and have wins more frequently.
- Deliberately Improve. I go see and interact with the work that creates value for at least fifteen minutes, listen first, and leave with one agreed improvement I can influence that lowers friction for the team.
- One Standard Better. I update or create one standard with the people who use it, making the what, how, and why visible. The smaller and more focused, the better. I would rather have a few very high-quality agreed ways of doing important tasks than many generalized guidelines that are not useful.
- Replicate One Win. If you know the root cause of any success you have, where else can that best demonstrated practice be used? For example, discovering the relationships and trust you have built with employees has helped us win at retention. Can I build stronger relationships with my customer? Can I learn more about them and their work, as I have with my own team?
- Plan for Sustaining Results. Improvement is actually simple; we often make it way more complicated than it needs to be. If you want to raise the level of performance, the rate of addition (change) needs to be greater than the rate of subtraction (not sustaining the standards). It is very easy to focus on the new shiny thing we are fixing or improving, ignoring the leaks in the processes or standards we worked on last month or last year.
What’s the most effective strategy you’ve discovered to get back on track when you break a commitment you’ve made?
If you draw a curve, it is actually a series of straight lines. Navigating curves can be hard, and we sometimes get off track, often because we are looking all the way out at the entire curve. When you get off track, move your focus closer to the task or barrier in front of you. Find the straight line you can navigate, because you are only looking such a short distance ahead. Breaking big problems into smaller ones is the foundation of every improvement or problem-solving methodology.
Thank you for sharing these important insights. How can our readers further follow your work?
My author site including Superperformance and all of my published work and interviews //georgepesansky.com// Connect with me on LinkedIn //link//, also find resources at MyBlendedLearning.com //link//. If you’re a leader aiming to build a culture of Quiet Committing, I share tools and templates regularly!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/deliberateimprovement/
https://myblendedlearning.com/
About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000 organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Quiet Committing: George Pesansky On The Five Commitments High Impact Leade was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.