Crying Babies, Hiring Challenges, and the Problems You Choose to Have

My wife and I recently welcomed our first child into the world! Sloane Carotti was born 7/5/2025. Of course, there’s a lot to celebrate with her arrival, and perhaps I’ll take time in future editions to bring her into the forefront of our discussions, but for now, we’ll use an incident that occurred earlier this week to highlight a frame that applies to work, life, and well…parenting too I suppose.

The incident with my daughter parallels an issue I’ve experienced at work as well. I used to participate in weekly leadership strategy meetings as the Chief Operating Officer at a growing mental health practice. As part of these discussions, we were often weighing strategic decisions against the potential upside and downside of said decisions. Hiring, for example, was always a bit of a challenge (as it is for most companies). If we hired too quickly when the demand for mental health services wasn’t readily clear, then the organization would be saddled with the responsibility of paying that new hire without generating sufficient revenue to account for the salary burden. Hire too slowly, and by the time that demand for services did become clear, we might be too late to fulfill that need.

Onboarding employees was another perceived trade off. Onboard new employees slowly, as I had advocated for, suggested to the employee that there was time to learn the role and feel psychologically safe enough to perform the duties and responsibilities. Onboard quickly, and risk the psychological safety of the new employee, yet accelerate their entry into the daily work responsibilities in a way that also boosts earnings as well as tests the employees self directedness.

As with hiring, and onboarding, our daughter comes with her own set of unique tradeoffs. We were recently visiting family about an hour away from home. As we came close to leaving for the evening, we decided to feed her a bottle. We hoped she’d feel full and satiated, allowing us a calm ride home. Sloane doesn’t just eat and instantly relax. It takes time to feed her, and time to relax her post feed – usually about 30mins. As she finished her bottle and we went into soothing her, she wasn’t having it. 7pm turned to 7:30pm and 7.30pm quickly to 8pm. Not a lot of soothing happening.

Which prompted this question and frame that I now leave you with:

• In the case of Sloane’s feeding, we either choose to inherit the problem of soothing her at our family’s house, trading time away from our personal home (and a difficult next 24hrs of disrupted sleep/eating routines), for the benefit of soothing her and having a calm ride back. Either that, or choose to take her home – wailing and crying away, thereby trading an anxiously tense car ride home for the benefit of maintaining a sleep/eating routine.
• In the case of hiring in the above, hire too quickly and trade being proactively prepared for the possibility of not having the demand for that person’s services. Hire too slowly, and miss the demand for services altogether.
• In the case of onboarding, onboard too slowly and lose momentum, trading perceived psychological safety in bringing a new hire on board in a way that makes them feel comfortable for the potential downside of moving too slowly and missing an opportunity to have them learn trial-by-fire style.

A challenge that I see many leaders face is that they see critical decisions as zero-sum. If I do x, I lose out on y. And yet, when you frame it this way – which problem do you want to have? – you’ve just positioned this in such a way that you’re intentionally preparing to solve the second and third order consequences of the decision you’ll be making.

As you go through this week, solving problems, navigating strategic decisions, managing family commitments, or perhaps taking care of a crying baby, just remember – you’re in the driver's seat on your decision making. You can make whatever decisions you need to make, just be prepared to take care of the problems that come with it – make sure they’re the problems you want to have.

Thanks for reading as always.

Time to win the week 🏆

See you next week :)

– J

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