Figuring out how to become a COO while enjoying the process.
The Adaptable Chameleon Podcast
Claim This Podcastby José Fernando Costa
97 episodes
Updated Daily
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Podcast Overview
Figuring out how to become a COO while enjoying the process.
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
1/6/2025
1 verified contact email on file for The Adaptable Chameleon Podcast
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Recent Episodes
August 10, 2026
#96 The wrong metric stayed green
<p>Some of the most expensive decisions in a working week don't look like mistakes. They look like diligence. You hold the standout application until the full shortlist is ready, because judging everyone on the same information is the fair thing to do. You put a senior technical voice into the room where commitments get made. You keep four things moving instead of sinking an hour into the one that's stuck. You make the case so completely that nobody in the room can argue back.</p><p>None of it flags as an error. That's the problem. The bill shows up two quarters later, in a metric nobody connects back, charged to a person who wasn't in the room.</p><p>This episode gets into the mechanics of that delay. Why a reviewer's presence can manufacture confidence without creating control, and leave everyone reasonably assuming someone else caught the risk. Why silence is never neutral — it's the only information the other side has about you, and they read it. Why switching tasks changes what's on your screen but not the state you're in, so the frustration you earned somewhere else lands on whoever asked you a fair question next. Why being right and being effective come apart faster than most competent people expect. And why goodwill reliably converts into more work long before it converts into more authority or more money — and what has to be named out loud for that to change.</p><p>The common move: stop adding people, meetings, and controls on top of a gap, and close the gap instead. That conversation is harder, slower, and about ownership rather than calendars. It's also the only one that removes the failure.</p>
August 3, 2026
#95 Great Leaders Pick Clarity Over Comfort
<p>There's a category of workplace behaviour that looks like professionalism and functions as self-protection. It's rarely deliberate. It's almost never called out. And it quietly transfers risk from the person avoiding discomfort onto the people around them.</p><p>This conversation takes apart four versions of it.</p><p>The manager who softens feedback in a 1:1 because the honest version would make them the bad guy — while the team watches the underperformance continue and starts doing the math on what else their lead has been avoiding. The engineer who writes "might be worth breaking this up" instead of "break this up," keeping a get-out-of-jail card that turns into a blame fight the moment something breaks. The consultant who buries a delay under fifteen minutes of context, mistaking a client's exhausted "just go fix it" for agreement, and paying for it in the far worse conversation that follows. The manager who answers an unsolicited fix with "would you take responsibility if it's wrong?" and never sees another proactive idea from that person again.</p><p>The mechanics are the same underneath. Ambiguity is comfortable because it can't be held against you. Volume feels like preparation. A hedge feels like humility. Deferring to process feels like rigour. All of it protects your position at the exact moment your position is what should be at risk.</p><p>The alternative isn't bluntness for its own sake. It's deciding what you actually want before you open your mouth, then saying that — and leaving enough silence for the other person to genuinely respond instead of just agreeing to make it stop. It's separating kindness, which is how you treat people, from niceness, which is what you do to stay liked. It's asking what someone was trying to solve before you explain why it isn't their job.</p><p>Trust doesn't come from being agreeable. It comes from being clear when clarity costs you something.</p>
July 27, 2026
#94 Comfortable explanations, uncomfortable truths
<p>Most failures in a team don't come from bad intentions. They come from taking the easy explanation instead of the true one. </p><p>This episode digs into the quiet substitutions leaders make without noticing: reassigning someone instead of having the conversation that would actually fix them, cutting scope instead of finding the dependency that's really breaking the sprint, staying silent about the behavior that's working instead of naming it out loud, taking credit for a win without asking what actually produced it, and promising a timeline the room wants to hear instead of the one the work demands. </p><p>Each of these looks like a reasonable call in the moment. But each one is a shortcut around discomfort dressed up as a decision. The conversation traces what it looks like to catch yourself mid-shortcut: to go stand where the problem is instead of theorizing about it, to treat a win with the same scrutiny as a loss, and to say the harder sentence before someone else is forced to say it for you.</p>
97 total episodes available with 1 transcripts
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This podcast updates daily.
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Yes, this podcast regularly features guests.
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