Jacqueline ElliottLeadership Strategist | CEO, Mother, Wife, Legacy-Builder

As a business owner, everyone brings you “problems.”

20 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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1:22

A short, direct leadership coaching excerpt where two speakers advise business leaders to distinguish between chronic complainers (described as 'cancer') and employees with genuine, solvable problems. Leaders should shut down toxic complaining quickly, encourage candid reporting of real issues, and take responsibility for resolving problems—failing to fix problems makes the leader the problem.

Chapters

There's cancer in business. You have people that complain, and, you know, they just talk and complain and join little groups of people, and it just grows that way. And then there's those people that have an actual problem that they're desperate for a solution, and we tend to ignore them. And they keep their mouths shut because they don't want to come across as complainers. As a leader, you're going to have to differentiate between the two and know when one is an actual problem that's going to turn into something that's going to. That requires resolution. And you want to involve them and keep them open about telling you when there's an actual problem and also shutting the freaking cancer up because there's only so many matches you can light. You don't want to be consumed with that other bullshit and you want to make sure that you shut them up completely super fast. But when there's a voice and you know there's some truth to that voice and it requires resolution, you're going to have to be wise enough to be that leader and put that ego aside and be like, hey, listen, we got to work on this. That's the difference between good and bad leaders.
Yeah, yeah, write this down. If there's a problem and you don't fix it, you're the problem. Anytime that there's a problem in a company and you see that there's a problem and you're the leader, if you don't fix it, you're the freaking problem now. And so some of you in here, you get what you tolerate. Tolerate. Your team will look at you and they're like, you didn't do nothing about that.