Successful Doesn't Mean Supported

Good morning, afternoon, evening, whatever time it is where you are. I'm Megan, and today we're going to talk about something the MSP world is weirdly excellent at ignoring until it catches fire, which is on brand, frankly. We are very good at monitoring servers. We notice latency, we notice failed backups, we notice when the ticket queue starts looking like a boss fight nobody consented to. But people? People could be running at 97% CPU, fans screaming, memory leaking, emotional support raccoons chewing through the wires, And we'll still say, they're fine. They're our best employee. That is the problem. Today's talk is called Successful Does Not Mean Supported because a person can be articulate, reliable, promoted, client-facing, praised, trusted, and still be paying a brutal hidden tax to function inside the workplace. Especially if that person is autistic, ADHD, chronically ill, disabled, anxious, burned out, Or just built with a nervous system that did not come pre-installed with corporate small talk and fluorescent lighting tolerance. And before anyone panics, this is not a sit-in-a-circle-and-process-your-feelings session, although some of you could definitely benefit from that. No shade if that's your thing. We have tickets to close and geese to respect. This is a systems talk. This is about how we design work so more people can perform well without having to disappear behind the mask. I'm Megan Killian. I'm a founder, consultant, speaker. I have autism, ADHD, borderline personality disorder that is highly stigmatized, and I think this is the first time I'm saying it publicly. PTSD, CPTSD. I'm chronically ill with POTS, hypermobile EDS, anemia, and then a host of other things I won't get into right now. I'm a cancer survivor, former homeless single mother. And I'm also credentialed as fuck. I've done $550 million of B2B tech revenue. $50 million of that has been for MSPs. It's more than that now, but that was the last time I brought receipts and did the math. I'm a bestselling author and award-winning speaker. I went from BDR to BD manager to director of BD to VP of sales and marketing to 3x CRO in 5 years. I'm a founder and chief consultant. Basically, I'm a big girl and I know the gap. Between looking capable and being properly supported. This isn't an inspirational talk. I'm not here to talk to you about how great my life is and how I turned it all around. It's workplace design with fucking receipts. I think you just demanded context. Let's start with the person everyone thinks is fine. She shows up prepared. She writes the recap. She remembers the client's entire environment, their renewal date, the weird printer issue from last March, and the emotional state of the office manager who says, Quick question. Like it's a threat. She is great with clients. She is articulate. She is reliable. She is probably the person managers trust with messy situations because she just handles it. Because she handles it, nobody asks what it costs. That is the trap. In MSPs, we often mistake output for support. If the ticket got closed, the system worked. If the client calmed down, the communication worked. If the employee didn't complain, the workload worked. If they smiled on the call, they must be fine. Absolutely fucking not. This is like looking at a server that technically stayed online through a power surge and saying, great news, no infrastructure problems here! No. The logs are screaming. You just haven't looked. For a lot of autistic and neurodivergent people, the work itself is not always the hardest part. The harder part is everything around the work. The noise, the ambiguity, the constant interruptions, the meeting with no fucking agenda, the client emotion you're expected to absorb, the unwritten rules, the can you just hop on a quick call from someone who's apparently never met a fucking nervous system before. And yet sometimes the hardest part is performing normal while doing the job. The performance has a name. It's called masking. Before we go any further, I want to name something about this room that's not a room. Storm has 2 jobs. Some of you are going to hear this talk from the inside. You are the person who has been called high-functioning, intense, too sensitive, too direct, brilliant but difficult, great under pressure, or my personal favorite, a lot. Because if I'm too much, go find fucking less. Which is often corporate for, you are noticing things I would prefer not to deal with. Sorry, Megan, your pattern recognition is ruining my self-esteem because I think I'm perfect. Some of you know exactly what it looks like to co— to look competent while burning through every internal resource you have. You know what it is to handle the client, close the ticket, write the recap, smile in the meeting, and then spend the rest of the day recovering from what everyone else thought was just a normal interaction. For you, the job today is not to look for the shiny new identity crisis. We have enough side quests. Your job is to lead with language. Language for what it is costing you, language for what you need, language for the difference between, I can't do this, and, I can do this better if the system stops making it stupid. Not, I am too disabled to do this job, but, I need to be accommodated to do this job correctly, and as my employer, it is your responsibility to enable me. I'm not asking for too much. I am asking for just enough to get it done and get it done well so that your business can perform better. A lot of people do not need lower standards. They need clearer maps, fewer fake emergencies, and less workplace jazz hands pertaining to the culture. Now, some of you are going to hear this as leaders, owners, managers, service directors, team leads, the people responsible for building the environment. Other people are trying to survive. Your job is not to sit there thinking, oh no, have I accidentally harmed everyone I have ever managed? Possibly, but that's not the workshop. Your job is to notice where the system is creating hidden load, where expectations are vague, where urgency is undefined, where people are masking instead of communicating, where your best performers are becoming infrastructure, where they're fine has become a substitute for actual support. Because if you lead people, your job is not just to get output. Your job is to build the conditions where output does not require self-erasure. And here's the fun part, because apparently I do bring optimism to places occasionally. These are not competing jobs. The individual contributor does not need one talk and the leader needs another. It is the same mission. The person living it needs better language. The person leading it needs better design. And everybody in the room benefits when we stop treating human sustainability like a weird HR DLC and start treating it like operational infrastructure. So that's the frame. If you live this, listen for language. If you lead people, listen for design flaws. If you do both, congratulations, you are probably very tired, and this talk is aggressively for you. Now let's talk about masks. Masking is when someone suppresses, edits, or performs around their natural way of being so they can pass as acceptable in a given environment. For autistic people, that can mean forcing eye contact, it can mean suppressing stims, it can mean rehearsing every sentence before a meeting, it can mean mirroring someone's tone so precisely that you are basically running a live social emulation engine in the background while also trying to do your actual job, it can mean pretending the fluorescent lights are not committing war crimes against your nervous system, it can mean laughing at the right moment, Softening your language, hiding confusion, hiding pain, hiding overwhelm, hiding directness, hiding the fact that your brain is currently holding 12 tabs open and one of them is playing chanting music. And to be clear, masking is not always a bad strategy. In fact, I might argue that everyone needs to know how to mask some of the time. Sometimes it keeps people employed, sometimes it keeps people safe, Sometimes it helps you get through a client's call, a conference hallway, a networking event, a quarterly business review, or Thanksgiving with extended family, which is frankly its own unregulated combat sport. But here's the problem. A lot of workplaces confuse masking with professionalism. They reward the mask, they praise the mask, they promote the mask, then they act shocked when the person under the mask is exhausted, resentful, burned out, and Do yourself a favor and go to my LinkedIn real quick. It is linkedin.com/in/MeganKillian, or you can just put me in the top and I will pop up. I'm a top performer. I have risen to the top of every company I have ever been inside in my specific job description. I was the number one in my region at Radio Shack. I was the only person capable of doing my job at Erickson at the time that I left. I have quadrupled the revenue of businesses for From the time they hired me, so on and so forth. My average tenure is about 2 to 3 years because then what happens? I burn out. It costs me too much to mask like that. But I'm a great employee. And if I were accommodated, I could probably hang around a lot longer. But usually I'm not. So I burn out, move on to the next thing, and eventually I became a consultant. For the people in this room who live this, masking may have helped you survive. I'm not here to shame the tool that got you through the dungeon, but I do want you to know the tool has a cost. And for the leaders in this room, if your environment requires constant masking to be seen as professional, you are not measuring performance cleanly. You are measuring someone's ability to hide the cost of the performance. That's not leadership data. That is a corrupted save file. This is where it gets tricky, because masking often looks excellent from the outside. It looks like polish, It looks like composure. It looks like great with clients. It looks like always prepared. It looks like high functioning, which is a phrase I would personally like to launch directly into the sun, because high functioning usually means your suffering is not currently inconvenient to me. Here is a fake KPI that has done a truly impressive amount of damage: eye contact. Somewhere along the way, workplaces decided that looking someone directly in the face was a proxy for honesty, attention, confidence, respect, competence. Which is adorable. Incorrect. Adorable. Eye contact is not a performance metric. Light nodding is not a performance metric. Looking engaged in the socially expected way is not a fucking performance metric. The actual performance signals are things like, did they understand the ask? Did they write an accurate recap? Did they ask the right clarifying question? Did they identify the next step? Did they document the follow-through? Because competence is not always delivered in the social packaging people expect. For autistic, ADHD, trauma-impacted, anxious, exhausted, and honestly a lot of perfectly neurotypical people on a bad Tuesday, the correct social packaging can cost more energy than the work itself. So if you're an individual contributor in this room, here's your permission slip: you do not have to mistake someone's preferred communication style for your actual competence. And if you lead people, here's your warning label: if you measure the costume, you will miss the signal. The goal is not to make everyone perform professional the same way. The goal is to know whether the work is clear, accurate, complete, and moving in the right direction. That is the signal. Everything else might just be theater. MSP work is not fucking normal work, guys. I'm so sorry. How did you get here? I say that with love, but also with evidence and probably a little bit of an eye twitch. MSP work has stress with admin credentials. You have urgency, you have interruptions, you have ambiguity, you have escalations, you have client emotion, you have context switching, you have noise. And then you repeat that daily until someone says, why is everyone so burned out? Mystery for the ages. Now, some of this is the job. Things break, clients panic, security incidents happen, Microsoft moves a button and acts like it is innovation, printers wake up and choose violence. That is necessary difficulty. But a lot of what exhausts people is not necessary difficulty. It is stupid difficulty. Necessary difficulty is the server is down. Stupid difficulty is nobody knows who owns the client update. Necessary difficulty is the client is upset. Stupid difficulty is every meeting has no agenda, every request is urgent, and all the actual rules live inside the head of a senior tech admin, Brian, who is somehow both indispensable and unavailable. The problem is not that people are fragile. The problem is that the system is running hot. And when a system runs hot long enough, you do not get better performance. You get throttling, you get errors, you get shutdowns, you get people who look fine until they suddenly are not. For the people living this, your reaction to a high-load environment is not proof that you are defective. For leaders, if the same pattern keeps creating stress, conflict, errors, and burnout, you are not looking at a people problem. You are looking at an environment that needs better design. This is one of the most important slides in my deck. The ticket's not the whole quest. The visible work might be resolve the issue, document the fix, update the client, move on. Nice, clean, very cute. But underneath that, there is a hidden load stack. There is a sensory load. Noise, lights, rooms, events, interruptions, alerts, crowded spaces, too many inputs at once. There is cognitive load. Context switching, unclear priorities, half-written tickets, decision fatigue, missing documentation, trying to remember if urgent means urgent or just the client needs to know. Good. There's social load. Meetings, client tone, masking, office politics, trying to figure out whether someone is actually mad or just living in Teams like a Victorian debt collector. There's emotional load. Conflict, pressure, fear of being misunderstood, rejection sensitivity, shame after a mistake, the sheer psychic violence of being told to just communicate better with no actual instruction. And there is operational load. Unwritten rules, vague ownership, folklore, broken handoffs, processes that technically exist, but only in the archaeological record. When leaders only look at the visible task, they miss the hidden stack underneath it. And when individual contributors do not have language for the stack, they blame themselves. They think, why am I so tired? Why does this meeting wreck my whole day? Why can I solve the technical problem but still feel fried afterward? Why does one vague message send my nervous system into a side quest? Sometimes the answer is not, you are bad at work. Sometimes the answer is, the ticket was never the whole quest. You guys already know what unmanaged load does. Like, we're in tech. You know what would happen to a CPU if you were running it like this. And here's where we have that advantage. You know what happens when a system is carrying too much. You see recurring errors, latency spikes, noisy alerts, degraded service capacity thresholds. And you know the worst time to start caring about the system is after it fails in front of a client. Human beings work the same way. The signals are different, but they're there. Sudden sharpness, avoidance, more mistakes, brittle availability, fine with no detail. That person who used to respond thoughtfully now sends one-word answers. That person who used to ask questions stops asking. That person who is always reliable starts missing small things. The person who usually, who is usually direct becomes cutting. That person who is usually social disappears. Those are alerts. But too many workplaces only respond to visible distress— someone crying, yelling, quitting, going on leave, dropping the ball so badly the client notices. It's too late. Visible distress is a lagging indicator. By the time someone is visibly falling apart, the system has probably been throwing alerts for months. For ICs, individual contributors, learn your own alerts. Do you get sharp, quiet, avoidant, over-explainly, weirdly productive, in a doom spiral? That's me! For leaders, stop waiting for collapse before you believe the load is real. If you would not wait for a server to fully die before checking the logs, maybe do not wait for your people to break before adjusting the load. Wild concept. Very dudes approved. And this is where universal design comes in. Universal design is the idea that we should design environments tools and systems to work for a wider range of people from the beginning instead of building for one imaginary default person and then scrambling to patch reality later. In education, Universal Design for Learning talks about giving people multiple ways to engage, understand information, and show what they know. In MSP terms, better defaults Not heroic accommodations. Because the best accessibility work usually does not look dramatic. It looks boring. And boring is where the money is. Written agendas, basic updates, clear urgency rules, cameras optional whenever possible, quiet focus blocks, template handoffs— none of that is special treatment. That is basic workplace architecture. A written agenda does not only help autistic people. It helps the overbooked owner, the The ADHD tech, the anxious dispatcher, the new hire, the person with a migraine, the person joining from their car because life is fucking rude sometimes, and the person who actually wants the meeting to produce a decision instead of a shared sense of doom. Async updates do not only help neurodivergent people, they reduce forced context switching for everyone. Clear urgency rules do not only help people with anxiety, they stop the entire company from treating every pain Like the Death Star is approaching. Accessibility is not charity, it is better architecture. The best default is the one that helps the person who needs it most without making everyone else's life worse. That's the design standard. Regulation is a work skill, not a personality trait, not a moral virtue, not something we should just assume people magically developed because they got promoted into management and received a company credit card. Regulation is the ability to stay present, think clearly, communicate, recover, and choose your next move when your nervous system is under load. And in MSPs, that is not soft. That is uptime. If a tech is dysregulated, communication gets worse. If a manager is dysregulated, the team gets louder. If an owner is dysregulated, the whole company gets weathered. This is where DBT skills become useful. And no, DBT does not mean that this keynote is becoming group therapy. This isn't like a keynote. Mindfulness: notice the reaction before you feel it. DBT gives practical tools for not detonating under pressure. Emotion regulation: name what is happening before judging it. Distress tolerance: survive the hard moment without adding damage. Interpersonal effectiveness: ask clearly, set boundaries, repair conflict. Translated into MSP, that could look like, I need 10 minutes to organize the facts before I respond. We are escalated. Let's identify the actual next decision. I could take this if something else moves. I'm not refusing, but I am overloaded, and I need the priority clarified. This is useful for everyone. ICs need regulation language so they can signal load before they expire, explode, or disappear. Leaders need regulation skills so they do not make every high-stress moment worse by adding threat, ambiguity, or ego. The goal is not to make everyone calm all the time, That's not realistic. The goal is to stop making stress more expensive than it already is. Now for the field tool. The support audit is a quick scan for where people are spending hidden energy, and it is a downloadable at the end. This is not a diagnosis tool. This is not go identify who is neurodivergent and make it weird. Please do not make it weird. This is a workplace design tool. S, sensory load. Where are noise, lighting, interruptions, events, rooms, or constant alerts making the work more expensive than it needs to be? Unwritten rules. Where do expectations live in folklore instead of documentation? P, processing time. Where are we demanding instant answers when better work would come from prep? P, predictability. Where are we treating chaos as culture? O, output versus sustainability. Who is producing good work at a cost we are not measuring? Regulation tools. R, do people know how to pause, reset, clarify, and repair before stress becomes damage? T, trust and disclosure. Can people ask for support before they are visibly breaking? The better question is not, who needs special treatment? The better question is, where did we design friction into the work? Because if the same parts of the work keep creating confusion, overload, mistakes, avoidance, and conflict, that is not a personality epidemic. That is a design flaw, and design flaws can be fixed. So if you're an individual contributor, you do not have to disclose a diagnosis to ask for clarity. You do not have to explain your entire medical history to ask for structure. You do not have to provide a TED Talk about your nervous system to request the conditions that help you do good work. A lot of people hear accommodations and think they need to walk into a manager's office with a binder, a diagnosis list, a tearful monologue, and possibly get a supporting affidavit from a wizard. No. Sometimes the better move is just to ask for the output condition instead of I'm overwhelmed, try, I can do this well, but I need priority, order, and context clarified first. Instead of, this is too much, try, quality will drop if everything stays urgent. Which one of these things wins? Instead of, I need accommodations, try, this is the working condition that produces my best output. However, do be ready to escalate to, this is an accommodation for my disability, if necessary. This is not about becoming easier to manage. That framing is gross. Put it in the bin. This is about making good work easier to produce. That is a different conversation. And for leaders, if someone gives you a sentence like this, don't punish the clarity. Don't make them regret being specific. They're not being difficult. They're giving you an instruction manual before the machine starts smoking. Fucking read it! This slide is for my leaders. Stop managing by visible stress. If help only arrives after someone breaks, the help is too late. If someone has to cry, snap, quit, disappear, or make a client-visible mistake before you believe the load is real, your support model's broken. And yes, I know leaders are busy. I have been guilty of this inside my own organization. I scaled too big, too fast, and was collapsing underneath these types of things. That's why I know what works and what doesn't, is because I've done it wrong and I've done it right. I know MSP owners are wearing 17 hats and at least 4 of them are on fire. Been there, done that. But this is not about becoming a mind reader. This is about designing better defaults. Define urgent. Use rules, not vibes. Write the unwritten. Stop hiding expectations and folklore. Prep before discussions. Give people context before asking for judgment. Normalize reset breaks. Recovery's not a fucking character deficit! Protect focus. Deep work is not a luxury. Prepare conflict. De-escalate before you fucking dominate. And most, most importantly, you do not need a diagnosis list to stop designing work around unnecessary fiction. You do not need to know who's autistic to write agendas. You do not need to know who has ADHD to reduce random interruptions. You don't need to know who has PTSD to make communication less threatening. You do not have to know who's chronically ill to stop treating constant availability like it's morality. Good design helps the people who need it most and irritates almost no one except the people emotionally attached to chaos. Those people will survive. Probably. This is one of those places where MSP culture can get a little silly, because there's a kind of hero mode that gets rewarded. The person who jumps in, takes over, talks louder, moves faster, demands instant answers, and creates them. Feeling something is happening. Sometimes that's useful. Often it creates more blast radius. When stress is about to become damage, here's what not to do. Do not demand instant eye contact. Do not call shutdown attitude. Do not stack new tasks mid-escalation. Do not make calm down the plan. Telling someone to calm down has a near-perfect record of making no one calmer. Instead, pause. Ask, what's the priority? What can wait? What input is missing? What reduces error? Then do the useful thing. Reduce inputs, clarify the next move, switch to written, repair after the moment. This applies to client escalations, internal conflict, project chaos, and team stress. The heroic move is not pushing harder. The heroic move is reducing the blast radius. Very unsexy. Very effective, which frankly describes most good operations. You do not need a 5-year culture initiative to start. Please do not leave this room and create a committee. Please do not make a 47-page change management plan. Please do not name it something like Project Inclusive Synergy Phoenix. Goats will know! Start Monday. Pick one default and make it less hostile to brains under load. Define what urgent means. Send agendas before meetings. Document one unwritten rule. Create one handoff template. Make cameras optional when possible. Protect one focus block per week. Ask your team what is harder than it needs to be. The last question is dangerous in the best possible way because people know. They know exactly where the work is stupid. They know which meeting creates no value. They know which client handoff always fails. They know which process only works because Sarah remembers everything. They know which expectation is unclear. They know which quick question derails the afternoon. Ask, and don't punish the answer. You do not need to fix everything by Monday. You need to prove the system can learn. That is the cultural move. Not a poster, not a slogan, not a values exercise, a changed default. The mission is not to make every brain work the same way. It never was. The mission is to build teams where more people can do excellent work without disappearing behind the mask. That means successful does not mean supported, fine does not mean sustainable, quiet does not mean calm, reliable does not mean endlessly refillable, and different does not mean defective. If you are an individual contributor, I want you to lead with language. Language for the load, language for the ask, language for what helps you produce good work without turning yourself into a human patch cable. You do not have to wait until you break to ask for clarity. You do not have to disclose everything to request a better work You do not have to become someone else's preferred version of normal to be competent. If you lead people, I want you to lead with responsibility, not guilt. Responsibility. Look at the environments, look at the defaults, look at what you reward, look at who carries the hidden load, look at whether your best people are thriving or just useful, then design better. Design for clarity, design for constraints, design for the person under load, because eventually everyone becomes the person under load. Even the high performer, even the owner, even the loud, confident guy with a strong opinion about everything and suspiciously little documentation. The bar does not need to be lower. The path to the bar needs to be less stupid. That is the point. That is the mission. And if anyone disagrees, send them to Goots. Goots will handle it. Thanks, guys. Leave in the comments what sucked and what you would improve, and if you'd like to see this come to a conference near you. I obviously Prep this for MSP GeekCon. Oh wait, hold on, last slide. It's got all the resources. My bad. I'll leave it up here.