The Fourteen Stations of the Post

The first draft was good.

Cass knew it was good because she got that little flicker in her chest - the one that meant this is a real person saying a real thing and people will feel it. She’d been doing employee advocacy long enough to know the difference between a post that would get polite likes from colleagues and one that would actually stop someone mid-scroll.

Maeve Hartley, VP of Customer Success at StratusEdge, had sent it over in a voice note at 11pm on a Tuesday. Cass had transcribed it, tidied the edges, kept the bones. The post was about a client call that had gone badly - properly badly - and what Maeve had learned from sitting in the discomfort instead of rushing to fix it.

There was a line in it: I stayed quiet for nine seconds. I counted them. Nine seconds of a client telling me we’d let them down, and for once I didn’t interrupt with a solution.

It was specific. It was a bit raw. It was Maeve.

Cass sent it back with a note: This is brilliant. Small tweaks flagged in yellow. Ready whenever you are.

Round two came from Maeve’s chief of staff, Greg.

Greg had “some thoughts.” Greg always had some thoughts. His thoughts were: could they soften the bit about the call going badly? StratusEdge didn’t really want to lead with failure. Also, could they add context about the company’s overall client satisfaction scores? Just so people knew this was an outlier.

Cass removed the word “badly” and replaced it with “not as expected.” She did not add the client satisfaction scores. She wrote back: Happy to include a broader point about learning culture if that helps, but stats might feel a bit out of place in a personal reflection.

Greg said that was fine. Greg said he’d run it past Helen in Brand.

Round three. Helen in Brand had not changed much, but she had changed everything. She’d swapped “let them down” for “hadn’t fully met expectations.” She’d cut the nine seconds line and replaced it with: Taking a moment to listen is one of the most powerful things a leader can do.

Cass stared at the sentence. It was the kind of thing you’d find on a poster in a hotel lobby. Framed. Behind glass. Next to a photograph of a lighthouse.

She wrote back, gently: The nine seconds detail was doing a lot of heavy lifting here - it’s what makes this Maeve’s story rather than a generic leadership insight. Could we keep it?

Helen said she understood, but the word “counted” felt a bit clinical. Could Maeve have “noticed” them instead?

Round four. Cass changed “counted” to “noticed.” Something small died.

She sent the revised draft back. Helen approved it. Cass felt the brief, dangerous warmth of thinking they might be close to done.

Round five arrived on a Friday afternoon, which should have been a warning. Owen from Legal had been CC’d. Owen had no problem with the post “in principle” but wanted to flag that referencing a specific client interaction, even without naming the client, could be perceived as a breach of confidentiality norms. Could they make it more general?

Cass removed the client call. She replaced it with “a challenging conversation.” She did not specify with whom, or about what, or when. The post now described a challenging conversation in which Maeve had paused to listen. It could have been about anything. It could have been about a parking dispute.

The nine seconds were still there. Barely. Floating in a vacuum.

Round six. Owen wrote back to say he was happy. Cass forwarded the approved draft to Greg, who said he’d loop in Maeve for final sign-off.

Round seven. Maeve resurfaced.

“I barely recognise this,” she said on a call, and Cass wanted to say I know, I’m sorry, I watched it happen in slow motion. Instead she said: “I think we can pull some of the original voice back in. Let me have a go.”

She went back to the first draft. She rebuilt it, carefully, like restoring a fresco. She kept Helen’s “hadn’t fully met expectations” because she’d learned to pick her battles. She smuggled the nine seconds back in. She added a new closing line from Maeve - something about how the client had called back two days later, and how that second call had been different.

It was good again. Not as good. But good.

She sent it round.

Round eight was Rhys from the exec team. Rhys had not read the previous seven rounds. Rhys had what he called a “top-line observation,” which was that the post didn’t mention StratusEdge’s new partnership programme. Could they work it in? Not in a salesy way. Just organically.

Cass tried to think of a way to organically mention a partnership programme in a post about listening during a difficult conversation. She could not think of one, because there wasn’t one, because those two things had nothing to do with each other.

She wrote back: Might be better suited to a separate post - happy to draft one focused on the partnership programme next week?

Rhys said sure, but could they at least add a line about StratusEdge’s commitment to long-term client relationships?

Round nine. Cass added a line about StratusEdge’s commitment to long-term client relationships. It sat in the middle of the post like a brick in a soufflé.

She sent it back to Maeve for approval. Maeve didn’t reply for two days.

Round ten. Maeve replied. She said it was “fine.” The word “fine” had never sounded less fine.

Greg confirmed sign-off. Helen confirmed brand alignment. Owen confirmed legal clearance. Cass put the post into the scheduling tool and felt the specific emptiness of a job completed but not accomplished.

Round eleven. Someone - Cass never found out who - had gone into the scheduling tool and changed Maeve’s sign-off from her own words to: Proud to be part of a team that puts listening first. #Leadership #CustomerSuccess #StratusEdge

Cass deleted the hashtags. The hashtags came back. She deleted them again. They came back again, like a rash.

Round twelve. Cass emailed Greg to ask who had access to the scheduling tool. Greg said he’d check. He did not check.

Round thirteen. Cass gave up on the hashtags. She told herself they didn’t matter. She knew they mattered.

Round fourteen.

The post went live on a Wednesday morning. Cass watched it go out. She read it one more time.

It said:

As leaders, we’re often focused on having the answers. But sometimes the most impactful thing we can do is pause and listen. Recently, I had a challenging conversation that reminded me of the importance of creating space for honest dialogue. When we commit to understanding before responding, we build stronger, more authentic relationships - both with our teams and our clients. At StratusEdge, we’re proud of our commitment to long-term partnerships, and moments like these reinforce why that matters. Proud to be part of a team that puts listening first. #Leadership #CustomerSuccess #StratusEdge

The nine seconds were gone. The client call was gone. The callback was gone. Maeve’s voice was gone. Everything that had made it worth reading had been carefully, collabouratively, professionally removed.

It got forty-three likes. Eleven of them were from people who worked at StratusEdge. Greg hearted it. Helen shared it to the Brand team’s Slack with a party emoji.

Maeve didn’t share it from her own profile. When Cass asked, she said she’d meant to but forgot.

She hadn’t forgot.

Three weeks later, Maeve posted something from her personal account. No review rounds, no CC list. Just a paragraph about a morning run where she’d taken a wrong turn and ended up at the river, and how she’d stood there for a minute watching the water and thought about how rarely she let herself be lost.

It wasn’t about StratusEdge. It wasn’t about leadership. It wasn’t about anything, really, except being a person in the world for sixty seconds without a framework.

Two hundred and nine likes. Thirty-one comments. A DM from a client she hadn’t spoken to in months, saying this is why I like working with you.

Cass screenshotted it. Not to send to anyone. Just to remember what it looked like before the rounds.

The following Monday, Cass had a new voice note from Maeve. It had come in at 6:47am, the sound of wind and footsteps underneath the words. Maeve had an idea for another post. A real one, she said. About something that had happened on a call last week.

“There was this moment,” Maeve said, slightly out of breath. “The client went quiet, and I could hear her thinking. Like actually thinking. And I just - I let it happen. I didn’t fill it.”

Cass listened to the note twice. She felt the flicker.

She opened a blank document and started typing. She did not CC Greg. She did not CC Helen. She did not CC Owen or Rhys or anyone whose job it was to sand the edges off a thing until it could no longer cut.

She typed the first line: She went quiet for eleven seconds. I didn’t fill them.

Then she sat there, cursor blinking, and thought about what she was going to do. She could send it to Maeve directly. Just the two of them. A draft that lived outside the rounds, the way the river post had. She could let Maeve decide whether to put it through the machine or let it breathe.

Or she could do the responsible thing. Open the CC field. Start the cycle. Watch it happen again.

Cass looked at the screenshot on her phone. Two hundred and nine likes. This is why I like working with you.

She picked up her phone and texted Maeve: I have your draft. It’s good. Really good. How do you want to handle this one?

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Then Maeve wrote back: Can we just skip to round fourteen?

Cass laughed - a real one, not a work one. She looked at the draft on her screen. She looked at the empty CC field.

She hit send. Just to Maeve.

It wasn’t a solution. Next week there would be another post, another review chain, another slow erosion. Greg would have thoughts. Helen would have concerns. Owen would have caveats. The machine didn’t stop because you stepped around it once.

But the draft was good. And for now, it belonged to the person whose voice was in it.

That was enough. That was round one.