Interview with Joshua Teixidor, Leader & Author of Carry the Weight

You open the book admitting you never wanted to be a leader, and when your VP promoted you, the entire onboarding was “Congratulations. Don’t fuck it up.” Twenty-plus years later, what did you actually need to hear in that conference room, and what would you say now to someone getting that same call this week?

I should clear up the timeline first. I’d been a top seller for about eight years when that call came. I have twenty-plus years in B2B sales, thirteen of them building, scaling, and leading teams. So, I didn’t hear it as a veteran leader. I heard it as the guy who had been good at a different job.

What I needed to hear was that the things that made me successful as a rep were not automatically going to make me successful as a leader. I knew how to sell. I knew how to work. So when I got a team, my instinct was to take everything that worked for me and expect it to work for everybody else. It doesn’t.

Somebody needed to tell me: your job just changed. You’re no longer measured by what you can do. You’re measured by what other people become capable of doing because of your leadership. I also needed permission not to know everything.

If you get that call this week, don’t spend your first ninety days proving you deserved the promotion. Spend them learning the people you’re now responsible for. Listen. Diagnose. Set the standard. Being needed for every answer is not the same as leading well. You got promoted because of what you did. What happens next depends on what you help other people do.

You trained for an IRONMAN 70.3 while leading a team and raising four daughters, and you admit there were weeks you “trained hard and led my family poorly.” The race was one day; the training was every day. What did that season teach you about carrying weight at work and at home that leadership alone never could have?

IRONMAN exposed something leadership had already been trying to teach me. You can be disciplined in one part of your life and still be failing somewhere else.

Some weeks, I hit every session and followed the plan. From the outside, that looked like discipline. But my family got whatever energy I had left. One Saturday, I left before sunrise for a four-hour ride. My daughter had ballet class that morning, and I told myself I’d make it back. I didn’t. She never said a word, and that silence taught me more than any argument could.

That isn’t balance. That’s prioritization, whether you admit it or not. Every yes carries a cost somewhere else. Leadership has weight. Training has weight. Marriage has weight. Being a father has weight. You can’t pretend one disappears because another is important.

The race was easy to understand because it had a finish line. Leadership and family don’t. That changed my question from “Can I carry all of this?” to “Am I carrying the right things well, and who’s paying the price when I’m not?” That’s a much harder question.

About the Writing and Publishing Craft

You call this “a memoir grounded in more than twenty years of sales leadership”: real people, changed names, one composite character. Why choose memoir over a straight business playbook, and how did you decide what to protect and what to reveal about the people in these pages?

The truth is, this whole thing started because I needed to get what was in my head onto paper. Every time I promoted or hired a new leader, I onboarded them by walking through frameworks I’d built over the years. Those frameworks became a stack of notebook pages.

Then I started pairing them with stories, because the frameworks don’t mean much unless you understand why I needed them. EKS didn’t come from sitting at a desk inventing an acronym. It came from getting situations wrong. People I pushed when I should have taught. People I rescued when I should have coached. Conversations I avoided. A framework tells you what to do. A story tells you why, and why is what makes it stick. That’s where the part memoir, part playbook shape of this book comes from.

On privacy, I tried to protect the person without protecting myself from the lesson. I changed names and identifying details, and one character is a disclosed composite. I was much more comfortable exposing my own mistakes than someone else’s. The reader needs the truth of what happened. They don’t need somebody else’s identity.

The voice is deliberately plain: short, blunt sentences, no corporate polish, the occasional profanity, and a field drill like “Carry This Into Your Next 1:1” closing every chapter. How intentional was that voice, and how did you keep the editing and publishing process from sanding it down into the kind of leadership book you say this isn’t?

Completely intentional. I spent enough years in corporate environments to know how quickly simple ideas get buried under language that sounds impressive and says very little. If a leadership book sounds nothing like the leader, it's lying to you.

I wanted it to sound like the conversation I’d have with a manager sitting across from me after a bad Tuesday. Not a keynote. Not a textbook. That’s why it has short sentences, some profanity, stories, and something you can actually use. The “Carry This Into Your Next 1:1” sections exist because most people read a leadership book on a Sunday and change nothing on Monday. I wanted readers to close each chapter thinking, “I know what I’m doing differently tomorrow.”

The manuscript went through developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and proofreading. My rule at every pass was simple: fix clarity, keep the voice. Whenever something got too polished, I asked one question: would I actually say this to one of my managers? If the answer was no, it came back out. And “Don’t f*ck it up” stayed, because that’s what was said, and softening it would soften the point.

The book’s core line is: “You don’t become a leader when you get the title. You become a leader when you decide to carry the weight.” Define the weight for us, and why do so many people in leadership seats refuse to pick it up?

The weight is responsibility. Not the title, not the authority, not your name higher on the org chart. It’s carrying the people and the performance at the same time. You own the number without treating people like numbers.

It’s knowing your decisions now affect someone else’s confidence, career, income, and sometimes their family. It’s having the conversation you’d rather avoid. Holding someone accountable when it's easier to let it slide. Admitting when you’re the problem.

Some leaders avoid it because authority is easier. Authority lets you say, “Because I said so.” Leadership makes you ask, “Did I create clarity? Did I coach it? Did I hold the standard? What part of this belongs to me?” That second set of questions is heavier. But that’s the job.

The EKS framework (Effort, Knowledge, Strategy) was born in a meeting where you spent forty-five minutes preparing to challenge a rep’s ownership, only to realize you’d been measuring an effort problem that was actually a teaching gap. Why do leaders reach for “effort” as the diagnosis first, and what does it cost when they get it wrong?

Because effort is visible and emotionally convenient, and it doesn’t implicate the leader. If someone isn’t performing, “they need to work harder” is a simple answer. Sometimes it’s even true.

The problem is that effort, knowledge, and strategy produce almost identical symptoms. A weak pipeline can be laziness. It can be someone prospecting into the wrong accounts. Or it can be someone who never learned how to start a good first conversation. Those need three completely different responses.

Treat a knowledge problem like effort, and you pressure someone who needs teaching. Treat a strategy problem like effort, and you tell someone to run faster in the wrong direction. And if it really is effort and you keep coaching around it, you dodge an accountability conversation that needs to happen.

In that meeting, I’d spent forty-five minutes preparing to prove a rep wasn’t taking ownership. Then I realized I’d never taught him what I was holding him accountable for. That’s humbling. EKS came from learning to diagnose before I prescribe.

With OIRC (Observation, Impact, Recommendation, Commitment), you describe handing Johnathan his own deal notes instead of your conclusions: “You can’t drag someone to the water... hand them the cup.” What changes in a person when they draw the line under the evidence themselves?

Ownership. People defend conclusions you hand them. They own conclusions they reach. One creates compliance. The other gives them a chance to form judgment.

I could have given Johnathan my conclusion in thirty seconds. Faster, sure. It also would have taught him that when things get complicated, Joshua will tell me what it means. That’s dependence. So, I handed him his own deal notes and let him see the pattern.

That’s the design of OIRC. The Observation is evidence, not opinion. The Impact is what it’s costing. The Recommendation gives direction. But the Commitment has to come from them, or it’s just compliance. When someone reaches the conclusion themselves, they’ll recognize it next time when you’re not sitting beside them.

The goal isn’t for people to get great at following my answers. It’s to help them get better at finding their own. You can’t drag someone to the water. You can hand them the cup.

“What you allow, you teach” runs through the book, from Jordan being three minutes late to Keisha asking you whether the rules were real. Why is silence such a powerful teacher, and why is early accountability an act of care rather than conflict?

Because people watch what leaders tolerate far more closely than they listen to what leaders say. You can put accountability on a slide. You can talk standards at kickoff. But when someone breaks the standard and nothing happens, you've taught the team the real standard.

The three minutes is rarely about three minutes. It’s about whether the rule is real. Keisha’s question forced that into the open. My silence had already answered it for the whole team.

Leaders avoid early accountability because they think they’re being kind. Usually, they’re just borrowing a harder conversation from the future. Three minutes late is a two-minute talk. Ignore it for six months, and it becomes a performance plan, a damaged relationship, and a team that watched you tolerate it. Accountability done early, clearly, and without drama isn’t punishment. It’s clarity, and that’s care.

In the Ben chapter, you pull a struggling rep off his biggest deals so he can stack small wins, because “belief comes back from evidence, not a pep talk.” How does a leader rebuild someone’s belief without lowering the standard, and how do you know when to hand the big deals back?

You lower the stakes, not the standard. Ben didn’t need me to tell him he was great. He needed evidence he could still do the work. A pep talk doesn’t give you that, and neither does lowering expectations.

So, I took the giant deals off his plate for a while. Same activity standard, same process, same expectations, just situations where he could execute the fundamentals and see the result. Small win. Another small win. Then another. Confidence becomes believable again when it’s attached to something real.

When do you hand the big deals back? When the behavior comes back before the confidence does. I’m watching preparation, judgment, follow-through, the quality of his questions, and how he responds when something goes wrong. Once those are consistent, the bigger deal becomes a test of the recovery rather than a rescue attempt. You don’t lower the bar. You rebuild the person’s ability to reach it.

Ben is a composite, but that sequence came from real people I led.