What a Seasoned COO Taught Me About Trust, Guts, & Legos
Leadership Lessons from Meagan Slavin
In the years I’ve known her, Meagan has pivoted no less than 4 times—across job functions, markets, business models, and actual geography. Now that I think about it, it might be more than 4 depending on how you define “pivot”.
So when we found out she’d be speaking at the Global Workspace Association Conference on “Turning Challenges into Wins,” it felt delightfully on-brand. Her best lessons have always been modeled more than preached, so I was excited to hear them translated from stage. Here were my top 3 takeaways:
1) Align yourself with people you trust.
One of the most costly challenges Meagan shared about came from a partnership that collapsed from lack of trust.
For many people, “trust” functions as their general good vibe about someone. But we think trust is best established by tracing someone’s decision-making over time. On what basis have they made their most important decisions? What do they hold dear? What are they unwilling to give up?
Then, we ask: do we share those?
At 25N, we cultivate a high-trust environment by surrounding ourselves with partners (and teammates) who align with our deepest beliefs about what makes work good. These are our values. A careful distinction I want to make: values alignment is not about flattening individuality. How the values show up will look different by personality, cultural background, and job function—that’s a good thing. But values are a statement about our shared non-negotiables and what we refuse to give up, even when things get hard. As I’ve said before, these are the signposts that guide us toward the next right step. Especially in moments when the future branches into many possible paths.
Within our company, these trust-powering non-negotiables take five forms: do you believe that what matters is to be people-first, growth-minded, resilient, purposeful, and balanced? Alignment on these values produces real, tactical business outcomes. 1) Decisions move faster because we already agree on what matters most, even if the how differs based on a leader’s perspective. 2) There’s resilience under pressure because you know what you need to get back to when hardship rocks the boat. When partners make values-based decisions, the hope is that when something goes wrong (because it’s inevitable), it’s because of circumstance, not because we broke trust.
2) Go with your gut.
Before I met Meagan, this advice used to irritate me. Why does “gut” (often interpreted: “vibes”) belong in business decision making?
Harvard Business Review calls “gut” a deep sense of intuition that shapes your impressions, even when you’re not aware.
“Everyone knows what it feels like to have a pit in your stomach as you weigh a decision. That’s the gut talking loud and clear. If you’re a manager, for example, getting a “read” on your direct reports allows you to sense when they’re demotivated and to take steps to re-engage them. Similarly, doing a “gut check” on a product design can steer your creative process in the right direction.”
Meagan told a story about wishing she’d listened to her intuition sooner. It surrounded personnel decisions–some of the most weighty for leaders. Her advice in the end was “listen to your gut instincts, and act on them faster”.
My hunch is that overthinkers are the least likely to treat instinct as data. We focus more on the drive to be perfect, to be liked, or to have every decision justifiable to the nth degree all the time.
Is the gut instinct infallible? No, says Daniel Kahneman of Thinking Fast and Slow. But paired with experience and feedback, it's an incredibly powerful, often underutilized tool. A nagging hunch or a pit in your stomach is usually a good indicator that it’s time to do some deeper investigation. Meagan says: do the digging, and then make swift moves in response.
3) Give away authority—even if it scares you a little.
This is Meagan’s recipe for growth: bring on people you trust, pour into them, and then step back so they can lead.
Meagan told a story about a time when her leadership was stretched too thin: she had many direct reports while juggling a pile of operational tasks that she still ran point on. Breakthrough happened when she equipped a leadership tier to take over things she used to lead the charge on. This sounds simple—”just delegate!”—but if you’ve ever led a team, you know how terrifying this can feel. Especially when the items to delegate are crucial to business success.
Molly Graham calls this the “give away your Legos” principle. It’s a concept we discuss a lot around 25N. Scaling is counterintuitive. Often the leader’s first instinct is to grab back the Legos the new person took, micromanaging or reclaiming control. But real growth comes from ignoring that instinct and finding a bigger, better tower to build.
But besides this, the part that often gets missed is development. You can’t hand someone a Lego tower they haven’t been prepared to build. Pouring into people—training, sharing context, and creating space for trial and error—is what makes the delegation sustainable. Blindly handing off responsibility just shifts the problem. Investing in people first gives them the confidence to lead, and it gives you the freedom to step back without the anxiety that comes from letting go too soon.
For Meagan, those Legos were our sales and people operations processes. Letting go of them created space for her to focus on something bigger: new location growth.
What’s true for companies is true for people: growth always costs something. A good leader is willing to bear that cost, giving up certainty for curiosity, control for trust, and perfection for efficiency. I could tie this up neatly with a list of clean takeaways, but that would miss the point. The best lessons unfold as the leader grows, and brings people along into that growth. And, the kind of leadership that steps forward with humility (“here are the mistakes I’ve made–here’s where I want to be better”) is the kind 25N plans to keep building on for years to come.