The Carly Effect

On the people who leave their fingerprints on how you lead and what happens when they send you exactly the right person.

I was trying not to reach out to her.

Carly is going through something I can’t write about here. Something that has been sitting heavy in the part of my chest that doesn’t have words. And for months I’d been stubborn about not adding my problems to what she’s already carrying. I told myself it was respect. It might have also been pride.

But the runway is ending. And at a certain point, pride is just another word for refusing help from the people who love you.

So I reached out. One message. And Carly, being Carly, came through before I finished asking.

She connected me with a friend of hers. A man in his retirement who decided to spend that chapter doing the best work of his life, helping professionals in transition find their footing again. He accepted my connection request the same day. Called me the next morning, first thing, while I was still opening my eyes.

Within minutes, we figured out we already knew each other. Carly’s wedding. Years ago. We’d been in the same space, on the same day, surrounded by the same love and somehow the universe held us apart until now.

I’m starting to call it the Carly Effect.

Talking about her, I fell apart for a moment. I’m not going to pretty that up. I grieved out loud what she’s facing, the unfairness of it, the anger that has nowhere useful to go. He sat with me in it. He didn’t rush past it to get to the agenda.

When I came back to myself, I told him what I needed him to understand: that the foundation underneath everything I’m building with Anthilles, the whole reason I care so much about people feeling seen at work, about growth being real and not performative, is in no small part because of her.

She was my first real boss. Then my co-lead. Then my peer. Then my mentor. Then simply my friend. The permanent kind, the kind that doesn’t require maintenance to survive time.

We both immediately connected, and then we went to work.

An hour later, I felt revived.

That’s not a small thing to say. I’ve been absorbing hard blows in this season including, recently, not getting a role I had let myself hope for. I didn’t mourn the job. I mourned the revenue I had already mentally spent, the exhale I thought was coming, the version of this chapter that was almost in reach. There’s a difference, and it took me a beat to understand which grief I was actually feeling.

But something about being seen by a stranger who also loves the same person I love, it put something back.

Last December, I visited Carly in Chicago after twelve years. Twelve years of life happening, distance, time, the thousand small reasons people drift, and we sat down across from each other and it felt like last weekend.

It wasn’t a visit for the human body. It fed me from every corner of heart, spirit, something above both. The kind of reunion that reminds you that love doesn’t actually respect time the way we think it does. That some connections aren’t maintained so much as they just are.

We had that same quality on our first call, her friend and I. Almost immediately, without trying because we’d both been touched by her. She didn’t engineer it. She didn’t even know she was doing it. She just lived her life with enough warmth and integrity that the people who came into contact with her kept a piece of it and now those pieces are finding each other.

That’s the Carly Effect. The bond you didn’t ask for. Built entirely out of love for someone else.

The best leaders I’ve known don’t just do good work. They leave behind an imprint of how to treat people. It lives inside you without permission, and one day you’re on a call with a stranger and you both say it at the same time “she shaped me” and you realize you’re not strangers at all.

Anthilles exists because I kept asking: what does it look like to build organizations where people actually grow? The answer keeps pointing back to the same handful of people. Carly is always near the top of that list.

I hope she knows.

I’m going to make sure she does.

Anthilles Consulting helps organizations close the gap between executive vision and frontline execution. If something in this resonated, or if you’re building something worth believing in, I’d love to connect.