The day James Ferguson got diagnosed with cancer, he also got a call that he was being let go from his job. Within the first week of his chemotherapy treatment, he passed out from dehydration. By the time the ambulance brought him home, his wife had gone into premature labor with their daughter, Nora. This was 2021, the heat of COVID, when no visitors could come to treatment.
Most people would call that the worst week of their lives and try to forget it. Ferguson got it tattooed on his arm.
The mark is a small cross, placed exactly where the surgeon drew an X before removing the cancer from his body. He looks at it every day. When people ask why he would put something so painful where he can’t avoid seeing it, his answer is simple. We try to put hard stuff behind us, but it shapes who we are. Better to keep it in front of you.
That instinct to keep the hard thing visible rather than hidden runs through everything Ferguson now teaches about leadership. We sat down recently to talk about his new book, Seek the Good and Celebrate, and the framework that emerged from those 12 weeks of chemo. Most of what he shared had little to do with cancer. The lessons were about how leaders actually show up when work gets hard.
Live It or Leave It
Ferguson had built a reputation as a positive guy. The kind of leader who shares quotes and gives high fives. Then 2021 happened.
“It tests you to see if you’re going to live it or if you’re going to leave it,” he told me about the diagnosis.
That phrase is worth sitting with. Most leadership values are aspirational until something forces them into practice. A company can claim “people first” on its website for years without ever testing what that means in a layoff conversation or a budget cut. Most cultures stay theoretical until reality stress-tests them.
Ferguson’s stress test came fast. He chose to write thank-you notes to his nurses every Friday. He visualized himself throwing confetti at the end of treatment, the way other patients ring a bell. On the day he finished, he did exactly that. He cried. His wife was the only person allowed in the room. The point of the story isn’t the confetti. The point is that he had decided, in advance, who he was going to be when the situation got worse than he could have imagined. Most leaders do not make that decision before they need it.
Protect or Prepare
Ferguson built a leadership model out of his cancer journey. He calls it CONFETTI, an acronym for celebrate often, ownership mindset, nurture trust, fueled by feedback, engage with intention, train and develop, thankfulness as a habit, and inspire daily. His favorite chapter, somewhat surprisingly, is not the one on celebration.
It’s the one on ownership. And his framing of it is the sharpest leadership reframe I’ve heard in a while.
“Sometimes we get promoted into these leadership roles, and we think because we got promoted because we’re good at our job that we should keep doing that as the leader. But we’re no longer responsible for the job. We’re responsible for the people who are responsible for the job.”
The trap, in his words, is mistaking protection for leadership. Jumping in saves time. Doing it yourself produces a better result this week. But the leader you need next year is the one you didn’t develop this year. Ferguson uses a coaching analogy to make the point. When a basketball team loses, the coach doesn’t say his players were bad. He prepared them the wrong way. That accountability is what ownership looks like in real time.
For most managers, the practical shift is small but uncomfortable. When someone comes to you with a question, resist the urge to answer it. Flip the question back. What would you do if I weren’t here? That single move forces ownership without preaching it.
Why Engagement Beats Satisfaction
Ferguson draws a hard line between two words that leaders often confuse. “Satisfaction is a promise. Engagement is a practice.”
Satisfaction is transactional. You give people benefits and perks, and they show up. It costs a lot of money and produces relatively little. Engagement is what happens when you’re actually in the work with your team, building relationships and shaping programs around what people tell you matters. It costs almost nothing in dollars. It costs a tremendous amount of attention. That distinction explains why so many companies have impressive benefits packages and disengaged workforces at the same time.
The same logic applies to feedback. Ferguson reframed how I think about giving it. “When you shift your focus from what you want from people to what you want for people, everything changes.”
That single preposition swap, from “from” to “for,” changes the entire energy of a feedback conversation. Wanting something from someone creates expectation and pressure. Wanting something for someone creates a partnership. Same words. Different relationship. The person on the receiving end can feel the difference instantly.
Keep Showing Up
There’s a moment in our conversation I keep thinking about. I asked Ferguson what he would tell himself if he could go back to the recliner where he sat alone during chemo. He paused for a long time.
“Just keep showing up. Because everything you want is on the other side of this.”
That phrase, “keep showing up,” is the quiet thesis underneath everything else. Inspiration isn’t a quote on a wall. Resilience isn’t a character trait you either have or don’t. Both are byproducts of doing the unglamorous thing on the day you don’t want to do it.
Ferguson made the point about hotels, where he came up. The hot water will fail. A guest will scream. None of that is preventable. The only variable is whether the leader walks toward the problem or hides from it.
The same is true of every workplace I’ve spent time in. The best leaders I know aren’t the ones who avoid the hard weeks. They’re the ones who showed up the same way during them. That’s what Ferguson kept on his arm. A small reminder, in a place he can’t ignore, that the worst week didn’t get to choose what came next. He did.
Brandon Laws is the host of the Transform Your Workplace podcast. He works at Xenium HR in Tualatin, Oregon, an outsourced HR, payroll, and benefits firm serving small and mid-sized businesses.