The Steady blog
The reading behind the app
Steady was built out of about a hundred articles, books, guides and papers on managing people, all of which sit in the app’s library. These are the arguments we keep coming back to: on starting out as a manager, on the conversation itself, and on practice. Every source is linked at the foot of the piece and labelled by what kind of evidence it is.
Starting out as a manager
Step 06 · Built for the role you are in
Managing the people who were your peers last month
You did not get a new job. You got a new relationship with eight people, and nobody told them the rules had changed either.
6 min read · 6 sources
Step 01 · Know where you stand
You are the least reliable witness to your own conversations
How you think that one-to-one went is only loosely related to how it went. What to ask instead, and who to ask.
4 min read · 5 sources
The conversation itself
Step 02 · A structure you can lean on
The five steps of a hard conversation, and the two that usually go wrong
Nearly every model of a difficult conversation says the same five things. Here they are, and what each one asks of you.
5 min read · 7 sources
The pillars · Feedback
Say what happened, not what they are like
In the largest meta-analysis of feedback ever run, more than a third of feedback made performance worse. Where the feedback points is most of the difference.
5 min read · 6 sources
The pillars · Boundaries and saying no
A clean no
No is a complete sentence everywhere except work, where it needs about three. What to say to your boss, to the peer who wants your best engineer, and to the 11pm Slack.
6 min read · 7 sources
Step 03 · Make it safe to be honest
Why nobody tells you what you most need to hear
Psychological safety is not niceness, and it is not a perk. It is the price your team pays for saying something awkward, and you set that price.
5 min read · 5 sources
Practice and progress
Step 04 · Speak it, and Step 05 · Keep it sharp
Going over a conversation in your head is not practice
Replaying the conversation at 2am feels like preparation. One study put 40 people into a real argument afterwards and measured what actually transferred.
5 min read · 5 sources
Step 07 · See what actually changed
Four things worth counting in your next hard conversation
Not how it felt. How long you took to say it, how often you softened what you said, how much of the talking you did, and the longest silence you let stand.
5 min read · 5 sources
Then the other half
You cannot read your way to a conversation you have never had.
Steady is 22 rooms with someone in them who answers in a real voice, holds their position, and does not care what you planned to say.
All 8 went up on 20 September 2026. Nothing here is HR, legal or clinical advice, and where a source is a practitioner’s method rather than a research finding, it says so.