Writing

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 eight pieces are the arguments we keep coming back to, one for each part of the toolkit and one each for feedback and for saying no. Every source is linked at the foot of the piece and labelled by what kind of evidence it is.

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

Step 02 · A structure you can lean on

Five phases, and the two where it usually goes wrong

Nearly every model of a difficult conversation shares a spine. Here it is, and here is what each part of it actually asks of you.

5 min read · 7 sources

Step 03 · Make it safe to be honest

Why nobody tells you the thing 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 the awkward thing, and you set that price.

5 min read · 5 sources

Step 04 · Say it out loud, and Step 05 · Keep it sharp

Rehearsing it 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

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 06 · Built for the seat 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 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 hedged, how much of the airtime you took, 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 out loud, holds their position, and does not care what you planned to say.

Download for iPhone The evidence behind Steady

All eight 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.