Hot Cross Fun: How to Come in Hot, Keep a Bad Idea in Your Crosshairs, and Still Be the Person People Want on the Team

Dr. Tracey C. Jones|T3 Solutions

‍ ‍When I was a kid, we sang the old nursery rhyme: “Hot cross buns, hot cross buns, one a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns.” I couldn’t have told you what a hot cross bun was. I just liked the tune.

Decades later, after a career in the Air Force, the corporate world, and now running a publishing company and chairing more than one board, I’ve decided the phrase deserves a leadership remix. Not Hot Cross Buns. Hot Cross Fun.

Because here’s a truth that took me years to learn: you can come in hot. You can have something — or someone — squarely in your crosshairs. But you had better keep it fun, by which I mean collegial, warm, and human. Warm but firm. That combination is rarer than it should be, and it’s the difference between a leader people follow and a leader people merely endure.

Let me break down the three buns.

Bun One: Hot — Bring the Heat

Somewhere along the way, “professional” got confused with “passionless.” We started mistaking a flat affect for maturity, as if the highest form of leadership were to feel nothing and react to less.

Nonsense.

You are allowed to care, and to care out loud. When something matters — a deadline, a safety issue, a value you won’t compromise — bring the heat. Move fast. Be decisive. Let people see that you’re invested. The leader who responds to a genuine crisis with a shrug isn’t being calm; they’re being absent.

I learned this in maintenance bays on the flight line, where “I’ll get to it” was not an acceptable answer when an aircraft needed to fly. Urgency is a form of respect. When you move quickly on what matters, you’re telling your people: this is important, and so are you.

So: be hot. Just remember that heat without the other two buns is just a fire, and fires burn down the house.

Bun Two: Cross — Earn the Right to Disagree

Here’s where most “be positive!” leadership advice falls apart. It pretends that good leaders never have anyone in their crosshairs. That they smile through every bad idea and nod along to every stalled process.

That’s not leadership. That’s a hostage situation with better catering.

You are allowed to be cross. You can look at a wrong call, a manufactured drama, or a plan that’s going to hurt the people you serve, and say — plainly — “No. Not this.” You can hold a hard line. You can name what’s out of bounds. Firmness is not rudeness. Disagreement is not disloyalty. In fact, a team where no one ever pushes back isn’t harmonious; it’s just quietly failing in unison.

And while we’re here, a word about the phrase “let’s agree to disagree.” It’s a verbal shrug. It sounds gracious, but most of the time it’s a muzzle — a polite way to shut a conversation down, end the dissent, and make the person who pushed back feel as though they’re the rude one for not dropping it. That’s not collegiality. That’s “Fun” smothering “Cross.” Real disagreement stays on the table and stays honest; it doesn’t get waved off with a shrug dressed up as manners.

The trick is what you put in your crosshairs. Aim at the idea, the behavior, the broken process — never at the person’s dignity. You can be immovable on the issue and gracious toward the human. Those aren’t in tension. They’re the whole job.

Bun Three: Fun — Keep It Collegial, or You’ve Lost the Plot

And now the bun that holds the other two together.

You can be hot. You can be cross. But the moment you stop being collegial — warm, respectful, decent — you’ve traded leadership for domination, and people will comply with you exactly as long as they have to and not one second longer.

“Fun” here doesn’t mean a clown nose. It means humanity. It means you can deliver hard news without contempt, hold a firm line without humiliating anyone, and disagree vigorously while leaving the relationship intact. It means the person on the other end of your “no” still feels respected as they walk out the door.

This is the bun people skip, and it’s the one that makes the other two safe to use.

The Secret Ingredient: Be Winsome

So how do you actually hold a hard line and stay collegial at the same time, without it being a contradiction? Here’s the part nobody tells you.

You don’t end the disagreement. You carry it across on something human — a bit of diplomatic spin, a nod to shared history, a well-timed joke, a quick story, an icebreaker that disarms the room before you make your point. In a word: be winsome.

You’re not softening the content. The content stays as firm as it needs to be. You’re warming the delivery, so the person you disagree with leans in instead of bracing for a fight. Warmth is the bridge you carry the hard truth across. Without it, even a correct point lands like a slammed door — and people defend against doors, even when what’s on the other side is exactly what they need to hear.

A joke that lets a correction land softly. A callback to something you’ve been through together. A story that makes your point without pointing a finger. That’s the craft. It’s the difference between “you’re wrong” and “you know me — I’ve got to push back here, and here’s why.”

The Two Ways Leaders Fail

I’ve served under both failure modes, and you probably have too.

The first is all hot, no fun. The dominator. The one who runs every meeting like a siege, who confuses volume with authority, who can tell you you’re wrong but never without making you feel small. I once worked with a leader like this for years — a man who could tell me to “shut up” in a meeting and think he’d won something. People didn’t follow him. They flinched around him and waited for him to leave.

The second is all fun, no hot. The appeaser. The one whose entire strategy is to keep everyone comfortable, who takes turns making people happy, who would rather a problem fester quietly than risk a single hard conversation. This leader is pleasant and utterly ineffective. Nothing gets decided, because deciding might upset someone.

Hot Cross Fun is the road between them. It’s the leader who will act decisively (hot), hold the line on what’s right (cross), and do it all without ever making it personal or cruel (fun).

A Story From the Field

I recently chaired a small board through a genuine emergency. A piece of critical infrastructure failed. I came in hot — got the right people on the phone immediately, diagnosed the cause, fixed it fast, and kept everyone informed in writing so no one was surprised.

Then came the harder part. One member decided to turn a solved problem into a standing grievance — relitigating the past, manufacturing a crisis out of a repair that was already complete. This is where cross came in. I held the line: the facts are the facts, the problem is fixed, and we don’t run this board on grievance. I put what was out of bounds plainly on the record.

But here’s the thing I watched myself do, and the thing I’m proudest of: I never stopped being collegial. I thanked the members who engaged in good faith. I welcomed dissent and routed it through proper process — bring a motion, make your case, let the body decide. Even the antagonist was met with courtesy and a fair path, not a counterattack. I was immovable on the issue and gracious toward every person in the room.

That’s Hot Cross Fun. Not warmth instead of firmness. Warmth and firmness, from the same person, at the same time.

And It’s Not Just for Leaders

Here’s the part my followership work won’t let me skip: the best followers are Hot Cross Fun too.

A great team member brings energy to the mission (hot), will respectfully tell you when they think you’re wrong (cross), and does it as a colleague, not a combatant (fun). That’s constructive dissent — the lifeblood of any board, unit, or company that wants to make good decisions instead of comfortable ones. A room full of nodding heads is a room headed off a cliff. Give me a few good Hot Cross Fun followers over a dozen yes-people any day.

What We’re Actually After

Here’s the thing to remember underneath all of it: almost nobody actually enjoys working with people who just want to disagree. We don’t want to win the argument and stand there alone. We want to arrive at a collaborative solution — together. The disagreement was never the destination; it’s just the road we sometimes have to take to get to a better answer.

The only people who treat conflict as the prize are the ones suffering from a contentious bone stuck in the throat or a chronic case of chip-on-the-shoulderitis. For everyone else, being hot, cross, and winsome all at once isn’t about being the most formidable person in the room. It’s about staying shoulder-to-shoulder long enough to solve the thing as a team.

The Last Word

There’s a line everyone credits to Winston Churchill — though, fair warning, the quote detectives say he never actually said it (it was floating around anonymously in a Missouri newspaper back in 1937, long before anyone pinned it on him). True or not, it’s the perfect button:

Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.

That, right there, is Hot Cross Fun in a single sentence. The hot (you’ve got something to say), the cross (it’s not a compliment), and the fun (they thank you for it anyway).

So go ahead. Come in hot. Keep the bad idea in your crosshairs. Hold your line.

Just make sure that when it’s over, the people on the other side of your conviction still want you on the team. That’s not softness. That’s the whole art.

One a penny, two a penny — and worth every cent.

Dr. Tracey C. Jones

President & CEO, T3 Solutions