Whose Accounting?

What we carry without knowing we’re carrying it

Everyone in business knows the phrase: “you’ve been too close to it, you need a fresh set of eyes.” Bring someone in who hasn’t seen it before. The assumption is that familiarity is the problem and distance is the cure.

It’s not wrong. Familiarity does blind. But the phrase quietly assumes that the eyes are neutral, that seeing freshly means seeing without the residue of how things are usually measured, what success is supposed to look like.

I’ve spent a lot of time in rooms where fresh eyes were brought in. What I’ve noticed is that they almost always see through the same lens as the people who were already looking. They see the content clearly, sometimes more clearly than those who’d stopped noticing it. But the frame they use to see it is the same frame. The same definition of performance. The same theory of what organizations are for. The same accounting.

Fresh eyes. Inherited lens.

This is what makes zero-based budgeting more interesting to me than it first appears. And also more troubling.

The appeal is obvious. Rather than assuming that what was spent last year deserves to be spent again this year, you start from zero. Every line item has to justify its existence. The burden of proof shifts from the new to the existing. Rational on its face. Rigorous, even.

But zero-based budgeting isn’t actually rigorous. It feels rigorous because it’s effortful. What it actually does is substitute the assumptions of the present for the assumptions of the past. You are not eliminating the bet. You are placing a new one: using today’s criteria and today’s sense of what matters against a future you cannot see. The examination is real. The certainty it produces is not.

Organizations almost never say this out loud. They call it rigor because rigor implies arrival. But what they are really doing is hypothesis testing, and they would rather not know that.

I was mulling this over on a walk in my new surroundings when the question turned inward.

If I zero-based my life (examined every commitment and chose consciously rather than merely inherited), what would I actually have done? The same thing. I would be using the criteria I hold today and the sense of what matters that I have assembled over time. Against a future I cannot see, for a self I don’t yet know.

The examined life is not the life of better choices. It is the life of more conscious bets.

That’s already a less comfortable claim than the one usually made for examination: that the unexamined life is the problem and looking closely is the answer. But scrutiny only relocates the uncertainty. The person who drifts inherits assumptions they never inspected. The person who examines owns assumptions they chose. Neither knows what the future needed them to carry.

And there is a harder problem underneath this one.

When you zero-base your commitment to success, the shape of a career, or what contribution looks like: what criteria are you applying? If they are the institution’s criteria, absorbed across years of moving through structures that assumed them without ever stating them, then the examination isn’t liberation. It’s ratification. The instrument is made of the same material as what it’s trying to measure.

Which means the person who examines their life using the institution’s definition of success, concludes that yes, this matters, and now owns it consciously. They may be more captured than the person who never looked. They now defend the framework as chosen rather than inherited. The examination reproduced the lens. They just signed for the delivery.

You cannot zero-base the categories using the categories.

I don’t have an exit from this. I’m not sure there is one. What I have is the distinction between two kinds of examined life: the one that achieves conscious ownership of its commitments, and the one that keeps asking whose commitments these are and by whose accounting. The first is more rigorous than drifting. The second is more uncomfortable than the first.

It is also, I think, the only version that earns the name.

photo by Graham Covington

Purpose Won’t Cover a $400 Emergency

A new NBER working paper forced over a million real tradeoffs across 126 dimensions of life from 3,300 respondents. When people can’t just endorse everything, when they actually have to choose, a clear hierarchy emerges. Family well-being, financial security, and health dominate. Children’s health alone carries marginal utility 67 times the average dimension. Happiness and life satisfaction, the twin pillars of modern well-being science, rank 35th and 36th. Status, prosocial virtues, meaning-at-work, the things people readily cite in surveys, collapse toward the bottom when they have to be traded against something real.

The paper is careful about what this means. High marginal utility for something could reflect how deeply you value it, or how little of it you have. Deprivation drives up the value of each additional unit. The paper distinguishes between these interpretations carefully, and for financial security and health specifically, the data points toward deprivation. People aren’t ranking these things because of what they believe. They’re ranking them because of what they lack.

Pause there for a moment.

What that means, precisely, is that the workers in the organizations these managers lead are ranking financial security, alongside things like children’s health, which carries 67 times the average marginal utility, not as an expression of their values but as a direct measure of how much of it they don’t have. The survey isn’t capturing preferences. It’s capturing the shape of a gap. And the gap has an address.

The Federal Reserve has been confirming this for years. More than a third of American adults cannot cover a $400 emergency using cash or its equivalent. Between 1979 and 2024, US productivity rose 80.9% while hourly pay for workers grew only 29.4%. Upper-income households now hold 48% of total US household income, up from 29% in 1970. In 2024 alone, S&P 500 companies returned $942.5 billion in share buybacks, a new annual record, plus $657 billion in dividends. Over the last five years, buybacks alone are $4.1 trillion.¹

The national food budget shortfall (the actual dollar gap between what food-insecure Americans have and what they need) is $32 billion a year. Closing it entirely, for all five of those years, would have cost $160 billion. The five-year buyback total is more than 25 times that figure.

Buybacks are not irrational. Capital returned to investors moves somewhere. The question the arithmetic raises isn’t whether the mechanism is efficient. It’s whether the aggregate pattern of those decisions, sustained across decades, has produced consequences that the mechanism itself doesn’t account for, and whether calling it efficient settles anything about those consequences.

Buybacks were not always a defining feature of American corporate finance. The SEC’s adoption of Rule 10b-18 in 1982 created a legal safe harbor for share repurchases. What followed was not inevitable. It was a specific revisable decision about where surplus goes. No single firm can step outside its competitive labor market unilaterally. However, the pattern that no single firm produced alone is nonetheless the pattern all of them are operating inside. Individual constraint and collective consequence are both real. Acknowledging one doesn’t dissolve the other.

The management writing industry has spent this same period building an elaborate architecture of purpose, meaning, and psychological safety. Most of the people who built it, and most of the people who bought it, are not cynics. They were trying to do something real. But there is a particular kind of self-deception available to people who are genuinely trying, the kind that lets you attend the psychological safety workshop in the afternoon without connecting it to the capital allocation meeting in the morning. The kind that lets you hold both realities in the same week without feeling their weight against each other.

This is not an argument about tax policy or labor law, though both matter. It’s an argument addressed to managers: people whose decisions about compensation, staffing, and resource allocation are neither purely personal nor purely systemic. They are something in between, which is precisely where agency lives. The question of what falls within that space is not answered by pointing to what falls outside it.

The research doesn’t adjudicate between purpose and pay. It sequences them. When people must choose, the material floor comes first, not as a preference but as a need. Everything else is built on top of it. An organization that has not secured that floor for its people, while demonstrably holding the resources to do so, is not facing an engagement problem.

It is facing the question it has been avoiding.

¹Annual S&P 500 buyback totals: 2020— $519.8B; 2021— $881.7B; 2022— $922.7B; 2023— $795.2B; 2024— $942.5B. Total: $4.06 trillion. For context, Germany’s nominal GDP in 2024 was approximately $4.66 trillion. The five-year buyback total represents roughly 88% of that figure.

Sources

NBER Working Paper

Benjamin, D.J., Cooper, K., Heffetz, O., Kimball, M.S., & Kundu, T. (2025). What Do People Want? NBER Working Paper No. 33846. nber.org/papers/w33846

Federal Reserve — $400 Emergency Expense

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. (2025). Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2024. federalreserve.gov

Wage Growth vs. Productivity

Mishel, L., and Kandra, J. (2026). The Productivity-Pay Gap. Economic Policy Institute. epi.org/productivity-pay-gap

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Labor Productivity and Costs, Nonfarm Business Sector. bls.gov/lpc

Pew Research Center. (2018). For most US workers, real wages have barely budged for decades. pewresearch.org

Distribution of Economic Gains

Pew Research Center. (2015). The American Middle Class is Losing Ground. pewresearch.org

Stock Buybacks

S&P Dow Jones Indices. (March 2025). S&P 500 Q4 2024 Buybacks Increase 7.4% and 2024 Expenditure Sets New Record. prnewswire.com

S&P Dow Jones Indices. (March 2022). S&P 500 Buybacks Set Quarterly and Annual Record. prnewswire.com

Rule 10b-18

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (1982). Rule 10b-18. 17 CFR § 240.10b-18. sec.gov

Food Budget Shortfall

Feeding America. (2025). Map the Meal Gap 2025. feedingamerica.org

Two-Income Households

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (April 2025). Employment Characteristics of Families — 2024. bls.gov

Child Food Insecurity

USDA Economic Research Service. (December 2025). Household Food Security in the United States in 2024. ers.usda.gov

Germany GDP

World Bank National Accounts Data. GDP (current US$) — Germany, 2024. data.worldbank.org

photo by Joss Woodhead

The day my boss said: Not one of your best performances?

My boss called me in after a significant misstep. He asked one question: “Not one of your best performances?”

I didn’t need to answer. He knew I knew.

That question (which wasn’t really a question) did something the explicit never could. It said: You’re intelligent. You have agency. You know exactly what happened here. We don’t need this conversation.

If he’d catalogued what went wrong and walked me through what I should have done differently, he would have said something else entirely: You lack the judgment to assess your own work. You need me to explain it to you.

The implicit respected my intelligence. The explicit would have insulted it.

This matters especially with perfectionists. They already know. Making it explicit forces them to experience their failure twice.

The implicit can be mercy. The explicit can be cruelty, even when delivered with kindness.

Of course, the implicit can also abandon. The same restraint that respects can also withhold what someone needs to hear.

My boss could have walked me through what went wrong. He could have been thorough.

He asked one question instead.

I’ve never forgotten it. I’ve never forgotten what it said about what he thought of me.

photo by Tobias Keller

The question behind the question

The program had barely begun (just past introductions) when one of the participants interrupted the facilitator. Not with a question, exactly. More of a challenge.

“What could you possibly bring to this room, never having been a C-level executive yourself? Why are you worthy of my time?”

The room went quiet.

The facilitator took a moment. Then she said:

Off the bat, I can tell you two things I bring to this room.

First, I am a professional who deals with other professionals with respect. You can expect that from me at all times. And what that means, among other things, is that I will never interrupt others.

Second, before this program is over, you will have insights into what it is about yourself that led you to ask this question, at this moment, in this manner, and what impact that might have on your management practice.

Then the program continued.

photo by Tim Mossholder

Abandon All Hope of Mattering

I’ve been wrestling with an idea that sits at the heart of how we think about leadership: intentionally influencing others. Two pieces I wrote, three years apart, led me somewhere unexpected—what if we’ve got the whole thing backwards?

What follows is both the story of how I arrived there and where that insight took me. Part I traces my journey from what seemed like a straightforward observation—leading by example—to something much deeper. Part II pushes that insight to its logical conclusion, challenging almost everything we assume about influence and leadership.

Read together, these two pieces reveal something fascinating about management thinking: when you follow a practical observation rigorously enough, it can lead you to a breakthrough that changes how you see everything.

Part I. A Critical Self-Review

The Evolution of the Argument

Rereading my 2021 and 2024 pieces on leading by example side by side revealed an intellectual journey: from empirical clarity to philosophical uncertainty, and toward a breakthrough still waiting to be fully articulated.

The Initial Empirical Strength

The 2021 piece was ruthlessly efficient. Its argument was simple and undeniable: people see everything you do, not just what you intend them to see. This exposes the central fallacy of leading by example—you cannot control which examples you set. The strength of that argument lay in its brutal honesty and grounding in observable reality.

The Philosophical Wrestle

The 2024 piece, inspired by Javier Gomá Lanzón’s ideas, aspired to something more ambitious. It tried to shift focus from demonstrating to being, but fell short of its full potential. Caught between rejecting leading by example and salvaging some intentional influence through being an original, the piece lacked resolution. It reached toward something radical but didn’t quite grasp it.

The Core Problem

The flaw wasn’t in moving toward the philosophical—it was in stopping too soon. By trying to rehabilitate influence through originality, I overlooked the more profound implication: real influence arises only when you abandon all intention to influence.

The Missing Insight

The insight that eluded me is this: You matter most when you abandon all hope of mattering. True influence is unintentional. It emerges when you are fully absorbed in the work itself, not in the act of setting an example or managing perceptions.

This is not just a semantic distinction—it’s a fundamental truth that resolves the tension between the two pieces. The empirical clarity of 2021 shows why intentional influence fails. The philosophical wrestle of 2024 hints at why unintentional influence might be the only kind that exists.

Toward a Course Correction

The task, then, is not to choose between empirical honesty and philosophical depth but to integrate them. The next step demands:

Fully embracing the 2021 observation that people see everything.
Pushing Gomá’s distinction between being and demonstrating to its limits.
Exploring the paradox: true influence emerges through its complete abandonment.
Understanding why any intention to influence corrupts the possibility of genuine influence.

The goal is not to influence better—it’s to understand why influence only becomes possible when you stop trying to achieve it.

Part II. The Paradox of Influence: A Radical Insight

True influence exists only in its complete abandonment. The moment you intend to influence others, you fail. Why? Because people see everything. They see not only what you want them to see, but also every contradiction, every struggle, every unconscious motive. The attempt to curate your impact creates dissonance that others detect instinctively.

Consider the master woodworker. They don’t approach their bench thinking, “I must demonstrate proper technique for my apprentices.” Their mind is fully engaged with the work—reading the grain of the wood, adjusting to its resistance, letting the shape emerge. If you watch them, you’ll notice something profound: the moment their focus shifts from the craft to their performance, something essential is lost.

This is more than a lack of self-consciousness. It is what Heidegger might call authentic being: a way of existing that arises from full engagement with the task at hand. The woodworker’s mastery isn’t about showing anything. It’s about being fully present to the demands of the work itself.

The Nature of Authentic Being

Authentic being means engaging deeply with what is real—responding to the grain of the wood, the shape of the challenge, and the needs of the moment. It’s not about trying to be authentic or setting an example. That effort corrupts the very authenticity it seeks. The woodworker’s focus is not on influence but on the work—and that’s precisely what makes them influential.

The Freedom of Non-Intention

Here lies the paradox: abandoning intention is not a strategy. The moment you treat it as a technique—“If I stop trying to influence, I will influence more”—you’ve fallen back into the trap of intentionality. This abandonment is not tactical but liberating.

Like the woodworker, we are freed when we stop performing and simply engage with the real work before us. This freedom allows presence—authentic engagement with others and the task—because it releases us from the exhausting need to manage perceptions or outcomes.

Rethinking Exemplarity

This insight reframes Gomá Lanzón’s idea of exemplarity. While Gomá emphasizes being over demonstrating, his framework still implies a function: that being exemplary serves a social or moral purpose. But what if true exemplarity requires abandoning even that intention?

The woodworker teaches not by trying to teach but by fully inhabiting their craft. Influence emerges organically, not as a performance but as a consequence of their deep absorption. This is a more radical vision of exemplarity—one that dispenses with performance entirely.

The Management Paradox

This challenges the very structure of management thinking. Influence, as conventionally understood, fails because intention corrupts authenticity. Yet this doesn’t mean passivity. It means reorienting ourselves toward engagement with the craft of management—solving problems, making decisions, supporting others—not as a performance, but as real work.

Beyond Leadership

This insight unravels our conventional understanding of leadership. If leadership is the intentional exercise of influence, what happens when we abandon intention?

The answer lies in the woodworker’s workshop. True leadership may emerge not from trying to lead but from full absorption in the work of managing. When we abandon the desire to perform leadership, we step into something deeper—presence, authenticity, and real engagement.

The Final Paradox

Here we confront a stark truth, akin to Dante’s inscription: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” To matter, we must abandon the hope of mattering. To influence, we must abandon the desire to influence.

This is not comfortable terrain for management thinking. It demands letting go of techniques, strategies, and even the very concept of leadership as intentional influence. But in that abandonment lies profound freedom—the freedom to engage fully in the craft of management itself.

When you stop trying to be influential, when you let go of curating your impact, you might finally begin to matter. But only if you pass through these gates, leaving behind the comfortable illusion of control.

Beyond them lies something simpler and truer: the craft itself. The paradox resolves when you realize that, in abandoning performance, you become who you are. And it is in that simple being that real influence—unintentional, unforced, undeniable—can finally emerge.

Don’t Be an Echo, Be a Voice

We say “Here’s what I think” with confidence that sounds authentic but often isn’t. When pressed to explain why we hold these views, our honest answer frequently boils down to: “Because Bob said it.”

This is the intellectual equivalent of a child saying they did something “because Tommy did it.” We recognize this pattern in children. But as adults, our intellectual lives often follow the same pattern. We’re just more sophisticated about how we phrase it.

Confidence isn’t the same as clarity. The volume of your voice doesn’t prove ownership.

The real question isn’t whether we agree with Bob. The real question is: how do we agree with Bob?

The architecture of agreement

Genuine agreement requires more work than most people realize. It’s not enough to like Bob’s conclusion or find his position convenient. Real agreement works on at least three levels:

Bob’s reasons – What evidence is he using? What concerns drive his position?

Bob’s reasoning – How does he connect his reasons to his conclusions? What logical steps does he take?

Bob’s assumptions – Where is Bob coming from? What foundational beliefs shape how he sees the world?

Think of it this way: Bob’s reasons are the ingredients he uses. His reasoning is the recipe, how he combines and cooks them. His assumptions are his taste preferences, shaped by experience, culture, or mood. You can’t really cook the same dish until you understand all three.

But here’s what strikes me as crucial: you can only meaningfully agree with Bob’s reasons when you hold reasons of your own. Without your own foundation of thinking, all you can do is understand Bob’s position. You can’t genuinely agree or disagree with it.

If you don’t have your own reasons, then you’re not thinking. That’s intellectual vending.

The precision of disagreement

Most disagreement is lazy. We call people “idiots” or “morons.” Words that translate across cultures as universal ways to voice disagreement without doing any intellectual work.

But what becomes possible when disagreement gets precise? You might disagree with someone’s reasons, their reasoning, or their assumptions. Knowing where you disagree allows you to articulate what you disagree with specifically.

I find I can’t meaningfully disagree with Bob until I understand his position well enough to present it as well as Bob himself presented it. Or even stronger.

When I can make Bob’s argument better than Bob made it, something shifts. I’ve demonstrated sufficient understanding to meaningfully disagree. Not because I’ve earned some rhetorical right, but because I’ve done the work to know what I’m actually disagreeing with.

In other words, I need to find all the reasons to agree with Bob before I can explain which reasons, reasoning, or assumptions I don’t share.

The dance

When both parties commit to this standard, understanding each other well enough to strengthen each other’s positions, something remarkable happens. Disagreement transforms from adversarial battle into a dance.

You take turns making each other’s arguments stronger, then explaining precisely where and why you part ways. This creates space for genuine intellectual engagement rather than the exchange of borrowed talking points.

What I find beautifully ironic is that this approach relieves anxiety rather than creating it. When you know that Bob is committed to understanding your position well enough to present it fairly before he disagrees with it, you can relax. You don’t have to be defensive or perfect. If there’s a flaw in your reasoning, Bob will find it. But only after he’s done the work to understand and strengthen your position first.

An echo is what happens when you’re alone, yelling into emptiness. Even in a room full of people, if you’re just repeating borrowed thoughts, you’re essentially alone. Nothing meaningful comes back to you because you’re not engaging with anyone’s actual thinking.

But having a voice (your own reasons, reasoning, and assumptions developed through genuine exploration) enables you to engage in the dance of authentic disagreement. Voice enables connection with other thinking people.

The paradox is this: even though developing your own voice feels like solitary work, you can never complete it alone. The dance requires a partner. You need other voices to help you challenge your reasoning and strengthen your arguments.

If you’ve done the work, you’ll know the difference between shouting into an empty canyon and moving in step with another thoughtful person.

Related writings: I’ve explored the distinction between genuine and borrowed thinking: what intellectual presence requires, the cost of translating thoughts for comfort, and how understanding emerges through dialogue.

[photo by Andrew Seaman]

Dear Line and Middle Managers: I’m a Big Fan

I’m a huge fan.
There is no limit to the admiration I have for the life you lead and the work you do.
You are the heart of an organization.

The things you do and say—
And the things you choose not to do,
And not to say—
Have significant, direct, and immediate impact.

On the lives of your team members.
On the lives of their families.
On the communities they belong to.

Teachers of the Workplace

In my simple mind, I equate your impact to that of teachers.
I’ve been a professor in the classroom.
A program manager outside it.
A dean sitting in an office.

And I know this:
The immediate—unmediated—impact of a teacher
On the life of their students is immeasurable.

The further you are from the classroom,
The more mediated the impact.

So it is with managers:
C-level executives,
VPs of every sort—
They get the attention.

But your type of impact?
Immediate. Real.
Life-changing.

The Challenge of Being in the Middle

You are a manager.
You also have a manager.

Sandwiched between them, you create an environment
Where your people can get their work done,
Even while living in the environment
That your manager builds for you.

And we all know:
These do not necessarily align.

The devastating impact of a micromanager—
Could anything make it clearer?

You rely on your team’s talents,
On their readiness—
That mix of ability and willingness
You know so well.

And yet,
There they are,
In all the splendor of their self-importance,
Barking orders from above,
Sweeping in over your head,
Into the lives of your team members.

The Transition Paradox

What makes us successful at one level
Does not guarantee success at the next.

Being an excellent individual contributor
Does not make you an excellent manager
Of individual contributors.

It’s not automatic.
It requires different skills.
Different types of experience.

And yet, how often do we believe
That others will succeed
Simply by doing what we say?

The same is true for you.
What made you successful as a manager of individual contributors
Isn’t necessarily what will make you successful
As a manager of managers.

Different skills.
Different experiences.
More politics.
More complexity.

What I See in You

I see you.
I hear you.

In our coaching conversations,
I admire you.

Resilience.
That’s the word that comes to mind.

And wisdom—
That ability to separate wheat from chaff,
Day in and day out.

In the mix, I see those
Who truly care for their team members
And those who are focused on their own promotion.

These need not be mutually exclusive.
But sometimes, they are.

A Glass Office

Your team members see you.
They see everything about you.

Even if you’re not on site,
You’re in a glass office.

They see what you do.
They hear what you say.

And they notice—
What you choose not to do.
What you choose not to say.

They see your efforts to connect.
And the times you don’t.

They see the priorities you make:
Your promotion—or theirs.

Your success—or their success.

These need not be mutually exclusive.
But sometimes, they are.

An Ode to You

It’s a complex, layered, multi-faceted existence you lead.
And I applaud you for it.

I see you.
I admire you.
And I’m a big fan.

photo by Mel Poole

You’re Indispensable: That Sucks for All of Us

Protecting Our People’s Right to a Full Life – a policy

Core Purpose

Every person has the right to a full, rich life outside of work. It is fundamental to who we are as an organization. No one should sacrifice their personal life, family time, or wellbeing because they’ve become “indispensable” to our operations.

Why This Matters

1. Life Comes First

People deserve to be fully present for their children’s birthdays
Vacations should be times of real relaxation, not constant check-ins
Family events, holidays, and personal milestones should be celebrated without work interruption
Weekends belong to our people, not to our company
Sick days are for getting better, not answering urgent calls

2. Protecting Personal Time

No one should miss their child’s school play because “only they know how to fix it”
No one should have their vacation interrupted because “we can’t do this without them”
No one should lose sleep because they’re the “only one who can handle this client”
No one should miss family dinner because they’re the “only one who knows the system”

Our Stand

If anyone becomes “indispensable,” we have failed as an organization. We have failed to:

Respect their right to a life outside work
Build proper systems and processes
Foster true teamwork and knowledge sharing
Live up to our values

Corrective Action

When someone becomes indispensable:

Recognize this as an organizational failure – specifically, a leadership failure
Immediately redistribute knowledge and responsibilities to protect the person
Fix the systemic issues that allowed this to happen
Hold the responsible manager accountable through performance management
If a manager persistently creates conditions where people become indispensable or overworks people despite intervention, termination may be necessary because they have demonstrated inability to lead in ways that honor human dignity

Prevention

We protect our people’s right to a life by:

Building redundancy into all critical functions
Ensuring knowledge is shared across teams
Creating clear documentation
Cross-training as a standard practice
Planning for absences and transitions
Celebrating time off and work-life boundaries

Leadership Commitment

Leaders are responsible for:

Protecting everyone’s right to disconnect from work
Building systems that don’t depend on individual heroes
Creating a culture where taking time off is celebrated
Ensuring no one becomes a single point of failure

Remember: If someone can demonstrate they’ve become indispensable, we have failed organizationally and we’ve failed them as human beings. We’ve allowed a situation where their personal life can be held hostage by work demands. That sucks for all of us.

photo by Rahul Saraf

Lies, Damned Lies, and Performance Evaluations

You do their performance evaluations. Their survival in the company depends on your decision and your criteria. So when you say “I get along fine with the people who report to me because I always get good evaluations from them,” do you really think that’s evidence?

This doesn’t mean they lack courage or are being strategic. They might be entirely sincere. The asymmetry simply means you cannot know. When you hold power over someone’s professional life, that structural inequality is present in every interaction whether anyone responds to it or not. Their positive evaluation might reflect their genuine experience of working with you. Or it might not. The asymmetry makes the meaning of their feedback fundamentally indeterminate.

And while the surveys are anonymous, there are just too many managers who’ve told me they can recognize who wrote the comments by the way it was written and the words they used. So even the structural protection of anonymity often dissolves in practice. And if comments are too risky and you take them off, then you’re left with numbers. And as Disraeli said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

You might deserve the praise. But their positive evaluation, given the context, cannot tell you whether you do.

The same dynamic appears when executives cite employee engagement surveys as proof their culture is healthy. The survey measures what employees are willing to say about a culture that determines whether they remain employed. What you’re measuring isn’t engagement. It’s what people are willing to have measured.

photo by Jon Tyson

Trust Doesn’t Work Like That

I keep seeing versions of the same claim: that trust is the natural result of psychological safety. Or that it can be engineered through a formula.

That’s tidy. It’s appealing and it’s convenient.

It’s also not true.

Psychological safety may create the conditions where trust could grow. But that’s all they are: conditions. Trust is never automatic, and never unilateral. It’s not a reward for checking the right boxes.

Trust is a decision. It’s someone else’s decision.

And that changes everything.

Trust works like foreign currency. It’s never strong in general, only strong against something else. The dollar is not stronger overall; it is stronger than the euro, the yen, whatever you’re measuring it against. Trust operates the same way: relational, contextual, and maddeningly specific. You might be someone’s anchor while remaining someone else’s question mark.

Here’s the thing: you can create the perfect conditions (open communication, demonstrated competence, unwavering reliability) and still manufacture nothing. You can create the environment where trust might grow, but the seed belongs to someone else entirely.

The other person chooses to trust. It doesn’t happen automatically. Their history, their scars, their appetite for vulnerability are all variables you’ll never control, no matter how trustworthy you become.

Which leaves you with a paradox in human connection: you can perfect your trustworthiness but never guarantee their trust. You can tend the garden but not force the bloom.

So create the conditions and then wait.

You can knock. But the door has to be opened from the other side.

The idea that trust is relational, chosen, and not guaranteed lies at the heart of my approach to leadership practice. It invites us to hold both our responsibility for trustworthiness and our humility about what trust ultimately requires.