On Any Given Day

How are they feeling today? Are they after a big win that’s taken a lot of time and energy, or a quick win from being clever and nimble? Are they after a loss, a big loss, like a major project they worked on, prepared, pitched, and got a no? Or a little loss, something they thought they would get at the last minute, but the client said no?

Are they rebuilding because someone left or someone got fired? Are they still working out the kinks of who’s who and what’s what; not in terms of titles, but in terms of the informal culture? What’s the age composition? Do you have more people closer to the exit than the entrance? And those closer to the exit – are they looking at their work, or are they looking at the calendar counting down the days?

How often do your people call on each other for help or counsel or expertise? How often do they recruit each other for their projects? Do they socialize? Do they like being in the presence of each other?

How’s their health? Are they eating well? Are they sleeping well? Or do they just look like they’re eating and sleeping well? Are they calm and rested, or do they need caffeine and Red Bull to pump them up?

Are they engaging in extraprofessional activities and community activities, and do they do so regularly, consistently? Are they involved in forms of service: community, church, or otherwise? Do they perform acts of service at work?

What are the ages of their children? Is it kindergarten time? Is it high school time? Is it time to pick a college and pay for it?

How do they talk about their work when they’re not at work? Do they tell stories about what happened, or do they change the subject? When they mention it, is there energy or flatness? Do they seem to carry it with them, or do they set it down completely?

What do they do with silence? When there’s a pause in a meeting, do they fill it immediately, or can they sit with it? Do they look uncomfortable, or do they seem at ease? Do others wait with them, or does someone else always break it first?

How do they handle being wrong? Do they adjust when new information arrives, or do they defend their original position? Can they say “I don’t know” easily, or does it come out with qualifications? Do they circle back later, or move on as if it didn’t happen?

What’s their relationship with time? Do they act like there’s never enough, or do they work as if they have what they need? Are they always running to the next thing, or do they finish one thing before starting another? Do they protect margin, or fill every gap?

How do they respond when someone else succeeds? Is there genuine interest in the details, or quick congratulations before moving on? Do they ask questions about how it happened, or shift to their own similar experience? Do they celebrate differently depending on who succeeded?

What do they notice? Do they see when someone’s struggling before being told? Do they pick up on shifts in the room? Do they comment on what’s happening beneath the surface, or stay focused on what’s being said? Do they notice patterns over time, or just what’s immediate?

How do they make decisions? Do they gather more information first, or decide with what they have? Do they involve the people affected before deciding, after deciding, or not at all? Do they announce decisions or propose them? Do they revisit when circumstances change, or stick because they already decided?

What’s their tolerance for mess? Can they work when things are unclear, or do they need everything defined first? Do they categorize quickly to move forward, or sit with complexity longer? Do they simplify when they talk about it, or keep the complications visible?

How do they treat people who can’t advance their work? The security guard, the custodian, the contractor brought in for a day? Is there eye contact? Do they learn names? Does their tone change from how they speak to colleagues?

What do they do between meetings? Do they check their phone, talk to whoever’s nearby, or sit quietly? Do they prep for what’s next, decompress from what just happened, or something else entirely? Are they present in hallways and elevators, or already somewhere else?

photo by Stephane Gagnon

The Gandhi Paradox

You are not Gandhi.

Gandhi was a private citizen when he began. No title, no formal authority. People followed him because they chose to. They could walk away, and some did, and that was their right, and the movement survived anyway. The commitment of those who stayed was real precisely because it was voluntary. You could see it because leaving was an option.

Your direct reports operate inside a legal framework of employment. Their income depends on meeting your expectations. Their career depends on your assessment of them. The question this creates is one most managers never ask: how much of what I read as engagement is engagement, and how much of it is the entirely rational behavior of people who have learned that agreement is safer than dissent?

I watched this once in a team meeting. A new initiative was presented. Everyone engaged: questions, notes, apparent buy-in. Weeks later, in a casual conversation, I learned that several people in that room had serious reservations. Reservations they took home with them. They had done everything right. Their compliance had been indistinguishable from commitment.

It was not commitment. And the room never knew.

The manager who recognizes this pattern has usually decided it doesn’t apply to them. The open door is real. The invitation to candor is sincere. And none of it changes what people will risk saying to someone who controls their livelihood. The effort was genuine. The structure doesn’t register it.

This is not a culture problem. It is not a communication problem. It is not a psychological safety problem, though it will be diagnosed as all three. The power differential does not disappear because you have made yourself approachable. It shapes what people will risk saying in every conversation you have with them. It shaped what they said to you this morning.

What you are reading as engagement is real. It is also insufficient evidence. The question worth pondering is not how to fix the structure. You can’t. It is what kind of attention you owe people you cannot fully read.

photo by 愚木混株 Yumu

The fourth book

Javier would have a pile of books waiting for me whenever I showed up at his bookshop. His selection was based on our conversations, during which he had discovered my dissertation topic, my previous studies, my professional experience, my broad interest in music, as well as the purchases I had made. Naturally, he would ask about my hockey team back home and also bitch about the local soccer team losing, again, and possibly dropping to a lower division.

Javier lived in a relatively small city. A provincial capital, for sure, but relatively small. I haven’t found a Javier in the big cities I came home to. But I try: I go to a local bookstore, find three books I want to buy, and then take them to one of the employees and ask them to pick me a fourth.

photo by Olya P

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

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.

What You Lose Every Time You Get Promoted

Organizations rarely name what actually happens when you get promoted: each transition destroys your identity. The capabilities and ways of working that made you successful at one level become obsolete at the next. Every promotion is not an expansion of capability. It is the death of one professional identity and the birth of another. And that destruction follows a recursive pattern that compounds with every promotion.

The recursive pattern

When you move from individual contributor to manager, you lose the satisfaction of creating tangible output and must find meaning in developing others. When you move from manager to manager of managers, you lose direct contact with individual development and must find meaning in shaping systems. When you move to organizational leadership, you lose decisive ownership of your domain and must find meaning in collaborative deliberation with peers.

Each transition asks you to surrender the identity and capabilities that made you successful at the previous level. The engineering manager who writes code at night isn’t integrating her technical skills. She’s trying to keep a dead identity on life support.

And each time, the new identity is more abstract:

IC identity: “I wrote this code. I designed this system.” You can point to the thing you made today.
Manager identity: “My team shipped this feature.” You can still see the output, even if your hands didn’t create it.
Manager of Managers identity: “The organization delivered these results.” The causal chain is longer.
Organizational Leader identity: “We navigated this tension productively and made a better collective decision.” Your contribution is the quality of the deliberative process itself, almost entirely invisible.

Each level is harder to inhabit, harder to feel competent in, provides less immediate satisfaction. The grief compounds because just when you’ve finally learned to derive meaning from the abstraction, just when you’ve built a new professional identity and found your footing, you get promoted. You spend two years discovering that your value comes from developing your team rather than doing the work yourself. You finally feel the satisfaction when someone you coached has a breakthrough. And then we promote you. That direct development work you just learned to love? Not your job anymore.

The refuge of power

Leaders retreat to what they know, seeking refuge in an identity they know how to inhabit. Where they can still feel competent. Where their expertise still matters in ways they can directly experience. Where they have control over variables that produce tangible outcomes.

When you can no longer derive identity from what you produce, you grab for identity through what you can control. Power becomes the refuge from abstraction and loss. You reach for certainty because deciding means you don’t have to sit in ambiguity. You seek visibility because when people do what you say, you can see your impact. You tighten control because determining outcomes means you’re not dependent on others. You validate your expertise by ensuring people defer to you, proving you still matter.

The CEO who micromanages is seeking the feeling of competence through control because they never successfully grieved the loss of hands-on creation. The executive who dominates meetings is grasping for the certainty of “being right” because the ambiguity of collaborative deliberation provides no ground to stand on.

Organizations full of individually capable leaders become toxic political environments because they promoted people into identity-destroying transitions without support. But this isn’t only psychological failure. It’s structural design. Organizations reward executives who “take charge” and “drive results,” language that encodes a bias toward unilateral control over collaborative deliberation. The very behaviors that indicate unprocessed grief are the ones that get celebrated and compensated.

Power is what you reach for when you’re drowning in abstraction and loss. The organizational debt of eroded trust, broken relationships, alliance-building instead of collaboration isn’t a failure of process or skills. It’s unprocessed grief manifesting as destructive behavior.

What I observe in those who navigate this well

The people who make it through these transitions share something I find interesting: they work as if they’re managing one team, the people who report directly to them. Not the team below them. Not peer domains. Not work that now belongs to their reports. Just their team.

This pattern holds at every level. The manager focuses on their direct reports (the ICs). The manager of managers focuses on their direct reports (the managers). The functional leader focuses on their direct reports (the senior managers). The organizational leader focuses on their direct reports and their peers as their working team.

When leaders violate that boundary, managing past their directs or trying to control peer domains, they seem to be using positional power to avoid grief. Staying in an old identity by force. What they’re missing is operational clarity about where their actual leverage is. A manager trying to manage two levels down is working on variables they don’t actually control. Their direct report sits between them and that team. Any attempt to go around them either undermines authority or wastes energy on influence they don’t have.

The leaders who navigate transitions well appear clearer about the actual nature of their work. They identify where their leverage is and stay focused there. But holding that boundary seems to require staying with discomfort when every instinct tells you to reach for the familiar.

What I notice in those who make it through is something that might be called the discipline of non-interference. The capacity to not act when action would provide comfort but undermine others’ development. Leadership as restraint practiced at scale. The hardest transition isn’t learning new skills. It’s learning when not to use the skills that made you successful. Tolerating the space where you’re not the hero, not the expert, not the decider. They hold the boundary as a commitment that seems to force them to discover what contribution means at this level.

What enables someone to stay there long enough to discover new sources of meaning? Those who make it through begin to notice impact in forms they didn’t previously recognize as contribution. They start to see that the abstract work (the quality of a deliberation, the strength of a system, the capability of their team) actually does produce something real, even if their hands never touch it. The question becomes: can you stay in the not-knowing long enough to discover what satisfaction feels like at this level of abstraction?

The expanding scope

What changes at each level isn’t the principle of “manage your team.” What changes is the scope of what you must consider. But here’s the paradox: your scope expands while your leverage contracts.

Manager: your team’s work, how it fits into the broader function, coordination with adjacent teams
Manager of Managers: the entire functional domain, resource allocation, functional strategy
Functional Leader: your function’s role in organizational strategy, dependencies with other functions, how your decisions affect the whole company
Organizational Leader: the entire enterprise (market dynamics, competitive landscape, cross-functional tradeoffs, long-term viability)

Yet at every level, you still only directly manage one team. The challenge becomes: How do I make good decisions that account for this massive scope of consideration, when my direct control is limited to developing this small group of people who report to me?

The organization works because everyone is applying the same principle at their level. Each person managing their team, considering their scope, with that same discipline recursing down through every layer.

The reframe

At every level, the people who report to you are contributors. They’re just contributing different things:

ICs contribute technical output, functional execution, tangible deliverables
Managers contribute team capability, people development, coordinated execution
Managers of Managers contribute organizational systems, functional strategy, leadership capacity
Functional Leaders contribute cross-functional integration, organizational outcomes, strategic direction

You’re always managing contributors. The nature of their contribution changes, but your job remains the same: enable your contributors to contribute at their level.

And you yourself are a contributor to the level you report to. The manager contributes team capability to the manager of managers. The functional leader contributes cross-functional integration to the organizational leadership team. Everyone is simultaneously managing contributors below them and contributing to the level above them.

You don’t stop being a contributor when you become a manager. You become a different kind of contributor. You don’t stop managing contributors. You manage contributors whose contribution is enabling other contributors. The grief isn’t “I’m no longer a contributor.” It’s “my form of contribution has changed.”

What we’re really asking

Becoming an organizational leader means surrendering decisive control and unilateral authority (the very capabilities that defined functional leadership excellence) and finding meaning in something maximally abstract: the quality of collective deliberation itself. You must derive satisfaction from outcomes you don’t fully control. You must feel competent at work that produces no tangible artifacts. You must find meaning in the deliberative process rather than in decisive action. Your contribution is the quality of your engagement with peers, an identity that only exists in relationship and can’t be fully controlled by any individual.

That’s grief work. Until we name it as such, we’ll keep promoting people into identity-destroying transitions without support, creating the organizational debt of broken relationships and toxic politics, then wondering why smart, capable leaders keep struggling with cross-functional collaboration.

Navigating these transitions requires yet another surrender of what made you successful, yet another grief process for what you’ve lost, and yet another discovery of meaning in increasing abstraction. All while everyone pretends it’s just learning new collaboration skills.

photo by CHUTTERSNAP

The Room: When groups become collective intelligence

Something happens when a group begins to think together. The air thickens, the silence deepens, and the room becomes more than a room.

For me as a facilitator, the room is a sacred place. Not sacred because it’s solemn or ceremonial, but because what unfolds there can’t be manufactured or guaranteed. It’s a physical space like any other: tables, chairs, markers. But given the right conditions, it becomes a collective intelligence with a mind and heart of its own.

We often think of facilitation as running activities and directing traffic. But just as no two spaces are identical, no two rooms are ever the same. The facilitator’s approach becomes one of discovery. You don’t know who will walk through the door, what state they’ll be in, or whether they’ve come willingly or by obligation. But when people come together not as bodies in seats or a list of participants, but as a group, they can become the room itself.

When that happens, the room takes on a life of its own. The facilitator’s role shifts from running it to letting it run: just allowing it to follow its own natural course. This doesn’t happen in instructional settings where people learn technical skills or repeat practices toward mastery. Those require direction and individual focus. The “sacred” room emerges in experiential learning contexts, where experience is shaped into insight through structured reflection, shared wisdom, and collective meaning-making.

In these moments, the facilitator becomes like a dot in the corner of a square: present just enough and positioned at the edge rather than the center. When the room finds its life, you participate rather than intervene. You become part of the room’s intelligence instead of standing outside trying to manage it. You sense when to ask a question the room seems to be asking already, when to speak a reflection that’s already forming, when to hold silence so the room can breathe and think.

Sometimes we tell participants: it’s not my room because I’m the facilitator, and it’s not your room just because you outnumber me. It’s our room. And it will become what we collectively make it. Not what I dictate. Not what you overpower. If I control it, it will never be. If you dominate it, it will never be either.

The Requirement: A Specific Kind of Truth-Telling

For the room to emerge, it requires a critical mass of mature people. People willing and able to take an honest look at themselves. This shows up as a particular kind of truth-telling: being truthful with yourself when reflecting on experience. Not just “what happened,” but “what was happening to me as this was happening.”

This creates a particular form of alertness: a clear, calm watchfulness. A capacity available to any human being, but likely only in those willing to observe their own reactions, resistances, and habits without rushing to explain or defend them.

This internal honesty is both necessary and sufficient, because it becomes the most powerful invitation for others to be honest with themselves. When someone shares something genuinely personal around the table (like a professional struggle that still stings), it makes it easier for others to lower their guard. Not because vulnerability is being modeled, but because genuine calls forth genuine.

Now, not everyone can stay in that kind of honesty. For some, the air of truth becomes too clear and too thin to breathe. And for them, the reaction is to become performative

When Ego Can’t Find Its Place

Some people can’t find their footing in the room. They tend to reveal themselves in predictable ways: overpowering, undermining, or checking out entirely. They exit the process with vague comments like “yeah, it was a good refresher.”

In group discussions, they often answer what should be personal questions with “as managers we…”, suddenly speaking on behalf of all managers across times, cultures, and industries. The irony is striking: the inflated “I” that usually demands attention retreats into the anonymous “we” the moment genuine self-reflection is required. The ego can perform individuality, but it can’t inhabit it. Not when that means acknowledging uncertainty or a growing edge.

The room can’t form around abstractions. It needs the specific and the personal. It needs real. When enough people maintain that steady, honest relationship with themselves, collective intelligence begins to emerge. The room becomes what it needs to become: a sacred space of shared mind, discovering wisdom none of its members could have reached alone.

This is the secret of the room: a field of presence and truthfulness that allows groups to transcend their individual limits and become something greater.

And once you’ve been in such a room, the real question becomes:
How do you return to the world outside without forgetting what you experienced?

photo by Marian Kamenistak on Unsplash

The Counterpuncher Syndrome: Why Your Team Struggles to Innovate

In their historic trilogy of fights, Muhammad Ali demonstrated the art of counterpunching: neutralizing Joe Frazier’s attacks, then turning them into devastating blows of his own. Many organizations face similar team innovation challenges: waiting for others to make the first move, then responding with precision strikes aimed at exposing weaknesses rather than initiating bold ideas of their own.

But in organizations, counterpunching does more than deflect. It wears down the very people who generate ideas, training natural initiators to stop coming forward. Over time, even aggressive innovators learn to keep their guard up and wait, leaving companies full of Ali-style counterpunchers but few Frazier-style aggressors willing to take risks.

I call this the counterpuncher syndrome: a mindset that shapes behavior at every level of organizational life. It helps explain why innovation initiatives so often falter despite loud commitments to creativity and growth.

The Meeting Room Reality

Nowhere is the syndrome more visible than in meetings. A familiar choreography plays out: someone shares an idea, and within seconds the critiques arrive. Proposal collapses into postmortem before it has had the chance to breathe.

The implicit norm is “no, but”, a reflexive counterpunch that halts momentum. Contrast this with the “yes, and” of improvisational theater, where ideas are extended before they are judged.

Structures reinforce the pattern. Agendas allocate “discussion time” that becomes de facto criticism. Decision criteria emphasize risk avoidance over opportunity creation. Even the table itself can feel like a boxing ring, where ideas are opponents to be defeated rather than possibilities to be developed.

The result: meetings function less as generative spaces and more as arenas of evaluation. Only ideas backed by extraordinary confidence or power survive their first round, which makes innovation the exception, not the norm.

The Individual Manifestation

At the personal level, the syndrome often sounds like: “I’m not creative.” That phrase rarely points to innate limits. More often, it reflects a mindset trained by systems that reward critique over creation.

We’ve schooled and socialized people to excel at flaw-finding while leaving their generative muscles underdeveloped. Professional identity becomes defined by what one prevents rather than what one proposes, measured in problems avoided rather than possibilities realized.

The Parasitic Nature of Pure Critique

Criticism without contribution is essentially parasitic. Like a leech, it feeds on the vitality of others’ ideas but produces no life of its own.

Teams that excel at problem-spotting but stall when asked for solutions become organizational drags rather than drivers. Critique may expose weakness, but without generation, there is nothing left to strengthen.

Cultural Origins and Reinforcement

This orientation runs deep in management culture. Systems are built to prevent loss, not foster gain. Risk registers are meticulously maintained; opportunity inventories rarely exist. We celebrate “failing fast” more than “discovering rapidly.” We conduct postmortems, not growth analyses.

Our very vocabulary skews defensive. And that language shapes systems, which then shape behavior, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where counterpunching becomes the default stance.

Misunderstanding Critical Thinking

Organizations often mistake criticism for critical thinking. True critical thinking examines an issue from multiple angles: testing assumptions, recognizing patterns, weighing evidence, and imagining alternatives. Criticizing, by contrast, is narrow: it spots weaknesses without balancing them against strengths or possibilities.

This slippage allows leaders to claim they prize “critical thinking” while presiding over cultures hostile to new ideas.

Beyond Binary Thinking

Escaping the counterpuncher syndrome doesn’t mean swinging to the opposite extreme. Blind optimism is as unhelpful as reflexive critique. The task is to integrate both: to create deliberate sequences where ideas are generated before they are evaluated, to balance offense with defense, to enrich our vocabulary of possibility alongside our vocabulary of risk.

It means treating paradox as a feature, not a flaw: seeing creativity and critique as complementary modes rather than competing ones. And it means asking who holds the initiative, not just who has the sharper response.

The Choice

Counterpunchers excel at responding to what others create. But who’s creating what they respond to?

So the question for teams and organizations is this: are you content to keep counterpunching, or are you ready to name what could be and summon the courage to build it?

photo by Rikin Katyal on Unsplash

Keep it on the one: From funk to management

I sometimes close my newsletters with the expression: “keep it on the one.”

Some of you have asked what it means. Others have asked how a phrase rooted in music applies to the craft of management.

So here’s a short reflection on both.

The musical foundation

“The one” refers to the first beat of a 4/4 time signature. Think of it simply as the one, two, three, four count that underlies much of Western music. James Brown would tell his band to “hit it on the one,” emphasizing that first beat hard, anchoring the groove so everything else could lock in around it.

What I grew up with was mostly jazz, where the groove works a little differently. The bass lays down the one and the three; my guitar came in on the two and the four. That gave us a pulse—boom, clap, boom, clap—a conversation between instruments. Once that back-and-forth is in place, everything else can layer in. The horn section, the keys, the percussion, each doing their own thing, but all staying grounded.

It’s not uncommon in a tune to have the bass lay out the foundation on the one and three for a while before the rest of the rhythm comes in.

You can drift in and out of solos, experiment with voicings, stretch the phrasing. But if you ever get lost, you just listen for the one.

That’s where you rejoin the groove.

The management connection

The same holds true in management.

Just as musicians need a shared pulse to stay in the pocket, teams need a clear, dependable reference point, something that centers them.

In practice, keeping it on the one means establishing and sustaining the fundamental rhythms that hold a team together. The values you live by. The priorities you return to. The cadences you maintain. What that looks like will differ from one team to the next.

When projects get complex or improvisation runs wild, or when a new player joins the ensemble, it’s those fundamentals that help everyone find their way back into sync.

It’s not about rigid structure. It’s about shared rhythm.

It’s what allows people to play differently without falling apart.

That’s why I say “keep it on the one.”

It’s a reminder, for myself and for you, to stay grounded. To stay in time with what matters. To keep the rhythm that makes both structure and creativity possible.

Because great performance, whether in music or management, is never just about the solo. It’s about staying connected to the groove we build together.

Keep it steady. Keep it human. Keep it on the one.

Introducing: Behind the Scenes

I spend a fair amount of time rereading what I’ve written—to understand how my thinking holds together and where it might be heading next. How do ideas I explored months ago connect to what I’m circling now? What threads have I been following without realizing it? Where did a particular angle actually come from?

It’s a way of making sense of my own thinking. But I’ve started to wonder if others might find that process interesting, too.

So I’m starting a monthly-ish Behind the Scenes series where I share some of that reflection. The first one looks at how my recent essay, What You Lose When You Lead, fits within the larger conversation I’ve been building about management and leadership. How ideas about craft, exemplarity, and human motivation have been circling each other in my work, converging around one of the most misunderstood transitions in professional life.

The weekly newsletter stays just as it is: free and open to everyone. This is simply the thinking I’d be doing anyway, made available for the cost of a coffee if you’re curious to come along. Most Behind the Scenes entries will be for paid subscribers, though I’ll share one with everyone from time to time when it feels right.

If that’s not your thing, no worries. Nothing changes. The main conversation continues every week, just as it always has.

I’ll send the first one tomorrow.

Decoding ‘What For’: Understanding What Really Drives Us

In recent weeks, we’ve explored management as craft, requiring deep understanding of human nature, and leadership as poetry, flowing with rather than against the currents of organizational life. As we’ve ventured into embracing chaos—both within and around us—a new question emerges: what truly moves people forward? Perhaps the answer lies not in how we motivate others, but in understanding the complex web of motives that already drives them.

What draws people forward? We often frame this question in terms of motivation—what we can do to energize, direct, and sustain behavior. But what if the key lies not in motivating people, but in understanding their deeper motives?

Vicky is a dedicated doctor. She studied hard, interned tirelessly, and continues to work with unwavering commitment. Her warm bedside manner has made her a trusted physician, and she never gives up on her patients. Vicky also keeps up with the latest research, consults with colleagues, and strives to do the right thing. She genuinely cares about her patients and always wants what’s best for them.

But there’s another layer to Vicky’s story: she also wants to make a good living. She’s proud of her work, yes, but she’s also conscious of the financial rewards it brings. And why shouldn’t she be? Vicky wants to succeed on multiple levels—she’s driven by both her passion for medicine and her desire to support her well-being. This brings us to an important question: what drives people? What inspires someone like Vicky to do her best every day?

We often think of motivation as either intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation comes from within—it’s when we do something because we enjoy it or find it meaningful. Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is when we do something for external rewards, like money or recognition. But this traditional distinction is too simplistic. In reality, our drives are far more complex.

We might be better off talking about motives instead of motivation. Motives are the specific outcomes or goals we’re aiming for. They’re not just the ‘why’ behind what we do; they’re the ‘what for.’ What are you doing this for? Is it for financial security, personal satisfaction, or the well-being of others? Identifying these motives helps us understand what we’re trying to achieve.

And that’s where things get interesting. It’s perfectly possible—common, even—to have multiple motives at once. Take Vicky: she wants to make money (extrinsic), do good work and be proud of it (intrinsic), and ensure her work has a positive impact on others (what my colleague Iñaki Vélaz calls transcendent motives). Transcendent motives are those that go beyond ourselves—a desire to contribute to something bigger, to make a meaningful difference in the lives of others.

What if, instead of trying to motivate people, we sought to understand their motives? How might that change the way we lead? When assigning tasks or responsibilities, there is what needs to get done; and there is aligning that work with the motives of the person performing it. Rather than trying to push others, what if we simply uncovered and highlighted the motives they already hold? It’s not about forcing them to act but inviting them to engage with work that aligns with their personal goals.

Ultimately, the conversation isn’t just about motivation in some broad, abstract sense. It’s about recognizing the diverse motives that drive people in different ways. So the next time you’re thinking about how to inspire your team, ask yourself: What are their motives? And how might those motives connect with the goals of the organization? By opening up the field of possibility, we can create workplaces where people feel fulfilled not just by what they do, but by why—and for what—they do it.

Motives are fluid, and they can shift over time. Vicky who starts driven by financial security might later find herself more motivated by the impact she has on her patients. Or, she might prioritize both at different times, depending on what’s happening in her life. How often do we reflect on our shifting motives? If they evolve, how might that shape the way we engage with work and life? Understanding our motives is just one part of the endless journey of understanding what moves us forward, what holds us back, and how we might work with rather than against our human nature.

Go HERE for more Essays.