Category: Manage your team

The invisible Bob and Martha

Humus is the thin dark layer, a few centimeters at most, that sits at the surface of the earth and sustains virtually all life on it. It takes roughly a century to form a single centimeter. It can be destroyed in an afternoon.

Most people walk over it without a second thought.

Organizations have their own humus. It doesn’t have a name on the org chart and it doesn’t appear in the annual report. It’s the accumulated living layer that makes everything else possible: trust, institutional memory, the relationships through which decisions get made and exceptions get authorized outside formal channels. Like humus, it forms slowly and invisibly, through thousands of small interactions over years. And like humus, it can be destroyed in an afternoon.

A restructuring. A betrayal. A leadership change that signals, loudly or quietly, that the old rules no longer apply. The layer doesn’t announce its departure. You notice it the way you notice soil erosion: invisibly for months, then unmistakably, when something that used to grow no longer does.

The reason organizations chronically underinvest in these things isn’t negligence. It’s visibility.

Humus doesn’t have a line item. Neither does trust. Neither does the knowledge that quietly exits when the wrong people leave. We fund what we can see and measure, which means we systematically defund the layer everything grows from.

The accounting logic is impeccable. The biological logic is catastrophic.

And the humus has a face. It’s Bob. It’s Martha. The ones who’ve been there for decades, who know where everything is and why it works the way it does, who remember what was tried before and what happened.

But here is something we don’t say: some of them chose this.

They saw, early or late, what the organization could and couldn’t see, and they settled permanently into the space between what the organization measured and what it needed. The invisible layer isn’t only where the unrecognized end up. It’s also where certain people go deliberately, because it’s the only place in the organization where the work is judged by whether it functions rather than by whether it’s visible, and the exposure to organizational politics is low enough to ignore. They knew they were invisible. Some of them preferred it that way.

Which means the organization’s failure to see them was not always unilateral. There was an arrangement. Informal and unspoken. It held. The organization got the benefit of the layer without having to account for it. Bob and Martha got to do the work they cared about without having to perform for systems that wouldn’t have known how to evaluate them anyway. It suited everyone. It cost everyone something.

We see them. We appreciate them in a vague, fond way. We call them lifers. We call them grinders. And when they retire we give them a plaque and a room full of warm applause, and six months later things start not working and nobody can explain why.

Meanwhile we celebrate the stars. The ones who rose. We built a recognition system that rewards only what our existing categories can name — ascent — rewarding the people who rise and ignoring the people who hold the ground. Then we’re surprised when the ground erodes.

The question isn’t whether your organization has this layer.

The question is whether anyone is tending it. And tending requires visibility. Which means the first problem isn’t resources or intention. It’s that some of the people who live in this layer may not want to be found. The arrangement protected them too. Making the invisible visible isn’t neutral. It changes what the layer is.

You can’t tend something you can’t see. But seeing it changes it.

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photo by Matúš Kovačovský

Working with the Grain

Once you learn to read organizational dynamics, you can’t stop reading them. This is what happens when you take the practice seriously. Waste becomes obvious. The gap between stated values and actual practice becomes glaring. Sensing these undercurrents means feeling them.

This doesn’t make you noble. It makes you tired in specific ways that are hard to explain to people who don’t work this way.

The Practice Itself

A cabinet maker works with the grain, not against it. Not because it’s spiritual or beautiful, but because the material responds differently depending on how you approach it. The wood tells you something if you’re paying attention.

Management works the same way.

This means developing heightened awareness: how information actually flows versus how the org chart says it should. Where energy clusters and where it gets dammed up. The person who stops speaking in meetings after a particular decision. The shift in tone between front-stage and back-stage conversations. Subtle signals: a hesitation, a quick breath, the way someone’s hands move when they’re deciding whether to say what they actually think. You feel it physically: your chest tightens when something shifts, attention snaps to a pause that signals more than words convey. Over time you learn what that tightness means. Usually something important is about to happen or has just been avoided.

You learn through your hands, not books. The resistance when you push too hard. The smooth flow when your approach fits. The subtle feedback that tells you when to press forward and when to step back. This is craft knowledge: embodied and situational. Impossible to fully articulate.

What Gets Complicated Immediately

Each team, each situation has its own grain. What worked before may not work now. But here’s where it breaks: determining what the material “is” involves judgment that’s never purely objective. How much of what you see is actual pattern, and how much is your projection? The question matters more than the answer.

You will spend years learning to distinguish between reading what’s actually there and reading your own preferences into it. Some of what you’re seeing is real. Some is you. The line between perception and projection is thinner than most methods acknowledge.

There’s also this: people have agency.

Unlike wood, the grain responds to your touch, and your presence alters what you’re trying to read. You’re not just reading material. You’re in relationship with it, and the material is reading you back. This changes what craft means.

The Dangers

The practice doesn’t protect you from using it badly. You will meet people who use the language of craft to excuse slowness, who mistake their discomfort with metrics for depth, and who perform thoughtfulness while avoiding accountability.

Sometimes you are that person.

I spent six months convinced I was being patient with a person who needed time. It looked like craft. It felt like presence. What it actually was: avoidance. I didn’t want to have the hard conversation, so I called my hesitation “honoring their process.” They left the organization confused about what I thought, and the work suffered. Calling it craft made the avoidance feel noble.

Craft can become a way of not being accountable. “I see things others don’t” stops being an acknowledgment of cost and becomes a reason to stop being questioned and to stop engaging with people who don’t see it. The loneliness of the practice gets mistaken for evidence that you’re right.

There is a difference between working with the grain and just being slow, and calling it craft. Between being patient and avoiding decisions, and calling it patience. The danger is mistaking slowness for wisdom.

The central question is whether you can practice craft in systems designed for something else entirely: staying curious when the organization demands certainty or working with care when speed is rewarded.

What Happens Over Time

Early on, you begin noticing what others miss: tension, hesitation, a pause. Your attention snaps to subtle signals. This heightened perception is both a gift and a burden. You can’t unsee what you’ve learned to see.

Perception without wisdom about intervention makes things worse. Early on, I walked into a meeting reading silence as resistance. Something needed to be said, I thought. I broke the silence. Three hours later I learned that person had spent the whole meeting trying to find courage to speak, and my stepping in made them disappear further back into the room.

That was fifteen years ago. I still feel it.

Now when I see silence, I wait longer. Sometimes I wait too long. That’s another kind of harm. You learn—mostly through getting it wrong—when your seeing calls for action and when it calls for staying still.

Over time, something unexpected happens. Responsibility deepens while grandiosity falls away. You stop trying to fix things that aren’t yours to fix. A person resists a change you believe in and you watch yourself wanting to persuade them, but instead you say nothing. You notice the relief in your shoulders. That’s the lightness of releasing what you cannot carry.

This is the daily tension between caring deeply and accepting that your caring doesn’t control outcomes. Last week someone important to the organization resigned because of a decision you supported. You were right about the decision. They were right to leave. Both things are true. The tension doesn’t resolve. You learn to work within it.

Failures accumulate. Some reveal patterns you’d missed: you misread a person’s motivation and your intervention made things worse. Some show a mismatch that no intervention could fix: you did everything right and the person had already decided to leave. Learning to distinguish between these takes time and leaves marks.

Something shifts in how you hold difficulty. In a crisis last year, the room was fractured: two factions, impossible positions, language breaking down. You felt the panic just below the surface of everyone’s voice. You didn’t fix it. Instead, you asked questions no one wanted asked. And the resolution came from somewhere else. The room stopped fracturing while you were there. You felt that.

But other times nothing resolves. The conflict stays messy. The decision causes harm despite your care. You learn to value the attempt even when the result falls short.

What Has Changed

What has fallen away is the need to control everything. You used to feel responsible for how others received what you said, for whether they made the right decision. Ten years in, you stopped. The clarity of knowing what’s actually mine to do came slowly: I cannot control whether they believe me or whether it lands.

What has intensified is the sensitivity to unnecessary harm. A person is being set up to fail and no one sees it. A decision is being made on incomplete information and the person making it doesn’t know it. The organization says it values connection and the structure prevents it. These things become impossible to ignore. You feel them. The intolerance for it is almost physical.

What remains uncertain is whether any of this makes the difference you hope it makes.

You lose certain illusions: that you can control outcomes, that the system will reward integrity, that doing good work is enough, that organizations are fundamentally rational. These illusions make work easier to bear. Losing them clarifies. It also costs.

The Loneliness and the Aliveness

Decades in, the practice doesn’t stabilize. Unexpected.

You’re still discovering new ways to sense a room. Last month you noticed something: the way people arrange themselves has changed. Tighter. More defended. No one said this was happening. But the geometry of the room tells you something about the organization’s nervous system. You mention it to someone who’s been here twenty years. They haven’t seen it. You wonder if you’re right or if you’re seeing patterns that aren’t there.

The master craftsperson isn’t someone who has arrived. They’re still tinkering, still playful with the fundamentals. They know the craft deeply enough to question it, to try combinations that might be wrong. There’s aliveness in this.

You notice your own perception more precisely. But the more you understand, the more you see you don’t understand. Mastery means holding permanently that you could be completely wrong about what you’re reading.

Sometimes you’re alone in sensing undercurrents. Not everyone works this way. Most think you’re too slow, too concerned with things that don’t show up in quarterly reviews. You’re in a meeting, you see something—a shift in someone’s tone, a decision being made sideways, the moment trust breaks—and no one else seems to notice. You can’t unsee it. But naming it would sound strange. So you carry it alone. And the carrying is real weight.

Occasionally you encounter another practitioner: a nod, a glance. Understanding without explanation. These moments are rare. They remind you the craft exists independent of whether this particular organization values it.

The Cost Is Real

This practice demands things if you take it seriously. It also assumes conditions—enough credibility to be slow, enough standing to value what doesn’t show up in metrics—that aren’t equally distributed.

You will see things you cannot unsee. And you will feel them in your body.

You will keep experimenting. Not because you’re dissatisfied, but because you’re alive to possibility. The craft keeps revealing new questions and new ways of seeing. This continues as long as you practice.

The curiosity doesn’t diminish. It deepens.

Some people find they cannot work any other way because once you see the grain, you cannot pretend it isn’t there.

What Remains

Management as craft doesn’t guarantee good outcomes. Careful attention doesn’t ensure success. Working with the grain doesn’t mean the organization will flourish. Sometimes you do everything right and it still fails. Sometimes the system is too broken for craft to matter. Sometimes caring deeply just means feeling the harm more acutely.

Your hands learn to read the grain more precisely even as you become less certain about what the reading means. The practice continues.

This is what long practice looks like: not mastery as completion, but mastery as sustained attention, ongoing curiosity, the capacity to keep working thoughtfully with material that never fully reveals itself.

The craft is the work. Humanity is what prevents it from becoming manipulation. Whether any of it matters depends on questions you cannot fully answer, working in conditions you rarely control, with people who may or may not recognize what you’re trying to do.

The practice continues. That’s the whole thing. The practice continues.

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photo by Ted Balmer

On Any Given Day

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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?

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photo by Rikin Katyal on Unsplash