Don’t Be an Echo, Be a Voice

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

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

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

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

The architecture of agreement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The precision of disagreement

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

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

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

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

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

The dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[photo by Andrew Seaman]

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

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

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

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

Teachers of the Workplace

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

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

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

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

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

The Challenge of Being in the Middle

You are a manager.
You also have a manager.

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

And we all know:
These do not necessarily align.

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

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

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

The Transition Paradox

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I See in You

I see you.
I hear you.

In our coaching conversations,
I admire you.

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

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

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

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

A Glass Office

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your success—or their success.

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

An Ode to You

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

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

photo by Mel Poole

You’re Indispensable: That Sucks for All of Us

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

Core Purpose

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

Why This Matters

1. Life Comes First

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

2. Protecting Personal Time

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

Our Stand

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

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

Corrective Action

When someone becomes indispensable:

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

Prevention

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

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

Leadership Commitment

Leaders are responsible for:

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

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

photo by Rahul Saraf

Lies, Damned Lies, and Performance Evaluations

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

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

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

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

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

photo by Jon Tyson

Every orchestra needs a conductor. Really?

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra has operated without a conductor since 1972. Representatives from each section meet to discuss how they’ll approach a piece. Leadership rotates. Decisions emerge from dialogue among those who will execute them.

They’re a Grammy Award-winning ensemble.

Each musician must listen more intently and communicate more directly. Take greater ownership of the whole. Lead when their expertise matters most. Follow when others’ does. This distribution of authority changes what becomes possible.

Your organization employs people who create knowledge, apply expertise, and solve novel problems. The work can’t be fully specified in advance. Solutions emerge through collaboration. Value comes from synthesis and innovation.

Management is coordination. Things need to be done, sometimes in certain ways, at certain times, by certain deadlines. The question is where the capacity for coordination resides.

Orpheus demonstrates that coordination can live in a system rather than in a person. This requires structure: the section representatives, the meeting protocols, and the rotation of leadership within sections. It requires discipline, deep engagement, clear communication, and shared responsibility.

It doesn’t require a conductor.

The musicians need a framework for deciding together how to play. They need engagement with each other and the work. They need conditions in which shared vision can emerge.

Remove the conductor and different questions surface. What does leadership look like when genuinely distributed? What does a manager do when the team coordinates itself? What changes about authority when those doing the work hold it?

Orpheus is smaller than a full symphony. They select members carefully. They’ve built practices over decades. Their approach takes more time and generates more conflict. It demands more from each musician. It’s not universal.

But it exists. And it produces excellence.

The conductor stands separate from the orchestra, interpreting the score and imposing coherence. Orpheus embeds interpretation and coherence within the ensemble itself. One model centralizes the capacity for coordination. The other distributes it.

Which model matches how knowledge actually gets created in your organization? Not the theory. Not the org chart. The reality of how problems get solved when the work goes well.

The conductor metaphor has shaped management thinking for decades. It suggests that coordination requires a central authority who stands apart from the work, sees the whole, and directs the parts.

Orpheus suggests something different. Coordination is a capacity that can be built into how people work together. Authority can reside in those doing the work. The manager’s role might be something other than conducting.

What if it never was?

photo by Luisa Wachsmuth

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 Columbo Advantage: How cultural narratives create negotiation blind spots

When a culture invests heavily in a particular image of power, the blind spots become predictable. Americans consume Superman mythology daily: Iron Man, Captain America, the archetype where speed, polish, and overt competence signal strength. This creates a perceptual framework. Power looks like this.

In negotiation, this framework becomes a vulnerability.

Superman

Cultural narratives shape how people allocate attention, what cues they privilege, and where they expect power to reside. The Superman narrative teaches what strength looks like. More importantly, it teaches what doesn’t count as strength. That negative space becomes structural vulnerability.

When someone scans for Superman, they’re matching against a template: crisp strategy, decisive posture, visible capability. If you don’t fit, you slide beneath conscious attention. You’re not the negotiator. You’re just there.

The evaluation occurs pre-consciously, in seconds. If you don’t fit the schema, you’re filed as non-threat. That classification is remarkably difficult to revise.

Columbo

Go slow. Talk slow. Speak circuitously. Look unthreatening, and they won’t see you coming. By the time they recognize you’re negotiating, you’re already behind them.

Lieutenant Columbo: rumpled raincoat, apologetic tone, meandering questions. Suspects underestimated him because he violated every cultural marker of competence. By the time they realized what was happening, he’d already mapped their story and found the contradictions.

When you violate the template, you create a classification problem. They can’t place you. While they’re trying to understand what you’re doing, you’re already structuring the game.

Speed, polish, and visible efficiency can be tactical liabilities. When you present as Superman, you confirm expectations. You’re legible, predictable, and easy to respond to.

Someone who understands the narrative their counterpart has internalized gains leverage before any tactic is deployed.

Negotiation begins with the cultural stories that shape what people can see. Walking into a negotiation with Superman narratives running in the background isn’t a personal failing. It’s predictable cultural training.

Predictable patterns create predictable openings.

Notice the perceptual system you’re operating inside. Notice the one your counterpart is operating inside. By the time they see you, you’re already standing exactly where you need to be.

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

Learning from Leaders in the Spotlight

Most of what we think we know about leadership comes from a small, unusual subset of leaders: the ones who choose to be public.

They are the visible few: CEOs on stages, entrepreneurs in podcasts, billionaires with books. They explain how they became successful, often turning their particular path into a universal formula. This worked for me, so it will work for you. The memoir becomes a methodology.

Here’s the problem: leaders who teach are a self-selecting sample of leaders. They’re people for whom visibility is either a necessity or a desire for the business, for the brand, or for the self. Because they’re the ones we see, they become the ones we study. We mistake the most visible for the most representative.

Think about what it takes to write a book about your career, to build a personal brand, to position yourself as a thought leader. It requires comfort with self-promotion and belief in the value of your own story. It often draws on deeper motivations: a need for validation, an identity intertwined with being seen as successful, the ego-satisfaction of being a source of wisdom.

Once you step into that role, a feedback loop begins. The more you are recognized as a thought leader, the more your professional identity depends on maintaining that visibility. For some, this is a business necessity: visibility drives sales, attracts investors, or opens doors. For others, it’s about the self: a personal brand that must be fed.

That’s one kind of leader.

There’s another kind entirely: the invisible leader, the majority we never notice.

The CEO who slips out the side door after an all-hands. The founder whose name you’ve never heard because it’s on the product. The executive who transformed an organization and sees no reason to turn that transformation into a framework. The entrepreneur who created lasting value and prefers to spend it rather than explain it.

They’re quiet because their success doesn’t require an audience. They’re focused on results over recognition. Their effectiveness doesn’t hinge on being seen as effective.

And here is what gets lost: the lessons from these leaders don’t become books or podcasts, so they don’t circulate. Their ways of leading (often grounded in patience, craft, timing, and long arcs of trust) remain embodied in organizations rather than codified as “principles.” The subtle forms of leadership that shape cultures from the inside out are almost invisible to our theories. Our playbooks end up skewed toward charisma, communication, and visibility, while the quieter disciplines of listening deeply, building resilience without fanfare, and creating conditions for others to thrive remain undocumented.

Because we don’t see them, we don’t study them. Their approaches don’t enter our models of leadership at all.

This is a systematic skew. Our leadership canon is built not from the full spectrum of practice but from the sliver that comes with its own microphone. MBA programs lean on autobiographies and case studies of the visible few. Business media amplifies the same characters because they generate clicks and stories. Even organizational research is distorted by who agrees to be interviewed or written about. The structures that shape what we know about leadership are designed to reproduce the voices already amplified.

We mistake the loudest voices for the most representative ones.

How do we know what we know about success? How much of our understanding comes from leaders whose public presence is part of their strategy or their identity? How much comes from leaders whose success has nothing to do with being seen?

Visible leaders are not fraudulent. Many have built remarkable organizations. But visibility itself becomes part of the lesson, shaping both the path they took and the story they can tell.

The uncomfortable truth is that we may have built our entire understanding of leadership on this narrow, self-selecting group. We’ve been learning from leaders whose success depends on being visible, and ignoring the ones whose success never needed an audience.

What would change if we stopped learning from the leaders in the spotlight? What might we discover if we began to look for leadership in places where no one is trying to teach us a lesson? What might we find in the organizations that quietly endure, the teams that thrive without headlines, and the leaders who will never write a book because they are too busy leading?

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

What do you want your legacy to be?

I was in a final-round interview for a senior leadership role. The panel had barely finished introductions when someone asked,
“What do you want your legacy to be?”

Not: What challenges are you most drawn to?
Not: What do you think the team needs?
Not: How do you approach complexity?
Just straight to: How do you want to be remembered?

It was a surreal moment. I hadn’t met a single team member. I hadn’t spoken to any customers, or seen the space where the work happened. I didn’t know the vision of the person I’d be reporting to, or what pressures they were under. Yet here I was, being asked to pre-script my postscript.

That question seems to have become the norm.

We’ve made legacy-talk a kind of performance shorthand. A way of signaling that someone is “thinking big.” But increasingly, it feels like a distraction. A premature obituary disguised as strategic vision. A way of skipping past the mess of the present in favor of a tidy imagined future.

In practice, I’ve seen it show up in quieter ways too.

A manager agonizes over how they’ll be perceived. Will I be seen as a visionary? A people-first leader? They start managing the story of their leadership rather than the work itself. Meanwhile, a difficult team dynamic goes unaddressed, a necessary decision is deferred, and an uncomfortable truth is avoided.

The desire to be remembered can subtly displace the work of attending to what’s needed right now.

Walk through any city and you’ll see it in physical form. Streets named after people no one remembers. Foundations whose namesakes are long forgotten. Buildings with gilt-lettered donor walls that patients hurry past on their way to the right room. These supposed monuments to legacy reduced to wayfinding aids. Turn left at Johnson Avenue. Room 312, across from the Hastings Wing.

Even the grandest names eventually blur into background noise.

Jonas Salk seemed to understand this. When asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, he famously replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

He could have built a pharmaceutical empire. He could have carved his name into the landscape of institutions and endowments. Instead, he focused on getting the vaccine into as many arms as possible, as fast as possible.

The result? Real, lasting impact. Not in how he’s remembered, but in the children who never needed iron lungs. In lives quietly preserved.

Had he pursued legacy, he might have become another name on a building. Instead, he became part of people’s lives.

That’s the irony. The ones we remember most often weren’t chasing remembrance. They were thinking about what the people around them needed right now.

We’ve gotten it backwards.

Too often, we ask leaders about their legacy before they’ve even earned the right to have one.

If you’re a manager, the people you work with won’t remember your “legacy.” They’ll remember if you listened. They’ll remember if you backed them when it counted. They’ll remember if you made a path for them to grow, or closed it off. They’ll remember if you helped them become more of who they were, or made them feel smaller.

Most of that won’t show up in a keynote or on a plaque. It’ll show up in someone else’s work: the choices they make when you’re not around and what they pass on to someone else.

Legacy isn’t something you declare. It’s something you leave behind without knowing you left it. And it usually begins by paying attention to what’s in front of you.

photo the Lascaux cave, Bayes Ahmed, 2012.