Part 4 of “Unlocking Distributed Genius” — a series for leaders who know there’s more intelligence in their organization than they’re accessing.

Earlier in the series:

· Part 1 — “Trapped Genius: Why Smart Organizations Can’t Access Their Smartest People”

· Part 2 — “Your Organization’s Best Ideas Are Stuck in the Middle”

· Part 3 — “From Bottlenecks to Hubs: Why Your Middle Managers Are Your Secret Intelligence Weapon”

For over 700 years, the sonnet has been a crucible for literary genius. A rigid form of fourteen lines, a strict meter, and an intricate rhyme scheme; it should, by all accounts, be a cage. Yet for masters from Petrarch to Shakespeare, it became a powerful tool. The constraints of the form did not suppress their brilliance; they channeled it, forcing a discipline and intensity that produced some of the most enduring works in Western literature.

This same principle applies to the Gothic cathedrals of Europe. The builders of Chartres and Notre Dame were bound by the brutal constraints of stone, gravity, and medieval engineering. From these limitations, they innovated the ribbed vault, the pointed arch, and the flying buttress — architectural breakthroughs that allowed them to build structures of breathtaking light and height.

Every organization lives inside a constraint ecosystem. Some constraints are formal: budgets, approval thresholds, reporting lines, and compliance requirements. Some are temporal: quarterly cycles, product launch calendars, promotion windows. Some are cultural: what is praised, what is remembered, what quietly ends careers. Some are narrative: who we believe we are in the market and what kind of risks “people like us” take.

We rarely see these as a system. They feel like background conditions; yet they determine what is possible, what is probable, and what will never be attempted. The constraint ecosystem shapes the intelligence of the enterprise.

Without constraint, nothing progresses.

That may sound counterintuitive in an era that prizes empowerment and agility. But consider something simple. If you remove all constraints from your diet, you do not create health. If you remove all timing constraints from a workout regimen, you do not create athletic performance. Even something as basic as intellectual work depends on constraint. For example, a deadline focuses thinking or a budget forces prioritization. A uniform and strict schedule, as I learned when I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy, can free cognitive bandwidth. When I did not have to decide what to wear or where to be, I was surprised at how easily my brain could think about other domains.

I learned that freedom comes from the right kind of constraint, not the absence of it.

An organization without intelligent constraints is a place where brilliant people are set adrift. When every path is possible, no path has meaning. When every project is a priority, nothing is. When this design failure occurs, we think our top talent is burning out from overwork, but rather, they are experiencing dissipating energy and fragmented genius into a thousand shallow initiatives.

Different Situations call for Different Constraint

Within any serious enterprise, very different kinds of situations coexist.

A hospital is an obvious example. In the operating room, there is no room for interpretation of the sterilization protocol. Hands are washed in a specific way; instruments are handled in a defined sequence; checklists must be followed. In the Cynefin Modeli, these are all called fixed constraints and the purpose is reliability and consistency. The value comes from eliminating variation because deviation is known to introduce unacceptable risk. I like to think of the Grand Canyon — the water is only going in one direction because the constraints of the canyon walls are unforgiving.

In the same hospital, interpreting a complex scan requires expertise. There are diagnostic guidelines and escalation protocols, but no single mechanical answer. Radiologists operate within governing constraints. Clinical standards define acceptable bounds, decision rights clarify who makes the call, different experts are called in. Within those parameters, subject matter expertise, regulations, and judgment come together to create disciplined discretion rather than uniformity.

Then there is the hospital’s long-term positioning. How it responds to shifting reimbursement models, how it integrates telemedicine into its operating model, how it competes for specialist talent. Here, no amount of analysis can fully predict outcomes. Leadership may articulate strategic trade-offs, operating principles, or what the military calls commander’s intent: what must be achieved, what must be protected, what risks are acceptable. These are enabling constraints. They do not specify procedure. They shape direction and allow solutions to emerge through interaction. There is no right answer or even a known answer. Constraints in this situation are more principle-based than control-based.

Fixed and governing constraints are best for the knowable, ordered scenarios, whereas enabling constraints are best for the unknown, complex scenarios. Like most organizations, the hospital not one or the other, but rather it moves constantly between situations that demand different forms of discipline.

In fact, nearly all organizations contain all three realities at once.

In payroll processing, repeatability is the objective. In supply chain optimization, expert modeling matters. In redefining customer experience in response to new digital behaviors, the solution must be discovered through iteration.

The mistake is not really too much or too little constraint, but rather, failing to intentionally design constraints in relation to the nature of the situation. Or what I often see in client situations is an organization that has outgrown an outdated constraint framework.

Leaders often assume discipline has one form. Either tighten control or loosen it. But discipline in a routine compliance process does not look like discipline in a cross-functional transformation. In one case, discipline means eliminating variation. In the other, it means structuring variation so learning can occur.

When leaders attempt to manage a strategic repositioning the same way they manage expense approvals, the effect is subtle at first. It feels right, but the results are predictable and disappointing:

• Milestones are defined before the problem has taken shape.
• Metrics are locked in before meaningful patterns have emerged.
• Reporting templates are standardized for initiatives that are still exploratory.

Teams respond rationally:

• They narrow proposals to what fits pre-existing categories.
• They avoid ideas that cannot survive a rigid stage-gate sequence.
• Exploration becomes an incremental improvement of what is already known.

Nothing appears to be chaotic. In fact, everything looks controlled. Yet over time, the organization becomes cautious in precisely the areas where adaptability is needed.

At the other extreme, leaders sometimes remove constraints in the name of empowerment. In this case, decision rights are pushed out or down, approval layers are reduced, and teams are told to innovate freely!

In this case, what is often missing is a shared directional constraint that binds those innovations together. Without clearly articulated trade-offs, operating principles, or non-negotiable outcomes, each unit quite reasonably optimizes for its own objectives:

• Marketing pursues engagement.
• Operations pursues efficiency.
• Product pursues feature expansion.
• Finance protects margins.

In other words, each group acts intelligently within its local frame. Yet without a shared attractor, those efforts do not accumulate into coherent advantage for the organization. Yes, the organization moves forward, but it does not compound. 1+1 = 2, not 5, 7 or 10.

Bottom line: constraint is not the enemy of freedom. Rather, a set of designed constraints creates a condition for coordinated action. Every organization already lives inside a constraint ecosystem. Our work as leaders is to design it deliberately rather than manage around what was inherited unconsciously.

The Constraints You Do Not See: The Narrative Field

Formal constraints are visible. They live in policy manuals, governance charts, capital allocation models, and reporting dashboards. Leaders debate them explicitly.

The most powerful constraints are often invisible.

Every organization carries a narrative field — a shared set of stories about who “we” are, how success is achieved here, and what kinds of risks are acceptable. These stories do not function as formal rules. They function as orientation. They shape what is thinkable, what is sayable, and what is strategically imaginable long before any formal decision is made.

This is what Prof. Dave Snowden, the developer of the Cynefin model, refers to as dark constraints: constraints that exert force without being formally articulated.

In some cases, dark constraints stabilize performance in ways that extend well beyond routine operations. A company may carry a deeply embedded narrative that “we are engineers first.” That identity does more than reinforce rigor in compliance processes; it also shapes trade-offs in ambiguous situations. When speed conflicts with quality, the answer is clear without escalation. When an opportunity in the market tempts overextension, the bias toward technical integrity prevails. The narrative field becomes an enabling constraint. It channels decision-making across levels without requiring constant intervention from the top. In this case, identity can generate coherence.

In other cases, however, the same mechanism limits range.

Consider an organization that has long known itself as relationship-driven and consensus-based. Decisions are expected to be socially integrated before they are formally made. The narrative field values harmony and inclusion. When the company scales or enters more competitive markets, that same identity can begin to resist sharper trade-offs. Direct accountability feels abrasive. Clear performance differentiation feels culturally dissonant. Leaders may speak openly about becoming more performance-oriented, yet the underlying story of “who we are” constrains what forms of discipline are tolerated. We see this story play out time and again when a local company is acquired by a national brand. The deeply held values are different, even if the ones on the wall are similar.

The constraint is not written anywhere. It operates through recognition and reward. Those who behave consistently with the narrative advance. Those who challenge it often experience subtle friction or exclusion.

Dark constraints also shape decision flow in less visible ways.

In one global services firm, there was no policy requiring CFO endorsement before new initiatives were presented to the executive committee. Yet over time, everyone understood that proposals without financial pre-alignment were unlikely to survive. Business leaders began withholding early-stage ideas until projected ROI could be confidently modeled. What appeared to be financial rigor slowly compressed the organization’s exploratory capacity. Ideas that required iterative discovery rarely entered formal conversation.

Leadership believed it had empowered bold thinking. The lived constraint suggested otherwise.

These tensions often remain latent until the organization attempts to shift direction. When formal strategy evolves but the narrative field does not, these dark constraints constrain progress.

An executive team may declare a commitment to experimentation and adaptive learning. Town halls celebrate risk-taking. Strategic documents emphasize innovation. Yet promotion patterns reveal that visible failure lingers in performance evaluations for years. The organization carries a long memory for mistakes and a short memory for responsible risk.

No policy prohibits experimentation. Yet the narrative field communicates caution. Execution falters not because strategy lacks clarity, but because the constraint ecosystem — formal and informal — sends competing signals about what survival and success actually require.

Dark constraints are not inherently problematic. They often encode the history of what has worked. They protect coherence. They reduce the need for constant oversight. The difficulty arises when they remain unexamined while the environment shifts. What once stabilized performance begins to narrow possibility.

Most transformation efforts fail because they adjust the formal layer and ignore the narrative field beneath it. To design constraint intelligently, leaders must account not only for governance structures and decision rights, but for the narrative fields within which their organizations operate.

The constraint ecosystem includes both.

Reading and Reshaping the Constraint Ecosystem

If every organization already lives inside a constraint ecosystem, the work of leadership is not to add more control or remove it indiscriminately. It is to read the system accurately and then adjust the form and coupling of constraint in relation to the situation.

The misapplication risk for enabling constraints deserves clarity.

When leaders articulate aspiration without specifying trade-offs, the constraint lacks operational force. “Customer first” competes with “margin discipline.” “Move fast” competes with “avoid visible failure.” In the absence of explicit hierarchy among values, local leaders resolve tensions in inconsistent ways. The constraint exists rhetorically, but not structurally. Energy disperses because decisions are not anchored to shared, lived trade-offs.

Dark constraints operate differently. They are often inherited, but they are not immutable.

Narrative fields are reinforced or reshaped through attention, language, and reward. When leaders articulate what has historically guided the organization — naming it clearly — they bring the constraint into view. When they consistently reward behaviors aligned with an evolving identity, they empower a new narrative field to take root.

Dark constraints grow where attention flows.

If an organization carries the narrative that “we protect quarterly earnings above all else,” leaders who repeatedly signal that long-term capability building matters more than short-term optics begin to alter that field — but only if incentives and promotions follow the rhetoric. Narrative fields do not shift through declaration. They shift through reinforcement.

A simple example was an encounter I had through my consulting work with a three-star general. At the time, a cultural narrative had begun to take hold that it wasn’t safe to raise perceived breakdowns. Determined to shift this, the general made a deliberate move. During one meeting, a young colonel respectfully challenged a stated direction. Recognizing how critical visible support was in that moment, the general stood up, shook his hand in front of the group, and said, “Thank you — we need more of that.”

That single act of reinforcement helped reshape how openness to feedback was interpreted. Over time, it contributed to a new narrative — one that encouraged people to surface challenges, share bad news, and speak up about breakdowns without hesitation.

Reshaping Your Constraint Ecosystem

When leaders say execution is slow, the instinct is to demand urgency. Yet slow execution frequently signals constraint friction. Controls layered over time create approval cycles and compliance rituals disconnected from actual risk. Workarounds proliferate. Energy is spent navigating the system rather than advancing strategy. Constraint language reframes these frustrations. Instead of questioning motivation, leaders can examine design.

Reshaping constraints is not a matter of issuing new policies. It is a disciplined adjustment of both structural and narrative layers.

This can be visualized as a deliberate sequence rather than a reactive response.

1. Clarify the Nature of the Situation

Is the objective repeatability, optimization within known bounds, or exploration under uncertainty?

If leaders cannot answer this clearly, constraint design will default to habit.

2. Examine the Existing Constraint Form

• Are fixed controls being used where experimentation is required?
• Are governing parameters clear enough to prevent constant escalation?
• Are enabling constraints sufficiently specific to guide real trade-offs?
• Is the narrative field reinforcing or undermining these structural choices?

3. Surface Narrative Constraints Explicitly

• What identity stories stabilize current behavior?
• What behaviors consistently lead to advancement?
• What topics generate discomfort or avoidance?
• Where does lived practice contradict declared strategy?

Leaders often discover that the formal constraint they believed was shaping behavior is secondary to the narrative field. A stated commitment to experimentation will not overcome a promotion system that penalizes visible failure. A declared strategy of integration will not override a deeply embedded identity of divisional autonomy.

4. Adjust the Coupling Across Layers

Adjustment does not mean relaxing discipline. It means aligning discipline with the situation and ensuring the narrative layer reinforces, rather than contradicts, structural design.

The Question Leaders Must Confront

Every executive team operates inside a constraint ecosystem.

Some of it has been deliberately designed — through strategy, governance, decision rights, capital filters. Much of it has accumulated over time through inherited processes, promotion patterns, identity commitments, and stories about what succeeds here and what does not.

Together, those structural and narrative constraints shape what your organization can see, how it makes sense of what it can see, what it will attempt, and what it will avoid.

Leadership at scale is less about declaring direction and more about shaping the conditions under which direction becomes real. If initiatives feel slow, if innovation remains incremental, if alignment requires repeated escalation, the issue may not lie in talent or effort. It may lie in the form of discipline that has been normalized, and the constraint ecosystem your talent must work in and around.

Are the constraints currently shaping your organization proportionate to the situations you now face? What range of response do they permit? What forms of initiative do they quietly discourage? What possibilities have become unthinkable — not because they were rejected, but because they never fit the field in the first place?

The architecture is already at work; what defines your leadership now is how you choose to shape it.

Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68–76.

Part 3 of “Unlocking Distributed Genius” — How to transform your intelligence filtering system into an intelligence amplification network

Your middle managers sit at the intersection of every information flow in your organization. They see patterns from above and below, connect insights across departments, and understand both strategic context and operational reality.

So why do your best ideas die there?

What if the problem isn’t middle management? What if middle management is actually your secret intelligence weapon, just deployed in the wrong system?

From Ancient Agreements to Algorithmic Overlords: The Surprising Power of the Human Middle

For millennia, Homo sapiens have conquered the planet not with teeth or claws, but with an unparalleled ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Our unique trick, as historian Yuval Noah Harari notes, is the creation of shared fictions — myths, religions, and, in the modern era, the limited liability corporation [1]. These fictions allow us to build intricate systems of cooperation, the most enduring of which is the hierarchy. From the legions of Rome to the factories of the Industrial Revolution, a clear chain of command was the operating system for human progress. It was simple, scalable, and brutally effective.

But the world that hierarchy was built for is gone. We have traded the predictable, mechanical rhythms of the factory floor for the chaotic, exponential pace of a networked age. And the very structure that enabled our past success is now becoming our greatest liability. The modern organization is a marvel of distributed intelligence, a vast network of human sensors processing immense volumes of information at the edges. Yet, we still try to funnel this torrent of insight through a narrow, rigid pipeline designed for a bygone era. The result? A tragic and costly suppression of the very intelligence we need to survive and thrive.

Nowhere is this paradox more acute and more misunderstood, than in the middle of our organizations. We lament that our best ideas “die in middle management.” We see this layer as a bottleneck, a frozen tundra of bureaucracy and resistance. But what if this is a profound misreading of the situation? What if the problem isn’t the people in the middle, but the system we’ve trapped them in? What if your middle managers are not a bug in the system, but a secret and powerful feature waiting to be unlocked?

The System Has a Soul, and It’s Tearing Itself Apart

Organizational theorist Barry Oshry has spent decades demonstrating a predictable and tragic pattern that emerges whenever humans organize. He calls it the dance of the “Tops, Middles, and Bottoms” [2]. Tops, burdened with ultimate accountability, feel overwhelmed by unmanageable complexity. Bottoms, on the front lines of execution, feel vulnerable and invisible, seeing problems with crystal clarity but lacking the power to enact systemic change.

And the Middles? The Middles are systematically torn apart. They are the human conduits, pulled between the strategic imperatives from above and the operational realities from below. They are tasked with translating an abstract vision into concrete reality, often with conflicting priorities and insufficient resources. This isn’t a failure of character; it is a system condition. When we fail to see this system, we blame the people caught within it. The middle manager becomes a bottleneck not by choice, but by design.

They learn, through a thousand painful cuts, to filter. They sanitize intelligence flowing upward to protect already-burdened executives from the messy, contradictory truth of the front lines. They manage expectations downward to shield already-vulnerable teams from the whiplash of strategic shifts.

This filtering, born of a desire to make the system work, slowly and inexorably kills the very intelligence the system needs. The organization creates what Stanford’s Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao call “bad friction” — layers of approval, translation, and political calculation that make sharing vital intelligence exponentially harder than keeping it local [3].

In this environment, intelligence, like water, follows the path of least resistance. And when that path leads to a dead end, your most valuable insights stay trapped in the organizational equivalent of a stagnant pond.

The Ghost in the Machine: Misreading the Signals

This systemic dysfunction leads to a dangerous form of organizational hallucination. Leaders, disconnected from the ground truth, misinterpret the signals that do manage to trickle up. Consider two stories from the front lines of organizational change:

The Overconfidence Mirage: A retail VP, preparing to roll out a massive operational change across more than a thousand stores, was briefed by his middle managers to expect resistance. The system had taught them to anticipate pushback. But when a parallel intelligence network was opened, gathering direct, unfiltered feedback from the frontline staff, a shocking and far more dangerous reality was revealed. The teams weren’t resistant; they were overconfident. They believed the changes would be simple, blind to the cascading failures their leaders could foresee. The risk wasn’t a failure to comply; it was a failure to prepare. The rollout strategy was inverted — from selling a change to co-creating a readiness plan. The result was not just a successful implementation, but the creation of genuine agency for 1,000 people who, for the first time, felt like contributors, not just cogs.

The Friction Revelation: A three-star general was convinced his civilian experts were the source of resistance to a critical national security initiative. His command structure — the middle — reported that the experts were dragging their feet. But direct, distributed sensing revealed the opposite. The experts were desperate for the change to succeed. The “resistance” was not to the what, but to the how. They were resisting the bureaucracy that forced them up and down a rigid chain of command for simple collaboration. The friction wasn’t human; it was systemic. The middle managers weren’t the problem; they were simply describing the symptoms of a disease they were powerless to cure.

In both cases, the middle was not a source of failure, but a sensor reporting on a broken system. They were faithfully transmitting the distorted signals the hierarchy was designed to produce. The tragedy is that we, as leaders, have been trained to shoot the messenger.

The Intelligence Insurgency: Rewiring the System

If hierarchy is the problem, the solution is not to tear it down. Anarchy is not a viable business model. The solution is to augment it, to build a parallel, more dynamic system for intelligence flow — a Human Sensor Network. Think of it as the organizational equivalent of the nervous system, running alongside the skeleton of the hierarchy. The hierarchy provides structure and decision rights; the network provides real-time, distributed intelligence.

And who is perfectly positioned at the critical nodes of this new network? Your middle managers. They are the biological hubs, the natural connectors who already sit at the intersection of strategic intent and operational reality. The breakthrough comes when we stop seeing them as filters and start equipping them as amplifiers.

This is not a theoretical fantasy. Research from INSEAD provides stunning validation: 80% of transformation programs led by middle managers succeed, compared to a paltry 20% of those led by senior management alone [4]. Why? Because the middle possesses the contextual knowledge, the relational trust, and the cross-functional visibility to make change real. If you think about it, they may be the only ones who can see the whole system from the inside out.

Transforming this latent potential into active capability requires a fundamental shift in our leadership operating system. We must move from a model that treats middle managers as bottlenecks to one that empowers them as hubs.

This is more than just a change in process; it is a change in philosophy. It requires that we give middle managers the strategic context they crave and the genuine authority they need. It means trusting them not just to execute a plan, but to sense and respond to a constantly changing environment. It means giving them the tools — like the distributed sensing technologies mentioned in the case studies — to bypass the friction of the formal hierarchy and tap directly into the system’s (organization’s) collective intelligence.

The Technology of Transformation: Building Your Human Sensor Network

The most advanced organizations are deploying what we call Human Sensor Networks using sophisticated sensing technologies that fundamentally alter the energy gradients of information flow. These are not traditional survey tools or dashboards that aggregate and abstract. They are designed to preserve the richness and context of distributed intelligence while making it accessible to decision-makers in real time.

Consider SenseMaker™, a technology that enables people throughout the system to share and interpret their own micro-narratives — the small stories that reveal emerging patterns invisible to conventional analytics. Unlike traditional feedback mechanisms that force people to fit their experience into predetermined categories, SenseMaker allows the organization to see itself through the eyes of those living within it. The intelligence isn’t filtered through middle management translation; it flows directly, with middle managers adding their own contextual insights rather than controlling the narrative. This was the technology we used in the military example above.

Or MassSense™, which acts like organizational sonar — rapidly gathering perspectives from across your entire system on specific situations, decisions, or changes. Instead of waiting weeks for intelligence to percolate up through the layers (by which time the world has moved on), you can actively engage what people throughout the organization are seeing and thinking right now. This was the technology we used in the retail example above.

The Choice: Industrial Age Relic or Intelligence Age Engine?

The intelligence required for your survival is likely already flowing through your system. As I wrote about in previous blogs, it is in the observations of your frontline staff, the frustrated workarounds of your engineers, and the informal networks of your admins. Your middle managers are already positioned at every critical intersection of this flow.

We can continue to operate on an Industrial Revolution blueprint, treating our middle managers as cogs in a machine, destined to become bottlenecks. We can invest millions in AI and analytics, hoping to find insights in the data while the human intelligence that provides its context withers on the vine.

Or, we can make a different choice. We can see our organizations not as employee contributors to be controlled, but as part of a complex, living system to be cultivated. We can choose to see our middles not as a problem to be solved, but as the solution we have been looking for — the critical hubs of our emerging human intelligence network.

This is not simply about being better leaders. It is about building a more sapient organization. It is about having the courage to rewire the deep structures of power and information flow. The work is not easy, but the alternative is obsolescence. The intelligence is there. The potential is there. The only question is whether you will unleash it.

Next in the series: The Constraint Paradox: Why Unlimited Freedom Kills Creativity and How to Design the Enabling Boundaries That Unleash Breakthroughs.

References

[1] Harari, Y. N. (2015). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper.

[2] Oshry, B. (2007). Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

[3] Sutton, R. I., & Rao, H. (2024). The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder. St. Martin’s Press.

[4] Deloitte. (2025, March 24). What’s the future of management? Deloitte Insights. https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/human-capital-trends/2025/future-of-the-middle-manager.html

While you’re building artificial intelligence systems to capture insights, your organizational systems are systematically filtering out the human intelligence you already have.

Consider the Challenger disaster. NASA engineers knew the O-rings would fail in cold weather. They had the data, ran the tests, and understood the risk. But their intelligence never reached the decision-makers who could have delayed the launch. The organizational system filtered out the very information that could have prevented the tragedy.

A few decades later, with the Columbia vehicle, NASA engineers knew foam strikes were damaging heat shields. But over time, the culture transformed this critical intelligence through language: “foam strikes” became “known anomalies” became “acceptable risks.” The intelligence was there, but the organizational system normalized it away until people stopped looking.

After working with thousands of leaders, I would bet my new car that your organization faces the same dynamics every day, just with lower stakes. The intelligence you need most is already in your building, but your Leadership Operating System may be unintentionally designed to suppress it rather than surface it.

The Two-Current Problem

Every organization operates with two intelligence currents running simultaneously:

The first is the surface current — the world of reports, dashboards, meetings, and official channels. These currents carry what people think you want to hear, information that’s been sanitized, aggregated, and stripped of its most valuable context. It’s clean, measurable, and fits neatly into PowerPoint presentations. Most executives navigate entirely in this surface current, optimizing what gets measured and making decisions based on information that’s traveled through multiple filters.

The second is the subsurface current — the world of hallway conversations, workarounds that actually work, and insights that never make it past the first filter. This is where people share what they actually see, not what they think they’re supposed to see. It’s where solutions emerge organically, where early warning signals first appear, where the gap between “how things are supposed to work” and “how things actually work” becomes visible.

What most executives sense but haven’t really yet accepted is the subsurface current often contains your most valuable competitive intelligence. While your competitors are looking at the same industry reports and market data you are, they don’t have access to what your EA knows about client sentiment, what your newest hire sees about industry blind spots, or what your middle manager has discovered about operational efficiency.

But there is a catch. The subsurface current is fragile and when people sense that their insights aren’t valued or that sharing what they really see might be politically dangerous, the subsurface current goes deeper underground. The intelligence doesn’t disappear entirely — it just becomes invisible to leadership. In fact, the smarter your people are, the faster they learn what not to share. They quickly figure out which insights are welcome and which ones aren’t. They learn to read the room, to sense what leadership wants to hear, and to filter their intelligence accordingly.

Here are two recurring examples I see across our client systems: someone shares a pattern they’re seeing and gets told “that’s just anecdotal” or “we need more data.” They don’t just stop sharing that particular insight — they learn to stop sharing patterns altogether. Another one is when someone creates a better way to do something and gets told to “follow the process,” they don’t just abandon that innovation, they learn to keep future innovations quiet and take their discretionary ideas to other outlets.

Over time, intelligent people become intelligent about what not to share. The very people whose insights you need most become the least likely to offer them. They develop an adaptive behavior of keeping valuable insights to themselves to avoid negative consequences — “learned intelligence suppression.”

This creates a vicious cycle. Leaders, starved of real intelligence from the subsurface current, make decisions based on incomplete information. When those decisions don’t work as expected, they often conclude they need better data or more rigorous analysis. So they add more filters, more approval processes, more formal channels — which drives the subsurface current even deeper.

We Need More Beta! (not data)

My partner and I enjoy skiing in the backcountry, and one thing I have learned is that in backcountry skiing, my life depends on “beta” — scattered bits of raw intelligence. A local mentions recent snowfall. Someone coming down the mountain talks about conditions on the north-facing slope or how it was “great pow all day”. Simply feeling cold walking back from the bar at night is a piece of beta about what might be beneath the surface tomorrow. Without all of these unpolished clues, I wouldn’t understand a coherent as a picture and could risk entering avalanche-prone terrain unaware.

The backcountry community has a discipline around receiving beta. In organizations, we’ve lost the art of receiving beta. Instead, we demand well-curated data, analyzed and wrapped in neat presentations, before we’ll listen. Such insistence filters out the unpolished, frontline insights that might reveal subtle risks or unexpected shifts. Our people are like knowledgeable locals whose beta gets dismissed because it doesn’t come with a PowerPoint deck.

Here are some pieces of Beta to look out for:

Early warning beta emerges from people who interact with external stakeholders — customers, suppliers, partners, competitors. They often sense shifts in sentiment, behavior, or market conditions months before those shifts show up in formal metrics. Be careful to dismiss this intelligence as “narrow”, “soft” or “subjective” just because it can’t be generalized or quantified immediately. As someone who spans industries, I often share something I learned from one into the other and watch as some discount the “beta” because simply because it is not industry specific. I never mean for it to be a conclusion, but as a single piece of beta, when combined with other single pieces of beta, may provide a more coherent picture.

Operational beta comes from those closest to the operational front lines. They know which processes really work, which systems are truly mission-critical, and where the inefficiencies hide. They’ve often developed informal solutions that work better than official procedures, but these innovations remain invisible because they exist outside formal channels. Even worse, they have to hide these innovations from you so they are not reprimanded and made to do things inefficiently. We always do “ride alongs” or “day in the life of” in the first few weeks of a client engagement to understand how things really work on the front lines.

Strategic beta exists in the minds of people who are in unique vantage points where there is unsuspecting data that does not usually register as strategically interesting. For example, the person who schedules meetings knows which initiatives are really getting attention and which ones are consistently cancelled or pushed out. The person who processes expenses sees where money is actually spent and where the bottle necks lie in approvals. The person who handles customer complaints understands which problems are systemic versus isolated. While the reportable data is available, the contextual intelligence is often invisible.

Innovation beta lives in the spaces between formal roles and departments. It emerges when people with different expertise and perspectives connect informally to solve problems or explore opportunities. It happens when people are solving problems, overcoming barriers while implementing initiatives, or encountering anomalies. Because they are anomalies, by definition, there is no trend to report. These cross-functional insights often represent your biggest innovation opportunities, but they rarely surface through formal innovation processes.

As Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “The truth comes as a conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as a guest.” Leaders that successfully unlock the distributed genius in their ecosystem have rediscovered this art. They realize intelligence is voluntary — people choose whether to share what they know based on whether they believe it will be valued and acted upon, no matter how small.

This doesn’t mean accepting every piece of scattered intelligence as gospel. Like avalanche beta, each fragment is just one piece of the puzzle. The skill lies in treating these hints as starting points — prompts to investigate further and validate what’s real and relevant. You maintain perspective, neither dismissing raw insights nor letting one snippet define your entire outlook. Instead of demanding certainty before listening, you learn to do what the master listener (and my mother), Jill Rickards advises, “gather everything and let it lie before you”. Or more urgently, gather intelligence as if your company’s life depends on it — because in a rapidly changing world, it does.

As you take on building the organizational capacity for emergent and distributed intelligence, understand that such intelligence operates differently than artificial intelligence. First, such intelligence is discretionary not obligatory and does not respond to demands but rather genuine invitations followed by validation and appreciation. Second, interpretation of such intelligence leverages abductive reasoning which is making sense of incomplete information, forming hypotheses about what might be causing something, picking up on subtle energy or mood shifts, and inferring the best explanation from limited clues, etc. It’s the “aha” moment when someone says “I think something’s changing because…” based on subtle signals. This is in contrast to inductive reasoning which is finding patterns in historical data and making predictions based on correlations. It’s the difference between inferring what might be happening now and analyzing what already happened. Interestingly, humans excel at abductive while AI excels at inductive. When these two forms of reasoning work together, organizations can anticipate their future in ways neither could achieve alone.

The Choice

When you successfully tap into distributed genius, something remarkable happens: The intelligence compounds. People start connecting insights across departments, new patterns become visible, and cross-functional solutions become possible.

But the real transformation is cultural. When people realize their intelligence is genuinely valued — not just their compliance or execution, but their actual insights and perspectives — they shift from being passive recipients of direction to active contributors to organizational intelligence. The organization becomes more than the sum of its parts because it’s finally accessing the intelligence of all its parts. Real engagement comes from engaging! (PS — yes, this is how to get those eNPS scores to genuinely rise.)

The opportunity for each of us is to acknowledge the intelligence that is already in our buildings (virtual and physical). It’s in the observations our people make every day, the patterns they notice, the solutions they create, the insights they develop. The question isn’t whether or not this intelligence exists. It does.

The question is whether you’re going to invest in human intelligence at the same level you are investing in artificial intelligence. Your competitors are looking at the same market data you are. But they don’t have access to what your people know. The question is: Do you?

Next: Why your best ideas die in middle management, and how to create parallel intelligence networks that actually work.

As a Captain in the military, I had a bigger contribution to make than my company-grade rank allowed. My superiors were phenomenal; they recognized and pulled the best out of me, creating opportunities within their power. But outside my immediate chain of command, there wasn’t an outlet. The system itself couldn’t access what I had to offer.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Hierarchy isn’t bad — it’s actually essential for creating decision rights, clarity of direction and execution. The military’s hierarchical structure exists for good reasons and works brilliantly for what it’s designed to do. But it also meant that I could only contribute to the top of my rank. As a Captain, there was a certain scope of contribution I could make, and that was it.

I realized I was going to have to wait 10–15 years before I’d be able to contribute systemically and strategically in the ways I knew I could. So I got out.

Here’s the part that’s bothered me ever since: Soon after leaving, I started consulting for the same military organization. Suddenly, I could make a much more widespread impact from outside the system than I ever could from within it. Same person. Same insights. Same commitment. But the system could finally access what I had to offer — because I was no longer trapped by its necessary structures.

I loved my life in the military, and I think I would have really enjoyed staying in. But the system — despite being well-designed for its primary purposes — couldn’t unlock the distributed genius within its own ranks. I encounter people like this all the time: talented individuals with big contributions to make, trapped in pockets of excellence by systems that can’t access their full potential.

That experience launched nearly 20 years of work helping organizations unlock the hidden genius already in their systems. I’ve spent my career teaching executives how to recognize the intelligence that exists throughout their organizations and create conditions that enable it to flow. I know this stuff works because I’ve seen it transform companies.

So when two key people on my own team decided to move on recently, I had to face an uncomfortable truth: Even after two decades of studying this problem, I had fallen into the same trap.

The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here I was, teaching other leaders how to access distributed intelligence, while somehow failing to fully access the intelligence of my own people. The very expertise that I brought to client organizations had created a blind spot in my own leadership.

In a virtual company like mine, you don’t have the luxury of hallway conversations or chance encounters in the break room. The informal networks that carry so much of an organization’s real-time intelligence are harder to see and easier to miss. My focus on client work and the structured nature of virtual communication created a perfect storm for this kind of blind spot.

The Contradiction Nobody Talks About

Here’s the reality unfolding in organizations right now: Companies are investing record amounts in innovation programs, engagement initiatives, and artificial intelligence — while simultaneously running systems that suppress the human intelligence they already have.

Your organization probably has multiple channels for capturing intelligence: innovation workstreams, engagement surveys, town halls, skip-level meetings, brainstorming sessions, teams or slack channels, etc. You’ve invested in these systems because you genuinely want to hear from people.

But after nearly 20 years of working with organizations to unlock distributed genius, I’ve seen a consistent pattern: Critical insights take weeks to reach decision-makers — if they reach them at all. Breakthrough innovations come from the same predictable sources, not because others lack ideas, but because the system can’t access them. Your frontline manager knows exactly which process is creating bottlenecks, but raising it requires building a business case that takes more time than just working around it. Your customer service team can predict which clients are about to churn based on subtle shifts in tone, but your retention metrics only track explicit complaints. Your high-potential employee has an idea that could reshape your business model, but she’s learned that “strategic thinking” is reserved for people two levels above her.

The intelligence is there. The channels exist. But the system, through a thousand small signals about what’s valued, what’s risky, and what’s worth the political capital, is filtering it out.

This is an intelligence problem with a measurable cost.

Research from the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) program shows high-information-flow environments where intelligence can move freely are roughly twice as likely to meet or exceed their organizational goals in profitability, productivity and market share. The difference isn’t just cultural, it’s measurable advantage.

And profit aside, it’s also about preventing accidents, defects, and in some cases, preventable harm. Gallup’s longitudinal research across thousands of organizations shows that when people don’t feel their opinions count, safety incidents rise by 64% and quality defects increase by 41%. In healthcare, over 70% of serious patient harm events are failures of communicating the available intelligence.

The Middle Ground Most Organizations Live In

I learn something new and am awed by every single client I’ve ever worked with. When we start our work, in fact, most things are going right. Most leaders do want ideas, and most have channels for it. Most have engagement scores that really aren’t terrible. They all have smart people doing good work.

But somewhere between having the intelligence and channeling it in such a way that it can be considered and acted on, something gets lost. Ideas surface but don’t reach their full potential. People share insights but the really valuable stuff — the uncomfortable truths, the early warning signals, the innovations that challenge assumptions — those stay underground.

It’s likely that your system does not completely block intelligence. Rather, it is optimized for a certain kind of intelligence — the kind that’s understandable, repeatable, easily actionable, and fits neatly into existing frameworks and surveys. Meanwhile, the intelligence that could give you breakthrough advantage (the kind that challenges assumptions, reveals uncomfortable truths, or emerges from unexpected places), learns to stay quiet.

This intelligence is fragile, unconventional and sometimes uncomfortable. It lives in hallway conversations, informal networks, and the space between what people are supposed to say and what they actually think. When people sense that their real insights aren’t valued or that sharing what they truly see might be politically risky, that intelligence goes underground.

The cruel irony is that the smarter your people are, the faster they learn what not to share. They figure out which insights are welcome and which ones aren’t. They learn to read the room, to sense what leadership wants to hear, and to filter their intelligence accordingly.

Just like the military system couldn’t access my full contribution as a Captain, my own system wasn’t accessing the full contribution of my people. Different context, same dynamic.

If you’re like most leaders I work with, you’re dealing with some version of these challenges. Our leadership systems are intentionally designed to filter rather than amplify.

The Operating System Problem

Every organization runs on what amounts to a Leadership Operating System — the combination of strategy, culture, leadership practices, and operating structures that determines how intelligence flows and decisions get made. Most of us are running Industrial Revolution software in an exponential world.

When we realize our system isn’t working, we typically add more features to the existing infrastructure rather than upgrading the foundation. We layer engagement surveys on top of disengaging practices. We create innovation labs while maintaining approval processes that kill innovation. We launch “speak up” campaigns while keeping the hierarchical structures that taught people to stay quiet in the first place.

The intent is always good. But when the foundation is faulty, adding more sophisticated tools just creates more sophisticated dysfunction. It’s like installing a state-of-the-art navigation system in a car with a broken engine — you’ll know exactly where you’re stuck, but you still won’t be moving.

These legacy systems were designed for predictable work where intelligence could be centralized and decisions could be made at the top. They worked brilliantly when change was slow and work was routine. But they’re badly mismatched for today’s reality, where the most valuable intelligence often lives at the edges of your organization and the best solutions emerge from unexpected connections.

Most leadership systems are optimized for scale and execution, not intelligence and adaptation. This design enabled the remarkable growth and operational excellence we’ve achieved over the past century. But systems optimized for one thing inevitably create trade-offs. As an unintended consequence of that design, they filter out dissent, suppress experimentation, and reward compliance over insight. The very people whose intelligence could give you competitive advantage learn that sharing their real insights is risky or pointless — not because leaders don’t want to hear it, but because the system wasn’t built to receive it.

What’s Coming in This Series

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be exploring how to upgrade your Leadership Operating System to unlock the human intelligence your organization needs to thrive. We’ll cover:

• The Intelligence Already in Your Building — How to see and access the distributed genius that’s hiding in plain sight, and why “beta” matters more than big data
• Why Your Best Ideas Die in Middle Management — Understanding the system dynamics that trap intelligence and how to transform bottlenecks into amplification hubs
• The Constraint Paradox — Why unlimited freedom kills creativity and how to design enabling boundaries that channel intelligence toward breakthrough results
• When Surveys Conceal Lived Truth — Moving beyond reported experience to access what people actually experience, and why the gap between them contains your most valuable intelligence
• Navigating the VUCA Nexus — How to lead when the world feels volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and how to find clarity in the chaos
• The Coherence Advantage — How to integrate everything into a Leadership Operating System that enables human and artificial intelligence to work together

A Simple Question to Ask to Open the Conversation

Moving forward, I’m committing to regularly asking my team a simple but powerful question: “What is it like to be you right now?” Not “How satisfied are you?” or “What do you need from me?” but “What is it like to be you in this organization, doing this work, at this moment?”

I suspect the answers will surprise me. They’ll show me the difference between what I think I’m creating and what people are actually experiencing. They’ll reveal intelligence about our own system that I can’t see from my vantage point.

More than anything, they’ll help me practice what I teach: that the intelligence we need most is often the intelligence we’re least likely to hear unless we create specific conditions for it to emerge. Research shows when leaders create such conditions, information is able to flow to leaders with actual decision rights. Such properly routed intelligence improves unit performance, while intelligence that only circulates among peers without agency dissipates into noise.

A Different Kind of Upgrade

You have a choice that will define your organization’s next decade: You can continue optimizing Industrial Revolution systems while investing in AI, hoping technology will compensate for suppressed human intelligence. Or you can upgrade to a Leadership Operating System designed to unlock both human and artificial intelligence working together.

It’s the same story across industries: when systems dampen voice, results suffer. When systems enable intelligence to flow (especially to those with decision rights) performance follows. The choice isn’t whether to have structure. It’s whether your structure enables or suppresses the intelligence that could give you breakthrough advantage. I’m fully diving into articulating what we have learned to address this challenge starting with this series.

Next: “The Intelligence Already in Your Building” — How to see the genius that’s been there all along

What intelligence might be hiding in plain sight in your organization? Hit reply and share your thoughts — I read every response and often explore these insights in future articles.

The Body Keeps the Score

Two days after the shooting, a siren wailed in the distance. My body tensed before my mind could process why. I became irritable, short-tempered, upset. Then it hit me: I was scared. The police chase down a familiar highway the next day, with the same number of sirens, solidified a new, unwelcome reality. The sounds of my town, once benign background noise, now put me on high alert.

This is trauma. Not the dramatic, obvious kind we see in movies, but the quiet rewiring of our nervous systems that happens when safety becomes conditional. A freedom I didn’t even know I had — the freedom from fear in my own community — is gone.

I let myself cry. I cried for the parents who lost their child in the shooting, for the unimaginable grief they now carry. But I also cried for someone else: the mother of the shooter.

The Mother We Don’t Talk About

She is the mother we don’t talk about, the one whose grief is complicated by shame, whose loss is compounded by isolation. She woke up that morning not knowing she would lose her son twice: first to the darkness that had consumed him, then to the violence he chose to inflict.

I think about her constantly now. She is us.

She packed lunches, worried about grades, celebrated birthdays. She probably lay awake at night wondering if she was doing enough, being enough. She loved a child who became unreachable, radicalized by voices she couldn’t see, in spaces she couldn’t enter. When the call came, she didn’t just lose her son — she lost her identity as the mother who could protect him, guide him, save him.

We failed her. We failed her son. We failed all our children.

The Invisible Community

While we were managing carpools and checking homework, some of our children were being seduced into online worlds we couldn’t see — spaces where hate grows in the shadows, where isolation festers, where young minds can be weaponized by strangers we’ll never meet. We thought we knew our community because we could see them at soccer games and town events. But the truth is, we can no longer see our full community with our own eyes.

The shooter in Evergreen was connected to an online community I couldn’t see from my mountain town. His radicalization happened in plain sight, yet completely invisible to the adults in his physical world. This is the new reality: our children exist in two communities simultaneously, and we’ve been parenting for only one of them.

My daughter says she’s okay, but I see the subtle shifts — the ups and downs of her mood more pronounced than typical pre-teen fluctuations. She wants to sleep with me. She doesn’t want me to leave the parking lot during her 90-minute soccer practice, when I would normally run errands or take a bike ride.

And I find myself unable to let her take the bus anymore — the same bus route the shooter took with a gun in his backpack. Certain freedoms are gone, for both of us.

The Power of Women’s Leadership: What Research and Experience Teach Us

I’ve spent my career studying leadership — what creates better communities, better organizations, a better world. The research is unequivocal: when women step into leadership roles, communities are fundamentally transformed. In developing nations, women’s political participation correlates directly with reduced conflict and increased social cohesion. Countries with higher female parliamentary representation have lower rates of civil war and are more likely to maintain peace agreements. When women control household resources, children’s health and education outcomes improve dramatically.

But it’s not just about formal political power. At the community level, women’s leadership brings measurable changes because we approach problems differently. Women are more likely to build bridges across social divides, creating networks that strengthen community resilience. Female leaders tend to use more inclusive, consensus-building approaches that result in broader community buy-in. Women in leadership positions are more likely to prioritize policies and initiatives that benefit future generations, and we’re more likely to see connections between seemingly separate issues — understanding, for instance, that mental health, education, and community safety are interconnected.

This isn’t about women being inherently better leaders — it’s about calling us to step up and gift the qualities many of us have cultivated through nurturing, through seeing the whole, through understanding that our individual wellbeing is inseparable from our collective wellbeing. The question isn’t whether women should be in charge, but whether we’ve given ourselves permission to bring love, belonging, commitment, and integrity to leadership roles. Have we allowed ourselves to lead with the full range of human qualities, or have we constrained ourselves to fit narrow preconceptions of what leadership looks like and what we allow into the leadership conversation.

Many women are already leading in our communities, but perhaps we haven’t fully embraced the power of leading with our whole selves. Mothers — and I include in this definition all who carry the heart of a mother, whether they’ve given birth or not — possess qualities that our communities desperately need, but we may have been hesitant to bring them forward because they don’t fit traditional leadership models.

We are early warning systems. We see the mood shifts, the withdrawal, the changes in our children’s eyes before anyone else. We feel the temperature of our homes, our schools, our communities. We have the power to intervene before darkness takes root. We naturally think in terms of interconnected systems, understanding that a child’s behavior at school is connected to what’s happening at home, that community safety is linked to mental health resources, that today’s choices shape tomorrow’s outcomes.

When our children — all children — are threatened, we find reserves of strength and determination that can lift cars and move mountains. This protective instinct, channeled into community leadership, can be a powerful force for positive change. We love our children through their worst moments, their biggest mistakes, their darkest phases. This capacity for unconditional love, extended to our communities, creates space for healing and redemption that punitive approaches cannot achieve.

The Permission We Haven’t Given Ourselves

It’s not that we’ve been silent — women are speaking up, leading, and making change in countless ways. But perhaps we haven’t given ourselves full permission to lead with love, belonging, and the full range of human qualities that come naturally to many of us. We’ve often felt pressure to adopt more traditional, hierarchical leadership styles to be taken seriously, leaving parts of ourselves — the nurturing, the intuitive, the collaborative — at the door.

We’ve sometimes accepted that certain conversations aren’t for this or that arena, that aspects of our voices don’t belong in the “important” conversations, or that leading with love and care isn’t “professional” enough for serious leadership roles.

This silence is killing our children.

Every school shooting, every suicide, every child lost to addiction or violence represents a failure of community leadership. Not because we didn’t have enough security measures or mental health resources — though we need those too — but because we failed to create a condition in our communities where every child is seen, known, and valued.

The Mother of the Shooter

I don’t know her. However, I imagine the mother of the shooter is grieving in isolation right now. Perhaps she is carrying shame that isn’t entirely hers to bear. Maybe she is wondering what she missed, what she could have done differently.

She needs us.

Not our judgment, but our fierce love. Not our distance, but our embrace. Not our condemnation, but our understanding that she, too, is a victim of the systems that failed her son.

If we cannot extend love and see her pain as connected to our own, how can we build the inclusive communities our children need?

The Moment of Choice

Our children are watching. They’re waiting to see if we will rise to meet this moment or continue to hope someone else will handle it. They’re observing whether we will step into our power or remain on the sidelines, whether we will lead with love or continue to manage with fear.

The evidence is overwhelming: when we lead with maternal wisdom — with love, belonging, commitment, and integrity — communities heal and thrive. When we bring our full selves to the work of community building, transformation happens.

But it requires us to step out of our comfort zones. It requires us to speak up in meetings where we’ve been silent. It requires us to run for school board positions, city council seats, and community organization leadership roles. It requires us to take risks on our big ideas. It requires us to have difficult conversations with our neighbors, our children, and ourselves.

This is not a call for mothers to do more — we’re already doing plenty. This is a call for us to do different. To channel our protective instincts into community leadership. To use our systems thinking to solve complex problems. To bring our capacity for unconditional love into spaces that have been dominated by fear and judgment.

Start where you are:

• Know your child’s online world as intimately as their physical one

• Create spaces in your community where struggling families can find support

• Run for local office or join community boards

• Speak up in meetings when decisions affect children and families

• Build bridges across the divides that separate us

• Extend maternal love to all children, including those who have made terrible mistakes

The children in our schools need us to create environments where they can be seen and supported before they reach crisis points. Our communities need us to lead with the wisdom that comes from nurturing life, protecting the vulnerable, and believing in the possibility of redemption.

The time for our leadership is now. Don’t wait for it to happen to your community.

*Kari Zeller supports genuine leaders make big stuff happen. She lives in Evergreen, Colorado with her daughter and husband.

www.tgn-consulting.com

One of the most important and sought-after skills in the modern workplace is the ability to coach others.

It’s one thing to identify coaching as an important capacity — it’s another thing altogether to develop that capacity. The reality is that many HR departments are not practiced in developing the coaching capacity in managers. What’s more, most managers do not think of themselves as coaches to begin with. They see coaching as a different job, usually done by someone outside the company.

To expand one’s coaching capacity, it makes sense to begin with a basic question: What exactly does it mean to be a coach, as distinct from a manager? And how can those two competencies complement one another?

Realizing Outcomes Versus Empowering Individuals
The difference between managing and coaching stems from what each is out to achieve. In simple terms, management is about ensuring the job gets done. Managing begins with the question: What outcome are we out to achieve, and how can I ensure we will get there?

A manager gets paid to assume accountability for the overall performance of the team. To that end, managers pull from a range of tools in their managerial toolkit: They coordinate resources (both human and financial), they create structure, they provide clarity and they apply incentives (as well as consequences).

Coaching, on the other hand, is about getting people to be their best selves. Coaching begins with the question: What obstacles stand in the way of this individual becoming a peak performer, and how might we remove those obstacles by increasing the individual’s awareness?

This difference isn’t merely theoretical — it leads to all sorts of differences in practice, which we will look at now.

Solving the Problem Versus Developing Problem-Solving
Managers are more likely to jump in to fix a problem themselves when the people they manage encounter a breakdown. After all, when the outcome is imperiled, a manager often prioritizes that it get done and done right. “I’ll just do it myself,” is often the most expedient and least risky strategy.
A coach would never jump in to “just do it myself.” For a coach, the focus isn’t merely diagnosing and fixing the problem — it’s about developing the individual to solve the problem themselves.

A coach would get curious about what’s getting in the way for the individual performer. How are they observing themselves? (E.g., “I am not capable.”) How are they observing the situation? (E.g., “It can’t be done.”) What mood are they in? (“I’m overwhelmed and frustrated right now.”) Where are they abdicating power and responsibility? ( E.g., “If it weren’t for Mark, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”) What assumptions are they banking on? ( E.g., “Next quarter is going to be different; it has to be.”) A manager might feel the need to sidestep these questions to get the job done — a coach would almost certainly be concerned with exploring them further.

Ultimately, a coach focuses on keeping the responsibility for results with the performer.

Listening for Results Versus Potential
Another example of how managers and coaches would go about a situation differently is the kind of listening they bring to interactions.

Managers listen for results. Are we tracking on this project? Is this individual performing in a way that will yield the result we need, and, if not, what intervention might we stage?

As a reflection of this, managers often listen for what can go wrong. Again, their primary concern is to hold the overall goal in mind and to ensure that the team reaches that goal. To that end, an effective strategy is to constantly assess risk and to prepare for contingencies.

Coaches listen for potential, and what gaps, if closed, could make a difference. They start with the assumption that the performer is capable and can cause the result. Are you bringing your best self or your limited self? Do you have energy? Are you waiting for someone to solve your problems? What is the next productive action you can take? Are you able to take that action or is something blocking you? Are you connected with a larger purpose and stakeholder interests? What assessments do you have about this situation?

As a reflection of this, coaches often listen for what can go right. They very much operate in the world of growth mindset. They assume that the individual performer is capable and can fully accomplish their job with a little help in navigating their environment and relationships.

Managing is Assumed, Coaching Requires Permission
Generally speaking, one does not need to request permission in order to manage someone. It is assumed that a manager will check in with their direct reports to ensure they are hitting targets. It’s their job after all. Management is not personal in nature. It’s in the domain of tasks, projects and deadlines.

Coaching, on the other hand, can be personal in nature, which requires a different level of relationship. While management is relatively neat, coaching can get messy. Coaching involves “going deep” — it requires that someone let a coach in to see how they are observing, how they are feeling, what mood they are in and what’s getting in their way.

Therefore, you need permission to coach someone, and that permission is often granted only in situations where the individual trusts the coach. A major consideration for the coach, then, is earning and sustaining that trust. For example, a coach would be careful to ensure that any vulnerable moments shared in a coaching session were not subsequently used against the individual.

You Don’t Need Managing or Coaching — You Need Both
The truth of the matter is, when it comes to managing and coaching, it simply isn’t an either/or proposition. It isn’t enough to just have managing skills or just having coaching skills. Rather, the modern-day leader needs to develop their range to employ both skills when appropriate. It’s about having the sensitivity to diagnose a given situation and decide what is required in that moment.

In the beginning, managers looking to incorporate coaching into their leadership often find it challenging to make space for within their day-to-day interactions. When under pressure to get it all done, the time and energy needed to slow down and coach doesn’t always seem worthwhile. In the end, though, it’s precisely this coaching capacity that can bring out the best in their people and propel their team to better (and more efficient) results in the long term.

I was recently on a development call with a high-tech company experiencing a period of intense growth and expansion.

The leader I spoke with painted a picture of the overwhelm that had crept into the organization. Employees had too much to do and too little time to do it, fueling a constant and deflating sense of “not keeping up.” They felt siloed, fractured, and pulled in too many directions. They felt inadequate and ill-prepared to meet the challenges ahead.

On the heels of this less-than-ideal description, I asked about their success in the area of retention. A purely rhetorical question, mind you. Given what he had just described, I all but assumed that the folks at this company were heading for the hills.

“Retention is pretty good, actually,” he said. “People are sticking around.”

Huh?

That didn’t add up. I pressed him further. If your people are having such a hard time, why are they sticking around?

“Well, despite it all, they really believe in the work we’re doing. And they want to be a part of it.”

You see, this company is a trailblazer in the space. The technology they are developing has far-reaching implications for considerable advancement in the areas of medicine, higher education, design, and more.

The world stands to be a better place because of this technology. And despite the very serious growing pains this company was going through, that was enough to keep their employees around, and performing at a high level.

To me, this was another reminder of the very real, very tangible power of purpose.

This effect isn’t merely anecdotal. Consider a recent Gallup study showing that a “10% improvement in employees’ connection with the mission or purpose of their organization leads to an 8.1% decrease in turnover and a 4.4% increase in profitability.”

A caveat: no matter how much a sense of purpose pervades the halls of your company, employees who feel stretched aren’t going to stick around forever. And eventually, your performance in the marketplace will invariably suffer.

But a sense of purpose buys you time, loyalty, and engagement.

I work with companies going through all sorts of transitions. Merger and acquisition. Re-structuring. New ownership. Cultural Transformation. You name it.

These can be hectic times, and inevitably, some stuff falls through cracks. That’s okay.

One of the highest impact actions you can take during this period to mitigate the messiness is to re-presence your people to the purpose guiding this transition in particular and the company in general.

For example, if a healthcare company is acquiring another healthcare company, it serves to remind folks the impact that the acquisition can make in the lives of real human beings: e.g., that this is about providing access and better quality outcomes to healthcare for those who need it. An inspiring sense of purpose such as that can give folks the wherewithal to roll with the punches.

It’s got to be authentic. If all this talk about “purpose” is seen as lipstick on a pig, a diversion so you can get back to railroading your people, that’s only going to fan the flames of overwhelm and mistrust.

But if you can get it right — if you can tap into a real sense of “why” — you stand to unlock stores of performance and potential that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

For your own inspiration on “why,” check out one of my all-time favorite videos: Know Your Why | Michael Jr.

The “Great Resignation” is upon us.

According to one study conducted by Microsoft, 41% of the global workforce will consider leaving their current employer within the year. The Wall Street Journal reports that more U.S. workers are quitting their jobs now than at any time in the last 20 years.

Why the impending exodus? Some economists point to the historic level of savings (north of $2 trillion) Americans have amassed while home-ridden during the pandemic creating the breathing room needed to consider a career change. Others point to more psychological factors: after the harrowing experience of a global pandemic, fewer people will hang around in a job they don’t like for the sake of a paycheck. (Some pundits have dubbed ours the “Life is Too Short Economy,” or as Ezra Klein called it on his podcast, the “Take This Job and Shove It” economy.)

Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: to remain competitive in the marketplace, companies must figure out how to retain their core people. Companies have long engaged in a War for Talent — but that battle just got fiercer, and the stakes higher.

So — how do executives ensure that their best and brightest do not run for the hills?

The first step is to recognize that this is the wrong question.

“How do we make sure people don’t leave?” is a fear-based line of inquiry rooted in defensiveness and reactivity. It leads to desperation (“Is Brandon looking at other jobs? What will we do?”) and reeks of paranoia (“I heard Company X is revamping their bonus structure!”) An organization might easily contort itself to seem attractive to current and prospective employees and lose its sense of self along the way.

Instead, leaders can ask a better question: “How can we make this the best possible place to work?” That’s not a fear-based question. It’s an ambition-based question. It’s not outward focused — it’s inward focused, concerned with what it can control and unperturbed by what it can’t. It leads to curiosity and intentionality and authenticity.

So how do you do it? How do you make your place to work the best place to work for your employees?

The answer is simple: the employee must see a compelling future at the organization.

We can break this idea of a “compelling future” down further into three parts. A compelling future is one in which:

• What is important to me is addressed.
• I am recognized for making a noteworthy contribution.
• I am a part of something bigger than myself.

1) My Needs Are Met

To be sure, for many employees, the decision to take another job boils down to simple dollars and cents: they want to get paid more. Staying competitive in the domain of salary is important — if you’re unsure of where you stand here, talk to a compensation expert. Fair compensation is a hallmark of the current economic moment, and if you don’t pay, employees will make you pay.

For other employees, it’s a logistical concern. Many employees rearranged their lives around a remote work lifestyle. (In my own case, my husband works from home, and we now rely on him to pick up our child from school.) Many will now insist on a job that will allow them to continue this lifestyle.

But for many employees, their needs for their job aren’t purely financial or logistical or nearly as straightforward. Their cares run deeper and are more nuanced than that.

Some employees want to take on more responsibility in their roles. Some want to be continuously learning. Some want to have opportunities to expand beyond their comfort zone. Some are looking for a sense of community (or even family) from their work. Some want to know that they are free to give input, and that their input is acknowledged and implemented.

More likely than not, an employees’ needs combine a few or even all of these. These needs may not easily come to the surface, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And when it comes to the decision to stick it out at a particular company, the degree to which these needs are recognized and addressed can make all the difference.

2) My Contribution is Clear and Recognized

People want to know that they have contributed, and there are two important considerations when it comes to fostering a sense of contribution: clarity of contribution and recognition of contribution.

Clarity of contribution happens when an employee understands where the organization is headed and sees clearly how they uniquely help the company get there. If an organization aims to go from $50 million to $100 million in five years, what does my job have to do with making that happen? How are my skills and capacities being leveraged to move the needle for the collective?

To understand how their work fits within the big picture, employees need to see the big picture in the first place. There’s a tendency for leaders to inoculate employees from the big picture. They pay lip service to transparency, but their actions say clearly: “stay in your lane and focus on your job.” But there’s a unique satisfaction in seeing the big picture, and further seeing your contribution to turning it into a reality. Disconnection from the big picture plants the seed of future de-motivation.

Recognition of contribution happens when an employee knows and experiences regularly that they are valued. Readers won’t need convincing on this point. We all understand how crucial it is for people to feel acknowledged, not only for the work that they do, but for who they are. It’s best to avoid generic platitudes (“Jim, you’re doing great.”) and instead opt for specific, authentic, and consistent recognition (“Jim, the report you put together made a real difference in how we showed up to the meeting with Client X. And your can-do attitude is such a contribution to this team.”) The feeling of being recognized in this way is tremendously gratifying, and having it consistently can make an employee want to stick around for more.

3) I’m Part of Something Bigger than Myself

People want purpose. Millennials — who comprise the majority of the workforce — especially want to feel purposeful. They want to know that their work makes a difference.

This is especially true in the age of stakeholder capitalism. More and more, people look to business to be a force for good in society. Moreover, employees are holding their employers accountable to their ideals.

And so, one way for a company to retain key talent is to have a clear sense of its purpose and values, to operate in integrity with that purpose and those values, and to consistently re-presence that purpose and those values.

It’s easy to lose sight of purpose in a sea of day-to-day pressures. For instance, our firm works with several companies in healthcare. The job can be grueling. Burnout is common. Turnover is always an issue. What we’ve seen is that the simple act of re-connecting to purpose goes a long way in re-generating commitment and engagement along the way. When leaders remind team members of the real, tangible difference they are making — in the lives of patients and their families, in the communities they serve — the daily struggles are easier to bear. Continually putting that sense of purpose front and center doesn’t solve every problem, but it’s a powerful act of re-framing.

Focusing on What You Can Control

There is so much about the current talent environment that we cannot control. It’s important to note the macro-economic factors at play here. The economy in general and the labor market in particular is undergoing some fundamental shifts as we regain our economic footing in this post-pandemic period. As a business leader, we can do our best to stay in tune with these shifts — but we cannot control those shifts.

Further, we cannot ultimately control the decisions of our employees on where they choose to work. (And that’s a very good thing!) In some cases, we will have done all we can, and they will still bid adieu.

But exploring the questions outlined in this article is an example of how to focus on what we CAN control — and will put you in a great position to navigate the “Great Resignation.”

I talk a lot about the importance of “managing stakeholder cares.” It’s important to remember that this isn’t just some abstract, conceptual idea. Managing stakeholder cares means making tough, real-life, decisions, nearly every day that affect real people.

The pandemic has made this even more pronounced.

This came to my mind when reading a recent article in the Economist about “how companies should handle vaccines.” It was a great and relevant example of what it really means to balance stakeholder cares, when apparent trade-offs seem to be everywhere.

You’ve got to register for the Economist to view the full article — in case you haven’t got time for that, here are a few examples of the conundrums raised in the piece:

• What happens when customers demand that employees receive a vaccine? Especially if those same customers do not wish to get vaccinated themselves?
• How about employees who do not wish to receive a vaccine? What if it goes against their religious principles? Is it on the employer to find “safe roles” that the employee can partake in? What is the obligation to the customer in terms of informing about unvaccinated staff?
• What about when staff cannot get the vaccine, say, if a staff member is pregnant? In the article’s words, “do companies have a duty of care to protect such employees from colleagues who have refused to take the jab on principle”?

As in all examples of stakeholder trade-offs, there are (rarely) “right” answers to stakeholder tensions. The “right” course is to deeply acknowledge the cares and values — say, quality, service, integrity — and seek a way of addressing all of those cares, without giving every stakeholder exactly what they want.

Where are you seeing stakeholder trade-offs come up as of late?

I would love to hear from you.

Each week, every kid in my daughter’s first grade class takes on a different “job.” The jobs include things like wiping down the tables, sweeping the floors, or ensuring the books are lined up to the edge of the shelves.

But there is one job that my daughter considers the holy grail of all the tasks: being the “checker.”

The checker does not have one assignment in particular. The checker’s role is to check off that everyone else has done their job properly so that the class can go to recess.

A few weeks ago, it was my daughter’s turn to assume the coveted role of “checker.” When she returned home from her first day on the job, I asked how it went.

“Oh, it was awesome!” she told me. “I got to check off that everyone did their job correctly. Three people did not do their job, so I had to help them.”

“Hm,” I responded, empathetically. “That must have been tough. How did you tell them? Were they upset with you?”

She seemed genuinely confused.

“Upset? Why would they be upset? I just…helped them! And then we went to recess.”

My seven-year-old’s genuine look of bewilderment at my misplaced empathy made me realize: I had assumed the awkwardness of her experience holding her classmates accountable. I assumed that it created upset and hurt feelings. I assumed that it was “tough.”

But it wasn’t tough at all. Not for these first graders who were unburdened by the baggage that so many of us bring to our interactions around accountability.

For them, it was just about getting the job done to arrive at an outcome that mattered very much to all of them — getting to recess! No need for discomfort when the checker came around to point out that Johnny hadn’t put away all of the pencils. They hadn’t learned to make it personal yet. It was all just…matter of fact. The goal of the checker is there to ensure they can go to recess on time — not to point out faults. The context of accountability for this elementary classroom is shared accomplishment.

But I can’t say the same for us adults. We’ve learned a lot about accountability over the years. And, by and large, many adults have learned to hate it. We’ve learned that accountability is about holding other people’s feet to the fire. Holding them to account.

Of course, that isn’t the way accountability has to be. In fact, my company teaches an entire course on accountability, with practices and structures to improve accountability across an organization.

But for many people, getting to what accountability is begins with an act of unlearning, with a return to that childlike, unburdened view of accountability. It begins with seeing what accountability isn’t.

Accountability isn’t crime and punishment. It isn’t about making people wrong. It isn’t personal. As our internal defense mechanisms crystallized over the years in an effort to address our insecurities, we learned to make accountability all of these things.

But as my daughter reminded me, it doesn’t have to be.

So, here’s my takeaway for you: The next time you’re about to enter a conversation around accountability, take a few minutes and reflect: What have I learned about accountability over the years? How am I bringing that into this interaction? How might that impact the way that I will show up?

For example, if you have come to understand accountability as inherently oppositional, you are all but certain to take on an antagonistic tone in the conversation. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sometimes just the awareness of the pattern is enough to create a different tone in the conversation altogether.

Accountability is a sticky subject for a lot of people, often a source of tension and frustration. But with enough unlearning, we may just get back to that simple, matter-of-fact relationship with accountability and find ourselves wanting to be the “checker” once more.