Tiny Leadership Story #19
Brett managed the maintenance subscription program his boss, Diane, had built. He had rapidly grown it from twelve accounts to ninety-three, and now the renewal cycle carried the most ambitious targets yet. He felt the weight of them.
He admired Diane. She was a rising executive, decisive and sure, and she had recruited him for his steadiness and reliability. They built a good cadence: weekly one-on-ones, a shared list of accounts, real respect. From the outside, the relationship looked healthy.
For six months he had been asking her a version of the same question. Is there anything I should be doing differently? Each time, he tightened. He would watch her face and brace. She would say something thoughtful about the great progress, and how they might create even more success on that foundation. He would nod, write it down, and replay it on the commute home. But was Diane satisfied with his work or not? Was her pause a thinking pause, or a not-quite-saying-it pause?
He walked me through their last one-on-one. Two minutes in, I stopped him.
"Where are you sitting?"
He tilted his head.
"Picture a table. Where are you, and where is Diane?"
He paused. "Across from her."
The chair across the table was one Brett had pulled out himself.
He had sat across from Diane for six months, waiting for a verdict that wasn’t coming. She was his boss. She was also a partner building something neither of them had run at this scale.
"What changes if you sit beside her?" I asked.
He came to his next one-on-one without a list of the ways he might be falling short. He brought the two growth strategies he was least sure of and asked Diane to think them through with him. The conversation ran forty minutes and produced two decisions, neither of them about Brett.
We often sit across from the people we most want to sit beside.
The Question
Whose verdict are you still waiting for, when you could be working beside them?
"The leader and the led are both following the invisible leader — the common purpose." — Mary Parker Follett
Shall we begin?
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