Inspired by my Kenyan safari, “Field Notes” are my observations from the field where my clients and I work – coaching sessions, private 1:1 conversations, and Energy Leadership Index debriefs. Each field note is drawn from actual client sessions and give an insight to the personal evolution of my clients.
Location: A litigation practice, small-sized, several attorneys along with numerous non-attorney team members.
Observation: The firm ran better in his silence than in his presence, and that should have unsettled him before it relieved him.
Here’s what the real world revealed.
- The Call That Dropped
He was driving back from a meeting when his connection cut out mid-call with his leadership team. He could still hear everything going on. He just couldn’t talk. Thirty minutes later, he came back online. Here’s what my client shared: the team had gotten more out of that meeting because he hadn’t said a word, and he was fairly certain it wasn’t because he’d held back strategically. The choice had been made for him by a dead cell signal on a highway. He didn’t design that absence, and it still worked, which tells you the firm’s dependence on his voice was never as load-bearing as he believed it was.
- Touchpoint, Not Control
More recently, he parachuted into a meeting he doesn’t normally attend, a standing check-in his operations lead runs every week. He told me he went in wanting a touchpoint more than control. What he got instead was data. His team didn’t ask him what to do. They told him what they’d already decided and asked him to confirm it. “We don’t need his direction,” he said, catching himself talking about his own team in the third person. “We just need the decision.” That’s the whole ballgame right there. Direction means you’re thinking for them. A decision means they’ve already done the thinking and are simply asking you to bless it. One keeps you the bottleneck. The other builds the firm he says he wants.
- He Is Not the Guy at the Front Desk
Earlier in the same session my client had been describing an employee at the firm who brings relentless, contagious positive energy into the office every morning, the kind of person who makes everyone’s Monday a little lighter just by walking in. Good for morale. Not who he is, and he wasn’t sure he could bring that same kind of energy himself, day after day. I told him the plain truth: he is not that employee, and it would be strange if he tried to be. A founder who walks into the room with someone else’s enthusiasm is nothing other than a performance, and the room feels it before anyone can name what’s off. What his team needs from him isn’t borrowed enthusiasm. It’s his own energy, steady and real, whatever that happens to look like on a given Tuesday.
None of this started as a plan. A dropped call, an unscheduled visit to a meeting he doesn’t normally run, an offhand comment about an employee at the front desk. Strung together, they told him something his firm had been trying to tell him for months. It doesn’t need him in the room to function, and it doesn’t need him to be anyone other than who he already is. His team was never waiting on his voice. They were waiting on his trust.
Field Exercise
Think about the last meeting you weren’t in, whether by design or by accident. What actually happened without you there? Ask your team directly whether they’re waiting on your direction or your decision, and let the honest answer tell you where you’re still the bottleneck. Name one thing you catch yourself doing to be someone other than who you are in the room, whether it’s tone, energy, or persona, and ask what it would look like to just be you instead.
Your firm doesn’t need a better performance from you. It needs the real thing, present or not.
End of dispatch.
