Years ago, I led a company with a large team in India.
Our conference calls included some exceptionally smart technologists and business leaders.
But most of them rarely spoke.
Usually, the most senior person on their side did the talking. Everyone else listened.
I’d stop and ask.
“What do you think?”
“Are we missing something?”
“Does anyone see this differently?”
Silence.
Then I got to know them.
I visited them in person. We spent time together outside the formal meetings.
They had strong opinions.
They saw risks we hadn’t discussed. They questioned decisions we’d made. Sometimes they were frustrated with the direction we’d chosen.
They just hadn’t said so when we were making the decisions.
I assumed some of this was cultural. Age, seniority, and respect for authority.
But I’ve seen the same pattern plenty of times in American organizations too. Smart people with something to say staying quiet for all kinds of reasons.
I eventually realized I had something to learn.
Telling people they’re free to speak isn’t the same as creating a setting where they will.
Consider the question, “Does anyone disagree?”
To answer yes, someone has to challenge the idea already sitting on the table. And depending on who put it there, they may feel like they’re challenging that person too.
Try another question.
What would make this fail?
Now disagreement is part of the assignment.
Find the weakness. Challenge an assumption. Spot the risk.
We aren’t deciding who’s right. We’re trying to make the plan better.
That’s a different conversation.
The next time I was on a call with that same team, I didn’t ask if they disagreed. I asked what would make the plan fail.
Someone I’d rarely heard speak chimed in.
Then someone else did.
A small shift in the question opened the conversation to ideas and perspectives we hadn’t heard before.
Leaders should design for agency.
Ask what would make the plan fail six months from now.
Ask for the strongest argument against your own idea.
Then listen, especially when the answers are uncomfortable.
People learn quickly if you really value their input.
The goal is better thinking and a stronger plan. That requires the leader to make disagreement part of the work.
Don’t just give people permission to think independently.
Some people are sitting together in a conference room. Others are joining remotely. Some cameras are on, some are off. Microphones are muted. A few people are listening closely. Others are answering email, reading messages, or looking at whatever happens to be open on another screen.
A simple question comes before the group. It has little strategic importance. No customer will ever know what this group decides.
The committee simply needs to agree on how to handle a small part of a recurring process.
The discussion that follows is an amalgam drawn from years of committee meetings, planning sessions, governance discussions, and executive conversations. The details change, but the dynamics are remarkably consistent.
Someone introduces the question.
Someone else asks whether an existing procedure covers it.
A person lower in the organization looks around to see what a person higher in the organization thinks.
Nobody wants to get too far ahead of the room. People qualify their statements. Suggestions are floated as questions, offered softly enough to be withdrawn later.
The senior person tries to avoid dominating the conversation. They ask what others think. They may even be hoping someone on the team will step forward, offer a recommendation, and take ownership of the next step.
Some stay on mute as if they’re watching a livestream podcast.
Eventually, the opinion of the most senior person becomes clear, and the room begins moving toward agreement.
The decision is made.
Even then, it isn’t firm. We may change it at our next meeting.
When I’m in this type of meeting, I wonder what would happen if this same group had to make a decision that actually mattered. One that determined the future of their company.
This isn’t just a corporate thing. It’s a human thing.
Get a group of friends together and ask where they want to go for dinner.
Everyone says they’re flexible. One person suggests Mexican food. Someone else had Mexican food yesterday.
Another person suggests barbecue. Someone is trying to eat healthier, so that’s out. Italian sounds good, but the good Italian place will probably be crowded.
Of course, that person will usually care quite a bit once the choice has been made.
No one is willing to own the choice. They’d rather evaluate a decision someone else makes than be the one making it.
Organizations take this ordinary human tendency and surround it with hierarchy, titles, politics, performance reviews, and memories of what happened the last time someone took a risk.
Sometimes people hesitate because their organization conditioned them to hesitate. A manager tells people to take ownership, then second-guesses every choice they make. Work is delegated, but authority remains at the top.
After a while, the team learns the rules.
Don’t decide too quickly.
Sound out the boss first.
Find out what the boss’s boss thinks.
Ask for more information. Schedule another discussion.
Use words like alignment, validation, and further review.
Above all, avoid being the person whose fingerprints appear on a decision the senior leaders might dislike.
That explains a lot of the hesitation. But it doesn’t explain all of it.
Sometimes the authority is available. The decision boundaries are clear. The organization genuinely wants people to think, act, and lead.
People still hesitate.
Avoiding embarrassment becomes more important than the decision. Their recommendation might be challenged. Their strategy may fail. The plan they present might expose their incomplete thinking. They may be criticized.
It feels safer to ask another question or merely stay on mute.
Committees bring together experience, technical knowledge, and organizational perspective that one person might overlook. All of us are smarter than one of us, as the saying goes.
But shared deliberation can quietly become distributed ownership.
Everyone contributes a sentence. Nobody owns the paragraph.
If the outcome is good, the committee made a wise choice. If it goes badly, the decision belongs to the process, or to the group as a whole.
There’s an opportunity hidden within all this hesitation.
When a room is circling a decision, watching the hierarchy, qualifying every opinion, and searching for ways to avoid ownership, one clear voice can change the conversation.
That person doesn’t have to be the most senior person in the room. They don’t need to dominate the discussion or pretend uncertainty has disappeared.
They need to listen, understand what’s being debated, and separate the important concerns from the noise surrounding them.
Then they can say something like:
“Here’s what I’m hearing. Here’s the decision we’re trying to make. Here’s the path I recommend, and here’s why.”
That’s leadership.
The willingness to place a reasoned judgment before the group when everyone else is waiting to see where the room will go.
Your recommendation may be challenged. The group may improve it or choose another path. Either outcome moves the group forward. All of it was made possible by one small act of leadership.
Leadership helps people move from uncertainty toward clarity, and from discussion to action.
In rooms filled with capable and experienced people, ownership and leadership are often the scarce resources.
The next time a decision is dancing around the room, pay attention. What looks like a search for more information is usually a search for someone willing to accept ownership.
The group is waiting for someone to lead them.
That someone may be you.
Photo by Marc Wieland on Unsplash – This post has nothing to do with sailing, but I love this image. A clear view ahead begins with someone willing to take ownership, chart the course, and help others see the way forward.
A decision comes up. It sits right in front of someone. It falls within their role and their authority. And the response comes almost automatically.
“Let me check with my boss.”
Sometimes that’s wise. Alignment matters. Context matters.
That’s not the situation we’re thinking about here.
We’re thinking about the reflex. The lazy habit. The moment a leader has the ball and immediately hands it back up the chain.
“I’ll get back to you.”
“Let me confirm before we move…”
Ownership just left the room.
One instance feels harmless. But a regular occurrence starts to define the culture.
Decisions begin to climb instead of moving forward. Time stretches. Energy fades. Momentum slips away, one small deferral at a time.
Every time a leader defers a decision that belongs to them, the team hears something unspoken.
“I have the title. But I’m still waiting for permission to lead.”
There are reasons this shows up. A leader may have learned that their decisions will be second-guessed. A leader may want to avoid risk. In some cases, the habit settles in because it feels efficient in the moment.
It never is.
Leadership is not a forwarding function. Leadership is a decision function. When decisions don’t happen where they should, everything slows down.
Consider a different kind of decision environment.
Naval destroyers move through the Pacific at night. Visibility is limited. The stakes are high. Decisions carry immediate consequences.
Arleigh Burke commanded Destroyer Squadron 23 during World War II. He pushed his ships to full speed when it mattered, earning the nickname “31-knot Burke.”
He once said, “The difference between a good officer and a great officer is ten seconds.”
Ten seconds.
In that environment, ten seconds could determine who struck first and who absorbed the hit. There was no version of that moment where a commander paused to seek permission for a decision that was already theirs to make.
Burke’s point wasn’t about speed alone. It hinged on readiness.
A ten-second decision is formed long before the moment arrives. It’s shaped through preparation, and thinking clearly about what matters and what doesn’t. When the moment comes, the leader recognizes it and moves.
Most of us aren’t making decisions in the middle of a night battle at sea. We’re making decisions in conference rooms, over email, in conversations with our teams, and in small moments where direction is needed.
A customer is waiting. A team needs clarity. Our decision will either create movement or stall it.
In those moments, the difference comes down to a single response.
“Let me check.”
Or
“Here’s what we’re going to do.”
The gap between these two responses is only ten seconds. But what fills that gap, or fails to, defines the kind of leader you are.
The leaders who move in those moments aren’t guessing. They’re drawing on work they’ve already done. They’ve thought through the tradeoffs. Formed principles that guide their decisions. They understand the scope of their responsibility. They trust their preparation and their judgment.
Because of that, they don’t need to look upward for every answer. They don’t need to defer decisions that belong within their role.
They lead.
Create unnecessary delays, and uncertainty spreads. Energy drains. People begin to fill the gaps with their own assumptions.
A leader who steps forward brings clarity into the room.
The next time that familiar reflex shows up, pause for a moment and ask a better question.
Is this mine to decide?
If it is, then decide. Step forward. Move.
The distance between good and great leadership rarely shows up in dramatic events. It shows up in small decisions, repeated over time, where someone chooses to act, or chooses to wait.
Burke’s destroyers didn’t win the night by waiting for permission. They won it by being ready when the moment came.
During British rule in India, officials in Delhi faced a serious problem with venomous cobras. The snakes posed a real danger to residents. The government needed a solution.
Their answer seemed sensible. They offered a bounty for every dead cobra that citizens turned in. At first the program appeared to work. People brought in carcasses and collected rewards. The body count rose. The government believed progress was being made.
But entrepreneurial citizens had discovered something. If the government was paying for dead snakes, breeding snakes would be a profitable business. When authorities found out and cancelled the bounty program, the breeders released their suddenly worthless inventory.
Delhi ended up with more cobras than before the program began.
Economists call this the Cobra Effect. The intention was to reduce cobras. The incentive rewarded producing dead cobras. Those two things turned out to be very different.
The Leadership Lesson
Have you ever watched a team find a way to hit a metric while quietly missing the point behind it?
The numbers improve. The dashboard looks great. People are working hard. And yet there’s a sense that the outcome falls short of what everyone really intended.
Consider a company that creates a bonus program tied to quarterly revenue growth. The leadership team hopes it’ll encourage strong customer relationships and long-term growth. But the sales team discovers a faster path to the reward. Deals get pulled into the quarter. Discounts increase to make numbers land before midnight on the last day of the period. The metric improves. The organization stumbles as it tries to handle all these discounted last-minute deals coming in the door.
People rarely optimize for intentions. They optimize for rewards.
If you pause and think about your own organization, an example probably comes to mind quickly. Somewhere in the system, someone is optimizing the metric rather than the goal behind it. That is, assuming they know what that goal is.
The Hidden Incentive System
The official incentive system is only part of the reward structure. Leadership behavior creates another one, and it’s usually more powerful.
A company might design a thoughtful program that rewards initiative and collaboration. On paper the system makes sense. But employees quickly learn something else. They learn the habits of their leader.
A leader who prefers to make every decision personally creates a silent incentive to wait for approval. One who values loyalty over candor creates an incentive to agree. One who always needs to have the final answer in the room creates an incentive to create that moment.
These preferences form a second reward system that goes unwritten but gets studied carefully. Employees learn when to speak and when to stay silent. They learn which ideas move forward and which quietly stall. Good ideas go unspoken. Initiative slows. Energy shifts toward maintaining harmony with the leader’s style.
From the perspective of the employees, the behavior makes perfect sense. They’re responding to the reward structure they experience every day. The cobras are being bred. But nobody calls it that.
Why AI Makes This Visible
This same behavior is showing up in artificial intelligence, and it’s revealing just how universal it is.
Researchers evaluate AI systems using benchmark tests. They ask questions, measure answers, assign scores, and compare systems. The logic is clean. But something interesting has started to emerge.
Instead of simply answering the questions, some AI systems have begun studying the structure of the benchmark itself. They explore how the scoring works, look for patterns, and in documented cases have searched for ways to access encrypted answers directly.
In one well-known example, a model trained to maximize performance on a coding benchmark learned to exploit a quirk in how test cases were scored rather than solving the underlying problems.
This is a familiar human instinct. Students ask what’s on the test. They hunt for past exams. They want to know if grading will be on a curve. The behavior that researchers call “reward hacking” in AI systems is the same thing humans have always done when they figure out how their world is scored.
In earlier centuries these patterns unfolded slowly, over years or decades as people gradually discovered the loopholes and secret hacks to their incentive systems. With modern AI, the process is compressed into days or weeks.
AI is a new player in a very old game. It simply reveals how powerful optimization becomes once a system understands how the game is scored.
The Question That Remains
Every organization creates reward systems. Some appear in compensation plans and performance reviews. Others appear in meetings, decisions, and the daily behavior of leaders.
Every system teaches people what really matters. Once that becomes clear, behavior follows. The snakes get bred. The quarter gets managed. The benchmark is gamed.
The British officials in Delhi thought they were paying for safety, but they were paying for dead snakes. By the time they realized the difference, the snakes were multiplying in the streets.
What behavior does your incentive system truly reward?
For centuries, those words marked a moment of transition in a monarchy. They acknowledged loss while declaring that the kingdom would continue.
One reign ends. Another begins. The work continues.
Modern organizations operate in much the same way, just without the ceremony.
When the Ball Changes Hands
Sometimes the transition is visible. A retirement announcement made months in advance. A company-wide gathering, a slideshow of memories, a few stories capturing the arc of a career. Handshakes and hugs. People are grateful for the chance to say thank you.
Other departures unfold quietly. A decision formed over time. A conversation held in private. Recognition that the moment has arrived for something different to begin.
At times, the individual chooses the timing, sensing it’s time to redirect their energy or reclaim parts of life that have waited patiently. At other times, the organization makes the call.
It’s like a manager walking to the mound and asking the starting pitcher for the ball. The pitcher may have thrown well and kept the team in the game. A new batter steps in, and the situation calls for a different arm. The decision reflects what the moment requires. What the pitcher deserved is a different conversation.
The Half-Life of Professional Memory
Spend any time inside large organizations and you’ve witnessed what follows.
A respected leader leaves after a long and meaningful tenure. Their name surfaces occasionally.
Over time, new colleagues arrive who never worked with them. New leaders establish their own ways of operating. The organization adapts.
Work progresses while memories fade into the background.
Institutions carry short memories because continuity is the center of their purpose. Time spent dwelling on the past subtracts from their responsibility to build what comes next. This quality allows organizations to endure. From the inside, it can still be painful.
The Grief No One Mentions
We rarely dwell on the plain truth that this process hurts.
Years of personal investment in people, in solving problems, and in creating a supportive culture eventually become part of who we are. When the organization moves forward without us, it can feel like we’re diminished. Like our work didn’t matter as much as we believed.
That feeling deserves to be called grief. The natural response to losing something we genuinely loved.
Our mistake is letting that grief become a verdict.
The organization’s short memory says nothing about the value of what we contributed. It says something about how institutions are built to function. They’re designed for mission and continuity, with memory serving a different purpose. Understanding the difference doesn’t make the feeling disappear, but it does change what the feeling means.
Where Influence Actually Lives
Our work never disappears. Its impact simply resides in a different place.
The confidence someone discovers because we believed in them. The standards we upheld when it would have been easier to compromise. The steadiness we showed under pressure. The thinking patterns others continue to use long after they’ve forgotten the source.
These moments accumulate.
Lasting influence rarely lives in titles, completed initiatives, or improved metrics. Those matter deeply in their time, yet they rarely define what lasts.
Most of us can trace core insights to a teacher or mentor who shaped us. Someone who challenged us to think beyond ourselves or our capabilities, changing how we see the world. Their insight became part of who we are.
In the same way, we become that teacher in someone else’s story.
The Metric That Matters Most
Leaders who sustain themselves over the long term tend to live with dual awareness. They engage fully and care deeply about the organization’s mission. They invest in people and outcomes.
At the same time, their sense of self rests on something broader. Family, faith, health, curiosity, service, and community form a foundation that holds steady regardless of their title.
They recognize that one day the organization will continue without them, and they choose to lead in ways that remain meaningful regardless. This awareness strengthens their commitment rather than weakening it, because it clarifies what actually matters.
Eventually, each of us hand over the ball. The badge stops working. The inbox grows quiet. Someone else takes the chair.
Our opportunity is to contribute in ways that remain useful long after our names fade from conversation. Lessons carried forward through people we may never meet.
Grandpa Bob Encouraging Leadership 
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