the muscle we stopped using

No one decided to stop leading. It just quietly stopped happening.

Dear reader,

The most significant leadership problem I see in senior teams isn't a lack of ability. It's atrophy. A capacity that was once there — to hold ambiguity, to decide without a slide, to sit inside a difficult conversation without escaping into process — has simply not been used in long enough that the muscle has thinned.

Atrophy is quiet. It doesn't show up in the annual review. It shows up as an unusual number of meetings to prepare for a meeting, as decisions that need one more workshop, as conflicts that are managed rather than named. The organisation continues to function. It just leads less.

The remedy isn't a course. Muscles come back the same way they went: through use, under load, on purpose. Which usually means a leader takes one decision this week they'd normally socialise for another fortnight, and lives with the discomfort.

What did you last defer that a version of you five years ago would simply have decided?

— Kenneth

Copenhagen, October