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Hello, Friends!
Some days you get to see yourself clearly. It almost never happens in the moment, and it almost never happens alone.
We start here.
Early in my Target years, I was leading a store visit for our division executive — two levels above my boss, the most senior leader most of us would ever host in that building. I had my entire leadership team in the store that morning, hours before she was due, and we were deep in final preparations. Nothing about that part was unusual. You get the store right for a visit like that. Everyone knew it, everyone was doing it, and everyone had been doing it for days.
What was unusual was me.
Is the backroom finished? Was the café stocked? Did anyone walk the dollar spot after the reset? I moved through the building asking questions that had already been answered, checking work I had no reason to check, following up on things I had watched people complete. This was a strong team — genuinely strong, experienced, trusted — and none of us were used to me operating this way. My habit, then and now, is to be the calm one. That morning I was something else, and I couldn't see it.
The visit went beautifully. She walked the store, she liked what she saw, she said so, and she left. By any measure that mattered on paper, the day was a win.
Then my salesfloor executive asked if she could have a minute.
She wasn't someone who wasted words, and she didn't waste them then. "You made us all so nervous."
I remember being bummed in a way that took me a second to locate. Not defensive — she was right, and I knew it the moment she said it. What landed hardest was the all. I had spent the morning thinking my nerves were mine, something I was privately managing while the team did their work. They weren't private. They had been moving through the building all morning, ahead of me, behind me, settling on people while I asked about the café.
And here's what made it worse: they had nothing to be nervous about. This team had earned an executive visit going well. They were prepared, they were good at their jobs, and left alone they would have spent that morning proud and maybe even a little excited to show the store off. Excitement was the honest condition of the day. I had taken that from them, one already-answered question at a time, and replaced it with something that fit me and didn't fit them at all.
So I called my executives and team leads into a quick huddle before the day got away from us. I congratulated them, because the visit was theirs and it had gone exactly the way their work said it should. And then I apologized — not for being nervous, which I couldn't have helped, but for handing it to them. For creating an anxiety they never needed to have had.
I don't remember my exact words. I remember that it felt necessary, and that it was easier than I expected, and that it was nowhere near the end of my thinking about that day.
It took me a while to understand what had actually gone wrong that morning, because for a long time I filed it under nerves. I got anxious, the team caught it, I apologized. True as far as it goes.
But that's not quite what happened, and the difference has stayed with me for many years.
Because think about what those questions sounded like from the other side. Is the backroom finished? Was the café stocked? Did anyone walk the dollar spot? From inside my head, every one of those was about the visit — a nervous system discharging itself on whatever was nearby. From where my team stood, not one of them was about the visit. Each was a question about them. Whether they had done what they said. Whether they could be counted on. Whether, after everything, I trusted them.
My anxiety left me as anxiety. It arrived as doubt.
That's the part I couldn't have seen that morning, and it's the part I've never stopped seeing since. Whatever is going on inside us doesn't reach other people as information about us. It reaches them as a message about themselves. The team didn't spend that morning thinking he must be worried about the visit. They spent it absorbing what my behavior implied about their work, their competence, their standing with me — implications I never intended and would have been horrified to endorse. Nobody receives our state as our state. They receive it as a verdict, and they take the verdict personally, because it was delivered to them personally, one already-answered question at a time.
Which means the transmission was worse than contagious nerves. Nerves, they could have forgiven easily — everyone understood the day. What I actually sent was harder to metabolize: the strongest team I'd worked with to that point spent a morning wondering, at some low frequency, whether their leader believed in them. They knew better. Their track record knew better. And it worked on them anyway, because that message doesn't check the evidence before it lands.
A few years after that morning, I chose a graduate program in organization development — chose it in part because I knew its reputation for making people do the uncomfortable work of self-awareness before it let them do anything else. I didn't enroll thinking about the Target visit. But I was carrying questions by then about the distance between who I meant to be as a leader and what actually reached people, and that morning was one of the places the questions came from.
Somewhere in that program, a piece of language found me that I've used ever since: there is my stuff, your stuff, and our stuff. Simple enough to fit on an index card. What it asks of you is not simple at all — because it makes you responsible for knowing which is which, and for keeping your stuff from doing its work through you while you're busy believing you're fine.
I had walked that store certain my nerves were my stuff, privately held. They were already our stuff by 9 a.m. That's what the language finally gave me: not a way to have prevented that morning, but a way to see it. The leak had come first. The words came looking for it.
Years later, I was leaving Wells Fargo after only eighteen months — long enough to lead some deeply tenured people, and nowhere near long enough to take any of them for granted. By then, what began as instinct had become deliberate: the smile when I joined a call, the greeting before anything else, the real question before the meeting was allowed to start. My stuff still existed. There were mornings I brought plenty of it to work. The practice was never about having nothing going on. It was about deciding what would get through.
In my last week, in a final one-on-one, an associate who had been with the company for nearly fifty years told me something I've kept ever since. They said they had never worked with a leader who cared about the experience of their team the way I did. That the smile, the greeting, the question — it was humanizing, they said. It made them feel like more than an employee.
Fifty years. This was a person who had seen every leadership style American banking ever produced, and what they chose to name on my way out the door was two words and a smile.
I want to be careful here, because this is the part of the story where it would be easy to congratulate myself, and that isn't what the moment felt like. It felt almost exactly like that huddle with my team — the same startled recognition, the same I had no idea that was landing. I knew what I was doing. I had no idea what it was doing. The transmission I'd spent years trying to manage had been reaching people the whole time, and once again I only found out because someone decided to tell me.
The greeting, if you're wondering, was the same one I've used at the top of every one of these essays. Hi, friends. It has never been a flourish. It's the practice itself — the two seconds where I decide what walks in with me — and it has been running quietly at the top of this page since the first essay, doing whatever it does, the same way it always has: without my being able to see it land.
Two moments. In a career of thousands of mornings and tens of thousands of small exchanges, these are the two that stay with me — the times someone stopped and told me, plainly, what my presence was doing to them. Once because a colleague was brave enough to say something hard the same hour it happened. Once because a person with fifty years of perspective decided a departing leader should know. Both were gifts. Neither was owed to me. And most mornings in between went out unmeasured.
That's the part I sit with now. The transmission never stops — for any of us. Whatever we bring gets received, gets taken personally, and then goes home with people. My nerves went home with a team who had earned a proud day. Two words and a smile went home with someone as proof they were more than an employee. It travels farther than we do, and it almost never reports back.
I've stopped expecting it to. What I haven't stopped doing is the two seconds at the top — the decision about what walks in with me — made in the knowledge that some mornings I'll get it wrong and won't be told, and that somewhere it may be landing better than I know, and I won't be told that either. A handful of times, someone opened the door and let me see. The rest of the time, I'm guessing.
So are you. So is everyone who walked into a building this morning. Somewhere out there is the ledger of what we've all been sending — and other people are the only ones who can read it.
"The story your people tell when you're not in the room is your truest legacy." — MB
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