I’ve spent 30 years teaching people in leadership positions how to build high performing teams. Teams where people take real ownership, hold themselves and each other accountable, and create a healthy ecosystem together.
And in all that time, the framework I teach hasn’t changed. I don’t think it ever will. Because it isn’t a trend. It’s endemic to being human.
The framework is simple:
1. We need to know where we’re going. A shared direction. A vision we all understand.
2. We need agreed upon values and behaviors. Not aspirational posters on the wall. Actual behavioral agreements that everyone on the team said yes to.
3. We each need to know our role. Clear instructions for how we individually contribute to that shared direction.
4. We need real measures. Ways to assess how well we’re doing against our responsibilities. Not vague feelings, but clear markers.
5. And we need a feedback loop. Consistent accountability. A known practice for what happens when we excel and what happens when we fail.
That’s it. That’s the structure. And every thriving team I’ve ever worked with runs on it. Every society that has ever functioned runs on it. It is, I believe, something we understand at an ancestral, almost genetic level. The architecture of effective human community.
Here’s the paradox of our time.
We have people in conspicuous, high level positions of leadership in corporations, in institutions, in governments who are not following this process. They are not honoring the social agreements of their own organizations. They are not fulfilling the vision they curated. Instead, they are pursuing personal gain.
And the rest of us are supposed to carry on as if nothing is off kilter. As if nothing is strange. As if nothing is scary.
I find this deeply disquieting.
I sit with leaders every day. I talk to them about why this structure matters, why it is *essential* to the thriving of their teams, their companies, their people. And then I watch, at the macro level, the systematic destruction of the very principles I know to be true.
It leaves me, a coach, a leader, a woman, a human, asking a question I think a lot of us are quietly asking:
Who are we anymore?
Here’s what I want you to remember, even in the disorientation:
The power has always been in the followers.
Leaders throw around a lot of weight. They make a lot of noise. But real power, the kind that builds civilizations and sustains communities, has never lived in a single person at the top. It lives in the collective agreement. It lives in the people who show up, who contribute, who hold the structure.
What these leaders have done is knock everyone off kilter. They’ve violated a system that we all, at every level, agreed to. And when that system gets violated from the top, it creates a particular kind of disorientation because the disruption is coming from the very place that was supposed to protect the structure.
But here’s the truth they don’t want you to see: their power is actually quite limited. They’ve confused domination with leadership. Noise with direction. Self interest with vision. And that confusion has an expiration date. It always has.
So how do we find relief right now?
Not by pretending nothing is happening. Not by performing normalcy when every instinct tells us something is profoundly wrong.
We find relief by naming what we know. By trusting what we’ve always known, that human beings thrive inside a structure of shared direction, shared agreements, clear roles, honest measures, and real accountability.
We find relief by continuing to build that in our own teams. In our own companies. In our own lives. Not as an act of denial, but as an act of defiance.
The framework hasn’t changed because *we* haven’t changed. What we need from each other to do extraordinary things together is the same as it’s ever been. And no amount of leadership malpractice at the top changes the truth of that.
If you’re feeling the dissonance right now, between what you know to be true about how humans work best and what you’re watching unfold, I want you to know: that feeling isn’t weakness. It’s recognition. It’s your deepest knowing telling you that this isn’t right.
Trust that knowing. And then go build what’s right in every room you walk into.
That’s how we find relief. That’s how we always have.
