Part of the day belonged to a senior executive of the region. He turned the organization around in the past 18 months (2-3x volume), putting it on a path of growth and expansion.

He dropped a lot of nuggets of wisdom. But this one stuck with me:

“People follow energy before they follow strategy.”

What a line!

And in all honesty, that line alone would have been enough to write about. But it wasn’t just the line itself that got me.

It was what he did with it…

The security of the visible

Part of my work is helping leaders of growing companies into their next chapter. The one where the business needs to run without the founder in every room.

Almost every leader arrives with a “what” question. What structure, what framework, what strategy.

And I get it. A strategy is something you can see. Almost something you can touch. It fits on a slide. You can present it to a board, hand it to the new managers, point at it when things get shaky.

Visible things give you a sense of security.

But once the slide is done, the security is mostly the founder’s. The team nods. And the thing that actually decides whether they move (the trust, the energy, the belief) lives on a different level. One you can’t put on a slide.

The executive in that room had a strategy. He could have stopped there.

Instead, he took it to a completely different level.

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Being the change

The question that guided him went something like this: if I want this organization to change, what gives them any reason to believe it’s possible?

A strategy alone might not answer that. Only a person can.

His insight:

He couldn’t ask the organization to change without demonstrating what transformation actually looked like… on himself.

I mean… read that again…

He noticed how he had to be the change he was asking for. Because that’s what creates the energy people follow. Nobody follows a document. They follow a person who is visibly moving.

So that’s what he did.

He went from heavily overweight (barely able to breathe when walking between buildings) to incredibly fit - training five times a week, running 15km every day.

And more than just for himself, this is what it showed the organization: week after week, a different man walked into the room.

Not thinking about transformation. Demonstrating it.

That’s the security his people could actually feel. They watched someone do the hard things on himself first. So the hard thing they were being asked to do became believable.

People follow energy before they follow strategy. Now I knew what he meant.

What’s transforming in you?

Of course the strategy still came. It’s not energy or strategy. It’s energy first, so the strategy lands on ground that has already moved.

If you’re asking your team to transform right now, here’s a question you could sit with:

What can they see transforming in you?

Something people notice without you announcing it. It could be how you run meetings, receive bad news, or what you stopped doing.

The change that spreads fastest is the one people can see in the leader first.

Energy first. Then strategy.

Warmly,

Marc

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A live conversation series with founders, leaders and experts. 30-45 minutes on their journey and what they’re burning for right now. For everyone who wants to build something more alive.

My next live conversation this week is with executive coach Fredrik Lyhagen. spent 15 years in international IT companies. Then burnout brought the big questions, and with them a complete career change. For the last 10 years he has dedicated himself to inner development, supporting leaders and leadership teams.

When: Thursday, 3rd September 2026 at 5pm BKK time (12pm CET), on Substack. Sign up here.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Maybe it was early days. The company was smaller, the work was closer, and you were quick but not rushed. Direct but warm. Ideas came easily, and your team seemed to... lift when you walked in.

Take a moment to reflect: when was that, exactly?

If you have to think hard, keep reading.

Because that version of you wasn’t a phase. As far as I can tell, it was simply you - with a full tank. Your creative power, your presence, your ability to empathize, empower and innovate... it all seems to stem from the same source: your aliveness.

Which means the reverse is also true. Lose the energy, and you lose access to all of it. I watched the extreme version happen in slow motion. After four weeks of relentless work, a good friend of mine - brilliant, talented, typically unstoppable - hit her wall. Tired eyes, disconnected presence, unable to take care of herself, her relationships, or her family.

All her capability was still in there. She just couldn’t access it.

The false suspect

Now, here’s where most explanations go wrong, in my opinion.

The hours get blamed. The hours are visible, countable, the thing everyone can point at. “You’re working too much.”

But be honest: you’ve worked long weeks before. Many of them. In the early days, the long weeks gave you energy. Remember? Building your thing until midnight and waking up excited?

Same hours. Completely different tank.

So it’s not the hours. Something else changed.

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What’s actually draining you

Here’s what I keep finding when I work with founders and creative leaders in growth mode:

The drain comes from a shift in identity that nobody announced.

You started as the maker. The craft filled you up. It’s probably why you started at all. But growth turned you into the leader of makers. The thing that used to feed your energy now belongs to your team. What fills your days instead: decisions, expectations, other people’s problems, a heavier version of every relationship you have at work.

That sounds like a promotion. It’s also a change in who you are... and it happened without a single conscious decision from you.

One client I worked with put it this way, more or less: “I still love my company. I just don’t recognize my place in it.”

He wasn’t tired from working. He was tired from working against the person he was asked to become, and from not honoring the things that actually matter to him. For him, it was craft and closeness: making things with his own hands, staying near the people he loves working with. Both had disappeared from his weeks.

No holiday fixes that. Rest refills the body. It doesn’t return what stopped being honored.

The way back to the full tank

So the real question isn’t “how do I recover?”

It’s this one:

“Who do I want to (or need to) become, and what do I need to honor so that this person is actually alive?”

For the client above, the answer wasn’t a sabbatical. It was putting craft back into his week: a few protected hours where he makes, not manages. And naming, out loud, what closeness he needed with his team. Small moves. His energy didn’t come back gradually. It came back fast, because the leak closed.

Your answers will look different. Maybe it’s craft. Maybe it’s a value that’s not been honored lately. Maybe it’s your founding relationship that needs one real conversation.

But whatever it is: treat it as the foundation, because it is one. Everything you’re building - the business, the culture, the work you’re proud of - runs on your aliveness. When that goes, everything goes with it.

The full-tank version of you is still in there.

It’s not waiting for a holiday. It’s waiting to be honored.

Warmly,
Marc

That moment became the engine of her whole life. Two exits from an academic career. A business built on her own terms. And now a practice she might start calling narrative alchemy: helping writers, artists and leaders see the story they’re trapped in and find the one they could live instead.

This was the first live conversation in the What’s Alive? series, and honestly, I couldn’t have asked for a better opener. Rachel doesn’t talk about aliveness as a concept. She talks about it as something with heat in it. By the end, she said she could feel the momentum in her body. So could I.

Show notes

[02:02] Arriving before starting

• We open with a check-in, not an intro. Where is your head, where is your heart?

• Rachel arrives with residue from a client session and warmth in the chest. Both are allowed in the room.

• The small ritual sets the tone for everything after: notice what’s here before you try to do anything with it.

[04:12] Why Rachel doesn’t call herself a coach

• Coaching, as she sees it, grew up in sport and business. Goal first, fix what’s wrong, optimise for outcomes. Nothing wrong with outcomes. But it’s not where she starts.

• Her work starts with what’s here right now: the resistance, the fear, the parts of you that want to stay hidden. Make space for those first.

• “Guide” and “space holder” also let her honour the whole arc of her work, from seminar rooms onward. She’d been holding space since her twenties. Nobody called it coaching.

• Her favourite question with clients: Who are you becoming?

[10:30] You can’t make the magic happen. You can hold the container.

• Rachel names her superpower: a robust structure, clear boundaries, full attention. Then she gets out of the way.

• I hear the same thing in team chemistry work. You can’t order chemistry to show up. You hold the space, give it structure, and let it emerge. Sometimes early, sometimes late, but it comes.

• The quiet part: holding space feeds her as much as it serves the room. That’s the sign you’ve found your thing.

[14:17] The turning point underneath all the other turning points

• She's left academia twice and started a business. The real one was earlier: a lecture hall at university

• The realisation wasn’t “I made it to university.” It was “I made it to become this person. Life won’t be the same.”

• Every later change in her life traces back to that same skill: seeing the possibility of another narrative, another path.

[20:32] Vision as possibility, not expectation

• I brought in Ben Zander’s line (adapted): a vision isn’t an expectation to live up to, it’s a possibility to live into.

• Rachel’s novelist version: some writers need to know the ending before they start, but not the route. Hold the destination firmly and the path lightly.

• The vision is a compass point. The work is asking what’s in the way. That’s where the alchemy starts.

[24:02] What most people miss about the human side

• The fixes, systems and strategies work. But if you skip the inner work, they’re bolted onto something that hasn’t moved.

• “Creativity is a crucible.” You’re tested constantly on resolve and on whether you’re good enough. Rachel goes to the core wounds those stories sit on.

• When a fear gets named in a trusted space, the energy moves through and the fear loses its power. Expression gets freer. You become more of who you are.

[28:29] When are people ready?

• Rachel’s answer is simple: when the pain of pretending becomes too great. Until then, nothing shifts.

• Not everyone is ready, and that’s fine. A single conversation might just open a door a crack. That counts.

• My version with founders: the pain arrives differently. Often it’s energy that runs out, or “more of the same” that stops working. But dig a little and the quality of what needs looking at surprises them.

[33:27] Healing, and the word Rachel resisted for years

• Second half of life, looking back at decisions made from an unconscious place, carrying wounds that weren’t all hers.

• Money as her laboratory: leaving a professor’s salary for self-employment was the hardest and most healing thing she’s done.

• She's stopped resisting the healer piece. She doesn't heal anyone, she creates the conditions for people to heal themselves.

• We land on a shared word: capacity. Not more skills. More room to be with more.

[39:23] What she’s burning for

• An in-person retreat next year, in a location she’s already found. Four or five days, a temporary community built around healing, expression and becoming.

• The bigger fire: learning how to live in community. Rachel believes the climate crisis will force us to rely on each other in ways we haven’t practised yet. Communication and togetherness are survival skills too.

[45:54] What’s alive in you right now?

• Rachel: the joy of connection, and possibility. A rush of momentum in the body. She wanted to go straight to her notebook and scribble on the retreat vision.

Key quotes

“It’s not like I’m making the magic happen. I’m holding the container in which the magic happens for the other person or people.” – Rachel Connor

“Creativity is a crucible. It’s a place where you have to take a hard look at yourself, where you’re constantly tested in terms of resolve, in terms of am I good enough.” – Rachel Connor

“To put it in a nutshell, the soul needs to express. And so, you know, the pain of the soul not being able to express is the thing that creates the shift, the readiness for the shift.” – Rachel Connor

Resources mentioned

• The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

• Creative Courage Circle, Rachel’s community

• Phil Powis and Carolina Wilke from Sacred Business Flow

Where to find Rachel

Rachel writes every week on Substack. That’s where her community, her writing on witnessing and integration, and (soon) the retreat details all live.

Her own invitation, in her words: reach out. Not to become a client. Just to say hello and talk about what you’re burning for.

Creative Courage with Rachel Connor

For those of us who are fragmented in our creative lives and ready to do the inner integration work to live more fully aligned and alive

Conditions, not control

Rachel works with individuals. I work with teams. But we kept landing on the same thing: you can’t force the magic, you can only build the container it shows up in.

In teams, I call the magic that emerges “chemistry”. And chemistry seems to work the same way Rachel described. You don’t make it happen. You set the conditions (how honestly people speak, how much they need each other, whether the structure frees them or slows them down) and then it emerges. Sometimes early, sometimes late. But it comes.

That’s also what makes it hold. Performance that’s pushed into a team lasts as long as the push. Performance that grows out of the conditions tends to sustain itself.

If you want to see where the conditions in your team are strong and where they’re missing, the Team Chemistry Map shows you.

Thank You

To Rachel, for saying yes so fast and showing up so fully. To Phil, Carolina and everyone who joined live.

Warmly,

Marc

PS: What’s next: the second What’s Alive? conversation is being booked now. Previous newsletters are all in the archive at itsmarcengel.substack.com.

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Many people in the content world say the same thing. Video is where the attention goes. Live is where the connections happen.

So… you gotta go live… right?

I tested the waters by joining a few Lives as a guest myself. And then something unexpected happened.

Simply put: I was really enjoying myself. Not in the sense of “this is great for the algorithm” way. In the way where a conversation pulls you in and an hour feels like fifteen minutes.

There’s something in live conversations that writing cannot reproduce. The smile when something resonates. The shift in energy when intuition lands. You share a half-formed thought, and instead of polishing it at your desk, the other person picks it up and takes it somewhere you wouldn’t have gone yourself.

The power of conversations. This is what I want to lean into more.

What’s Alive?

“What’s Alive?” is a live conversation series here on Substack. 30-45 minutes with founders, leaders and experts - about their journey, their learnings, and what they’re burning for.

Aliveness matters deeply to me. It’s connected to my purpose. It’s the one thing I associate strongest with being on a path that’s worth it. Looking back at the end of your life, that’s one thing I want to be able to say: I felt alive.

And in my work with founders and leaders, it turns out to be an important topic, too. Granted: nobody comes and asks to be more alive. They usually either come with a lack of energy, a magic they’ve lost, or a growth barrier they can’t push through.

But in many ways, aliveness - be it on a personal level, within the team, across the whole organization - is what they end up walking away with.

The first guest: .

Rachel is a creative courage guide. She helps people find their way back to their creative work when it’s gone flat or stuck.

Few things make you feel more alive than creating something… and few things drain you faster than not being in flow.

This goes beyond artists and writers. Building a company is creative work. Leading a team is creative work. Whenever you bring something into this world that wasn’t there before, you’re creating. Which also means: whenever that flow gets blocked, a part of your aliveness goes with it.

I’m really looking forward to starting this series with her!

Join live

First episode: Thursday, 20th August, 5pm Bangkok time (12pm CET), live here on Substack.

I’d love to see you there.

Warmly,

Marc

The high score with a blind spot

So far so good.

But here’s the thing: it’s mostly measuring what we could call vertical accountability. You, as a leader, holding your people accountable.

What it doesn’t show is the horizontal kind... team members holding each other. And that’s usually where lasting high-performance comes from.

The wrong kind of success

The pattern rarely shows up as a problem. It shows up as a success story.

A leader tells me a team member isn’t delivering. So they do what good leaders do: step closer, mentor, check in more often. And it works. Performance improves. Everyone feels good about it.

And honestly, I cherish them for it. Leaders who take their time to sit with someone more closely despite all the responsibilities and other priorities… that’s fantastic.

And yet, at some point, that’s exactly where the trap lives. Because the move that works is the same move that keeps every thread of accountability running through you.

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Meanwhile, between team members? When someone sees a peer dropping the ball, they hint sideways. They stay silent. Or they bring it to you. Because direct peer accountability, in most teams, would land as an attack: “Who are you to tell me this? You’re not my boss.”

That’s rarely because people don’t care. It’s just that nobody ever agreed this is how the team works. Holding each other accountable was never talked about, never set up, never made normal. So it doesn’t happen.

The cost: momentum leaks, resentment builds, and every chain of accountability still ends in your hands.

Four moves to build accountability that doesn’t need you

1. Have the accountability conversation. Who holds whom accountable, for what? Say it out loud. Make the implicit explicit.

2. Make priorities team-visible. If progress only lives in one-on-one threads with you, peers can’t hold what they can’t see. Put the priorities where everyone looks.

3. Design the agreements before you need them. How do we flag a slipping deadline? What do we do when things go south? Agreed upfront, these conversations stop feeling like attacks.

4. Draft a team description. Everyone has a job description. Almost no team has one for the team: what we produce together, what we’re co-responsible for. It seems like a small shift. It changes who owns the outcome.

A team that holds itself accountable keeps moving when you’re not in the room. And that’s when you find out what you actually built.

Marc

PS - If you want to go deeper on what builds mutual accountability and what it unlocks, I wrote a full piece on it here.

You know this one. Or you think you do.

Because here’s the catch.

When I measure a whole team, I keep seeing the same split: The leader rates this dimension high. The team rates it… lower.

Woops…

Same room. Same people. Two different readings on how safe the space actually is.

So the 7.4 might not be measuring the room after all. It might be measuring the person who filled it out.

Why the founder feels safer

Think about where a founder sits.

It’s your company. Your baby. If something’s off, you say it, because staying quiet is the real risk for you. You have the most to lose by holding back, so you speak. You set what gets talked about. You’re rarely the one being evaluated in the moment.

From that seat, the room genuinely feels safe. Not because you’re braver (no offense 😉). Because you’re playing a completely different game at the same table.

Your team is playing another one. For them, speaking up is the risk!

So they don’t. And what stays in their heads is exactly the stuff you needed in the room. The sharper idea. The objection that would’ve saved a bad call. The thing everyone senses but no one says, until one day someone finally does, and you realize how long it had been sitting there.

The room stays pleasant. The best thinking stays unspoken. And the tensions you can’t see keep growing in the background.

None of this shows up as a problem (at first). That’s what makes it easy to miss. So the work isn’t fixing a broken room. It’s checking whether the safe one is as safe as it looks from your seat.

Three moves to check your read

1. Go first. Share the thing you would normally keep back. How you actually feel about a decision, a doubt you’re sitting with. You lean into the discomfort before you ask anyone else to. For a lot of leaders, this alone is the big step.

2. Ask, then wait. Open the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Ask directly for the thing that’s hard to hear. Then hold the silence long enough for the honest answer to arrive.

3. Stop reading quiet as agreement. Calm isn’t proof the space is safe. It might just be proof you’re the one who feels safe in it. Go find out what the room is actually holding.

And if you do, what comes back isn’t just a warmer room. It’s the critical opinion that saves the call. The rebellious idea that turns out to be the good one. The tension surfaced while it’s still small enough to handle.

The closeness is real. But that is not the only point. The point is a team that finally thinks out loud… and decides better for it.

Marc

PS: If you want to go deeper on what the Space dimension looks like and how to build one that holds as you scale, I wrote a full piece on it [here].

My heart warmed.

I was on a Substack Live with and . Fifty-five minutes on the big stuff. How I left asset management. What this work is really for. What winning could mean if we stopped splitting performance and connection into two separate things.

Then, towards the end, Carolina had this image appear and shared it.

I’d told them earlier about a former creative client who once called me “a corporate with heart.” They meant it as the reason they reached out. I bring the structure they need, yet I’m not mainly there for the structure.

It’s funny. Other people find words for this more easily than I do.

Which is exactly what happened on that call.

That was the moment. Sitting there, being seen like that.

It made me feel vulnerable. She put it in a way I couldn’t name about myself. Maybe in a way I wouldn’t even have dared to name.

It’s not that I hadn’t reflected on it. But it arrived as a picture… and that went somewhere my sense hadn’t.

There’s a part of you that only becomes visible from the outside. You can reflect on yourself as long as you like… I don’t think you get all the way there alone. Someone has to be looking.

And you have to have shown enough of yourself for there to be something to look at.

Fifty-five minutes of my story. The ups, the downs, the reason I left a career that was working.

Then ten words that took me deeper into it than I’d been in a while.

Thank you both for the conversation. And Carolina: thank you for that image.

I’ve been carrying it around since our call, and letting it guide me. How I walk into a room. What I say yes to. What I say no to. What I let happen instead of managing it.

Marc

PS: here’s the link to the full episode →

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Below 50 people, something works that nobody notices. You mention a shift at lunch, and by evening the whole company knows. A new hire sits near the founder for two weeks and somehow absorbs who you are. People stay woven together without anyone planning it.

Then you scale. And something slips.

It probably looks like a communication problem. And it is one... but only one of three jobs that sitting together was quietly doing for you.

The first job

Moving information. The one everyone sees - and still under-invests in.

Because here’s the pattern: the founders I work with usually know everything. The priorities, the why behind the pivot, what the big client actually said. Three levels down, almost none of it arrives.

What felt like over-communicating at 30 is not even the bare minimum at 100. You gotta adjust the dial.

The second job

I’m seeing this with two co-founders right now. 120 people, growing fast, and their frustration in one sentence: no leader lives up to their desired leadership brand.

Not because the leaders are incapable. Because “who-we-are” never started to live outside of the co-founders. It traveled through sitting together - new people caught it from being near them, the way their early team once did.

That’s the second job: carrying your identity. Quietly, for free, without anyone calling it that.

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The third job

The third one is the easiest to miss. I only really saw it after moving to Bangkok.

Here, lunch is not a pause between the real work. It’s close to an intimate ritual. The choosing matters. The time is protected. You don’t schedule over it.

A Swiss leader here lived what that means. For months he couldn’t get through to his people. Then he found the key: know the person who talks to everyone during the lunch breaks. Influence here doesn’t run through the org chart. It runs through the meal.

That’s the third job: keeping people woven together. Thai culture protects it through ritual. Many scaling companies drop it first - because it produces nothing you can point to.

Doing on purpose what used to be free

Here’s the uncomfortable part: you can’t get it back. Sitting together doesn’t replicate at scale. What lunch did for free, you now have to do on purpose… three times.

• Communication rhythms for the information - at a volume that feels like too much to you and arrives as just enough three levels down.

• Explicit identity for the who-we-are. Words and practices that don’t need the founders in the room.

• And rituals for the connection: containers you set up with no deliverables.

You can’t scale the lunch. But you can make sure the jobs it was doing don’t go unstaffed.

Warmly,
Marc

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It’s simple. Almost too simple to matter.

Yet it brings back something teams easily overlook as they grow.

Last week I was with the leadership team of a fast-scaling company in Asia. Around 170 people, growing quickly. They’d asked for two days of alignment work: get on the same page, learn to move forward more effectively, get ready for the pressure that comes with that kind of growth.

And they were good days. The team bonded, stayed constructive, wanted to learn. The kind of group you enjoy being in the room with.

Then, near the end, we played the game.

You turn to someone on your team and tell them, out loud, one thing you appreciate about them. Not their output. Them.

And I watched something I see almost every time, in almost every culture. At first, people can barely hold each other’s gaze. Eyes drop. Someone laughs to break the tension. In some cultures here in Asia it’s even more unfamiliar than back in Europe (though honestly, we don’t do it nearly enough there either).

But then, slowly, it opens.

Someone says the first real thing. And the room softens. Shoulders come down. Smiles appear. And every so often, a few tears.

In the feedback afterwards, several of them said they wished they’d had more time for it. 🙂 It was sweet, coming from a room that could barely start it five minutes earlier.

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But one moment stayed with me.

One of them, visibly moved, said something that in turn moved me. She pointed out that we spend more of our waking hours with the people we work with than with almost anyone else in our lives. And yet so much of that time stays on the surface. A project. A status update. A quick decision. The work gets touched. The human heart rarely does.

So how is it, she asked, that we spend that much of our one life together and quietly agree for it to stay shallow?

Appreciation, she said, felt like a place to start.

She spoke right out of my heart.

Because this is what I mean by chemistry. Underneath the nine dimensions, underneath all the language of performance and alignment, it’s reaching for something simpler. Not “get along better.” More like: let the time you already spend together actually count.

There’s a performance side to this too, though it isn’t the point of this note. Ron Friedman, who studies what he calls “Superteams”, found that the best teams don’t just work well together. They make each other better, and sharing genuine recognition is one of the quiet ways they do it. Appreciation isn’t the soft alternative to performance. It tends to travel with it.

This is what I’ve come to call the Third Space™. It’s not work or life, performance or connection. The workplace isn’t the opposite of a meaningful life. It’s where a huge part of that life actually happens. So, of course it gets to matter

Two days of good, capable work. And the part that moved people most was thirty seconds of being truly seen.

Warmly,
Marc

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It’s not all relational…

The over-indexed dimension

The dimension in focus here is what I call “Diversity.” It’s not about gender or culture in particular. It’s about bringing together talented people who complement each other, with the right mindset: one of growth and learning.

Honestly, I’m not surprised this dimension scores this low: leaders tend to over-index on the talent. And under-index on the “completing”.

The belief runs deep: get the right people in the right seats, and the rest takes care of itself. So the energy goes to the individual. Hire the best.

And of course there’s an important truth in all of that: A-players matter. In fact, they matter a lot. Get a couple of them together and that’s the best you can have. But there seems to be a tipping point. Past it, more raw talent doesn’t add horsepower.

It adds ego.

You’ve seen it in the stacked all-star team that somehow can’t play together. All that talent, and the potential never shows up on the field.

Why? Because competition starts to take over completion.

Too many A-players can make things difficult as their individual desires start to outrank what the work - the co-founder, the team, the business - actually needs.

Completion is the goal. Bring people together who genuinely complement each other, and healthy competitiveness flows from that on its own.

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Before your next hire

So before you go looking for the next great name, three questions:

1. Are you hiring for the star, or for the gap? “Who’s the best available” is an individual question. “What is this team missing” is a system one.

2. Where is brilliance costing you? Who’s the most talented person on your team whose presence somehow makes the room smaller?

3. Is your collaboration problem really a talent problem? When something isn’t clicking, the reflex is “we need a better someone.” Often the talent is already in the room. It’s the connection and flow between them that’s missing.

The leverage might not be the next hire. It’s what happens between the ones you already have.

Marc

PS — I wrote a longer piece about what I believe matters most when it comes to Diversity. Read it here.

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The big surprise

A hidden drag on your growth

I call this dimension “Structure”. It’s about operational clarity on two levels: organizational (i.e. strategy) and relational (like roles and ways of working).

How come it’s scoring so low?

This is the reason I expected: part of it is resistance. A lot of creative leaders I worked with flinch at the word. It sounds like process, bureaucracy, the stuff that made you start your own thing to get away from. It kills the magic.

But that’s the easy explanation.

What I didn’t expect: even the teams sure they’ve built it mostly haven’t.

Look closely at the low scorers, and the same things keep surfacing. Strategy that’s clear at the top and fuzzy two levels down. Roles defined by function but blurry on who actually holds the team together when it wobbles. Ways of working nobody ever agreed on out loud, so everyone runs their own quiet version.

The thread underneath all of it: it stays too implicit.

Which is the strange part. Structure is the most explicit dimension there is. Strategy, roles, decisions rights… and it’s the one teams leave most to assumption.

When clarity stays implicit, people fill the gaps with their own assumptions. And if those assumptions quietly disagree, you’ve got a massive drag on the system.

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Three questions to test your own clarity

1. How clear is your strategy, and how clearly is it communicated? Not whether you know it. Whether the person two levels down could say it back to you.

2. How clear are you on your must-win battles? The few things that actually matter this quarter. If everything’s a priority, nothing is.

3. How explicit are your expectations on working together? Not the work itself. The how. The agreements everyone assumes but no one ever spoke out loud.

If any of these made you hesitate, that hesitation is the gap.

The real thing about structure is this: it doesn’t kill the magic. Its absence does. The clearer the system, the less the magic depends on one person holding it all in their head.

And that’s the version that survives growth.

Marc

PS — There's a third level of structure I even left out here: the emotional roles people quietly carry but nobody ever wrote down. That one's a piece on its own. I went deep on it here.

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The Universal Low

Surprised? Probably not.

Leaders aren't shocked by the low score. They feel it. They rate themselves low on it, after all.

What surprises them is where it shows up.

You might think communication is a nice-to-have. Soft, secondary to the performance stuff that actually moves the business. Turns out it is the performance stuff. The missed deadline. The decision made three times. The strategy that never quite sticks. You go looking for an execution fix… when the real issue is a conversation the team isn't having.

Almost every team I work with has solid conversations about projects and progress. But they rarely go to the layer deeper than that. Feedback is absent or weak. Ideas get shut down before they can breathe. The conversations are either too nice or too harsh.

So something stays hidden. And it doesn’t stay quiet. It shows up later, wearing the costume of an operational problem.

A hiding team runs on a fraction of its actual intelligence and potential.

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Four moves to start widening “Flow” as a leader

1. Count your questions. In your next conversation, notice the ratio of telling to asking. Most leaders tell far more than they think. The more you tell, the less you learn.

2. Wait five seconds. When someone finishes speaking, don’t fill the silence. Let it sit. The real thought often comes after the polished one.

3. Watch your first two words. When someone proposes something unexpected, what comes out? If it’s “yes, but...” you’re narrowing the room before the idea has landed. Try “yes, and”… even when you’re not sure yet.

4. Say the hard thing you’ve been softening. Pick the one piece of feedback you’ve been protecting someone from. Caring about someone and challenging them directly aren’t opposites. Withholding the challenge feels kind. It costs the team dearly.

Investing in this as a leader and/or team is probably one of the top 3 recommendations I give. Every time I've seen a team finally have the conversation they needed to have, a breakthrough was right around the corner.

Marc

PS - If you want to go deeper on what blocks Flow and what unlocking it actually looks like, I wrote a full piece on it here.

The feelings. The friction. The mood of the room…

Everyone came to her. With the project, yes. But also with how they felt, with what someone else had said, with the thing they couldn’t say to each other.

She held the invisible web between her people in her hands and smoothed it in the background, all the time.

It looked like care. And it mostly was.

Then a rough personal stretch hit her. Her energy drained, and she simply didn’t have the capacity to keep playing babysitter.

So she made a choice. She stepped back, on purpose. She started having the conversations she’d avoided, about expectations, about who carries what. She drew boundaries she’d never drawn.

And to her surprise, a lot of it kept running without her. People talked to each other instead of routing through her. The friction she used to smooth, they worked out themselves. The threads she’d held so carefully, they picked up.

They’d been able to all along. Her holding was the thing in the way.

The trap dressed as care

It wasn’t a workload problem. It was a carrying problem.

She’d become the switchboard. Every connection ran through her, and as long as she sat in the middle holding the threads, her people never had to learn to hold them with each other.

This is the trap many scaling leaders are in, and it’s sneaky, because it doesn’t feel like a trap. It feels like being good at your job. You set the standard, decisions route through you, the culture holds while you’re in the room.

It works. Right up until you become the ceiling the company can’t grow past.

That’s your strength, by the way. Ever considered how it might also be your limit?

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A role that doesn’t exist yet: the CCO

If you’ve been reading along, you’ve heard me talk a lot about chemistry. About the invisible web between people. About the catalyst, the leader who ignites that web instead of carrying it.

I want to go a step further now. Because the catalyst is one move. What I keep seeing in the leaders who actually break through is something bigger. A whole way of holding the seat.

I think growing businesses need a role that doesn’t exist on any org chart yet.

A Chief Chemistry Officer.

I’m not talking about a softer style of management, or a sub-role. I mean a full-fledged operating role, the way CEO or COO is an operating role. A seat with its own job: to make sure the chemistry of the company, the thing that makes it more than the sum of its people, actually holds as it grows.

It sounds like a title. It’s really a claim about what scaling demands and most leaders are never taught.

The job runs through three moves. The catalyst is one of them.

The three games of a CCO

1. The Inner Game: ignite your own fire.

You cannot ignite others if your own fire is out. The creative director learned this in reverse. Her capacity ran out, and only then did the rest become possible.

But you can build this on purpose, before depletion makes the choice for you. Your energy, your inner compass, your ability to return to your own centre when the pace pulls you out of it. A leader with this changes the quality of every room they enter. Not by what they say. By how they’re present.

This is a crucial, yet easy-to-skip game. Leading others before they can lead yourself… that’s a recipe for challenges along the way.

2. The Relational Game: activate the web.

This is the move I’ve written about most, so I’ll keep it short here.

The charge between people who challenge each other hard and trust each other completely, so the team runs on its own energy rather than yours.

This is where the both/and lives. Stepping back is not caring less. She didn’t stop caring about her people. She stopped carrying them. Different thing entirely.

And it isn’t soft. Activating the web often means letting a hard conversation happen that you’d normally smooth over. More tension, not less, just tension finally pointed at the real thing.

3. The Cultural Game: install what lasts.

She started leaning into this one too. A simple practice around expectations, a way for people to stay clear with each other without her in the middle.

But of the three, this is the game she invested in least. And that’s the pattern almost everywhere.

Culture asks what you build so the chemistry holds when you’re genuinely gone, not just temporarily out of the room. Explicit rhythms, not vague intentions. Rituals people can name. A shared language. A real way new people learn how this team works. The things that let chemistry scale past the founder and outlast them.

The hardest game, the last one, the one most leaders underinvest in. She opened the door to it and started walking through. Most don’t get that far.

(Quick aside: there's a 2-minute assessment that scores you on these three. Take the CCO Assessment if you want to know where you stand.)

The thread through all three

Notice what every game points toward.

The Inner game, so you’re not the thing the system depends on. The Relational game, so the energy lives between people, not in you. The Cultural Game, so it holds when you leave the room.

Every move is a small subtraction of self.

Which is a strange thing to call an executive role, I know. We’re taught the opposite, be more present, carry more, hold it all. That instinct isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete. It gets you to a certain size and then becomes the exact thing keeping you there.

The creative director found this out by accident, because life emptied the tank and her team rose into the space she left.

Most of us won’t get the gentle version. We’ll get forced into it too. By burnout, by a crisis, by the stretch that finally drains us.

The question is whether you’ll recognise it as the opening it is. Or just try to recover, so you can go back to carrying.

A question to sit with this week:

Where are you holding a thread your team could hold themselves?

Warmly,

Marc

“Ok, so I can see where my team stands. But how do I lead so the chemistry actually goes up?”

Fair question. Let me give you the context, then the small new thing I built because of it.

Evolution of team chemistry

When I started out with this work, I wanted to create a snapshot for leaders on the characteristics they need to focus on in order to bring chemistry alive.

So I created the Team Chemistry Map™. I thought it was the easiest entry point.

But interestingly, it was not… AND it turned into something fuller. Once a team development journey starts, the whole team takes part, and you get a real 360°: a perspective on how the team works together from every seat at the table, not just the view from the top.

This assessment shows what the team needs to work on - where the team merely functions or truly thrives.

But it doesn’t directly imply who the leader needs to become to raise and sustain chemistry.

The fundamental shift for leaders

Most people come to me in one of two states.

Either they’re running low on energy, carrying everything themselves. Or they’ve hit a growth barrier that more effort won’t move. Different doors, same room. And in both, chemistry tends to be the thing that’s quietly stuck.

The move isn’t leading harder or caring more. It’s a shift in the way you see your leadership.

The leaders who lift their team’s chemistry the most have stopped carrying everyone, and started to catalyse. They spark something between people that keeps moving even when they leave the room.

A new role: The Chief Chemistry Officer

I’ve started calling that role the Chief Chemistry Officer (and I’m playing with it still).

So I built a short assessment to meet it. 9 questions, about 2 minutes. It doesn’t ask “how good are you?”. It asks “how close are you?” to becoming that kind of leader.

You’ll get a read across three games:

1. Your Inner game - igniting your inner fire. Your relationship with yourself: energy, resilience, a clear inner compass. The premise is simple. You can’t ignite others if your own fire is out.

2. Your Relational game - activating the invisible field. The charge between people who challenge each other hard and trust each other fully, so the team moves on its own energy instead of yours. It starts with seeing the invisible web, then knowing which part needs containing, sparking, or supporting right now.

3. Your Cultural Game - installing chemistry infrastructure that lasts. The rituals, the manifesto, the onboarding, the habits across teams that let chemistry hold when you’re not in the room. The real test of whether you’ve actually stepped out of the centre.

It’s built for founders and creative leaders growing somewhere between 25 and 300 people, who sense they’ve quietly become the ceiling their own company can’t grow past.

If that’s not you, no worries. If it is, it might be worth two minutes.

Take the CCO Assessment

By the way, next Tuesday I’ll publish a full article on what a Chief Chemistry Officer really is, and why I think it’s one of the most useful reframe I’ve found for leaders stuck in the push-harder-or-care-more trap.

Warmly,

Marc

Then came across a framework, and I caught myself smiling.

Because once again, a technical problem turned out to be a human one wearing a technical costume.

The piece was in Harvard Business Review, by Jin Li, Feng Zhu and Pascal Hua. Their argument is simple, and I think mostly right: most companies aren’t failing at AI because the technology is bad. They’re failing on three fronts. People. Processes. Politics.

The processes part is real, and it’s where most of the money and attention already goes. Workflow redesign, governance, tooling. Important. Necessary. Genuinely hard.

But that’s not my point today.

It was the other two that made me smile. Because People and Politics are the layer that tends to get stepped over. In AI adoption, in transformation, in team performance in general.

The relational layer. The one you can’t put on a dashboard.

The solution that never made it to the room

One line stayed with me: the fear of losing status can hurt more than the fear of losing your job.

I thought of a senior leader at a client of mine. Big company. His team had built an AI solution that worked. Really worked. It would have made a whole chunk of their process dramatically more efficient.

The board never saw it.

Not because it wasn’t ready. Because showing it would have been embarrassing. The solution exposed just how much of his hard-won, expensive, slow process could now be done faster and more easily. So a working solution sat in a drawer, and a whole organization kept running slower, to protect one person from a conversation he couldn’t afford to have in public.

Nobody had to lie. It just... never made it to the room.

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A threat on a different level

This wasn’t fear of losing his job. He wasn’t going to be fired. It was something quieter and heavier.

He was protecting the version of himself that the old process made necessary.

That’s a different animal than job anxiety. Lose a job, and you lose a role you can rebuild toward. But when the thing being threatened is your craft, the expertise you spent twenty years becoming, you’re not losing a role. You’re losing a category of self.

And there’s nothing obvious to rebuild into. So it tends to come out sideways. As concealment. As “it’s not ready yet.” As the senior person who quietly checks out and takes the institutional knowledge with them.

And before I sound like I’m diagnosing him from a safe distance, the same counts toward me.

I happen to feel fairly steady about all this. The work I do is human-centric, embodied, alive in the room, and as far as I can currently see, that sits in the band AI doesn’t easily touch. It’s partly where I happen to stand, and partly a different path. A decade ago, in my asset management days, I’d have been far more shaken. And plenty of the leaders reading this have lived through layoffs and reorganizations that make my own adjustments look small.

They’ve “metabolized” harder things than I have.

Metabolic Capacity

Which is the expression Claude AI suggested for all of this, and I kind of like.

What seems to decide whether someone makes it through a shock like this isn’t how big the shock is. It’s their capacity to take it in and convert it into a new version of themselves, instead of letting it pile up, unprocessed, as hidden damage.

You can think of this as metabolic capacity. It binds together a few ideas that already exist (how a body adapts under chronic stress, how organizations absorb new information, the role of safety in being able to admit you don’t know something).

The senior leader couldn’t metabolize it. So it came out as concealment. The board never seeing that solution wasn’t a technology gap. It was un-processed human load, showing up as a slower company.

Why AI tests this, specifically

AI seems almost built to test this exact capacity.

It doesn’t threaten the new hire doing entry-level tasks nearly as much as it threatens the senior expert whose judgment was the whole point.

It hits the core, not the edges. It doesn’t arrive once and resolve. It keeps re-triggering. Every few months a new model does another thing you thought only you could do.

And it tends to arrive quietly, half-admitted, used in private out of a kind of shame. That’s a lot of load. And most of it has nowhere to go.

This capacity isn’t only personal. A team has it too, or doesn’t. The ability to name a threat out loud. To let someone grieve the old way without punishing them for it. To help a new role take shape before the old one has fully gone. That’s not a process you install. It’s something closer to the quality of the relationships underneath the work.

The layer you want to see

I believe this is where team chemistry comes in. And the uncomfortable thing about chemistry is that you can’t really see it when things are calm. A team with very little of it can look completely fine, right up until something tests it. “Feels fine” is, at least in part, what low chemistry looks like for a while.

AI doesn’t create the need for chemistry. It just seems to be the current (and, granted, huuuge) stressor present enough to reveal whether you ever built it.

So if the dashboards look healthy and something still feels slightly off, it might be worth a thought: the instruments could be measuring the wrong layer. The layer that decides whether your team converts what’s coming into reinvention, or quietly absorbs it as damage, is the one that tends to stay invisible.

The performance is real. The chemistry holding it together is real too. You just can’t see the second one until something leans on it.

And by the time something does, you don’t get to choose whether you built it. You only get to find out.

Warmly,

Marc

It’s neither the long hours nor the pressure from different stakeholders, although both are real.

It’s the exhaustion of being the emotional weather of your team.

The way your mood sets the temperature in the room before you’ve said a word. The way people read your face in the Monday standup for data about whether it’s safe to be honest today. The way you’ve become, without anyone deciding it, the container for everyone else’s anxiety, ambition, and uncertainty.

You are carrying the chemistry of your team.

And it can be heavy.

Carrying looks like this:

You are the one who notices when things feel off… and fixes it before anyone else names it. You translate conflict into palatable language so no one has to feel the friction. You absorb tension rather than surface it. You hold the vision with such intensity that your team doesn’t have to.

Carrying can look like good leadership from the outside. It can feel like love. It often comes from exactly the right instincts: care, responsibility, the genuine belief that it’s your job to protect the energy of the people around you.

But carrying is not catalyzing.

And the difference is everything.

Catalyzing looks like this:

You create the conditions where the team can hold its own chemistry.

You surface friction instead of absorbing it, because you trust that named tension is workable, and swallowed tension is a slow leak. You let people sit in discomfort long enough to grow a response instead of rescuing them with your answer. You stop being the room’s emotional regulator and start being its honest witness.

You speak what’s true.

And in doing so, you give the room permission to do the same.

This is what I call the Chemistry Shift - the moment a founder stops being the engine of team chemistry and becomes the architect of it.

Why Founders get stuck in Carrying:

Three reasons, in almost every team I’ve worked with.

First: Carrying worked. At 5 people, your personal energy was the culture. Your presence held everything together because everything was close enough to hold. That’s not a flaw. It was the right tool for that season.

Second: Catalyzing feels like letting go of control. And for a founder whose identity is built on their ability to make things happen, that feels dangerously close to failure. It isn’t. But it feels like it.

Third: No one taught you what team chemistry actually is. You were handed frameworks for strategy, for hiring, for product-market fit. The relational architecture of a high-performing team? You were expected to feel your way through it.

Most founders are still feeling their way through it at 50 people.

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The Third Space^TM between carrying and abandoning:

Here’s what I want you to understand: the move from Carrying to Catalyzing is not about doing less. It’s about doing differently.

The Third Space^TM isn’t detachment. It’s not the founder who stops caring or delegates their humanity along with their tasks.

It’s the founder who cares so precisely - who is so clear about what they’re building and who they’re building it with - that they can hold the team’s potential without holding the team’s weight.

That’s a capacity. And like every capacity worth having, it’s developed in practice, not theory.

One question to start:

In your next team conversation, notice this: are you speaking to make people feel better, or to make what’s real more visible?

Both can sound like care. Only one builds a team that can eventually carry itself.

That’s the shift.

That’s the work.

And it starts, as all real things do, with you being willing to tell the truth first.

Warmly,

Marc

And then the founder speaks.

There’s nothing important in what they say. But they speak because silence feels passive. Because watching others move feels like not contributing. Because “holding space” doesn’t feel like a skill. It feels like doing nothing.

So they add. They summarize what was already understood. They layer more context on top of an insight that had already landed.

And the energy drops. Like a flame that ran out of oxygen.

I watched this happen recently. The team had been alive, genuinely alive, and within two minutes of unnecessary input, they were sitting back in their chairs again. The moment was gone.

This is the “Sustain” failure: the team that loses momentum because their leader couldn’t stop caring enough to get out of the way.

What Sustain actually is

You shaped the direction. You sparked the right conversation. The system’s intelligence is activated. Now your job changes. It’s mostly about subtraction. That’s Sustain is about.

In many ways, Sustain is about removing obstacles. To not interfere with what’s working. Getting out of the way of something that’s already moving.

That’s a harder ask than it sounds for most leaders who’ve built something. Because building something usually required the opposite… constant input, presence, pushing. That’s how they got here. And at a certain point, that same instinct starts to work against them.

The team has its own intelligence, its own momentum, its own capacity to figure things out. Every time a leader steps in unnecessarily, they take a little of that capacity away.

Chemistry, once it’s alive, wants to sustain itself. Your job is mostly to not get in the way.

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What subtraction actually looks like

This doesn’t mean disappearing. A leader who sustains well stays close enough to the system to see what others can’t.

You’re more detached from the operational day-to-day. More zoomed out. Clearer on the long-term direction. That position gives you something valuable: you can see barriers coming before the team runs into them. Political friction. A resource gap. A decision that nobody has the authority to make but everyone is waiting on.

Remove those. Quietly, quickly, without making it a production. That’s subtraction in action.

And when the team takes things in a direction slightly different from what you planned? Sit with that before reacting. Sometimes what emerges is better than what you scripted.

But: sustain is not “sort it all out yourselves”

I once watched a senior executive apply a version of “let the system carry things forward” to a situation where the system was not carrying anything forward at all! Two leaders on his team were in serious conflict. His response was essentially: they’re adults, they can handle it.

They couldn’t. Or at least, they didn’t. The executive just stayed on the sidelines, convinced that stepping in would undermine their autonomy.

That’s not Sustain. That’s avoidance dressed up as trust.

Sustain requires you to read the difference between a system that’s activated and carrying itself forward, and a system that has stalled and is waiting for someone to remove the barrier. Sometimes that barrier is operational. Sometimes it’s between people.

When two people are in conflict and it’s blocking the team, that conflict is an obstacle. And removing obstacles is exactly what Sustain asks of you.

The hardest part

The founder who spoke unnecessarily in that workshop wasn't being careless. They were being human.

Because for most founders and leaders, presence is proof of value. You built this thing. You carried it when no one else could. Your input, your instincts, your ability to read a room and redirect it… that's not just how you lead. That's how you know you matter.

Sustain asks you to loosen that grip. Just enough to let the room do what you trained it to do.

The hardest thing about getting out of the way isn't the discipline. It's tolerating the discomfort of feeling unnecessary, right at the moment when the team needs exactly that from you.

It’s an art

Sustain is difficult because it asks you to notice when your presence is helping and when it’s the obstacle. To add energy when things stall. To remove barriers (operational, relational, structural) before the team runs into them. And to hold space when something alive is already moving.

Less addition. More subtraction. And the discernment to know which one the moment needs.

Warmly,

Marc

Ready to Dive Deeper?

1. Curious which of the four Catalyst modes is your natural strength and where your growth edge is? The Catalyst Assessment shows you exactly that in 3 minutes. [Take the Catalyst Assessment →]

2. Want to learn more about the larger framework? Read The Third Space™ Manifesto to understand how performance and relationships integrate into something more powerful than the sum of their parts. [Read the Manifesto →]

Day one. Day two. Functional. Productive, even. People speaking their minds. Sharing updates. Offering perspectives. A few laughs here and there.

But something was missing. There was a hint of superficiality in all of it. Maybe even a hint of arrogance… the kind that comes when a group of smart people are performing competence at each other rather than actually connecting. Everyone spoke their mind. No one spoke their heart.

Then, near the end of day two, a senior executive spoke up.

I don’t know what finally broke it open for him. Enough safety, maybe. Enough courage. Enough energy circulating in the room after two days of work. Whatever it was, he said the thing. With clarity. With passion. With a certain demand that put everyone on alert.

It rippled through the room.

And then, finally, they had the real conversation.

What Spark actually is

Spark is not good vibes.

I want to be clear about this, because a lot of teams confuse the two. Good vibes are pleasant. People get along. Lunches are fun. There is warmth. But when you start to dig a little, you find truths unspoken. Conversations quietly avoided. A kind of pleasant surface stretched over things nobody wants to touch.

Good vibes can actually be a warning sign. A team that agrees on everything isn’t aligned. It’s afraid.

Spark is different. It has depth and realness to it. It’s what happens when people stop performing and start being genuine. When someone says “I didn’t know you felt that way” and means it. When a “yes, and” builds on something instead of shutting it down. When there is tension in the room, and the tension is constructive, not corrosive.

Spark is not about harmony. Friction is part of it. A generative argument, a challenge that lands, a perspective that shifts something, this is what Spark is about. They require people to actually show up.

You can create conditions. You cannot control the outcome.

Here is the thing about Spark that took me time to understand.

You cannot enforce it. You can set the stage. You can facilitate. You can model what you want to see. But the moment itself, when something breaks open and becomes real, that is not yours to produce.

I have seen it happen within sixty minutes. I have seen it take much longer. There is always a threshold: enough safety, enough courage, enough trust built up that someone finally says the thing. And once one person goes there, others follow.

What you can do is make the room ready.

Speak with your heart, not just your head. Be vulnerable first… it gives others permission. Build on what others say instead of redirecting to your own point. Ask more questions than you give answers. Listen in a way that makes people feel heard rather than processed.

How you show up is how you spark.

That last sentence sounds simple. It is not. It requires a leader to have done their own work before they can genuinely invite others into depth. You cannot ask for something you are not willing to offer.

Spark within the Catalyst role

Source, Shape, Spark, Sustain, these are not sequential steps. They are capacities a leader moves between, depending on what the moment needs. Sometimes the work is going inward (Source). Sometimes it is designing better conditions (Shape). And sometimes it is simply being present in a way that ignites something in the people around you.

The Catalyst creates enough space and enough safety that the breakthrough becomes possible. Then they get out of the way and let it happen.

The executive at the end of day two: he did not need me to spark him. He needed two days of gradual conditions shifting until something in him was ready. My job was the room. His job was the moment.

That is how Spark works.

Warmly,

Marc

Ready to Dive Deeper?

1. Curious which of the four Catalyst modes is your natural strength and where your growth edge is? The Catalyst Assessment shows you exactly that in 3 minutes. [Take the Catalyst Assessment →]

2. Want to learn more about the larger framework? Read The Third Space™ Manifesto to understand how performance and relationships integrate into something more powerful than the sum of their parts. [Read the Manifesto →]

We were talking about making expectations explicit. How we give feedback, how we handle tension, what we actually want from each other at work. And she pushed back. Making things too explicit, she said, loses the mystery. Takes the magic out of it.

I loved that. I could feel exactly what she meant. In creative work, over-definition kills something alive. You leave room for the unexpected because that’s where the interesting things happen.

And then I looked at what was actually happening in that team.

Misunderstandings. Recurring conflict nobody could quite explain. Frustration that felt personal but wasn’t. People operating on completely different assumptions about what was expected of them. Assumptions nobody had ever stated, so nobody could live up to them.

The mystery wasn’t creating magic. It was creating dysfunction.

This is the thing about the relational layer of a team: what you leave undefined doesn’t stay neutral. It fills up with assumptions. And assumptions, over time, become invisible walls.

The three layers of ‘Shape’

There are three layers where Shape happens: Identity. Operations. Relationships. And what I find, almost without exception, is that leaders have invested very differently across the three.

Identity usually exists in some form. Values on a website. A mission statement. A deck that gets shown to new hires. But identity as decoration is not the same as identity as a living thing. The test is simple: when someone on your team faces a difficult decision and doesn’t know what to do, do they reach for your values? Do those values actually answer the question? If not, identity is still a poster on a wall. What it needs to become is a decision-making framework. The organizational equivalent of a leader’s inner compass… something people internalize so deeply it guides behavior even when you’re not in the room.

Operations are usually the strongest layer. Strategy exists, or at least the outline of one. There are processes, tools, pipelines. Where it tends to break down is role clarity. People think they know who’s responsible for what until a difficult moment reveals they don’t. But broadly, most founders have invested here. It’s the most visible layer, the easiest to point to.

The relational layer, on the other hand, is almost always undesigned.

What founders do instead

When something feels off, the instinct is almost always to go back to the operational layer.

A new project management tool. A clearer strategy. Better-defined roles. Another offsite. Sometimes a rebrand, like a fresh attempt at identity that still doesn’t answer the question of how people are actually supposed to be with each other.

These things are not wrong. A relationship-driven founder who has warmth and connection in abundance but no clear operating model is going to struggle just as much as a performance-driven one who has never thought about the relational layer. Both are incomplete.

But when the relational layer stays undesigned, the other two can’t fully do their job. Identity without relational norms is decoration. Operations without relational clarity creates confusion, because the how of the work is defined, but the how of being together never was.

What ‘Shape’ actually is

Shape is the leadership capacity to design all three containers.

The identity container is about more than articulating values. It’s about enrollment. There’s a difference between informing people about a culture and enrolling them in one. When you inform, you hand someone a document and hope it lands. When you enroll, you bring them into the story: where we came from, what we’re building, why it matters, what we’re asking of each other. Identity becomes alive when people feel they helped shape it, or at least genuinely understand it. And when it’s alive, it functions as a compass. People reach for it when they’re uncertain. It answers questions you’re not there to answer.

The operational container is strategy, role clarity, and the structural how. Clear enough that people know where they’re going and what they’re responsible for. Flexible enough that it doesn’t suffocate the work. This layer is necessary, but it lands differently when the other two containers already exist. People engage with structure differently when they feel enrolled. They ask better questions. They flag problems earlier.

The relational container is about how we give feedback here. What we do when something goes unsaid. How we handle conflict when it arrives (and it will). What accountability actually looks like on this team, not in theory, but in practice. These are the questions that determine whether the inevitable friction of working together builds something or quietly destroys it. Designing the relational container means making the implicit explicit.

The container holds

When you excel at ‘Shape’, the system starts to carry the weight.

It’s not only you as a founder anymore. When identity functions as a compass, when operations are clear, when relational expectations are explicit… teams start to self-correct. Problems surface earlier. Difficult conversations happen not because someone forced them, but because the container makes them feel possible.

The question I sometimes ask founders: if you disappeared for three months, what would actually hold?

The structural answer is usually not bad. The relational answer is almost always more honest: the culture only works when I’m in the room.

Shape is the work of changing that answer.

Shape as a stance, not a phase

One thing worth saying clearly: Shape is not something you do at the start and then move on from. It’s not a founding activity.

In the Catalyst Assessment, Source, Shape, Spark and Sustain are not a sequence. They’re stances. Capacities a leader moves between, often within the same week, sometimes within the same conversation. A founder who shaped the culture beautifully three years ago may find that rapid growth has quietly eroded one of the containers.

Shape has to always be in play. It’s what creates the shared container that accelerates performance as well as relationships.

Warmly,

Marc

Ready to Dive Deeper?

1. Curious which of the four Catalyst modes is your natural strength and where your growth edge is? The Catalyst Assessment shows you exactly that in 3 minutes. [Take the Catalyst Assessment →]

2. Want to learn more about the larger framework? Read The Third Space™ Manifesto to understand how performance and relationships integrate into something more powerful than the sum of their parts. [Read the Manifesto →]

Simple at its core: you cannot ignite others if your own fire is out.

There’s a physical signal of its absence, if you learn to read it. For me it shows up as a kind of flatness before an engagement. No fire when I think about the meeting. Sometimes a quiet I don’t want to do this... an ongoing tiredness that I cannot explain.

That signal is telling you that something between you and this moment has disconnected. And if you walk in without addressing it, you’ll actually stop leading.

The three components of Source

Source has three components.

1. Your Vitality.

Think of the founder who hasn’t taken a real break in eighteen months. She’s sharp in meetings, still quick on strategy, still the first to respond on Slack. But her team has started noticing something: the patience is thinner. The humor is gone. The creative leaps that used to define her leadership have been replaced by merely “competent” decisions.

Vitality is your capacity to sustain genuine presence and energy over time. It includes foundational practices and rituals, such as physical activity, the quality of your sleep, and breath.

When vitality drops, everything still works. It just stops being alive. When vitality stops, like during a health crisis, many things actually fall apart. Vitality, or health, is your absolute foundation.

2. Your Inner Compass.

Now think of the tech leader who built something he was genuinely proud of. A culture, a performance standard, a team that made things happen. Then the growth targets arrived. The investor conversations. The quarterly reviews where every metric had to trend up and to the right.

Somewhere in that, the deeper truth of why he built the thing got pushed to the background, buried under what felt constantly urgent.

Your inner compass is the orientation that keeps you honest when everything is moving fast and the metrics are demanding all of your attention. It’s not a mission statement on the wall. It’s the felt sense of this is what we’re actually here for... and the willingness to let that guide decisions, even when it’s inconvenient.

Without your inner compass, you can still lead. But you’ll be leading toward something you can measure rather than something you also deeply believe in. And your team will feel the difference, even if they can’t name it.

3. Your Resilience.

Resilience is the capacity to return to yourself when pressure, pace, or a hijacked agenda pulls you away from your center.

You see this in scaling teams constantly. The founder who is brilliant in a crisis but can’t recalibrate afterward. The creative director who absorbs every piece of feedback and needs three days to find her own perspective again. The CEO who handles the board meeting beautifully and then carries the tension into every conversation for the rest of the week.

Resilience isn’t about not getting knocked off center. It’s about how quickly and cleanly you find your way back, and grow from the experience.

How Source connects to the rest of the map

Source sits at the beginning of a sequence. In the Catalyst Assessment™, it’s the first of four leadership modes: Source, Shape, Spark, Sustain.

Shape depends on it. Shape is how you design the conditions for your team to thrive: the structures, rhythms, and agreements that let people do their best work. But a leader designing from depletion builds different structures than one designing from vitality. The choices look similar on paper. The quality is completely different.

Spark requires it. Spark is the capacity to ignite energy and commitment in others. You’ve probably seen the difference between a leader who sparks genuine enthusiasm and one who manufactures it through sheer willpower. The first is contagious. The second is exhausting, for everyone, including the leader. You can’t spark from empty.

Sustain reveals its absence. Sustain is about maintaining momentum over time, and it’s where unaddressed Source problems become most visible. The leader who keeps pushing, keeps delivering, keeps showing up... but the vitality, the originality, the life in their leadership has slowly flatlined. The system still runs. It’s just running on structure rather than on something real.

Make your Source a priority and your presence itself becomes an act of service. Neglect it, and Shape, Spark, and Sustain become techniques without a center. Useful, perhaps. But not alive.

Why this matters when you’re scaling

In the early years, Source is natural. The mission is fresh, the team is small, there’s an aliveness to the work that doesn’t need to be managed.

But once you cross a certain size, something shifts quietly. The system pulls constantly. Decisions, conflicts, energy, attention... all flowing toward you. The pace is relentless. And somewhere in that, the inner signal gets pushed to the background.

The result? Depletion sets in, invisibly, until it almost knocks you off your feet.

And here’s what makes it even more expensive: a leader’s inner state doesn’t stay with them. It moves through every meeting, every interaction, every offhand comment on a Tuesday afternoon. Teams are extraordinarily good at reading the person leading them, and adjusting accordingly.

A sourced leader changes the quality of every room they enter. People feel the difference between a leader who is genuinely there and one who is manufacturing enthusiasm while running on adrenaline.

So….

Before your next meeting, take sixty seconds. Notice what’s actually alive in you... or what isn’t. Let that be information rather than something to push through.

In my experience, that small pause is often where the shift begins.

Warmly,

Marc

Ready to Dive Deeper?

1. Curious which of the four Catalyst modes is your natural strength and where your growth edge is? The Catalyst Assessment shows you exactly that in 3 minutes. [Take the Catalyst Assessment →]

2. Want to learn more about the larger framework? Read The Third Space™ Manifesto to understand how performance and relationships integrate into something more powerful than the sum of their parts. [Read the Manifesto →]