There is something more fragile than the end-of-quarter budget: the trust between the person who signs and the person waiting for their salary to land. One sentence in the wrong tone and that line snaps like a thin cable.
Le Pham
Tinkerer · CEO · Hope Dealer
There is something more fragile than a quarter-end number, more fragile than the cash at the start of the month, and that is the relationship between the person who signs and the person waiting for their salary to land in an account. One sentence in the wrong tone, one look that gets misread, one decision left unexplained, and the line of trust between a leader and their team snaps like a thin cable.
After that everyone climbs into a safe shell: yes of course from one side, whatever you think from the other, and nobody actually meets in the middle.
Why I do not like being called boss
Back when I had a team, I was never really comfortable hearing anyone call me boss. Not out of false modesty. Because the word acts like an invisible wall going up between two people.
Boss is a very convenient label. Convenient for the team to place every responsibility on, convenient for the leader to hide inside. And that convenience kills the truth, the mutual respect, and the feeling of being on the same side.
When you call me boss, the conversation stops being two people solving a shared problem and becomes one person with authority and one person waiting for a ruling. Suddenly every word has to be chosen carefully: is this disrespectful, will that cause offence. The conversation is bent out of shape from the first syllable.
I did not want to be the boss, I wanted to be someone who shares the responsibility. A boss has the right to be right on his own. Someone who shares responsibility has to listen, has to revise, has to give ground, has to apologise when it is needed.
From outside, the relationship between a leader and their team looks clear enough: who evaluates whom, who signs off on whom. Inside, it is a very breakable network of feelings.
One grimace at a piece of feedback and the person opposite files it away: right, do not say things like that. One promise not kept and they conclude: fine, it was just talk. One instance of favouring the wrong person and the whole group quietly warns each other: what matters here is keeping people happy, not getting it right.
From then on they stop telling the truth. They say the safe thing. And I think I am leading well because the team has few problems, when in fact everyone has chosen silence.
The other direction is just as fragile. Direct feedback without context can land as an attack. One day I am too busy to answer a message and they can read it as being abandoned. A firm decision, if left unexplained, is easily heard as caring about results and not about people.
#leadership#identity#reflection#management#team
Le Pham
Tinkerer · CEO · Hope Dealer
Tinkerer in financial economics, serial entrepreneur, and professional stumbler. 99% failures, 1% still here.
We stand at two ends of the same rope. Pull too hard and it breaks. Let it slack and it drifts. Holding it at the right tension, serious enough, close enough, clear enough, is genuinely difficult.
When the boss forgets he works for someone too
When I was leading an organisation, it was easy to forget something very simple: I am an employee too. We are all working for something, for a partner, for the market, for our own expectations.
But once you step into the role, the illusion of power is easy to fall into. Your words automatically carry more weight. A half-joking remark becomes an instruction. One minute of your temper can cost someone else several months of trust.
If I believed I always knew more, was always more right, always saw more clearly than the people working with me, I had pushed myself into a blind spot. And from that moment on the relationship stopped being let us make this better together and became do it my way.
That is when the word boss does its worst work. It gives me permission to stop listening to anyone.
I have no illusion that changing what people call you changes reality. Call it brother, leader, coach, if the thinking underneath is still up and down, nothing has moved.
I avoided the word to remind myself daily: I do not rank higher as a human being. I am in a role that requires me to carry more responsibility, take a larger share of the risk, and sometimes absorb the dirtier pressure.
For a while I wanted the relationship with the people working with me to look like this: I have the final decision, and they have the right to challenge it all the way. I have the right to disagree, and no right to make light of anyone's effort or feelings. I have the right to a larger financial share, and I have to take a larger share of the responsibility when things go wrong.
If it can be named that precisely, then whether someone calls me boss or by my name stops mattering. But I needed an anchor in the language to remind me: I am here to serve the shared goal, not to be served.
I do not believe this generation of employees is lazier than the last. I see them more tired, more scattered, and with less to believe in.
I meet a lot of people with three years of experience across four jobs, skills good enough for the work, and a slightly unfocused look in their eyes. They join a company hoping to be guided, and a few months later the illusion breaks when they realise the person leading them is fumbling just as much. They work with one eye on the feed, surrounded by images of who had achieved what by twenty-five, by thirty, so every working day carries a small sense of falling behind.
A lot of people today are not short on skills. They are short on a reason to believe and to go far with one place. They see the company as a stop, not a boat. They see the leader as an assessment score, not someone rowing beside them.
So the relationship is more fragile than ever. A little dissatisfaction and they are thinking about leaving, a little feedback and they are thinking the word toxic, a little feeling of being ignored and the emotions get withdrawn immediately. Do enough, do not do everything.
I do not blame them. Most of those scratches were not made in a day. They are the accumulated result of years of being treated as a resource, a headcount, a line in a cost table.
That does not mean employees are permanent victims. This fragile relationship cannot hold if only one side is trying.
On their side I see three very common traps. The first is demanding a perfect leader before giving your own effort. Unfortunately no such person exists. If you only work at full capacity when you find the ideal leader, you are handing your career to probability.
The second is treating every challenge as toxic. A bad leader can use blunt feedback to belittle and undermine. A good leader will also use words that make you uncomfortable: not good enough, do it again, this one is on you. Dodging every collision does not make you safer, it makes you less grown.
The third is treating the company as a place that must look after your feelings, rather than a place where you build a result together. Feelings matter. But if every reminder about the work is a wound, and every request for a higher standard is proof of not being valued, it is very hard to go a long way in any environment.
To make that relationship less fragile, back when I was leading, I reminded myself of a few things. I am not the boss, I am only the person who took the front seat earlier. I have the right to be wrong, and I have to be able to say out loud: I got that wrong, let us do it again. I cannot demand loyalty if nobody understands what I am trying to do.
And from the people working with me I always hoped for a few things too. Speak honestly, but on the data, not to let off steam. Give feedback, and also take your own share of the responsibility. If you have chosen to stay, do not work in a temporary way until somewhere else turns up.
The relationship between a leader and a team is not one between someone above and someone below. It is between people sitting in the same boat, in different seats.
I do not like being called boss because I am afraid that one day the word will make me forget that simple thing. And by the time I snapped out of it, the most valuable, most straightforward, most committed people might have quietly stepped off the boat a long time ago. I work alone now, with no team, and the lesson is still with me.
