What do you do? Freeze? Back away slowly? Step toward it? Run?

On my last visit, a Maasai guide named Amos took us on a tour among wildlife, and he explained a great deal along the way. I haven't stopped thinking about it since.

Because people in his community learn how to handle dangerous situations from childhood. When do you stand still? When do you move toward a threat? When is running the right call? When do you freeze and wait for it to pass? Amos had an answer for each case, and he described them like skills people grow up with.

How does a child learn that? Who teaches it? At what age does it start? And what do the elders say when someone gets it wrong?

Now think about your own week. A client calls, upset. A key person hands in notice. A project slips at 4 p.m. on a Friday. What's your first move? Wait? Step in? Step back? Pick up the phone? Say nothing for a minute?

Some leaders seem to know. How? Were they born with it, or did someone teach them? Can calm under pressure be learned like any other skill? And if it can, why do most companies leave it to chance?

Granted, a buffalo in the bush is rarely our daily challenge. Still, the parallels are hard to miss. There is much to learn from Amos and the Maasai. I am truly looking forward to our conversation.

The trip is part of the Leadership Alliance, our project with partners in Kenya.

Leave your email below, and we'll tell you the moment the interview is out.

Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and founder of logotherapy, learned this from his flight instructor, and he told the story himself in a lecture in 1972.¹ He used it for how we see other people, and he quoted Goethe: “If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as what they could be, we help them become it.”²

Frankl used it for therapy. We can use it in the office. Every team has its crosswind: old habits, self-doubt, a hard quarter. A leader who aims at who someone is today gets what the wind delivers. A leader who aims higher gets someone who arrives where they are capable of arriving.

So where do you aim with the people on your team? Most of us would say: higher. In practice, two kinds of bosses often miss the runway, in opposite directions. The bad guys often develop talent badly. They are too harsh, and they can hurt people. And the good guys? They often don't develop others.

“If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as what they could be, we help them become it.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Why do the nice ones hold back?

Hardly anyone decides to expect little of a colleague. It happens in small steps, and five reasons come up again and again.

• Kindness. Asking for more feels like pressure, and we like these people. So the bar stays where it is.
• Fear. The difficult conversation. The disappointed face. Being disliked, or being wrong about someone.
• Laziness. Stretching someone takes effort: more explaining, more check-ins. Giving the task to the person who always delivers is faster.

• Complacency. Good enough becomes the standard, for them and for us.
• First impressions. A missed deadline, a so-so report, a quiet first meeting. The picture forms early, and afterwards we notice what fits it.³

These small steps can add up to a cycle. The manager comes to see someone as a weaker performer and supervises more closely. The employee feels distrusted and withdraws, and the weaker performance seems to confirm the manager's view.³ The good news? The cycle runs in both directions.

The class that bloomed

Want proof that expectations travel? Here is the classic. In the mid-1960s, the psychologist Robert Rosenthal and the school principal Lenore Jacobson told teachers at an elementary school in California that a test had identified some children as about to bloom. The test had done nothing of the sort. The children had been picked at random.⁴

At the end of the school year, the first and second graders on the "bloomer" list had gained more on an IQ test than their classmates. The only difference sat in the teachers' heads. In work organizations, a meta-analysis by Nicole Kierein and Michael Gold found a substantial effect across settings, strongest in the military samples.⁵ Researchers call it the Pygmalion effect.

How expectations travel

What do bosses do differently when they expect a lot? Psychologists who reviewed decades of studies found that people we expect much of typically get four things from us:⁶

• Climate. More warmth, more eye contact, more patience.
• Feedback. More feedback, and more specific.
• Input. More challenging tasks and more information.
• Output. More chances to speak, try and show what they can do.

The mirror image has its own name, the Golem effect: low expectations travel through the same four channels and pull people down.

From belief to behavior

Is it enough to believe in people? Researchers tried it. Dov Eden and colleagues taught managers in companies to create Pygmalion effects through workshops, and the results were mixed.⁷ Belief alone is not enough. What helps is the behavior that follows from belief: the harder assignment, the closer feedback, the extra hour of attention.

The goal has to stay within reach. Goal-setting research by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham shows that specific, demanding goals raise performance, as long as people believe they can reach them and get the support to do it.⁸ An expectation that feels impossible tends to discourage. Aim above the mark, the way the pilot does, and keep the mark in sight.

How to raise the bar

Name it. Tell the person what you see in them and what you think they can achieve in the next year. Say why, with an example from their own work. A specific sentence carries more than a general "I believe in you."

Back it with an assignment. Give the next harder task, one step beyond what they have done before, and say what support you will offer.

Follow up. Give specific feedback soon after, and set a date to talk about how it went. If the bar turns out too high, adjust it together.

Check your channels. Look back at the last week. Who received your warmth, feedback, challenging work and airtime, and who received less? Add one stretch moment for someone in the second group.

Related in The Times Glossary: Pygmalion Effect · Golem Effect · Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome

¹ Frankl used the comparison in a 1972 lecture; a short recording circulates under the title "Why to Believe in Others."

² Goethe, J. W. von (1795–96). Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Book 8, Chapter 4. The wording here is a paraphrase.

³ Manzoni, J.-F., & Barsoux, J.-L. (1998). The set-up-to-fail syndrome. Harvard Business Review, 76(2), 101–113.

⁴ Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupils' intellectual development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. The study drew methodological criticism, and later results have been mixed.

⁵ Kierein, N. M., & Gold, M. A. (2000). Pygmalion in work organizations: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21(8), 913–928.

⁶ Harris, M. J., & Rosenthal, R. (1985). Mediation of interpersonal expectancy effects: 31 meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 97(3), 363–386.

⁷ Eden, D., Geller, D., Gewirtz, A., Gordon-Terner, R., Inbar, I., Liberman, M., Pass, Y., Salomon-Segev, I., & Shalit, M. (2000). Implanting Pygmalion leadership style through workshop training: Seven field experiments. The Leadership Quarterly, 11(2), 171–210.

⁸ Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.

Picasso later called him "my one and only master."¹ In 2011, one version of his Card Players reportedly sold for around $250 million, at the time the highest price ever paid for a painting.²

Which raises an uncomfortable question for anyone who develops people: would we have spotted him?

His life reads like a leadership course in short chapters. Each one holds something we can use immediately.

The Bank Could Wait

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was supposed to follow his father, Louis-Auguste, a former hat merchant who had co-founded a bank in Aix-en-Provence.³ Paul enrolled in law school to please him and took drawing lessons on the side. In 1861 he left for Paris to become a painter. His father objected, then relented, and paid him a modest allowance for years.

In 1866 Cézanne painted his father reading a newspaper in a large armchair. Above the old man's head hangs a small still life by the son. The National Gallery of Art in Washington reads it as a quiet declaration of independence.⁴

Talent Needs a Second Look

The Salon rejected his submissions every year from 1864 to 1869, and again in the late 1870s. When he showed with the Impressionists in 1874 and 1877, critics singled out his pictures for ridicule.

In 1882 a picture finally got in, most likely the portrait of his father. It took a friend on the inside: the painter Antoine Guillemet sat on the jury, secured the admission and had Cézanne listed in the catalogue as his pupil.⁵ It remained the only time the Salon showed his work.

Each rejection told him what one jury thought of one picture in one year. It said very little about what he might become.

Recognition came late. In 1895 the young dealer Ambroise Vollard gave him his first solo exhibition in Paris. Collectors and younger painters began to pay attention.⁶

One of them was Henri Matisse. In 1899, short of money, he bought a small Cézanne anyway. Almost forty years later he wrote that the picture had carried him through the critical moments of his career, and that from it he had drawn "my faith and my perseverance."⁷

Same Mountain. New Eyes.

Outside Aix rises a limestone ridge, Mont Sainte-Victoire. Cézanne painted it again and again, in oil and in watercolor, from different hills, in different light. The Princeton University Art Museum counts more than sixty versions.⁸

That is either an alarming shortage of subject matter or a rather profound theory of learning.

He returned because the problem was still open. The mountain barely changed. He did.

His sitters were less patient. Vollard later wrote that he posed more than a hundred times for his portrait. At the end, Cézanne declared himself "not displeased with the shirt front" and left the painting unfinished.⁹

Research on expertise points in the same direction, with one condition. K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues showed how much expert performance owes to deliberate practice: focused, effortful work on the specific things we cannot yet do well.¹⁰ Repetition alone does not do it. What counts is coming back with a new question each time, and Cézanne did exactly that.

Doubt Keeps Learning Open

Cézanne rarely considered a picture finished. He reworked, abandoned, and started over. Asked years later what drew him to the older painter, Picasso pointed to exactly this restlessness. What interested him was "the anxiety of Cézanne," the inner drama of the man, more than any single beautiful apple.¹¹ The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave his famous essay on the painter a fitting title: "Cézanne's Doubt."¹²

Doubt, in this sense, is a learning tool. The moment we feel certain we have understood a person, a market, or our own craft, we tend to stop looking.

They Looked

The Big Short opens with a voice-over. The whole world was having a party, the narrator explains, and only a handful of people saw the crash of 2008 coming: "a few outsiders and weirdos." What set them apart was simple. "They looked."¹³

In Michael Lewis's account, the investor Michael Burry did what few on Wall Street bothered to do: he read the mortgage bonds himself, loan by loan, and saw what the ratings covered up.¹⁴

Cézanne was an outsider too, and he spent his life looking. In letters to the young painter Émile Bernard, he described the painter's task as giving concrete form to his own sensations and perceptions through line and color.¹⁵ Merleau-Ponty argued that Cézanne painted a "lived perspective," the world as we actually experience it.¹² The ellipses of his cups swell at the ends. Tables tip toward the viewer. If what he saw broke the rules of perspective, the rules had a problem.

For anyone who develops people, this may be the most useful chapter. The person across the table has a file, an assessment profile, a reputation, and our first impression from three years ago. Before we can develop what is in front of us, we have to see what is actually there.

Two Men, One Table

Cézanne worked on the card players for years, in drawings, studies, and five paintings. The early versions are crowded: several players, an onlooker, a pipe rack, a curtain. The later ones strip the scene down to two men facing each other across a table, with a bottle between them.¹⁶ Less happening. More to see.

In a letter to Bernard from April 1904, Cézanne gave his famous advice: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.¹⁵ Find the basic shapes, and the rest falls into place.

Teach Them to Look

Cézanne had help. In the early 1870s Camille Pissarro took the struggling painter outdoors in Pontoise, worked next to him day after day, and led him from the heavy, dark manner of his early pictures toward close observation. Near the end of his life, Cézanne asked to be listed in an exhibition catalogue as "pupil of Pissarro." We told that story in The Man Who Could Teach Stones to Draw.

The painter who would later teach Picasso how to see first needed someone who helped him see. That may be one of the quieter jobs of a good mentor, coach, or leader: to make looking longer, closer, and more honest.

A Personal Note: The Two Commodes

Cézanne rarely painted the same still life twice. One of the exceptions is Still Life with Commode, from the late 1880s. One version hangs in the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, the other belongs to the Pinakotheken in Munich.¹⁷ I live and work between those two cities, so I have spent a good deal of time in front of both.

When I stand there with visitors, I ask how the picture feels. The answers are remarkably similar: calm, balanced, warm, almost cozy. Then we look closer. The edges of the table do not line up. The proportions shift from one object to the next. The tablecloth stands up like a small mountain range. The art historian Meyer Schapiro compared it to a rocky mass with "an inner balance of directions."¹⁷

That is the moment I like best. Over the years I have used this painting with leaders to talk about their own lives and careers. The calm contains fractures. Many lives do. A life can feel warm and whole and still be full of breaks when we look closely. Perhaps that is why Cézanne still has so much to say to anyone trying to understand another person's talent.

Look. Doubt. Look again.

¹ Brassaï. (1999). Conversations with Picasso (J. M. Todd, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1964)

² Martin, R. (2012, February 5). Cezanne sold to Qatar for a record price [Interview with Alexandra Peers]. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2012/02/05/146424989/cezanne-sold-to-qatar-for-a-record-price. The figure is an estimate; the sale was private.

³ Rewald, J. (1986). Cézanne: A biography. Harry N. Abrams.

⁴ National Gallery of Art. The Artist's Father, Reading "L'Événement," 1866 (1970.5.1), collection entry. https://www.nga.gov/artworks/52085-artists-father-reading-levenement

⁵ Rewald, J. (1996). The paintings of Paul Cézanne: A catalogue raisonné. Harry N. Abrams. Salon de 1882, no. 520, "Portrait de M. L. A." The identification with the portrait of the artist's father is widely accepted but not certain; see Feilchenfeldt, W., Warman, J., & Nash, D., online catalogue raisonné, entry FWN 112. https://www.cezannecatalogue.com/catalogue/entry.php?id=112

⁶ Feilchenfeldt, W., Warman, J., & Nash, D. The paintings, watercolors and drawings of Paul Cezanne: An online catalogue raisonné. Société Paul Cezanne. https://www.cezannecatalogue.com

⁷ Matisse, H. (1936). Letter to Raymond Escholier, 10 November 1936. In J. Flam (Ed.), Matisse on art (rev. ed., 1995). University of California Press.

⁸ Princeton University Art Museum. Mont Sainte-Victoire, ca. 1904–06, Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation. https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/pearlman/highlights/mont-sainte-victoire

⁹ Vollard, A. (1914). Paul Cézanne. Galerie A. Vollard. English edition: Vollard, A. (1923). Paul Cézanne: His life and art. Nicholas L. Brown.

¹⁰ Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

¹¹ Zervos, C. (1935). Conversation avec Picasso. Cahiers d'Art, 10(7–10), 173–178. English in A. H. Barr Jr. (1946). Picasso: Fifty years of his art. Museum of Modern Art.

¹² Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Cézanne's doubt. In Sense and non-sense (H. L. Dreyfus & P. A. Dreyfus, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1945)

¹³ McKay, A. (Director). (2015). The big short [Film]. Paramount Pictures. Opening voice-over by the character Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling).

¹⁴ Lewis, M. (2010). The big short: Inside the doomsday machine. W. W. Norton.

¹⁵ Cézanne, P. (1904–1906). Letters to Émile Bernard, including 15 April 1904. In J. Rewald (Ed.), Paul Cézanne: Letters (rev. ed., 1995). Da Capo Press.

¹⁶ Ireson, N., & Dolman, B. (Eds.). (2010). Cézanne's card players. Courtauld Gallery; Paul Holberton.

¹⁷ Harvard Art Museums. Still Life with Commode (1951.46), 1887–88, collection entry, citing Schapiro, M. (1952). Paul Cézanne. Harry N. Abrams. https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/299841. Munich version: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Neue Pinakothek, inv. 8647.

Further reading: John Rewald, Cézanne: A Biography (Abrams, 1986); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cézanne's Doubt" (1945); Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cézanne (Abrams, 1952); Alex Danchev, Cézanne: A Life (Pantheon, 2012); John Elderfield, Cézanne Portraits (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Images: Wikimedia Commons, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Open Access), and WebMuseum; public domain.

Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and founder of logotherapy, learned this from his flight instructor, and he told the story himself in a lecture in 1972.¹ He used it for how we see other people, and he quoted Goethe:

“If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as what they could be, we help them become it.”²

Frankl used it for therapy. We can use it in the office. Every team has its crosswind: old habits, self-doubt, a hard quarter. A leader who aims at who someone is today gets what the wind delivers. A leader who aims higher gets someone who arrives where they are capable of arriving.

So where do you aim with the people on your team? Most of us would say: higher. In practice, two kinds of bosses miss, in opposite directions. The bad guys often develop talent badly. They are too harsh, and they can hurt people. And the good guys? They often don't develop others.

“And the good guys? They often don't develop others.”

Why do the nice ones hold back?

Hardly anyone decides to expect little of a colleague. It happens in small steps, and six reasons come up again and again.

Kindness. Asking for more feels like pressure, and we like these people. So the bar stays where it is.

Fear. The difficult conversation. The disappointed face. Being disliked, or being wrong about someone.

Laziness. Stretching someone takes effort: more explaining, more check-ins. Giving the task to the person who always delivers is faster.

No need. The numbers look fine and nobody complains. Why change anything?

Complacency. Good enough becomes the standard, for them and for us.

First impressions. A missed deadline, a so-so report, a quiet first meeting. The picture forms early, and afterwards we notice what fits it.³

Left alone, these small steps can add up to a cycle. The manager comes to see someone as a weaker performer and supervises more closely. The employee feels distrusted and withdraws, and the weaker performance seems to confirm the manager's view.³ The good news? The cycle runs in both directions.

The class that bloomed

Want proof that expectations travel? Here is the classic. In the mid-1960s, the psychologist Robert Rosenthal and the school principal Lenore Jacobson told teachers at an elementary school in California that a test had identified some children as about to bloom. The test had done nothing of the sort. The children had been picked at random.⁴

At the end of the school year, the first and second graders on the "bloomer" list had gained more on an IQ test than their classmates. The only difference sat in the teachers' heads. In work organizations, a meta-analysis by Nicole Kierein and Michael Gold found a substantial effect across settings, strongest in the military samples.⁵ Researchers call it the Pygmalion effect.

How expectations travel

What do bosses do differently when they expect a lot? Psychologists who reviewed decades of studies found that people we expect much of typically get four things from us:⁶

• Climate. More warmth, more eye contact, more patience.
• Feedback. More feedback, and more specific.
• Input. More challenging tasks and more information.
• Output. More chances to speak, try and show what they can do.

The mirror image has its own name, the Golem effect: low expectations travel through the same four channels and pull people down.

From belief to behavior

Is it enough to believe in people? Researchers tried it. Dov Eden and colleagues taught managers in companies to create Pygmalion effects through workshops, and the results were mixed.⁷ Belief alone is not enough. What helps is the behavior that follows from belief: the harder assignment, the closer feedback, the extra hour of attention.

The goal has to stay within reach. Goal-setting research by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham shows that specific, demanding goals raise performance, as long as people believe they can reach them and get the support to do it.⁸ An expectation that feels impossible tends to discourage. Aim above the mark, the way the pilot does, and keep the mark in sight.

How to raise the bar

Name it. Tell the person what you see in them and what you think they can achieve in the next year. Say why, with an example from their own work. A specific sentence carries more than a general "I believe in you."

Back it with an assignment. Give the next harder task, one step beyond what they have done before, and say what support you will offer.

Follow up. Give specific feedback soon after, and set a date to talk about how it went. If the bar turns out too high, adjust it together.

Check your channels. Look back at the last week. Who received your warmth, feedback, challenging work and airtime, and who received less? Add one stretch moment for someone in the second group.

Related in The Times Glossary: Pygmalion Effect · Golem Effect · Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome

¹ Frankl used the comparison in a 1972 lecture; a short recording circulates under the title "Why to Believe in Others."

² Goethe, J. W. von (1795–96). Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Book 8, Chapter 4. The wording here is a paraphrase.

³ Manzoni, J.-F., & Barsoux, J.-L. (1998). The set-up-to-fail syndrome. Harvard Business Review, 76(2), 101–113.

⁴ Rosenthal, R., & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupils' intellectual development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. The study drew methodological criticism, and later results have been mixed.

⁵ Kierein, N. M., & Gold, M. A. (2000). Pygmalion in work organizations: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 21(8), 913–928.

⁶ Harris, M. J., & Rosenthal, R. (1985). Mediation of interpersonal expectancy effects: 31 meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 97(3), 363–386.

⁷ Eden, D., Geller, D., Gewirtz, A., Gordon-Terner, R., Inbar, I., Liberman, M., Pass, Y., Salomon-Segev, I., & Shalit, M. (2000). Implanting Pygmalion leadership style through workshop training: Seven field experiments. The Leadership Quarterly, 11(2), 171–210.

⁸ Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.

Münter, Kandinsky’s companion and a formidable painter in her own right, turns these evenings into a portrait. She leaves the speaker out of the picture and paints the listener. And she gives the picture a one-word title: Zuhören. Listening.

You can see the painting right now at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, or from your desk in the museum’s online collection.

When I first saw this painting, it fascinated me so much that I gave it a place in my book. Münter captured exactly what the book is about: listening as turning toward someone, giving them their full attention and presence.

A question mark in human form

The picture is strikingly simple. A single black line suggests a table. Behind it, pushed into the right half of the frame, sits Jawlensky: a broad body, a curve of pink shirt front, a round, ruddy face with two blue dots for eyes and eyebrows raised high.

His head tilts slightly. As the Lenbachhaus describes it, the whole figure becomes one large question mark. Even the objects lean with him: two sausages on a plate and the base of a kerosene lamp echo the angle of his listening.

Münter later explained the scene. The friends argued about art without pause, she recalled, and Kandinsky’s theories often left Jawlensky baffled. She painted him with a “verdutzt,” or perplexed, look on his face as he took in Kandinsky’s newest ideas.

The bold, angular blocks of color in the center of the canvas pull our eye away from him. Jawlensky ends up at the margin of his own portrait. It is gently funny. It is also uncomfortably familiar. Most of us have seen this face in a meeting. Some of us have worn it.

What leaders can see in it

I keep coming back to three things in this portrait. Each runs through my new book, Why Am I Talking?

Attention can hide confusion. Jawlensky sits with his head tilted and his eyebrows raised high. He looks attentive, even eager, and by Münter’s account he was perplexed. Someone can give us their full attention and still lose the thread. Listening means turning toward a person and checking, now and then, whether we are still following each other.

The speaker is missing. Kandinsky is nowhere in the frame. We see only the effect of his words: a kind, willing face that has stopped following. Leaders rarely see themselves talking. They see faces, and a polite nod is easily mistaken for agreement. A 2013 study by Leigh Plunkett Tost and colleagues points the same way: when people in formal leadership roles feel especially powerful, they tend to dominate team discussions, their teams contribute less, and performance suffers. Think back to the last time you explained something important to your team. How many faces were still with you at the end?

The painter saw what the speaker missed. Münter caught on canvas a moment that easily slips by in conversation: a willing listener whom the conversation has left behind. A simple workshop exercise shows this well: participants work in threes. One person speaks, one listens, one simply observes. The observer often notices what the other two miss: a change in the voice, a spark in the eyes, the moment someone drifts off. Münter played that third role, with a paintbrush.

The quietest person at the table

Münter gave the painting to the Lenbachhaus in 1957, along with much of her collection. If you happen to be in Munich, you can see it in the museum’s exhibition “Beyond the World. The Blue Rider,” which runs until September 5, 2027. Otherwise, the online collection makes for a good first visit.

Either way, the painting is worth a long look. It reminds us that listening sits at the heart of leadership. It is where understanding starts, and sometimes stops. Next time you are in full flow, glance across the table. Is anyone wearing Jawlensky’s face?

Before you next speak

Five small habits help leaders spot their own Jawlensky moments, and avoid creating them.

• Ask yourself: Why am I talking? For years a Post-it has hung on my desk with one word: WAIT, for “Why Am I Talking?” Sometimes talking is leadership. More often, listening is.
• Hold the silence. After asking a question, leave a few seconds before anyone speaks. Eight can work well. The pause feels long, yet the real answer often arrives in it.
• Read the faces, then ask. If your team looks the way Jawlensky does, stop explaining. Ask: “What are you making of this so far?”
• Change seats. Let a team member chair the next meeting, and tell everyone: “Today I’m just listening.”
• Close with an open door. End one-on-ones with: “What haven’t I asked you that you’d like to tell me?”

Why Am I Talking? How Listening Transforms Relationships, Family, and Leadership by Verena Lauffs is published by Autoris Press (2026). It combines current research with real-life stories, exercises, reflection questions, and practical tools for work and home. The German edition, Mund zu, Ohren auf!, is also available.

Get the book (English edition) | Get the book (German edition)

Sources

Lenbachhaus München: Gabriele Münter, Zuhören (Bildnis Jawlensky), 1909, including the catalog text from Helmut Friedel and Annegret Hoberg, Der Blaue Reiter im Lenbachhaus München, Prestel, 2007. https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/digital/collection-online/detail/zuhoeren-bildnis-jawlensky-30018339

Lenbachhaus München: Beyond the World. The Blue Rider, March 10, 2026 – September 5, 2027. https://www.lenbachhaus.de/en/program/exhibitions/details/ueber-die-welt-hinaus-der-blaue-reiter

Tost, Leigh Plunkett; Gino, Francesca; Larrick, Richard P.: “When Power Makes Others Speechless: The Negative Impact of Leader Power on Team Performance.” Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 56, No. 5, 2013.

Familiar? Most of us have sat in that meeting, and some of us have given the presentation.

The question

How do we make sure everyone knows what our best people know?

This question has rarely been as important as it is today. Luckily, it is not new. Quite a few true masterminds have tackled it before us, and I believe there is a lot to take from them: today, perhaps even more than ever.

One of them put his answer in paint. Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520), or Raphael for short, one of the great artists of the Renaissance, hid it in one of the most famous frescoes in the world, The School of Athens. Whether he meant it as an answer to our question, we cannot ask him. I think he would have liked it.

What should we do? Buy a leadership book?

Perhaps not just yet. Let's have a closer look.

Rome, 1509

A young painter from Urbino, still in his mid-twenties, gets a wall in the private apartments of Pope Julius II. Within about two years, Raphael fills it with ancient philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, Euclid and dozens more, all gathered in a grand hall that never existed. No pressure, then.¹

Guidebooks sell The School of Athens as a who's who of Western thought. But here's another interesting perspective - why not look at it as a gallery of  people who learn and teach in very different ways. Plato points to the heavens, Aristotle to the world in front of him. Socrates counts off his arguments on his fingers and asks questions. Pythagoras writes while others lean in to copy. Heraclitus sits alone with his thoughts. In the first two parts of this series we looked at these types (part one on Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, part two on everyone else).

For our question, one group is especially worthwhile: the one on the bottom right. Euclid bends low over a slate with a pair of compasses and works through a proof.²

A word about the man with the compasses. Euclid taught in Alexandria around 300 BC and wrote the Elements, a geometry textbook that builds everything from a few simple assumptions, one careful step at a time. It remained a standard textbook for some two thousand years, which makes it one of the most influential teaching books ever written. Euclid is also said to have told King Ptolemy that there is no royal road to geometry.³ Even kings begin on the floor.

Four students crowd around him, and from the bottom up we can read a chain. At the bottom, a student kneels and studies the slate. He has not cracked it yet. Right next to him, a classmate looks up in amazement: something just clicked, and he is not sure what. Above them, a third leans in, puts a hand on a shoulder and seems to begin explaining. And Euclid? He shows the proof and keeps his eyes on his compasses. He does not even look up.

We admit, this is our reading. Raphael left no instruction manual. But it is a reading with a lot of workplace in it: your team meeting, painted in 1511, with better lighting.

Four students, four answers

Look at the four again. Each stands at a different step, and each would need a different answer from us.

• The student on the floor needs time and a concrete example. A longer lecture will pass right over him.
• The amazed classmate needs a good question, so the "aha" turns into understanding.
• The one with the hand on the shoulder needs a stage and a thank-you. Let him explain, and say so out loud.
• Euclid needs nobody. A slate, a compass and a proof, and the lesson is complete: the master teaches by drawing alone. But for the rest of us (everyone who is not Euclid), and especially for the experts among us, who occasionally might forget the room while a good proof is on the slate: why not lift our heads from time to time, to see where the others stand (or sit)?

Now think of the meeting from the start. One briefing, one slide deck, one answer for all twelve. It fits the person who is ready for it, and passes the others by. The right answer depends on where someone stands.

Six moves to use immediately

1. Find out where people stand. Before anyone explains, ask for a quick round: "Where are you on this: still lost, starting to get it, ready to explain?" Thirty seconds, and you know which answer each person needs.
2. Let the person one step ahead explain first. Choose someone who learned the process last week. They often still remember where it gets confusing, and that is what the room needs.
3. Then ask the expert to add the rest. Depth, corrections, the hard questions. The expert may feel slightly demoted. They will survive, and the room will likely understand more.
4. Skip "Any questions?" It is a reliable way to get silence. Ask instead: "Who can tell us in two minutes what we just decided?" Then ask a second person to add what the first one skipped.
5. Look for the person on the floor. New hires, career changers, the colleague who nodded politely. Confusion rarely announces itself, so name one person who looks after each of them.
6. Give the explainer credit. Explaining a topic to others often deepens our own understanding, which is why we have a glossary entry on the Protégé Effect. So the explainer gains too, and everyone sees whom to ask next time.

Raphael practiced what he painted

Look at the center. Plato and Aristotle walk side by side. Aristotle spent some twenty years at Plato's Academy and opened his own school, the Lyceum, some years after Plato's death. Twenty years! Our trainee programs tend to last eighteen months. They seem to disagree, and they keep walking together. Aristotle put the tension into words, and later generations shortened it to a Latin slogan: Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.⁴

Raphael also painted his own circle into the picture. According to a long tradition, Plato has the face of Leonardo da Vinci, the older master Raphael studied closely.⁵ Giorgio Vasari, writing in 1550, says the stooping figure with the compasses is a portrait of the architect Donato Bramante, who, according to Vasari, recommended Raphael to the pope. Today the figure is usually read as Euclid, with Bramante's features as a possibility.⁶ Role model and sponsor, both in the picture. Smart, and rather kind. Leonardo, by the way, believed in learning from others himself: see Excellence Is a Team Sport.

Then there is the brooding man in front, leaning on a block of marble. He is missing from Raphael's preparatory cartoon in Milan, so he was a late addition, probably around 1511.⁵ Many art historians see Heraclitus with the face of Michelangelo, who was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling a short walk away. The two were real rivals. Thirty years later, in a letter of 1542, Michelangelo still grumbled that Raphael had learned everything he knew about art from him.⁷ Raphael gave him a seat in the front row, with his own block of marble. What would we do with our rival? Honest answer, please.

How did Raphael run his own shop? Vasari knew several of his former assistants and describes a workshop that ran on courtesy: bad feelings seemed to vanish around him. He adds that when Raphael went to court, some fifty painters walked out of his house with him.⁶ Fifty! Many of us would be happy with a team meeting where most people turn up on time. Vasari loved a good story, so let's allow for generosity in the numbers. The bigger picture holds. Raphael ran one of the largest workshops of the Renaissance and gave his assistants real responsibility. When he died in 1520, at only 37, his pupils Giulio Romano and Gianfrancesco Penni finished the work he left behind, and Giulio went on to design the Palazzo Te in Mantua.⁸ A legacy, Renaissance style.

He even painted himself at the far right edge, looking straight at us, with a fellow painter usually identified as Sodoma beside him. Even in his self-portrait, Raphael brought a colleague along.

The same idea runs through our other portraits. Camille Pissarro, the man who could teach stones to draw, taught Paul Cézanne and treated him as a colleague, which is a fairly efficient way to get a Cézanne. Rembrandt's workshop, as we showed in Rembrandt's Other Masterpieces, produced masterpieces by other hands. And Leonardo began as an apprentice to Verrocchio before he became a master, as we described in Leonardo da Vinci's Success Habits.

Making Others Great, painted in 1510

A fresco more than 500 years old still has a lot to tell us. Raphael's philosophers teach, argue, show and listen, and knowledge grows between them. His workshop did the same in real life: a young master who made the people around him better, and let colleagues see it.

So, no new leadership book needed. Just a look at where each person stands, a different order of speakers, and a better question than "Any questions?"

Raphael was in his mid-to-late twenties when he painted this. Some of us are still working on it.

¹ Musei Vaticani. School of Athens. Stanza della Segnatura, collection entry. https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/stanze-di-raffaello/stanza-della-segnatura/scuola-di-atene.html

² The reading of the four students as stages of learning is ours, not Raphael's or an established art-historical position.

³ Euclid's dates are uncertain; he is placed in Alexandria around 300 BC. The remark to King Ptolemy comes from a later source, Proclus, Commentary on the First Book of Euclid's Elements (5th century AD), and is traditionally attributed to Euclid.

⁴ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.6, 1096a: truth is to be honored above friends. The Latin slogan is a later summary.

⁵ Biblioteca Ambrosiana. Raphael, cartoon for the School of Athens. https://www.ambrosiana.it/en/discover/masterpieces/school-of-athens/. The likeness of Leonardo is a tradition, not a documented fact. The dating of the Heraclitus figure follows the common art-historical view that it was added after the cartoon stage.

⁶ Vasari, G. (1912–1914). Lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors and architects (G. du C. de Vere, Trans.). Macmillan. (Original work published 1550, revised 1568). Life of Raphael of Urbino.

⁷ The identification of the figure with Michelangelo is one widely held interpretation. Michelangelo's complaint about Raphael appears in his letter of 1542 concerning the tomb of Julius II.

⁸ National Galleries of Scotland. Giulio Romano. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/giulio-romano-giulio-pippi

Note on the cast: the figure in white that many websites call Hypatia was identified in 1695 by the art writer Bellori as Francesco Maria della Rovere, the pope's nephew; the Hypatia reading came later. Bellori, G. P. (1695). Descrizzione delle imagini dipinte da Rafaelle d'Urbino nelle camere del Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano. Rome.

Further reading: Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (Yale University Press, 1983); Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

Images: Raphael, The School of Athens, details; public domain.

Most of us know a dozen versions of this moment. A client email, written in two minutes, comes back polished, with an offer to draft three alternative subject lines. Even a short note to the team ends with a friendly prompt: "Shall I make it sound more confident?"

Each offer may be reasonable, and each costs only a few minutes. Together they can fill evenings that were supposed to be free. The work could be better. Then better still. Then better again. We call this the AI Never-Enough Trap.

The Finish Line That Keeps Moving

For many of us, the trap can become a treadmill. One way this happens: AI makes the next possible improvement unusually easy to find, so the point where we would have called a piece of work done keeps sliding away. The result can run against the promise. In many settings, work the technology was supposed to eliminate grows instead, spent on small refinements few readers will ever notice.

Researchers are beginning to notice. Early research suggests AI can lengthen the workday and add mental strain. Over eight months, Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye of the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business followed about 200 employees at a U.S. technology company that offered AI tools without mandating them. People worked faster, took on more kinds of tasks and let work spill into more hours of the day, often without anyone asking them to.1

A Boston Consulting Group-led survey of 1,488 full-time U.S. workers named a related strain, "AI brain fry": mental fatigue from using or overseeing AI beyond one's capacity. Fourteen percent of AI users reported it, and it went along with more errors and a stronger intention to quit.2 Both studies are early. They show associations, and neither tests the one-more-improvement loop directly. They fit a broader mood: in a Pew Research Center survey, a third of U.S. workers said they felt overwhelmed thinking about future AI use in their workplace.3

A Question of Health

We should take this seriously as a question of health. Late evenings, constant comparison and a persistent sense of falling short can be early warning signs, often long before anyone speaks of exhaustion. How this plays out over years is something research has only begun to study, and it deserves careful, long-term work.

Leaders carry a large share of the responsibility. The trap runs on tools and expectations, so a finish line belongs to the team as much as to each person's willpower. And anyone who feels the trap weighing on them deserves real support, from colleagues and, where needed, from a doctor or therapist.

Three Other Ways It Shows Up

Feeling outclassed by our own machines is not new. In 1956, the philosopher Günther Anders called it Promethean shame: the unease people feel before machines more precise and more perfect than their makers.4 Today it can show up in three further ways. Withdrawal: some people stop practicing a skill because the machine seems better at it, and over time they lose the ability to judge whether the tool got it right. 

Hiding: in four experiments with 4,439 participants, researchers at Duke University found that people using AI at work were rated lazier and less competent than people who got the same help from a colleague.5 That penalty may lead people to keep their AI use private, so that few learn from the prompt that worked or the answer that was wrong. 

Surrender: in a survey of 319 knowledge workers, researchers from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University found that higher confidence in AI went along with less self-reported critical thinking.6 A field experiment with Boston Consulting Group consultants shows what that can cost: on one task designed to lie just beyond the AI's capabilities, consultants using GPT-4 were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the correct answer than colleagues working without it.7

None of this is inevitable. Perhaps food for thought comes from a game the machines won first.

What the Go Players Did Next

In 2016, Lee Sedol, one of the strongest Go players of his generation, lost a match to Google DeepMind's AlphaGo. He retired in 2019 and told Korea's Yonhap News Agency: "Even if I become the number one, there is an entity that cannot be defeated."8 In the same interview he named a dispute with his professional association as a further reason, so the machine was one factor among several.

The rest of the field stayed. A team from Princeton University and City University of Hong Kong analyzed more than 5.8 million moves by professional Go players between 1950 and 2021, using a superhuman AI to rate each human decision. For decades, quality barely moved. After superhuman AI appeared, human decisions became significantly better by the study's measure, and players made more novel decisions, moves that had never appeared in earlier professional games.9 The authors suggest that the AI prompted players to explore, and the observational design cannot prove it.

The study cannot show how individual players learned. A plausible reading is that many used the machine as a sparring partner while keeping their own judgment in charge. Chess offers an earlier parallel. After a 2005 freestyle tournament in which two amateurs with three ordinary computers beat grandmasters who also had machines, Garry Kasparov concluded: "Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process."10

Process is something we can design, and a good process includes a finish line.

Setting the Finish Line

Define done. Before opening the tool, decide what good enough looks like: purpose, reader, deadline and how many revision rounds the work deserves. When ChatGPT offers the next improvement, check it against that definition. Often the best move is to close the laptop.

Protect the evening. Agree as a team when work ends, including work with AI. Leaders help most by modeling it, starting with the late-night "one more version" message they leave unsent.

Name it. Say it out loud: "The machine always has another idea. Which ones are worth our time?" Many relax when they hear that colleagues feel the same.

Go first. Show your own use, including the draft you threw away and the answer that was confidently wrong. Visible use turns a private secret into a shared practice.

Compare like with like. Look at the same kind of task, done with AI and without, and track quality, time spent and after-hours work. That points straight to results.

Train judgment. Before accepting an AI answer, ask: "How would I know if this is wrong?"

Good Enough to Ship

Lee Sedol saw an entity that cannot be defeated. Much of the field kept playing and, by the study's measure, got better. The question that helps most is "What can I learn from this?"

The tools will keep getting better, and they will keep offering one more option. Our job, as people who develop others, is to help our people get better too, and to help them know when their work is done and when their day is over.

The story of the original Macintosh team's final push to finish is titled "Real Artists Ship," and the phrase is often attributed to Steve Jobs. In a world where the next improvement is always one sentence away, that has perhaps never been truer. Ship it, and go home.

Notes

1. Ranganathan, A., & Ye, X. M. (2026, February 9). AI doesn't reduce work—it intensifies it. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2026/02/ai-doesnt-reduce-work-it-intensifies-it. Early findings from an eight-month ethnographic study (April to December 2025) at one U.S. technology company with about 200 employees; the research is still in progress.
2. Bedard, J., Kropp, M., Hsu, M., Karaman, O. T., Hawes, J., & Kellerman, G. R. (2026, March 5). When using AI leads to "brain fry." Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry. Summary by Boston Consulting Group: https://www.bcg.com/news/5march2026-when-using-ai-leads-brain-fry. Survey of 1,488 full-time U.S. workers; the 14% refers to AI users; the results are self-reported and show associations, not causes.
3. Lin, L., & Parker, K. (2025). U.S. workers are more worried than hopeful about future AI use in the workplace. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2025/02/25/u-s-workers-are-more-worried-than-hopeful-about-future-ai-use-in-the-workplace/. Survey of 5,273 employed U.S. adults, October 7–13, 2024: 52% worried about future AI use at work, 36% hopeful, 33% overwhelmed.
4. Anders, G. (1956). Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen: Band 1. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. C. H. Beck. The essay "Über prometheische Scham" opens the volume.
5. Reif, J. A., Larrick, R. P., & Soll, J. B. (2025). Evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(19), e2426766122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2426766122. The experiments used described scenarios and online hiring tasks, so they measure perceptions rather than actual workplace behavior or long-term career outcomes.
6. Lee, H., Sarkar, A., Tankelevitch, L., Drosos, I., Rintel, S., Banks, R., & Wilson, N. (2025). The impact of generative AI on critical thinking: Self-reported reductions in cognitive effort and confidence effects from a survey of knowledge workers. Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713778. Self-reported data showing an association. Our summary: https://www.thetimesoftalent.com/confidence-in-ai-predicted-less-critical-thinking/
7. Dell'Acqua, F., McFowland III, E., Mollick, E., Lifshitz, H., Kellogg, K. C., Rajendran, S., Krayer, L., Candelon, F., & Lakhani, K. R. (2026). Navigating the jagged technological frontier: Field experimental evidence of the effects of artificial intelligence on knowledge worker productivity and quality. Organization Science (March–April 2026 issue). https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2025.21838. First circulated as Harvard Business School Working Paper No. 24-013 (2023). The 19-point gap refers to one task selected to fall outside the AI's capability frontier. Our summary: https://www.thetimesoftalent.com/ai-made-consultants-better-until-the-task-crossed-its-edge/
8. Yonhap News Agency. (2019, November 27). Interview with Lee Sedol. https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20191127004800315. In the same interview Lee named his dispute with the Korea Baduk Association over membership fees as a further factor.
9. Shin, M., Kim, J., van Opheusden, B., & Griffiths, T. L. (2023). Superhuman artificial intelligence can improve human decision-making by increasing novelty. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(12), e2214840120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2214840120. The study is observational; the authors present AI as a likely driver of the change, not a proven cause.
10. Kasparov, G. (2010, February 11). The chess master and the computer. The New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/02/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/

Five circles, five verbs

Me: Model. How we show up. Our questions, our patience, the advice we hold back. The person we can change most directly is ourselves. People tend to copy what we do faster than what we say.¹

You: Develop. The person in front of us. Their growth belongs to them. What we can develop is our skill to help. In a good development conversation, people find their own solutions, and we support rather than prescribe. Growth starts right here, in tiny leaps. We call the ones worth noticing and celebrating Small Greats.²

Us: Build. The team. Here we build trust and shared habits, and growth gets more dynamic: a team follows its own rules, and different people are driven by different things. Where people feel safe to speak up, they learn more together.³

Organization: Shape. Peers, our own manager, senior leadership. We shape through example, good arguments and relationships, and we raise concerns with the people who decide.⁴

World: Read. Markets, customers, technology, regulation. We read it carefully and translate it calmly for our people.

Outside in, inside out

Understanding flows inward: the market shapes the organization, the organization shapes the team, and the team shapes many of the conversations we have. Influence flows outward: clear leaders hold better conversations, better conversations build stronger teams, and strong teams can change how an organization works.

Grow their circle

The two arrows give us two lines. The model adds a third. In the second circle, our influence does the most good when it widens the other person's circle of influence: the range of things they can decide and solve on their own. People often reshape their own work: the tasks they take on, the relationships they build, the way they see their role.⁵ Our job is to make room for that. A team member who solves something she would have escalated last month has a bigger circle today. That is the moment we look for.

The whole model fits in three lines: Understand from the outside in. Act from the inside out. Grow their circle.

In good company

The family resemblance is easy to see. The Stoics drew the line between what is up to us and what is not.⁶ The Serenity Prayer asks for the courage to change what we can.⁷ And Stephen Covey gave the idea a popular modern form with his circles of concern and influence.⁸ The Circles of Growth add the question we care about most: how does the other person's circle of influence grow?

¹ Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice Hall.

² Weick, K. E. (1984). Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems. American Psychologist, 39(1), 40–49. Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The progress principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Review Press. Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218 Small Greats is our own term in Making Others Great; this research inspired it.

³ Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

⁴ Dutton, J. E., & Ashford, S. J. (1993). Selling issues to top management. Academy of Management Review, 18(3), 397–428. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1993.9309035145

⁵ Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2001). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of Management Review, 26(2), 179–201. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2001.4378011

⁶ Epictetus. Enchiridion, ch. 1. https://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

⁷ The popular version of the Serenity Prayer is traditionally attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose own wording differs slightly. Versions circulated from the 1930s and 1940s, and its early history has been debated.

⁸ Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 habits of highly effective people. Free Press.

Further reading: Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Harvard University Press.

Why "greats"? In English, the greats are people who made it: the jazz greats, the all-time greats. Little Greats holds both meanings. It names the little moments, and it names the people who are growing through them. In Making Others Great, we use the term for exactly this part of the job: spotting the tiny leaps of others.

Where it comes from

Three lines of research meet here. Karl Weick wrote in 1984 about "small wins": breaking big problems into concrete, doable results that build momentum.¹ Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer later studied nearly 12,000 diary entries from 238 knowledge workers. Of all the events that marked their best days at work, making progress in meaningful work stood out most often, even when the progress was small.²

The third line explains why celebrating matters. Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory shows that positive emotions widen what we notice and consider, and over time build lasting resources: skills, confidence, relationships.³ With Thomas Joiner she found that positive emotions and broader thinking can feed each other in an upward spiral.⁴

The loop

A tiny leap happens. Someone notices it and says so. The good feeling opens the mind: more ideas, more openness, more willingness to try. That builds confidence and skill. And the next leap gets a little easier. Leaders sit at the second step of this loop, and it costs them almost nothing.

Where it goes wrong

Celebration works best when it is specific. "Great job" fades fast. "You asked the question nobody dared to ask, and it changed the meeting" stays. Little Greats also belong to the person who made them, so the most useful celebrations tend to be short, sincere and close to the moment. Big speeches about small leaps can make people shrink.

¹ Weick, K. E. (1984). Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems. American Psychologist, 39(1), 40–49. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.39.1.40

² Amabile, T. M., & Kramer, S. J. (2011). The progress principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work. Harvard Business Review Press.

³ Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218

⁴ Fredrickson, B. L., & Joiner, T. (2002). Positive emotions trigger upward spirals toward emotional well-being. Psychological Science, 13(2), 172–175. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00431

Where it comes from

Stephen Covey drew the two circles in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989), in the chapter on his first habit, "Be Proactive." Proactive people, he wrote, focus on the inner circle, and as they do, it tends to expand.¹ In the same chapter he sorted our problems into three kinds: those we control directly (our own behavior), those we control indirectly (other people's behavior) and those we cannot control at all (the past, situational realities).

That sorting lives on in the version most people know today, with three rings: control at the center, influence around it, concern on the outside. The picture travels widely through coaching, classrooms and therapy rooms. No single originator is known. Most sources describe it as a later adaptation of Covey's work.

Older roots

The thought is far older than the book. The Stoics built much of their philosophy on it. Some 1,900 years ago Epictetus opened his little handbook by separating what is up to us from what is not, and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius come back to the same line again and again.² The Serenity Prayer asks for the serenity to accept what we cannot change, the courage to change what we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.³ And psychology later found that people who expect their own actions to make a difference tend to feel more motivated at work.⁴

Where it goes wrong

The model is sometimes heard as "stay in your lane." It works best with open eyes on the outer circles. When something out there worries you, say so early, and say it to the people who decide.⁵

A close relative

For people who develop others, we use a related model: the Circles of Growth. Five circles, from Me to World, show where developing others begins and how far it reaches.

¹ Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 habits of highly effective people. Free Press.

² Epictetus. Enchiridion, ch. 1. https://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html See also Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, and Seneca, Letters to Lucilius.

³ The Serenity Prayer is traditionally attributed to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Versions circulated from the 1930s and 1940s, and its early history is debated.

⁴ Ng, T. W. H., Sorensen, K. L., & Eby, L. T. (2006). Locus of control at work: A meta-analysis. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27(8), 1057–1087. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.416 The study looks at locus of control: whether people expect outcomes to follow from their own actions. Those with a more internal locus tend to report better experiences at work and greater motivation.

⁵ Dutton, J. E., & Ashford, S. J. (1993). Selling issues to top management. Academy of Management Review, 18(3), 397–428. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1993.9309035145 On how and when people raise concerns with those who decide.

Further reading: Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0092976