Leadership: examine your intent

The leadership advice moving across LinkedIn posts, podcasts, and short videos right now sounds almost embarrassingly simple. Ask better questions. State your intent. Notice when fear is running the room. That simplicity is the point. Simon Sinek has spent years arguing that leaders create trust when they make purpose legible, not just goals, and his current platform now packages that idea into daily prompts and bite-sized lessons for managers who want something more practical than a slogan (simonsinek.com, ted.com). Tony Martignetti is pushing the same turn in different language, telling leaders to stop performing certainty and start leading with clarity, authenticity, and attention to what is not being said (tonymspeaks.com). That message has caught on because it names a problem that many workplaces still refuse to name. A lot of leadership communication is polite theater. People ask for “feedback” while signaling that dissent will be punished. They invite “candor” and then defend every decision. The result is not alignment. It is self-protection. Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard Business School helped give this dynamic a precise name: psychological safety, or people’s sense of the consequences of taking interpersonal risks at work (hbs.edu). Once you see leadership through that lens, the card’s claim makes more sense. Fear does not just feel bad. It changes what people say, what they hide, and what leaders get to know. That is why the seemingly small question “What am I missing?” matters. It does not work as a trick. Employees can tell the difference between a real invitation and a ritual. But when the question is genuine, it changes the status dynamics of a meeting. The leader is no longer acting as the person who already knows. The leader is making it safer for other people to supply reality. Edmondson’s work argues that teams learn when candor is expected and when speaking up does not carry a penalty (library.hbs.edu). Google’s Project Aristotle reached a similar conclusion from the corporate side. After studying team effectiveness, Google found that psychological safety was the most important group norm in its strongest teams (rework.withgoogle.com). The newer twist is the insistence that this cannot stay abstract. Sinek’s business now sells “practical tools for leading, communicating, and building trust,” which is a sign of where the market is. Leaders are no longer just buying inspiration. They want repeatable habits (simonsinek.com). Martignetti frames his own work the same way. His site turns broad values into operating behaviors: listen to what is not being said, gather more voices, honor outlier insights, translate values into daily decisions and actions (tonymspeaks.com). Reflect, ask, record is not a grand theory. It is an attempt to make intent observable before stress turns it into control. That is also where the story gets less flattering for leaders. If your team grows quiet when you enter the room, the issue is probably not that people lack courage. It is that they have learned the cost of honesty. Edmondson’s recent framing is blunt: in an uncertain and interdependent world, leading through fear no longer works, either as a motivator or as a path to high performance (library.hbs.edu). So the real task is not to sound wise in public. It is to make your intent visible in the moment when someone disagrees, hesitates, or says the thing you did not want to hear. That is when “What am I missing?” stops being a line and becomes evidence.