Marcus had made his decision. He was restructuring his sales team, moving from geographic territories to account-based pods, and he'd landed on it after three weeks of analysis and conversations with his team. Then he drove two hours to his regional office, where his leadership team was waiting to hear the plan, with a leadership podcast queue running the whole way.
By the time he arrived, he wasn't sure anymore. One guest swore by geographic territories. Another dismissed account-based models as a fad. A third talked about a completely different structure that had "10x'd" a company Marcus had never heard of. He walked into that meeting, stood in front of the people waiting for his decision, and tabled it. Six weeks later, nothing had changed except his team's confidence in him.
Nothing in those episodes was wrong. That's what made it dangerous.
The Menu, Not the Prescription
Good leadership content is a menu. It's a set of ideas someone tested in their own kitchen, with their own ingredients, for their own guests. It was never meant to be a prescription you fill without a diagnosis.
The trouble starts when we forget that. An idea gets presented with total conviction, because conviction makes for good audio, and we hear it as a rule rather than a data point. Marcus didn't need a new plan. He needed permission to trust the one he already had. What he got instead was doubt, dressed up as insight.
Doubt like that erodes the confidence decisions require. A leader who dithers isn't being thoughtful. They're borrowing someone else's certainty and finding out the hard way that it doesn't fit.
Copying the Form, Missing the Substance
Physicist Richard Feynman told a story about islands in the Pacific after World War II. During the war, these islands had airstrips, and planes landed loaded with supplies. When the war ended and the planes stopped coming, some islanders cleared their own runways, built control towers out of wood, and carved headsets from coconuts. They went through every motion they'd observed. No planes ever landed.
Feynman used it to describe science that imitates the form of rigor without the substance. It's just as useful for leadership. The 5am routine, the specific meeting cadence, the exact phrase a famous founder used to fire someone gracefully. These are the runway and the control tower made of wood.
What actually made them work was everything invisible: years of trust already built, a specific market moment, a team that had seen this leader come through for them before. Copy the visible ritual without the invisible substance, and you're not landing planes. You're wearing a coconut headset, waiting for something that was never coming.
There Is No One Right Way
This isn't new territory for organizational thinking. Back in the 1970s, researchers Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard proposed what became known as situational leadership: the idea that there is no single best style, only styles that fit or don't fit the person and moment in front of you. A directive approach that helps a brand-new hire find their footing will suffocate someone with fifteen years of experience. A hands-off, collaborative style that unlocks your most seasoned person can leave someone still building skill feeling abandoned.
The specific model matters less than the premise underneath it. Effective leadership is a function of fit between you, this person, this team, this moment, not a formula you import from a case study.
Every organization is its own organism. Two companies can share an industry, a size, and a developmental stage and still be nothing alike, because the people, the history, and the trust in the room are never the same.
Trying It On Instead of Trading Places
None of this means tune it all out. The answer is to change how you listen.
Researcher Herminia Ibarra studied how leaders actually grow and found two common pieces of advice fall short. "Just be yourself" leaves people stuck, repeating patterns that stopped working years ago. "Copy what works for them" leaves people performing a version of leadership that was never theirs to begin with.
Real development, she found, happens through adaptive authenticity: trying on a piece of what someone else does, testing it in your own context, keeping what fits, and letting the rest go. Interestingly if you've watched children develop their personalities you probably noticed them play-acting to find out what fits. It's not the same thing, but an adult version of this. We can try out ideas but also need to be very aware of their fit and the feedback we get from others.
That's a completely different posture than the one Marcus had in his car. He wasn't trying anything on. He was trying to trade his whole outfit for someone else's, based on secondhand advice tailored to a life that wasn't his.
What I Actually Do
I'll tell you plainly: I don't think it's my job to tell a leader they're doing it wrong. I've watched prescriptive coaching work, briefly, in narrow situations, and then quietly stop the growth it was supposed to produce. A leader who's been told the answer stops building the muscle that finds answers. The org stops developing judgment and starts waiting for the next directive, whether it comes from me or from whoever they listened to on the drive in.
What I offer instead are ideas.
Things I've lived through, patterns I've seen across four decades of my own businesses and my clients', frameworks that have held up. Then I get out of the way and let the leader in front of me figure out what applies, what doesn't, and why. That's slower. It's also the only version that actually builds someone to no longer need me, or the next podcast, six months from now.
Don't get me wrong I can ask some very tough questions when a leader seems to be going against their best interest, but my different opinion doesn't make them wrong, and I've seen them avoid the pitfall I had imagined enough times to prove that out.
A Few Filters Worth Keeping
When something lands hard in a book or an episode, three questions are worth asking before you act on it:
Does this fit the specific people I lead, or more so the people the speaker led?
What conditions made this work for them that I don't currently have?
Am I drawn to this because it's true for me, or because it sounds certain and I'm tired of not being certain?
There are real common threads across good leadership. Clarity, consistency, and follow-through show up again and again for a reason. But the threads are a starting point, not the finished garment. The moment you stop tailoring is the moment good advice starts working against you.
What would change if you treated the next piece of leadership advice as one idea in a room full of them, rather than the one you'd been missing?
