From Hollow Rituals to Real Ownership

Michel’s journey from “knowing the concept” to creating psychological safety in practice

Michel didn’t join Leadership Landing because he lacked ambition.

He joined because he could feel a gap, the painful, familiar gap many new engineering managers meet the moment they step out of senior engineering and into leadership:

You can read the books.

You can understand the models.

You can even believe in them.

And still… not know how to live them.

The moment that sparked his curiosity

Michel’s entry point wasn’t theory. It was observation.

He noticed something in the wild: a team where autonomy wasn’t a slogan, and psychological safety wasn’t a poster. It was real, visible in how people spoke, how decisions were made, and how responsibility was carried.

What he saw wasn’t that I knew what tasks needed to be done.

He saw that I was standing at a different angle.

Not inside the work, not above the work, but beside the team, paying attention to something deeper:

How does a team become capable of completing the work without needing to be held?

That was his question.

Not “How do I manage?”

But “How do I build a team that can lead itself?”

When leadership is still fresh and tender

Michel was three months into being an engineering manager when he started.

That matters.

Because early leadership is a strangely vulnerable phase: you’ve been chosen, but you don’t yet feel chosen. You have authority, but you don’t yet feel legitimate. You are suddenly responsible for outcomes that cannot be solved by individual brilliance.

And every old instinct tries to pull you back to what used to work:

🖤 being the expert

🖤 being the doer

🖤 being the one with the answer

But Michel didn’t want to become a “task manager in a hoodie.”

He wanted to become a leader.

The painful truth: books don’t install behavior

Michel named something I wish more leaders would admit out loud:

Reading about servant leadership is inspiring.

Reading about psychological safety is clarifying.

But translating it into daily behavior, that’s the real mountain.

Because the difference between a concept and a practice is always the same:

People.

Messy, brilliant, diverse, inconsistent, emotional, exhausted, motivated, fearful, courageous people.

Michel’s struggle wasn’t a lack of knowledge.

It was the lived complexity of humans.

The shift: from “a team” to “humans with needs”

The deepest turning point in Michel’s story is this sentence:

A team is not just a group of individuals.

It’s individuals and the shared values that emerge between them.

Before the program, his retrospectives were “hollow.” Not because the team didn’t care, but because the conversations stayed on the surface:

🖤 “That didn’t work.”

🖤 “Next time we’ll do something else.”

🖤 Repeat.

It’s what I call efficiency theater: movement without meaning.

What changed was Michel’s lens.

He began looking beneath behavior, into values, needs, convictions, and motivation. He started asking:

💚 What does this person need to thrive?

💚 What are they protecting?

💚 What do they value that isn’t being met?

💚 What stage of readiness are they in right now?

When you lead from that place, “psychological safety” stops being an abstract goal and becomes a daily navigation skill.

Maslow as a leadership compass

One of the most practical, and most human, insights Michel carried forward was this:

If someone isn’t safe, they can’t grow.

A leader can’t demand development plans from someone who is in survival mode.

A leader can’t push performance from someone who is drowning.

Michel learned to recognize readiness.

Not as judgment, as compassion.

He didn’t lower expectations.

He learned how to sequence them.

This is one of the quiet skills that separates managers from leaders: knowing what people can realistically access right now, and helping them become ready for what comes next.

The dragon underneath: “I’m not competent enough to be in the room”

Michel also named his real blocker, not as a weakness, but as an inner dragon:

The fear of not being competent enough to deserve the seat at the table.

This is the hidden burden of many new leaders, especially those promoted from within: they carry a belief that legitimacy must be constantly earned, and that any mistake could revoke their invitation.

But Michel did something powerful:

He didn’t pretend it wasn’t there.

He didn’t cover it with ego.

He learned to look underneath his own behavior too, and ask why it was there.

That is the start of self-leadership.

Radical inclusion in practice: speaking last, asking better questions

Michel’s leadership style began to crystallize when he stopped believing that inclusion meant losing direction.

He learned to speak last, not because his ideas didn’t matter, but because he understood power dynamics.

When a leader speaks first, the room narrows.

When a leader speaks last, the room expands.

Michel learned to hold the helicopter view while still making space for the team’s path. He didn’t “let everyone decide everything.”

He learned something more mature:

You can guide without gripping.

You can steer with questions, not control.

That is radical inclusion in real life: not equality of authority, but equity of voice, while still protecting the North Star.

The moment that could have broken trust, and didn’t

One of the most meaningful moments in Michel’s story is the one he almost didn’t share:

He realized he had been close to making a decision based on the wrong metric.

A decision that would have removed “team glue” because it wasn’t visible as mastery.

And then something rare happened:

He took accountability.

He corrected course.

He owned the mistake without shame.

That one moment reveals something important:

Michel didn’t just learn leadership tools.

He learned leadership integrity.

Because a leader who can repair trust is more powerful than a leader who never makes mistakes.

What changed in the end

By the end of this journey, the tangible outcomes weren’t just better retrospectives or more autonomy.

The deeper change was internal:

Michel stopped trying to prove he belonged.

And started leading as someone who does.

He began trusting first, so his team could show trustworthiness.

He began valuing the human system, not just the technical system.

He began creating the kind of space where engineers become leaders, not because they are told to, but because the environment invites it.

A quiet reflection for you

If you’ve read the books and still feel stuck, consider this:

Are you missing knowledge…

or are you missing the practice that turns knowledge into behavior?

Because leadership doesn’t happen in ideas.

Leadership happens in rooms.

In conversations.

In pauses.

In what you choose to see in people.

And in what you choose to see in yourself.

🐉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw1ttRa09tQ