The Day Michel Almost Fired the Glue
- Sarah Gruneisen
- Feb 1
- 4 min read
Why most leaders mistake “fairness” for truth
There is a moment in leadership that doesn’t show up on LinkedIn.
It doesn’t come with applause.
And it rarely gets written about honestly.
It’s the moment when you realize:
If I hadn’t slowed down, I would have made the wrong call, and destroyed trust in the process.
Michel named that moment without defensiveness.
And what makes his story uncomfortable is this:
his instincts weren’t malicious. They were standard.
The leadership lie we rarely question
Most organizations claim they want fairness.
What they often mean is measurability.
Michel admitted something many leaders won’t:
“If I had not followed this program, I would have rated my team differently.
I would have been much more biased about signals that were maybe not true.”
That sentence matters.
Because the bias wasn’t favoritism.
It wasn’t politics.
It was mastery bias.
The assumption that technical depth is the primary, sometimes the only, valid currency of seniority.
When “objectivity” quietly deletes people
Michel described a decision point many leaders face:
End-of-year evaluations.
Questions of retention.
Who stays.
Who goes.
On paper, this is about performance.
In reality, it’s about what the system values.
He realized that without deeper reflection, he would have removed what he later named clearly:
The glue.
The people who:
💚 stabilize teams
💚 coach others quietly
💚 connect product intent to engineering work
💚 hold context
💚 build trust
💚 prevent friction before it explodes
People who are often less visible, and therefore easier to cut.
The uncomfortable truth: teams are not built from specialists alone
Michel articulated something deeply unpopular in performance-driven cultures:
Engineers are not just mastery machines.
They can be:
💚 initiative leaders
💚 coaches
💚 product thinkers
💚 autonomy builders
💚 cultural stabilizers
You can have:
🔥 a senior with exceptional technical mastery and little else
❤️🔥 or a senior with moderate mastery who holds the team together
Both are seniors.
But most systems only know how to see one.
The moment leadership actually showed up
What made Michel’s story powerful wasn’t that he noticed the bias.
It’s what he did next.
He took accountability.
He didn’t hide behind process.
He didn’t double down to protect his ego.
He didn’t pretend the first judgment was “just business.”
He shared the mistake.
He owned the recalibration.
He repaired trust.
That is leadership.
Not perfection.
Not certainty.
But responsibility without shame.
Why most leaders fail this moment
Here’s the controversial part:
Many leaders feel this hesitation, and override it.
Because admitting bias feels dangerous.
Because reversing a judgment feels weak.
Because owning a mistake feels like losing authority.
So they protect themselves with:
🖤 harder masks
🖤 louder certainty
🖤 stronger hierarchy
And in doing so, they quietly teach their teams something devastating:
🖤 Trust is conditional.
🖤 Safety is temporary.
🖤 And being human is risky.
Psychological safety is not a vibe, it’s a decision
Michel connected this directly to autonomy and psychological safety.
Not as theory.
As consequence.
If leaders judge narrowly, teams stop taking risks.
If leaders punish complexity, people simplify themselves.
If leaders remove glue, teams fracture, even if delivery looks “efficient” for a while.
Psychological safety doesn’t come from saying the right things.
It comes from moments like this one:
when a leader chooses truth over ego.
Leadership is revealed under pressure, not in calm
One of the hardest truths Michel’s story reveals is this:
You don’t know what kind of leader you are
until you’re tired, under pressure, and making consequential decisions.
Everyone looks values-driven in theory.
Leadership shows up when:
🔥 you’re triggered
🔥 context is incomplete
🔥 stakes are high
🔥 and someone might get hurt
Michel didn’t get it right the first time.
He got it right because he was willing to look again.
A question most leaders avoid
If this post makes you uncomfortable, sit with this question:
Who in your team would disappear
if you evaluated “objectively” tomorrow?
And what would that say about the system you’re leading?
Because leadership isn’t about being bias-free.
It’s about being bias-aware, and courageous enough to correct course when it matters.
Michel didn’t just save a team member.
He saved the trust of the entire team.
That’s the kind of leadership that doesn’t look heroic
but changes everything.
The dragon at the gate
Every leader has a dragon at the gate of decisions like this.
It doesn’t breathe fire.
It whispers.
It tells you to protect your authority.
To move fast.
To stick with what’s measurable.
To not look back, because looking back might expose doubt.
That dragon isn’t evil.
It’s trying to keep you safe.
But here’s the truth Michel lived out:
A leader who always listens to that dragon ends up ruling ruins.
The bravest leaders don’t slay this dragon.
They turn toward it, listen to what it’s protecting, and then choose differently.
They slow down.
They look again.
They ask deeper questions.
They keep the glue.
Because real leadership isn’t about guarding power.
It’s about standing in the fire long enough
to protect what actually holds the team together. 🐉
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