Last weekend I wrote about the reading list, the books that cracked me open over twenty-five years. But something happened at that SXSW panel that I did not fully process until days later, sitting in a hotel lobby watching people rush past each other without eye contact.
The moderator asked us what advice we would give to leaders. I had prepared something reasonable, something about culture and trust and the long game. But what came out of my mouth surprised even me.
I said: Travel.
And the room shifted. I could feel it. People leaned forward. A few nodded like they had been waiting for someone to say it out loud.
I did not mean vacations, though vacations matter. I meant something closer to pilgrimage. The willingness to leave what you know, to enter spaces where you are not the expert, where your assumptions do not hold, where you have to actually see other people as they are rather than as projections of your own worldview.
I said that leaders who show up to the role without demonstrated curiosity, without presence, without even the basic investment of interest in lives unlike their own, are committing something I called leadership malpractice. The phrase felt strong as it left my mouth. I meant every syllable.
The Managers Who Are Too Busy
I meet them constantly. Managers who are too busy to travel. Too busy to read. And if they read, they do not engage with fiction because fiction unlocks no new tools they can apply to material success. Everything must be instrumental. Everything must optimize something. The soul is not on the quarterly roadmap, so the soul can wait.
And if they do read fiction, I have noticed, it is often fiction that does not challenge them. Nothing that forces them to inhabit a consciousness radically different from their own. Nothing that asks them to feel what it might be like to be a woman in nineteenth-century Norway discovering she has been performing a version of herself her entire life. Nothing that sits them inside a concentration camp and asks what meaning looks like when everything has been taken.
I am not saying everyone must read Ibsen and Frankl. I am saying that the unwillingness to be changed by encounter, whether with a book or a person or a place, is a kind of cowardice. And cowardice is not a leadership quality, whatever the management literature might suggest about confidence and decisiveness.
Leadership requires the capacity to understand people. Not to manage them. Not to optimize them. To understand them. And you cannot understand people you have never been curious about. You cannot lead humans if you have not done the work of recognizing that other humans are, in fact, as real and complex and worthy as you are.
This sounds obvious. It is apparently not obvious to a remarkable number of people in positions of authority.
What I Mean by Travel
I lived in Norway for nearly a decade. I have written about this before, probably too much, but it keeps being relevant because that experience broke something in me that needed breaking.
In Norway, I encountered a society organized around different assumptions. Rest was not laziness. Trust was not naivety. Collective wellbeing was not communism. The social contract was simply different, and living inside it forced me to question things I had accepted as natural laws of the universe.
The commute home from work at a reasonable hour. The empty office on a Friday afternoon in summer because everyone was at their cabin. The way my colleagues would bring homemade cake to share on birthdays, not as corporate ritual but as genuine expression of care. The lunch break where people actually ate together and talked about their lives instead of hunching over keyboards.
I could describe these as cultural curiosities. But what they really were was evidence. Evidence that the way I had been taught to work and live was not the only way. Evidence that I had been carrying assumptions I did not know I was carrying.
That is what travel does when you let it. It shows you that your normal is not normal. It reveals the water you have been swimming in your whole life.
But I want to be clear: you do not have to get on an airplane. Travel is also a book that takes you somewhere you have never been. Travel is a conversation with someone whose life has been shaped by forces you have never had to think about. Travel is the willingness to sit with discomfort, to not know, to let your certainties become questions.
The opposite of travel is the defended life. The life that only consumes what confirms. The life that mistakes familiarity for truth.
Get Over Yourself
I told the SXSW audience that leaders must get over themselves. I could hear how that might sound harsh, so let me say what I actually meant.
I meant it quite literally. Self-transcendence. The movement beyond the ego’s endless project of self-protection and self-promotion. The recognition that you are not the center of the universe, that your perspective is partial, that your needs are not more important than the needs of the people you are supposed to be serving.
This is not a personality trait. It is a practice. And it is the practice that most leaders I have encountered refuse to undertake, because it feels like weakness, because it requires admitting that you do not have it figured out, because the whole architecture of modern leadership is built on the performance of certainty.
I have been that leader. I have walked into rooms performing confidence I did not feel, protecting an image of competence that was more important to me than the people I was supposed to be leading. I have treated vulnerability as a liability rather than a resource. I could be wrong about many things, but I am not wrong about this: I was terrible at leading when I was too defended to actually see the people around me.
Getting over yourself does not mean becoming passive or uncertain about everything. It means holding your certainties loosely enough that new information can actually change you. It means being more interested in what is true than in being right. It means recognizing that your triggers, your wounds, your unexamined assumptions are not neutral. They shape how you show up. They affect everyone around you.
Go Home and Come Back Present
I told a story at the panel that I had almost forgotten. In the early days of building Agile Six, my partners and I were constantly triggering each other. We were stressed, we were scared, we were building something with no guarantee it would work, and we were bringing all of our unprocessed stuff into every conversation.
We tried to handle around each other’s triggers. We developed elaborate workarounds. We walked on eggshells. It did not work. The eggshells kept cracking.
One day I told my partners to go home. Not tomorrow. Now. And do not come back tomorrow, or maybe ever, until you can come back present. Until you can show up without the defensive armor. Until you can be in the room without needing to protect yourself from the room.
It sounds dramatic. It was dramatic. It was also, I think, one of the most important leadership decisions I have made.
Because here is what I have learned: you cannot create space for other people to be whole if you are not willing to do the work of being whole yourself. You cannot ask your team to be present if you are not present. You cannot build trust while operating from fear. The inner state of the leader becomes the culture of the organization. This is not metaphor. It is mechanism.
For those who do not aspire to leadership, there is no obligation here. Live your life. Protect what needs protecting. But for those who do aspire to lead, who want the authority and the influence and the title, anything less than the inner work is malpractice.
The Urgency of This Moment
I think about all the organizations I have encountered where the leadership was too busy to be curious. Too defended to be changed. Too certain to learn. And I think about the human cost of that failure. The people who showed up every day to work for someone who had never taken the time to understand what it might be like to be them.
We are in a moment when the nature of work is being renegotiated. Automation is coming. The old contracts are fraying. The people entering the workforce now have watched their parents burn out and are asking whether there might be another way.
This is an opportunity. But the opportunity will be seized only by leaders who have done the work. Leaders who have traveled, literally or through the pages of a book, into lives unlike their own. Leaders who have gotten over themselves enough to actually be present. Leaders who understand that their job is not to extract maximum productivity from human beings but to create the conditions under which human beings can flourish.
I do not know if I am that leader yet. I am trying to become that leader. I have failed at it more times than I can count. But I know, with the kind of certainty that comes from lived experience and not from a management textbook, that the path runs through curiosity and presence and the willingness to be changed.
See my reading list in my last post!
