Nobody Remembers the Speech

I turned 53 last week.

My kids sent me a video. I did not ask for it. One of them came up with a question, sent it to the other two, and they all sat down and answered it properly.

I watched it twice. Then I noticed something I have not been able to put down since.

Not one of them named a lesson

I have been coaching leaders for years. I have frameworks. I have given the talks.

None of that showed up.

What they named were small things. Ordinary things. Things I repeated so often I stopped noticing I was doing them at all.

One of them brought up the drive to school. I used to put a talk or a podcast on in the car, and at the end I would ask what their biggest takeaway was. That was it. Twenty minutes, most mornings, for years.

Another one went back to her gymnastics years. Before a competition I would help her build a playlist and get her headphones on so she could get herself into the zone. She had a shirt in those days that said mind over matter.

She thought it was about the music.

What she actually took was that being mentally ready counts as much as being physically ready, and that she could talk herself into believing she was capable. She still does it. She told me she had never traced it back.

I would never have put either of those on a list of what I taught my kids.

What transfers was never labeled

That is the part worth sitting with, and it is not really about parenting.

None of those moments were announced as lessons. I was not running a session in the car. I thought I was filling a drive.

What transfers is almost never the thing you framed as teaching.

Now think about that at work.

You run the offsite. You put the values on the wall. You give the all-hands talk about ownership. And then you wonder why none of it shows up on a Tuesday.

Meanwhile what your team actually absorbed is how you behaved in the meeting where the numbers were bad. What you do when a client is unreasonable. Whether you answer the hard question or move past it.

Those are your car rides. You repeat them, you never label them, and they are what people keep.

And you will not be told

Here is the harder half.

Whatever you have passed on, you are probably not going to hear about it. Not on schedule, and possibly not ever. People carry things for years without knowing where they picked them up.

One of mine only made the connection while she was recording her answer. Twenty years of using the thing, and she had never put it next to me.

That is uncomfortable if you need the feedback to keep going. So do not build on the feedback. Build on the repetition.

The one I did not expect

The thing that surprised me most was not about the past at all.

What one of them values, it turns out, is watching me still work at things. Still learning. Still getting better at something in my fifties, where he can see it.

I had always assumed the job was to have it figured out by the time they were grown. Be the finished example.

He was telling me the opposite. The unfinished part was the example.

It holds at work too. A leader who has all the answers teaches people to wait for answers. A leader who is visibly still learning teaches people that learning is what we do here.

So here is the question

Pick the one thing you most want to outlast you on your team. Ownership, honesty, steadiness under pressure, whatever it is for you.

Now ask yourself what you do, over and over, that would actually teach it. Not what you have said about it. What you repeat.

If nothing comes to mind, that is your answer. And it is fixable, because the fix is small and boring and daily. That is the only kind that works.

I got lucky. Most leaders never find out what landed.

If you would rather not wait twenty years to find out what you are teaching, that is most of what we work on together. Here is how I work with leaders.