In London, I was responsible for coordinating Ford’s social media communication across Europe. The work covered the brief, the development and sharing of content, and the assessment of its performance. There were colleagues working in different markets, with their own expertise and ways of approaching the work. A coordinated plan mattered, but it could only take us so far. The harder part, as I recalled in my Overhear interview in 2021, was working with the people themselves and with the relationships between them. [1]
That distinction sounds obvious until the responsibility is yours. Activities can be arranged on a calendar; people rarely become easier to understand because you have given them a deadline. I had energy and ideas, and I wanted things to move. Learning to lead meant recognising the limits of that impatience, especially when it made my own pace seem like the only sensible one. Over time, I came to value greater flexibility and a better sense of when to act. It also meant accepting that someone else’s expertise could improve the work in ways I could not produce myself.
When impatience gets mistaken for commitment
I still think the energy to challenge an established way of working is useful. Without it, a process can survive for years because nobody wants to disturb it. In the interview, I described how that early energy gradually changed into greater empathy and sensitivity to timing. There was plenty of hurry in my earlier approach, and learning that not everything could happen immediately took time. [1]
The problem with impatience is that it can look remarkably like commitment, particularly to the impatient person. If I have already understood a proposal, I can start treating the time someone else needs to understand it as an unnecessary delay. That skips over a fairly obvious fact: I have had time to form the idea, while the other person may be encountering it for the first time. My conclusion arrives with a history that they have not been given.
There is also a difference between an obstacle and a disagreement. A colleague who points out a dependency, or who doubts that a new process will work in their market, may be contributing information the plan needs. Treating every objection as resistance makes the plan easier to defend and harder to improve. It is an efficient way to preserve the appearance of progress while avoiding some of the work that progress requires.
Flexibility, as I understand it now, includes being willing to change the route while remaining responsible for the destination. The proposal may need a clearer explanation or a different sequence, while an objection may turn out to be correct, which is inconvenient but usually less expensive than discovering it after implementation. Patience has a practical purpose when it helps distinguish those situations; it becomes an excuse when it merely postpones a decision nobody wants to make.
Giving expertise somewhere to go
One conviction I expressed in that conversation was that a good team should include people who are better than its manager in specific areas. If I were building a digital team with responsibility for e-commerce, I would want someone with deeper e-commerce expertise than mine. My contribution could be organisational and strategic without requiring me to pretend that I knew everything. [1]
The uncomfortable part is allowing that expertise to affect decisions. Hiring a specialist and then requiring them to reproduce your own opinion is a rather elaborate way of hiring an audience. Making room for others means accepting that their judgment can change your initial view, and being clear about the decisions they can make without waiting for your approval.
I also see the growth of the people I work with as part of a leader’s responsibility. That does not mean taking credit for their achievements, or treating adults as a personal improvement project. It means paying attention to whether the work gives them a chance to develop their judgment. Handing over a task without context offers little room to learn; taking it back at the first difficulty can be equally unhelpful. The balance involves explaining the outcome that matters and staying available without quietly reclaiming every decision.
Amy Edmondson’s 1999 study of 51 teams in a manufacturing company offers a useful perspective here. It found an association between psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, and learning behaviours such as asking for help or discussing mistakes. This was an association observed in one company, not proof that a particular management style will produce the same result everywhere, but it gives me a reason to take the cost of speaking up seriously. Psychological safety is about interpersonal risk, rather than comfort or the removal of standards; people can acknowledge uncertainty while still being accountable for demanding work. [2]
Explaining change to someone who does not see it yet
In the interview, the discussion turned to communicating unfamiliar ideas. I pushed back on the assumption that the difficulty was simply generational: a younger person could be just as unconvinced. I used the comparison between the cultural visibility of rappers and that of gamers to help explain a phenomenon through something more familiar. The point was to give the listener a reference they could work with, rather than assume that unfamiliarity was evidence of stupidity. [1]
An analogy has limits. Recognising a similarity does not prove that the same commercial decision will work in both settings. It can, however, create enough shared understanding to examine the proposal. That is already more useful than repeating the original explanation more loudly, a communication technique whose popularity has somehow survived its fairly modest results.
The emotional side matters because a change in process can also change someone’s relationship with their work. A person who knows the existing system well may need to learn again; a proposal framed entirely around efficiency may leave them uncertain about the value of their experience. These are possibilities to understand, not motives I can assign to every colleague who disagrees. Listening should help me discover their actual concern rather than supply a more sophisticated label for dismissing it.
I used to put considerable faith in the idea that a sound argument should carry the decision. I still want arguments to be sound, but I no longer think that reasoning can be separated neatly from the experience of receiving it. Someone can understand the proposal and dislike how they have been treated in the process. Acknowledging that gives me more responsibility for how I explain change. It does not give me permission to manipulate people into agreement.
The calm I learned to recognise
When I spoke about people who had influenced me in the Overhear conversation, I associated my father with calm and self-control. My older brother was a reference for curiosity, while my father’s example helped me think about the way a person carries responsibility. Each taught me something different; neither had to be a complete model of leadership. [1]
Calm interests me less as a personality label than as a way of keeping a situation open long enough to understand it. If a leader responds to difficulty with immediate agitation, the people around them may have to manage that reaction before they can address the problem. A measured response leaves more attention available for the work. It can also make disagreement less costly, because an objection does not automatically become a confrontation.
This is not an argument for the manager who remains serenely detached while everybody else deals with the consequences. Calm still has to end in judgment and action. Its value is in preventing urgency from becoming a permanent excuse for reacting badly, or authority from becoming a demand that other people absorb whatever mood accompanies it.
I find it useful to think about the team as a system rather than an extension of my personality. If every uncertainty has to travel upwards and every answer has to travel back down, the structure creates delays that no amount of personal energy will solve. Making room for expertise requires looking at those relationships as well as my behaviour. Being patient while retaining every approval is a limited improvement.
Keeping a method without becoming rigid
None of this makes method optional. In the same conversation, I described an approach built around a long-term mission, concrete objectives and a way to measure progress, followed by execution and revision. I also recalled encountering Raphael’s The School of Athens through a multimedia encyclopaedia. Its juxtaposition of different approaches to thinking stayed with me: I remain interested in ideas while wanting a way to test what we do with them. [1]
Clear objectives make it easier to give people genuine discretion. When the outcome is understood, a specialist can propose a different route without every difference becoming a dispute about commitment. Measurement can then help us decide whether the route is working, provided we are prepared to revise our assumptions rather than use the numbers only to defend them. Emotional awareness and operational discipline have work to do together.
After that 2021 conversation and my time at Versace, I worked at Armani and eBay. I have been freelancing for a year. The company names do not settle whether I have learned to lead well. Today, in consultancy, I want to give other people’s expertise enough room to influence the work, while being explicit about the responsibility I am taking on.
I remain interested in moving things forward, and I do not imagine that impatience simply disappears once you have written about it. The more useful change is learning to notice when my urgency is helping and when it is making the work smaller than it needs to be. I want the people alongside me to have room to contribute judgment I do not possess, and I want to stay responsible for what we decide. That leaves me with plenty to practise, which seems a more honest place to stand than at the end of a finished leadership lesson.
References
Overhear interview with Fabrizio Rinaldi, published 8 December 2021. The autobiographical passages draw on approximately 16:50–18:26, 57:12–1:02:20 and 1:07:14–1:16:34. The automatic transcript is paraphrased, not presented as verbatim quotation.
Amy Edmondson, Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams, Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999.