The Invisible Plumbing of Leadership
Most of what passes for leadership isn’t strategy or vision. It’s plumbing.
Not the shiny kind either — the quiet, invisible sort that decides where water flows and where it stagnates.
You can give a thousand talks about values and principles and “what good looks like,” but people don’t learn from the talk. They learn from the defaults.
How long a PR sits open before anyone comments. Whether “good job” gets said out loud or buried in a heart emoji. Who hits “merge.” Whether the last message in a Slack thread is a thank-you or an awkward silence.
Those are the settings that actually run your culture. Most leaders just forget they exist.
I’ve lost count of how many teams I’ve joined where everyone is technically excellent but socially asleep. The 95th percentile times on the API are fantastic, but the feedback loops between the humans run at the speed of glacial melt.
Culture doesn’t live in your Notion doc. It lives in the ambient noise: tone, timing, tiny rituals that signal what’s normal around here.
Say someone interrupts a junior engineer and you let it slide. That’s a new default. Next time, everyone will assume it’s fine. Or you quietly fix problems instead of delegating them — congratulations, you’re on your way to dependency hell.
I sometimes think leadership is 10% inspiration and 90% pattern hygiene. The strongest leaders aren’t loud. They’re gardeners. They keep an eye on the soil, the little defaults that decide whether things bloom or rot.
And here’s the trick: once you tune those defaults well, you barely need to lead at all—or at least, not in the heroic, fist-banging caricature of leadership we assume delivers results. The environment takes over. It nudges people toward better behaviour without another memo, another meeting, another pep talk about ownership.
You want speed? Fix the default for communication.
You want trust? Fix the default for how people disagree.
You want creativity? Fix the default for how safe it feels to look stupid.
Because here’s the truth that’s awkward to admit: most “leadership problems” are just unexamined defaults.
Before you spin up a task force or hire another consultant, take a walk through your team’s everyday rhythms. Notice the small stuff. Who speaks first. Who finishes last. What silence means.
Then tweak the plumbing.
A team becomes whatever it repeats. Tune the repetitions, and you change the future without announcing it.