The Myth of Extraordinary: What Leaders Can Do Differently

Part Four in a Series

What Leaders Can Do Differently

Knowing something and doing something are separated by one of the longest distances in human experience.

Most leaders, if asked, would say they believe in the potential of their people. They would mean it. They would not be performing the answer — they would be giving the truest response available to them in that moment. And then they would return to a calendar full of status updates, performance gaps, and quarterly targets, and the belief — real as it was — would have no place to land.

This is not a failure of character. It is a failure of practice.

Because seeing people the way a grandparent sees a child, the way a firefly calls forward what is already present — that is not a feeling you can simply decide to have. It is a discipline. It is something you build, deliberately, into the way you lead. And it begins not with a program or a policy, but with a single, uncomfortable question that most leadership development curricula never think to ask:

When did you last feel genuine awe for someone you lead?

Not appreciation. Not satisfaction that a deliverable was met or a goal was reached. Awe. The specific quality of attention that stops you mid-thought because you have just witnessed something in another person that you did not expect and cannot quite measure — an idea that came from an unexpected place, a moment of courage that nobody else noticed, a question asked in a meeting that quietly reframed everything. The grandparent watching the child on the stairs did not plan to be moved. They were simply paying the kind of attention that makes being moved inevitable.

That quality of attention is available to every leader. But it has to be chosen. Repeatedly. Against the considerable pull of urgency.

See People in Motion, Not in Position

It begins with the decision to see people in motion rather than people in position. The nine-box grid, the performance rating, the annual review — these are snapshots. They capture a person at a single point in time and assign them a category that has a way of becoming a ceiling. The grandparent does not take snapshots. The grandparent watches a child across time, across attempts, across the beautiful and instructive failures that are simply called Tuesday in a house where someone is learning to walk.

Leaders who see people in motion ask different questions than leaders who see people in position. Not where does this person rank? but where is this person going? Not what have they delivered? but what are they becoming?

Name What You See — Specifically, and Without Waiting

It continues with the practice of naming what you see — specifically, and without waiting for it to be perfect.

This is where many well-intentioned leaders stop just short of the moment that matters. They notice something in a person — a flicker of capability, an instinct that showed up quietly in the middle of an ordinary interaction — and they file it away, meaning to mention it later, in the right context, with the right framing. And later becomes the performance review. And by then the moment is archaeology.

The grandparent does not wait. The grandparent says did you hear that? in real time, to anyone who will listen, with a specificity that tells the child: I was watching. I saw exactly what you did. And it mattered to me.

That specificity is everything. Vague praise lands softly and disappears. Good job today is the organizational equivalent of a participation ribbon — technically positive, essentially invisible. But I noticed the way you held that conversation when it got difficult, and I want you to know that took real skill — that lands differently. That stays. That becomes part of the story a person tells themselves about who they are and what they are capable of. And that story, quietly and over time, determines everything about how far they are willing to reach.

Trust the Light to Find Its Own Direction

It also requires leaders to make peace with the fact that the spark they ignite may not illuminate the path they expected.

The child who watched the firefly did not necessarily grow up to do what the adult standing beside them hoped they would do. The spark follows its own logic. It goes where the child's particular constellation of curiosity, experience, and imagination directs it. And the leader who understands the firefly principle does not try to aim the light. They trust that illumination, once genuine, finds its own right place.

This means celebrating the question as much as the answer. The attempt as much as the achievement. The moment someone says I have never tried this before but I think I see a way — because that sentence, unremarkable as it sounds, is the sound of someone stepping onto the staircase. And the leader who recognizes it, who stops and says I hear that, tell me more — that leader has just done something that no recognition program, no award ceremony, no stage and spotlight can replicate.

They have made one person feel seen.

And a person who feels genuinely seen does not go back to doubting quietly in the third row. They lean forward. They begin to close the distance between where they are and what they wondered, fleetingly, if they might be capable of. They do not become someone else's version of extraordinary. They become — and this is the only version that lasts — their own.

The grandparent knew this all along. They were never trying to produce a prodigy. They were simply refusing to look away from a person they believed in completely — and trusting that belief, expressed consistently and specifically and with genuine awe, was the most powerful developmental tool in any room.

It still is. It always was.

The leaders who understand this do not build cultures of performance. They build cultures of possibility. And possibility, once it takes root in a person, does not stay contained to the original moment of planting. It grows. It spreads. It becomes the thing that person carries into every room they enter — and eventually, if the conditions are right, into the way they see the people they lead.

The firefly lit something. The light kept going.

That is not a metaphor. That is how movements begin.