The Further You Get

By Ryan McMillian

It was often the case that I worked around my direct reports to get closer to the work. It felt efficient in the moment. I knew what needed to be done and there wasn't time to explain. We had to execute.

In the back of my mind, however, I knew what I was communicating to them and to those watching. That their role and significance are decorative at best, performative at worst. That the reality is: they are not load-bearing; they aren't carrying any weight, and I made sure of it.

It's stayed with me: the reality that things change the further you get from the work. Early in a leadership role, you have a lot of proximity; you can see the work, touch it, correct it, feel the gaps as they unfold. Often you are physically present to the problem and the people in charge of correcting it. The directions you give and their impact are immediate. That direct model works. So, you think.

The further you move from the work, however, things change. There are layers; your scope widens, and the distance between your decision and reality starts to grow. The fact of the matter is that you can no longer see the execution; you aren't sure of what's happening in the moment. Instead, you are updated on the work by someone else. Their distortions, their unaudited layers of interpretation, and their desires often shape the information.

You see, in this environment, pressure loses its utility: you can apply it, people will feel it, but you won't have access to make it land on anything specific. Pressure at a distance becomes ambient; it raises tension without directing it. Often your team absorbs it and moves on, and in some cases openly resists it.

Throughout my time, I've often contemplated whether the insistence on pressure was the right tool, the right method; it seemed to be the most utilized, at least from my experience, yet the literature and the data suggest otherwise, and my own experience argues differently. What works at a distance is slower; in fact, it's calmer, more measured. It builds over time. We call it influence. Relationships that carry weight before they need to carry weight. Trust that moves people when you are not watching, because something has given them meaning and energy to move forward. It's often not a result of pressure; it's from the work you've cultivated over years of small interactions, check-ins, and favors that don't benefit you directly. It's a different kind of work and skill that, in my experience, often goes unnoticed.

The problem, though, is that it's never actually communicated; we promote those who are closest to the work because the measurement is easier. You are the highest performer at task A; you were relied upon for getting the job done, so we promote, not understanding that the skills that made you great in proximity to the work are different from those that will make you great further away. The distance changed the required skill set, yet we didn't tell them. So, they do what they know, and we wonder why they fail.

When that model is applied across every altitude, you get some movement at closer range; at mid-level, you get compliance without commitment; and at the highest level, you get performance theater. Each level adapts to the pressure without ever moving in the direction it was meant to create.

To be clear, there are those who are successful under intense pressure; however, it is a combination of specific conditions and their own resilience. It may not be a testament to the leader's pressure tactics, and I think that is a distinction worth making. The results come in, the leader gets the credit, they are attributed to the model that was applied, and in this case "pressure" continues, and the underlying conditions go unexamined.

The further you get from the work, the more you must become someone worth following.

We tend to settle for someone worth fearing or worth appeasing. Neither moves people. What we need are leaders worth following. That requires knowing what you are asking people to carry and whether the conditions you're creating are making that a possibility or an impossibility. It requires being present to people rather than to only outcomes. It requires understanding that the further the distance, the less your authority does the work, and the more you must.

Most leaders aren't trained for that transition. We were just moved further from the work and handed the same tools.

Tools of the Trade — Written by Ryan McMillian. Published in conversation with Claude (Anthropic).

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