There is a question most leaders never ask. Not because they don’t care, but because somewhere underneath the busyness and the pressure and the performance, they’re afraid of what the answer might be.
What does your team say about you when you’re not in the room?
In Part 1 of my conversation with recording artist, worship leader, and author Big Fil, we go somewhere most leadership content never goes. Not strategy. Not systems. Not how to run a better one-on-one. We go into the interior. The stuff that lives underneath your leadership style and drives it without your permission.
Big Fil spent years leading people while his emotional intelligence was quietly doing damage he couldn’t see. He was giving everything he had. He was passionate. He was committed. And he was burning bridges he didn’t even know existed. Straining relationships. Losing people he thought were solid. Operating at full intensity while the people around him were absorbing the cost of it.
The turning point wasn’t a book or a framework. It was a therapist who told him something about his emotional development that stopped him cold. It was a feedback exercise with his own team that surfaced a pattern he couldn’t unsee once it was visible. It was someone close to him reflecting back a word for his behavior that wasn’t the word he would have chosen.
He called it passion. They called it something else entirely.
That gap, between how we see ourselves as leaders and how our people actually experience us, is where this conversation lives. And it is one of the most important gaps a leader can close.
What Big Phil describes isn’t unique to him. It shows up in corporate offices and team meetings and performance reviews every single day. Leaders who were excellent individual contributors, promoted because of what they could produce, now responsible for people they were never trained to lead. Operating from emotional patterns they’ve never examined. Wondering why their team feels distant, disengaged, or difficult.
The problem usually isn’t the team.
This episode is for the leader who is willing to ask the harder question. Not “what’s wrong with my people?” but “what am I bringing into the room that they have to manage?”
Part 1 of my conversation with Big Phil is available now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen. This is where the real work starts.