There’s a particular kind of confidence — I’ve worn it myself — that walks into a room already talking. It has its notes prepared, its agenda loaded, its opening line polished. It means well. It just doesn’t look around first.
I was that kind of leader for longer than I’d like to admit.
I remember a staff meeting, years ago, early in my time at a congregation I was just beginning to understand. I had an idea I was proud of. Something about restructuring how we handled Sunday hospitality — a practical, sensible proposal I’d been drafting in my head for two weeks. I walked in, set my notepad on the table, and launched into it before the coffee had finished brewing.
About four minutes in, I noticed that the woman across from me hadn’t looked up from her hands. The man to my left had a tight jaw. The room had a quality I can only describe as braced.
I kept talking anyway. I finished. There was polite discussion. The idea was received, more or less. But something had been missed, and I knew it even then — I just didn’t know what.
Afterward, someone told me quietly that two families in the congregation had experienced significant losses that week. The people in that room had been carrying something heavy when they sat down, and I had never once asked.
What I learned that day — slowly, imperfectly, over many years — is that the first act of leadership in any room is not to speak. It’s to receive. To look. To ask the question that costs you nothing but a minute: How is everyone doing? And then to actually wait for the answer.
This is harder than it sounds, because it requires surrendering the momentum of your own preparation. You’ve thought carefully about what you want to say. Pausing to read the room can feel like losing ground. But the ground you gain when people know they’ve been seen — that’s the kind you can actually build on.
I still catch myself charging in sometimes. Old habits are persistent, especially the ones that feel like competence.
But I’ve gotten better at standing in the doorway for a moment before I cross the threshold. At reading the faces. At understanding that whatever I brought to the room, the room itself has something to tell me first.
Leadership, I’ve come to believe, begins before the first word. It begins with a willingness to be present to people before you ask anything of them.