Creating Invisible Chaos

What Michael Scott reveals about the gap between how leaders experience growth and how their teams experience leaders.

May 18, 2026

The clock turns 8:59 AM as you hastily hoist your laptop to the conference table, scattering the coasters as you try to keep your coffee out of range of your keyboard. You just completed your morning workout routine — that is, the coffee-laptop-briefcase-lunchbox dash up the stairs from the parking lot. You’re eager to be in your seat in the thirty seconds remaining before your weekly team meeting kicks off.

Everyone knows that the meeting segue gives you a beat to settle in, sign in, and get the AI assistant running. By the time you get to the substantive agenda items, you’re ready to deliver detailed answers and direction.

You’ve trained them well. Not consciously. Yet you’ve trained them, nonetheless, to orient their behavior around you, to expect answers from the expert, and to unconsciously tailor the meeting segue to your messy morning melee.

Humans are highly skilled at pattern recognition and building an unspoken dictionary of the things that make you you. Your team knows what kind of work to bring to your desk versus theirs. They know when you’re overwhelmed, even if you don’t say it, because things start slipping through the cracks. Even your spouse can differentiate between the fine you utter in response to “How was your day?” and the fine that follows a question they asked twice.

Acknowledging that the pattern recognition and normalization happens doesn’t mean there’s a flaw in your relationships or with you. It’s actually a sign of care and attention because people calibrate to people that matter. Then these unconscious dictionaries direct every office interaction going forward.

It works until it doesn’t.

Now, you’ve begun, or are considering, the internal work to level up your identity and leadership mindset. Your identity is expanding, which is exactly what happens to healthy, growing leaders. You start modifying the behaviors of your past in favor of trying new leadership approaches. You realize it’s no longer the right answer to have the answer, and you’re proud that you’re learning to live in the ambiguity of leadership. You’re no longer the first or the last to respond and you’ve even turned down a few requests to provide others an opportunity to learn. All these behaviors confirm that you’re finally stepping into deeper levels of leadership.

What you haven’t done is expressly verbalize to your team that you’re in a growth season — being coached, trying on new leadership styles, and working to elevate the team. Instead, they notice that you have stopped providing answers, distanced yourself from work and from them, and just aren’t your normal self…at least as far as the normal self they’ve created in their minds about you.

Making Sense of Sensemaking

As Karl Weick’s research on sensemaking explores, people develop an ongoing plausible image to rationalize what’s happening around them, including what their leader is doing and why. Sensemaking is both retrospective and ongoing, extracting cues from the context to build explanations to interpret current events. It’s an inherently human behavior and you’ve done it too.

It’s why we love Michael Scott in The Office. As he receives information and processes it through his model of the world — one that is wildly miscalibrated — he produces confident conclusions that are always just a degree off from reality. His sensemaking ability is there, but his filters are incorrect, producing hilarious results. We all laugh because our own sensemaking ability built a reasonable conclusion in contrast to Michael’s comedic conclusion. In one scene, we learn he keeps a George Foreman grill by his bed because: I enjoy having breakfast in bed; I like waking up to the smell of bacon; why not keep a griddle by the bed? He gets burned, and everyone around him ends up managing the aftermath.

As your team notices the changes in your behavior, their sensemaking abilities engage to assign meaning to it. The people around you aren’t passive observers of your growth, they’re often actively and unconsciously adjusting their own behavior to accommodate the version of you that they don’t yet fully recognize. As they experiment to see how to most effectively engage with you, they are also figuring out how to protect themselves and their interests. I know he has a lot on his plate, so now that he can’t think of an answer, he must have given up on us. Or she’s overwhelmed and seems checked out so she must be about to take another job. None of those reasons are true, but the change has to mean something to them, and it often means something about you, not them.

The leader who doesn’t publicly acknowledge an intentional growth period isolates themselves inside it. Which means by the time you finally have language to describe the change you’re experiencing, they’ve already been living under its effects for months.

What you’re experiencing as leadership growth, they’re experiencing as something else entirely. They feel like they got it wrong when they bring work to you and you redirect or delegate. They may feel unseen and unheard when you respond with coaching questions instead of the answers they’re looking for. In fact, this requires more energy from them to think deeper than they’ve been accustomed to. They may even be motivated to go around you to get quicker answers when they aren’t sure how you’ll engage with them today. Your ambitious team members might recognize the opening for taking increased ownership. Your risk-averse folks might feel uneasy about the workplace conventions changing in ways they haven’t learned to interpret yet.

You agree philosophically that leaders don’t drift toward better leadership, so you went looking for it. Even though you took initiative and brought on a coach to help you assimilate into your new leadership seat, you didn’t tell your team. In their limited context of your transformation, they fill the silence with their own narratives.

Trying to project stability, you created a gap for them between the boss they know and the leader you’re becoming.

The Invitation

Here’s where you have an option to amplify your progress: Invite others into your growth. By inviting your team into the process and the conversation, you contribute to the narratives and build trust through authenticity. When you acknowledge the effort required to navigate a growth period, you prevent unhealthy misrepresentations from forming about the change, and you open feedback loops for their own growth.

You don’t need to have it all figured out to lead effectively. In fact, leaders know there isn’t a point where you “have it all figured out” because growth doesn’t end. Some of the leaders I’ve respected the most are the leaders who painted a picture of the future and openly shared how they’re growing to support that future. To wait to engage others until it’s completed is to miss the point of growth.

The point of growth is that it’s in motion. It’s a process. Research by Amy Edmondson, Brené Brown, and Adam Grant converges on a shared finding: the most effective leaders and cultures cultivate vulnerability, admit mistakes openly, and practice flexible thinking. An organization’s or a relationship’s capacity for growth and honest exchange is always capped by the leader’s tolerance for being seen as incomplete.

Your team can only run as wide-open as the person at the top has the internal capacity to allow. That’s you. The good news is that you can control the openness of your teams by opening up yourself.

. . .

It’s 8:59 AM and the coasters are scattered again. Your coffee is steaming at the lip of the cup as you settle in from the familiar workout dash. The meeting energy is different this time, though.

A few weeks ago, you said that you were working with a coach and experimenting with how you lead and would be asking more questions, holding back answers to drive creative thinking, and delegating more work than your old habits would have done. You acknowledged that things might feel different for a while but that you didn’t want them guessing about what is happening. You framed it as an invitation to partner with you in growth. They can now interpret your new and changing behavior as opportunity.

As the segue unfolds, your senior analyst, who used to wait for approval on every recommendation, presents the results of a time-saving idea she implemented over the weekend for fun. What you’re observing as a leader is their response to giving them permission to grow with you.

They were waiting for permission to operate at a higher level. Your old leadership style trained them to suppress it. The unconscious dictionary that previously helped them adapt the meeting agenda to your constraints also kept them from seeking growth that would outshine you.

When you gave yourself permission to grow publicly, you also gave them permission to explore a new version of themselves, one that thinks independently, one that takes initiative and brings the question and the answer in the same conversation. By trading the performance of having it all figured out for the honesty of being in progress, you will find that they join you in the process, turning the old dictionary from a cage into a foundation for the model of who you’re becoming as a leader and what the team’s future holds.

The meeting is rolling and the coffee is still safely contained in the Yeti. Today, the agenda is moving faster, and the problem-solving discussion and questions are more finely tuned. Most importantly, the most powerful answers aren’t coming from you. You trained them well and trained them in something new. The new question is what you’ll train them to do next.

If you’re in a growth season and haven’t found the words for it or the best way to bring others into the process, that’s exactly what a coaching conversation is for.

Let’s give it language together →

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