Leadership Culture: How Boundaries Rebuilt My Team's Trust

I was the attention, the memory, and the brake

The best idea my team shipped last year wasn't mine.

It came from someone who, two years earlier, would not have raised her hand in that room.

I've been thinking about why, and a book gave me the language for it. In Boundaries for Leaders, Henry Cloud says a functioning organization needs the same three things a functioning brain does:

1)    Attention: focusing on what matters.

2)    Working memory: holding the relevant information for decisions, and

3)    Inhibition: the ‘no’ function, filtering out and refusing what’s irrelevant or destructive so the important thing has space (e.g not getting distracted by other things).

At the top of a hike in Sestri Levante

Here is the part I had to sit with. For a long time, I was all three. I was the attention, the memory and the brake. Every priority, every follow-up, every "wait, why are we doing this again" ran through me.

That is not leadership. That is a single point of failure with a nice title.

So I stopped trying to be the system and started building one.

And then the idea that won us that recognition arrived from somewhere in the room that wasn't my chair.

The hour that gave the team its attention back

I was afraid that protecting one hour a week would cost me my team's trust.

For years I thought a good meeting was a well-run meeting. Tight agenda, ended on time, everyone nodding.

I was wrong.

Heads always nodding means no one is speaking up. If an agenda is too rigid, there’s no opportunity for open collaboration. While ending on time is a positive, it’s not enough to consider that approach valuable.

Here is what I changed. We meet once a week at same time, and the agenda gets built before we sit down or in the first two minutes together, not by me alone. Everyone gets the opportunity in our team meeting to bring up items relevant to them, and then we decide on priorities for the week. They no longer need to chase me down via emails, or corner me at work to get things done.

We carve out an hour a week. That’s it. It sounds almost too small to matter.

But those constraints changed how we work together. The meeting becomes the team's attention, and it points everyone to what matters this week. It combines the team members’ attention and working memory, which are two of three things that an organization needs to function well. It also happens to be two of the things we need for our brain’s executive functioning (and that’s not a coincidence.)

All of this might seem obvious, but the part I did not expect was the trust this approach built. Initially, I was afraid that setting a boundary with dedicated time for this meeting rather than doing things off the side of my desk was going to create distrust, but it did the opposite. The structure strengthened trust, and the boundary on time allowed for each of us to be more efficient with our workday. And they know that unless something is urgent, this dedicated time once a week is where we work on solving issues together.

Leadership boundaries: what I took out of the room

The most useful thing I ever did to a meeting was take things out of it.

I run a monthly meeting with another team, and it used to sprawl. Updates, FYIs, "just so everyone knows," and somewhere near the end, buried and rushed, are the two decisions that are now rushed rather than attaining a true consensus.

A colleague had the courage to tell me that our meetings are too packed and that they don’t feel comfortable asking to add another agenda item because of how busy the meeting agenda is.

So, we split it. Anything that is information only goes into a consent agenda ahead of time, and we prioritize the short time we have together on what truly matters for decision making.

Dr. Henry Cloud would call this the third thing that organizations need: inhibition. His definition of inhibition is deciding what the priorities are and staying on track with these.

What happened after we changed the meeting format came as a surprise to me. Constraint did not make people quieter: it made them braver.

Because we weren’t spending the first 15 minutes of our meeting sharing ‘updates’ that could have been shared in an email, we purposefully created space for true dialogue. Quieter members of the team started speaking up, and being the dissenting voice became safer. There was no capacity previously for anyone to express dissent or disagreement, as there was no time in the meeting to discuss anything meaningful.

I did not create good ideas by asking for them. I created the conditions where the good ideas were finally safe to surface organically, and that takes courage from everyone in that room, including you as the leader.

How this changed our culture

I want to tell you where this ended up, because I still find it a little hard to believe.

The changes were not dramatic. Weekly meetings with the operational team. A monthly one where boring information stopped stealing time from real decisions. Not exactly the stuff of a leadership keynote.

But over a year, the ideas started coming from the ground up instead of down from the people with titles. The team started trusting each other with harder conversations. Morale, the real kind you can feel in a room and not just measure in a survey, went up. All of that created conditions for a very well-deserved bit of institutional recognition. I didn’t go looking for it, the rest of the organization noticed and wasn’t shy about validating the success of these changes.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to though.

I did not fix anyone. Nobody on that team got replaced, retrained, or "developed." They were already capable. What was missing was a structure that trusted them with that capability, and a leader willing to stop being the single point of everything.

That is most of what I believe about leadership now. The people you lead are rarely the problem. There are usually other factors that create barriers that impede success, and these include a lack of leadership boundaries.

Throughout my years as a leader, I’ve realized how rarely anyone builds these types of structures for the leader herself. Most of what I’ve learned as a leader is self-directed, and my most meaningful personal development came from leveraging the experience and knowledge of other leaders in the field, then having the courage to turn that advice into action. That's the whole reason I now run NAVIGATE, a six-day retreat on the Italian Riviera for ten women who lead. But that's a story for another page.

If any of this resonates, and you decide to implement some of these tools, let me know how it goes!