There is a moment in organisations that I’ve started paying attention to over the years.
It isn’t when someone resigns. By then, the decision has usually been made long ago.
It’s much earlier. It’s the moment a capable employee quietly decides, “I’ll stop putting myself forward.”
Most managers never see that moment happen. A few months later, they’ll say the person has become less engaged or doesn’t show enough initiative anymore. What they rarely connect is that these behaviours usually begin with one small interaction that seemed insignificant at the time.
I remember one such interaction very clearly.
A young team member, let’s call her Ananya, had been asked to prepare her first important client deliverable. She worked hard on it, stayed back to finish it and sent it to her manager for review. She opened it late that evening. There were things she wanted done differently, so she rewrote almost the entire document herself and sent it to the client before she came into work the next morning.
When I spoke to her later, she genuinely believed he had done the right thing. “I was just trying to help,” she said. And I believed her.
This is not a story about a difficult manager. It is a story about a welll intentioned manager who hadn’t realised that her job had changed.
When Ananya opened the document the next morning, she didn’t find comments explaining the edits or a conversation inviting her to think differently. She found a document that no longer looked like something she had written.
I’ve often wondered what went through her mind.
Not because the edits were unfair. Managers should absolutely improve the quality of work before it reaches a client.
But in the absence of a conversation, people usually fill in the blanks themselves.
Maybe she concluded she wasn’t ready. Maybe she thought she wasn’t as capable as she had imagined. Or maybe she simply decided not to put too much effort anymore.
Whatever she told herself, something changed after that.
Her manager noticed it months later. He never connected it to that document.
Good intentions don’t always build confident teams
What fascinates me is that I’ve seen versions of this story many times since.
The managers involved are rarely controlling or insecure. More often than not, they’re high performers who built their reputation by producing exceptional work. When they become managers, they naturally continue doing what has always worked for them. They edit. They step in when something isn’t perfect. They solve problems before anyone else has the chance to.
From their perspective, they’re protecting quality.
From their team’s perspective, they’re slowly teaching people that the safest option is to comply, not to think differently, to question status quo or volunteer new ideas.
Success has been redefined
Somewhere between being an individual contributor and becoming a manager, the job changes in a way we don’t talk about enough.
Success is no longer measured by the quality of what you produce yourself. It’s measured by what other people become capable of producing because they worked with you.
That’s a difficult transition.
We celebrate the promotion, hand over a larger team and assume people will naturally move from being the best individual contributor to helping others grow.
Many struggle, get stressed and burnt out.
That’s because the transition was not enabled.
Culture is built in moments nobody records
Over time, those habits leave traces.
You see them in meetings where everyone waits for the manager to speak before offering an opinion.
You see them in teams where people stop taking ownership because experience has taught them the work will eventually come back with someone else’s edits.
You see them in capable employees who quietly choose safer assignments over stretch opportunities.
By the time organisations begin talking about disengagement, those patterns have often been developing for months.
That’s why culture can rarely be understood only through surveys or exit interviews. It lives in everyday interactions.
We at Marching sheep have always maintained- An employee experiences an organisation through their managers. And if managers are not enabled to invoke critical thinking, healthy debates, welcoming diverse perspectives, then we are slowly stifling the culture.
The help that comes too late
The engagement survey results that show alarming belonging scores, or the dwindling talent pipeline because of high attrition, that is when solutions are sought in leadership programmes, workshops and frameworks. But by that time months, years and decades have passed. Habits, beliefs and behaviors become deeply entrenched. Unlearning feels painful.
This is reactive solutioning. But as they say, prevention is better than cure.
What if we started building our CXO pipeline right from that first time manager, wherein we built the capability and the capacity to lead others to succeed.