At one point in my career, I believed constant activity was evidence of leadership.

One week São Paulo. The next San Francisco. Then Singapore. Then London. I was responsible for people across fifteen offices around the world, and I took a certain pride in the pace of it all.

Looking back, I confused visibility with value. I was making a great deal of noise, but not always creating much substance. There was plenty of doing, but much less being.

Some time ago, while talking with another coach, I found myself searching for a word to describe that kind of leadership.

Windmillingness

We both immediately understood the image: someone in deep water, arms flailing, moving furiously, trying to stay afloat. The harder they move, the less control they seem to have.

I have seen that same pattern in leadership teams and in myself.

Windmillingness appears when leaders believe their value lies in constantly driving, fixing, solving, and accelerating. They fill the silence, answer the uncertainty, and resolve the tension before the team has had time to understand what is happening.

Everyone, particularly the leader, looks busy, yet very little moves.

Over time, the team begins to wait. People contribute less because the leader has started carrying too much of the thinking and directing for them.

This is also how psychological safety can erode. Not because the leader is harsh or dismissive, but because the room learns that the safest response is to defer. The leader becomes the center of gravity, and everyone else adjusts around them.

The opposite of windmillingness is not passivity.

It is groundedness.

Nearly four centuries ago, Blaise Pascal observed that much of our unhappiness comes from our inability to remain quietly in a room. Leadership may have its own version of that discomfort. We find it difficult to remain present without intervening. Silence feels unproductive. Uncertainty feels like something to solve. Conflict feels like something to bring under control.

So we move. We speak. We fix.

Grounded leaders resist that impulse. They can stay with silence, allow disagreement to develop, and remain curious when tension enters the room.

When people feel safe enough to disagree honestly, conflict can help a team grow. It can expose assumptions, loosen silos, and bring people back to the work they must do together.

The longer I coach teams, the more convinced I become that our most important interventions are often invisible. They are found in the steadiness we bring, the quality of our attention, and our ability to remain present when the room becomes uncomfortable.

Technique matters. Every leader and coach needs good tools. But there comes a point when people respond less to what we do than to who we are while doing it. That may be one of the defining transitions from competent leadership to mature leadership: the moment we stop focusing only on the next action and begin paying attention to the quality of our presence.

Instead of asking only, What should I do next?, we begin to ask, Who am I being in this moment?

That question changed my own leadership. I began to see that my constant movement was not always creating momentum. At times, it was creating dependency. My urgency could keep others from developing their own judgment and ownership, while my instinct to help could prevent the team from learning how to help itself.

There can also be an ego hidden inside all that movement. Constant activity makes us visible. Being the person who flies in, solves the problem, carries the pressure, and keeps everything moving can make us feel important and indispensable. We may tell ourselves that the team needs us, when part of us also needs to be needed.

Beneath this is often a very human desire for recognition, relevance, and control. But when that desire goes unexamined, leadership can become a performance in which the leader remains central and the team never fully steps forward.

Over time, I learned to intervene less, resist the impulse to rescue, and trust the room more. Not because leadership requires withdrawal, but because teams need enough space to think, disagree, and take responsibility together.

They often take their emotional cues from the person leading them. A leader who cannot tolerate silence will fill it. A leader who fears conflict will rush to resolve it. A leader who needs to feel indispensable will struggle to let the team become capable without them.

So the next time you feel the urge to jump in, solve the problem, or accelerate the conversation, pause long enough to ask what the team actually needs.

It may need your direction. It may need a decision. But it may also need you to stop windmilling and give others the space to find their footing.

Sometimes the most valuable contribution we make is not another action, but the grounded presence from which the right action can emerge.

‍