Working With What Remains: A Letter to Leaders in Unsettled Times
Updated: Oct 4
On grief, truth, teams, and staying human in complex organizations
A few years ago, I worked with a telecom sales team where one account executive kept winning awards while lying to customers. Everyone knew. The people selling honestly watched him collect the trophies, quarter after quarter, and you could see them deflate.
I've been seeing that same look on a lot of leaders' faces lately.
The best description of it I've found isn't in a business book. It's in a poem about a man whose garden has died, and the wind that comes asking for roses anyway. I'll share it at the end.
Many of the leaders I work with, from founders and CEOs to heads of People, are tired in a way that rest doesn't quite fix. So are their teams. They aren't burned out, exactly. They're unsettled. Maybe a little heartsick.
We've seen layoffs announced by email, promises to customers quietly broken, and leaders who misused their power and then explained away the damage. Meanwhile, it gets harder every month to tell what's true. After a while, you get more guarded. You say less. You stop saying what you actually think.
I don't believe that's a personal flaw. I think it's a form of grief: the moral sorrow of caring in environments that don't seem to value care.
It's made worse by the distortion all around us: spin, selective truth, strategic silence. Over time, that weakens language itself. Speaking plainly starts to feel risky. Sincerity starts to feel naïve. When language weakens, trust weakens. And when trust weakens, everything gets harder.
So if you feel tired, discouraged, or disoriented right now, that may not be a failure of resilience. It may be evidence that your moral compass is still working.
But grief doesn't disappear because we're busy. Left unnamed, it turns into "just get through the quarter" leadership, and into talented people checking out long before they leave.
What It Looks Like on a Team
That telecom team wasn't unusual. At a software company, a sales manager routinely promised customers delivery dates the engineers couldn't come close to hitting. He made the promises. His team took the angry calls. Before long, many of them were present in body and gone in spirit.
At a pharmaceutical company, I was brought in after the CEO had pushed a wave of change through the organization by demanding the impossible. By the time I arrived, people were worn down and wary. Our work there was mostly cleanup: helping managers work with integrity and take care of their teams.
In each case, the damage spread far beyond the person who caused it. When leaders don't make space for honesty and grief, teams learn to protect themselves by withholding energy and insight. You see it in meetings where important things go unsaid, and in feedback softened until it's meaningless. Over time, that erodes trust far more than any single bad decision.
What Leaders Can Do
The alternative isn't choosing compassion over results. It's holding both — integrating — never one without the other.
First, good leaders acknowledge what's happening. They stand in their people's shoes and say out loud what the team is going through. They don't make a production of it. They tell the truth, and they listen before rushing to fix anything.
Then they turn to results, separating targets from commitments. A target is the outcome you want: revenue, a launch date, a customer satisfaction score. You don't fully control it, and neither does your team. A commitment, on the other hand, is a specific, well-considered action a person can control, one that's likely to help you hit the target. Hold people accountable for commitments, and you stop asking for the impossible. People asked for something within their power can say yes and mean it.
Look back at the three stories. When leaders insist on outcomes people can't honestly promise, the organization finds another way to manufacture certainty. Sometimes that's overpromising or spin. Sometimes it's burnout, or people pretending everything is fine. In each story, people were pushed toward a target with no honest commitment underneath it.
Acknowledging what's been lost, speaking plainly, and asking for commitments people can actually keep won't restore everything. But it's how leaders work with what remains.
Working With What Remains
Here's the poem I promised, in brief. It's by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, and I first heard it in a 2004 interview with the poet Robert Bly. (The full text is below.)
The wind visits a man and asks for the scent of his roses. The man says he has none. Everything in his garden has died. Fine, says the wind. Then I'll take your withered petals, your yellowed leaves, and the water from your fountain. And it leaves. The man weeps, asking himself what he has done with the garden that was entrusted to him.
Some of our garden is gone, too. Some trust won't come back, and pretending otherwise doesn't help. But life does not wait for perfect conditions. It works with what is offered.
So perhaps the most important leadership question right now isn't "How do we get back to the way things were?" It's this: What will we do with what is now in our care? Our people, our words, our authority, our attention, our courage.
We don't need perfect leaders. We need honest ones.
The wind is still asking. What are we going to offer it?
Warmly,
Russ
The Wind, One Brilliant Day — Antonio Machado
The wind, one brilliant day, called
to my soul with an odor of jasmine.
And the wind said, “In return for the odor of my jasmine,
I would like the odor of your roses.”
I said, “I have no roses. All the flowers in my garden have died.”
The wind said, “Well, then, I will take your withered petals
and your yellowed leaves and the waters from your fountains.”
And the wind left.
And I wept.
I said to myself, “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?”
If you’re curious about the original interview: “The Wind Isn’t Depressed: Robert Bly Talks with Michael Ventura”, The Sun Magazine, May 2004
If This Resonates
Two questions to sit with: What has your team lost lately that no one has named? And where are you asking for targets when you could be asking for commitments?
These are the kinds of leadership challenges we work on in Leadership and the Middle Path: seeing situations more clearly, noticing the traps that can distort judgment, getting to the root of problems, and building agreements people can actually keep.
And if you’d like occasional reflections like this, join my bi-monthly newsletter here.
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