What Others Learn From Watching You

Meetings, messages, and everyday habits are teaching your team what to expect. Here’s how to see it.

Every team has a way of doing things that nobody wrote down. Where did it come from, and who taught it?

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In 2009, our team was part of an initial cohort to test remote working. I was a project manager, and I brought a strong preference with me: transparency.

I made that preference visible in everything I did. My meetings existed to make decisions. My update emails were informative, never performative or static. I was deliberate about what got shared with whom, so confidential matters stayed confidential while everything else moved into the open. People stayed in the loop, and the work kept moving.

Then the pattern started to spread. Teams that treated the project team as optional found out what that cost them. They were left out of decisions, and the delays and impact that followed were traced straight back to their absence. Because our meetings and emails were worth their time, their peers began encouraging them to attend and to read what we sent.

Meeting by meeting and email by email, we were teaching people what to expect from us (that we only shared what had value) and, eventually, what to expect from one another.

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We can learn to see the culture our behavior is already building by drawing a few distinctions: what we intend, what we repeat, and what others learn from it. Once we see those distinctions clearly, we can adjust one behavior at a time and let a healthier culture take shape with joy rather than force.

Intending and Doing

The first distinction is between what we intend and what we actually do. Most of us hold good values and describe them well. Fewer of us have checked whether our calendars and inboxes say the same thing.

Chris Argyris and Donald Schön called this the difference between our espoused theory and our theory-in-use: the theory we believe we’re acting from and the theory our behavior actually follows. Few of us notice the difference from the inside.¹ The people watching us often see it plainly.

For me, transparency became real when it showed up in small, visible choices: what a meeting was for, what an email said, who stayed in the loop. Once a value shows up in choices a colleague can see, people can rely on it. There’s a quiet joy in watching that happen.

Deciding and Updating

The second distinction is between meetings that decide and meetings that merely update. We’ve all sat in the second kind. Someone reads status aloud, everyone nods, and the real decision happens later somewhere else. Steven Rogelberg, a researcher who studies meetings at work, observes that most companies and leaders treat poor meetings as an unavoidable cost of doing business.² People pick up the lesson quickly: this meeting is optional.

Meetings earn their place when they decide something, and anything that can simply be read can travel by email. Updates work best when they inform rather than perform. Researchers who study organizational transparency judge it by the quality of shared information: whether it’s sufficient, clear, and accurate.³ A flood of status text and graphs fail that test. Being open takes judgment about what belongs in the open, and honesty about what doesn’t. The reward is people who show up because their time is worth it.

Repeating and Learning

The third distinction is between what we repeat and what others learn. We rarely get to choose the actual lesson we’d like someone to learn, because observers draw lessons from behaviors, not slides. Picture a leader who answers messages late at night and never announces an expectation about late night messaging. The team learns one anyway. Psychologist Albert Bandura observed that most human behavior is learned by watching others.⁴ Culture spreads the same way, and researchers who spent a decade studying workplace cultures found that you can hear it in the words people use every day.⁵

In an earlier Dispatch, I wrote about what we quietly tolerate. Tolerance is one of the loudest things we repeat.

Here’s a small practice I’d offer for this week: pick one behavior you repeat, such as how you open a meeting, how you answer a message, or how you handle bad news. Imagine a newcomer watching it for a month. What would they conclude about how things work here? If you like the answer, keep going. If you don’t, change that one thing and watch what follows.

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Culture is being built whether we design it or not. These three distinctions give us a way to see it: what we intend against what we do, meetings that decide against meetings that update, and what we repeat against what others learn. Each one begins with noticing.

When we notice with care, we begin to steward the influence we already carry. A team that knows where it stands and a meeting worth attending are ordinary ways of serving the people we lead, and doing that well is a quiet form of excellence that people feel as joy. The Presence Field, a one-page tool in The Joyful Excellence Playbook™, holds three prompts for stepping into any room: what is already present, what I am signaling, and how I will hold the space.

What is one behavior you repeat every week that someone new to your team would learn from without a word being said?

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