Every system we move through runs on norms: rules and agreements that are both explicit and implicit. And nowhere are they more powerful–or more invisible–than in how we lead and how we build our businesses. 

In fact, sociologists have consistently found that norms don’t announce themselves. 

They travel through families, schools, workplaces, and entire cultures through repetition and imitation, often persisting long after the conditions that created them have changed. We absorb them before we can name them. And once they are inside us, they feel like “just the way things are.”

In leadership development the norms run so deep we have mistaken them for truth. As a result, the model leader–despite decades of language to the contrary–still looks and sounds like a very particular kind of person.

My guest today offers that leadership development has been trying to make better leaders for a broken system, rather than questioning whether the system itself needs to change. 

Nilofer Merchant has spent her career making the invisible visible–naming the norms, the systems, the daily routines that keep us collectively stuck. In this conversation, we go deep on the difference between caring and caretaking, what it means to trust yourself when the ground keeps disappearing, and what it actually takes to stop trying to fix what is not working and become someone who builds what is needed, right where you are.

Nilofer Merchant is the co-founder of Intangible Labs. She spent over 25 years leading technology companies (Apple, Autodesk, GoLive/Adobe) and personally launched over 100 products and services, netting $18 billion in revenues. She is ranked among the top 50 influential management thinkers in the world (one of her TED Talks has been referenced 300 million times). Our Best Work is her 4th book.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

• Why accepting our current norms won’t get leaders where they want to go
• How what we call personal agency is in reality socially constructed and driven
• Why we need more real care and less caretaking in our relationships at work and in life
• How teams can shift towards situational leadership and recentering how we think about the unique value and capabilities individuals bring
• How ownership, shared purpose, and co-creation help us build new systems, unstuck from the status quo
• Nilofer’s lessons about self-trust, taking risks, and approaching the future of work with hope

Learn more about Nilofer Merchant:

• Website
• The Intangible Labs
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nilofer/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nilofer.merchant
• Connect on LinkedIn
• Our Best Work: Break Free from the 24 Invisible Norms That Limit Us

Learn more about Rebecca:

• rebeccaching.com
• Work With Rebecca
• The Unburdened Leader on Substack
• Sign up for the weekly Unburdened Leader Email

Resources:

• The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World
• Mary Parker Follett
• Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• Prizefighter – Mumford & Sons
• Law & Order
• Dire Straits – Money For Nothing
• Duran Duran – Hungry like the Wolf
• The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant