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Opening Salvo
Scoring higher on an engagement survey than the people you lead doesn't mean you like the organization you're running. It means you have more clarity, more autonomy, and more discretion than they do, and those structural conditions will produce a higher score whether or not you believe in the direction, trust the culture you inherited, or would have built any of this the way it was built before you got here.
I've coached enough senior leaders, including those who just inherited someone else's org and those who built theirs from the ground up, to know that the ones who are most dangerous to their organizations aren't the ones who are openly checked out. They're the ones who are present, capable, scoring fine on the survey, and operating like passengers on a ride they have every discretion and delegation to drive. The data doesn't capture that, but I do.
Practical Personas (with a tinge of hyperbole)
The Inherited Skeptic: They took over an org that was already mid-drift and spent the first year learning the landscape, the second building relationships, and somewhere in the third the diagnosis they had on day one became institutional knowledge they carry without acting on. The window between arriving with a mandate to change things and becoming part of the thing that needs changing is shorter than most leaders want to believe, and they've been in it longer than they'd admit.
The Comfortable Critic: They have the sharpest read in the room on what's broken and they use it, in the right meetings, with the right people, with enough frequency that naming the dysfunction has become their organizational identity. What that identity doesn't require is ownership of the fix, and the org has been getting the diagnosis without the intervention long enough that both parties have gotten comfortable with the arrangement.
The Reluctant Owner: They have the discretion, the delegation, the relationships, and the credibility to move the org in a materially different direction, and the reason it hasn't happened shifts depending on the quarter. Budget cycle, leadership transition, the reorg that just landed. Each reason is legitimate enough to defer on its own and collectively they've added up to a posture that looks like patience and functions like avoidance.
Ask Yourself
If you removed every structural constraint you're currently citing as the reason change hasn't happened yet, what would you do differently starting Monday, and what does your answer tell you about how much of the delay is structural and how much of it is yours?
Think about the org you're leading right now. If you had built it yourself from scratch, would you have built it this way, and what does your answer tell you about the distance between the org you're running and the one you're actually willing to own?
The data will keep confirming you're more engaged than the people you lead. That number doesn't tell you whether you're leading or just occupying the seat, and only one of those is actually in your purview.
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The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.
Talent Management 101 (TM101)
Authority Without Psychological Ownership
Julian Rotter introduced locus of control in 1954 to describe the degree to which people believe outcomes are within their own control rather than determined by external forces. Leaders who operate from an internal locus treat their discretion as the primary variable in what the org becomes. Those who operate from an external locus treat the system, the predecessor, the board, the budget cycle, and the culture they inherited as the primary variables, and their discretion becomes something they manage carefully rather than deploy deliberately. The passenger posture is less of a motivational failure, and more of what an external locus looks like at the top of the org chart, in the seat with the most authority to change things and the most sophisticated set of external explanations for why the timing isn't right yet. And when the felt ownership of the org erodes alongside it, the two conditions reinforce each other, and the organization gets a senior leader in name and a passenger in practice.
Why It Happens
Inherited orgs produce inherited postures: Leaders who take over existing organizations absorb the political landscape, the cultural norms, and the implicit rules about what's changeable before they've established enough credibility to challenge them. The diagnostic clarity they arrived with gets gradually replaced by organizational fluency, and fluency in a broken system is its own form of accommodation.
External locus of control gets rewarded in complex organizations: In environments where outcomes depend on multiple stakeholders, boards, budgets, and legacy decisions, attributing results to external forces is often accurate enough to be credible. The senior leader who cites systemic constraints isn't wrong that the constraints exist. What gets obscured is whether those constraints are as fixed as the explanation requires them to be.
Naming the problem substitutes for owning the fix: Organizations with strong diagnostic cultures, where naming dysfunction is valued and visible, can inadvertently create conditions where the diagnosis satisfies the expectation for leadership without producing the accountability that should follow it. The leader who sees it clearly gets credit for seeing it, and the org waits for the intervention that the credit was supposed to signal.
The Question Organizations Avoid
If the senior leaders with the most discretion in your organization are also the ones with the most comprehensive explanations for why the conditions for change aren't right yet, the question worth sitting with isn't whether the constraints are real. It's whether the constraints are being used to lead or to wait, and who in the org is absorbing the cost of the difference.
The Plug
This newsletter is brought to you by AstutEdge, a performance improvement consultancy. We help organizations close the gap between what leadership intends and what actually gets executed by fixing the misalignment in people, systems, and structure that stalls results.
We work through consulting engagements and coaching. If your organization is producing effort without outcomes, let's talk.
Visit astutedge.com or share this with a leader who feels the drag.