I want to tell you about a pattern I hear described more often than I’d like.
Someone works for a leader who is capable, often impressive, and, by all external accounts, doing a good job. Their peers respect them. Their boss trusts them. The results are there.
And yet every day, the people who report to this leader start their morning with a version of the same question: What are we going to get today?
Not in a good way.
They’ve learned to read the signals — the pace of the footsteps coming down the hall, the tone of a brief email, whether the door is open or half-closed. They’ve become fluent in an anxious kind of anticipation, because the leader is so inconsistent that any moment could be warmth or volatility, and they can never tell which until it arrives.
When a leader is unpredictable, the people around them don’t just get anxious. They get vigilant. And vigilance is exhausting — because it never fully turns off.
Some leaders create this intentionally. They subscribe to the philosophy that keeping people slightly off-balance keeps them sharp. That uncertainty is a form of motivation.
That’s not the leadership I promote. And in my experience, it’s not leadership at all — it’s control masquerading as a leadership style.
Often, the unpredictable leader isn’t doing any of this on purpose. They’re busy. They’re stressed. They’re running on whatever’s happening internally that day, and they’re not paying attention to the signal they’re sending. The impact is the same regardless.
Here’s what makes this particularly damaging: when people can’t predict how their leader will respond, they stop taking initiative. They stop speaking up. They stop bringing problems forward, because the cost of a bad-day reaction feels too high. The leader walks around thinking everything is fine — because nothing’s being raised — while the team has quietly learned that raising things isn’t safe.
And here’s the piece that often goes unexamined: many of these same leaders hold their teams accountable to expectations that were never clearly communicated. They’re frustrated when work doesn’t meet a standard they assumed was obvious. They’re reacting to outcomes as if the requirements were unambiguous — when in reality, the only thing the team knew for certain was that they didn’t know what was coming.
Accountability for unstated expectations isn’t accountability. It’s blame.
The gap between those two things is enormous. And it starts with the leader’s willingness to ask an uncomfortable question: Have I actually made it clear what I need, how I’m going to measure it, and what the standards are? Or have I been holding people responsible for a bar I never showed them?
This is where accountability — real accountability — has to begin: with the leader.
If you’re curious whether this pattern might be showing up in your organization, or if you’re a leader who wants to lead differently, I’d love to connect.
Photo by Uday Mittal on Unsplash
