Nobody talks about the batteries.
Leadership conversations at CxO level focus on vision, decision-making, stakeholder alignment, strategic clarity. The instrument metaphors are always about the light itself. The reach, the direction, the beam.
What depletes the instrument rarely makes it into the conversation.
We worked with a COO who was, by every visible measure, performing well. The board was satisfied. The team was moving. The results were holding. When we asked her, quietly, how she was actually doing, she stopped for a moment longer than usual.
“I think I’ve been running on reserve for a while.”
She had not noticed the gradual dimming. It had happened slowly enough to normalize. The beam was still on. She was still moving. But the quality of the light had changed, and with it, the quality of what she could see.
This is one of the less visible risks at the top. The instrument does not fail dramatically. It fades. Decisions that once felt clear become slightly harder to read. Signals that would normally register start arriving muffled. The leader keeps walking, because stopping feels like failure, and the dark feels safer to manage through motion than through stillness.
Maintaining the batteries is not self-care in the soft sense of the word. It is a leadership discipline. Knowing what depletes you, knowing what restores you, and building both into the structure of how you lead.
The flashlight is yours. So is the responsibility to keep it working.
This is part of our series: In the dark. On purpose. To be continued…