🔥 5 Minutes of Leadership Fuel
✉️ This post is part of The 5-Minute Mentor — my weekly leadership newsletter. If you’d like to get it delivered straight to your inbox, click here to subscribe.
Welcome to The 5-Minute Mentor — your weekly dose of leadership inspiration, curated resources, and practical action. All in under 5 minutes.
Activating Your Genius in 5,4,3,2,1… 🤩
🫶 A Dose of Inspiration
“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.”
— John Buchan
There’s something beautiful and freeing in this. You don’t have to manufacture your team’s potential… it’s already there. Your job is simply to create the conditions where it can show up and blossom.
📥 Download the quote graphic to use in your next staff email or meeting.
🤓 A Dose of Learning
Here’s the uncomfortable truth Liz Wiseman’s research surfaces: the way you lead can double what your team brings to the table… or cut it in half.
Liz, author of Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter, shared her research recently on an episode of the Radical Candor podcast. She found that leaders who diminish only access 48% of their people’s intelligence, know-how, and insight. Leaders who multiply get 95%. Same people. Twice the contribution. As Wiseman puts it, multipliers are getting the whole person instead of half the person.
And here’s the thing: most of the diminishing that happens at work doesn’t come from tyrants (although she does address those unfortunate types.) It comes from good leaders. Well-intentioned ones. People who care about their teams and would be horrified to learn they’re shrinking the very people they’re trying to elevate.
She calls them accidental diminishers. And the reason they’re so hard to spot is that each one is simply a strength, overplayed. Wiseman groups them into three clusters:
⚡️ The Over-Energetic Leader
Your energy fills the room… and leaves no room for anyone else.
- The Always-On leader – so charged up that people feel drained and start avoiding you
- The Idea Fountain – you toss out ideas (and lots of them) to think out loud, but your team hears marching orders and scrambles to act on all of them
💚 The Ruinously Empathetic Leader
Your care becomes their cage.
- The Rescuer – jumping in to help, you quietly teach people they can’t do it without you
- The Protector – you shield people from difficult situations, so they never build the muscle to handle them
- The Optimist – your “it’ll be fine!” leaves people feeling unseen in how hard the work actually is
🧠 The Over-Thinker
You carry all the cognitive weight, so no one else has to… or gets to.
- The Strategist – you do all the big thinking, so the team is left to only follow and execute their small slice
- The Perfectionist – nothing’s ever quite good enough, so people stop bringing their best, because it’ll just get redone
Notice what they all share: not malice, but strengths overplayed with the best of intentions. That’s what makes this so valuable. The question isn’t “Am I a diminisher?” It’s “Which of these can I most easily slip into?”
🎧 Listen to the episode here: Radical Candor: Liz Wiseman – Great Leaders Make Everyone Better
🎯 A Dose of Action
Awareness is the first step. But the real shift happens in the small moments… the meeting, the hallway, the email thread where you feel the pull to jump in. This week, pick the cluster you saw yourself in and try its counter-move:
If you’re Over-Energetic: Before you share the next idea, pause and ask one question instead. Let someone else fill the space you’d normally fill. Your restraint is their room to think.
If you’re Ruinously Empathetic: Find the moment you’d normally rescue… and don’t. Ask “What do you think you’ll do?” instead of “Here’s what I’d do.” Let them struggle productively. That’s where capability grows.
If you’re an Over-Thinker: Hand someone a real piece of the thinking, not just the execution. Give them 51% of the vote on something that matters, and 100% of the ownership. Then give their version your support, even if it’s not how you’d have done it.
The thread through all three: make room. Diminishing, even the accidental kind, is almost always about taking up space that would create more if it belonged to someone else, putting a lid on their genius. Multiplying is the discipline of leaving it open, elevating their contribution.
You got this. Let’s lead with belief.
In your corner,
Melody
Founder, Culture of Belief
PS: Even the bookshelves have imposter syndrome now… 📚😂
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