Anxiety Wearing a Suit

The Quietest Man on the Door

What eleven years as a doorman taught me about urgency, control and the truth:

A Saturday in Catford, gone midnight and the second queue surge is in full flow now the pubs have closed. A man at the front of the queue has decided tonight is the night. He's shouting, squaring up and the youngest lad on the door is matching him decibel for decibel. That younger lad was me...

The face I thought was strength

Then Ricky, the oldest doorman on the team walks over. He doesn't raise his voice. He says one sentence, quietly, close enough that only the man can hear it. The man looks at him for a second, then turns and walks away.

I spent almost eleven years on doors before I ever wore a suit to work. I thought I'd left those nights behind. It took me years to see that the most useful thing I learned there was the thing I'd forgotten first: the strongest person in the room is rarely the loudest.

Corporate life taught me the opposite. It rewarded motion. Fast replies, full diaries, a list of actions at the end of every meeting. When something went wrong, the leader who moved first looked like the leader in charge. So, I moved first. I was good at it. I learned, slowly and later than I'd like, that urgency can look like strength, but often it is just anxiety wearing a suit.

The shift, when it came, and I was working for the leading LPG company in Poland was a single question. I stopped asking "How do we fix this fastest?" and started asking "What is actually happening here?" That one change altered my leadership more than any strategy I ever wrote.

The Greeks understood this. Apollo was their god of light and truth, and the words carved at his temple at Delphi were know thyself. Not as an invitation to introspection, but as orientation. Before you act, see where you are standing.

Apollo's power was never in volume. It was in precision. He was, in his way, the quietest man on the door.

Here is what I didn't understand at twenty-two, or even at forty. The doorman shouting back at the man in the queue wasn’t being strong. He was frightened, and the noise was how he held on. The same is true in the boardroom. When a leader can't bear what the numbers, the client or the team are really telling them, they reach for control. Tighter reporting. More approvals. Another initiative. It feels like grip. It's usually fear with a project plan.

A leader who fears the truth will always reach for control. The leader who can face the truth no longer needs it.

I never asked Ricky what he said to that man - a missed learning opportunity....