Mimicry is the most underestimated force in organizational life. Not plagiarism — the subtler thing where people unconsciously adopt the emotional register, pace, and reasoning style of whoever holds status near them. The sociologist Gabriel Tarde argued this a century before social psychology caught up: imitation is not a derivative of social life, it is its engine. What this means practically is unsettling. When a senior person in a meeting speaks with false certainty, the room doesn't push back — it recalibrates toward false certainty. When someone influential treats shortcuts as sophistication, the team doesn't notice the norm shifting; it just shifts. The behavior you model in your highest-stakes moments becomes the ambient standard your team operates by without ever deciding to. Today, before your first meeting of consequence, notice what emotional and intellectual posture you're bringing in — because it will spread, whether you intended it to or not.

In the last difficult conversation you were part of, what did others in the room start doing that matched your energy — and was that what you'd have chosen to spread?

Drawing from Social philosophy / sociology of imitation — Gabriel Tarde