The people closest to you — your family, your team — are not just witnesses to your work. They are, as the philosopher Martin Buber argued in *I and Thou* (1923), the very medium through which you become fully real to yourself. Buber's distinction was sharp: there is a mode of encounter where you treat others as objects in your orbit (what he called I-It), and a mode where you meet them as complete subjects whose reality presses back against yours (I-Thou). Most high-performing people, without noticing, spend their leadership hours in I-It mode — efficient, goal-directed, treating even their closest collaborators as instruments of outcomes they've already decided on. The organizational psychologist Amy Edmondson's research on surgical teams found something Buber would have recognized: the highest-performing units weren't the ones with the most talented individuals but the ones where members felt genuinely *seen* — where the leader's gaze was I-Thou, not I-It. The practical implication is strange and specific: your next conversation with someone who matters, try to notice the exact moment you stop listening to them and start composing your response. That moment is the switch from Thou to It. Catching it — just catching it — is already a form of leadership that no productivity system can teach.

Who in your closest circle have you been treating as a function — someone who performs a role — rather than as a person whose inner life is pressing against yours right now?

Drawing from Jewish Existential Philosophy combined with Organizational Psychology — Martin Buber (I and Thou, 1923) and Amy Edmondson (The Fearless Organization, 2018)