A Leader’s Overdrawn Account

September 17, 2025

Expectations. We all have them.

They are the silent contracts we draft in our minds, but it seems we write them with a leaky felt pen.

The ink bleeds,

it smudges,

and it leaves indelible stains on our relationships.

In leadership, these inky expectations carry a special kind of weight.

As a team, we treat our expectations as an investment—a clandestine wire transfer of trust and effort sent with the best of intentions and zero confirmation.

We expect this deposit to mature like a fine wine, forgetting we never actually told the ‘banker’ about the money, let alone checked if she even likes wine.

But here lies the maddening paradox: what feels like a deposit to us is often experienced as a withdrawal by our leader.

Without a conversation, that mental deposit slip vanishes. All the leader feels is a sudden, alarming ping from their emotional bank account—a withdrawal for "Providing Optimism on a Rainy Tuesday" or a service fee for "Knowing What I Meant, Not What I Said."

This is the moment leaders start to fracture.

Buried under countless invisible transactions, they feel less like a visionary and more like an ATM...

Perpetually out of cash.

Overdrawn.

Resentful.

...and about to display that one dreaded message: "Unable to Process Your Request."

The Ghosts in the Machine

So, how did this account get so dangerously overdrawn?

The answer is simple: ghosts.

Every organization is a haunted house, filled with the ghosts of leaders past.

Their memories, habits, and precedents are etched into the team's muscle memory. A new leader thinks they have an empty room to design, but they are navigating a space crowded with invisible relics—beloved heirlooms and forgotten booby traps.

Unknowingly, they trip over the shag carpet of "how we used to do things" or try to walk through a door sealed shut by years of mistrust.

They are living in someone else's house, judged for bumping into furniture they cannot see, and slowly going mad trying to figure out why the walls keep moving.

From Haunted Victim to the Invisible Woman

Stumbling through this haunted house, it’s easy to wish you could just disappear.

We start acting like the Fantastic Four's Sue Storm in her earliest days, when her only power was to turn invisible and hide.

But that’s not where her story—or yours—ends.

Sue Storm’s true power isn't disappearing. It's her ability to take that same energy and project it outward, creating something tangible, solid, and visible: a force field.

A leader's job is to stop being a victim of invisibility and start projecting a force field of clarity. You do this not with superhuman energy, but with proactive communication.

Define "Support": Instead of letting your team guess, create a visible construct. Know your non-negotiables and verbalize them.

Ask: "What does active support from me look like for you in this situation?"

Reveal "Success": Make unspoken performance expectations solid.

State: "My expectation is X. To do that, I need to see A, B, and C. What do you need from me?"

Create a Shield: Make it safe to talk about the ghosts themselves.

Invite: "Let's talk about past leaders. What was helpful? What do you hope we do differently?"

By doing this, you are no longer guessing.

You take all that ambiguous, invisible energy and give it a visible form. The expectations don't go away, but they are no longer ghosts tripping you in the dark.

They are now clear shapes contained within a structure everyone can see and navigate together.

Todd Rutkowski

Read more reflections like “A Leader’s Overdrawn Account" in my free ebook called “Lifelines.” Get Lifelines