The Ripple You Don’t See
Any idea how many people at work have impacted your life in a positive way?
Not in a transactional sense. Not “they helped me hit a deadline” or “they gave me a good review.” Actually changed how you think, how you work, or how you see yourself at work. If you sat down and made the list, I suspect it would be longer than you expect. And I suspect most of those people have no idea they’re on it.
My leader left recently. Senior, experienced, the kind of person who had real influence over how the org operated and how people inside it felt about their work.
After they left, I started having conversations. And I kept running into the same thing. People I didn’t expect to know them well. People who had a story. A real one. Not “we were on a project together.” Something more personal. Something that stuck. The reach of their impact was wider than the org chart suggested, and it was moving in directions I hadn’t anticipated.
That’s the thing about presence. It doesn’t follow reporting lines.
We tend to measure workplace impact vertically. Scope, headcount, results. These aren’t bad measures. But they mostly capture what flows through authority. They largely miss what flows through how someone actually shows up. The way they remembered details about your life. The way they pushed back without making you defensive. The way they made the work feel like something shared rather than something transacted.
That kind of impact is hard to quantify. It doesn’t show up cleanly in a performance review. But it absolutely shows up in a culture, stretched across hundreds of small moments, shaping what people believe about the place they work and the people they work alongside.
When someone like that leaves, you feel it before you can name it. Something is quieter. Something is slightly less warm. The cost is real. It just doesn’t appear on a balance sheet.
Why does this stay invisible for so long? Because organizations are wired to notice outputs, not inputs. The deliverable. The result. We are far less practiced at noticing the texture of someone’s presence. These things resist measurement, so they resist recognition, until the absence forces the accounting.
There’s also the pace. When you’re heads-down and moving fast, you don’t often stop to say: this person is making my work life meaningfully better. You feel it. You don’t name it until they’re gone.
I found myself turning the lens inward. Where am I showing up that way? Where am I not? I know there are people I connect with deeply. Real mutual impact. And I know there are others where it simply doesn’t click. I can’t manufacture warmth. But I can be more intentional about where I’m bringing it, and where I’m letting the pace of the day make me less present than I want to be.
For those of us in HR who support leaders, there’s an additional layer. We don’t just need to think about how we show up. We also need to help the leaders we support see this in themselves. A leader’s presence scales. Their patterns, the texture of their attention, travel through the organization in ways that are hard to trace and impossible to miss.
This is not soft stuff. The quality of presence inside a team shapes what people are willing to try, willing to say, and willing to stay for.
Go back to that opening question. Make the list. Then ask yourself: do the people on it know they’re on it?
And while you’re at it. Do you know who has you on theirs?