Leading by Example, By Accident

On how your autopilot quietly becomes everyone else’s job description.

Leaders should lead by example.

Nice sentence. Looks good on posters. Perfect for the last slide in a deck that nobody reads.

In real life, it usually means this: whatever you do on autopilot becomes somebody else’s job description.

You don’t announce a new rule. Just live it once or twice, and the team quietly updates their operating system.

You answer emails at 23:07 a couple of nights in a row, because you couldn’t sleep and the phone was there and inbox zero sounded better than doomscrolling. Nobody says anything. Next week, people are apologising in the morning for replying “so late” at 22:30.

You tell yourself, “It’s fine, I don’t expect anyone to reply right away.”
They tell themselves, “Apparently this is when we work now.”

You skip lunch all week because there’s a deadline and you’re “just not hungry anyway”. A month later, you hear someone proudly say, “We’re really in sprint mode right now,” while eating a sad sandwich over the keyboard. You didn’t set a standard. You just made not-eating look professional.

You join every meeting “just to stay in the loop.” You’re being supportive. Present. Available. Also, everyone now feels weird declining invitations, because if the boss has time for this recurring 12-person sync, who are they to say no?

Nothing was written down. No policy changed. You simply led by example, completely by accident.

And it’s not just at work. At home it’s even more obvious.

I keep telling my son to put the phone away.
“Enough screen time.”
“Give your brain a break.”
“Do something else for a bit.”

On a recent road trip we did together, same story: I’m telling him to look out the window, notice the landscape, be present. Meanwhile I’m half scrolling, half pretending to “just check the route” for the fifth time in ten minutes. He’s supposed to enjoy the moment; I’m apparently exempt, because mine is “for navigation”.

Ten seconds later, I’m checking my phone again.
Notification.
News.
Message.
Nothing important, just the usual adult thumb gymnastics disguised as “I’m just checking something quickly.”

At some point he looks at me and asks the obvious question:
“Why do you get to be on your phone all the time and I don’t?”

And I hear myself say something like:
“You don’t need to do the same things I do. I’m trying to make sure you don’t end up completely fried with whatever version of adult ADHD I’ve built for myself.”

Which is technically an answer, but also complete nonsense.
The example I’m actually giving him is simple: phones are fine, we just pretend they aren’t.
He listens to the words, but he sees the behaviour. Guess which one wins.

Same pattern, different setting. At work you call it “commitment” or “ownership”. At home you call it “just five minutes”. The actual lesson is the same: what you do on autopilot has more weight than whatever speech you’ve prepared about it.

There’s also the noble line many managers love: “I’d never ask you to do something I wouldn’t do myself.”

On paper, it’s fair. In practice, it’s a trap.

If you’re the kind of person who automatically takes on extra work, stays late without complaining, cleans up messes that aren’t technically yours, and quietly absorbs stress so the team doesn’t have to… guess what becomes the baseline?

Not because you demanded sacrifice. Because you modeled it.

Your personal tolerance for chaos and overload becomes the new normal. People don’t see your inner monologue of “just this week, just this project”. They see: “Apparently, this is what commitment looks like here.”

That’s how “leading by example” turns into “making everyone else feel permanently behind.”

The same thing happens with hero mode. You step in, rewrite the document at the last minute, take over the tough call with the client, jump into the project that’s going off the rails.

The work gets saved, yes. Short term, everyone is grateful. Long term, the system learns a different lesson: when things really matter, we wait for you to show up and fix it. Ownership quietly shifts upwards, while the calendar fills up with “just one more thing I should probably look at.”

You think you’re demonstrating standards. Often you’re demonstrating dependency.

The annoying part is that you can’t really opt out. The moment you’re in any kind of leadership role, you are always teaching. Not with what you say in town halls, but with what you actually do on a random Tuesday:

• what you answer immediately and what you ignore
• what you let slide and what you stop the meeting for
• what you joke about and what you refuse to joke about

That’s the real handbook. Nobody prints it. Everybody reads it.

There’s no neat framework at the end of this. Just a couple of questions worth sitting with for a week:

What are you currently normalising without meaning to?
What do people copy from you that you secretly wish they wouldn’t?
What would actually happen if you stopped being the heroic example, at work and at home, for a month?

“Leading by example” isn’t optional. You’re doing it already.
The only choice you really have is whether the example matches the culture you say you want, or the one you’ll pretend you never created.