After two years of working together — navigating conflict, influence, feedback, executive presence, and offering tools to help address the full complexity of senior leadership — we asked our client the question we always ask at the end of an engagement: What was most useful? What stands out?
She didn’t hesitate.
“You told me to get up and get a glass of water between meetings.”
We’ll be honest: we paused. We had spent two years exploring sophisticated frameworks for managing triggers, wielding influence, and delivering hard feedback. We had gone deep. And the thing she remembered most was… a glass of water.
But here’s what she taught us.
The walk to the kitchen wasn’t really about thirst. It was a ritual, a physical interruption between one thing and the next. A moment of transition that most of us have engineered completely out of our days. In a calendar full of back-to-back meetings, she had created a small, deliberate pause. And in that pause, she had learned to ask herself a simple but powerful question: “What part of me do I need to bring into the next meeting?”
For our client, that question changed everything.
She remembered her agency. She remembered her presence. She wasn’t just a participant but someone who actively shaped what was about to happen. The water break re-engaged her agency in a way that no framework had quite managed to do.
She remembered change starts in tiny ways. This is one of the things we don’t say enough in leadership development: transformation is sometimes (always?) tiny. Sometimes it arrives in a two-minute walk down the hall. The recognition that small actions carry real weight is a more accurate map of how change works.
She remembered her sphere of influence as a culture creator. She started recommending to her teams that all meetings become 50 minutes instead of an hour. Not as a policy handed down from above, but as an idea she believed in and modeled herself. It spread. It became the culture in her department. What began as a personal practice became a structural change that gave everyone a moment to breathe, reset, and show up more intentionally.
That’s what we mean when we talk about the sphere of influence. Change doesn’t need a grand gesture, official policy, or reorganization. Our client changed culture by building into her world a ten-minute buffer that said: the space between things matters. You matter in it.
We share this story not because we think everyone needs to drink more water (though, honestly, you probably do). We share it because senior leaders are often looking for the next sophisticated tool, the next framework, the next edge. But sometimes, the tool is right there. All you need is permission to pause. To walk away from your desk for ninety seconds. To ask yourself who you want to be in the room you’re about to walk into.