Fault Lines

Last week marked my 100th straight weekly article.

As I sat down to write the next 100, the question wasn’t what to write.

It was:

How do I make these matter even more?

So, I did what I often do in these moments…

I sat quietly and thought about the people I speak with every week… leaders, professionals, executives, people trying to figure out why things feel harder than they should.

And an underlying theme emerged.

People aren’t just dealing with pressure.
They aren’t just tired.
They aren’t just uncertain.

They’re living inside something they can feel… but can’t quite name.

But I will…

Leadership risk.

What Gets Measured

In the corporate world, we measure everything.

We track metrics like we’re trying to control gravity.

Dashboards.
Heat maps.
Risk registers.
Quarterly reporting.
Escalations.
Committees.
More committees.

But here’s the part that always bothered me…

The biggest risk in the building is often the one nobody names.

Because it’s uncomfortable.
Because it’s political.
Because it’s human.

It’s the risk created by the people who lead.

It’s not that they’re bad people.

But because they’re human beings under stress.

And under stress, people do predictable things:

They avoid.
They deflect.
They protect themselves.
They stop telling the truth.
They start managing perception.

And when leaders do that…

Everything downstream gets ugly.

Simply put…

Leadership Risk is what happens when the behaviors at the top (or the middle) quietly create conditions that increase exposure everywhere else.

What It Sounds Like

If you’ve spent time inside organizations, some of these will feel familiar:

“Let’s not escalate this right now.”

“We just need to get through the quarter.”

“Be a team player.”

“I need solutions, not problems.”

None of these sound catastrophic.

But repeated over time, they reshape the environment.

Truth gets filtered.
Accountability softens.
Decisions drift toward what protects careers rather than outcomes.

People start managing perception instead of reality.

Good people begin second-guessing themselves.

High performers quietly disengage.

And nothing on the dashboard moves… until it does…

By then the story sounds very different:

“Everyone knew the risk. No one escalated it.”

“We kept adding resources, but the decisions never got clearer.”

“We committed to an impossible timeline… and paid for it for years.”

“We spent millions fixing what could have been prevented with one brave conversation.”

By the time organizations are saying these things, the problem isn’t emerging.

It has already happened.

The Bill Comes Due

Organizations rarely label these dynamics directly.

Instead, they measure the downstream outcomes:

Turnover.
Missed targets.
Operational failures.
Reputational damage.
Burnout.
“Culture issues.”

By the time those metrics move, the underlying conditions have usually been present for years.

This is exactly why I’ve shifted a large part of my work toward helping organizations see the risk they aren’t seeing… the human patterns that quietly amplify every other category of risk they already track and pay for daily.

It requires humility.

Because once you see the conditions clearly, you can’t pretend they don’t exist.

The Uncomfortable Questions

If you are accountable for the leaders in your organization, the issue isn’t whether this risk exists.

Of course it does.

The real question is:

What are we choosing not to see because dealing with it would be uncomfortable?

When leaders don’t deal with it, everyone else feels it.

And if you’re not the one in charge… but you’re the one living with those consequences, consider this:

It’s easy to assume the problem is you.

But it may not be a failure of your effort.

It may be exposure to conditions no individual can solve alone.

You don’t escape unhealthy dynamics by proving how much effort you’re putting in.

You change your position by making your impact undeniable.

Build “proof of impact”, not “proof of effort”.

One changes how others see you.
The other only exhausts you.

Beneath It All

Fault lines don’t appear when the earthquake hits.

They were there long before… invisible, silent, easy to ignore while everything felt stable.

Organizations are no different.

Leadership risk isn’t something that suddenly shows up during crisis.
It lives in the human dynamics that exist every day… incentives, fears, blind spots, avoided conversations, unresolved tensions.

Most of the time, nothing visible happens.

Until pressure builds.

Deadlines tighten. Stakes rise. Markets shift. Mistakes compound.
And when the system finally moves, it doesn’t break at random.

It breaks along the lines that were already weak.

That’s why great leadership isn’t about eliminating pressure.
Pressure is inevitable.

It’s about understanding where the human fault lines are…
and strengthening the structure before stress tests them.

Because leadership risk isn’t the pressure.
It’s the uncomfortable human reality the pressure was always going to reveal.

P.S. My forthcoming book, Leadership at the Dinner Table explores leadership risk and its real-world ripple effects more deeply. Sign-up for the waitlist!

With Absolute Sincerity,

Ed Clementi
Founder & CEO of Inspired Fire, LLC

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