A lot of leaders are quietly asking the same thing right now: which parts of what I do still matter, when so much can be done faster without me? Here's where I'd look first. In Gallup's strengths work, Individualization is the theme of noticing what one person on your team needs that nobody else in the room needs. The thing they're good at that never shows up on a dashboard. The reason one of them went quiet in the last meeting. That kind of noticing holds up, because it only happens when a real person is paying attention to another real person. So try this in your next one-on-one. Before you get to deliverables, say out loud the one thing you've noticed this person does better than anyone else on the team. Be specific. Then watch what it does to the rest of the conversation. The leaders who keep mattering are the ones who stay close enough to notice. Hard to automate, easy to stop doing.

Someone caught me after a talk last month. Not right after. Three weeks later, in a hallway. She didn't say "great talk." She repeated one line back to me, in her own words, and told me she'd used it in a meeting that morning. That's the compliment I've started paying attention to. "You seemed so confident" fades by lunch. The line someone carries into their own week is the one that actually landed. So I'm curious: what's a compliment after a talk that meant more to you than it probably looked like from the outside?

Last week someone ran a pitch past me in a session. Five minutes, clean slides, a good story. She stopped, looked up, waited. So I asked one question. "What do you want us to do now?" Silence. Then, "I guess... think about it?" That's the gap I see in most pitches. Not the structure, not the delivery. The ending just sort of stops. A pitch carries a verb. Sign. Pilot it. Approve the budget. Say yes by Friday. The whole talk exists to make that one action feel obvious by the time you stop speaking. Before you build your next one, finish this sentence first: "When I stop talking, I want them to ___." If you can't put a verb in that blank, the slides aren't ready yet.

In sessions with women stepping into bigger roles, I keep noticing the same gap. They pour energy into being visible. Posting more, speaking up more, raising a hand in the room. Visibility gets you seen. What people actually carry around is a sentence. The one they use to describe you when you're not in the room. So find out what yours is right now. Ask two colleagues how they'd describe what you do. Then hold it next to the sentence you want repeated. When those don't match, that's where the real work sits.

There's a pitch tool I keep coming back to. I call it Today/Tomorrow, and it's about as simple as it sounds: before you say a word about what you're selling, you describe the world as it is for them right now, then the world as it could be once they say yes. Most people pour their energy into the tomorrow. The vision, the after, the better version of things. That part feels like the persuasion. What I see in live sessions is the reverse. The today sentence does the heavy lifting. If you describe someone's current reality accurately enough that they think "yes, that's exactly it," they'll trust almost everything that comes after. The recognition buys the belief. Get the today wrong, and tomorrow just sounds like a brochure. Try this in your next pitch: write one sentence that names where your audience is stuck today. Not a problem in general. Their problem, in the words they'd actually use. Say it out loud. If they'd nod, you've earned the next thirty seconds. Then, and only then, paint the tomorrow. What's the "today" sentence you open with right now, and would your audience really recognize themselves in it?