ME06b: When Growth Becomes the Work
How Maya’s team discovered Praxis Q through the stretch of their roles
Maya had learned something simple but radical: development didn’t have to sit on top of delivery as extra effort. It could live inside the work itself.
If the right stretch was named, if the right rhythm was set, growth could happen while delivering results. Not perfectly, not tidily, but in ways that left people stronger rather than hollowed.
That was the promise of Praxis Q: one quadrant, one stretch posture, one concrete deliverable, one ripple.
Over the next 90 days, Jo, Anil, Priya, and Kieran each stepped into their quadrant. What followed wasn’t a workshop, a coaching session, or a competency model. It was the lived practice of leadership becoming developmental by design.
Jo’s Stretch — Disciplined Delivery: Making Rhythm Visible
Jo was steady. Her dashboards immaculate, her market on track, her people loyal. Yet Maya could sense brittleness under the surface. Everything was smooth, but too tightly wound, like an orchestra with no space to breathe.
Jo herself had become the rhythm. Every hand-off ran through her, every deadline echoed her vigilance. Her team executed flawlessly, but learned little. The system delivered, but didn’t evolve.
Maya began with four probes:
What parts of your rhythm energise your team — and which just keep them compliant?
If you stepped away for four weeks, what would actually break?
Do people learn as they deliver, or only repeat what works?
Could your rhythm be shared as a pattern, not just a checklist?
Jo’s answers were sharp, professional, correct. But something was missing: invitation.
So Maya named it. “Jo, you’ve become the rhythm. And you’re going to burn out. The system won’t scale unless you release it.”
Together they agreed on a 90-day experiment: externalise the rhythm. Jo would create a “Ways of Working Playbook” with her team, turning her embodied tempo into shared practice.
At first she was skeptical. But she began with one question in a retrospective: “What does delivery feel like here — and what would you change if you could?”
Her people spoke truths she hadn’t heard before:
“Everything’s smooth, but we’re scared to break it.”
“We copy you, but we don’t know why.”
“You make it look effortless. That doesn’t mean it is.”
Jo listened. Slowly, the rhythm left her body and entered the team. They co-designed rituals: stand-ups that reinforced ownership, monthly reviews with a single “why is this still here?” challenge, project kick-offs where teams shaped their own tempo.
By the end, Jo presented her playbook not as a manual, but as a living pattern. More importantly, her own posture had shifted.
“For the first time,” she told Maya, “I feel like I’m setting the pace, not chasing it.”
Her quadrant stretch was Disciplined Delivery — not in gripping harder, but in releasing rhythm so others could hold it.
Anil’s Stretch — Strategic Fluency: From Interpreter to Frame-Setter
Anil was the diplomat. Calm, trusted, the one who could turn any top-down directive into a palatable local narrative. His gift was absorption — smoothing tensions until people felt safe again.
But Maya noticed the cost. In meetings, everyone waited for Anil’s phrasing before deciding what they believed. And when asked directly what the system should prioritise, he deferred: “Let’s wait until people feel comfortable.”
Comfort, Maya knew, is a lagging indicator. Strategic coherence doesn’t appear by accident. Someone has to hold the tension long enough for shape to form.
So she asked different questions:
Are you helping the team make meaning, or just stay aligned?
When did you last leave something unresolved, letting others wrestle with it?
Where are you softening tension that might hold insight?
Anil hesitated, then confessed: “I spend most of my time calming the middle. If I speak too strongly, I lose trust. If I say nothing, we go nowhere.”
That was the tangle: visibility without certainty, authority without mandate.
His 90-day experiment: frame the frame. He would produce a short Strategic Pattern Brief — not a plan, but 3–5 adaptive tensions playing out across markets. No solutions, just names.
He gathered stories from peers, asked about invisible tensions under their priorities, and compiled themes. At the regional offsite, he presented three patterns:
Speed vs. Safety — rewarding delivery, punishing risk-aware delay.
Belonging vs. Authority — promoting inclusion while driving compliance through fear.
Purpose vs. Resentment — people inspired by the mission but drained by mechanistic control.
He didn’t propose fixes. He asked: “Which one matters most in your context?”
The room shifted. People leaned in. They began comparing patterns, not just trading updates.
By quarter’s end, his peers were seeking him out: Jo to test her playbook against his patterns, Priya to co-facilitate a developmental lab, even Kieran to share diagrams sparked by Anil’s language.
Anil hadn’t become louder. He’d become clearer. His stretch in Strategic Fluency was moving from interpreter to frame-setter — holding contradictions without apology, so others could make meaning.
Priya’s Stretch — Adaptive Growth: From Invisibility to Presence
Priya was perceptive, empathic, and strategic. People trusted her insights, but they rarely followed her lead. She held herself small, performing humility to avoid appearing arrogant. It kept her safe — and invisible.
Maya saw it clearly: Priya’s growth edge wasn’t competence. It was presence.
Her probes landed directly:
Are you letting your learning change others’ work, or only your own?
Where are you shaping the work before you feel fully ready?
Who loses when you downplay what you know?
Priya admitted, “I step back when I should step in. I don’t want to become the kind of leader I used to resist.”
So her 90-day experiment: become seen in service of others. She would design a Capacity Framework — a living tool to help country leads assess and grow leadership readiness. But she wouldn’t just draft it; she would own the rollout and present it herself.
She began as always — listening, collecting stories. But this time she shaped them into themes, language, and entry points others could adopt. Her writing was not abstract but piercing:
“Capacity isn’t readiness. It’s the space between who we are and what the system needs next.”
At the quarterly gathering, her words landed. Colleagues quoted her before she’d finished speaking. By the end of the sprint, she was mentoring new leads, co-hosting retreats, even saying yes to a podcast interview.
The turning point was simple but profound: modesty without presence is erasure.
Her quadrant stretch was Adaptive Growth — learning in motion, stepping into visibility not for ego but to create space for shared development.
Kieran’s Stretch — Relational Influence: From Solitude to Convenor
Kieran was brilliant, private, efficient. His country ran like a diagram: numbers tight, reports clean. Yet no one came to him with hard dilemmas. He was respected but not relied on.
Maya watched his regional calls: logical, efficient, bloodless. He solved problems privately, then presented them clean. The system needed something else: not his conclusions, but his convening.
She asked:
Do people share truth with you, or only updates?
Who feels safer because you’re in the room?
Where are you holding ambiguity alongside others, not just alone?
Kieran replied simply: “I was taught not to bother people with uncertainty.”
His 90-day experiment: convene before you conclude. He would launch a Resilience Learning Circle, bringing peers together to share one story, one mistake, and one “still not sure” every session.
At first, he hated it. The silence, the mess, the lack of metrics. But by the second session, he tried something new. He told a story about a rushed decision, a missed signal, and the emotional blind spot it revealed.
The room shifted. Others began sharing too: a director on managing grief after an outage, another on fearing to be the weak link. Kieran didn’t solve it. He held it.
The Circle became a regional relay point: surfacing signals faster, spreading practices sideways, creating a relational early-warning system. By the end, Jo borrowed one of his prompts, Priya co-hosted a session, Anil invited him into strategic brief planning.
Kieran’s stretch in Relational Influence was learning to lead not through expertise, but through presence — turning solitude into stewardship.
The Praxis Q Cycle: One Stretch, Four Ripples
By quarter’s end, each leader had produced something tangible:
Jo — Delivery Cadence Playbook
Anil — Strategic Pattern Brief
Priya — Capacity Framework
Kieran — Resilience Learning Circle
Each began with one quadrant. But each ripple crossed into the others: Jo’s rhythm gave Anil space to frame; Anil’s patterns sharpened Priya’s framework; Priya’s presence emboldened Kieran; Kieran’s circles fed back into Jo’s rhythm.
Development was no longer abstract. It was embedded in the work. The system grew smarter not through mandates, but through shared practice.
Reflection Prompts for You
Which quadrant calls to you right now?
Disciplined Delivery — Where are you holding the rhythm too tightly?
Strategic Fluency — Where are you softening tensions instead of framing them?
Adaptive Growth — Where are you hiding growth behind modesty?
Relational Influence — Where are you avoiding the messy conversations that could build trust?
What one small deliverable could you create in 90 days that would help you practise this stretch — and leave behind a ripple others could pick up?
Closing: Development as a System
Maya looked around the table. Jo no longer carried the rhythm alone. Anil named contradictions instead of protecting the room. Priya spoke with clarity people wanted to follow. Kieran convened spaces where the unspoken could land.
Each had stretched into one quadrant. Together, they were learning across all four.
Praxis Q was no longer theory. It was rhythm, pattern, practice. A developmental system they were building themselves.
The next challenge was already looming. What happens when development outpaces the structure? When a leader grows faster than the role can hold? That question would demand deeping another simple rule: Calibrate for the Level. Anticipate the Next.
But for now, Maya let herself breathe. The work had not gotten easier. But it had gotten livable. And for the first time, growth felt less like a burden — and more like the work itself.
You're truly leading from the edge, Dr. Richard.
It's been a pleasure following along with Maya- & team's developmental journey over the last few months. Can't wait to see what's next!
I hope to re-join EQ Lab's Dialogic Drinks soon. I've missed the Tuesday & Thursday gang. ♡
Cheers! 🍻