Here’s what most managers don’t realise: Your team doesn’t remember your vision statements or your carefully prepared annual strategy presentations. They remember how you responded when the pressure was on, when no one was watching, or when it would have been easier to do nothing.
They remember the small moments. The ones that felt insignificant to you but revealed everything about who you actually are as a manager.
Today, I want to talk about why these tiny decisions carry so much weight, which specific moments your team is watching more carefully than you think and what to actually do when you find yourself in one of these situations.
As I said in this very newsletter a little while ago: you’re always on stage.
Why small moments carry disproportionate weight
These moments reveal your actual values, not your stated ones or the ones that are painted on the walls of your office.
Anyone can say “we support each other” in a team meeting. Anyone can put “psychological safety” in their team charter or culture code. But when a client publicly criticises someone’s work in an email thread, what you do in that moment shows what you actually believe.
Do you defend them? Do you stay silent? Do you add to the criticism to show the client you’re “on top of it”? Your team is watching. And whatever you do becomes the real definition of your values, regardless of what you’ve said in meetings.
These moments also happen when people aren’t performing perfectly or when they’re not prepared. The big moments (promotions, quarterly reviews, annual celebrations) happen when everyone’s on their best behaviour. People expect you to be supportive during those times because there’s an audience and a script.
It’s the small moments that catch people when they’re vulnerable. When they’ve made a mistake. When they’re uncertain. When they’re under pressure. That’s precisely when they’re watching most carefully to see what you’ll actually do.
And here’s the thing: Your team talks about these moments.
“Did you see how they handled that?” becomes the story that spreads. These moments become part of team folklore. They’re the evidence people cite when describing what kind of manager you are to new joiners, to other teams, to their partners at home.
Scared at the thought of this? Yep, I get it!
The specific moments your team is watching
Let’s talk about the actual situations where these small decisions happen. Because once you know what to look for, you’ll start noticing them everywhere.
How you handle their mistakes when others can see
Public mistakes are the highest stakes moments. We’re talking about things such as:
- Client facing errors.
- Mistakes in front of senior leadership.
- Team wide miscommunications in Slack/Teams etc.
These are the moments where your team is most vulnerable.
Do you deflect blame? Share it? Own it as a leadership failure? Or do you let them take the hit alone?
I’ve seen managers reply all to a client email thread saying “This is on me, I should have reviewed this before it went out” when a team member sent the wrong file version. I’ve also seen managers stay completely silent while their team member apologises alone.
Both of those moments got remembered. For very different reasons.
The thing is, how you respond doesn’t just affect that one person. The entire team sees it and thinks “that’s how they’d treat me if I made a mistake.” One person’s experience becomes everyone’s expectation. You set the expectation for everyone.
What you do with last minute, unreasonable requests
When a client or senior leader makes an unfair demand, you have choices. You can push back. You can pass it straight to your team. Or you can absorb some of the pressure yourself.
Let’s say a client asks for weekend work on a non urgent project. You can tell the team “we need to make this work” and ask who’s available. Or you can reply to the client saying “We can get this to you first thing Monday, but weekend turnaround isn’t possible for this type of request.”
One of those decisions takes the hit yourself. The other passes it down.
Your team notices which one you choose. Especially when it happens repeatedly. They’re tracking whether you’re a buffer between them and unreasonable demands, or whether you’re an amplifier of that pressure.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t always get this right. Early in my management career, I’d forward these requests straight to the team with “Can anyone take this?” because I didn’t want to be the blocker. I thought I was being collaborative and doing the right things by the client.
What I was actually doing was abdicating my responsibility to protect their time and boundaries. It took a team member finally saying “It would help if you pushed back sometimes” for me to realise the impact of those small forwards.
Whether you give credit in public and take blame in private (or vice versa)
This is classic management advice, but the question is: does it actually happen when it matters?
When your team delivers great work and you present it to leadership, do you say “the team did brilliant work on this” with names attached? Or do you say “we delivered this” in a way that’s ambiguous about who actually did the work?
Related – you can tell a LOT about a leader by how often they say “I” instead of “we” or “they” when talking about team successes.
When something goes wrong and leadership wants to know what happened, do you explain the context and take responsibility? Or do you forward their question to your team with “can someone draft a response”?
The pattern matters more than any individual moment. But your team is tracking it.
They notice when their work gets presented without their names attached. They notice when you use “I” for successes and “they” for failures. They notice when you’re quick to take credit but even quicker to redirect blame.
How you respond when someone raises a concern or admits uncertainty
This one happens in team meetings, one to ones and casual conversations. Someone raises a concern about a project. Someone admits they don’t know how to do something. Someone questions a decision that’s already been made.
How you respond in that moment sets the tone for whether people will speak up in future.
Do you shut it down with “let’s take this offline”? Do you validate it with “that’s a good question, let’s think through it”? Do you dismiss it with “we’ve already decided this”?
I’ve caught myself doing the shutdown version more times than I’d like to admit. Usually when I’m tired, or when I think we don’t have time for the discussion, or when I’m worried about losing control of the meeting.
There are other moments too. Whether you reply all or reply privately when someone makes an error. How do you talk about team members who aren’t in the room? What you do when you don’t know the answer to something in front of the team?
All of these are small. All of these get remembered.
What to actually do in these moments
Right, so what do you actually do when you find yourself in one of these situations?
Buy yourself time to choose, not react
You usually have more time than you think. When that angry client email comes in, you don’t have to respond in the next five minutes. When someone makes a visible mistake in a meeting, you don’t have to address it immediately.
“Let me think about how best to handle this and I’ll respond in an hour” is almost always acceptable.
The rushed decision is usually the political one, the self protective one. Not the right one.
I got to a point in my career where I used what I called “comfortable silences” to think about a response. I’d literally sit silently for a few seconds or more before responding. Well, it was comfortable for me – maybe not so much for my team! But I ended up getting feedback quite often about this approach and how it made a situation feel much calmer and under control.
Default to protecting your team’s dignity, even when they screwed up
As one of my first managers once said to me: “never hang your team out to dry”.
This doesn’t mean lying or avoiding accountability. It means taking the heat publicly, having the hard conversation privately.
“I take responsibility for this and I’ll work with the team to understand what happened” in public. Then the real feedback happens one to one, where you can be direct without humiliating anyone.
Your job is to create the conditions where people can learn from mistakes without being destroyed by them. That starts with how you handle the public moment.
The bonus here is that usually, the clients who you’re taking the heat from will respect you for this – assuming that things actually do get fixed.
Make the values consistent choice, not the politically safe one
If you say you value transparency, learning, or psychological safety, the small moments are where you prove it or disprove it.
You can’t claim to value “speaking up” if you shut people down when they question your decision. You can’t claim to value “supporting each other” if you stay silent when someone gets unfairly criticised.
The gap between your stated values and your actual behaviour in these tiny moments is where your credibility lives or dies.
Remember: Your team is always watching
Even when you think they’re not. Even when it feels like a private email or a one to one conversation.
The Slack thread after the meeting. The conversation at coffee. The debrief in someone’s one to one with their report. They’re comparing what you say to what you do and the small moments are the evidence they cite.
This week, pay attention to the small decisions.
You’ll likely face at least one or two of these moments over the next week or two:
- A minor mistake someone makes.
- A client being unreasonable.
- A team member asking a question that feels inconvenient.
- A chance to give credit or take it.
Before you respond, take 30 seconds. Ask yourself: What would the manager I want to be do here?
Then do that thing, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Your team will remember. And more importantly, you will too.
