There’s something that most leaders who have worked with me hear me say often. We are going to take the “turtleneck approach” to this because not every decision deserves your attention.
Every morning, Steve Jobs wore the same thing. Black mock turtleneck. Jeans. Sneakers. The uniform became iconic. It showed up in TED talks and leadership books as a symbol of creative genius, of someone so above ordinary concerns that clothing had become irrelevant.
His wardrobe choices signaled his precision about which decisions deserved his attention. Every choice, even a trivial one, draws from the same reservoir as the choices that actually matter. Every unnecessary layer of complexity competes for space with the thinking your organization actually needs from you.
So he eliminated the competition. The turtleneck was a discipline. Simplicity as strategy. Subtraction as a form of focus.
Most leaders add and the weight becomes a lot to carry. They carry the emotional temperature of every room they enter. They carry the unresolved tension from the last meeting into the next one. They carry the weight of decisions they made but couldn’t fully commit to, conversations they softened when they needed to be direct, priorities they protected until the first competing request arrived. They carry responsibility for how everyone around them feels about every direction the organization takes.
This is the burnout epidemic that organizational research keeps circling without fully naming. Leaders reporting depletion, disengagement, a creeping sense that the effort required to sustain performance has become unsustainable.
The source is the invisible labor of carrying what was never meant to be carried. The ongoing cognitive and emotional cost of monitoring every room, managing every reaction, softening every edge, reopening every closed door. The accumulation, over years, of small accommodations that each felt reasonable in the moment and collectively built a leadership style organized around a need the leader cannot easily name.
The need to be liked. The need for everyone to feel comfortable with the direction before the direction becomes final. The need to remain safe in every relationship, even at the cost of the clarity the organization requires.
That labor lives at the identity level, in the governing beliefs that run beneath behavior, shaping every decision before the decision is consciously made.
Leadership development has spent decades organized around accumulation. New skills. New strategies. New capabilities. Leaders learn to communicate more clearly, influence more strategically, execute more efficiently. The industry is organized around adding. What almost nobody teaches is how to subtract, the invisible patterns that accumulate inside a leader’s identity over years of career building.
I worked with a senior executive named John for over a year. Large division within a complex organization. John is extremely smart, emotionally intelligent, compassionate, trustworthy. He listened in a way that made people feel that what they said actually mattered. He created space for dissent. He remembered things about people. I particularly enjoyed that he always called me by my name and always made me feel like I was the most important person in the room. For all those reasons, it was challenging to even see the growth edges because they appeared in subtle ways but the impact was deep.
John felt the emotional temperature of every room he entered the way some people feel weather. He read faces. He tracked energy. He noticed who leaned in and who went quiet. All great things. But he also registered disagreement as something unresolved, something requiring his repair. Someone leaving a conversation disappointed felt like a failure.
I noticed one pattern emerge. The word “just” appeared everywhere. In his calendar. In his emails. In the way he narrated his own decisions when we talked. A direction would become clear, and he would keep the conversation open just a little longer, just to make sure everyone was fully on board. A message needed its edges, and he would soften them, just slightly, just to make it land better. A decision had been made and communicated, and a competing request would arrive, and he would put it back on the table, just to be thorough, just to be fair.
Each instance was small and even reasonable yet it was costing him something that he hadn’t named yet. We worked together on the identity underneath the behavior. On the governing belief that had been running his leadership.
That work is slow. You cannot think your way to the kind of insight that actually changes behavior at the identity level. You have to sit with it. Return to it. Let it reveal itself to you. One afternoon, after months of that work, John said something I have thought about many times since.
My conviction to clarity has to be greater than my desire to be liked.
He found it in himself, after sitting honestly with what it had actually cost, his organization, his people, and ultimately himself, every time he had chosen comfort over clarity.
That sentence changed everything. Now that he saw it, he couldn’t unsee it- everywhere. John had built his leadership identity around relational attunement, the emotional safety, the collaborative instinct had built real trust, real loyalty, real followership. People wanted to work for him because being in his orbit felt like being genuinely seen.
What had happened, gradually and without his awareness, was that the instinct to stay connected had fused with the instinct to avoid disruption. Maintaining relationship and avoiding discomfort had merged into a single reflex.
Every meaningful decision creates friction somewhere. That is the nature of direction. Prioritizing one thing means deprioritizing another. Strategic clarity always disappoints someone. Moving decisively means some people won’t feel ready. Leadership changes the emotional landscape of organizations precisely because forward movement requires adjustment and adjustment is uncomfortable for someone, always, without exception.
Jobs understood this with unusual clarity. Simplicity at Apple was a relentless, sometimes brutal practice of elimination. Features that didn’t serve the essential experience were removed. Product lines narrowed when complexity threatened focus. Decisions were made and held even when they disappointed. The company became known not only for what it created but for what it refused to carry forward.
After John found that line, things shifted. He told me he felt lighter. That is what unlearning feels like. The removal of something that was never yours to carry in the first place, a weight so familiar it had started to feel like identity itself.
The turtleneck was an act of elimination. The discipline it represented was about understanding, with precision, what you are willing to stop carrying and having the conviction to let it go.
The leaders who move organizations forward are the ones willing to carry clarity when it creates friction, when it disappoints someone. That willingness is a practice. And it begins with being honest about what you have been carrying.
Interested in bringing The Unlearning Advantage® to your leaders, team, or organization? Carolina and her team work with companies ready to evolve leadership, align teams, and transform culture, one unlearned pattern at a time. Visit CarolinaCaro.com