The Receding Tide

Why Most Leadership Advice Fails the Organizations That Need It Most

This is the first in a series on Hope-Forward Leadership — a framework for leading organizations through compounding disruption toward genuine restoration and capacity for change.

You’ve heard the phrase a hundred times.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

It’s one of those ideas that feels so obviously true you stop questioning it. Good economy, healthy culture, strong momentum — everything rises together. The competent boats and the struggling ones. The well-resourced and the under-resourced. The tide does the work.

Leadership just has to not get in the way.

There’s something genuinely right about that.

But here’s the question nobody is asking:

What does a receding tide do?

It grounds all boats.

Not the ones with bad captains. Not just the old ones, or the poorly built ones, or the ones that never had a strong season. All of them. Every vessel — regardless of vision, talent, strategy, or effort — gets stranded when the water goes out.

And here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of leading organizations through disruption: most of the organizations I know are operating in a receding tide. And almost none of the leadership frameworks we’ve been handed were built for that.

The Tide Goes Out Slowly, Then All at Once

We talk about organizational crises like they arrive as headlines. And sometimes they do — a scandal, a sudden departure, a public failure, a financial collapse. Those are the dramatic moments, the ones that make the staff meeting feel like a funeral.

But that’s not usually how the tide goes out.

More often, it goes out in inches. Quietly. Incrementally. Over months and years of small moments that never make the internal newsletter but accumulate into something heavy and real.

• A leader promises a change that never happens.

• A reorganization disrupts a team’s rhythm and the trust they’d built.

• A new initiative launches with fanfare, then quietly disappears.

• A conflict between two departments goes unresolved, and everyone chooses a side without saying so.

• A person everyone respected leaves, and leadership says all the right things but nobody feels the weight being acknowledged.

Each of these is a small withdrawal from the trust account. Each one is a little more water going out. And because the change is gradual, because you can still technically float for a while, it’s easy to miss what’s happening until one day the hull is scraping on the bottom and you’re standing there wondering why nothing is moving.

This is the world most leaders are actually leading in. Not a stalled organization waiting for a great vision. A grounded one, waiting for the water to come back.

The Diagnosis We Keep Getting Wrong

When boats are grounded, the instinct is to work harder on the boats.

Better engines. Sharper navigation. A clearer destination. A more compelling captain. And so leaders do what leaders have been trained to do — they cast vision, build strategy, restructure teams, launch initiatives, hire consultants, run retreats, update the mission statement.

And the boats don’t move.

Not because the vision is bad. Not because the strategy is wrong. Not because the people don’t want to go somewhere. But because you cannot sail a grounded boat. The problem isn’t the vessel. It’s the water.

Most organizational change frameworks — and I say this with genuine respect for the people who built them — were designed for systems that are ready to move forward. They assume a basically functional organization that needs to be moved from where it is to somewhere better. They’re built for momentum, not recovery.

So when a leader walks into a grounded organization and runs the standard playbook, they get the standard result: resistance, disengagement, cynicism, the quiet hopelessness of people who have seen this movie before and know how it ends. The leader calls it change resistance. The people call it self-preservation. They’re both right, and neither is the real problem.

The real problem is that we’re trying to sail without a tide.

What Grounds a Tide

Before we talk about raising the tide — and we will — it’s worth slowing down and naming honestly what grounds it. Because in my experience, leaders are often the last to see the full picture.

The obvious sources: financial crisis, public scandal, loss of a founding leader, organizational trauma that everyone can name. These are the events that show up in the postmortem. They matter, and they do real damage.

But the less obvious sources are just as corrosive, maybe more so, because they’re easier to minimize:

• Failed initiatives. Every vision that launched and didn’t land, every program that was announced with energy and died without acknowledgment — these don’t just waste resources. They teach people that movement isn’t safe, that investment leads to disappointment, that the wisest posture is to wait and see before you give yourself to something.

• Leadership inconsistency. Not malice. Not even incompetence. Just the ordinary human failure to follow through on what was said, to be the same person in the hard conversation that you were in the inspiring one. Each gap between word and action is a small withdrawal. Enough of them and people stop depositing.

• Unacknowledged loss. Organizations grieve. When someone leaves, when a program ends, when a building changes, when an era closes — there is loss. When leadership moves too quickly past it, when the mood is “onward” before anyone has processed “that mattered,” the grief doesn’t disappear. It goes underground. And it stays there, adding weight every time something new is asked of people who haven’t put the last thing down yet.

• The ambient friction between people. The departments that don’t trust each other. The teams that were restructured and still haven’t healed. The unresolved conflict that everyone navigates around but no one has named. This is water going out one drop at a time, and it will drain a system dry over years.

The tide doesn’t go out all at once. It goes out in all of these ways, simultaneously, over time. And the organization that’s the hardest to lead — the one that seems most resistant, most cynical, most exhausted — is often the one that’s simply been through the most.

They’re not difficult. They’re depleted.

Raising the Tide: A Different Kind of Leadership

 So here's the shift I've had to learn the hard way.

In a recovering organization, the leader's first job is not to move the boat. It's to get water back under it — so people can trust what it feels like to float again. To breathe again. And eventually, when the conditions are right, to sail again.

And to be clear — this is not about moving the boat to deeper water. That's how most leadership thinking works. Adjust the strategy. Reposition the team. Find a better current.

But grounded organizations don't need relocation. They need restoration.

That sounds obvious when you say it. But it runs counter to almost everything we celebrate in leadership culture. We reward vision. We promote urgency. We applaud bold moves, courageous pivots, transformational agendas. And those things matter — eventually. But when the water is out, they are the wrong medicine.

What actually restores the system is slower, quieter, and far more costly — costly in the currency leaders least want to spend: time, patience, and the willingness to do unglamorous work that no one will applaud. It's consistency over time. It's following through on small things before announcing big things. It's naming what has been hard before describing what could be good. It's creating enough safety that people can believe again without having to risk everything on that belief.

Because before you are a vision-caster, you are a trust-builder.

And in a recovering system, trust doesn't come from compelling ideas. It comes from demonstrated reality. You say you'll do something — and then you do it. And then you do it again. And again. Until people begin to feel it: the water is coming back.

This is Hope-Forward Leadership. Not a new strategy. A different posture entirely.

Hope is not optimism. Optimism is a mood. Hope is a posture — and in a system that has been through disruption, it has a specific structure. It's the belief that the past does not have to determine the future. It's the evidence — real, lived evidence — that leadership can be trusted. And it's enough clarity about the next step that movement feels possible, not reckless.

When those are present, something begins to shift. Not because of a speech. Not because of a strategy. But because the conditions for trust have been rebuilt from the ground up.

And when that happens, the water returns.

Quick Reflection: What Is Your Instinct If your instinct is to push harder, clarify vision, or move faster—you may still be trying to move the boat.

If your instinct is to rebuild trust, slow down, and follow through—you’ve started restoring the float. Instructions:

• Draw a line.

• At one end write "Move the Boat".

• At the other end write "Restore the Float".

• Reflect on your leadership.

  • What has your current approach actually produced?

  • Where are you experiencing the most resistance?

  • What feels forced or unsustainable right now?

  • Where, if anywhere, have you seen trust begin to rebuild?

What This Series Is

Over the coming posts, I want to build out the Hope-Forward framework in full — the diagnostic tools, the leadership practices, the phased approach to organizational restoration, the difference between leading people who are ready and people who are still recovering from the last thing.

But I wanted to start here, with the metaphor, because I think it reframes the whole conversation.

If your organization is grounded, you don’t need a better vision. You don’t need a sharper strategy or a louder voice or a more compelling mission statement. You need someone who understands what raises the tide — and who is willing to do that slower, quieter, more patient work before they ask anyone to sail.

That’s the leadership the moment requires. It may not be the leadership we were trained for.

But it’s the one our organizations are waiting for.

Next: The Disruption Audit — mapping your organization’s trauma stack before you build your strategy.