A Lesson on Leadership: A Nerve-Wracking Experience

A Surprising Nervousness

My hands were shaking.

Surprisingly.

It happened today while delivering our Impact Project presentation for the final pitch of the MIT’s Professional Certificate Program in Digital Transformation in the AI age. Our team was presenting an AI-oriented solution we had worked on for a year. All six members of the team were there: Shubham, John, Chaithra, Ruchi, Bruno and me. We had practiced. We had received feedback from those who were not presenting. We had reviewed the sequence, the transitions, the timing and the content.

We had this.

And yet, my hands were shaking.

What surprised me even more was that the shaking continued when I was no longer speaking. I could feel it while advancing my teammates’ slides.

I always experience some nervousness when presenting. I think a certain level of nervousness comes with caring about doing well. But shaking? That was a first for me.

Afterward, I found myself thinking about why.

This was not a presentation to a board that would determine the future of an organization. No lives depended on the outcome. It was our final project presentation in a professional education program.

Still, it mattered enormously to me.

It mattered because of the work behind it, because I cared about the outcome and, perhaps most importantly, because five other people had invested their time, thinking and effort in something I was now helping to represent.

That realization made me think about leadership.

Awareness Changes the Weight of the Moment

There is a different weight attached to something when the outcome no longer belongs only to you.

When I present my own work, I am accountable for my preparation, my thinking and my performance. When I stand in front of others representing the work of a team, the responsibility expands. My performance becomes one part of how our collective effort will be seen.

Leaders experience this constantly.

A manager speaking on behalf of a team carries work that other people have contributed. A project leader presenting a recommendation represents hours of analysis that may have been completed by people who are not even in the room. A senior leader announcing a decision is often giving voice to months of work by many others.

Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie wrote about the need for leaders to develop the capacity to step onto the “balcony,” gaining enough perspective to observe what is happening while remaining engaged in the work itself. That ability to see beyond our immediate task becomes particularly important when the stakes increase.

Awareness changes what we notice.

It makes us think about the quality of our own contribution, but also about whether we are honoring the contribution of everyone else involved.

Perhaps that is partly what I was feeling.

Anticipation: Looking for What We Might Have Missed

Our team had prepared carefully. We practiced the pitch, listened to one another, asked for feedback and adjusted the presentation along the way.

Preparation, however, does something interesting. The more seriously you prepare, the more aware you sometimes become of everything that could still go wrong.

Was the message clear enough?

Were the transitions smooth?

Had we overlooked an assumption?

Would the audience understand why the solution mattered?

Could we answer the questions that might come next?

Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe have studied organizations that operate reliably under conditions where failure can have serious consequences. One of the principles they describe is a “preoccupation with failure”: a disciplined attentiveness to small anomalies, weak signals and potential problems before they grow into larger ones. Their work also recognizes something every experienced leader eventually learns—our understanding of a situation is always incomplete.

The application to everyday leadership does not require operating an aircraft carrier or an emergency room.

Before a client presentation, a major organizational change, a product launch, a difficult conversation or the introduction of a new technology, good leaders spend time looking for what the team may have missed.

Who has not been heard?

What assumption have we made?

Where are we vulnerable?

What happens if this does not go as planned?

This kind of anticipation is part of stewardship. People have trusted us with something that matters, and preparation is one of the ways we honor that trust.

Representation: Carrying Other People's Work

Of all the reflections that came from this experience, this may be the one that stayed with me most.

When we lead, we frequently represent work that does not belong entirely to us.

Our Impact Project had six contributors. Each person had brought ideas, knowledge, questions, challenges and perspectives to the work. Some of us were presenting particular sections, but the presentation itself belonged to the team.

That changes the role of the person standing in front of the room.

Leadership requires enough confidence to take that position and enough humility to remember whose work you are carrying with you.

That balance is easy to forget.

Visibility can create the illusion that the person speaking created the result. Yet some of the most important contributions may have come from people sitting quietly in the room, from someone who challenged an assumption several weeks earlier, from the teammate who noticed a gap, or from the person who helped make the argument stronger during rehearsal.

Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety has consistently emphasized the importance of environments where people can speak candidly, raise concerns and contribute their knowledge. Psychological safety, in her work, does not imply reducing performance expectations. Teams benefit when candor and high standards coexist.

That combination is important because strong representation begins long before someone stands up to present.

It begins when people are encouraged to contribute fully, when disagreements can surface, when someone can say, “I don't think this works yet,” and when the person leading the effort is willing to listen.

By the time a leader represents the work, leadership has already happened many times.

Responsibility for the Outcome, Humility About the Success

There is another tension in leadership that this experience brought back to me.

When things go wrong, leadership requires us to resist the temptation to separate ourselves from the collective result.

Imagine finishing a poor team presentation and saying, “Well, my part was good.”

Perhaps it was. That may even be objectively true. It would still miss something important about leadership.

If we have accepted responsibility for helping lead the work, the overall outcome matters.

Success carries a different responsibility.

When the work goes well, leadership asks us to remember how many hands created the result.

I have always believed that leadership involves accepting meaningful responsibility for outcomes while being generous about the ownership of success. The more visible our role becomes, the more deliberate we may need to be about recognizing the people whose work made that visibility possible.

Our final presentation belonged to six people.

Whatever each of us contributed individually, the result came from the interaction among all of us.

Perhaps Leadership Should Feel Uncomfortable Sometimes

I would certainly prefer that my hands do not shake during my next presentation.

At the same time, I do not want to lose what was behind that nervousness. I cared.

I understood that other people were relying on me.

I knew that my performance could affect how our collective work was received.

I wanted to do justice to what we had built together.

Experience often makes us calmer. Preparation gives us confidence. Repetition develops competence. All of those things matter.

Yet I wonder whether complete comfort should ever become the goal of leadership.

There are moments when leadership should carry some weight because the consequences extend beyond us. Decisions affect people's work. Words influence how a team interprets a situation. Our preparation can strengthen or weaken someone else's contribution. How we show up can build confidence in a team or diminish it.

That awareness may occasionally make us nervous.

The important part is what we do with it.

For me, the shaking eventually stopped. We delivered the presentation. Everyone played their part.

And I walked away with an unexpected lesson.

Leadership changes the meaning of performance. As individuals, we often perform to demonstrate what we can do. When we lead, our performance becomes part of something larger because other people have entrusted some portion of their work, their effort and sometimes their confidence to us.

Feeling the weight of that responsibility does not make us less prepared to lead.

Sometimes, it reminds us how seriously we have taken the privilege of doing it.