Golden Opportunities

The Most Underrated Leadership Skill Nobody Talks About

I just had a great and encouraging and life-giving conversation with a friend I've known less than a year. What makes him unique is what I'm writing about today...

He mentioned a book he'd been readingTheo of Golden by Allen Levi. Maybe you've heard of it. #1 New York Times bestseller. A word-of-mouth phenomenon that started with one man self-publishing in his 60s and somehow took over every book club in America.

He told me what it was about. And I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

The story follows a mysterious stranger named Theo who arrives in a small Southern city called Golden. He visits the local coffeehouse where pencil portraits of the townspeople hang on the walls — and he begins purchasing them, one at a time, giving each portrait to the person depicted. In exchange, he asks only for their story.

That's it. That's the whole move.

Portrait by portrait, Theo tells each person what he "saw" when he studied their face in the frame. All forty-three recipients had been told they were capable of saintliness.

He sees the good in them. And then he TELLS them.

I sat with that for a minute. Because honestly? That's not normal. That's not what most leaders do. Most leaders are focused on performance gaps, development areas, and what needs to get better. And those things matter. I'm not dismissing them.

But what Theo does is something different. Something rarer. He looks at a human being, finds the gold buried in them — and then has the audacity to hand it back.

Here's what I know about people.

We are all walking around with a question we're afraid to ask out loud.

Do you see me?

Not my output. Not my metrics. Not what I produced last quarter. ME. The actual human doing the work. The person behind the performance.

This question lives in every person on your team. The high performer who looks like they have it all together. The quiet one in the back of the room who never speaks up in meetings. The one who's struggling and trying to hide it. They're all asking the same thing.

And most of the time? Nobody answers.

We have confused proximity with connection.

Here's the thing about modern teams — we spend enormous amounts of time together. Meetings. Slack messages. Project updates. Collaborative docs. We are technically "with" each other constantly.

But being in the same room isn't the same as being seen.

You can sit next to someone for three years and never really know them. Never learn what they're afraid of. Never discover what they're actually proud of. Never find out that the weird, niche thing they mentioned once in passing is actually a SUPERPOWER you've been leaving on the table.

Proximity without presence is just furniture arrangement.

Real connection — the kind that unlocks something in people — requires someone to look at them and say,I see something in you. And I want you to know what it is.

That's what Theo does. He doesn't just buy a portrait and hand it over. He studies the face. He sits with it. He finds the thing. And then he names it to the person's face.

Stories are shared, friendships are born, and lives, in response to his inexplicable kindness, are affirmed and transformed.

One conversation at a time. One person at a time. One portrait at a time.

This isn't soft. It's the whole game.

What my friend described — and what Allen Levi captures in this book — isn't just warm and fuzzy. It's a competitive strategy.

When someone on your team knows that the person leading them genuinely sees their value — not as a role-filler, not as a headcount, but as a person with something real to contribute — everything changes. The trust level goes through the roof. The willingness to sacrifice for the team multiplies. The resilience when things get hard? Exponential.

People do not go to war for organizations. They go to war for people who believe in them.

The book is good for the soul. It made readers want to slow down and savor the little things. But I'd argue it also made them want to be better leaders. Because Theo holds up a mirror and asks a simple, devastating question:When is the last time you actually looked at the people around you?

Now let's get uncomfortably personal.

When's the last time you told someone on your team specifically what you see in them?

Not a performance review. Not a generic "good job." I mean a real, specific, personal observation. Something like:

"Hey, I've been watching how you handle conflict. You have this ability to de-escalate without anyone losing face. That's rare. You might not even realize you're doing it. But I see it — and it matters."

That costs you nothing. It takes thirty seconds. And I promise you — I PROMISE you — that person will carry that moment for years.

I know this because I've been on the receiving end of it. I've had exactly two or three people in my life look at me and name something they saw. And I can tell you the exact words they used. The exact setting. The exact feeling in my chest when it landed.

That's the power you hold as a leader. The power to name what you see.

This is actually biblical, by the way.

(You knew I was going there. Stay with me.)

Jesus had this habit of looking at people and calling out their future before they could see it themselves. He looked at a fisherman named Simon and said, "You're going to be Peter." A rock. The foundation. Before Peter had done a single thing to earn it.

He named it. He said it out loud. And Peter spent the rest of his life growing into the person Jesus had already seen.

That's not coincidence. That's a leadership principle hiding in plain sight. What you name in people, you release in people.

Theo of Golden — fictional as he is — somehow embodies this. He is a man aiming for heaven, with no doubt in his heart. And because of that, he moves through a town of ordinary people and leaves each one feeling extraordinary.

So here's the challenge I'm sitting with — and I'm inviting you into it.

This week, identify one person on your team. Just one. Study them for a minute. Watch how they work. Notice what they bring that nobody seems to be noticing.

And then go tell them.

Don't make it weird. Don't over-rehearse it. Just be honest."Hey, I've been watching you, and I want you to know what I see."

Watch what happens to their posture. Watch their eyes. Watch the tiny shift that happens in how they carry themselves for the rest of the day.

You're not buying a pencil portrait and hand-delivering it to their door. But you ARE doing the same thing Theo did in Golden — you're saying:I looked. I saw you. And you are worth naming.

In a world where most people feel invisible, especially at work, being the leader who actually SEES people?

That's a superpower worth developing.

Go read the book. And then go find your people.