A Longer Look

We’ve all worked beside someone who wasn’t quite in the right spot. They tried, maybe even harder than most, but the results just didn’t click. You could feel the frustration building on both sides—co-workers adjusting around them, managers trying to make sense of why good intentions weren’t translating to good outcomes.

I once led a team like that. One member was a young employee who’d been hired during a strong, “move up or move out” philosophy. On paper he looked promising; in practice, the role didn’t fit. The easy move would have been to let the system take its course. I nearly did. But something about it bothered me. The problem wasn’t work ethic or intelligence. It was misalignment—his strengths didn’t match the seat he was in.

I didn’t fix everything. The company didn’t rewrite its policies. But I did learn something that changed the way I lead: sometimes the most valuable thing you can give a person is a longer look.

What You See When You Slow Down

A longer look doesn’t mean rescuing everyone or pretending problems don’t exist. It means slowing down long enough to understand what’s actually broken. It means asking whether someone’s failure is really about effort, or about fit.

Genesis says the ground itself resists our work. It’s a poetic way of describing what we all know—the world pushes back. Systems get tangled, people get misplaced, motives get mixed. In that kind of soil, patience becomes a form of wisdom.

When I finally took time to see this employee’s situation clearly, I realized my job wasn’t to “save” him; it was to see him. The gap between who he was and where he’d been placed wasn’t a moral flaw. It was simply the wrong fit. And seeing that difference gave me a quiet conviction: leadership begins with noticing.

Gifts Hide in Plain Sight

Every person carries some combination of ability, curiosity, and temperament—call them gifts, talents, wiring, whatever language fits. Some gifts build things. Others perceive. Some operate in the spotlight; others hold a team together behind the scenes.

The trouble is that we often look for the obvious ones: the big personality, the technical wizard, the polished communicator. The quieter gifts—empathy, steadiness, discernment—don’t always get noticed until something goes wrong. Then we realize how much we depended on them.

A longer look gives those gifts room to surface. It shifts our mindset from “Who’s performing?” to “What’s actually happening here?” Sometimes what a person needs isn’t a bigger challenge or a louder pep talk; it’s a small change that lets their strengths breathe.

Seeing as a Form of Stewardship

Good leaders aren’t always the smartest or most visionary. They’re the ones who see people in context. They connect the dots between ability and environment, between motivation and meaning. They treat alignment as an act of care.

That perspective doesn’t come naturally. We’re conditioned to move fast, measure quickly, and fix what looks broken. But every so often, wisdom whispers that the problem may not be the person—it might be the placement. And that distinction can make all the difference.

The moment you pause to take a longer look, you create the possibility of restoration. You give someone a chance to bring their best self to work instead of their defensive self. And sometimes, that same pause reveals your own blind spots too.

Work That Matters

None of this makes work easy. The ground still resists. There will always be thorns and sweat and mismatched expectations. But when we learn to look longer—at people, at systems, even at ourselves—work starts to change shape. It becomes less about sorting who’s right for what and more about cultivating spaces where people can actually contribute.

Maybe that’s what stewardship looks like in the workplace: doing what you can, where you are, to help others do the same. The tools might be meetings and metrics instead of plows and soil, but the principle is the same. The work is hard, but it’s good. And sometimes, all it takes to see that is a longer look.

If you’re learning to take a longer look at your work and the people around you, join me next time in the Work Matters series as we talk about calling — where gifts meet direction and work starts to feel like purpose again

I’ll be sharing more reflections like this on work, calling, and leadership. If you’d like to follow along, the best way is to connect with and follow me on LinkedIn.