My own app told me how I lead.

That feedback did not land all at once. It sat with me. I started journaling every evening in Intura, the app I built for exactly this, answering the same three questions: what mattered, who mattered, what is still on my mind.

I was not looking for a framework. I was trying to get better at noticing what I was actually doing as a leader, rather than what I thought I was doing.

Somewhere in February, after about three months of daily entries, I asked the coach in the app a direct question: how would you describe my leadership style, based on everything I have written?

I had told it before that my approach as a design director is to get my hands dirty, and that I think managers should do as well as guide. It gave that back to me, and then it gave me something I had never put into words. It said there were three distinct modes in my entries, and that it could not map them onto a framework from the leadership literature. They were mine.

Each one is a real project rather than a definition. That is the only reason they stuck.

Looking back at November, there was nothing wrong with exploring. The problem was that I was only exploring. For weeks. Without telling anybody why I was deep inside one project and nowhere near another.

My team could see the pattern. They had no explanation for it. They were not stressed because I was building a hackathon tool. They were stressed because they could not predict which manager they would get on a given day.

The coach suggested I tell the team. Not as a presentation, just in a conversation. Here is how I operate, here are the three modes, here is the one I am in on each project right now.

The reaction was not surprise. It was relief. They had already noticed the pattern and never had words for it. One designer told me she had been confused for months about why I was so involved in some projects and completely absent from others.

Then the coach suggested the thing that actually made it useful: let the team ask for the mode they need. That turned a self-awareness exercise into a two-way tool. Now somebody can say “I need you in Explorer mode on this, I am stuck” or “I have got this, just enable me”. That conversation does not happen if the modes have no names.

I plan my week in the three categories now. Every project gets a mode, and I look at whether the balance is right. Too much exploring and I am probably neglecting the team. Too much enabling and I might be avoiding a hard problem that needs my hands on it.

I report upward in the same format. Every 1:1 with my boss has an agenda of what I am building, what I am directing and what I am unblocking, plus a fourth section I call Open Loops for whatever does not fit. He gets a picture of where my time went without me narrating every decision.

This is not a leadership model. It is not Situational Leadership or anything else with a name and a book. It came out of my entries, my team and my own tendencies, and your three would probably be different ones.

That is the point, and it is also the limit. The value was never in the labels. It was in three months of daily entries that made the labels visible, and I would not trust a version of this that somebody arrived at in an afternoon, including mine.

The harder admission is the one in the first paragraph. My lead designer saw the imbalance instantly, in a single conversation, and told me plainly. I needed a written record and a model reading it back to me to get to the same place three months later. The framework did not make me a better leader. It made me more honest about which version of me my team was getting on a given day.

And the thing I still do not know: whether naming the modes improved anything measurable for the team, or whether it mostly made me easier to read. Those are not the same, and I have no number for either.

You do not need three months to start. You do need to write things down, because memory rewrites the day before you have left the office, and your idea of how you lead is built on a fraction of what actually happened.

Start with the three questions. What mattered today. Who mattered. What is still on your mind. Answer them honestly for a few weeks, then read them back and ask what pattern you are looking at. Where does the energy go. Which mode are you in when things go well, and which one when they do not.

I use Intura for it, which is the app I built because nothing else asked managers the right questions. I built it, so I am obviously not a neutral party about it. A notebook works too. The written record is the part that matters.

The three modes, and the system I wrote down so a room works when I am not in it, are on the design leadership page.

In November I was told to spend less time building and more time on my team. I went away and built something, which is the most Explorer answer available, and it is how I found out that was the problem.