Author and pastor Craig Groeschel started out like most entrepreneurs—in a garage. His earliest congregation met in a borrowed two-car garage with furniture that had seen better days and audio-visual equipment that was faulty at best.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in similar humble beginnings. Ruth and Elliot Handler and Harold Mattson founded the toy company Mattel, initially making picture frames and dollhouse furniture in the Handlers’ garage. Even Walt Disney created his first films in a garage behind his uncle’s house.
So, what’s all the fuss about incubating startups in a garage? It’s that perfect place in between two extremes: the demands of your day job and your life. It’s a balance between no-man’s-land and “the room where it happens.”
Have you ever found yourself wishing you had the time and space—or mental garage—so you could incubate leadership values that suited your skills?
You’re neither too confident nor too humble; you’re driven yet healthy, focused yet flexible, and wise yet vulnerable. With today’s amount of complexity, visibility, and external factors weighing on every decision in the C-suite, engaging teams to put forth their best effort calls for constant calibration, a balancing act of leadership skills.
Finding your balance between the extremes is a personal journey; there’s no single answer. It’s specific to you, your personal values, and your skills to match them. But for the purpose of this post, I’ll get you started with some examples. Here are some guardrails to discover the lane that’s right for you between leadership extremes:
1. Practice conscious authenticity—the sweet spot between total transparency and strategic restraint lies in conscious authenticity. This means being vulnerable about certain challenges without undermining confidence in your leadership. When leaders practice conscious authenticity, they create psychological safety while maintaining the necessary authority to guide their organizations forward.
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2. Embrace dynamic consistency—the balance between rigidity and inconsistency is dynamic consistency. This involves being predictable in your values but unpredictable in your thinking. Like those garage startups, the most effective leaders provide enough stability for people to feel secure while creating enough flexibility for growth and adaptation.
3. Cultivate reciprocal trust—the middle ground between blind faith and micromanagement is reciprocal trust. This requires delegating meaningful work while remaining engaged as a resource. Reciprocal trust acknowledges that relationships with employees, peers, board members, and stakeholders are interdependent—each party must contribute to a cycle of trust-building.
Consider making room in your schedule to reflect on the values you hold dear. Spend some time in your mental garage and ask yourself if you’ve found a balance between the two extremes. If it helps, start with the values I’ve provided. Then add others and try to describe what balance looks like.
Discuss this with your team members and encourage them to do the same. In this shared journey of self-discovery, you’ll not only find your own leadership sweet spot, but you’ll also create the space where your entire organization can truly flourish.
