How are you making yourself small?
Microsoft's latest Work Trend Index makes a striking argument: as AI agents absorb more of the technical work, the question that defines a career is no longer what you can do, but how much human agency you bring to what remains. Judgement. Presence. The willingness to be seen taking a position.
Which makes this a strange moment to be shrinking… And yet shrinking is exactly what I find myself doing and watch other talented leaders do, every week, in rooms where their full presence is most needed.
You will know the moves, in yourself or in others. The idea offered with a shrug, or three disclaimers attached. The email redrafted five times to soften a view that was sound the first time. The seat taken at the side of the table rather than at the head of it. The reluctance to go for the promotion. Or the imposter syndrome if we take it, and then still doing the work of the role below the one you now hold, because it feels safe down there. The silence in the meeting, followed by the honest opinion in the corridor afterwards.
We tend to file these moves under confidence, and prescribe accordingly: executive presence training, positive self-talk, a stretch assignment. Sometimes that helps. Often it doesn't, and the pattern quietly reasserts itself — because making yourself small is rarely a skills gap. It is usually a loyalty.
This is where a systemic lens changes the picture. In systemic coaching and constellations work, every one of us belongs to systems, starting with the family we were born into and extending through every team and organisation we join. Each system has its own mostly unspoken rules of belonging, and belonging matters so much to human beings that we will do almost anything to protect it. The family system is where we first learn about belonging, and about leadership. It is, as John Whittington puts it, the deepest pattern-maker for the rest of our lives and work.
Now consider what that means for the leader who shrinks. Somewhere, in some system that mattered, they may have learned that staying small was the price of staying in. Perhaps visibility was dangerous. Perhaps outshining someone was a kind of betrayal. Perhaps success meant leaving people behind, and the unconscious answer that hovered below the surface was, “Then I would rather not fully succeed”. Seen this way, making yourself small is not a failure of nerve. It is an act of hidden loyalty — often to a person or a system that has no idea a debt is still being paid.
Constellations work would ask a different question than the confidence coaches ask. Not "why can't you speak up?" but "who are you being loyal to when you stay small?"
There is a second thread here, and it concerns place. In every system, each person has a place — a right place, the one that belongs to their role, their contribution, their time of arrival. Systems settle when people fully occupy their place, and wobble when they don't. A leader who stands "smaller than" their role leaves a disquieting gap - and systems abhor gaps. Someone else over-functions to fill it, decisions blur, the team senses an absence it can't name and starts compensating in ways nobody chose. Interestingly, the leader who makes themselves "bigger than" their place — rescuing, over-reaching, carrying what belongs to others — creates a parallel distortion. Both are ways of not quite standing where you actually are.
So the question in the title is worth taking literally. How — in what specific, observable, repeated ways — are you making yourself small? In which rooms? In whose presence? And if you traced that pattern back through the systems you've belonged to, where might it first have made perfect sense to be so?
Because that is the reframe that matters: the pattern once protected something. It kept you belonging. The work is not to break it by force of will, but to see what it has been serving, and faithfully acknowledge it. Then find a way to take your place fully — with what the systemic coaching tradition would call respect for where the pattern came from. There is a well-developed way of doing that work, and it is quite different from anything you would find in a presentation-skills course. It is also not something to attempt from a paragraph in an article.
If you recognised yourself somewhere in this piece — a specific meeting this week, a particular person around whom you go quiet, a role you hold but don't quite occupy — that recognition is the starting point, and it is worth taking seriously while it's fresh. I'd welcome a conversation about what taking your full place might look like. You can book a 30-minute session with me directly here: https://calendly.com/tara-minchin-aintreeleadership/30-minute-session
References
Microsoft (2026, May 5). 2026 Work Trend Index Annual Report: Agents, human agency, and the opportunity for every organization. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/agents-human-agency-and-the-opportunity-for-every-organization
Whittington, J. (2020). Systemic coaching and constellations: The principles, practices and application for individuals, teams and groups (3rd ed.). Kogan Page.