Coming soon
Leadership Isn’t What You Intend. It’s What People Experience.
How People Want to Be Led explores leadership from the place where it matters most: the experience it creates. Through lived workplace stories, organizational insight, leadership research, and the Led Experience™ approach, Brendaliz Mak examines what builds trust, what quietly destroys it, what happens when people stop speaking, and what leaders and organizations can do differently.
It looks at what happens when leadership intent and employee experience do not match, and what leaders, employees, and organizations can learn from that gap.
The question many people carry
Many people spend months, sometimes years, inside workplaces where something feels hard to name. Over time the questions can turn inward, and abilities once trusted begin to feel uncertain.
This is not a diagnosis of you or of any workplace. It is an invitation to consider that workplace systems and leadership experiences can influence how people see themselves.
Sometimes clarity begins when we stop asking only, “What’s wrong with me?” and begin asking, “What am I experiencing?”
The other side of the question
What a leader may intend to be
What employees may experience
Something different.
Not because anyone is acting in bad faith, but because intention and experience are two different things.
The book does not portray leaders as villains. It makes room for the realities of leading: blind spots, competing pressures, imperfect systems, organizational constraints, unintended impact, growth, accountability, and repair.
Leaders can cause harm without malicious intent.
That is why the challenge is not simply deciding whether a leader meant well. Meaning well matters, but it is not the same as being experienced well.
The deeper leadership question is one that intention alone cannot answer:
What did people repeatedly experience?
Two sides of one experience
The book is written for the people who lead and the people being led. These are not opposing teams. They are two perspectives within the same leadership experience, and each sees something the other may not.
If you lead
The book helps leaders examine, and ask better questions about:
If you are being led
The book helps employees consider:
When silence looks like stability
What leaders may read in silence
Why people may become quiet
Silence is not the absence of feedback. Silence is feedback.
That does not mean every quiet team is in trouble. Silence has many possible meanings. The point is for leaders to get curious about what it may mean, instead of assuming they already know.
When organizations treat the effect as the problem
An organization may notice performance decline, disengagement, absenteeism, conflict, reduced participation, withdrawal, or turnover, and respond to what it can see without examining what happened beforehand.
Sometimes leaders move quickly toward performance management or discipline without asking whether a known workplace experience contributed to the change. Some performance concerns are exactly what they appear to be, and they deserve a direct response. The question is whether anyone has asked what came first.
The book is not against accountability. It argues for accountability that works.
Accountability should help organizations understand and address the problem—not simply document its effects.
Discipline addresses behavior. Repair addresses damage.
What organizations often notice
The cost of protecting performance at any price
A person is not truly a high performer if the organization must continually absorb the damage their behavior creates for everyone around them.
Performance should be measured not only by what a person produces, but by what their presence makes possible—or impossible—for others.
Many organizations face this dilemma. A person produces strong results, and the organization hesitates to look closely at how those results are produced. The cost does not disappear. It tends to be absorbed by others, in extra work, in silence, in workarounds, in lost confidence, and sometimes in departures.
This is not a label for any person, and the book does not diagnose behavior or make legal judgments. It asks leaders to consider outcomes together with the conditions under which they are produced, and to count what a person’s presence makes possible, or impossible, for the people around them.
Legal compliance is not the same as leadership
Behavior does not have to violate a law before leaders should care about its impact. Even when conduct clears the legal bar, organizations still have to consider dignity, trust, credibility, employee experience, their stated values, workplace expectations, appropriate accountability, and repair.
Compliance asks what is required. Leadership asks what kind of workplace is being built.
This page is not legal advice, and Elite Myth does not determine whether conduct is lawful. Legal and compliance questions belong with qualified legal and HR professionals.
What happens when we leave
Leaving a difficult workplace does not always mean leaving the experience behind. Fear can travel forward. Difficult workplace experiences can shape what we expect from the next one, and the questions that come with us can be hard to set down.
This is not a description of any medical or psychological condition. It is a recognition that difficult experiences can influence how we approach what comes next.
The goal is not certainty about the next workplace. The goal is greater trust in ourselves.
Fear-based vigilance
Informed discernment
The goal is not finding a perfect employer. It is becoming better equipped to:
For readers who want a coach alongside them while they work through this, Elite Myth Reclaim™ exists for that purpose. The book stands on its own.
Imperfect does not mean unhealthy
Healthy organizations still experience conflict. Leaders make mistakes, and so do employees. Communication breaks down, difficult decisions get made, and accountability can be uncomfortable.
The book is not an invitation to label every hard interaction as something larger. The question that often tells the difference is:
What happens after something goes wrong?
A healthier system is capable of
Repair is not a meeting. Repair is a process.
The Led Experience™ behind the book
The book grows out of a structured way of understanding leadership experience. The Led Experience Standard™ gives leaders and organizations a shared language for what people experience through leadership, and for the circumstances around it. Here is the shape of it, without repeating the Standard itself.
What people experience through leadership.
The circumstances that can support or undermine the experience.
The cumulative outcome of repeated leadership experience. Understood separately, and not an eighth Dimension.
A reminder that context, identity, culture, and environment influence how leadership is experienced and interpreted. It is a lens for interpretation, not a scored Dimension or Condition.
The Led Experience™ is a proprietary developmental framework. It is not presented as psychometrically validated. For organizations that want to apply these ideas beyond individual leaders, see Organizational Health.
Explore the Led Experience Standard™Explore the Led Experience™
What readers will explore
These are some of the themes the book invites readers into. It is a window into the book, not a summary of it.
Why intention alone does not determine leadership effectiveness.
What leaders can learn from what employees say, and from what they stop saying.
What happens when speaking honestly begins to feel risky.
Why accountability must examine both behavior and context.
What happens when organizational actions contradict organizational values.
Why apology, discipline, and repair are not the same thing.
How recurring experiences can reveal something larger than an isolated incident.
How difficult workplace experiences can change the way people see themselves, and how confidence can be rebuilt.
How leaders, employees, and organizations can make different choices once they understand what they are experiencing.
From understanding to action
The book’s practical movement is from understanding to action. The 90-Day Led Experience™ Leadership Reset is part of that movement, not a separate book, and it helps move the leadership conversation toward change that can be observed and sustained.
About the author
For more than twenty years, Brendaliz Mak has worked inside complex organizations across the public sector, human resources, organizational operations, public safety, governance, nonprofit leadership, and education, observing both effective leadership and organizational dysfunction firsthand. She has also served as a university instructor and holds graduate education in management and organizational behavior.
Across those settings, one question kept returning: what is it actually like to be led here? How People Want to Be Led brings together that experience, her leadership lessons, and the Led Experience™ approach to help leaders see what their leadership creates, and to help people inside difficult workplaces make sense of what they are experiencing.
Book status In development
How People Want to Be Led is currently being developed. No release date has been announced, and the book is not yet available.
Join the updates list to hear as things take shape.
What to expect
How People Want to Be Led
Whether you are trying to understand the experience you create as a leader, the experience you are living as an employee, or the culture taking shape inside an organization, the first step is learning to see what is actually happening.
