Two senior partners, two mornings, one lesson about what fear actually looks like in the room.
I don’t use a podium when I keynote. I wander the room, down the aisles, close enough to see faces. Most of the time that’s a gift, you can watch a room shift in real time, watch the exact sentence that lands. But it also means you see the ones who aren’t shifting, and if you’re leading through fear, that’s exactly where your attention needs to go.
At a recent keynote for 500 senior partners at Womble Bond Dickinson, one of the country’s largest law firms, I saw one. Midway through a talk on how AI is reshaping the legal profession, one partner stood out, arms crossed, jaw tight, not one nod, not one note taken. Everyone else in that ballroom was leaning in. He was the one face that looked like he wanted to be anywhere else.
I kept going. Fifty more minutes of it. I didn’t single him out, didn’t change my delivery to chase him down. But I noticed him the way you notice a raised eyebrow at exactly the wrong moment ‚Äî it stays with you.
The Next Morning, He Came at Me Fast
The next morning, I was walking to catch an early flight. Down the hallway toward me came a man in gym clothes, moving fast, sweaty, jaw still set the way it had been the day before. I recognized him immediately. Same partner.
For half a second, I genuinely thought, here it comes. He’s going to tell me I wasted an hour of his time.
Instead, he closed the distance, grabbed my hand, and told me, in so many words, that was amazing yesterday. Incredible. Thank you. Then he kept walking, just as fast as he’d arrived, gone before I could say much of anything back.
The Room Doesn’t Always Tell You the Truth
That thirty-second hallway exchange taught me something I now carry into every keynote I give, the face that looks the most resistant in the room is very often not disengaged. It’s processing. And what it’s usually processing is fear it isn’t ready to show yet.
The same event, a different partner, I’ll call him Rex, his first name, since his card got lost in the shuffle before I could keep his last, caught me right after I walked off stage. He shook my hand and told me, in substance, this, a lot of us in this room have been putting on a brave face about what AI is already doing to this profession, and what’s still coming. You had me genuinely worried ten minutes into your talk, worried, but agreeing with you. You validated concerns some of us had already been quietly having, and raised a few we hadn’t thought of yet. But then you spent fifty minutes giving us specific, pragmatic tools and principles for what we can do today to be proactive and secure our place in this. You made me feel like I have control over what happens to me, and that our leadership team has control over what happens to this firm. I’ve been worried about what this means for my kids’ future too, and I can’t wait to go home and tell them what you laid out today.
I never got Rex’s last name. He’d handed me his card in the scramble right after the keynote, along with a dozen others, and it got lost before I could put it somewhere safe. I still think about that conversation often anyway.
What Leading Through Fear Actually Looks Like From the Stage
Here’s what those two men, on two different mornings, taught me about the difference between fear and resistance, from where I stand, they can look exactly the same. Crossed arms. A tight jaw. No visible reaction. I could easily have written off that second partner as unreachable, checked out, a lost cause in that room. I would have been completely wrong.
This is the exact reason the Kryptonite Defense doesn’t start with an argument about whether AI is a threat. This is what leading through fear actually requires, not an argument about whether AI is a threat, every senior partner in that ballroom already knew that part. It starts with something more useful, five specific things, IDEAS, SPEED, TALENT, DISTINCTION, and LEADERSHIP AT ALL LEVELS, that convert fear you can’t out-argue into control you can actually exercise. You don’t defeat fear with reassurance. You defeat it with a plan specific enough that someone can start executing it before they’ve even left the ballroom.
The Question Worth Asking About Leading Through Fear
If you lead people, somewhere in your organization right now there’s a version of that partner. Arms crossed. Not taking notes. Reading, to you, as checked out, resistant, maybe even a lost cause. Here’s the question worth sitting with, what if that’s not resistance? What if it’s the person most quietly worried about what’s coming, and most eager for someone to hand them something concrete to do about it?
The people who look the most unmoved in the room are very often the ones who need the plan the most.
This is exactly the gap the 5-Ingredient Kryptonite Defense is built to close for anyone leading through fear right now, and it’s the core of what I lay out in Distinct or Extinct: Future-Proofing People and Organizations in the Age of AI, including the 90-Day Deployment Plan for putting it to work in your own organization. If you want a faster read on where you or your team stand today, the Kryptonite Scorecard takes about ten minutes: realmikeevans.com/scorecard.
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