642- What Happens in Rooms When Nobody Is Performing
Jens Heitland reflects on what he observed working inside Deutsche Bank offices at 22, and what it taught him about leadership presence, consistency, and the patterns that shape how leaders behave when they think no one is watching.
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What Happens in Rooms When Nobody Is Performing
When I was 22, I had a job that gave me access to almost every room in Deutsche Bank's German locations. I was driving a van between offices, watering plants, replacing light bulbs, doing the kind of work that keeps a building running without anyone noticing.
Nobody adjusted their behavior for me. I was not a colleague. I was not a client. I was the person who kept the lights on, and that distinction mattered more than I expected.
What I observed over those years was a pattern I have since seen repeat in many different organizations, at many different levels of seniority. The people in those rooms behaved differently depending on who else was present.
The shift was not dramatic, not the kind of thing that would have been obvious to someone watching from outside. But the pattern was consistent. When a director was in conversation with a peer or a client, the posture, language, and attention changed. When I walked in to water the plants, something in the room shifted, and the whole performance quietly adjusted around me.
I want to be careful here, because I am not describing bad leadership or moral failure. The people I observed treated me respectfully, and I hold nothing against how they moved through their days. What I noticed was something more structural than personal, and far more common than any individual behavior would suggest.
They were managing their presence. Consciously or not, they were allocating their attention and energy according to how much they thought the situation required. A peer conversation warranted a certain kind of engagement. A client conversation warranted another. Someone coming in to change a light bulb warranted almost none.
At scale, in complex organizations, this pattern tends to emerge whether anyone intends it or not. Presence becomes a resource that is rationed, and the allocation follows a hierarchy that is rarely written down but is understood by everyone within the system.
The question that experience planted was one I kept returning to across the years that followed: Is this truly the way to do things?
I did not reach a clean answer at 22, and I am not sure I have one now. But the question changed how I paid attention to my own behavior in rooms and how I thought about what consistency actually means in leadership.
The version of leadership I find more durable is the one in which the underlying orientation remains the same regardless of who is in the room. The person walking in to change the light bulb is not outside the system. They are part of it. How they experience a place's culture is as real as how clients or colleagues experience it.
What I also took from that job was a practice that became more useful the further I moved from it: writing things down. Not formally, not as a framework, but as a way of taking a moment seriously enough to capture it.
The experiences that shape how we think about leadership are rarely the ones that feel important in the moment. They tend to be ordinary moments, things witnessed from the corner of a room, patterns that register slowly. The value comes from deciding to do something with what was noticed.
For anyone thinking about thought leadership, there is one step further: taking what you learned and shaping it into something that travels. Not just writing it for yourself, but building the story in a way that lets someone else find the same question inside their own experience.
Highlights:
00:00 Learning Leadership Lessons
00:07 Early Career at Deutsche Bank
00:37 Behind the Scenes Observations
01:09 Turning Moments Into Stories
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Transcript :
The thing that I was always looking into is how do I learn from good and bad examples in leadership. When I was 22, I was driving this van across different locations of the Deutsche Bank in Germany. So I was the guy that was watering the plants, I was guy that was changing the light bulbs, and I was the person that was able to go into all the different rooms, even of the bank directors of the region and/or local. What I've seen is that they treated me different because I was basically a nobody for them, and they have treated me all well, so nothing against that. But what was interesting that they behaved differently when I was in the room and when they had, like, either colleague conversation or client conversation. So I was observing this over a couple of years and learned from that, that in the end, they always looked into how do I perform when I'm in certain situations, so they treated every person differently and over time, I just looked into that and looked into, is this truly the way to do things, yes or no, for myself? So these are the moments that I think everyone has to learn from, it's just the question, do we take this learning and write them down for ourself? And if you're interested in thought leadership, then it's even, do we take this learning, build stories around that so that other people can learn from it?