Author: candy@webworldadvantage.com

I’ve been getting emails lately that almost work on me.

They open with a sharp little comment about something I posted, or a line from my LinkedIn profile. They sound like the sender actually paid attention. Like they noticed me. For a second, there’s a flicker of, “oh, this person sees me, maybe I should write back.”

Then I catch it. They didn’t read my profile. They pointed an AI at it, asked for a hook, and pasted the result into a template. They have no idea who I am. They simulated cherishing me, because cherishing sells, and they wanted the sale without the work of actually caring.

It’s gross. It’s also revealing, because it shows what a lot of marketing has quietly become. A project to hack someone’s emotions. To find the words that perturb a person into feeling chosen, seen, attended to, without the sender ever having to be the kind of person who chooses, sees, or attends.

Bonus or Pizza Party?

Here’s the second story this reminded me of. A leadership team once asked me, “We want to do something nice for our people. Should we give them a bonus, or throw a pizza party?” The question itself was the tell. If you genuinely cared about your people, you would already know which one mattered to them. You wouldn’t be polling an outside consultant about what your own employees value. You’d know, because caring is the thing that produces knowing.

What they wanted was for their people to feel cared for. What they were skipping was caring for them.

The Shortcut That Corrodes

This is the move, over and over. People understand the marketing power of cherishing. They get that humans light up when someone holds their concerns as if those concerns mattered. So they try to manufacture the feeling, on the cheap, with a clever opener or a pizza party. They want the result without the practice. They want the customer or the employee to feel chosen, while not actually choosing them.

The shortcut does not work. Or rather, it works for a week, and then it corrodes the relationship from the inside, because the other person eventually clocks it. I clocked it on those emails. Your employees clock it on the pizza. Your customers clock it when your “personalized” follow-up has nothing to do with them.

Cherishing as a Superpower

Here is what I want you to really hear. In 2025 and 2026, the capacity to actually cherish another human being is a superpower in the marketplace. I think it might be the most profound one available right now. We are surrounded by people pretending to cherish us, and we feel it, and it is making us sicker. So when we run into someone who actually does, the response is almost involuntary. Wow. Where have you been. I want to do business with you. I want to work for you. I want to tell my friends about you.

That is the opening. Not because cherishing is a clever positioning move, but because the rarer it gets, the more it stands out, and the more it stands out, the more it compounds. And it can be developed. It is not a personality trait you either have or do not. It is a practice.

The Practice

If you want your employees to feel cared for, care about them. If you want your prospects to feel cherished, learn them. Sit with their concerns. Find out what they are actually trying to build. Notice what they are afraid of. That is slow, expensive, and inconvenient. It is also the thing.

Entrepreneurs who try to learn the trick of faking it are training themselves into the wrong instinct. They are building a business on a kind of cleverness that will, eventually, leave them surrounded by people who do not trust them. Including, by the way, themselves.

There is a different path. It is slower at the start and much faster after that. Pay attention to real people. Hold their concerns as if they were your own, then design your business so that their winning is also your winning. That is cherishing. The other thing is a costume.

There is a quiet image most leaders carry, even if they rarely say it out loud: the desire to have people follow close behind them.

Not dragging behind. Not resisting. Not waiting to be told what to do. Half a step back, already adjusting, already supporting the movement. Not mindless obedience. Not hero worship. Just alignment.

When leadership works, everything feels lighter. Momentum replaces friction. Decisions move without distortion. You don’t spend your days clarifying, correcting, or recovering from misinterpretation. People anticipate what matters and act accordingly.

This is what many leaders actually want. Not control. Not admiration. But followership that works.

Entrepreneurship is fundamentally a leadership game. Employees are followers. Customers are followers. Even the marketplace “follows” through changed behavior. If no one follows, nothing scales. If no one aligns, effort multiplies but progress does not.

Early in my career, running an IT company with about thirty people, I experienced a stretch where this alignment existed. It wasn’t perfect, but direction traveled cleanly. People leaned into it. They adapted quickly. They often encouraged me forward when I hesitated. It felt like the organization could move as a single body.

That experience clarified something important:

Followership cannot be demanded. It has to be earned.

There is a deeply entrenched belief, what I call a Zombie Operating System™ view of leadership, that alignment, ownership, and loyalty can simply be requested. As if leadership were positional rather than relational.

It isn’t.

You do not get followers in lockstep because you want them. You get them because you have done the work required to deserve them.

There are no shortcuts. But nearly every leader can move toward this. The work falls into three areas.

The First Cost: Clarity

If people are to align behind you, they must know where you are going. Not vaguely. Not emotionally. Not as a general feeling. They need clarity they can organize themselves around.

Most leaders believe they are clear. They are not. Not because they lack intelligence, but because they cannot see the gaps in their own thinking. Others can. And those gaps show up as hesitation, friction, and resistance, which leaders often misinterpret as execution problems.

In working with entrepreneurs, this is almost universal. The vision sounds compelling until it is examined closely. Then it becomes thin. Incomplete. Difficult to follow.

Real vision takes time. It requires sustained inquiry, into the business and into yourself. You must know what you want, what works for you, what kind of life your business is actually building. Without that clarity, you cannot offer others a future they can trust.

If you want a structured place to build that level of clarity, not alone, and not theoretically, Entrepreneurs EDGE exists for exactly this reason.

We don’t just talk about alignment.

We pressure-test it.

We refine it until it can actually be followed.

If you are ready to earn followership instead of hoping for it, this is where that work happens.

People don’t just need to know where you’re going. They need to understand the rules of the game. Your values. Your standards. Your boundaries. These are not cultural accessories, they are orientation devices.

Until you can follow yourself, you cannot expect others to follow you.

What often feels like failure is simply the cost of insufficient clarity.

The Second Cost: Care

Alignment does not come from extracting effort. It comes from protecting and investing in the people who choose to follow you.

This is structural, not sentimental.

When leaders consistently take their people’s concerns seriously, often more seriously than the people do themselves, something shifts. People relax. Loyalty forms. Energy rises.

Not because it was demanded. Because it was earned.

This requires genuine curiosity about who your people are becoming and where they are headed. It also requires a shared trajectory. Alignment is not sameness, but it does require movement in roughly the same direction.

Sometimes the future you help someone build lives inside your company. Sometimes it prepares them for something beyond it. Either way, leadership requires honesty about the deal.

People act like owners when the success of the business produces meaningful gain in their own lives.

You must also overcome cynicism. Many people have been trained to distrust leadership. Care cannot be a tactic. If it is merely instrumental, it will be felt.

And it will fail.

The Third Cost: Openness

If people are half a step behind you, they will see things you cannot. They will detect cracks before they reach the surface. If they have no real influence, if their voice cannot shape direction, their commitment fades.

Alignment without influence becomes compliance.

Compliance never produces lockstep.

This requires humility. When you stumble, others absorb the impact. Leadership that works demands openness to being shaped by those who are organizing themselves around your direction.

The image of followers in lockstep is not a fantasy. It is achievable. And it is one of the most rewarding experiences leadership offers.

But it is not free.

It requires clarity most leaders avoid, care many organizations shortcut, and openness that challenges the ego.

Leadership is not about being admired.

It is about being worth following.

And that is an ongoing discipline.

If you are ready to raise your standard as a leader, Entrepreneurs EDGE begins soon.