Synergy Team Power

Twenty-five years later, we remember what happened. But remembering is not the same as learning. That may be the most uncomfortable truth about September 11, 2001. We remember the images. We remember the smoke. We remember the names. We remember where we were. But memory can become passive. Learning requires something harder: changing how we think, how we prepare, how we lead, how we communicate, and how we treat people long after the headlines disappear. On September 11, 2001, 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airplanes and killed 2,977 people from 90 nations. The tragedy changed American security, emergency management, aviation, public health, leadership, technology, and our understanding of terrorism. But some of the most important lessons are not about terrorism at all. They are about human behavior under pressure. And those lessons still apply to CEOs, teachers, parents, first responders, organizations, communities and anyone responsible for other people. Here are ni...

You may not have the title. You may not have the authority. But your coworkers may already be treating you like the person who should lead. There is an uncomfortable truth about leadership: Your boss does not get to decide when people start seeing you as a leader. They can decide your title. They can decide your salary. They can decide whether your name appears on the organizational chart. But leadership itself often begins somewhere much less official: In the behavior of the people around you. Researchers call this leader emergence,  the process through which someone becomes informally recognized as a leader by other members of a group. It can happen without a promotion, without a management title, and without anyone formally announcing it. Recent research continues to treat informal leadership as a dynamic social process rather than simply a personality trait or job position. A 2026 study of self-managing teams, for example, found that informal leadership can develop over time th...