His legs were shak­ing before he even went down into the next squat. He stood in front of me at the wall ball sta­tion with that look peo­ple get when they are no longer real­ly decid­ing any­thing. They are just try­ing to keep the body mov­ing for one more rep, then one more, then some­how anoth­er. He picked up the ball, dropped down, came back up, threw, caught it. I watched the move­ment and called it straight away: no rep. Not because he missed the tar­get. Because he had not gone low enough.

That was the hard part. It was not some obvi­ous fail. Not a total col­lapse, not a messy rep, not some­thing dra­mat­ic enough for any­one around us to notice. It was a mat­ter of depth. A few degrees in the squat. A tiny gap between almost there and there. He nod­ded, bare­ly, took the ball again, tried again. Same thing. Close, but not enough. No rep.

I Had to Say No, and I Had to Keep Him Going

By then his legs were trem­bling so hard you could see it before he moved. And I remem­ber hav­ing two com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent impuls­es at the same time. One was to hold the stan­dard. The oth­er was to help him through it. That is the strange dou­ble role of being a judge at Hyrox, a race for­mat that com­bines run­ning with func­tion­al work­out sta­tions. You do not just watch and decide. You enforce the stan­dard, and at the same time you try to keep peo­ple in the race. Nei­ther impulse can­celled the oth­er out. I had to say no, and I had to keep him going. So I heard myself doing both. Low­er. No rep. Again. Come on. Deep­er. Breathe. You’ve got this.

And because this was Hyrox, none of it hap­pened in a clean, qui­et, con­trolled set­ting. It hap­pened at FIBO in Cologne, the huge fit­ness and well­ness expo, with loud music, noise every­where, peo­ple shout­ing, judges shout­ing, ath­letes deep in the pain cave, and my own voice already start­ing to give out from hours of call­ing reps. There is noth­ing pol­ished about that envi­ron­ment. You do not real­ly talk. You yell. You point. You repeat your­self. Every­thing is a lit­tle raw, includ­ing the people.

That moment has stayed with me more than I expect­ed. Prob­a­bly because it showed me a ten­sion I know from lead­er­ship, but in a much more phys­i­cal and stripped-down form than I usu­al­ly get to see it.

A Quiet Erosion of the Standard

In most oth­er sports, ref­er­ees are sup­posed to be neu­tral. They watch, they decide, they enforce. Their author­i­ty depends on dis­tance. A Hyrox judge does some­thing stranger. You still have to enforce the stan­dard, but you are also in it with the ath­lete. You are not there to com­fort them exact­ly, but you are also not some detached offi­cial float­ing above the scene. You count the reps, reject the ones that do not meet the stan­dard, and at the same time you push peo­ple to find the next clean one. You are strict and sup­port­ive in the same breath. That com­bi­na­tion is what got under my skin.

Because a lot of lead­er­ship talk still treats those two things as if they sit on oppo­site ends of a scale. You can be empa­thet­ic or demand­ing. Warm or clear. Sup­port­ive or rig­or­ous. And if you try to be both, peo­ple often assume one of them must be fake. Either the care is soft and unse­ri­ous, or the stan­dard is just pres­sure in nicer language.

But stand­ing at that wall ball sta­tion, that split made no sense to me. If I had start­ed giv­ing reps for squats that were not deep enough, just because the ath­lete was vis­i­bly suf­fer­ing, that would not have been kind­ness. It would have been a qui­et ero­sion of the stan­dard. And we often dress that move up as being human. We tell our­selves we are being fair because the per­son is try­ing so hard. But fair to whom? Fair accord­ing to what? If a rule only holds when it is easy to apply, then it does not real­ly hold.

At the same time, pure rule enforce­ment would have been wrong as well. There is a ver­sion of author­i­ty that hides inside tech­ni­cal cor­rect­ness. The rep is invalid, end of sto­ry. But that would have missed what was hap­pen­ing right in front of me. This was not just a move­ment error. It was a per­son right on the edge, try­ing to hold form under exhaus­tion, fight­ing for every last bit of con­trol. To reduce that moment to mechan­ics alone would have been its own kind of failure.

That is what made the role so inter­est­ing to me. It did not let me retreat into soft­ness, and it did not let me retreat into detach­ment. I had to stay with the per­son with­out bend­ing the stan­dard. I had to keep the stan­dard with­out becom­ing cold toward the person.

The Standard Stays — The Support Stays Too

The more I think about it, the more I feel that lead­er­ship often asks for exact­ly that, and that we do not talk hon­est­ly enough about how uncom­fort­able it is.

Because it is uncom­fort­able. It is uncom­fort­able to tell some­one that what they just did is not enough when you can see how much it cost them. It is uncom­fort­able to encour­age some­one while cor­rect­ing them. It is uncom­fort­able because both sides can be mis­read. If you insist on the stan­dard, you can look harsh. If you stay encour­ag­ing, you can sound per­for­ma­tive. If you do both at once, you risk sound­ing contradictory.

Maybe that is why so many peo­ple resolve the ten­sion by choos­ing one side. Some lead­ers hide behind empa­thy and stop say­ing the hard thing clear­ly. Oth­ers hide behind stan­dards and call their emo­tion­al dis­tance pro­fes­sion­al­ism. Both options are eas­i­er. Nei­ther one is espe­cial­ly good.

What I saw at Hyrox was a more demand­ing ver­sion of the role. The stan­dard stays. The sup­port stays too. One does not replace the other.

I do not mean that lead­er­ship should become some kind of work­place ver­sion of race judg­ing. The anal­o­gy breaks fast if you push it too far. Work is not sport. Peo­ple do not sign up for every chal­lenge at work in the same way an ath­lete signs up for a race. Pow­er is dif­fer­ent. Stakes are dif­fer­ent. Pres­sure can be much hard­er to see and much eas­i­er to mis­use. That mat­ters. A lot. And any­one in a lead­er­ship role should be care­ful with the fan­ta­sy that push­ing peo­ple is auto­mat­i­cal­ly noble just because it comes wrapped in encour­age­ment. But even with that caveat, some­thing about the wall ball sta­tion still feels true to me.

The Gap Between Support and Appeasement

Some­times peo­ple do not need you to make the bar eas­i­er to clear. They need you to be hon­est about where the bar is. And they need to feel that your hon­esty is not with­draw­al. That you are still there. Still engaged. Still on their side. Not in the sense of giv­ing them the rep any­way, but in the sense of believ­ing they can find the next bet­ter attempt.

That is a hard­er bal­ance than most lead­er­ship slo­gans admit. It asks more than being nice. It asks more than being clear. It asks you to tol­er­ate the ten­sion between the two with­out rush­ing to resolve it.

At the wall ball sta­tion, the dif­fer­ence between a valid rep and an invalid one could be just a few degrees of depth. Not much to look at. Every­thing to decide. That also felt familiar.

A lot of what mat­ters in lead­er­ship lives in gaps like that. The gap between sup­port and appease­ment. Between clar­i­ty and cold­ness. Between hold­ing some­one account­able and leav­ing them alone with the weight of it.

I went into that day expect­ing to judge move­ment stan­dards. I came out of it think­ing about how rare and how dif­fi­cult it is to com­bine firm­ness with real encour­age­ment with­out let­ting either one slide into caricature.

Maybe good lead­er­ship is not about choos­ing between being demand­ing and being human. Maybe it starts when you realise that, in the moments that mat­ter, you do not get to choose.