What a Beehive Taught Me About Leadership Presence
Updated: Jun 24
When I decided to leave Amazon in the spring, my team sent me off with a literal team: a colony of bees. Just a casual 15,000 new direct reports.
It was one of the greatest gifts I’ve ever received. I’m a beekeeper, have been for a few years now, and getting a colony from the people I’d worked alongside, people who knew me well enough to choose it as their parting gift, meant more than I expected. A hive is not something you give lightly. It’s alive. It requires tending. It’s a vote of confidence that someone will show up, week after week, and do the quiet work of paying attention. And it’s a good dose of hope, too: that if I do my part, the bees will do theirs, and somewhere down the line, all that steady teamwork pays itself forward into something sweet. For me, for them, for everyone who gets to share in it.
At the heart of a bee colony is a kind of built-in belonging. Every bee has a role, and that role matters to whether the colony survives. A colony with bees doing the wrong things, or no things, dies. The roles shift over a lifetime, too. A nurse bee becomes a forager. A builder becomes a guard. There’s no org chart pinned to the comb, but there is an order, and it works because every member of the colony is oriented toward the same thing: the health of the whole.
I find myself watching my bees constantly. The way they draw out comb, slowly, deliberately, one hexagon at a time. The way half the colony "beards" outside the hive on a hot Minnesota afternoon while the rest stay inside, wings beating like tiny air conditioners to keep the brood cool. The way a colony will replace a queen who isn’t serving them well, not out of cruelty, but out of necessity. So many parallels to org design, to leadership, to what it actually looks like when a single person at the center either carries the whole thing forward or watches it collapse.
There’s one lesson that’s been buzzing in my ear lately (pun very much intended), and I think it’s useful beyond the hive.
The Queen Doesn’t Give Speeches
Here’s what most people get wrong about a queen bee: they think she’s in charge. She’s not. Well, not in the way we think about being in charge. She doesn’t direct traffic. She doesn’t assign tasks. She doesn’t hold court.
What she does is signal.
A queen bee produces a pheromone, a chemical signature that permeates the entire hive. It communicates her presence, her health, her fitness to lead. When the pheromone is strong and consistent, the colony is calm, productive, and aligned. Bees know what to do and they do it. When the pheromone weakens or becomes erratic, the colony gets anxious, disorganized, and agitated. And eventually, they move to replace her. They build queen cells. They raise a new leader. Notably, they don’t ask permission. And the queen doesn’t know this is happening until it’s too late.
I think about this all the time now. Because I’ve watched it play out in organizations for nearly two decades, just with more Slack channels, fewer hexagons, and a lot less awareness of what’s actually happening.
Presence Is Not Performance
When I coach leaders on executive presence, the first thing I try to undo is the idea that presence is about how you show up in a room. E.g., the big entrance, the 'power pose' posture, the polished talking points.
Of course that stuff matters, but it’s not the signal.
The signal is what people feel when you’re not in the room. It’s the residue of your leadership. It’s whether your team can make the right call at 9 p.m. on a Thursday without texting you, because your priorities are that clear. It’s whether someone two levels down could articulate what you stand for without checking a slide deck.
That’s pheromone. Signal. You catching my scent?
And like a queen’s pheromone, it either permeates or it doesn’t. You can’t fake it. You can’t manufacture it in a single all-org meeting and expect it to hold for a quarter. It has to be steady. It has to be real. And importantly, it has to be tended.
Where Leaders Lose Their Signal
In my experience, signal breaks down in three predictable ways:
Clarity. The leader hasn’t actually decided what they stand for. They have values on a slide somewhere, but they haven’t distilled their leadership point of view into something simple enough to travel. If you can’t say it in one sentence, your colony can’t carry it.
Consistency. The leader’s signal shifts based on audience, stress level, or the last meeting they were in. Monday’s message doesn’t match Thursday’s energy. The team learns to read the weather rather than trust the direction. This is the equivalent of erratic pheromone. It breeds anxiety.
Reach. The leader’s signal is strong in their inner circle but dissipates beyond it. Their directs get it, but everyone else is guessing. A queen’s pheromone has to reach every corner of the hive (every last millimeter!). If it only reaches the bees closest to her, the edges of the colony start building queen cells.
If any of this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Most leaders I work with are strong in one of these areas and weaker in the other two. The good news is that signal strength is coachable. It’s not charisma or personality. It’s something you practice and tend to, the same way you’d tend to anything alive.
The Amazon Connection
For those of you who came up in Amazon’s leadership culture (as I did), this maps cleanly to a few principles you already know. But these aren't Amazon-specific, they're perennial. Any organization with humans and hierarchy runs on the same wiring.
Earn Trust is the foundation of signal. If people don’t trust you, they tune out your pheromone entirely. Full stop. Do you listen as much as you talk? Are you willing to name your own missteps out loud, before someone else has to?
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit is signal clarity. Do people know where you stand? Will you say it out loud even when it’s uncomfortable, or only after the room has already decided?
Insist on the Highest Standards is signal consistency. Does your bar hold steady, or does it slip when no one’s watching?
The Replacement Instinct
Here’s the part no one wants to talk about. When a queen’s pheromone weakens, the colony doesn’t send a 360 feedback survey. They don’t schedule a skip-level. They start building queen cells in the margins and out of sight. And by the time the queen notices, the decision has already been made.
Organizations do this, too, just more slowly and with more HR paperwork. When a leader’s signal weakens, when people can’t feel the presence or trust the direction, the team starts working around them. They find other sources of clarity. They build informal leadership structures. They disengage, or worse, they leave. And eventually, someone above notices that the colony is restless.
This isn’t cruelty so much as biology. Systems orient toward survival, and a colony without a clear signal is a colony at risk.
The lesson here isn’t to grip tighter. It’s to tend to your signal the way I tend my hive: consistently, attentively, with the understanding that it’s a living thing that requires maintenance.
A Diagnostic for Your Own Signal
I’ve put together a simple self-assessment for the leaders I coach called The Signal Check. It’s ten questions across three dimensions: clarity, reach, and consistency.
Think of it like a mirror. Something you can sit with honestly and use to identify where your signal is strong and where it’s starting to fade.
Download tool:
The Quiet Work of Tending
Every week I go out to my hive. I carefully pull out the frames and I look for the queen. Not because I need to do anything with her, but because I need to know she’s there. That her signal is strong. That the colony is calm.
Most weeks, I don’t even see her. And I don’t have to because I can tell by the behavior of the bees around her. By the pattern of the brood. By the hum. By whether or not I'm getting stung! And honestly? That’s the whole point. Good leadership presence doesn’t announce itself. You just feel it. In the decisions that get made without you. In the culture that holds when things get hard. In the steady hum of a team that knows where it’s going.
So if you take one thing from this, let it be the question I keep coming back to: what’s my signal, and how am I tending to it?
One more thing: To my Amazon team, the ones who sent me off with a living, buzzing, 15,000-member colony: thank you. You gave me something that, every single week, teaches me new things about the work we used to do together and the work I’m building now. This one’s for you.
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