Sometimes it feels like it would have been simpler to look the other way. There were clients to serve, deadlines to meet, and countless other decisions demanding my attention. Like most leaders, I’ve learned that confronting behavior is almost always harder than ignoring it.

When you first notice something isn’t right, it’s easy to rationalize it away. You tell yourself it’s an isolated incident. Maybe they’re having a difficult week. Maybe you’re overreacting. Maybe you’ll deal with it after this project is finished. You roll your eyes, shake your head, and think, “Are you kidding me?” Then you move on to the next thing. It is only after it is over that the absurdity of the behavior comes into full view.

We are each responsible for our own microenvironment

Leadership is busy, and defending culture rarely feels as urgent or as attractive as the work sitting in your inbox. Over the years I’ve come to believe that this is exactly how organizations begin to lose themselves. It’s not all at once, it’s little by little. One tolerated behavior at a time.

I’ve spent much of the last twenty years studying how technology changes human behavior. That may sound like an odd place to begin an essay about leadership, but I’ve discovered something surprising. The same principles that explain why new technologies reshape markets also explain why some organizations flourish while others slowly lose their way.

Behavior follows the environment. Change the environment, and behavior eventually changes with it. Organizations are no different.

Every leader creates a microenvironment within the broader organization. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, we teach people what matters through our daily actions. We communicate what excellence looks like, what behaviors are celebrated, what standards are expected, and perhaps most importantly, what behaviors we are willing to overlook.

Long before I encountered the research, I had seen this principle play out in real life.

The Rosenthal Effect

In the 1960s, psychologist Robert Rosenthal conducted a fascinating experiment. Teachers were told that certain students in their classrooms were likely to experience extraordinary intellectual growth during the coming year. The remarkable part was that those students had been chosen at random.

Yet many of them did, in fact, outperform their classmates.

The teachers weren’t consciously giving them better grades or easier assignments. Instead, their expectations subtly changed the way they interacted with those students. They became a little more patient. They offered a little more encouragement. They provided more opportunities to grow. Over time, thousands of seemingly insignificant interactions accumulated until the students began performing at a higher level. The expectation became the reality.

Most people think of the Rosenthal Effect as an educational concept. I think it’s one of the most profound leadership lessons ever discovered. It changed the way I think about my own role as a leader.

For decades, leadership has often been defined by command and control. Set goals. Measure performance. Correct mistakes. Hold people accountable. Those things certainly matter, but I’ve come to believe they aren’t the heart of leadership.

The real responsibility of leadership is creating an environment where people can become more than they believed they were capable of becoming. That is a very different way of thinking.

Protect and project what you value

At MarketStorm, our first company value isn’t innovation. It isn’t performance, it isn’t profitability. It’s kindness. Not being polite, not avoiding difficult conversations because you might hurt someone’s feelings, genuine kindness.

To be clear, I am not talking about kindness because it makes people feel good, but because we’ve come to believe it is a competitive advantage. When most people hear the word kindness, they imagine avoiding conflict or lowering standards. That isn’t what I mean. Real kindness assumes the best in people while expecting the best from them.

True kindness celebrates growth. It offers encouragement without becoming dishonest. It gives people the confidence to take risks while holding them accountable for learning from them. It also removes people from bad situations or more importantly in a leadership role, removes the bad situation from your team. There is nothing more unkind than letting people suffer through a bad situation because dealing with it makes you feel uncomfortable.

We all have our own extraordinary

Every day we celebrate accomplishments. We openly cheer one another on. We intentionally recognize progress, sometimes in very small ways. We talk constantly about playing to one another’s strengths while protecting one another’s weaknesses. Rather than trying to make everyone good at everything, we help people become exceptional where they naturally excel while surrounding them with teammates whose strengths complement their own.

One phrase we use often is, “Find your own voice.”

What we mean is simple; we don’t expect anyone to become a copy of someone else. We want each individual to discover the part of their work that genuinely resonates with who they are.

Some people discover they love solving technical problems. Others become remarkable communicators. Some find joy in helping clients navigate difficult decisions. Others discover talents they didn’t know they possessed because someone finally believed they were capable of more. Someone finally saw what is uniquely extraordinary about them.

I’ve never believed that people come to work wanting to do a poor job; most people want to contribute. People want to grow, they want to be seen, they want to matter. Leadership isn’t about extracting more effort from people. It’s about removing the barriers that keep them from becoming who they’re capable of becoming.

Inputs become outputs

One of the unexpected outcomes of this philosophy has been the work ethic it produces. We often hear business leaders grousing about younger employees simply don’t want to work anymore. Our experience has been almost the exact opposite.

In fact, we sometimes have to remind people to go home, to take vacations, and to spend time with their families. They aren’t driven by fear or unrealistic expectations. They work hard because they genuinely enjoy contributing to something meaningful and because they know their teammates are counting on them.

I don’t believe that’s a generational phenomenon. I think it’s a human one. When people feel trusted, respected, challenged, and supported, most of them naturally want to contribute. The question isn’t whether people want to do meaningful work. The question is whether we’ve created an environment that allows them to.

Protecting what you build

But building a healthy culture is only half the responsibility. Protecting it is where leadership becomes difficult.

Every leader eventually encounters behavior that doesn’t align with the environment they’re trying to create. Rarely is it one dramatic event. More often, it’s a pattern. A dismissive comment. A lack of ownership. An unwillingness to support a teammate. A quiet erosion of trust.

Those moments almost never arrive when it’s convenient. There is always another deadline, another client call, another meeting, another reason to postpone the difficult conversation.

Every leader knows the temptation to convince themselves that it will get better on its own. Sometimes it does, more often than not it doesn’t. It is easy to hope that the team will take care of it. They won’t because they can’t. It is up to you.

What I’ve learned is that every time a leader ignores behavior that contradicts the values they publicly celebrate, they teach the organization something. The strongest organizational lessons are not through speeches; they come through silence.

People don’t ultimately believe what leaders say; they believe in what leaders do. Not what you do once but what you consistently do. Culture is not built by what leaders celebrate once a quarter. It is built by what they reinforce every day and what they refuse to tolerate. Eventually, if the gap between words and actions becomes too large, people stop believing the values altogether. They begin to assume those values exist for recruiting brochures or company websites rather than for real life.

In that moment, trust quietly disappears. Sometimes protecting a culture means making one of the hardest decisions a leader will ever make. No one enjoys telling someone they are no longer part of the team. I certainly don’t.

But I have come to believe that protecting a healthy culture is often one of the greatest acts of kindness you can show the people who remain. Every person who consistently lives your values deserves to know those values are real. They are not platitudes, they are not optional.

It is up to you

Certainly, Leadership is about setting goals and driving toward outcomes. The work has to get done, we all have to deliver. As leaders, we have to understand it is also about having the courage to protect the environment that allows everyone to grow.

The Rosenthal Effect teaches us that people often rise or fall to the expectations placed upon them. Leadership is choosing those expectations carefully. Culture is reinforcing them every day. Character is having the courage to protect them when it would be easier not to.

It is not just companywide. Every leader has an individual responsibility to drive and protect what we say we care about. In the end, every leader builds a microculture within their own team. The real question for each of us is whether we build it intentionally or is it built by what we choose to tolerate.

I’ve spent much of my career studying how the internet changes human behavior. One lesson has repeated itself over and over again: technology rarely transforms markets on its own. It changes what people expect, and those changing expectations reshape the market. That’s why I don’t see this announcement as simply another Google product update. I see it as another behavioral inflection point in the evolution of the internet.

Google’s goal is to recommend businesses, not provide searchable results

For years, digital marketing has been organized around separate disciplines. SEO managed your website. Google Ads managed paid search. Local Services Ads generated leads. Google Business Profile managed your local presence. Performance Max optimized campaigns across Google’s inventory. Each lived in its own dashboard, often managed by different people or even different agencies. Google is quietly removing those boundaries.

By bringing Local Services Ads into the Google Ads ecosystem, Google is connecting search intent, advertising, reviews, business information, and machine learning into a single AI-driven system. The objective is no longer simply to help customers discover businesses. Increasingly, Google’s goal is to recommend which business a customer should choose.

That may sound like a subtle distinction, but it changes everything.

For decades, Google functioned as the world’s largest search engine. Its job was to organize information and present choices. The customer compared businesses, visited websites, read reviews, and ultimately made the decision.

Today, Google is evolving into something different. AI Overviews summarize information before a user clicks. Google Business Profiles answer questions without requiring a website visit. Reviews establish credibility. Performance Max predicts buying intent. Local Services Ads recommend providers. Individually, each of these products represented an incremental improvement. Together, they reveal a much larger strategic direction.

The traffic economy of search has transitioned to the trust economy of AI

Google is becoming a recommendation engine. That observation aligns closely with another trend we’ve been discussing for months: the internet is shifting from a traffic economy to a trust economy. Search required Google to find businesses. AI requires Google to choose businesses. Those are fundamentally different problems. Finding businesses depends on keywords and relevance. Choosing businesses requires confidence. Confidence comes from trusted data.

That means Google’s AI increasingly depends on signals that demonstrate credibility: accurate business information, consistent digital identities, customer reviews, response times, service categories, behavioral signals, and countless other indicators that help the system determine whether your business deserves to be recommended. This is why I believe one of the biggest implications of this announcement has little to do with advertising budgets and everything to do with digital trust.

This is the end of search as we know it

Many companies still think of their Google Business Profile as an online directory listing that someone updates when business hours change. That mindset is quickly becoming outdated. Your Google Business Profile is evolving into Google’s primary source of truth. Every field—your business name, address, phone number, service areas, categories, photos, operating hours, and reviews—becomes another data point feeding Google’s AI systems.

As automation takes over more of the decision-making process, data quality becomes a competitive advantage. Small inconsistencies that once caused only minor inconveniences may now reduce Google’s confidence in your business. In an AI-driven environment, confidence influences visibility, and visibility determines opportunity.

Focus on the journey

Although MarketStorm specializes in programmatic advertising rather than Google Ads management, this announcement reinforces something we’ve believed for years: customers don’t experience marketing through individual channels. They experience a single extended journey.

A homeowner may first see your company on Connected TV. Days later they encounter one of your display ads. They search your name on Google, read your reviews, ask an AI assistant about your reputation, open your Google Business Profile, and finally call directly from the search results without ever visiting your website.

To that customer, it feels like one seamless decision. To many businesses, those interactions are still managed as separate marketing functions. The companies that will lead over the next five years won’t simply become better at Google Ads or better at SEO. They’ll build stronger digital ecosystems that consistently earn trust across every customer touchpoint. In an AI-driven internet, that trust doesn’t just influence people—it increasingly influences the machines making recommendations on their behalf.

If your business relies on Google for lead generation, now is the time to have a conversation with your search partner. Ask when your Local Services Ads will migrate to Performance Max for pay-per-lead. Verify that your Google Ads account, Google Business Profile, website, and call tracking data are completely aligned. Understand how automated bidding will affect your cost per lead, and make sure there is a strategy for generating a steady flow of authentic customer reviews.

Those are no longer technical housekeeping questions. They are strategic business questions.

Because I believe this announcement is part of a much larger pattern. Every major shift in the history of the internet has changed not only the technology we use, but the way people make decisions. Google’s latest announcement is another step in that evolution. The companies that recognize it early will optimize more than campaigns—they will optimize trust itself. And as AI increasingly mediates the relationship between businesses and customers, trust may become the most valuable marketing asset a company can own.

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In the early 20th century, that promise came wrapped in shiny new household appliances. Automatic washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and other labor-saving devices were sold as tools that would liberate women from endless household chores and create a future of leisure.

Advertisements promised to “give back” hours every day. Marketing slogans proclaimed:

• “Wash without work.”

• “Lighten your labors.”

• “Housewives rescued from washing-day drudgery.”

• “Roll dishpan drudgery out of her life.”

• “Your wife’s hands need never touch dishwater again.”

The vision was clear: less work, more free time, and a dramatically improved quality of life. That’s not what happened.

The Housework Paradox

Historians and sociologists have spent decades studying the impact of household technologies, and their conclusion is both fascinating and counterintuitive.

While appliances made individual tasks easier, they did not necessarily reduce the overall amount of housework. Instead, they changed expectations. Before automatic washing machines became common, washing clothes once a week was perfectly acceptable. Homes weren’t expected to be spotless every day. Standards were different because the effort required to achieve them was significant.

As technology made these activities easier, society responded by raising the bar:

• Families owned more clothing.

• Laundry was done more frequently.

• Standards of cleanliness increased dramatically.

• New fabrics required specialized care.

• Expectations for immaculate homes became the norm.

Rather than creating vast amounts of leisure time, appliances often led people to spend the same amount of time achieving a higher standard of living. Sociologists refer to this phenomenon as the housework paradox: technology reduces the effort required for a task, but society redefines what counts as acceptable performance.

The work doesn’t disappear. The expectations evolve.

AI Is Following the Same Script

Today, we’re hearing many of the same promises about artificial intelligence.

• AI will save time.

• AI will automate knowledge work.

• AI will eliminate tedious tasks.

And in many cases, those claims are true. AI can dramatically reduce the time required to create content, analyze data, generate code, summarize information, and perform countless other activities. Here is the rub: history suggests that time savings rarely remain as time savings. Instead, they become new expectations.

If AI allows a marketing team to create ten campaigns in the time it once took to create one, clients will not simply be satisfied receiving the same campaign faster. They will expect:

• More campaigns.

• More personalization.

• More testing.

• More optimization.

• Faster iteration.

• Continuous improvement.

The standard of “good enough” shifts. Organizations that once competed on speed will soon find that speed is merely the cost of entry.

Technology Doesn’t Determine Outcomes—Human Behavior Does

This pattern appears throughout modern history.

• The washing machine didn’t simply automate laundry. It changed society’s definition of a clean home.

• Search engines didn’t simply organize information. They changed what people expected when looking for answers.

• Smartphones didn’t simply make communication mobile. They changed expectations around availability and responsiveness.

• Social media didn’t simply connect people. It transformed how attention is captured, distributed, and monetized.

• And AI won’t simply automate knowledge work. It will redefine what customers, employers, and markets consider valuable.

The impact of technology is rarely found in the task it automates. The real impact emerges in how people adapt their behavior once that automation becomes available.

The New Competitive Advantage

Many business leaders focus on the efficiency gains AI can deliver. That’s important—but it may not be the most important question.

The more critical question is:

What new expectations will AI create?

As AI becomes ubiquitous, simply using it won’t create differentiation. Everyone will have access to similar capabilities. The organizations that thrive will be those that understand how customer expectations are changing and adapt accordingly. Just as washing machines didn’t create a world with less laundry, AI is unlikely to create a world with less work. Instead, it will create a world where the definition of exceptional work changes.

Looking Beyond Automation

The lesson from the washing machine isn’t that technology fails. On the contrary, household appliances fundamentally improved quality of life. The lesson is that human beings are remarkably adaptable. Every major technological advancement reshapes our expectations, our standards, and our definition of what is possible. AI will almost certainly do the same.

The winners won’t be the organizations that ask, “How much time can AI save us?” They’ll be the organizations that ask, “What will our customers expect once everyone has AI?” History suggests the future isn’t determined by technology alone. It’s determined by how people respond to it.