From backpack to bookshelf: Books every emerging leader should read

Book 5: Zach Mercurio's The Power of Mattering

I want to start this week with a piece of work advice I was given early in my career, one that I genuinely found helpful at the time, and one that, if I am being honest, I passed on more than a few times as I moved into more senior roles.

We are all replaceable at work.

It was shared with me early in my career, almost as a form of protection. A way to create distance from work. When the late nights stretched too far, when I was asked to prioritize work over family, when work began to take up more space than it should, I would remind myself: I am replaceable here. I am not replaceable at home. The intent was grounding. A quiet push against over-identifying with work.

When I became a manager, I used it in much the same way. When someone on my team or a colleague was overwhelmed or holding themselves to an unsustainable standard, I would offer the same reassurance. You are replaceable. Not as a dismissal, but as a release valve. A way of saying: this job should not cost you your well-being.

I still think there is a version of that idea that holds. In most roles, especially in large organizations, no single individual is irreplaceable in a structural sense. Systems continue.

Positions are filled. Work carries on.

But reading The Power of Mattering by Zach Mercurio forced me to confront the other side of that statement.

The Mattering Deficit

Zach Mercurio defines mattering as feeling valued by others and adding value to their lives. It is at once recognition and contribution. Being seen, and making a difference.

His argument is that this is not a soft or secondary need. Tracing it back to something deeply human, he shows that our need to matter is instinctive from the moment we are born: mattering is necessary to our survival. And necessary to revitalize the modern workplace.

Despite more meetings, more check-ins, and more tools designed to keep us “connected” over the last several years, many workplaces are experiencing what he calls a mattering deficit. The symptoms are familiar: disengagement, loneliness, quiet withdrawal, and ultimately, people leaving.

He points to research, including a large-scale study led by MIT’s Donald Sull, analyzing why over 1.4 million employees left their jobs in 2021. The most predictive factor was not compensation or benefits. It was culture. Specifically, environments where people felt disrespected, excluded, and undervalued were far more likely to drive turnover.

Other studies echo this pattern. People leave when they feel unseen, when their work lacks meaning, and when leadership doesn’t care.

The implication is difficult to ignore. Creating a culture where people feel that they matter is no longer a “nice-to-have.” It is central to whether people stay, contribute, and engage in the first place.

Noticing, Affirming, Needing

Mercurio organizes his approach to mattering around three leadership practices:

Noticing: truly seeing and hearing people.

Affirming: showing them how their unique strengths make a difference.

Needing: making it clear that they are relied upon.

None of these are revolutionary on their own. In fact, that is part of his point. As he explains, although they are ‘common sense’, they are not ‘common practice’.

Having spent years researching employees across different industries he explains that when people describe moments where they felt they mattered at work, they rarely point to awards, bonuses, or formal recognition programs. Instead, they describe something much quieter. A manager who checked in. Someone who remembered what they were going through. A moment where their effort was acknowledged. A time they were told, specifically, how they made a difference.

Mattering is built in small moments.

That idea resonated with me, particularly because it aligns with something I have come across in other books in this series: leadership is rarely defined by singular, dramatic actions. As John Amaechi reminds readers several times throughout The Promises of Giants “there are no pivotal moments”. Leadership is shaped and defined in the everyday.

A Necessary Tension

One of the things I appreciated most about the book is what it does not claim.

Mercurio is clear that leadership behaviours alone cannot fix broken systems. Encouraging leaders to “notice” their employees does not compensate for unlivable wages. Affirming someone’s contribution does not resolve inequitable policies. Making someone feel needed does not replace access to healthcare or predictable schedules.

Other authors, particularly those focused on equity and inclusion, push this further.

Organizations that invest in leadership development without addressing structural inequities will never become truly inclusive environments.

That tension matters.

At the same time, as several of these authors argue, leaders still have both the responsibility and the ability to improve the experience of the person directly in front of them. Not in theory, but on a daily basis.

Mercurio’s contribution is to make that feel tangible. He argues that the ability to help people feel that they matter is not an innate trait reserved for a select few. It is a skill that can (and needs to) be developed, practiced, and strengthened.

Rethinking “Replaceable”

This is where the book challenged me most directly.

If people have a fundamental need to feel that they matter, what happens when we tell them, even with good intentions, that they do not? Because that is, in effect, what “we are all replaceable” communicates.

Even when framed as reassurance, even when intended to reduce pressure, the underlying message can land as: your contribution is interchangeable. And if people begin to believe that they don’t matter, it becomes much harder for the work itself to matter.

That doesn’t mean the original instinct behind the advice was wrong. Protecting people from burnout, from overwork, from tying their identity too tightly to their job is still important.

But Mercurio offers a more nuanced way of navigating that tension by offering an important distinction: helping people feel needed is not the same as making them feel indispensable in a way that creates dependency.

Healthy “needing” is about clarity of contribution. It is showing someone how their specific skills, perspective, or effort is relied upon in a given context. It answers the question: why does your work matter here and now?

Unhealthy needing, by contrast, is when leaders (often unintentionally) create environments where people feel that everything depends on them, that stepping away would cause things to fall apart, or that their value is tied to constant availability. That is where codependence begins to form.

The distinction is subtle but critical.

You can communicate to someone:

• Your perspective on this file is important because of your experience with X.

• The way you handled that stakeholder made a difference to the outcome.

• The team relies on you for this, and here is why.

Without implying:

• Nothing works without you.

• You cannot step away.

• Your worth is tied to how much you carry.

In other words, people need to feel that they are meaningfully relied upon, not that they are the only thing holding the system together.

Words Matter

I have stopped telling people (including myself) that they (or I) are all replaceable.

Not because the structural reality has changed, but because I have become more aware of what that phrase does in practice. It flattens contribution at the very moment when people are often looking for meaning in their work and to feel valued and that they bring value.

What I try to do instead is hold two ideas at once, and communicate them more carefully.

The work will continue. No role should come at the expense of your health.

AND (an important word that becoming a coach has really helped me embrace)

What you do here matters. Specifically, concretely, and in ways that are worth naming.

That shift may seem small. But if Mercurio is right, and the robust research that backs up his arguments suggests he is, those small moments of being seen, affirmed, and needed are not peripheral to leadership.

They are the work.

Final Reflection

The Power of Mattering did not introduce entirely new concepts to me. What it did was sharpen them, and in doing so, it forced me to re-examine something I had taken for granted and passed on to others.

For emerging (and more senior) leaders, that may be its greatest value.

Not just offering strategies, but prompting you to question the quiet assumptions shaping how you show up for your team.

Because in the end, leadership is not only about driving outcomes. It's about whether the people around you feel that they matter while doing so.