Taking up the center of a sidewalk and making everyone else move is a clue to how you make decisions, says leadership adviser Virginia “Ginny” Clarke. She asks the same question about walking through a doorway: did you check for the person coming toward you?
In her August 18, 2025 video, Clarke argues that these everyday habits reveal whether you account for other people automatically. She describes the failure to do so as “operating with incomplete intelligence.”
Clarke, who previously led Google’s diversity, non-tech recruiting, and leadership internal-mobility teams, connects that awareness to work. If someone struggles to make room for another pedestrian, she asks, how will they handle competing needs on a team or guide people through organizational change?
She calls the ability strategic intelligence: including people’s likely responses when weighing a decision. In her account, effective leaders think ahead about how employees will receive a policy, notice when someone’s checking out, and adapt their communication to the people receiving it.
Clarke also challenges the belief that consideration makes someone weak, slow, or ineffective. She describes an unnamed CEO who planned the timing of a restructuring and the order in which people would hear about it, treating those choices as part of the strategy.
These are Clarke’s arguments about leadership. The video offers no study establishing that sidewalk or doorway behavior predicts leadership ability.
Her suggested exercise is “tactical consideration”: before an important interaction, pause and imagine how each person involved might receive what you’re about to say.