In a recent Times Evoke interview, Harvard physicist John Huth described two ways humans have always oriented themselves in space. An egocentric view places every landmark relative to “me”: go forward, turn left, turn right. An allocentric view allows space to exist on its own terms; landmarks are positioned relative to one another, so you might say go north rather than go left.
Then came an observation that stayed with me. Huth points to the idea that the way we perceive physical space may parallel the way we understand social relationships. We place people as close or distant, above or below us, and, consciously or otherwise, we are constantly trying to understand our own place on the map.
I think that map is nowhere more visible than at work.
The egocentric leader
Some leaders run a team the way an egocentric navigator reads a room: every position is measured outward from where they stand. Decisions route through them. Credit settles on them. Everyone else’s job, in this frame, is to orbit.
I once worked at a school where leadership operated this way. The head was extremely demanding, and things had to happen in her way and on her terms. Over time, the workplace began to feel like a fight-or-flight choice: you either fell in line and moved with her, or you left.
Many left.
Those who stayed gradually learned not to disagree. And when people stop disagreeing with a leader, something dangerous happens: the leader is rarely challenged and therefore rarely wrong, at least on paper.
A decade later, that school looked almost exactly as it had ten years earlier. Nothing had really moved, because very little could move except in the direction the leader was already facing.
Huth’s observation about GPS captures what can go wrong with this picture. A paper map is intrinsically allocentric: you have to work out where you sit within a larger landscape that exists independently of you. A phone map often does the opposite. It places you at the centre of the view, and the bigger picture can quietly disappear.
That school never really left the phone-map view. The leader could always see herself perfectly; what was lost was a sense of where the institution stood relative to where it could have gone.
The allocentric leader
An allocentric leader allows the goal to exist like a landmark on a map on its own terms, rather than as an extension of one person’s position.
Success becomes something the whole team can see and walk towards together, not a destination that makes sense only relative to the person at the top. Because no single vantage point is doing all the work, everyone else’s position on the map becomes real and worth listening to.
I saw the opposite play out at another school, under a leader who practiced participative leadership almost as a discipline. Every significant decision began with everyone contributing ideas, followed by an honest weighing of the pros and cons, before she finally decided.
People knew their input mattered, so they continued bringing new ideas rather than saving their energy for somewhere else.
That school grew visibly and continuously. Not in one spectacular leap, but mile by mile, term after term, because the direction of travel belonged to everyone in the room and not to her alone.
Huth’s retelling of Homer offers another useful way of thinking about this. When Odysseus is stranded on Calypso’s island, the directions he receives are not simply framed relative to himself; they rely on external reference points, the stars and the wider landscape, to guide his journey home.
That's important for leadership.
Good direction-giving isn't vague, passive, or self-effacing. It is about creating reference points that work beyond the leader’s own position. The destination remains visible even when the leader isn't standing there pointing toward it.
“What’s in it for me?”
It is a fair question, and it deserves an honest answer rather than a pious one.
Going it alone can genuinely be faster in the early stages. That is precisely what makes control so tempting. It may even be what the head of the first school believed she was buying: speed, consistency, and certainty.
The cost shows up later.
Nobody is right often enough, over the course of an entire career, to survive entirely on unexamined decisions. And a team that has learned not to disagree with you isn’t protecting you from your mistakes; it is simply delaying when you find out about them.
The egocentric climb can have another consequence too: the top can become lonely. A map with only one meaningful reference point eventually has no one left to check direction against.
Sometimes, from the outside, that loneliness looks remarkably like stagnation, ten years of an unchanged school.
The allocentric alternative is not selflessness dressed up as strategy. It is a bet that a shared map will outlast a private one.
Fights still happen in teams like these. Allocentric does not mean conflict-free. It means the disagreements are about the work rather than about protecting one person’s position.
What changes is what people do afterward.
They stay. They continue contributing. They challenge one another. They bring the next idea.
Because they were arguing from legitimate positions on the same map rather than merely managing a hierarchy.
Over time, colleagues become something closer to allies, and growth becomes something that belongs to everyone who helped build it.
One caution, in fairness
None of this makes the egocentric instinct worthless.
Humans have oriented themselves from the perspective of “me” for as long as we have told stories about journeys. Leadership, too, sometimes demands conviction. There are moments when someone has to decide, anchor the team, and say, This is the direction we are taking.
The failure is not having that instinct.
It is never widening the frame once the team is in motion.
Perhaps that is the real distinction.
Leadership is not about refusing to stand at the centre. There will be moments when a leader must. It is about knowing when to zoom out, when to stop asking where everyone stands relative to you and start asking where all of you stand relative to the destination.
The leaders worth learning from seem able to do both. They step forward and hold the compass when the moment demands it. But once the direction is clear, they hand the map back to the team.
Because the best leaders may sometimes hold the compass.
But they make sure everyone can read the map.
Source: John Huth (Donner Professor of Science, Harvard) interviewed by Srijana Mitra Das, "We navigate with egocentric or allocentric views — each positions us very differently," Times of India / Times Evoke, Sept 6, 2026.
