478 How Your Environment Shapes You Without You Realizing It with Leidy Klotz

What if one of the most overlooked influences on how people think, perform, and connect is the environment around them? In this episode of Partnering Leadership, Mahan Tavakoli welcomes back Leidy Klotz, professor at the University of Virginia and author of In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive. Building on their earlier conversation about his acclaimed book Subtract, Klotz explores a different but related question: not simply how we shape the world around us, but how that world continually shapes us.

Klotz argues that physical environments are far more than background. They influence three fundamental psychological needs: agency, growth, and connection. For executives, this has implications well beyond architecture or office design. The spaces organizations create can reinforce what leaders say they value, or quietly contradict those messages. An organization may talk about autonomy and empowerment while creating an environment that communicates control, hierarchy, and limited choice.

The conversation also examines a growing tension between technological convenience and human capability. GPS, smartphones, and increasingly AI allow us to offload tasks and reduce friction. That can be enormously valuable. But Klotz explains why some of the interactions we eliminate also help us learn, adapt, and maintain capabilities. The leadership question becomes less about whether to embrace technology and more about becoming deliberate about what we choose to offload and what we should continue exercising.

Mahan and Klotz also challenge assumptions about workplace connection. Simply bringing people into the same physical location does not automatically create collaboration, belonging, or serendipity. The design of the environment, the agency people have within it, and the cognitive load it creates can fundamentally alter how people interact and perform.

The conversation closes by returning to the ideas that made Subtract so influential. Klotz explains why organizations continue to default toward adding initiatives, processes, and responsibilities, and why subtraction needs to become more than an occasional exercise. For CEOs and senior executives confronting growing organizational complexity, the discussion offers a useful challenge: pay closer attention not only to what you add or remove, but also to the environments you create and the behaviors those environments quietly encourage.

Actionable Takeaways

• You’ll learn why agency over our physical environment can influence our sense of agency far beyond the space itself, and what the innovative “half-houses” in Chile reveal about giving people meaningful control.
• Hear how physical environments can undermine an organization’s stated culture, particularly when leaders talk about empowerment while the workplace sends a very different message.
• You’ll learn why technological convenience comes with a less obvious trade-off. Klotz uses GPS and cognitive offloading to explore what happens when technology removes experiences through which we develop and maintain capabilities.
• Hear why bringing people into the same office doesn’t necessarily create connection. Klotz challenges some familiar assumptions about proximity, collaboration, and the celebrated “water-cooler” encounter.
• You’ll discover how the spaces where important conversations happen can affect performance, from negotiations and interviews to presentations and executive meetings.
• Hear how to think differently about constraints you cannot control. Even when employees have little choice over where they work, seemingly small opportunities to shape their surroundings can restore a meaningful degree of agency.
• You’ll learn why organizations systematically overlook subtraction, especially as workloads, processes, and complexity accumulate.
• Hear why the most consequential opportunities for subtraction may not be meetings or processes at all, but assumptions, mindsets, and elements of strategy that organizations have stopped questioning.
• You’ll learn why subtraction works best when it becomes part of how an organization operates, rather than depending on people remembering to consider “less” when they are already overloaded.

Connect with Leidy Klotz

Leidy Klotz Website

Leidy Klotz LinkedIn

Connect with Mahan Tavakoli:

Mahan Tavakoli Website 

Mahan Tavakoli on LinkedIn 

Partnering Leadership Website