Be the ‘&’: What a 2,000-Year-Old Symbol Teaches Us About Leadership
A leader’s value lies not only in what they know or decide, but in what they enable others to build together.
Angeli Gianchandani writes about cultural intelligence, global leadership strategy, and the human dynamics that shape how leaders and organizations rise.
The Edge | By Angeli Gianchandani · August 21, 2026 · 3 min read
For nearly 2,000 years, the ampersand has done one job: joining one thing to another. Some nineteenth-century primers even printed it after Z, as though it were the alphabet's twenty-seventh letter. Its usefulness outlasted its place in the alphabet.
Leadership eventually requires a shift of its own: from doing the work to connecting the people, ideas, and functions that make it possible. That shift is what earns the trust to let people act without you in the room, and the clarity to decide from more than one part of the truth. The leaders people keep seeking out become the ampersand.
Placing People Together Is Not the Same as Connecting What They Know
A plus sign puts two things into the same equation. An ampersand asks what they might produce together. This is not typographic history; it is just how I have come to read the two symbols.
We often connect in the manner of a plus sign: marketing next to sales, a new hire shadowing a veteran. We hope proximity does the rest. It rarely does. Working side by side doesn't mean understanding how the other person thinks.
A leader can announce a strategy without connecting it to the people expected to deliver it. I see a version of that same gap in the classroom. Students can read a chapter on leadership theory and discuss it competently, yet the concept can remain adjacent to their thinking, present but inert. Then a guest speaker walks in and describes making that same decision under real pressure, and the theory and the experience connect. The room changes.
For most students, that one exposure is enough. But some leave wanting more, asking to stay in touch with the speaker, requesting a follow-up conversation to push further on what they heard. The mistake isn't the lecture ending. It's a professor who never notices which students need more, and never makes the introduction. When I do make that introduction, theory stops sitting next to experience and starts compounding with it, and that is when it becomes tangible.
What Connection Can Achieve
Understanding compounds over time. Proximity doesn't. Two people who understand how the other thinks become sharper together with every project. Two who merely sit near each other just make the org chart look tidy.
Leaders cannot make sound decisions from isolated information. Before a consequential call, they need to connect the people, knowledge, and perspectives holding different pieces of the picture. That's what turns separate facts into shared understanding, and shared understanding into action.
The question for any leader is simple: are your teams genuinely connected, or simply adjacent?
What Connection Earns Trust
Real connection lets people trust each other directly, without routing every decision through you or your title. That trust holds even when you're not in the room.
When I assign team projects, they are built to emulate real workplace projects: how you prepare, how you share responsibility, how you lead, how you listen. You can attend every meeting and still fail to pull your weight, and it catches up with you. The final presentation reveals both the tangible result, the work itself, and the intangible relationships behind it, whether people trusted you enough to hand you the next piece. Both are the same competitive edge that shows up later, in a job.
Leadership is measured less by what moves through you than by what people build once you step back.
Why Connection Comes First
Connection is the first principle of the CULTURE Framework™, a decision system I developed for leading when information is incomplete. It works because most bad decisions are not caused by too little intelligence. They are caused by intelligence that never got connected. Before leaders can understand a situation, they must bring together the people, knowledge, and perspectives required to see it more fully.
Connection does not guarantee the right decision. It makes it less likely that leaders will decide from only one part of the truth. The ampersand has done this one job for two thousand years without needing the spotlight. It still does.
Sources
Merriam-Webster, "The History of 'Ampersand'" · Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Ampersand" · Dictionary.com, "What Character Was Removed From the Alphabet?"
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About The Edge
The Edge examines how culture, business, leadership, sport, and global systems shape markets, institutions, and the decisions leaders make. It features original essays and analysis by Angeli Gianchandani.
About the Author
Angeli Gianchandani is a global brand strategist, cultural intelligence practitioner, and educator. She advises leaders on commercial growth, brand value, and the decisions connecting current performance to long-term opportunity.
She is Adjunct Faculty at NYU School of Professional Studies, Visiting Lecturer at African Leadership University, and holds a master’s degree from The Fletcher School at Tufts University. Read more at mobilitygirl.com/theedge and Authory.
