Early in my career I worked for a remarkable manager. He could settle almost any dispute with a single phone call. Suppliers and colleagues alike depended upon him. I admired him greatly. Then he took a month off. I soon discovered that the whole department had rested on him picking up that phone.
Some leaders excel at making things happen. When a problem appears, they step right in. When functions disagree, they sit everyone down and settle it. Bang. People turn to them whenever operations grow uncertain. They’re prized, and more than one co-worker thinks of them as a saviour. I’ve worked happily with plenty such.
But I’m not sure I should have been so happy. Splendid people, certainly. But what happens when such people aren’t there?
Even when this quarter’s numbers look identical, a leader who makes an organisation perform, and a leader who builds one that can perform without his constant intervention, are doing very different jobs. The first produces excellent results, to be sure. But just excellent results. The second produces a system that keeps delivering them. That kind of excellence lasts longer. It’s the sort of excellence that can spread through the whole firm, if the firm has the wit to copy the system.
One of the strongest measures of leadership is how much capability remains once the leader steps away. The best leaders make constant dependence on them unnecessary.
Being Needed Can Feel Like Leadership
There’s something rewarding about being the person everyone comes to when they’re in trouble. You have the experience, and you know the organisation. People trust your judgement. Your inbox becomes an escalation channel in its own right. Colleagues say, “We need to get Ursula in on this,” or “Let’s wait until Jack is back.” That’s recognition of expertise, even of indispensability, and it’s worth having.
But it’s also a weakness in the operating system. Why did the people handling the issue need the go-to person to get things moving, instead of dealing with it themselves? Because something somewhere is wrong: unclear authority, an inadequate process, information nobody can find or, worse, a team that lacks the capability.
Such leaders may solve the immediate problem, but they preserve the conditions that guarantee no one else will solve the next one. That’s one of the paradoxes of leadership. The better you get at personally patching over a weak system, the longer the weak system survives.
Heroic Leadership Can Hide Organisational Weakness
Most organisations have heroes. The planner who always finds the inventory. The customer-service leader who can always get an urgent order through. The executive who resolves a cross-functional argument with one phone call.
But heroic execution can mislead the people who benefit from it. The order arrives and the problem disappears, yet the business process that couldn’t cope is still there, still unable to cope. Only when you remove the hero do the weaknesses of the process become visible, and therefore repairable.
Heroic rescues and well-designed processes can hit the same KPI every month, and the monthly report won’t tell you which one did it. The problem is, heroics can’t be replicated and scaled. Only processes can.
An Observation From Practice
I was once brought into a business where a supply planner named Colin seemed to know everything. He knew which numbers could be trusted and which supplier needed a constant nudge. He knew which of three delivery dates was the real one, and what a particular department meant when it said ‘Soon’. Then Colin was seconded to the Rotterdam site for a fortnight.
On the second day the phone rang.
“The schedule you sent us is rubbish,” said the buyer at the other end. “Where’s the real one?”
“Ask Colin,” said the planner who picked up.
“I tried Colin. His out-of-office says he’s in Rotterdam for a fortnight.”
“Ah. Then… um… let us get back to you on that, all right?”
By the end of the week the workarounds had stopped working, one by one, and nobody could say who was allowed to decide what. Suppliers were being managed by people they’d never met.
The organisation had let critical knowledge sit in one person and had never put it into the operating system. The moment he was gone, the gap showed. No, it glared. Colin had become indispensable, which is a compliment to the man; and a sorry indictment of everybody else.
When he returned there was universal relief, and that was the wrong lesson. Everyone was glad to go back to a system that couldn’t work without one particular person. True leadership would have started turning his expertise into an organisational capability that depended on no single person.
Delegation Is Not Enough
The obvious answer looks like delegation. Give people more responsibility! Move decisions downward! But shuffling decisions around doesn’t create capability. All too often all it spreads is delegation without authority, and what that breeds is frustration. Without clear boundaries the decisions come straight back up.
People need to decide well, and that takes information, defined limits, clear priorities and decision rights that include when to escalate. Supply those and delegation stops being a way of sharing out the workload. It starts working because design works: people can now act on their own because they have a system built to allow them to.
The Leader’s Job Is to Improve the Decision Environment
What, autonomy by design? Isn’t that a contradiction? Or am I talking about that eternal buzzword, ‘empowerment’? Yes and no. Condescending pats on the back have never empowered anyone. What does empower people is a system that gives people everything they need to act, and to act competently.
Imagine an operational manager facing a customer-service exception. She knows the service priorities and has the relevant information. She understands the financial consequence, has the authority to make the trade-off, and knows exactly where that authority ends. Will the leader ever hear about it? Probably not. What needed to get done got done, and whether the doer felt ‘empowered’ at the time is irrelevant. Good leaders work on the decision environment as well as the decision. They make the next decision easier to make without them.
Every Escalation Contains Information
Repeated escalations provide some of the best leadership data available. When the same kind of issue keeps reaching the same leader, the temptation is to get faster at resolving it. “We dealt with this before. Apply the same fix.” I suppose that’s not the worst response. But a better one would be to ask, “Why does the organisation still need me for this?”
Maybe the cause is an authorisation limit set too high, or two functions with conflicting objectives, or a team lacking capability. Different causes call for different fixes. But the principle is the same, and the solution: resolve the escalation, yes, but learn from it too. A recurring escalation is the operating system telling leadership it hasn’t been designed well enough, and showing where the redesign is needed.
[No business is immune from such misalignments, and few have gained more from repairing them than Ford. When Alan Mulally arrived in 2006, everyone knew the company was heading for enormous losses, yet at senior meetings the status charts came up green as a matter of course. Then Mark Fields, who ran Ford’s Americas business, showed a red one: the new Edge crossover had a launch problem. Fields later recalled the dead silence, and the chairs moving away from him. (Daintily, one presumes.) Then Mulally began to applaud and, by most accounts, asked the room who could help. Fields called that meeting the tipping point at Ford. A week later, according to one account, everyone’s slides were splattered with red. A red chart had turned from a career risk into information the whole team could act on. The boss no longer had to sniff out trouble alone.]
Sources: Patricia Sellers, “The ‘tipping point’ in Ford’s turnaround”, Fortune (2010); Elizabeth Edersheim, “Alan Mulally, Ford, and the 6Cs”, Brookings.
Some Decisions Belong at the Top. Only Those Decisions Should Get There.
Pushing problems downward can pass for empowerment. Often what it really is, is avoidance. Decision-sharing isn’t automatically a good thing, and we all know it. Certain decisions belong at senior levels: enterprise trade-offs, material investments, significant risk and issues that cross decision boundaries. Only those should land on a senior executive’s desk. Everything else should be resolved as close to the work as reasonably possible.
But that takes deliberate design. For lines can and must be drawn, and what but deliberate design can do so rationally? What needs functional leadership, what needs cross-functional governance, what needs executive intervention, and what belongs with the Board? The clearer the boundaries, the less the organisation has to rely on pronouncements from the top to make lower-order decisions stick.
Knowledge Has to Leave the Leader’s Head
Experienced leaders accumulate a lot of tacit knowledge. They know why a customer relationship works the way it does. They know, often in precise and bitter detail, why a previous transformation failed. But so long as that knowledge stays inside the leader’s head, only one person holds the full benefits. It can’t scale.
The answer is to turn it into organisational knowledge. That doesn’t mean documenting every last thought, which would be impossible and not even desirable. It does mean capturing the reasoning behind significant decisions. Others can then use it without access to the person who did the reasoning, and the organisation can repeat its successes and avoid its mistakes far more often and far more easily.
Capability Is Built by Doing the Work
We often think of capability in terms of training, courses and competency models, but most of it is built through the work itself. Give someone ownership of a meaningful decision, and challenge their reasoning before they make the call. Then see what happens, review it afterwards and learn from it. That is how judgement develops.
Can you develop decision-making through other routes, such as games, simulations and scenario planning? To an extent. But to lead is also to mentor, and sometimes the fastest way for someone new to learn how to meet today’s challenge is to watch the senior leader work through a similar one, and to trace how they decided. To have a model is valuable; to actively and thoughtfully model the model is even more valuable.
Leaders Should Resist Becoming the Shortcut
Every organisation develops shortcuts, and sometimes the shortcut is the leader. After all, why navigate around a glitch in the process when you can just call the executive? Why build capability when the expert can fix it in five minutes? Each shortcut makes sense at the time, but together they build dependency.
Leaders turn into informal workflow engines because everybody knows that calling on them works. If that is persisted in long enough, the organisation’s capacity shrinks to a tiny number of its most capable individuals, when that capability is exactly what should be spread around and shared.
Every street has one neighbour with a ladder. Nobody else buys one. Why should they? Knocking next door is quicker and cheaper. Until the day that neighbour moves to Austria. Then everyone’s gutters overflow.
Calendars Reveal Dependencies
One diagnostic is to look at a senior leader’s calendar and see how much of it goes to approvals, operational escalations, status reviews and decisions someone else could reasonably have made. Then compare that with the time spent on developing future capability, strategy, key customers and the core enterprise decisions that need senior judgement.
The calendar shows whether the organisation is using its leader to lead, or to patch and compensate. A permanently overloaded executive may look as though they have an impressively demanding role. They do, but it may not be the sort that produces matching value. What the calendar usually reveals is an operating model too dependent on executive intervention.
Succession Tests Execution
Succession planning is really a test of the operating system. Imagine your key leader disappears tomorrow, with no carefully managed six-month transition. What goes off the rails? Which interventions, decisions and fixes stop happening, and which relationships become vulnerable?
The answers reveal the dependencies. Some are inevitable, because experience and relationships matter. But when too much of the organisation stops functioning, the problem is bigger than succession. The operating model has come to depend on one person, and that risk is too large for any sane company to carry.
Great Leaders Create More Leaders
Picture two senior leaders retiring at the same time. Both are admired. Both have delivered. The first leaves a capable successor, a warm handshake and a long list of things nobody else knows. The second leaves people who can make the calls she used to make, and who know why she needed to make them.
The difference lies in the reasoning. Strong leaders decide in the open, so that others can see how. They explain what they are trying to do and why, they state before everyone what evidence supports it, what assumptions sit behind it and what it may cost. Said out loud, again and again, in front of the people who will one day face the same call alone, that habit turns a leader’s judgement into something the next person can trace, and therefore borrow.
It only happens on purpose. Somebody has to write the reasoning down, or teach it, or build it into how the next decision gets made. Otherwise the thinking retires with the leader who thought it through, and the successor starts from scratch.
A Strong System Makes Leadership More Strategic
Some worry that making the organisation less dependent on a leader diminishes the leader’s importance. I think the opposite is true. When routine execution no longer depends on senior intervention, leadership capacity is freed to move upward. Leaders can spend more time shaping tomorrow’s system and less time patching today’s exceptions. They can improve decision rights instead of approving routine decisions, and address the conditions behind recurring conflict instead of reconciling it every single time. Their judgement goes where it counts most. That’s what leadership is for.
AI Can Reduce Dependency
AI offers firms a real chance to reduce organisational dependency on leaders. Knowledge becomes easier to reach, decision histories can be retrieved and policies interpreted at the press of a button. Routine decisions can be automated within defined boundaries, and employees can get sophisticated support without waiting for an expert.
There are dangers too. AI can create a new form of dependency by automating around unclear processes, or by centralising intelligence without distributing authority. An organisation that swaps dependence on one experienced person for dependence on an opaque system is moving sideways, not forwards.
But can AI help more of the organisation make better decisions within a well-designed execution system? I’m sure it can. But the responsibility for that design doesn’t lie with AI. It lies with us.
A Question Worth Asking
When a leader resolves an important issue, ask why they needed to. Then ask whether they will have to do it again the next time the issue arises.
If we don’t want that to happen, what has to change? Maybe authority has to move, or a rule needs clarifying. Perhaps a capability needs developing, or some knowledge needs capturing. Handled this way, a leadership intervention becomes a step in organisational learning. The immediate issue gets resolved as before, but the system ends up a little less dependent on intervention from above.
The Holiday Test
Let a key leader take a two-week holiday: a real vacation, with no remote work, no Zoom, and no checking email. Then watch. See whether the needed decisions get made anyway, whether people use the existing governance to settle the normal exceptions, whether information still flows and whether customers keep receiving the service they expect.
The tell-tale sign is what is waiting on the desk at the leader’s return. A queue stretching to the moon means dependency. A handful of items that really do need a leader’s touch means health. The test shows how the organisation uses the leader. A healthy system will miss the leader’s contribution and welcome their return. But keep operating effectively in the meantime.
Executive Reflection
When evaluating leadership effectiveness, look beyond performance. See what happens when the leader is absent, and which decisions and processes wobble without them. (I’d also like to know whether recurring escalations are being converted into system improvements, and whether critical knowledge has been institutionalised.)
It all comes down to this: is the organisation more capable because this leader is here, or more dependent on the leader being here? The answer says less about the leader than about the system around them.
Leadership Should Leave Infrastructure Behind
The most enduring leaders leave infrastructure behind: better people, clearer decision rights, stronger processes and more useful knowledge. None of it is dramatic and much of it is invisible, but it compounds, and it keeps producing value long after the leader has moved on.
That’s the difference between leadership performance and leadership legacy.
Continue the Conversation
People often say of a leader, “Nothing happens without them.” That sounds like praise, doesn’t it? I’m not sure it always deserves to be praised.
Read it again. Such leaders are exceptional. Does a thriving organisation really need an exceptional figure at the centre of everything? A strong firm should be able to succeed without constant exceptional intervention. Of course some decisions, and every strategic one, will always call for high intelligence, wide experience and personal accountability. Those should quite properly stay with the leader.
But an organisation’s work should not need direct personal intervention. The organisation should already know how to do it.
The strongest leaders solve problems, but also address and improve the conditions that created them. They make decisions, but also build people who can make equally good ones. Over time those people grow more capable, and the system depends less on the individual who helped build it.
(By the way. That manager with the telephone? He left for a bigger job in the end. His department managed to survive. But only after somebody found out the number of the fixer whom he used to ring.)
James Amoah
Executive Observation #021
Leadership
Executive Observations are practical reflections from more than twenty-five years of leading and supporting operational, supply chain and business improvement. They explore the connections between reliable execution, leadership, operational excellence and customer experience — and what those connections mean for those endeavouring to make their businesses better, stronger, more profitable leaders in their field.
