In this blog I’m going to explore a layer in the development of organisations and of leaders that at first seems very subtle. It’s beyond managing and beyond traditional leadership doctrine and theory, none-the-less, it does exist in the real work teams and companies do. It’s something I work toward in my own companies, and those I work with, and I hope these thoughts are useful to you too.
Traditionally there’s a version of the CEO job that sounds wonderfully clean; We set the vision, choose the strategy, hire great people, then get out of the way. And of course there’s truth in that, because the alternative is a leader who can’t stop themselves reaching into every decision, correcting every comma, re-running every meeting, and calling that “high standards” when really it’s just anxiety dressed up in a sharp suit.
But what struck me thinking about how I’ve grown through this stage, is that the clean version of the job is also where a lot of businesses can very subtly lose their edge. Because “trust the team to execute” only works when there’s something worth trusting. Not trust in people as individuals, you can hire brilliant people and still get a mess, but trust in the way work gets done. Trust in the system that turns intent into output, and output into customer value.
And that’s the bit that’s easy to romanticise away when you’re talking about leadership. We talk about vision as if it’s the hard part. We talk about strategy as if it’s the differentiator. We talk about talent as if it’s the lever. Yet the reality, in most organisations I’ve sat with, is that the strategy is often fine. Not perfect, but fine. The vision is usually clear enough and the people are usually capable enough.
What isn’t fine is the way things actually happen day to day; the way decisions get made, the way information moves, the way priorities get translated, and the way problems get raised, or avoided, or softened into politeness until they’ve become expensive.
The way “we said we’d do it” becomes “we tried” becomes “we’re still working on it” becomes “it wasn’t the right time.” That’s not a talent issue, nor a strategy issue, not even a culture issue, though culture often gets blamed because it’s a convenient unquantifiable partner.
I’ve found in reality it’s an execution design issue.
Think of the CEO role as the maker of an exquisite Swiss watch. Not the conductor of the orchestra and not someone waving a flag at the front of a parade, but someone building the mechanism by which the company keeps time.
It’s a very different way of thinking from the traditional “vision, inspire, step back” model. Because a watchmaker is obsessed with how the thing works, not just what it looks like from the outside. They care about tolerances, handoffs, feedback loops, and the repeatability of a result. And they don’t confuse “I’m not involved” with “it’s working”.
There’s also something surprisingly confronting about this idea for founders and long-standing leaders, because it removes many of the more comforting myths.
The myth that the higher you go, the less you need to think about the mechanics.
The myth that “hands-on” is a junior phase of management and leadership you graduate from.
The myth that delegation means you stop caring about the method.
What I’m really saying is this: if you delegate the method, you delegate the outcome. And that’s important because most of the big failures I’ve researched weren’t caused by lack of effort, they were caused by a poor method being repeated at scale. You can work incredibly hard on the wrong things, in the wrong way, and create a very impressive-looking failure.
Which brings me to the first principle today: obsessing over customer value. Not in the motivational-poster sense, but in the almost pedantic sense of measurement.
Not delegating the definition of the metrics is bigger than it sounds, because what you measure becomes the company’s religion. It becomes the thing everyone optimises for. And if you get it slightly wrong, you don’t get “slightly wrong performance”; you get hundreds of people becoming incredibly efficient at driving the wrong behaviour.
I’ve seen this up close when leaders think they’re being sensible by stepping back from the details, and what they’ve really done is abdicate the one detail that shapes all the others. They’ve left the measurement of success to whoever is closest to the spreadsheet. And spreadsheets don’t care about your customers; they care about what’s easy to count.
Fo me, I make it about being personally involved in defining how something like delivery speed is measured; what’s the start point, what’s the end point, and what’s the data source. It isn’t because I’m still in every detail, it’s because I understand that designing the metric is a lever, and you don’t hand the lever to someone else and then act surprised when the machine moves in a direction you didn’t expect.
Let’s build on that idea and discuss “designing how work gets done”. It’s important to understand the difference between designing a metric and not checking on, monitoring, keeping an eye on, and not approving every move.
You are taking responsibility for the design and shape of work itself. You know how to check the watch has been built to standards even though you don’t have oversight of the installation of every cog.
And yes, sometimes that means dictating a metric. If you’ve worked out that a change is a better way to operate, it’s not automatically noble to let a hundred people do it badly in the name of empowerment. There are times when clarity is a gift, and “this is how we do it now” is exactly what the organisation needs.
We recently moved away from using PowerPoint in our ops meetings, and moving to written narratives because we noticed the conversations were more about the numbers than the story behind them. On the surface that may sound like a quirky preference, even a back-step. But underneath it’s a decision-design change. It alters who prepares, how they think, how they talk, how they hide, and how they can be challenged. It forces a different standard of thought.
And again, that’s not micromanagement. That’s shaping the environment in which decisions are made. This I think, is where a lot of leaders get tangled. They think if they touch anything “how-related” they’re slipping into micromanagement. But micromanagement isn’t caring about how. Micromanagement is making other people’s decisions for them, because you don’t trust them, or because you want the dopamine hit of being needed.
Designing is different. Designing is caring so much about outcomes that you invest in the method, so that other people can make good decisions without you. I keep coming back to one key test: What happens to the system when you’re not in the room.
Every leader says they want a business that runs without them. Very few leaders behave like they actually want that, because behaving like you want that means you stop being the hero and start being the system builder. And system-building is less glamorous. It’s slower. It’s repetitive, and it doesn’t always make you feel important.
Then we move into experimentation, which is where this gets very practical. Because “experiment” can easily become one of those words that gets thrown around as if it means innovation theatre, posters, workshops, sprint days with lots of energy and not much learning.
What’s important here is designing the infrastructure of experimentation. The capability to run tests quickly, properly, repeatedly. Most organisations have plenty of effective and productive systems but most don’t have a native experiment system. They can’t easily create a test group and a control group. They can’t easily get the data because they need negotiations, permissions, and favours, and by the time it’s agreed, the moment has passed and everyone just goes back to opinion.
If you want experimentation at scale, you don’t ask teams to “be more experimental”, you build the system that makes experimenting easy. And that is CEO work, because nobody else is going to prioritise it above their day job.
Next comes the teaching part. This is subtle, because it’s where a lot of leaders trip over their own competence. They sit with a team when the team is trying to solve something. The leader sees the flawed method, and because they’re sharp, because they’ve got experience, because they can see around corners, they jump in and make the decision. Instant relief, box ticked, decision made.
Then they wonder why the team never improves – because the team didn’t get trained; they got rescued. And if you rescue people often enough, you train them to wait for rescue. The job isn’t to make the decision for the team; it’s to reinforce the method that allows the team to make good decisions without you.
That’s the line between leadership that scales and leadership that becomes a bottleneck. It’s the harder line, because it requires patience. It requires you to watch someone do it slower than you would, messier than you would, and still hold the boundary of ownership.
What we’re discovering here is that a well designed experimental system fosters continuous improvement.
Like “Vision, Inspire, Let go”, the phrase “Better, Faster, Cheaper” is a rhythm we’re conditioned to accept. Not because it’s new, but because it’s the idea that’s expected everywhere, not just in manufacturing, operations, and service, but in finance, marketing, HR, across the board.
Unless we have a workable and effective way to design experimental improvement, everyone in the company, including the leaders, and the company is likely to drift back to comfort, and that is not sustainable in an increasingly competitive world driven by a technological race.
What I notice most is how much of this comes back to attention; where leaders spend their attention, what they choose to care about, and what they’re willing to stay close to.
It’s easy to get pulled into conferences, speaking, press launches etc as you evolve your leadership role, I know I have. It’s easy because those things feel like leadership from the outside. They make you visible, and they make you feel like the captain of the ship.
But they don’t make the ship seaworthy. Seaworthiness comes from the work of building the way work happens, and then reinforcing it long enough that it becomes normal.
If we’re honest, customers care about only two groups of people; the people who craft the product, and the people who help them when they’re stuck. They don’t really care about the CEO, which is humbling, and also freeing because it means you don’t have to be the centre of value delivery. You have to be the one who designs the value of delivery.
And when that clicks, the whole “Vision, Strategy, Delegation” story doesn’t get thrown out; it just gets reframed. Vision without method is just aspiration. Strategy without execution design is just a plan you’ll be disappointed by. Delegation without a designed way of working is just hope.
A word about leadership maturity.
A lot of leaders switch between micromanaging and stepping back into high-level strategy, not always in a productive way. That switching is familiar. It’s what happens when you haven’t built a stable middle; a set of processes, measures, and methods that mean you can be present without interfering. So you either dive in and drown everyone, or you float above and feel disconnected, and neither feels right.
This is what I’ve found mature leaders who have found the middle do.
They stay close, but not inside.
They care about how, but they don’t steal the decisions.
They dictate occasionally, but only after learning what works.
They obsess over metrics, because metrics drive behaviour.
They invest in experimentation systems, because opinions don’t scale.
They teach methods, because capability is the real delegation.
They reinforce continuous improvement, because drift is natural.
The question that underpins all of it, the one every experienced leader ends up facing, whether they say it out loud or not; How much do I step in, and where?
Honestly, there’s not a neat answer, not one I’ve found anyway. It’s judgement, it’s sensing what needs attention now. It’s recognising that strategy, done well, doesn’t need rewriting every week, and that if you keep getting pulled back into strategy, maybe it’s a sign something else is weak. If you’ve ever sat in a business, or you do now, that keeps “revisiting strategy” every quarter, you’ll know exactly what he means.
Sometimes “strategy work” is just a socially acceptable way of avoiding the harder work of fixing how the company actually operates. Sometimes it’s easier to redraw the map than to repair the engine.
And that’s what I hope to have shared with you here. If you want to lead at scale without becoming a bottleneck, your real craft isn’t being the smartest person in the room.
It’s designing and building the room.
If you’d like to talk to me about my own experiences in leadership and how you can build this idea into your own company, drop me a line.
Mark Jarvis
6x Founder | Interim MD | NED | Coach & Mentor
Author of:
The Very Best Business Handbook You’ll Ever Own
The 63 Point Business Blueprint
Work with me:
I build companies worth owning by supporting owners, founders and leaders to create a scalable business that works without them, Book a call with me here to ask a question and get started.
Remember, there are only three types of people – those who make things happen, those who wait for things to happen, and those who talk about why things don’t happen for them. Which one are you?
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