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October’s Blueprint invites us to think about ways to be successful leaders with some provocations that may feel new or surprising! Leadership is a more complex endeavor than ever, but the basics of knowing the business and building strong systems are as important as they’ve always been. Sometimes the advice to be visionary and future-focused gets in the way of the basics, but moving between the “balcony and the dance floor” is never-ending work! We hope you enjoy these resources!
- Stephanie
| | Focusing on what matters doesn’t mean micromanagement. Instead, build systems for success. | | |
Leaders are frequently encouraged to avoid micromanaging, and conventional advice to boards emphasizes the importance of staying out of a CEO’s lane and not overstepping into operations.
But the temptation to micromanage arises when there are concerns that strategy is not being realized through effective execution, or when boards and leaders lack the information they need to assess progress towards goals. Micromanagement is a response to anxiety.
What can leaders—at both the board and executive level—do to bridge the gap between strategy and the daily actions that determine its success?
In “The Surprising Success of Hands-on Leaders” the authors highlight how successful leaders spend time and energy establishing, sustaining, and refining the systems and behaviors that support their organization’s strategy and mission.
| | “What distinguishes the leaders of these high-performing firms is their sustained and close attention to behaviors and systems. They are not inserting themselves into every decision or displacing their teams. Instead, they act as teachers and system builders: They’re present in the work not to control it or make every decision themselves but to model standards, sharpen problem-solving, and establish behavioral norms that enable others to act with autonomy and discipline. They don’t meddle—they coach. They don’t override—they elevate.” | | | |
Micromanagement isn’t scalable. It makes you a bottleneck. It takes you away from higher-value work. It stunts the growth of your people and limits their potential.
In contrast, when you put energy into transforming practices and systems, you can guide and facilitate positive outcomes at scale.
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What is an example of transforming a practice?
At Amazon, notes the article, PowerPoint presentations were forbidden:
| | “Amazon requires every proposal to be written in a narrative memo of six pages or fewer, to deliver more detailed thinking than is typically found in slide presentations. After all the meeting attendees read the memo closely, they have a nonhierarchical, no-holds-barred debate. The goal is to interrogate everything thoroughly, and vigorous dissent is encouraged.” | | | There is no one “best practice” in the board room or in an organization. What matters is establishing the “right practice” for you. How do you design accordingly? We appreciate a lesson from the playground shared in this Strategy+Business article: | | “Preschoolers often play near one another, but not necessarily together. They keep an eye on what their peers are doing, and sometimes copy from them, but their focus is on their own activities. They borrow what works to make progress toward whatever goal they are trying to reach. Similarly, startups and corporate innovators diversifying into new spaces treat competitors not as rivals to differentiate from, but as stepping stones to borrow ideas from—ideas about new products and new ways of creating value.” | | | |
While this article is specific to strategy creation, it offers wise advice for building systems—which are key to execution success. Borrow, study, and be inspired by the processes of other organizations, but always make sure that what you incorporate fits your organization’s needs.
Start by asking questions: How do we structure leadership? Teams or committees? Why? How do we currently do meetings? Why? What are we trying to achieve when we meet? If we changed our approach, could we achieve better outcomes? Align or work to our strategic needs? Experiment and review what works and what doesn’t. Keep in mind that identifying a “not-to-do” can be as beneficial as adding a “to-do.”
Meetings are a great example to consider. You might notice that different types of meetings require different practices. This McKinsey article is a useful reminder that “one size” doesn’t fit all when it comes to meetings. There are meetings focused on decisions and others aimed at creative brainstorming. Written preparation in advance is often helpful, as illustrated by the Amazon example, but there might be times when all the communication needs to take place within the meeting itself—for example, if the topic is highly sensitive.
Of course, meetings are just one of the numerous areas to build or transform systems and processes. Though it often focuses on the mundane, systems architecture requires ingenuity. The decisions you make are likely to touch everyone in your organization on an almost daily basis. You have the ability to unlock value or limit it. Through systems you can improve decisions, establish ways to address conflict, build trust, and improve use of time. You can enhance leadership development, retention, and support the ability to learn.
This responsibility is so important because, as we described in the September Blueprint, the practices you put in place—even seemingly small ones such as how meeting agendas are set or how information is shared—will shape and build the culture of your organization.
| | If systems building is a measure of effective leadership, then why isn’t this focus for leadership more widespread? | | The HBR article about hands-on leadership offers an insight that resonates with our work at GLP: | | “Moving from this conventional model to one where the CEO is the chief architect and role model of the systems of execution requires more than a behavioral change. It requires a redefinition of leadership itself—one that challenges long-held assumptions. That kind of identity shift is difficult, especially for leaders who rose through the ranks by mastering the traditional model.” | | | |
Great leaders exemplify the values and design the systems that support success. While the article is focused on the CEO, we think this concept applies equally well to the board and to board leaders. Today, boards that add value are boards that lead. Effective boards model the culture and standards for performance that cascade throughout the organization.
This article from Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance underscores the importance of systems thinking for governance:
| | “Outstanding board leaders treat governance as a living system, adapting structures and processes to match strategy and turning oversight into an engine for value creation. By embracing these principles, board leaders can move from ‘good enough’ to game-changing, steering their companies into the future with confidence and purpose.” | | | Good technical fiduciary work is no longer enough. Board work can be transformed into an “engine for value creation.” | | The mindset shift to value creation requires rethinking the relationship and responsibilities of the board and the CEO. | | |
Conventional advice that draws a hard, definitive line between board responsibilities, CEO responsibilities, and shared responsibilities is neither constructive nor sufficient because it is reductive. The relationships are nuanced, they demand transparency, and they build in confidence and trust through effective collaboration over time.
That said, clarity about roles is more important than ever. Collaboration starts when the board and the CEO lean into their crucial responsibility to discuss, define, and negotiate their roles, responsibilities, and working practices.
This work extends beyond the partnership between the board chair and the CEO. Distributed leadership is essential to effective governance and the organization as a whole. It is helpful to think of the board chair and CEO as a team that functions within and across several interconnected and overlapping teams, including:
- Board Chair and CEO
- Board Members
- Board Members, Board Chair, and CEO
- CEO and Executive Team
Success requires each of these to function truly as a “team” and not just as a “group”—and that starts with the commitment to continually improve working as a team. As noted in this McKinsey article,
| | “What comes to mind when you think of a stellar team? Perhaps it’s a favorite sports team, a symphony orchestra, or an elite military unit. What all those teams have in common is that they relentlessly practice working as a cohesive unit.” | | | How do NFP leaders create value? | | |
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As a not-for-profit leader or board member, you may be surprised that we are sharing this: “What Every Company Can Learn from Private Equity,” but we know some of the best ideas can be found in unconventional places. This article highlights six practices that help leaders unlock value—and value matters as much for NFPs as it does for a for-profit operation.
First gem: “build a fit-for-purpose management team.”
| | “The guiding principle for PE-backed firms is straightforward: The CEO and the team must fit the company’s value-creating thesis; the thesis shouldn’t be designed around their capabilities.” | | | |
Building executive teams in this way is good advice. This wisdom also applies to how we build effective NFP boards. For example, in our most recent paper, “Board Composition: Building a Board that Adds and Creates Value,” we examine key steps and principles for how to compose your board with purpose.
Second insight: board composition—and executive leadership composition—are built upon effective analysis of the organization, its strategy, and its trajectory. To design for value, you need insight into organizational capacity. The article opens with the benefit of conducting full-potential due diligence regularly.
| | “The diligence team analyzes all strategic, commercial, financial, and operational factors, including cost structure, capital expenditures, working capital, and overall risk. After identifying what needs improvement, the team determines precisely how to implement changes—mapping out necessary shifts in organizational structure, leadership, incentive schemes, and management systems.” | | | |
The analysis informs the strategy, which informs the composition, as well as other management systems. Effective leaders spend time understanding the current organization.
Third takeaway: the insights from private equity reinforce the importance of systems as a route to efficacy: “treat time as capital.”
| | “Boards of PE-backed firms will ask CEOs questions like: Are you spending enough time with top customers? Are you dedicating sufficient attention to the most critical value-creation initiatives? Are you spending too much time on tasks that should be reallocated to other management team members?” | | | Boards and chief executives are well-served to ask themselves these questions about their own time expenditures. For leaders, are you spending and blocking your time for optimal use? For boards, are you designing agendas and investing the precious resource of time in ways that add value? | | Great leaders mitigate risks. How can systems protect your team…from yourself? A surprising lesson in leadership… | | |
In a recent talk at Italian Tech Week, Jeff Bezos shared a story that illustrates how a leader sometimes needs to establish systems that protect their team from themselves.
Jeff Wilke told Bezos: “You have enough ideas to destroy Amazon.” The company couldn’t metabolize the ideas as fast as Bezos could share them. “Every time I released an idea, I was creating a backlog of work in process,” says Bezos. “And because it was just stacking up, it was adding no value. In fact, it was creating a distraction.” Bezos had to manage himself better in order to lead better.
We wonder: what might you, as a leader, need to build to offset or protect your system? And for board leaders, are there similar choices your board needs to make in order to allow the CEO to focus on the work that matters most?
| | Finally, for leaders, sometimes the roadblocks are internal. | | |
1. I need to be involved. The belief that you need to be part of every detail at every level, which leads to micromanagement, bottlenecked decisions, and less leverage from your team.
2. I need it done now. The belief that you need immediate results, no matter what, which creates false urgency, rushed execution, increased errors, and burnout.
3. I know I’m right. The belief that you—and only you—know the answers to the problems at hand, which shuts down collaboration, causes you to dismiss input, and leads to missed opportunities and reduced innovation.
4. I can’t make a mistake. The belief that your performance must be flawless, which encourages unhealthy perfectionism, indecision, and risk avoidance.
5. If I can do it, so can you. The belief that others’ performance must be like yours to be acceptable, which leads you to set unrealistic or unnecessary expectations, underestimate others’ skills, and limit development.
6. I can’t say no. The belief that you must always step up to the plate when asked, which results in overwork, blurred priorities, and poor boundary setting.
7. I don’t belong here. The belief that you don’t fit in where you are or at your level, which fuels debilitating impostor syndrome and self-sabotage and reduces your ability to communicate, visibility, and influence.
| | | “Be authentic and vulnerable” are ubiquitous messages delivered to leaders these days…but we have questions about this. More specifically, a pitfall for leaders can be misunderstanding or misapplying “authenticity” in leadership. This HBR article challenges the common advice to “just be ourselves” and “bring our whole selves to work.” | | “On the one hand, promoting authenticity makes sense. Decades of research suggest that authenticity is linked to self-esteem, and people who perceive themselves as authentic often experience higher levels of well-being, including positive mood, energy, relaxation, and flow.” | | | An excessive focus on “being yourself” writes Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic can create a chasm between your feelings of what he calls "subjective authenticity" and "reputational reality." To illustrate, he offers a series of comparisons. For example, on the topic of leadership vulnerability: | | |
Subjective authenticity: “I’ll admit to my team that I’m totally lost right now: that’s my real truth.”
Reputational reality: The team sees incompetence and loses confidence. In contrast, the leader who acknowledges limits but also focuses on projecting direction and competence (even if they have to fake it) earns respect and trust from the team.
| | | Oversharing or expressing intense vulnerability might feel “authentic” in the moment, but it may also limit your success and your ability to lead. | | Please feel free to forward The Blueprint to friends and colleagues who may find it helpful. And if you're not already on our mailing list and you'd like to receive future editions of The Blueprint, click the button below to subscribe! | | | | |
