Leadership & Talent
Here, your own excellence is not the point — and can actively get in the way.
In every other domain, the executive's personal capability is what matters most: better judgment in Direction, better credibility in Governance, better construction of a case in Influence. Leadership and Talent inverts this entirely. Here, the executive's personal excellence is not the deliverable. The deliverable is other people's growth, other people's capability, other people's eventual ability to do without the executive at all — and the executive's own brilliance, deployed the way brilliance wants to be deployed, is frequently the thing standing in the way of it.
The executive who cannot make this reorientation builds a function that is an extension of themselves: capable while they're present, brittle the moment they're not.
This domain covers honest performance conversations even when uncomfortable, delegating meaningful work rather than the fastest path to a good outcome, hiring for leadership potential rather than technical mirror-images of yourself, and building a leadership team with enough enterprise breadth to compensate for your own gaps.
Where to start
- Ask whether your team has quietly stopped bringing you hard questions or disagreement. That silence is rarely a sign things are going well.
- Pick one piece of meaningful work you'd normally do yourself, and hand it to someone who needs the stretch more than you need the certainty.