THE LEAFLET
July 31 2025
a requirement for progress, questions for executives, aspire to do nothing
A REQUIREMENT FOR PROGRESS IN YOUR ORGANIZATION
In my recent coaching, the biggest thing executives are missing is the notion that progress for their organization requires everybody continuing to level up by taking on new and bigger responsibilities.
The theory of why you delegate something doesn't create urgency for these executives. For many of them, delegation is a transactional thing. If there's somebody who can do something instead of you, maybe it's worth them doing that. You use units of their bandwidth to free up some units of yours. The analysis of that equation sort of stops there for most people.
This narrow arithmetic obscures what should be a general rule: everybody in the organization, across the entire org chart, should be increasing their capacity to do more. And though that does temporarily present you with the scary reality that you might not be needed, the truth is quite the opposite. This universal increase in power and responsibility-taking is what allows you, the executive, to 3x your impact. And that is the thing that will accelerate the organization the most.
When you go from being an executive who has to do ground-level things in a shoulder-deep way to an executive who simply finds themselves without those things to do—that is when a good executive is going to have the greatest impact on the organization. That good executive understands the vision, understands the bar, and understands the possibilities and directions the organization might seize next. The good executive, who has applied the general rule of delegation I’m talking about here, gives these things their full attention.
This is secretly what everybody at the organization wants. I say “secretly” because we have this basic understanding in the US, at least, that what everybody wants from each other is proof that they're working hard enough. When you ask an executive to delegate more, you threaten their ability to prove that they’re the hardest working.
Leaders would do well to release their grip on all the tasks that others can do. Instead, they should hold fast to the idea that their organizations will never become what they need to, unless everybody else takes on the things that the executive currently does. This frees the executive to do other stuff — the stuff that only they can do.
-ben
Read the rest here.
AGGRESSIVELY DELEGATE SO YOU CAN FOCUS ON THESE QUESTIONS
Almost every leader I’ve coached has needed strong urging to give more (even most) of what they’re doing now to others in the organization. They often wonder what I’m expecting they should spend their time on instead. Here’s a short list of evergreen questions executives should devote time and attention to:
Compare your current results to the outcomes your mission promises and ask, "Could we be doing this better and faster?" Another way to put this is “re-evaluate your strategy.”
“What’s the best data from the external world, from the market, about how things are going? What do human sources of data say about the future of the market?”
"I’m imagining that I doubled our returns, whatever those may be in my sector, over the next two years. Looking back, how did I properly do that?"
Obstacle analysis. “What is preventing me from doing the thing that would double our returns?” Maybe the answer is: I can't really trust the mid-level leaders in this organization. If I could wave a magic wand and make them all trustworthy, that would be good to do. Of course, a magic wand won’t do it, but there are lots of ways people do achieve this with investments of time and energy and money. Those ways wouldn’t have occurred to me or felt available when I was shoulder-deep in frontline work. Now I can pursue them or mobilize the team to do so.
-ben
Read the rest here.
GREAT EXECUTIVES ASPIRE TO DO NOTHING
There should be nothing regularly on your calendar that could be done by somebody else.
If you imagine a version of your organization that has succeeded beyond your wildest dreams for it, I guarantee you that executive time and bandwidth dedicated to that new version is required. If you're able to conceive of that future ideal state and it's something you believe should happen, you're hurting the organization and the community or customers you serve by not finding the bandwidth to achieve it.
When organizations do this well, it cascades to every other role. Through your VPs, your deputies, their deputies, and so on. They're all going to do a better job at what they're doing if they're pushing down more to others.
A major benefit of this is that you open growth trajectories in the organization that are powerful employee value propositions. You're able to promote internally with ease, which is radically transformative when you can do it reliably.
Another benefit is you are generally able to assume that when something does come your way, it's because it requires your attention, and your attention only. You can make this assumption because you’ve trained and delegated well, so the history of the people under you is that they take care of most things themselves.
And so the actual experience of walking around in your job, with your title, is to wait until something gets surfaced to you. And while you’re “waiting” you’re actually spending your time and energy making the organization more of what it can and should become.
-ben
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Pastry chef and novelist Louise Miller on loves:
Every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted. (h/t Cate Hall)
Writer Adam Gopnik on absolutes:
Competing absolutisms respect each other more than either respects those who are allergic to absolutes as an absolute principle.
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass on freedom:
Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric