The answers were never the job
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I remember my first direct reports. They were slightly older than me and had years of experience in their roles. I had asked for the leadership responsibility, and when it came I was petrified. Everything I’d absorbed from years of following great leaders, in the military and in commercial life, seemed to vanish. I drew blanks on the principles I’d studied about leadership and culture, and even how to run an effective meeting felt like a tough hill to climb.
I was a relative newcomer to the organisation, and most of my success had come as an individual contributor. Now I had seasoned people looking to me for direction and it was frightening because I thought my role was to have all the answers, all of the time.
You might feel some version of that in your role today.
Having answers for the people who report to you helps a leader hold their standing and relevance. It also creates a three-fold problem that can sneak up and stifle your own capacity to lead.
The first problem is micromanagement. When you believe your job is to have every answer, you need to know more of the inputs and outputs of most, if not all, of the decisions being made in and around your team. You spend more time working in the business and less time working on it, and ironically, while your grip on each decision increases, decision quality decreases.
The second is exhaustion. To stay across every decision, you have to stay across every communication and every meeting, and think through every scenario each decision could produce. I’m tired just writing that sentence! ‘Always on’ gets worn as a badge of honour. In my experience, it’s an accelerant to burnout.
The third problem is most expensive to your people. Believing you need all the answers deprives your team of their greatest development opportunity, which is learning to lead.
Steve Jobs understood this. In a 1996 interview with Terry Gross on NPR, the Apple CEO described how many companies hire people to be told what to do, and said Apple worked the other way: ‘It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
Distance makes all three problems worse.
When the people who report to you sit in another city, another country, or another time zone, the leader who needs every answer becomes the bottleneck for every decision. Calls stack up across time zones. Your regional leader waits for sign-off on decisions they’re better placed to make. And you, trying to hold every thread from the centre, have the least visibility of anyone about what’s happening on the ground.
Looking back, what my first direct reports needed from me was context. What I needed from them was theirs.
Today I’m sharing a Coaching Note, one of the tools I give the CEOs I coach to help them develop their people. This one is called Leading & Developing Regional Leaders. I wrote it for CEOs leading managing directors across several markets, and it applies to anyone who reports to you. It’s especially useful if you lead a distributed team.
The note is built on the 5 Cs, a framework from Brené Brown, research professor at the University of Houston: Context, Colour, Connective Tissue, Cost, and Consequence. Together they turn an effort to delegate into a complete picture.
Your leader can see where the ripple effects will land, what ‘done’ looks like, what money, time, and energy the work will take, what gets stopped to make room, and what’s at stake if it goes wrong.
My adaptation is that context runs both ways.
Each C has two columns: what you cover from where you sit and what you ask your leader from their market. The question I’d encourage you to ask most often sits at the bottom of the table: what local risk are you watching that I’m probably not?
Four stages of growth
The second part of the note grows your leader through four stages. Model comes first: in month one you write all five Cs for every delegation and talk them through your thinking. Coach follows in month two, where you write Colour, Cost, and Consequence and your leader returns Context and Connective Tissue within 48 hours. In month three you Stretch them, and they bring their own proposals framed in the 5 Cs for you to test. From month four you Multiply, as they brief their own leadership team the same way.
Each stage has a signal that tells you when to move on. My favourite marks the step from coach to stretch. You know they’re ready when their Context changes one of your decisions. That’s the moment answers start flowing toward you.
The third part helps you watch for progress. Keep every brief and your leader’s response, note their stage each month, and take that evidence to your next half year or annual review meeting. And be sure to ask them the coaching questions under ‘Ask once a month’. In my experience this helps deepen the relationship trust between leaders.
This approach is highly effective and it takes a little more effort in the first month. Writing five Cs for a delegation you could have handed over in a two-minute call will feel like overhead, and it is. The return on this investment arrives around month three, when proposals land on your desk already thought through. Some leaders will stall at a stage, and the signals tell you where. That’s more useful than a vague sense that someone isn’t stepping up.
Start with your next delegation. Write it as a 5 Cs brief, walk your leader through your thinking, and save a copy. You’re at month one and at the beginning of a better way to lead.
Shamelessly steal this note and use it with your team, especially if you’re holding back from delegating an outcome to a member of your team.
See you next Wednesday.
Phil Hayes-St Clair
CEO Coach
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