What happens when the leader isn't in the room?
We talk a lot about resilient leaders. Can they absorb pressure? Can they make hard calls under fire? Can they take criticism without taking it personally?
These are fair questions, but they miss the bigger picture as I often see a frustrating paradox. Well-intentioned CEOs surround themselves with brilliant, experienced people but without the right structures in place (clear authority, defined decision-making boundaries and the trust to let go) so that talent goes to waste.
The hardest part of leadership is to deliberately step back because when a leader stays in the centre of every conversation, even highly capable teams start looking upwards for validation. “What do you think?” “Should we do this?” “What would you do?” and before long, the person at the top becomes the bottleneck for every decision.
It is easy to see how this happens: it even feels like good leadership. You are responsive, supportive and highly visible but over time, this helpfulness builds a fragile culture. If every difficult decision travels up the chain, the organisation’s capacity shrinks to the capacity of just one person.
Values and strategy as operational tools
During the height of Covid, a junior colleague at an organisation I know faced a completely unprecedented situation.
Compassion was one of that organisation’s core values and in that moment, it stopped being a slogan on an annual report and became an operational tool as she asked herself a single question: “What is the most compassionate thing I can do here?”
The same logic applies to strategy. A strategic plan doesn’t build resilience just because it exists on a slide deck; it works when it gives people a compass during a storm.
Good CEOs I work with repeat their top priority so often it sounds like a mantra. Why? Because it gives the team something to orient around when things get noisy. Without that clarity, every stakeholder conversation becomes an emergency, every shiny new opportunity becomes a distraction, and the organisation constantly reacts instead of leading.
Good strategy and clear purpose do not eliminate uncertainty. They simply give you a solid place to stand when everything else moves.
The real job of leadership
If you want to test the resilience of your organisation, start asking these questions:
- What are we actually here to do?
- What matters most right now?
- Who has the authority to make this call?
- What would we do if the CEO wasn't here to ask?
This describes a massive chunk of my work in the space between a leader and their executive team. As a fractional Chief of Staff, my job is to find the places where everything still travels upward. I help teams figure out what genuinely needs the CEO’s eyes and what doesn't. We clarify where authority starts, where it ends and how to make the strategy more than a periodic exercise that gets filed away and forgotten.
The ultimate test of leadership is not how well you hold it all together; it’s how well the organisation runs when you let go.