When you lead people, you are no longer measured only by your own work. You are measured by what happens to the people who trusted you with their careers, and with a large part of their finite time on this planet. That is a different stick, and most leaders never pick it up.
I know, because for years I did not.
The system never crashed. The leadership did
When I built my first company, I created one of the most sophisticated and robust systems I have ever worked on. It ran mission-critical operations for multi-billion-dollar businesses and government organisations around the world. A client once described it as the first and only system that never crashed. That gave me a great deal of validation.
But did it mean I was a good leader, or even an adequate one? It did not. I was yet to find out how much I had to learn, and what my shortcomings would cost.
The price was a number of projects with high stakes and large financial upside, years of hard work, that never realised their full potential. It took me years of introspection to pinpoint why, confront myself, and accept the answer: I was a poor leader, and that was the core problem. I sat on the compassionate, weaker end of the spectrum, kind but not effective.
What changed it was education and practice: books, coaching, and the Oxford Executive Leadership Programme. I wish I had done it many years earlier. If someone had told the young founder I was, I would most likely have brushed it aside.
When I started asking people to take responsibility, it was met with resistance at first. But the teams that embraced it started thriving.
Why the stick is different
An individual contributor who coasts mostly limits their own output. A leader who coasts limits everyone.
Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units (Gallup, State of the American Manager, 2015). Whatever you think of engagement surveys, the direction is hard to argue with. As a leader, your impact on the success of your company is exponentially greater, for better and for worse.
So you are responsible for every person in your company, department or team. You need to give them clarity, meaningful work and the right tools, and create a supportive environment where they can do their best work. Above all, you need to inspire them to want to achieve more, to grow, and to take personal responsibility themselves.
Complacency and narrow-mindedness are costly in anyone. For a leader, they are not an option at all. Otherwise you are in the wrong job.
Stewards of finite time
The people you lead give you something they cannot get back. You need to make sure that every ounce of their life energy, and as much as possible of the precious time they spend at work, goes into meaningful outcomes and is not wasted.
That is not about extracting more from people. It is about respecting what they give. Their time on this planet is finite, and they spend a large part of it with you. Wasting it on unclear priorities, broken tools and pointless work is a failure of leadership.
And you need to grow them in the process, into better workers and better humans. Recognition is one of the cheapest ways to start: specific, genuine thanks changes behaviour more than most incentive schemes.
The standard I hold myself to
Here is the hardest part, and I apply it to myself first.
If I do not have a growth mindset and an open mind, if I am not hungry for more, and not demanding more of myself and of the people I lead, in a compassionate and inspiring way, then I am taking the place of someone who would do my job better. I am letting others down. I am an impostor.
That is a harsh standard. It is meant to be. Leadership is not a reward for past performance. It is a responsibility you either carry or occupy.
But it is also a hopeful one, because it is entirely within your control. You can be a great leader. It is a matter of attitude, beliefs and commitment. It is a matter of personal responsibility.
When lives depend on it
And if you lead a public institution, the stick is different again.
When patients depend on you doing your job well for their health, and sometimes for their lives, responsibility is on an entirely different level. You answer not only to your people and your board, but to every patient and every family who trusts that the system behind their care works, and to the public who pays for it. Complacency there is not a missed target. It is harm.
In a business, a complacent leader costs revenue, careers and morale. In a hospital, a health service or the digital systems behind them, the cost is measured in delayed diagnoses, missed treatments and people who are not there to complain.
When an organisation learns helplessness
I have seen what happens when leaders never pick up that stick, from the inside. Digital Health and Care Wales (DHCW) is the national body responsible for the digital systems behind the NHS in Wales.
What I saw there was a system-wide failure pattern. Many people had switched off and were doing the absolute minimum. Not because they were lazy. Most could not have done more even if they had tried: the culture, the organisational inertia and poor leadership made sure of that. Over time, they learned that nothing they did would change anything. They learned helplessness.
Psychologists have studied that state for half a century, and the researchers who discovered it later concluded they had originally got it backwards. Passivity is not learned. It is the default response to prolonged adversity you cannot control. What has to be learned is control: the experience that your actions make a difference (Maier and Seligman, Psychological Review, 2016). The research was done on animals, but the lesson for leaders is direct. People do not need to be taught to give up. They need to be shown that their effort matters. That is a leader's job, and nobody else can do it for them.
The result at DHCW: around £600M of public funding over five years, for precious little delivery. On 8 April 2026, Welsh Government escalated DHCW to Level 4, Targeted Intervention, "with concerns around delivery, accountability and leadership" (DHCW Programme Delivery Committee public papers, April 2026). In the NHS Wales escalation framework, Level 4 is for organisations "demonstrating serious failure or that are at risk of requiring commissioned intervention to support recovery".
The documented record, compiled from 89 primary public sources, is at The State of DHCW, part of the Digital Blueprint for NHS Wales I published after leaving.
That is what the different stick means in a public institution. The cost of leaders who do not carry it is not a dip in an engagement survey. It is public money that never becomes better care.
What it looks like done well
Ryszard Szubartowski teaches at a state secondary school in Gdynia. He studied cybernetics at the Military Technical Academy under communism. Between 1999 and 2008, 89 of his pupils reached the national final of the Polish Olympiad in Informatics, and 28 became laureates. Seventeen of his pupils won 34 medals at international olympiads, 17 of them gold (Wikipedia, citing Grochowski, 2011). Among them are Jakub Pachocki, now OpenAI's chief scientist, and Filip Wolski, a world programming champion.
He did it inside a system he believes is not built for exceptionally gifted pupils, so he teaches his own way. A 2025 documentary about him, Mistrz, carries his message: "Let young people learn what they are truly good at. Let them flourish" (Mistrz, 2025).
He was not a CEO. He led a classroom. One leader who refuses to be complacent can raise the ceiling for everyone around them, even when the system above does not help.
Measuring yourself with the different stick
The useful measure of a leader is not their own output. It is what happens to the people around them. Jocko Willink and Leif Babin built a whole book, Extreme Ownership (2015), on the leader owning everything in their world. A few questions I use on myself:
- Do my people know what matters most this quarter, and why?
- How much of their time last month went into work that truly mattered?
- Who has grown in the last year because of me, and who has stalled?
- When did I last ask for honest feedback on my leadership, and what did I change?
- If someone better could do my job, would my people notice the difference?
This is part of a series on the capacity for greatness, which began with why your ceiling is higher than you think. The philosophy behind it is here.
If you are carrying this kind of responsibility and want a sounding board, I would be glad to talk. Let's talk.
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