The Surprising Success of Hands-On Leaders

Among most CEOs, there’s broadthesensus: Senior leaders should focus on the “what”—purpose, vision, strategy, goals, resource allocation, and assembling a capable team. To protect their time for those high-level priorities, they must delegate the day-to-day operating decisions (the “how”) to subordinates.  Leaders who get too deep into the details of execution are typically criticized as being micromanagers.  Yet, according to the authors, when they study some of the world’s top-performing firms, they see a contradictory set of behaviors. These are companies where the CEOs and senior leaders care deeply about the “how”—that is, how people do their work—spending significant amounts of time observing the way middle managers and frontline employees work and designing systems and modeling behaviors that guide the methods people use to perform their tasks.

For this article, the authors have conducted intensive research on four extraordinarily high-performing firms: Amazon, Danaher, RELX, and Toyota.  On the surface these four organizations have few attributes in common.  The commonality is that each company has leaders who embrace a contrarian view of what a CEO should prioritize.  Leaders like these reject the model in which a CEO is primarily a delegator; instead, they see the chief executive as a vital participant in shaping how work gets done.

To be sure, many CEOs would claim they care about execution. What distinguishes the leaders of these high-performing firms is their sustained and close attention to behaviors and systems. They are not inserting themselves into every decision or displacing their teams. Instead, they act as teachers and system builders: They’re present in the work not to control it or make every decision themselves but to model standards, sharpen problem-solving, and establish behavioral norms that enable others to act with autonomy and discipline. They don’t meddle—they coach. They don’t override—they elevate. They don’t hoard decision rights—they teach others how to make sound decisions on their own. Their involvement is not disempowering—it is energizing. And it is purposeful: to build a system that performs reliably even when they’re not in the room.

In the course of their study, they authors found five core principles that guide hands-on leaders. Let’s look at each one in turn.  

They Obsess Over the Metrics That Customers Value.  Focusing deeply on how the company creates and delivers value for its customers was a cornerstone of the practices of the leaders we studied. According to the interviews, people in the organization don’t experience this specific kind of detail orientation as micromanaging. Rather, it creates mission clarity. When leaders show how much they personally care about what matters most to customers, attending to details becomes a shared norm for every employee—which expands the decision rights of those close to the front lines.

1. They Architect the Way Work Gets Done.  Leaders made it their personal mission to design work processes so that employees are empowered with the tools and support they need and don’t hit obstacles that slow them down.
2. They Use Experiments to Make Decisions.  When CEOs join in testing an idea—demanding that data, not hierarchy, decides—they elevate teams rather than override them. Authority comes not from opinion but from evidence.
3. They Lead by Teaching the Tool Kit.  Too many leaders treat this work as developmental. “The best leaders don’t. They know the real fun is getting in with the team and getting their hands dirty.
4. And They Strive to Be Better, Faster, Cheaper—Every Year, Forever.  Leaders reject the logic of transformation—the idea that performance improves through occasional, heroic interventions. They don’t aim for one-shot breakthroughs. They build systems, habits, and norms that make improvement the standard business, practiced every day.
5. Moving from this conventional model to one where the CEO is the chief architect and role model of the systems of execution requires more than a behavioral change. It requires a redefinition of leadership itself—one that challenges long-held assumptions. That kind of identity shift is difficult, especially for leaders who rose through the ranks by mastering the traditional model.

This is not a leadership style defined by isolated behaviors that can be grafted onto an existing model. It is a system—a tightly woven set of practices, norms, mechanisms, and beliefs. The habits we’ve described—an obsession with customer-defined value, the rigorous use of data, distributed decision-making, structured experimentation and reflection, relentless improvement, and leading by teaching—are mutually reinforcing. They gain power not on their own but through integration.  The system matters—and the CEO’s role in designing, modeling, and reinforcing that system is essential.

From the outside these practices may appear simple. But sustaining them requires uncommon depth of care, of consistency, and of lived commitment. That is what sets these leaders apart—not just that they care about execution but that they embed that care into the very fabric of how their organizations operate.

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