The Intentional Leadership Arc

A guide to what leadership actually demands

A manager who got the role because he was the best technical performer in the team. He stays late to keep his edge, reviews every deliverable line by line, redoes the parts he is not happy with and answers the hard questions himself in the meetings that matter. His calendar is full, his evenings are not his own and his team is competent but stuck. The good people are starting to look elsewhere because nothing is moving for them. The mediocre ones are comfortable, because he is doing half their job already. He is exhausted and convinced that he is the only thing holding the operation together, which, in a sense, is exactly the problem.

Which raises the question he has never stopped to ask: what even is the job of a manager?

The Leadership Arc is the series I am writing on what leadership actually is and what it actually demands. The pieces below build a single argument and are best read in order.

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What do you actually owe your people? Most managers never name the contract that governs the relationship, which is why it falls apart the moment a hard call has to be made. The piece names it in three lines.

What are you actually paid for? Meeting expectations is multiplication by one. The leader’s job is to produce a return above the baseline assumption attached to every resource he has been given, systematically.

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The list above will grow. The question in the first paragraph won’t change.

Luca