Maximise Yor Impact
There’s a simple reason some leaders seem to move mountains while others are forever stuck rearranging pebbles.
The best leaders consistently do the right work at the right level. It remains one of the most powerful leadership lessons I have learnt.
Originally published in November 2000, Stephen Drotter co-authored The Leadership Pipeline, which HR Professionals quickly embraced as a means of approaching leadership development.
However, whilst working with Stephen Drotter for a short while during the implementation of the Leadership Pipeline at the organisation I was working for, I soon discovered that it was a robust framework for understanding how to structure work in a business to optimise results.
It is a practical way to see how work changes as you move up and why results stall when people are dragged down to a level they’ve already passed. If you want more impact (and less busywork), this lens keeps you focused on what only you can do.
The Leadership Pipeline Framework
The Leadership Pipeline framework describes six career passages, each with a distinct set of skills, time horizons, and values. As you ascend, the work shifts from “doing” to “enabling,” “orchestrating,” and ultimately “owning” the whole enterprise.
They can be briefly described as follows:
Managing self (individual contributor): Master your craft, deliver reliably, and improve your own productivity. Time horizon: days to weeks.
Managing others (first-line manager): Shift from doing to planning and coaching. Your output is your team’s output. Time horizon: weeks to months.
Managing managers: Build a management system—cadences, metrics, hiring bar—and hold managers accountable for developing people. Time horizon: a year.
Functional leader: Own a function’s strategy and portfolio, not just projects. Orchestrate cross-functional trade-offs. Time horizon: one to two years.
Business unit leader: Make P&L choices, place bets, and align product, marketing, finance, and operations to a coherent strategy. Time horizon: two to five years.
Enterprise leader (CEO/executive team): Set direction, shape culture, allocate capital, pick leaders, manage the board and external environment. Time horizon: three to ten years.
Each passage demands a different definition of success.
A great coder who becomes a manager but keeps fixing bugs at midnight is failing the test. A new CEO who still approves campaign copy is failing the enterprise.
Why Organisations Stall: The Gravity Pulling Leaders “down a level”
Most companies don’t struggle from a lack of effort; they struggle because leaders spend too much time at the wrong altitude. Common causes are:
Identity grip. We stick with what we’re good at. Former star salespeople keep riding shotgun on deals. Ex-engineers dive into code reviews.
Underskilled bench. If the team can’t carry the work, managers “rescue.” This helps in the short term but freezes capability growth in the long term.
Hero culture. Firefighting gets praise while prevention goes unnoticed. Leaders learn to chase flames instead of fixing wiring.
Mushy decision rights. When it’s unclear who decides, issues escalate upward by default. Executives become traffic cops.
Activity-biased metrics. Dashboards celebrate volume (“tickets closed,” “calls made”) rather than outcomes that matter.
Attention fragmentation. Calendars fill with status meetings, leaving no space for the thinking and relationship-building only leaders can do.
The cost is enormous: strategy turns into a wish list, high-quality people leave for lack of autonomy, and the organisation’s time horizon shrinks to the next quarter.
Working at the Right Level: Practical Guardrails
If the problem is “being pulled down”, the solution is “building guardrails” that keep you at altitude.
Here are pragmatic suggestions to address this that work in any setting:
1. Write a “work at my level” charter
List the five outcomes only you can own at your current level on one page.
Examples for a business unit head might include:
(a) Set a three-year strategy
(b) Allocate capital across bets
(c) Hire and develop successors for all critical roles
(d) Secure three significant partnerships
(e) Shape culture and operating rhythm.
Keep the list visible, and if a task doesn’t advance those outcomes, delegate them or decline.
2. Decide who actually decides
Adopt a crisp decision-rights model (Bain’s RAPID is a good starting point): one Decision Maker, a clear Recommender, identified input givers, and the Performer. Publish decision owners for your top recurring choices (pricing bands, headcount, roadmap priorities).
When the owner is known, escalation drops, and higher levels stay out of the weeds.
3. Redesign your calendar around altitude
Your calendar is your strategy. Block the week around what only you can do:
Thinking time. Two to three 90-minute, meeting-free blocks to work on strategy, capital allocation, and talent moves. Protect this like a board meeting.
People and culture. Weekly one-on-ones with direct reports focused on judgment, priorities, and development; not status. Monthly skip-level roundtables. Quarterly succession reviews.
Customers and the market. Standing time with top customers, partners, and industry forums to keep your external radar sharp.
Operating rhythm. Short, high-quality reviews guided by written narratives and a small set of leading indicators. Eliminate recurring updates you don’t use.
4. Build an upward filter, not a vacuum
Issues should arrive at your level pre-digested: problem, options, recommendation, risks.
If a memo lands without options, send it back. It trains leverage.
5. Create “stop-doing” rituals
Every quarter, kill meetings, reports, or approvals that no longer move the needle. Peter Drucker called this the “systematic abandonment” that frees resources for real priorities. It’s as important as adding new initiatives.
6. Elevate measures from activity to outcomes
Swap “units shipped” for “retained, satisfied customers.” Replace “story points” with “time-to-value.” At higher levels, measure trajectory, not just totals. Your metrics should encourage your team to solve the correct problems without you.
7. Strengthen the bench so you can stay out
Talent is a CEO/executive’s first amplifier.
Define the hiring bar, invest in manager training, and coach for judgment. Gravity loosens when you can trust your direct reports to run their areas.
What Top Leaders Actually Do (and Why It Works)
Warren Buffett is famous for spending most of his day reading and thinking.
He structures Berkshire Hathaway around extreme delegation and clear decision rights and spends his time on the few capital allocation decisions that matter.
The lesson is not to copy his industry; it’s to copy his ruthless focus on where his decisions change the outcome.
Jeff Bezos institutionalised high-quality decisions by banning bullet-point updates in favour of six-page narratives and distinguishing between irreversible and reversible decisions.
The mechanism improves the quality of the hour, not just the quantity, and keeps senior time on design choices and customer obsession rather than status.
Satya Nadella reframed Microsoft’s centre of gravity around a growth mindset, cloud-first bets, and cross-silo collaboration.
Culture and talent moved to the top of the CEO agenda because changing how people learn and work at scale is an enterprise-level job that cannot be delegated. Results followed because the work matched the level.
Indra Nooyi pushed “Performance with Purpose” at PepsiCo, balancing financial results with long-term portfolio shifts and stakeholder trust. That dual horizon (today’s P&L and tomorrow’s viability) is enterprise work.
It required external orientation, capital allocation, and storytelling with employees, customers, and investors.
Tim Cook shows the power of operating excellence at scale. His cadence, attention to details that matter, and design of supply chain governance made Apple’s machinery reliable, freeing senior attention for product, platform, and brand choices.
Reliability in the system lets leaders stay at altitude.
The above examples highlight different industries but the same pattern: design the system, choose the portfolio, pick and develop the people, and create mechanisms that keep you out of the weeds.
Keeping your Managers at their Level
A pipeline fails if the level below is weak. Here’s how to help managers climb the next rung:
Managers of others: Train one-on-ones, expectation setting, and performance coaching. Give them a simple operating system: weekly priorities, monthly health metrics, quarterly reviews. Judge them on team output and people development, not personal heroics.
Managers of managers: Make them talent multipliers. Hold them to a bench plan, promotion slates, and succession readiness. Shift their reviews from team metrics to system metrics: hiring velocity, promotion quality, attrition of top performers, and defect rates in handoffs.
Functional leaders: Require written strategies with a diagnosis of the problem, a guiding policy, and coherent actions. Evaluate them on cross-functional outcomes, not silo wins.
Senior leaders can do less “doing” and more designing when each layer is strong; impact scales.
Focus for Maximum Productivity
Productivity for executives is about ensuring your time and attention are compounded.
Four practices raise the yield of every hour:
Deep work blocks. High-value thinking requires uninterrupted time. Two or three weekly deep work sessions often produce more leverage than twenty meetings.
Narratives over slides. Written memos force clear thinking, reduce performative updates, and make revisiting decisions easier.
Small, empowered teams. Big tables create passive spectators. Keep groups small, with clear owners and goals, so decisions stick.
Deliberate recovery. Energy is a productivity input. Sleep, movement, and real downtime ensure your judgment—the most valuable thing you bring—stays sharp.
A Quick Self-Audit: Are you at the Right Altitude?
Ask yourself weekly:
1. What are the three outcomes only I can own right now?
2. What did I do last week that someone two levels below could have done 80% as well?
3. Which meetings can convert to pre-read memos or be killed entirely?
4. Which decision rights are fuzzy and causing upward drag?
5. Who am I developing to take 30% of my current job within six months?
If you cannot answer these, your calendar will keep answering for you.
Final Thoughts
The Leadership Pipeline is a blueprint for where your attention belongs.
When leaders work at the right level, they set lasting direction, build systems that scale, and develop people who multiply results. When they don’t, the organisation grows heavier while its future shrinks.
Maximising impact means guarding your altitude, designing decision mechanisms, investing in talent, and structuring your week around the few levers only you can pull.
Until next time, may you spend less time moving pebbles and more time moving mountains, without being pulled back down by gravity.
Dion Le Roux
References
Charan, R., Drotter, S., & Noel, J. (2011). The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership Powered Company (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press.
Doerr, J. (2018). Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. Portfolio.
Drucker, P. F. (1967). The Effective Executive. HarperBusiness.
Grove, A. S. (1995). High Output Management. Vintage.
Jaques, E. (1998). Requisite Organisation: A Total System for Effective Managerial Organisation and Managerial Leadership for the 21st Century (Rev. ed.). Cason Hall.
McKeown, G. (2014). Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Crown Business.
Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. Grand Central Publishing.
Porter, M. E., & Nohria, N. (2018). “How CEOs Manage Time.” Harvard Business Review, July–August.
Rumelt, R. (2011). Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters. Crown Business.