Insight

The Leader Who Wasn’t There

How great leaders in business empower teams. And why it decides what your business is worth.

By Mike Reardon, operator, bEffective. Canadian revenue systems for owner-led businesses.

The dinner before the battle

In October 1805, Admiral Nelson sailed toward a larger enemy fleet at Trafalgar. Before the fight, he did something unusual for his time. He invited his captains to dinner on his ship. He walked them through the strategy. He asked what they thought. He set the rules of engagement in plain terms. Then he gave them one last instruction: if the smoke gets thick and you can’t see my signals, put your ship beside an enemy and fight.

Every captain left that dinner knowing the strategy. Better than that. They owned it.

Halfway through the battle, Nelson was shot. He died before it ended. His fleet won anyway. It did not lose a single ship.

Eric Beaudan tells this story in his book Creative Execution. I took one lesson from it. Take your ego out of the strategy. Involve your people in the decisions before the action starts. Lay out the rules ahead of time. Do that, and the strategy works whether you are in the room or not.

So let me ask you what I ask every owner I meet. If you stepped away from your business for 90 days, would your team win the quarter without you?

Most owners go quiet when I ask that. Let’s talk about why.

Strategy is failing. The layoffs prove it.

Roger Martin has a famous line. Strategic planning is not strategy. He is right. A binder full of goals is not a decision about how you will win.

Now look at the news. Companies keep announcing layoffs and pointing at AI. Decades of research have a verdict on that move. Companies that cut people do not outperform the ones that don’t. Wayne Cascio tracked S&P 500 firms for nearly two decades and found the downsizers gained no lasting edge in profit or share price. The people who stay pay a price too. Pooled studies link job insecurity to lower satisfaction, lower commitment, and weaker performance. Not a collapse. A steady leak. And a leak is enough to erase whatever the cuts were supposed to save.

Cutting people is not a strategy. It is what leaders do when they don’t have one.

And the bill is showing up. Gallup reports only 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. Eight out of ten people are going through the motions. Gallup puts the lost productivity near $10 trillion a year, about 9% of global GDP.

The fight over what leaders should do next

Read the business press today and you will see a tug of war.

One camp says the old rules still hold. Tools change fast, but judgment, trust, and reputation still win. Anyone can copy your software. No one can copy your people.

The other camp says leadership has ignored a settled truth for decades. People perform based on how they feel at work. Feeling respected. Feeling the work matters. Feeling that someone notices. The science on this is done. Leaders just haven’t acted on it.

Funny thing, though. Both camps land in the same place. Technology gets cheaper and easier to copy every year. People are the edge that’s left.

What the experts agree on, with odds

I did not stop at the popular business shelf. I went back through the people whose leadership work has lasted for decades. In one case, for centuries.

Lao Tzu, twenty-five hundred years ago: the best leader is the one whose people say, we did it ourselves. Mary Parker Follett, a hundred years ago: real power is power with people, not power over them. Kurt Lewin’s experiments in the 1930s: teams led with involvement beat teams led by command. James MacGregor Burns and Bernard Bass: leaders lift performance by inspiring purpose, inviting minds in, and caring about each person. Kouzes and Posner, backed by forty years of survey data: enable others to act, and encourage the heart. Jim Collins: the best leaders pair fierce will with personal humility. Ego out. Nelson again.

Different centuries. Different words. Same drivers.

Writers like Dale Carnegie, Chuck Coonradt, Daniel Pink, and Simon Sinek did not discover these ideas. They translated them into playbooks a working leader can run today. That is exactly why I lean on them. The scholars supply the why. The practitioners supply the how.

So let’s read the board like Vegas odds. Which leadership moves are the favourites for the rest of this century? Which are long shots?

• The favouriteA clear strategy your people helped build. Beaudan calls it a simple, unique strategy plus candid dialogue. Follett called it power with your people. That was Nelson’s dinner. When people help shape the strategy, nobody has to push them to run it. Drucker supplies the why: the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. Your newest hire should be able to say that in their own words.
• Even moneyA visible score and rules that don’t move. Chuck Coonradt noticed something strange. People pay for the privilege of working hard at their hobbies, then drag themselves to work. The difference is the game. In sports, the score is visible, the rules are clear, and nobody changes them at halftime. Build those conditions at work and people play hard there too.
• Strong oddsRecognition that’s real. Dale Carnegie taught this a century ago. Be honest in your appreciation of people. I have led teams with his playbook, including at Dale Carnegie’s own company. People can tell when it is real. That is why it works.
• Strong oddsRoom to run. Daniel Pink’s research shows carrots and sticks fail for thinking work. People need autonomy, a chance to get better, and a purpose bigger than the paycheque. Notice this is Nelson again. Set the strategy and the rules. Then trust your captains.
• Long shotFear and pressure. Command and control still fills the business news. The research keeps returning the same verdict. Pressure without trust buys you compliance. And compliance is quiet quitting with better posture.
• Long shotHands-off leadership. This is the trap on the other side. Lewin tested it in the 1930s. Leaders who set no direction and stayed out of the way got the worst results of all. Worse than the commanders. Empowerment without structure is abandonment. Nelson gave his captains freedom and rules. You need both.
• Long shotCuts as a strategy. See above. The house always collects on this bet.

I learned this the expensive way

I spent years in sales before I ran operations. I had no degree in what I sold. No rolodex of family connections. I beat quota anyway, which was not supposed to happen according to the people who believe pedigree sells.

Now for my confession. I also closed five, six, and seven figure deals that our business could never deliver. One seven figure deal in the late 90s particularly irked me. My company spent months promoting a new feature of our enterprise software. I took it and ran with it, and landed a global leader in professional services and real estate investment management. I flew five hours to meet their global VPs. I landed, and before the meeting I was told we could not deliver. I had to tell the client that after six months of work.

Why? The rules changed mid-game. Targets moved. Priorities flipped in the middle of operations. Coonradt warned about exactly this, and I watched it happen from the inside. Sales won. The company lost.

Later, leading teams at Zohar, and twenty years after that at Dale Carnegie, I ran it the other way. I was brought in to restructure the team. I told them the score plainly: we are behind the eight ball. I mapped out on the whiteboard what we were going to do. I defined the roles for each person and for the team. Then I showed them how we would survive, adapt, and grow. Clear strategy. Clear roles. A score everyone could see. Rules that stayed put all year. Honest recognition for real work. The minimum result was 30% growth in under nine months, and those teams delivered what they sold.

“Isn’t this just being soft on people?”

I can hear this objection coming, so let’s deal with it now. Some will call this woke. Treating employees as assets instead of expenses. Caring how people feel at work.

Fine. Check the math.

Gallup’s Q12 meta-analysis ties the most engaged teams, the top quartile, to about 21% higher profitability. The layoff research shows cuts destroy more value than they save. And nearly every credible study on AI productivity finds the gains arrive when AI helps engaged employees do their work, not when it replaces them.

Your accountant already knows the difference. Things that grow in value are assets. A trained, engaged team grows in value. This is bookkeeping, not politics.

Your first week as this kind of leader

Here is a micro playbook you can run starting Monday. It costs nothing but attention.

1. Ask five people one question: what is this business for? If you get five different answers, you just found your first leadership job. Strategy
2. Pick one process that touches revenue. Map it on one page with the people who run it. Ask them where it breaks. Operations
3. Put one score where the whole team can see it every week. Let the team choose how it is displayed. Performance
4. Write down the rules of the game for this quarter. Then don’t touch them until the quarter ends. Not once. Trust

Do those four things, then repeat them, and you will be ahead of most leaders in your market.

Now the part for the investors

If you are a private equity operator reading this, you already know where I am headed.

When a business depends on one heroic founder, you price it with a key-person discount, which is the reduction a buyer applies when too much of the value walks out with one person. When the strategy, the processes, the score, and the team all work without the founder in the room, you pay a premium. Same revenue. Different price.

Nelson’s fleet won without Nelson. That is the whole test. Lao Tzu saw it twenty-five centuries earlier: when the best leader’s work is done, the people say, we did it ourselves.

So, owners, one last question. If you stepped out for 90 days, what would your forecast do?