You Already Have What Bezos Had to Fight to Get Back
HBR's research on Amazon, Toyota, Danaher and RELX finds that some of the best-performing companies have CEOs who stay deeply hands-on with how work actually gets done — not because they can't delegate, but because they use that closeness to teach and set the standard, on purpose.
Prompted by “You Already Have What Bezos Had to Fight to Get Back”, Harvard Business Review (Scott Cook & Nitin Nohria).
Most leadership advice says the same thing: get out of the weeds, stop being the chief operating officer of your own company, start being the chief executive.
HBR ran a piece this week making the opposite case — some of the best-performing companies on earth, Amazon, Toyota, Danaher, RELX, have CEOs who stay deeply hands-on with how work actually gets done. Not because they can't delegate. Because they use that closeness to teach, build systems, and set the standard everyone else works from.
Here's what I'd add for the CEOs I work with running companies around Rochester and Buffalo: you already have this. You're on the floor. You know your customers by name. You spot the bottleneck because you built the process it's stuck in. Amazon and Toyota had to fight scale and bureaucracy to claw that closeness back. You never lost it.
So what's the catch?
The catch is that it only compounds if you're using it on purpose — teaching it, measuring it, testing it — instead of just being busy inside it. Being hands-on because you haven't built out a team yet isn't the same thing Bezos and Toyoda were doing.
Here's a challenge for your next leadership meeting or peer group: pick the one process you're most personally tangled up in right now, and ask the room straight — am I in this to teach it, or because I haven't let go of it yet? That question alone separates the leaders who scale from the ones who stay the smartest person doing the work, forever.
Staying close to the work without micromanaging it is a recurring thread in Team Coaching.
Originally posted on LinkedIn ↗