My most valuable leadership lesson wasn’t learned in a classroom. It was learned with the bite of an enormous backpack digging into my shoulders on some godforsaken training exercise in Wales. In the British Army, you learn one thing fast: extra weight is a liability. It doesn’t just make you tired; it gets people hurt. So you become ruthless. You field-strip your kit until only the essentials remain (memories of cutting toothbrushes in half remain). That instinct has never left me.
Twenty years on, I see the same thing playing out in offices, but in reverse. I watch good people, smart managers, dragging themselves through the week. They’re carrying a metaphorical pack, alright. One that’s stuffed with rusty tools, outdated beliefs, and habits that should have died a decade ago. And they wonder why they feel slow, why they’re frustrated, and why their teams look like they’ve completely checked out.
But burning the old playbook raises an obvious, and fair, question: what do you replace it with? It’s not enough to point out what’s broken. You need a new set of tools—a lighter, faster, and far more effective kit for leading in a world that won’t slow down. After working with over 3,000 leaders, I’ve seen what that new toolkit looks like. It starts not by adding more, but by ruthlessly jettisoning what’s holding you back.
Emptying the Old Backpack and what to try instead
Before you can pack the right gear, you have to ditch the dead weight. Most managers are weighed down by four pieces of obsolete kit.
1. The Annual Performance Review
This is the heaviest, rustiest tool in the bag. It’s a corporate séance where managers, armed with vague recollections, attempt to justify a rating decided months ago. The feedback is delivered too late to be useful, the process breeds fear, and it reduces a year of human effort to a single box-ticking exercise. It’s a process designed for organisational compliance, not for performance improvement. The cost is immense: you create a culture of fear around feedback and miss countless opportunities to course-correct in real-time.
Instead try focussing on 10-15 minute meaningful check ins weekly with each member of your team. We use a format called 3x3x3 – 3 wins you had this week – and what impact they made to the team, 3 things you are prioritising next week and how they will benefit the team, and 3 things you need approved, decided or supporting on by me. This helps you get a handle on what your team is doing and help you steer them in real time without micromanaging.
2. The Illusion of Control
When we feel unstable, our instinct is to grab the wheel tighter. This shows up as a desperate need for control, manifesting in two classic symptoms: endless meetings and approval bottlenecks. Meetings multiply to “stay aligned,” but most are just poorly disguised status reports that could have been an email. Approval gates are added to “ensure quality,” but they just create queues, slow down the work, and signal a fundamental lack of trust. This isn’t management; it’s anxiety. And it puts a tax on your team’s speed and morale.
Take 2 mindsets here. The first is the realisation that you got where you are through a combination of hard work and battlescars. We have to kiss some professional frogs to find a prince/princess and the same applies for your team. Let them kiss frogs. Allow this to happen in areas where they can graze their knees, not break their legs. We want battlescars but we don’t want permanent disfiguration. If you are in a 3x3x3 catchup and you know that something is not going well for them, but that it will give them a great experience, let it flow.
Equally important is to realise that sometimes giving up control can ease the burden on you and sometimes create better results that you can. L David Marquet’s book, Turn the Ship around centres on the idea that letting 143 sailors think is always going to outperform relying on 1 for everything.
3. The ‘Hero Manager’ Cape
The hero manager who always swoops in to save the day feels essential. They get a rush from being the one with all the answers, the one who fixes the crisis. But this is one of the most selfish acts in management. Every time you “save” your team, you rob them of a chance to learn. You create dependency, not capability. You become the ceiling on their potential, and you guarantee your own burnout. Your job isn’t to be the hero; it’s to build a team that doesn’t need one.
Try and become the Icebreaker leader. The icebreaker is the activity at the start of a networking event or meeting which helps everyone feel a little more at ease. This is essentially creating psychological safety. Try and put your team at ease through helping them feel safe to speak, act, learn and grow.
Equally an Icebreaker ship is the one which sails in front of the flotilla and breaks the ice – removing the icebergs that could tear a hole in the hull or sink one of the ships. The best leaders spend their time hunting for friction (icebergs): the invisible, systemic issues that cause the issues in the first place. This is the role you can play for your team. Help them sail through smoother waters by removing problems that might slow them down, ensuring there is a clear channel. Friction hides in handoffs, in approval delays, and in ambiguous standards. Your job is to find it and kill it.
A construction firm I worked with was constantly missing project deadlines. The leadership blamed the site managers; the site managers blamed the crews. Everyone was working harder, but they were still falling behind. Instead of firefighting, we went friction hunting.
- Step 1: Map the Work. Get everyone involved in a process in a room with a whiteboard. Draw the process from start to finish. Don’t map the ideal process from the manual; map what actually happens, warts and all.
- Step 2: Time the Waits. Look at the gaps between the boxes. This is where the friction lives. How long does it take for a decision to be approved? How long does a request sit in someone’s inbox? We found the construction firm was losing three days on every project waiting for a single engineering approval.
- Step 3: Ask ‘Why?’ Five Times. Once you find a delay, don’t just treat the symptom. Dig for the root cause. Why is there a three-day wait? Because the engineer is overloaded. Why is he overloaded? Because he has to approve things that don’t need his expertise. Why? Because the policy hasn’t been updated in ten years. By asking “why” repeatedly, you move from blaming people to fixing the broken system.
4. The ‘More is More’ Mindset Faced with a problem, the default corporate response is to add something. A new process. A new software tool. A new initiative. A new meeting. We pile on solutions without ever taking anything away. This “initiative-itis” just adds more weight to an already overburdened pack. The most effective leaders I know are masters of subtraction. They understand that progress doesn’t come from doing more things, but from removing the friction that slows down the important things.
We teach a model called PVC.
This is your operational filter for every commitment. Before you invest your focus, energy, or time, run the task, meeting, or project through these three gates. If it fails any one of them, it doesn’t get your attention.
P is for Purpose: The ‘Why’
- The Work: Why this? What critical outcome does it serve? What breaks if we simply don’t do it? Does it serve the mission or is it a distraction?
- My Involvement: Why me? Is my involvement essential, or am I just the default? Am I here to enable a decision or to control an outcome?
V is for Value: The Trade-Off
- The Work: Is this the highest-value activity for the business right now? What are we saying ‘no’ to by doing this? Does this create leverage or is it a one-off task?
- My Involvement: Is this the highest-value use of my time? What is the opportunity cost of my involvement here versus somewhere else? Am I doing £10 work at a £1000 an hour rate?
C is for Capacity: The Reality Check
- The Team: Does the team have the skills, time, and authority to win? What’s missing: a skill gap or a system constraint? Are we setting them up for success or for burnout?
- My Involvement: Do I have the personal bandwidth to do this properly? Will I be fully engaged or just a drive-by manager causing chaos? What does saying ‘yes’ to this take my energy away from?
Remember You Can’t Give What You Don’t Have
Here’s the final, crucial piece of the puzzle. A disengaged manager will never build an engaged team. You can’t give what you don’t have. Many leaders are running on empty, buried in work that drains them, and then they’re asked to go and inspire their teams. It’s an impossible task.
Before you can fix your team, you have to fix your own role. Try this simple exercise. I call it the Calendar Audit.
Your calendar is a statement of your priorities. A cluttered calendar means cluttered priorities. Use this response menu to protect your focus and ensure every meeting is a high-value use of time. This isn’t about rejection; it’s about precision, so we need to respond and clear out a heap of these meetings.
We call it the Calendar Defence Menu:
❓ Need a meeting?….What it means: “Is a live meeting the right tool for this job, or could a call or email be faster?”
⛔️ No….. What it means: “This does not align with our priorities and has no clear strategic value.”
⏰ Not yet….. What it means: “We are not prepared. A meeting now would be a waste of time.”
🕵️♂️ Need more… What it means: “I cannot have a useful discussion without more information (e.g., purpose, data, agenda).”
📊 Not now….What it means: “This is important, but it is not the priority right now.”
🙅♂️ Not me….What it means: “I am not the right person to add value here. This should be redirected.”
🍝 Noodle….What it means: “This topic is too important for a quick decision and requires dedicated thinking time.”
Not enough people…..What it means: “A 1-to-1 doesn’t need a formal meeting slot. Let’s have a quick phone call instead.”
The job of a modern leader isn’t to carry the weight for everyone else. It’s to make the pack lighter. It’s not about having all the answers; it’s about building a system that finds them. After working with thousands of leaders, I reckon only about 3 per cent truly get this. The rest keep piling more into their pack and wondering why the journey is so bloody hard.
When you are ready to find out more, here are a few ways you can connect with me
- Tired of leadership advice that doesn’t work in the real world? → Get practical insights that actually work
- Stuck in the leadership weeds and can’t see a way out? → Book your 1:1 Strategic Breakthrough Session
- Ready to reclaim 6+ hours weekly and lead with confidence instead of firefighting in chaos? → Discover Amplify
- Exhausted from your team needing constant oversight and direction? → Transform them with WoW
- Burning out from leadership overwhelm? → Get the antidote (my book)
