Leadership is a craft: On leading leaders
The best leaders I have known shared a perspective: they treated the fact that they couldn't know everything as great news. It kept them curious. It kept them listening. It kept the work alive. In my experience, this openness matters a lot in leadership, and it becomes even more valuable as the stakes rise and the pressure to project certainty becomes constant.
From experience, real seniority isn't about having all the answers. It's about creating the kind of environment where the best answers can emerge from the people around you. It is a transition from being a soloist to being the one who ensures the orchestra wants to play, even when you aren't holding the baton.
Leadership is one of those words that often gets tangled up with management. These two are different, and they both matter. Management has a model for every framework, a course for most competencies, and a library of books on techniques that many of us have read. It is about keeping track of the moving parts, knowing where the workflows run, and whether everything lines up with the direction. Management can often be taught, measured, and improved.
What has kept me interested lies elsewhere. Leadership appears in the moments when the framework runs out, and the accountability stays with you. As your career progresses, those moments become larger, more visible, and, if you enjoy this kind of work, more rewarding.
Leading leaders is often described as the next step for a strong manager, the natural rung on the ladder. To me, it is a different game entirely. What gets built is no longer just an expression of personal grit. It is less about developing individuals through predefined models and more about believing in other people's abilities, grounded in deep understanding. The instinct to be the person with the answer, to be in every decision, to pull the work forward yourself, must evolve into something more generous: putting your weight behind what other people can make possible.
Leading leaders is a craft in its own right. It’s not about “making it” to a certain level. It’s about refining how you show up, hand over responsibility, and grow the people around you. That mindset, more than any title, is what pushes something or someone forward.
When vision and direction has to travel
I find that leadership is something you practise. You adjust. You get it wrong in ways that teach you something, and right in ways that only make full sense afterwards. This is the privilege of working in environments that don't stand still.
There is a real shift when you move from leading a team to leading other leaders. Early in a career, diligence in running a team often means staying close to every decision and knowing every detail. That approach certainly served me well for years. I remember a clear turning point in 2019, when I stepped into a role with responsibility for almost twenty-five very capable managers spread throughout Norway. I went in with the same hands-on habits that had worked before, and I quickly saw what that default way of operating actually produced. Each time I stepped into a decision that really belonged to one of my managers, I reinforced an unproductive assumption: that no decision could be made without me.
Over time, I watched the pattern. People began presenting options instead of positions. They escalated problems that they were fully capable of resolving. They asked for permission instead of making decisions. From an efficiency standpoint, it was a disaster. The numbers were not groundbreaking. But most importantly, it was a failure of trust.
What had to change was my role in relation to my own standards. Practically, this meant adopting a new threshold: if a manager could reach a 80% solution on their own, I had to stop myself from providing the remaining 20%. That 20% was the tax I had to pay to buy back my own time and, above all, ensure their confidence. And with that, results followed. That sounds easy, but it isn’t, because it asks you to give up control that others anticipate for you to have, to trust fully, and to focus on whether someone understands the direction well enough to navigate conditions you cannot see.
It means investing in other people’s understanding, not just their agreement. A manager who nods along with the strategy is useful. A leader who has genuinely made it their own, who can adjust it under pressure without losing the core, defend it in a difficult room, and explain it to their team in their own words, is something else. They are the ones who keep the direction in place over time, without your constant involvement.
To be clear, leading differently is not about walking away. As a senior leader, you still bear responsibility for the organisation's health.
Trusting leaders to lead is also about being very clear about the non-negotiables, the strategic and ethical lines that cannot be crossed. I have learned that the more freedom I give someone on the how, the clearer I have to be on the what and the why. When someone understands exactly where those lines sit, they usually feel more self-assured moving quickly inside them. This isn’t just about autonomy; it’s about knowing where the edges of the field are, and managing uncertainty.
Taking care of those in your charge
How you treat the people directly in front of you travels further than most account for. Leaders will carry it into how they treat their own people, and those people carry it further still. That chain moves faster than any formal cultural initiative, and when it’s aligned positively, it becomes one of the organisation’s advantages.
Taking care of the leaders I led has always been a personal task, not just a professional one. It has asked me to make room for someone else’s thinking, even when I was confident in my own. To care beyond the task at hand.
This is where I have a rather provocative opinion: traditional, weekly 1:1s create the wrong dynamic. People come prepared to present, to account for their week rather than to align. I find this inefficient in a high-performance environment. The conversations that have told me most about where things actually stood have rarely happened in a scheduled meeting. They have happened in the informal moment, the walk between floors, the lunch with no agenda. Not because informality is the point, but because it removes the pressure to perform for you and shifts it to performing for the business. When I have used structured time with leaders, less frequent and more intentional has worked better than weekly and habitual. What matters is not the frequency of presenting tasks, but the quality and whether the people you lead are moving with genuine understanding, not just compliance.
When things are stable, this is relatively easy. Under pressure, it becomes harder. When targets tighten and timelines move in, the instinct is to step closer, re-check, and correct. Some of that is necessary. Done with intent, it can also be reassuring for everyone involved as engagement is important. Too much of it, though, tells people you don’t truly value them.
This balance is where the role becomes demanding. It requires an honest dialogue and transparency. You are not checking their work to catch them out, but looking at the horizon together, to make sure that the choices they are making today align with the metrics for the next quarter. When a decision starts to drift, you show up and ask the harder questions. I learned early on to stop saying "that's wrong" and start asking, "Walk me through the logic that led to this conclusion". It forces the critical thinking required to realign the course.
I don’t get all of this right all the time, and I don't know anyone who does. But I have experienced the difference it makes.
Being clear is kind. Being unclear, in the name of sparing someone, is not. I have had to sit across from managers I liked and respected, and say something they did not want to hear. That doesn’t get easier. But I have also seen what happens when those conversations are built on transparency. Care that avoids this is not care. And in an environment where results matter and time is short, it is also a poor strategy.
As a senior leader, you are constantly weighing when to let a leader fail safely, viewing the mistake as a tuition cost for their growth, and when the stakes require you to step back in. The leaders who experience honest care when things are tight usually come out of it taller, not smaller. Many of them also go on to pass that experience on.
Ambition wide enough to include others
There is a version of ambition that turns inwards, focused on your own targets and your mark on the organisation. I know that version well, and it’s perfectly normal and human to want to succeed. But if it remains the primary orientation, it becomes a ceiling for the people around you and for what the organisation can actually become. The difference between an organisation that scales and one that stalls is rarely strategy; it is usually whether leadership is concentrated or distributed.
The ambition that has mattered most to me is the kind you carry on behalf of other people. What they might grow into. What value they can create. How far they might go if someone saw their potential clearly before they fully did themselves. In this, I keep coming back to my time at Voice Norge, where ambition for others was part of how things worked. Your reputation did not rest on how quickly you moved yourself, but on who and what moved because of you. That expectation changed how we thought about our role as leaders and how we executed it. The real question was not just what you delivered, but who would be ready for more because they had worked with you.
That is not a small thing to ask of yourself. It requires the ego and self-ambition to take a different seat. The question is whether you can place it in the service of something with a longer view than your own next move. From what I have experienced, the joy of seeing someone you once worked closely with now outperform you in several areas is its own kind of reward. That, for me, has become the real measure of whether leadership has been done well.
Leading leaders is not a promotion from management. It is a different kind of work, with a different measure of success.
The measure is not what you, yourself, created on your own. It is what the people you led went on to create. Not what you decided, but the quality of the decisions made in rooms you were not in. Not how well you held the direction, but how well others carried it when the conditions got difficult, and you were not there to steady things.
That shift, from your own performance to theirs, is the one that defines outcome. It usually doesn’t happen overnight, but I have still not found a more interesting pursuit than this because the returns are unlike anything else in leadership. Seeing someone shine because they got the space for it. A team you never worked with directly, producing something that carries the fingerprints of values you instilled further up.
On the days when you can feel the organisation moving on its own strength, carrying the imprint of values and standards you helped put in place, there is very little that compares.
Cecilie Dobson
Founder, Dobson Advisory