The seven elements

This is where the definition goes, and it is worth being precise about what form it takes, because most people reach for objectives and objectives cannot do this job.

Without something to hold things up against, requests arrive, all of them reasonable, and the day gets decided by whoever asked most recently. The work is good. It just is not pointed anywhere, and nothing about the week will tell you that.

When you write your Wow paragraph you can say what you intend to be true in three years, in a way that makes other people react. It is a story rather than a target, which matters because a target is either hit or missed while a story stays useful when you revise it. That gives you something to test everything else against, so you know what deserves your time this quarter and, more importantly, what does not. Every decision becomes one you made rather than one you accepted.

Nearly everyone treats their environment as a fixed quantity. The question people ask themselves is whether this is a good company, which is a different question from whether this company can take them where they have decided to go.

The cost of not asking is that the direction quietly adjusts to fit the building. Constraints you have never tested become facts, and the adjustment always looks like being realistic. By the time it becomes obvious that the place cannot take you there, the conclusion arrives as a shock and you are leaving under pressure rather than choosing to.

When you test the environment against your direction, you find out which constraints are real and which ones you assumed. Some of them move, and knowing which is the work. You also find out early whether this place can take you where you are going, which means that if you do leave, it is a decision you made in your own time.

Most leaders can describe their remit precisely. Far fewer can name the people who would feel it if they stopped.

Without that, you are working to a brief rather than to a need. Briefs are written at a point in time by someone who has since moved on, and needs move underneath them. Pain has a shelf life, so what was urgent in January can be solved or deprioritised by June and nobody will tell you. You keep delivering beautifully against a problem that no longer exists, and when someone eventually asks what your impact was, you have outputs rather than consequences.

When you know who fails if you fail, by name, you have the only measure of your importance that is not self-assessed. You can tell when the need moves, because you are close enough to see it. And your value is attached to people rather than to a role, which means it does not evaporate when the role does.

The instinct is to plan backwards from the goal until the path is complete, and to reconsider the goal if you cannot build one. It is what you were taught and it is what gets rewarded.

The problem is that waiting is almost indistinguishable from diligence. The unfamiliar action is always the uncomfortable one, so it gets deferred, and every deferral is individually defensible. Two quarters go by. And movement on its own is not the answer either, because conviction with no feedback loop is obvious to everyone except the person who has it.

When you move before you know how to finish, and then go looking for evidence about whether it is working, you find out what actually works rather than what you predicted would. The next section of the route becomes visible from the new position, which it never does from where you are standing now. And you end up with a record of things that worked, which is a case you can make anywhere, rather than a plan that was sound.

Two versions of this go wrong. One is assuming good work speaks for itself. The other is doing all the visibility things, the posts, the newsletters, the launch announcements, without ever having a position worth arguing.

The cost is not neutrality. If you do not author the narrative about your impact, someone else will, and more often there is no narrative at all and you become a well-kept secret. You find out when a decision gets made about you and nobody in the room can say what you are for. By then it is not a communication problem, it is a conclusion.

When you campaign, you have a position that people can repeat when you are not there. That is the part that matters, because it is what travels. Your reputation starts arriving before you do, and it comes with you when you move rather than staying with the job.

Most people have good relationships. Considerably fewer have asked whether those particular people carry any weight in the rooms where decisions about them get made.

This one has the longest delay between the neglect and the cost. You do not need a backer until the afternoon you need one, and that is precisely the moment you cannot build it, because relationships take time you no longer have. The usual position is that your manager is the only one, which is a single point of failure you did not choose and cannot control. If they leave, and they will, you start again with nothing.

When you build this deliberately you have people who will argue for you in rooms you are not in, and you know whether their opinion carries. Not four enthusiastic ones. One or two whose view changes what happens, which is the difference between being well liked and having someone who will open a door.

Good leaders tend to become indispensable, and to read that as evidence they are doing well.

It is the opposite. Everything the other six produce is unusable if you cannot be spared, so the options exist and you cannot take any of them. The trap does not present as ego, it presents as arithmetic: you are faster at this than anyone available, so doing it yourself is the correct allocation of effort. The reasoning is sound and the condition it creates is permanent. If you are the only person who can do your job, you are the only person who will ever do your job.

When the thing runs without you, whether that is people, a process, a system or a decision rule others can apply without asking, you can take what appears when it appears. You also get handed the difficult, unformed problems, because the people who get those are the ones whose last problem stayed solved.