Leadership Success Pattern #5

In one international company I worked with, the leadership team had become highly competent firefighters. Problems were solved – quickly. But the organisation increasingly depended on escalation to make progress. People waited for answers. Decisions were improvised in meetings. Follow-up was inconsistent. And the same issues kept returning in new forms.

When the board and executive group wanted a different operating model, they discovered a hard truth: you cannot deploy a new governance model through communication alone.

The management system itself must carry the strategy. In their case, the turning point was the deliberate design of a predictable rhythm: recurring cycles for performance management, with clear expectations for preparation, decisions, and follow-up. That rhythm became a platform for cultural change because the organisation learned when and how to surface issues, prepare for decisions, and align across units.

Many leaders underestimate how often “firefighting leadership” is a system outcome rather than a personality trait. A core assumption sits underneath: : “I don’t have time for all those meetings. My calendar is too full already.” That assumption is usually incorrect, and the missing rhythm makes everyone inefficient.

 Firefighting thrives when the organisation lacks reliable mechanisms to notice weak signals early, interpret what they mean, decide what to do, and follow up consistently. When these mechanisms are weak, the leader becomes the routing point and a bottleneck. The organisation escalates and brings issues rather than solution options into meetings. Teams hesitate rather than taking an informed initiative. And the management team spends its time on today’s noise rather than tomorrow’s conditions.

The opposite is not bureaucracy. The opposite is a fit-for-purpose rhythm that improves decision quality. What’s true is that the system is pulling you into operational noise – and it rewards responsiveness over judgement.

But leadership, as I define it in The Contextual Leader, is broader than being “always involved.” Leadership is any intentional behaviour exercised to influence others, directly or indirectly, to realise the organisation’s intentions, aims, and objectives.

That “directly or indirectly” is crucial to effective leadership. At higher levels, leadership becomes increasingly indirect. It is about making the organization coordinate effectively by shaping the context and goal alignment. It is moving leadership to become intent-based and leave freedom to operate. If you accept that, then designing the information flow and meeting architecture is not admin work. It is leadership work.

The research I did is explicit: supporting performance depends on coordinating the recurring meetings across levels so timing “feeds naturally into each other” – connecting business reviews, reporting timing and leadership meetings. Build a system where information is consolidated into decision-ready input, not scattered across inboxes and ad-hoc meetings.

A management rhythm will not save you if you personally remain reactive. One of the highest-leverage “carrying waves” is a simple weekly discipline: protected, high-energy time for development-thinking. Not operational follow-up. Development-thinking.

It is where you:

• Revisit the assumptions behind job design, task allocation, processes, and policies
• Look for weak signals in the external environment
• Identify where empowerment is stalling because accountability and mandates are unclear, or there is a skill deficit
• Prepare the few questions that the organisation actually needs you to ask

Leaders often say they “don’t have time” for this. But if you don’t invest in empowered sensemaking, you force the organisation into constant sense-seeking – from you. That is how you end up busy, central, and exhausted while simultaneously reducing accountability around you.

In complex environments, leaders must establish a shared understanding of the context and promote critical thinking so employees can judge the right paths and decisions without the leader’s direct involvement. That does not happen by answering faster. It happens by asking better questions and building the conditions where people can surface and test information safely.

There is no single ideal frequency for governance. The cadence depends on dynamism, risk intensity, complexity, and interdependence.

• Stable, low-risk operations: a monthly business review and quarterly strategy progression might be sufficient if preparation standards are high and follow-up is disciplined.
• High dynamism/customer volatility: you may need daily huddles, weekly business reviews, with monthly business development meetings protected from operational noise.
• High risk intensity (safety, compliance, critical infrastructure): operational controls may require daily or weekly rhythms, making it even more important to protect separate time blocks for longer-horizon learning and system improvement.

The value driver is not “more meetings.” The value driver is “design for predictability”: people learn when decisions are made, what quality of input is expected, and how issues move from observation to judgment to action.

Where do we want information to become decision-ready – and what preparation standard will we require? If decisions are made in the room without preparation, you are training the organisation to escalate rather than think.