Summary: By looking at where leaders are really spending their time and building the capability that enables leaders to let go, HR can help equip leaders to navigate today’s uncertainty.
One of the biggest leadership risks in the current economic climate is hiding in plain sight.
As growth remains subdued, margins squeezed and organisations pursue ever greater efficiencies, many senior leaders are being pulled deeper into the operational day-to-day.
Against this backdrop, getting more hands-on can feel like responsible leadership. Get closer to the numbers. Scrutinise performance. Make more decisions. Step in when things aren’t moving quickly enough.
Here’s the danger. The tougher things get, the more tempting it is for leaders to spend their time on the dance floor, at exactly the time their organisations need their view from the balcony.
Leaders need the dance floor and the balcony
The dance floor and balcony metaphor is a useful way of thinking about leadership.
On the dance floor, leaders are immersed in the action: solving problems, making decisions, responding to colleagues and stakeholders, driving delivery and dealing with what is happening now.
From the balcony, they gain altitude. They can see a wider perspective: patterns, connections, emerging risks, opportunities and unintended consequences that are much harder to see from the middle of the action.
Neither is inherently better. Today’s leaders need to be brilliant at both. More importantly, they need to flex between them.
Economic uncertainty, AI, continuous transformation, competing priorities and changing workforce expectations mean leaders cannot simply sit on the balcony ‘doing strategy’. They need to understand what is happening on the ground.
But if they spend too long on the dance floor, their perspective narrows. Urgency starts driving choices. Short-term delivery crowds out longer-term thinking.
PwC’s latest UK CEO Survey captures that tension: CEOs report spending 55 per cent of their working time focused on the next 12 months, while 35 per cent question whether they are doing enough to ensure the medium- to long-term viability of their organisation.
So how can HR help?
The tougher things get, the more tempting it is for leaders to spend their time on the dance floor, at exactly the time their organisations need their view from the balcony
Start with where leaders are really spending their time
Before launching another leadership initiative, examine what leaders actually do. Ask your senior leaders to look at two weeks of their diaries and categorise their time:
- Running today’s business
- Improving today’s business
- Creating tomorrow’s business.
How much is consumed by operational meetings, internal problem solving, reviewing detail and decisions that could be made elsewhere?
How much is genuinely focused on customers, future capability, AI, emerging risks, new opportunities and the choices that will shape the organisation in three, five or 10 years?
This is not a time-management exercise. It is a leadership diagnostic.
Build the capability that enables leaders to let go
We also need to challenge a common assumption: leaders aren’t always trapped on the dance floor purely because there is too much to do. Sometimes they haven’t built enough capability and ownership beneath them to leave it.
A senior leader complains that everything comes to them. Yet they keep providing the answers, making the decision or stepping in when something becomes difficult. A dependency loop develops.
‘They aren’t ready, so I need to step in.’ If a leader continually steps in, when do their people get ready? This is where HR can make a fundamental difference by helping to embed a coaching culture throughout the organisation.
Coaching needs to become a way of leading: asking rather than telling, building people’s judgement, encouraging them to solve problems and strengthening their confidence to make decisions. Three simple questions can change a conversation:
- What do you think?
- What options have you considered?
- What would you do if I wasn’t here?
Every time a leader coaches rather than rescues, they build capability somewhere else in the organisation.
Let go, but don’t let accountability go with it
Leaders then need the courage to genuinely delegate. Delegation is not passing down a task while retaining every meaningful decision. It means being clear about the outcome, who owns it, the authority they have and the boundaries within which they can act, then allowing people to lead.
That becomes harder when results are under pressure. The temptation is to pull control upwards. HR can help leaders ask:
- What is it only I can do?
- Does this really need to sit with me? Who else could own this?
- Have I given them authority as well as responsibility?
- Am I prepared to let them do it differently from me?
There is an important counterbalance. Empowerment without accountability creates ambiguity. Accountability without empowerment creates frustration. People need real ownership and clarity about what they are accountable for. Leaders then need to follow through and hold them to it.
The combination of coaching, ownership and accountability strengthens capability throughout the system and reduces organisational dependence on a handful of senior people.
We also need to challenge a common assumption: leaders aren’t always trapped on the dance floor purely because there is too much to do. Sometimes they haven’t built enough capability and ownership beneath them to leave it
Protect the balcony
Even then, leaders need to deliberately create altitude.
HR can help put balcony time into the operating rhythm: protected thinking time, leadership meetings that deliberately move beyond operational reporting, and regular conversations focused on external change, assumptions and future choices.
- Instead of: ‘Are we on track?’, ask ‘What are we seeing now that may require us to change direction?’
- Instead of: ‘What’s the solution?’, ask ‘What pattern are we seeing?’
- Instead of: ‘What are you going to do?’, ask ‘What might we be missing because we’re too close to it?’.
Capability isn’t enough
There is one final challenge. Most experienced leaders already know they need to delegate, coach, prioritise and think strategically. The problem isn’t always capability. It’s capacity.
Capability is what a leader knows how to do. Capacity is how much of that capability they can still access when pressure, complexity and emotion increase. Under pressure, an empowering leader can become controlling. A strategic thinker becomes tactical. Everything starts to feel urgent.
That is why leadership development now needs to go beyond adding more skills. HR needs to help leaders retain perspective, think clearly, shift their approach and make better choices when pressure is at its highest.
The objective isn’t to get leaders off the dance floor altogether. It’s to build organisations that don’t require them to live there.
The leaders who navigate today’s uncertainty best are those who know when to step in, when to let go and when their greatest contribution is to step onto the balcony and see what everyone else is too busy dancing to notice.
Your actionable insights
- Audit where leaders are really leading from. Look at how leaders are balancing delivering today’s performance with strengthening and shaping the organisation for tomorrow.
- Embed a coaching culture that grows capability throughout the organisation, giving senior leaders the confidence to let go and others the confidence and capability to step up.
- Create real ownership. Delegate authority as well as responsibility, clarify decision rights and hold people consistently to account.
- Protect deliberate ‘balcony time’ for leaders to spot patterns, challenge assumptions and make the strategic choices only they can make.
- Build leadership capacity as well as capability so leaders can retain perspective and flex between strategic and operational leadership when pressure rises.
Read another article by Carole Gaskell: Why leadership capacity is the real root of sinking engagement
