Three things you can do to enable true leadership

Make sure people feel safe enought to hire real talent

It is quite simple in theory: keep your ego in check and things will work well. In practice, the organisation must explicitly recognise and value this type of #leadership. If anyone hires a smart person and then gets fired for underperforming (comparatively), the trust is gone, and nobody will risk attracting any talent again.

Let creative people work creatively

You cannot control a stallion. You can either let him run or cripple him. The same applies to knowledge workers. Codification of successful processes leads to the previously seen outputs. Novelty requires exploration and experimentation. You do not want to be a company that gets 50% of innovations born from illegal prototyping.

Accept complexity

Ashby's law is a law for a reason. The company and its leadership must have the capacity to cope with the complexity of underlying systems. However, if the leadership is not capable enough, the failure is not immediate, but rather manifests itself as a risk nobody has paid attention to. Accepting complexity means accepting that simplification, if possible at all, can happen only through hard work and not through a mandate forcing a 10% budget cut.

---

The common aspect of those three things is that they are all based on values, not procedures. You need to demonstrate that you value hiring smart people, experimenting, disputes and doing things in the right way. Unfortunately, if a company is used to making quick money and hoping somebody else will pay for hidden risks, the turnaround may not be possible :-(.

---

Sources:

[2] https://itrevolution.com/the-idealcast-episode-17/

[3] https://itrevolution.com/the-idealcast-episode-18/