Greg Stevenson answered every board question from memory at his first CEO meeting, impressing himself until the chairman asked him to open the papers so directors could follow along. Real leadership means enabling others to engage with details, not performing your own competence.
In my first board meeting as the Chief Executive, I answered every single question that came at me from the non-exec directors, and I never once opened the board papers sitting in front of me. I thought that was my job. I want to tell you why I was wrong. It was my first CEO role, my first time in that seat at the head of the table, and I prepared the way you prepare when you badly want to be seen as ready. I knew the numbers. I knew all of them, back to front. Every figure in those papers, every variance, every line of operational detail, it was all in my head. So when the questions came, and a board will always test a new CEO, I answered them fluently, from memory, without even reaching for a single page. I didn't have to open the board papers. And remember the quiet feeling of pride in that. Look how across this I am. Look how in command of the information I am. Then the chairman intervened. One of the directors had kept on asking me question after question, and I'd kept on answering question after question, but that director was getting slowly but surely frustrated. So the chairman intervened. He stopped the meeting and turned to the director who was asking all the questions and said clearly, clearly Greg knows the business and can answer all of your questions in detail. But Greg, please help us and turn to the relevant page in the board papers so we can follow along page by page because we don't know the business as well as you, but we want to get to understand it. as well as what you do. It landed as a small correction in the room, but it has stayed with me for the rest of my career. Because what I had been doing was not leading, it was performing. I was performing my competence, proving with every answered question that I deserved to be in the seat of the CEO. But the board did not need a demonstration of my memory. They needed a chief executive who could see Who could sit inside the detail with them and take them along the journey. Who could let the papers lie open on the table, a shared object, something the whole room could think with, rather than a test I was quietly passing on my own. The chairman was teaching me something I've watched play out at the top of every organisation since. The skill that gets you promoted is competence, knowing the answer, being the most across-it person in the room. And it's a hard habit to put down because it's been rewarded for your entire career. But at the top, the job changes. Leadership is not performance of competence. Sometimes it is knowing exactly when to put your competence away so that other people can step into the room with you. The higher you go, the more senior you get, the more that becomes the real discipline. Not how much you can carry on your own, How much you're willing to set down? I answered every question in that meeting, and I learned that day that answering every question was never the point. I should have just simply opened the board papers and taken them with me on that journey.
