The only KPI that matters in leadership

and the 5 steps I take to increase it

Gooood morning team, a big happy Tuesday from me,

Maybe it’s because of the rain, but I’m reminiscing today about a holiday I went on to Greece back in 2018, where I spent the first three days answering Slack messages from my phone (woops).

“Quick question…”
“Can you check this?”

I remember sitting by the pool thinking it was ridiculous. I naively told myself it was because I was a good manager. My team needed me, I was the manager, so of course, they wanted my input, right?

But as we all know, the truth is far less flattering…

I hadn’t built a strong team, I had built a team that needed me to think for them.

I was the bottleneck and the problem.

The job of a leader isn’t to run the team, it is to build a team that can run without them. And the more I learned about building high-performing teams, the more obvious it became that I had accidentally designed a team that revolved around me…

I answered questions quickly.
I fixed small problems because it’s faster.
I jumped in to help when something felt messy.

All completely reasonable decisions in the moment, but stack enough of those moments together and suddenly the team learns something dangerous: When in doubt, ask the manager.

The KPI I now care about more than anything else

So after that holiday, I decided it was time to make some big old changes. There was one question I started asking myself regularly:

If I fully stepped away for two weeks, would my team still perform?

I call this my Independence KPI, a quick litmus test for how healthy my leadership actually is.

The answers are simple: yes or no.

Not “sometimes.”
Not “they’d probably manage.”

Yes or no.

And the question isn’t about whether the team would survive without you. It’s about whether they would continue performing and moving forward.

Would projects still progress?
Would decisions still get made?
Would the work stay at a high standard?

If the answer is no, it tells me something important… That my leadership system still depends too heavily on me. That’s why I use this KPI regularly. Because it forces a different kind of thinking as a manager.

Instead of asking, “Did I do enough this week?”
I start asking, “Did I level my team up enough that they don’t need me?”

It pushes me to coach better, delegate properly, and design clearer ownership inside the team. And over time, that’s what separates busy managers from genuinely high-performing ones.

High-performing teams don’t rely on one person to keep things moving, they run because the capability, judgement and ownership exist across the whole team.

But how do you actually build a team that runs without you?

Here’s the 5 steps I’d take today, to build independence inside my team

1. Coach the thinking, not just the outcome

Teams that run well without the manager require us to do something that managers rarely permit themselves to do: Slowwww the hell down.

One of the biggest shifts I made as a manager was resisting the urge to immediately answer questions. When someone comes to you with a problem, the natural instinct is to help.

You already know the answer and it would take ten seconds to explain it.

But that ten-second answer can, over time, create a ten-year dependency. So instead, I started responding differently:

• “Okay, talk me through what you’re thinking.”

• “If you had to choose right now, what would you do?”

It takes longer in the moment but your team start developing judgment. And once someone develops judgment, they stop needing permission for every decision.

2. Delegate properly, not just dump tasks

A lot of managers think they’re delegating when they’re actually just redistributing tasks.

“Can you send this?”
“Can you handle this piece?”

But that’s not actually delegation i’s task management.

Real delegation looks like this: Instead of giving someone a task, you give them ownership of the outcome. You explain the purpose and context, why it matters and what success looks like.

Then you step back.

The first few times this happens it will probably feel uncomfortable for both of you. That’s normal. Stick to it.

3. Make ownership visible

Another thing that helps teams operate independently is clarity about who owns what. If ownership is vague, everything drifts back to the manager. Because when nobody is clearly responsible, someone eventually has to step in.

So inside teams that run well, ownership is extremely clear.

Everyone knows:

• What they are responsible for

• What decisions they can make

• Where their boundaries sit.

Once that clarity exists, managers stop being the centre of every conversation and the team starts running more like a network than a hierarchy.

4. Practice letting go

This might be the hardest part.

Even when managers say they want more ownership in their team, they often struggle when it actually happens because everyone in your team will do things differently, to different standards and with different skills.

They might structure a project differently.
Approach a problem differently.
Communicate differently.

And your instinct might be to jump in and ‘correct’ it or change it. But unless the outcome is at risk, sometimes the most powerful leadership move is doing nothing.

Let them run with it, let them learn and let them refine their own style.

5. Measure the right thing

And finally, come back to the question that inspired this whole piece… could you step away for 2 weeks and the team would still perform?

That question forces you to think about leadership differently.

Instead of asking: “Did I do enough today?”

You start asking: “Did I build enough capability in the team?”

Peace,

H

Want to keep learning with me?

I’m running a free, online masterclass next week on exactly how to build a culture inside your team that people WANT to work in. It’s free, register here.