Leading at every altitude

Back in the day, when a role asked for "10+ years experience, manager of managers, strong hands-on mentality" it was a red flag. It usually meant one thing: scope exceeds resources.

You were expected to lead at altitude and fill gaps on the ground. A corporate contradiction dressed up as an opportunity. My sense is that this contradiction is becoming the norm.

Layers are being stripped out. Spans are getting wider. The distance between strategy and execution is shrinking. If you've never actually operated, you're in a difficult spot to lead anything.

At the same time, "hands-on" has quietly changed definition. It used to mean SQL, campaign builds, dashboards. Now it's structuring the right question, prompting the right system, making sense of the output. The doing hasn't disappeared, it's just moved up a layer.

And culturally, something else is shifting. There's less patience for pure abstraction when margins are shrinking. Less tolerance for leaders who operate far away from the work. Everyone wants to be closer to the value chain, closer to decisions, closer to outcomes. Call it crunch time, call it reality, but the distance between thinking and doing is collapsing.

This creates a new kind of tension. You now need leaders who can operate across levels: zoom out, set direction, zoom back in, challenge details, make decisions grounded in reality.

That sounds obvious. But it's bloody difficult, hand on heart. Most leaders were trained in a system where distance from execution was the goal. Most operators were trained to go deep, not to switch context constantly.

So the question becomes: how do you build people who can move between abstraction and execution without losing clarity on what actually drives value? And how do you do that while organisations are still catching up?

The uncomfortable answer is that a lot of "org drama" is just this gap showing up. People operating at different altitudes, with different definitions of what "good" looks like. Fixing it is less about process and more about capability.

Leaders who can still operate, and operators who understand the system they sit in. I am an optimist by choice, so I think everything else tends to resolve itself as long as the change is named and acknowledged.