Leading Others: How Great Leaders Drive Performance Through People

Maya was a rising star at her organization — a strategic thinker with a reputation for flawless execution. As a senior product lead at a global healthcare company, she delivered results others couldn’t. When she was promoted to lead the product team, it felt like a natural progression. But within weeks of stepping into her new role, she found herself struggling.

Her team of eight was capable but inconsistent. Some team members hesitated to take initiative, deferring every decision upward. Others produced work that fell short of expectations, forcing Maya to step in and redo deliverables. Collaboration slowed. Meetings felt tense. Instead of surfacing and solving problems together, people either stayed quiet or passed issues along. Despite working harder than ever, Maya saw deadlines slip and team morale waver.

The breakthrough came during a session with her coach. Maya vented her frustrations: “I feel like I could do this faster myself.” Her coach nodded, then offered a challenge: “That might be true. But leadership isn’t about how much work you can do. It’s about how effectively you can help others do it.”

That challenge hit home. Maya realized that her success had always been measured by the quality of her own work. In her new role, however, her value wasn’t individual output — it was building a team capable of delivering results that exceeded the sum of its parts.

Leadership is the Act of Achieving a Clear and Compelling Vision Through Others

The words through others are critical. Individual contributors succeed by their own performance. Leaders succeed by building the conditions for others to perform. When high performers are promoted without developing this capability, the very strengths that drove their success can become liabilities. When that happens, gaps quickly appear:

• Breakdowns in Trust. High performers are used to relying on their own competence, so when they step into leadership, they often struggle to let go of control. Instead of trusting their team to deliver, they hover, second-guess, or step in to redo the work themselves. The message this sends erodes psychological safety.
• Weak Social Acumen. Technical excellence doesn’t guarantee relational skill. New leaders who don’t practice empathy or active listening can come across as transactional or distant. Without connection, team members hesitate to speak up, conflicts fester, and collaboration becomes strained.
• Mismanaged Performance. Many high performers equate leadership with setting high standards and correcting mistakes. But focusing only on problems creates a reactive culture. When leaders fail to coach, develop, and empower, they inadvertently cap their team’s potential — and end up shouldering the burden themselves.
• Ineffective Teams. Without deliberate attention to culture and collaboration, teams default to silos. Work becomes fragmented, innovation slows, and outcomes depend on individual heroics rather than collective strength. The team exists in name only, not in practice.

The irony is stark: the very leaders who once drove results through individual brilliance can end up limiting their team’s collective potential. Instead of multiplying performance, they unintentionally create drag.

Without deliberate development, the promotion of high performers into leadership roles becomes a liability — for the leader, for their team, and for the organization.

What Leading Others Can Look Like

When leaders commit to developing the skills within the Leading Others domain, the impact ripples far beyond individual interactions. Teams shift from dependence on the leader’s personal output to a more distributed, sustainable model of performance.

For Maya, the difference was striking. Six months after she shifted her focus from doing the work herself to empowering her team, the changes were undeniable:

• Decision-Making Became more Distributed. Instead of every issue landing on her desk, Maya’s team members began making confident calls in their areas of expertise. This not only sped up execution but also built their own leadership muscles.
• Problems Were Solved at the Source. Where once her team hesitated or deferred to her, they now raised challenges early and worked through them directly, freeing Maya to focus on long-term priorities.
• Innovation Emerged Naturally. In the past, team meetings had been tense, with little room for new ideas. As trust grew, the same people who once stayed quiet began proposing fresh approaches and experimenting with better ways of working.
• Performance Became Sustainable. Maya no longer carried the weight of every project on her shoulders. Instead, her team delivered consistently, motivated not by fear of her corrections but by ownership of the results they were creating together.