The Details – To Be or Not To Be... In Them

One of my leadership pet peeves is when someone says:

"You need to stay out of the details."

Really?

Always?

• Should the CEO never talk to customers?

• Should the CIO never review an architecture?

• Should the Head of Operations never spend time on the front line?

Of course not.

The question isn't whether leaders should be in the details.

The question is whether their presence is helping or harming.

More than 20 years ago, someone on my team said to me during a 1:1:

"Jeff, you're too in the details."

The comment stuck with me. At the time, I wasn't sure whether to agree or disagree.

Being in the details had been my job for most of my career. I enjoyed it. I believed it made me a better leader. When I spent time with the team, I could understand problems firsthand, identify obstacles, see who needed help, and better understand what was actually happening versus what was being reported.

I also appreciated leaders who understood my work because they had done it themselves. They could empathize with challenges, ask better questions, and provide more practical guidance.

So I spent quite a bit of time reflecting on whether being in the details was helping or hurting.

Eventually I came to a simple conclusion.

There are only three reasons a leader should pull away from the details.

1. You are not the best person to do the work

This is the polite version. The version I usually use is:

You're making things worse.

As leaders become more senior, of course there is often someone closer to the problem who knows more than they do.

If your involvement is slowing decisions, creating rework, or preventing experts from making it better, you should step back.

2. You are taking away autonomy and development

Or more directly:

You're doing their job instead of letting them do their job.

When leaders become overly involved, people stop thinking for themselves. They stop making decisions. They stop learning. They stop owning outcomes.

The immediate impact is reduced accountability.

The long-term impact is that future leaders never develop.

3. You are neglecting your actual leadership role

Or even more directly:

You're not doing your primary job.

Nobody else should fully perform a leader's responsibilities like:

Strategy	Prioritization
Organizational design	Talent development
Culture	Stakeholder management
Risk management	Long-term capability building

A leader can feel incredibly productive in the details while simultaneously failing at the work only they can do. And yes I am sure I missed a few above.

What I find interesting is that these three reasons affect three different time horizons:

• Doing the work yourself hurts today's execution.

• Taking over your team's work hurts tomorrow's execution.

• Neglecting leadership responsibilities hurts the organization's future.

  
  

Because of this, I've never liked blanket statements such as:

"I don't do details anymore.”

In my experience, that's often a warning sign. This is definitely not a flex to say as some may think.

Leaders who never enter the details become dependent on filtered information. Everything they know comes through layers of interpretation. Eventually they stop seeing reality and start seeing only PowerPoint.

Some of the best leaders I've observed could move seamlessly from strategy to process design to customer issues to organizational structure in the same conversation.

They understood both the battlefield and the trenches.

Years ago, while working as a consultant, I sat outside the office of a CEO who occasionally had customer service calls routed directly to him.

This wasn't because nobody else could handle the call.

This wasn't because he wanted to run the call center.

He did it because there is no substitute for firsthand knowledge.

Those conversations helped him understand how the company was actually operating, what customers were experiencing, and where improvements were needed.

The lesson stayed with me.

Leaders should spend time in the details whenever they can do so without causing harm.

• Be in the details to learn.

• Be in the details to build trust.

• Be in the details to understand reality.

• Be in the details to make better decisions.

  
  

Just don't stay there so long that you make the work worse, prevent others from growing, or neglect the responsibilities only you can fulfill.

Visit the details. Don't live in them.

What do you think? Are there other reasons a leader should pull away from the details?