When you become a leader of leaders, the guidance gets vague. “Build organizational capability.” “Develop your people.” “Create strategy.” I lacked a structured way to show how I improved things beyond “teams deliver and people are happy.” Everyone says there’s supposed to be something more when you’re responsible for an entire area of the business. Nobody tells you what.
The Pattern
Over the past several years, I’ve taken on the same challenge repeatedly: walk into a new area, each time a different domain, a different team, different problems, and make it work better. More mature. More standalone.
Different areas, different problems, but the same pattern emerged. I developed a repeatable way of thinking about what maturity means when you’re responsible for more than a single team.
These five dimensions became my scorecard. Not from a book. From doing the same thing in different areas and watching what moved things.
Why These Five?
Not every dimension of organizational performance belongs on your scorecard. You can’t own the market or control the CEO’s decisions. You can’t take credit for luck.
Two filters held across every area I’ve led. The dimension had to be within my control, something I could take action on and see results from, not something that depended on other parts of the company. And it had to help the collective, not just me, improving the group’s capability as a whole, not my individual performance.
When someone asked “What did you improve?” I had a real answer for each of these five. That’s what made them real.
Direction People Can Act On
People can’t execute on slides and goals alone.
The pattern is consistent: leadership creates a strategy deck, sets OKRs, communicates them at all-hands. Everyone nods. Then people go back to their desks and ask “So what are we actually doing?”
The problem is rarely that people don’t understand the words. They can’t see what actually changes in the world.
I learned a structure from Ebi Atawodi on Lenny’s Podcast that changed how I communicate direction — telling it as a story with three beats. Where we are now and what’s broken. What we’re going to do about it. How the world looks after. When you can tell your strategy as a story with a clear before, during, and after, people can retell it. They can explain it to new hires. They can make decisions aligned with it without asking you.
Then you connect the story to concrete goals. The narrative shows where we’re going. The goals show how we measure progress. Direction became something people could understand and act on, not just read and forget.
Foundations: Who Does What When
I’ve watched leaders try to fix organizations with one big initiative: a transformation program, a major reorganization, a new framework. They declare things fixed. Six months later, nothing has changed.
Improvement requires consistency. Clear cadences, structured agendas, clear roles, clear expectations. Unglamorous, but foundational.
These foundations work for teams, but they also work for you. When you’re starting in a new area, the early months should skew toward your own understanding: observing patterns, understanding the domain, building relationships. The cadences and structures are scaffolding for your own effectiveness as much as your teams’.
When people know there’s a weekly leadership sync, and it always has the same structure, and everyone knows their role, that predictability creates space for actual work. The shift I kept seeing: from “let me check with Stefan” to “here’s how we handle this.” The test is whether you can point to the structures and rhythms you established, or whether you’re still the single point of coordination.
Team Health, Measured Not Assumed
When you lead multiple teams, it’s easy to think “the teams seem okay” and move on to other things. Nobody’s quit recently. Things must be fine.
Making this explicit means you’re tracking it over months and quarters, not checking in occasionally. I’ve used team health surveys and structured frameworks. The specific tool matters less than what you do with it: look for trends over time, resist comparing across teams (different contexts, different starting points), and use the data to open conversations that wouldn’t otherwise happen.
The hardest part is the talent conversations. The real value of systematic measurement is that it gives you a structured way to talk about individuals with your leadership peers. You need to celebrate the high performers. You also need to discuss the people who are struggling and need help, and sometimes, the people who might need to leave. Without data and trends behind those conversations, they don’t happen with the clarity and honesty they require.
Leadership Across the Organization
It sounds obvious that the designated leader shouldn’t lead alone. Then you watch how organizations work: one person makes all the calls, everyone else waits for direction.
The shift I made was to expect leadership everywhere, not just from me. Individual contributors who spot problems and drive solutions. Team leads who make hard calls without escalating everything. People who see gaps and fill them. That’s leadership, and the job is to create conditions where it happens at every level.
When people see you as the person who turns things around, the real work is making sure you’re not the only person who can do it. The test is whether you can point to examples of leadership across your organization, or whether everything important still runs through you.
High Expectations, and There to Help
Many leaders set high expectations and then disappear. They make the standards clear and hold people accountable. Then when someone struggles, they’re nowhere to be found.
I made a different commitment: high expectations, and I’m there to help. Not as a safety net, but as someone who is there when people are pushing themselves — for the hard conversations, the technical problems, the decisions that matter.
The version that worked was scaling this across the organization, not just from me. Everyone in the area held the same commitment: ambitious standards, active support. People knew the expectations were high and knew they wouldn’t be alone reaching them. That’s a different experience from the “demand excellence and disappear” model, and the teams that had it produced work they were proud of.
The Scorecard Is Yours
These five dimensions became my scorecard, not because they’re universal but because they were the areas where I could take full responsibility and show real progress. They were within my control and they helped us as a collective.
Your scorecard will be different. Different context, different challenges, different strengths. The principle is the same: pick dimensions you can own that help the collective succeed, name them, track them, and show progress. When someone asks “What did you improve?” the answer should be specific enough that they can see the change in how the organization runs, not just in what it shipped.