EP216 This Simple Question Decides Team Success!
As a leader, you make hundreds of decisions a day. But there’s one decision you make unconsciously, over and over, that has more impact than almost any other. It’s a decision that dictates who gets heard, which problems get solved, and whether your team ultimately succeeds, or stagnates.
It all comes down to a simple question: as a leader, are you the Hands-On decision maker, or the Front Desk decision maker?
Think about it for a second. Your answer reveals a hidden default that could be holding your entire team back. It determines whether you’re too close to see the real problems, or too distant to understand the human challenges behind them. This isn’t just about preference; it’s about position. And that position is either your greatest asset or your most dangerous blindspot.
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The Leader’s Two Positions
Whether you realize it or not, every leader tends to operate from one of two positions. Think of it as a helpful metaphor.
First, there’s the leader in the Hands-On position. This is the “insider” leader. You’re right there in the mix with your team, at the shopfloor, empathetic, and plugged into the day-to-day grind. You feel their frustrations and celebrate their wins because you’re right there beside them. People trust you because they see you as one of them. You don’t just manage the team; you feel like you’re part of the team. In many ways, this is a huge strength.
But there’s the other position: the leader at the Front Desk. This is the “outsider” leader. From here, you’ve got perspective. You aren’t caught up in the immediate drama or the nitty-gritty of every task. You see the whole Hands-On from a different per spective, noticing how all the parts move together. You can spot patterns, anticipate collisions, and think strategically about where the group needs to go next. Your focus is on the big picture, the metrics, the long-term vision. This distance provides clarity that’s essential for making tough, strategic calls.
Now, you probably identify more with one than the other. But here’s the dangerous assumption most leaders make: they believe their natural position is the right one. The Front Desk leader scoffs at the Hands-On leader for getting lost in the weeds. The Hands-On leader criticizes the Front Desk leader for being cold and out of touch.
What if they’re both wrong? What if your greatest leadership strength, left unchecked, becomes your biggest blindspot? This isn’t about being a good or bad leader. It’s about recognizing that your default position creates predictable, dangerous consequences. Ignoring them can slowly but surely pull your team apart.
The High Cost of a Fixed Position
Let’s be brutally honest about the cost of staying in one place. These aren’t just theories; they are the real-world reasons why teams fall apart, projects fail, and your best people walk out the door.
First, let’s look at the danger of living in the Hands-On position. As the “too close” leader, your greatest asset, your connection, starts to backfire. Because you’re so involved, you risk losing impartiality. That “quick chat” with your favourite team member easily becomes proximity bias, where you unconsciously favour the people you’re closest to. Soon enough, you’re giving more opportunities to the people you like, not necessarily the people most capable of delivering results.
Think about Peter. Everyone loves Peter. He’s the heart of the team, and you’re close with him. But his performance has been slipping for months. The high performers see it, and their frustration is building. But because you’re Hands-On working together with Peter, you make excuses. You protect him. You can’t make the tough, impartial call because your personal relationship is in the way. The result? Your A-players get demoralized, feeling like effort doesn’t matter as much as friendship. Morale plummets, and eventually, your best people leave. Your desire to be a compassionate “insider” has led to favouritism and crippled your team’s performance.
Now, let’s climb up to the Front Desk. The danger for the “too distant” leader is just as severe, but it’s a colder, more isolating kind of failure. From the Front Desk, you see the spreadsheets, the charts, and the strategic goals. What you don’t see is the human friction. You don’t see the burnout building in your star engineer because of a clunky process you approved. You don’t hear the quiet resentment brewing because your team feels like cogs in a machine.
It’s a well-known pattern in business: when employees feel unseen or unheard by leadership, their engagement plummets. They may not quit, but they quit trying. They do the bare minimum to not get fired. They comply, but they are not committed. Imagine a leader who pushes for a major software rollout. From their Front Desk, the decision makes perfect sense for efficiency. But they never stepped into the Hands-On position to ask the team what challenges they might face. They never shadowed an employee for an hour to see how the old system actually worked. So, the rollout is a disaster. The team is frustrated, productivity tanks, and the leader is left wondering, “Why didn’t they just do what I asked?” They were so focused on the strategic “what” that they completely missed the human “how.” Their distance created a massive execution gap.
Whether you’re too close or too distant, the outcome is the same: you lose trust, you stifle growth, and you hold your team back.
Develop a Positional Awareness
If getting stuck is so dangerous, what’s the answer? It’s not about finding some mythical, perfect middle ground. The solution is to develop what we can call Positional Awareness. This is the skill of intentionally moving between the Hands-On and the Front Desk. It’s about building the reflex to know where you are, why you’re there, and when it’s time to move. The best leaders aren’t static; they are dynamic. They are both dancers and observers.
So, how do you actually do this? Here are three concrete strategies to build your Positional Awareness:
- The Scheduled Reality Check
This is your deliberate move from the Front Desk down to the Hands-On. An “open-door policy” isn’t enough, that’s passive. You have to be active. A reality check means scheduling time to experience the work as your team experiences it. This isn’t a meeting to review metrics; it’s a meeting to understand reality. Conduct skip-level one-on-ones, where you talk to the people who report to your direct reports. Ask them:
“What’s the most frustrating part of your day?”
“What’s one thing we do that makes no sense?”
Better yet, shadow a team member for an hour. Sit with them. Watch their workflow. This practice gives you the ground truth you’ll never find in a report.
- The Strategic Retreat
This is your intentional move from the Hands-On up to the Front Desk. If you’re a leader who is always in the thick of it, your biggest enemy is a lack of perspective. A strategic retreat is non-negotiable, scheduled time for you to be alone and think. Put one or two “think time” blocks on your calendar every single week and protect them like your most important meeting. This is your time to step away from the team’s immediate needs and emotions. Review the data, reread the strategic plan, and ask the big-picture questions:
“Are we still focused on the right things?”
“What obstacles are on the horizon?”
“Is the way we’re working sustainable?”
This forces you to get the objectivity you lose in the Hands-On position and stops you from letting urgent but unimportant tasks kill your strategy.
- The Position Audit
You can’t fix a blindspot you can’t see. A position audit is about actively asking others to be your mirror. Go to a trusted peer or mentor and ask them directly:
“Based on our last project, would you say I was operating more from the Hands-On or the Front Desk? Where did that show up?”
Even more courageously, create a safe way to ask your team. Use an anonymous survey with simple questions like:
“On a scale of 1–10, how connected do you feel I am to the team’s day-to-day challenges?”
“On a scale of 1–10, how clear are you on our strategic goals for this quarter?”
The gap between those scores will tell you everything you need to know about where your team sees you. This isn’t a performance review; it’s an awareness tool to help you see yourself the way your team does.
The Payoff – Leading with Agility
When you master moving between these two positions, something transformative happens. Your leadership stops being about your personal style and starts being about what your team needs in that moment.
When you’re in the Hands-On position, you build psychological safety. Your team knows you understand their world and have their back. They feel seen as people, not just resources. Then, when you move to the Front Desk, they trust your strategic decisions because they know their reality was part of your calculation. You’re no longer a distant authority handing down orders; you are a trusted guide who has seen the view from the top and is showing them the way forward.
This blend of empathy and strategy is what truly unlocks a team’s potential. It creates a culture where people feel safe enough to innovate and aligned enough to move in the right direction together. You stop being a leader who just reflects the team’s temperature and become the one who sets it.
In the end, the most effective leaders aren’t defined by one position. They’re defined by their agility. Your job isn’t to be the “close” leader or the “distant” leader. Your job is to be the leader who knows when to be which. The blindspot isn’t being Hands-On or Front Desk, the blindspot is believing you only belong in one of them.
So, don’t get stuck. Don’t let your default position become a prison. The best leaders know when to join the dance and when to step back and watch. Your real work is learning the steps to do both.
If this video challenged your perspective on leadership, hit that subscribe button, we talk about actionable strategies like this every single week. And now I have a question for you: which position do you naturally lean toward, the Hands-On or the Front Desk? Leave a comment below and share one challenge that position creates for you.
Thanks for all your ratings on my books The Quality Mindset, Life Quality Projects, and Principles of Quality. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one. Until then, stay excellent.