“How the best leaders create the conditions for total commitment”
Welcome to the latest issue of The Executive Edit
In the last issue we had an example of a leader who deleted a meeting entirely and rebuilt something better. This issue is about what needs to happen in the space that deletion creates.
For most of my corporate career I thought engagement was something you did to people.
You motivated them, you recognised them you ran the away-days, launched the initiatives, rolled out the survey. You did things visible, effortful, well-intentioned things and engagement was supposed to follow – normally measured by the survey!
It took me longer than I’d like to admit understanding that the most engaged teams I ever worked in or alongside weren’t the product of any of those things. They were the product of a leader who had created the right conditions and then crucially got out of the way. This leader did this with every team they were responsible for in their career – it was their mode of operation.
That reframe changed how I led and now how I coach. And it’s the central idea running through this entire issue.
Engagement isn’t something you manufacture. It’s something you make possible.
Since launching The Executive Edit, I’ve been building a framework around the High-Performance Formula P = (C + T + E + R) × L and going deep on each element in turn. Clarity in Issue 4. Trust in Issue 5. And in Issue 6 we took a deliberate detour to explore deletion – the discipline of intentional subtraction that I’ve come to believe is a prerequisite for everything else.
Engagement is where that detour pays its most significant dividend.
Because here’s what I’ve observed consistently: leaders who try too hard to engineer engagement often destroy it. High performers are acutely attuned to the difference between a leader who genuinely trusts them and a leader who is performing trust while quietly controlling everything. The former creates commitment while the latter creates compliance and eventually, quietly, exits.
This month I’ve been sitting with this in my own world too. Building Sandra Webber Coaching over the past decade has taught me that the clients who engage most fully with the coaching process are the ones I’ve trusted most completely to own their own journey where my job has been to ask the right questions, clear the obstacles, and then step back providing appropriate challenge and support on the journey.
We look at engagement through a wider lens than most leadership content does beyond the direct team to stakeholders, clients, peers and crucially yourself. Because a disengaged leader cannot create the conditions for an engaged team. That’s not an opinion. It’s a fact I’ve watched play out more times than I can count.
I hope this issue gives you a fresh perspective on becoming a leader who is committed to building true engagement.
Sandra Webber
Editor-in-Chief, The Executive Edit
Author: Own It and The Evergreen Executive
Have a leadership topic you’d like me to explore? Email me: sandra@sandrawebbercoaching.com
Remove the obstacles. Trust the capability. Curate the context. Get out of the way.
Context over control
When most leaders hear the word engagement they immediately think of their direct team. How do I motivate them? How do I get more from them? How do I make them care about what they do?
It’s the right instinct pointed in too narrow a direction.
The best leaders I’ve worked with over the past decades think about engagement through a much wider lens. Yes, the direct team but also senior stakeholders, investors, board members, internal /external customers plus peers and critically, most often overlooked – themselves.
Engagement isn’t just a people management technique it’s a leadership discipline that operates in every direction simultaneously. Leaders who practise this consistently well share one characteristic that isn’t in most management frameworks: they know when to get out of the way.
This is the counterintuitive truth at the heart of this issue.
High performers don’t need more corporate cheerleading; they don’t need over-engineered recognition programmes or motivational away-days. What they need is any friction removed and room to breathe. True engagement isn’t primarily about what you give your team it’s about what you stop taking from them. Their autonomy, their ownership, their ability to solve problems in the way they’re best equipped to solve them.
In Issue 6 we explored the power of intentional deletion removing what no longer serves. Engagement is where that principle pays its most significant dividend, leaders who try too hard to engineer engagement often kill it as people can see the performance. High performers are attuned to the difference between a leader who genuinely trusts them and a leader who is doing the right things to look good. The former creates commitment; the latter creates compliance at best and cynicism at worst.
Context over control – the core principle
There is a sweet spot in leadership between micromanagement and what I’d call macro-neglect where the leader is so hands-off that the team loses direction entirely. Neither extreme produces engagement. What produces engagement is what I call context over control.
Your job as a leader is to own the Why and the What and to aggressively delegate the How.
The Why: the macro pressures, the competitive context, the ultimate stakes. Why does this matter? Why now? Why us?
The What: the non-negotiable strategic outcomes and the boundaries within which the team operates. What does success look like? What are we not prepared to compromise on?
The How: entirely owned by the team. This is theirs and not yours.
When you give high performers a clear map of the landscape, the context instead of a step-by-step checklist, something shifts immediately. They stop behaving like contractors executing someone else’s task and start behaving like owners solving their own problems. The quality of the thinking changes, the level of commitment changes, the ownership changes and isn’t this what true engagement looks like?
This transition from a leader who controls execution to a leader who curates context is one of the most significant shifts I work on with senior leaders. It requires genuine trust in your team’s capability. It requires comfort with not knowing exactly how something will be done and it requires the discipline to stay curious rather than directive when the pressure is on.
Engagement operates in every direction.
With your direct team the context over control principle is the primary lever. But engagement as a leadership discipline extends significantly beyond the team you manage directly.
With senior stakeholders and board members, engagement means ensuring the right information reaches the right people at the right time not just when things are going well. The leaders who maintain strong stakeholder trust are the ones who communicate proactively, including when the news is difficult. Absence of communication is never neutral at senior level as it creates speculation, and speculation always trends negative.
With clients and external partners, engagement is about the consistency of the relationship investment. As we explored in Issue 5, trust erodes quietly often the client notices a shift in attention or quality before the leader does. Engagement here is active again rather than assumed.
With yourself, engagement is about maintaining the energy, clarity, and motivation to lead well consistently. A depleted leader cannot create the conditions for an engaged team. This is why the deliberate pauses we discussed in Issue 6 are not indulgences they are prerequisites.
The engagement killers worth naming.
Micromanagement is the most obvious and the most discussed. But there are subtler engagement killers that I observe consistently in leadership teams.
Lack of clarity about the Why. When people don’t understand why their work matters in the bigger picture they disengage quietly. They deliver but they stop caring.
Unaddressed friction. When a team is repeatedly slowed down by bureaucratic obstacles, redundant reporting, or pointless meetings that nobody has the authority or courage to stop, the message received is that their time and energy don’t matter. High performers find this particularly corrosive as they want to focus and deliver.
Inconsistency between words and actions. Nothing disengages a high performer faster than a leader who says one thing and does another. The commitment made in passing that never gets followed through. The value communicated in a companywide meeting that contradicts the decision made during a Monday morning team huddle.
Recognition that misses. Well-intentioned recognition that doesn’t match what the individual values can feel worse than no recognition at all. The high performer who values stretch and autonomy doesn’t want a certificate they want the next challenge or a robust development plan for their career progression.
The bottom line
Engagement isn’t an initiative you launch. It isn’t a score you manage via an internal survey. It is the natural byproduct of a team that has absolute clarity on the mission, genuine autonomy over the execution, and a leader who consistently clears the road ahead and always has their back.
Your job isn’t to be the most engaged person in the room. It’s to be the person who makes engagement inevitable for everyone else.
Remove the obstacles. Trust the capability. Curate the context. Get out of the way.
Sandra Webber is a high-performance executive coach and author of “Own It” and “The Evergreen Executive.” With 25+ years of leadership experience spanning corporate finance and executive development, she specialises in helping leaders develop the attitudes, behaviours and skills needed for today’s complex workplace.
Reach out at sandra@sandrawebbercoaching.com
The Delete Audit
Before you can build the conditions for engagement in others you need to get honest about where engagement is showing up and where it isn’t across your full leadership landscape.
This isn’t about your team’s engagement survey scores. It’s about your own clear-eyed assessment of the quality of commitment, energy, and ownership you’re currently experiencing across all the relationships that matter to your leadership.
Work through this honestly. One area at a time.
Your direct team
Where is the energy genuinely high? Where is it flat and has been for long enough that it’s become the new normal? Who is performing but not contributing? Who is present but not invested?
Your senior stakeholders
When did you last proactively communicate something difficult upward before being asked? Are your key stakeholders genuinely informed or just periodically updated? Is there anyone in this group whose support you’ve been assuming rather than actively maintaining?
Your clients or external partners
Have you had a genuine conversation about the quality of the relationship recently not just the quality of the deliverable? Where might someone be quietly reassessing their confidence in you before you’ve had any signal that something has shifted?
Yourself
What is your own engagement level with the work right now – honestly? What energises you most? What has started to feel like effort in a way it didn’t before? What would you need to change to lead from a genuinely engaged rather than a depleted place?
The question that pulls it all together:
Where in your leadership landscape is engagement currently being assumed rather than actively created and what is one thing you could do differently this week in that area?
The Three Hows Briefing
This is one of the most practical shifts you can make in how you lead and one of the fastest ways to assess whether you’re genuinely operating from context over control or just telling yourself you are.
The next time a significant challenge lands on your desk, resist the instinct to build the plan yourself. Instead, try this.
Step one – share everything
Bring the challenge to your team and give them one hundred percent of the context. The data, the senior leadership teams expectations, the risks you can see, the timeline expected, the competitive pressure. Everything you know, they will then know.
Step two – define the What and the Why, then stop
Be explicit about what success looks like and why it matters. Then stop talking, don’t offer your view on how it should be approached. Don’t even hint at the solution you already have in mind. Create genuine space for their thinking rather than a performance of consultation. This is where you can engage and capture the true perspectives from the different personalities within your team.
Step three – ask for three Hows
Issue one challenge: bring me three different ways we could approach this by a specific date. Not one but three.
This matters because the first solution is always the most obvious one.
The second requires more thought.
The third is where genuinely creative thinking tends to emerge.
A classic coaching question I was taught during by qualification process was “what else could you do?”
Step four -stay curious, don’t just pick
When they present the options, resist the urge to immediately select and move on. Ask what led them to each approach, ask which option stretches the team’s capability most. Ask what they would need from you to make their preferred option work letting defend and own the path forward.
Why this works
It signals genuine trust in their capability rather than performed trust.
It creates ownership from the moment the solution is chosen because they chose it.
It surfaces thinking and capability you wouldn’t have accessed if you’d arrived with the answer already prepared.
And it frees you to operate at the level you should be operating at strategic independent review, curious, enabling rather than the level the work sometimes pulls you back to.
The commitment required
This approach only works if you mean it. If you ask for three Hows and then override them with your own solution, the damage to engagement is worse than if you’d never asked. Your team will remember high performers will conclude that the consultation was theatre and going through the motions and they will not invest accordingly next time.
The How belongs to them. Give it and mean it.
Want to explore building high-performing teams further? Executive coaching helps you develop both the strategic thinking to create the plan and the leadership presence to make it happen. → sandrawebbercoaching.com