This is the seventh and final article in a leadership series exploring the six practices that create exceptional leaders. Read the introductory article here: The Future Of Work Has Outgrown โGood Enoughโ Leadership. Your 6-Part Playbook To Become An Exceptional Leader Starts Hereย
An old parable makes the point better than any data can. Two bricklayers are doing the same work, side by side. Someone asks each of them what they are doing. The first says, โIโm laying bricks.โ The second says, โIโm building a castle.โ
Same job, same motions, and yet a completely different experience of the work, and a completely different performance over time.
That is what enabling employees to meet the moment looks like when leaders get it right. And it is the sixth of six differentiators we identified in our research with The Harris Poll on what separates exceptional leaders from good ones. Exceptional leaders were 2.28 times stronger in enabling their employees than good leaders. That was the second-largest multiplier in the entire study, behind only gratitude.
In other words, the difference between a leader who is giving their people bricks and a leader who is helping them build a castle is close to the biggest gap we found.
What โenablingโ actually means
Enablement is the practice most leaders assume they are doing well. They delegate, hold 1:1s, and set goals. They also take the time to remove blockers when their people ask.
What they often miss is that enablement is about what a leader does when the playbook stops working.
When things get hard, most leaders tighten their grip. Every decision has to go up the chain. Every problem has to wait for an answer. Every opportunity closes before anyone is allowed to act on it. Exceptional leaders read the moment and lean the other way. They push more authority down and trust their people more. They move toward enabling when the instinct to control is strongest.
A leader who got this right in a hard moment
Adrianne Sullivan-Campeau, Chief Employee and Customer Experience Officer at CareRx in Canada, had a formative leadership moment early in her career that she has modeled ever since.
Her industry was hit by an unexpected regulatory change, one her leadership team knew would have serious negative consequences for the business. The room was frustrated and uncertain. Everyone was looking at the CEO for what came next.
He did not launch into a plan. He did not immediately start directing. He said, โIโm giving you all a few minutes to just absorb this and share your frustrations. But then we need to stop, focus on solutions, and walk out to our teams with a sense of calm and confidence. We need to tell them weโre going to be OK. Weโre going to figure it out, and weโre going to work together to get through this.โ
Enablement is the work a leader does to make their peopleโs judgment count as much as their own. That CEO acknowledged what his team was feeling, gave them a short window to be human, and trusted them to go lead their own people through it.
Why good leaders default to control under pressure
Most good leaders do not intend to tighten control when things get hard. They do it because it feels safer. When uncertainty rises, the instinct is to gather more information, make more decisions personally, review more work, and have more visibility into what everyone is doing.
The research on what this costs is consistent. A 2025 study summarized by SHRM found that micromanagement practices correlate strongly with lower employee productivity, lower trust in leadership, and reduced innovation behavior.ย
When employees are constantly checked on, they stop thinking independently and every issue comes back to the leader. The leader becomes the bottleneck, and the organization slows down at the exact moment it needs to move.
Exceptional leaders know this and fight the instinct. They keep pushing decisions down even when it feels uncomfortable. They keep trusting people even when they are not sure the people will get it right because they believe that their team has to feel trusted in order to do good work.
What to do starting Monday
Three practices build the enablement habit.
1. Change the question you ask when someone comes to you with a problem.
Most leaders, when asked โwhat should I do?โ simply answer the question with a strategy they think is best. But next time, try asking one back. โWhat do you think you should do?โ Then listen. If the personโs answer is reasonable, let them run with it, even if you would have done it slightly differently.ย
This one change, consistently applied, rewires what your team believes about whether their judgment matters.
2. Give the context, not the answer.
When delegating, most leaders simply describe the needed task. Exceptional leaders describe the outcome and the context, and let the person figure out the task. Tell them what the goal is, what the constraints are, what success looks like, and then step back. You will get a different answer than the one you would have given, and often a better one.
3. Resist the urge to hover in the hard moments.
When the stakes are high and things are changing, your people will feel it in how closely you are watching them. Build the muscle of staying out of it, especially when it is uncomfortable. Check in once, then back off. Your presence when things are hard should read as confidence in them.
Why this matters right now
Uncertainty is the operating environment weโre living in today. Artificial intelligence is reshaping roles before anyone has time to write new job descriptions. Economic conditions are quickly changing, too, creating a lot of uncertainty. This all leaves employees managing more change at one time than most workforces in recent memory.
In that environment, the organizations that move fastest will be the ones where leaders trust their people to make good decisions without waiting for permission. The ones that fall behind will be those whose leaders tightened control at the exact moment they needed to loosen it.
Enabling employees to meet the moment was one of the six differentiators for a reason. It is where everything else in our research comes together. Gratitude creates the foundation people need to take risks. Listening surfaces what they need to succeed. Inclusion makes sure the best ideas get heard regardless of seniority. Context gives people what they need to act with judgment. Connection to growth gives them a reason to invest. Enablement is what turns all of it into action.
Over the course of this series, I have tried to make the case that the gap between good and exceptional leadership is closeable. None of these six differentiators require charisma or unusual gifts. They require intention, repetition, and the willingness to lead differently than most of us were trained.
The work is what we call the โheart work.โ Nowโs the time to take it very seriously if we want to achieve exceptional results as leaders.
