Leading

The Practitioner Rule

Published on Apr 29

A few years ago I was sitting in a CEO peer group, and we made an accidental discovery.

Between us we had something like 70 years of hiring experience. We started comparing notes on the leaders we'd actually loved working with — the ones who consistently raised the bar — versus the ones who looked great on paper and somehow never quite did.

One trait came up every single time. It wasn't EQ. It wasn't communication. It wasn't pattern-matching from past companies.

It was that the leader could do the work. They were a practitioner — 10,000-hours-level skilled in at least one thing their team cared about.

I've come to call this the Practitioner Rule.

The conventional advice — the one I got handed early on and parroted for years — is "hire smart people and get out of their way." It sounds humble. It sounds modern. In my experience, it's a trap.

Leaders who step all the way back stop knowing what great looks like. They can't tell the difference between a good answer and a great one in the room. They lose the muscle that lets them push for the version no one on the team has the standing to demand. Over time, the bar quietly drops.

The reframe I love comes from Farhan Thawar, who runs engineering at Shopify: hire smart people and pair with them on hard problems.

That's the whole shift. Not get out of their way — get into the hard problem with them. Stay close enough to the details that you can recognize excellent work and ask for more of it. Stay close enough that the team can feel a leader who actually understands what they're doing.

The risk most leaders worry about is micromanaging. That's a real risk, and an easy one to spot and correct.

The risk most leaders ignore is the opposite: a senior person so detached from the craft that they can't lift the bar even if they want to. That one is much harder to fix, and I've watched it kill more momentum than micromanagement ever has.

Hire smart people. Then pair with them on the hard stuff.