The best strategy on my team wasn't mine. I just made room for it.

Henry Mintzberg drew a distinction that reshaped how I lead. Strategy, he argued, isn't only the deliberate plan you set at the top. A lot of the strategy that actually gets realized is emergent, it rises from the ground, from the people doing the work, discovering what works as they go. The leader's job isn't always to author the plan. Often it's to set the direction, then notice and back the good thing that emerges.

I watched this happen. Here's the story:

When we set up our tooling team (now called Enablement), I didn't hand them a detailed plan. I gave them an objective and an intent. The direction was simple: increase confidence and consistency in how we build and release software, because customers are happier when changes ship cleanly and work as expected. For the build pipelines specifically, I framed the why, not the how. Build and test are where you catch defects. Slow, clunky build processes frustrate engineers and stakeholders alike. So the standing mandate was just this: keep making them better. That was it. A clear why and ownership handed over.

What came back was more than I'd have known to ask for.

The engineer put in charge of our build pipelines took that mandate and ran somewhere I couldn't have specified. He automated build processes I hadn't thought to question, reworked the flow and cut our build times by around 80%. Not a tweak, a step change. Engineers got their feedback loop back. Releases got smoother. He was promoted on the strength of it and deservedly. And the important part, for me, is that I didn't design any of it. I set a direction and gave someone room. The strategy, the actual, specific, valuable strategy, emerged from him.

That's the thing I keep relearning. As you get more senior, the instinct is to plan harder, specify more, hand people tighter blueprints. But the best work on my teams has rarely come from a blueprint I drew. It's come from giving a capable person a clear why and a real sense of ownership and then being secure enough to be surprised by what they build. My job wasn't to have the idea. It was to create the conditions where someone else's better idea could show up and to recognize it when it did.

Deliberate strategy still matters. Boundaries, objectives, direction, those are mine to set and I set them firmly. But inside those lines, I've learned to hold the plan loosely, because the person closest to the work can usually see a path I can't. Set the why. Hand over the how. Then watch.