Leadership Reset: Rediscovering Simplicity

Max De Pree, in Leadership is an Art, captures the heart of true leadership: “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor.” That last word—debtor—speaks to a posture of humility, recognizing that leadership is a shared journey and that gratitude is due to those who make success possible.

Leadership, at its best, is about vision, team building, calmness, trust, encouragement, and service—not the endless complexity of being buried under metrics and dashboards, catering to investors instead of customers, and chasing status, approval, and recognition. Leadership isn’t supposed to feel like a high-wire act or an obstacle course. It should be a path, not a puzzle.

We’ve made leadership harder than it needs to be. It’s time to reset. We must identify and strip away the causes of overcomplicating leadership and rediscover the elegance of simplicity.

Let’s take a look at five of the fundamental causes of this complexity (the “complicators”) and fresh ways to address them.

1. Lack of Focus

The biggest barrier to greatness isn’t resources or talent—it’s a lack of focus. Some leaders never met an idea they didn’t like. The result? They become Jack-of-all-trades and master of none—spreading themselves thin, eroding excellence, and draining joy from their teams.

Here is an example of how we lose focus. I have observed that senior leaders like to do two things: reorganize and provide training. It is not uncommon for a vice president to come in with a reorganization idea, such as creating a new position in the organization and moving others around. When this happened in a leadership team meeting, I would go up to the flip chart or white board, draw the x- and y-axes of a graph, and tell them that I have just three questions: 

• What do we want to see improved? There must be something that is not performing at the desired level, and we want to see it improved by reorganizing (or with this training program). Once the new organization (or training program) is in place, what will we look at to see the improvement in organization performance? This subject of improvement should be put above the graph as the title.

• How do we measure to know if we are improving? This involves identifying the bottom line, whether the idea is a winner or a loser. Put the metric on the y-axis. (One of the leaders I worked with told me that the most important thing I ever taught him was to ask the question, “What’s on the ‘y’ axis?”)

• Who wants to sponsor this project? Whose name will be associated with it now and six months from now when we follow through and evaluate the project’s success and organization impact? Write that person’s name on the bottom of our chart as the sponsor.

More than once when I did this, the person suggesting the reorganization or training program would say, “I hate it when you do that, Justice. Just forget it!

”The word “priority” entered the English language in the 1400s (derived from the Latin prioritas, meaning “the state of being first”). For hundreds of years, it remained singular, reflecting the idea that only one thing could truly come first. It wasn’t until the 20th century that people began using the plural form “priorities” as they began juggling multiple demands. As Greg McKeown notes in Essentialism, the shift to pluralizing “priority” was a kind of linguistic sleight of hand. Business leaders were trying to make multiple objectives the “most important,” which is logically contradictory. Today, we find organizations/leaders talking about the ten “priorities.”

I once interviewed the top 20 leaders in a Fortune 500 company and asked them to name the most important issue for the organization going forward. I got 28 answers. Some said they just could not give me only one. When everything’s a priority, nothing is.

You can stop unnecessary, pet project initiatives that are threatening to sidetrack your progress with the three questions.

2.  Failure to Align (Link-in) Efforts Throughout the Organization

It’s not enough to just create this focus. Just as a conductor brings musicians together to create a masterpiece, leadership is what empowers organizations to achieve greatness and guide associates to utilize and express their talents.

Many organizations are still just warming up because the leader has not stepped to the podium, taken the baton in their hand, and declared the piece to be played. Only when the musicians know the piece to be played can they play their instruments and contribute to the harmony. The associates are waiting for clarity and direction from their leader so they can perform the work well.

Sometimes the problem is a leader who is still playing an instrument instead of leading the orchestra. They are ignoring the gifted musicians right in front of them. The leader’s job is to orchestrate, not play an instrument. Practicing your orchestrating skill will change noise into music.

3. Undervaluing Constancy of Purpose

Once, while traveling with Dr. Deming as his host on a flight back to Washington, DC, I had the opportunity to ask him about why he made “create constancy of purpose” point number one in his 14 Points for Management. I told him that it seemed to me that the first point must be a really important one. His reply was simple and powerful: “If you’re not going to maintain constancy of purpose, don’t even start.”

I believe the second biggest barrier to achieving greatness for organizations is not maintaining constancy. Leadership can be seduced by the latest fad or what others are doing. Leaders must learn to “stiff arm” those distractions that pull them away from their core goal and inhibit progress and success.

I saw this demonstrated firsthand while working with Charlie, a division director responsible for over 500 mechanics. Our focus was on improving equipment uptime, and though we were constantly offered alternative projects to “optimize” our operations, Charlie held firm. He made it clear that we were not going to dilute our efforts. I admired the way he consistently blocked every diversion, staying true to our purpose and keeping our progress on track.

4. The Pitfall of Annual Planning

The ritual of “annual planning” is one of the most counterproductive leadership practices—and a tremendous drain on time, energy, and creativity. Each year, countless hours are devoted to crafting, reviewing, and gaining approval for detailed plans. The result? A loss of momentum, a fractured focus, and disengagement across the board.

Even more damaging is the repeated effort to rally the workforce behind each new initiative. Employees are asked to adopt new priorities year after year. But when these initiatives consistently fade, are replaced, or lose support, the team stops investing their discretionary effort—the extra push that drives excellence—because they've learned that “this too shall pass.”

For accelerated and sustained improvements, major improvement opportunities (MIOs) are not chosen on an annual basis. There is no need to change the focus just because the calendar has rolled over to a new year. Once identified as the critical issue for the future of the organization, the work on the MIO continues until a high and steady level of success is reached.

I’ve partnered with teams that have pursued a single improvement focus for over a decade, consistently raising the bar. Even when they achieved what many would call “perfection”—zero defects, zero late deliveries, and zero turnover—they didn’t stop. They simply shifted focus toward sustaining those results, which resulted in weeks, months, and even years of uninterrupted excellence. This is much like championship teams who, after winning the Super Bowl, set their sights on “repeating” or “three-peating.”

At its best, planning is not an annual ritual. It takes place on a continuous basis. Every leader and every work associate embrace the charge, do the job the best-known way today, and find a better way to do the job tomorrow. This relentless mindset fuels a dynamic improvement culture. Teams maintain a visible, living list of improvement opportunities. As resources become available, new initiatives are pulled from the list, ensuring that innovation is always in motion. Budgets flex and adapt in real-time, aligning support with what truly drives progress.

5. Enamored with goal setting 

Some leaders are overly focused on goals: They are vision-heavy and execution-light. They prioritize setting objectives without adequate attention to the necessary actions to achieve them. They invest immense energy into crafting ambitious goals but stall when it comes to turning those goals into actionable, realistic steps. Their leadership style involves perpetual planning, frequent strategy sessions, and lofty aspirations, yet lacks the operational discipline to follow through.

Some leaders have created their reputation as “good goal setters.”  Too often these leaders are recognized as outstanding leaders “because of” their ability to set excellent goals.

In some ways, setting “new” goals is a crafty diversion from being accountable for the goals already set—an escape from the accountability that comes with follow through. Dr. Deming called this out decades ago. He warned against “targets without means.” He didn’t mince words; he called such goals a “burlesque”—all for show.

Every goal must have a detailed plan for improvement, including how to articulate the need, how to align the entire organization, how to keep score and provide feedback, and how to celebrate results and reinforce the behaviors that lead to the results.

Leadership just isn’t that hard. We make it hard—through distractions, over-engineering, and the addiction to starting rather than finishing.

Simpler leadership requires

• Getting focused: Define what matters most. Create clarity. Build like-mindedness.

• Staying focused: Stiff-arming unnecessary projects and initiatives. If it doesn’t serve the core priority, it doesn’t deserve your energy.

• Aligning activities: Connect every effort to the chosen focus. Orchestrate improvement.

• Embracing continual planning: Deemphasize annual planning in favor of continual creativity and innovation. Make real time adjustments.

• Requiring action plans: Prohibit goals without detailed action plans, including review. No exceptions.

To unlock extraordinary success in your organization and personal life, a radical leadership reset is essential.

Recommended Resources

1. Center for Creative Leadership. (2025, May 3). 12 essential qualities of effective leadership. https://www.ccl.org/articles/leading-effectively-articles/characteristics-good-leader/

2. Deming, W. E. (2018). Out of the crisis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

3. De Pree, M. (2004). Leadership is an art. Currency/Doubleday.

4. McKeown, G. (2014). Essentialism: The disciplined pursuit of less. Ebury Publishing.

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While at Eastman Chemical Company, Russell Justice combined behavior science with his engineering background to create the Accelerated Continuous Improvement process, which launched his successful consulting and mentoring career. Working with leadership teams around the globe, his 5 decades of experience designing and implementing continuous improvement initiatives prove leadership can be simplified and transformative. To learn more about Russell’s philosophy and approach to leadership, get a copy of his book This Is What Leaders Do.