You Are Responsible for Three Things as a Leader. Most Leaders Are Mostly Doing Something Else.
The Three Responsibilities of a Leader | Part 1 of 3
You Are Responsible for Three Things as a Leader. Most Leaders Are Mostly Doing Something Else.
Ask a senior leader what they are responsible for and most will give you a list. A long one. Some of the items on that list will be genuinely their responsibility. Many will not be. A proportion will be things they have absorbed because nobody else picked them up. Some will be things they do because they are good at them, not because they are theirs to do. A few will be things that are technically in their remit but would be better owned by someone in their team.
The combined effect of this long and undifferentiated list is one of the most common and least acknowledged experiences in senior leadership: a feeling of overwhelming complexity that produces constant busyness and intermittent effectiveness. Leaders who are excellent at their work, working extraordinarily hard, producing results that are broadly acceptable but not as good as they could be — because the energy is spread too widely and too thinly across too many things.
The framework I use with every leadership coaching client is deliberately simple. Leaders are only really responsible for three things.
The Three Responsibilities
The first is delegating brilliantly — to people’s strengths, removing the blockages to their people performing, and recognising the moment when coaching is no longer sufficient and structural change is what is needed.
The second is building, growing and nurturing a Resilient Team — utilising the Personal, Leadership and Team Resilience Wheels to create the conditions for genuine collective capability rather than managed individual performance.
The third is taking ownership and responsibility for engaging in their own personal development on their Leadership Resilience Wheel — not as a periodic event, not as a response to a crisis, but as a consistent, deliberate practice.
These three things. Nothing less. Nothing more.
“The purpose of naming three responsibilities is not to simplify leadership. It is to clarify it. Clarity reduces overwhelm. Reduced overwhelm produces better leadership.”
Are you delegating brilliantly? Photo Getty Images Unsplash
Why Simplifying Accountability Is Not the Same as Trivialising Leadership
The most common initial response to this framework is a version of: “but my role is more complex than three things.” It is. The complexity is real. The strategic decisions, the stakeholder relationships, the operational demands, the commercial pressures — none of these disappear.
The framework does not claim that leaders only do three things. It claims that the things leaders do that produce the greatest downstream impact on their team’s performance, their organisation’s resilience, and their own sustainability as a leader, resolve into three categories. Everything else — however technically necessary — is in service of those three.
The practical value of the framework is in the question it generates: how much of your current week maps to these three responsibilities? For most leaders, the honest answer is illuminating. The majority of their effort is not in these three spaces. The majority of their effort is in the things that feel urgent, that are technically within their remit, that keep the immediate machine running. The three responsibilities tend to be the things that get deferred, abbreviated or skipped entirely when pressure rises.
The Resilience Wheel is directly relevant here. The Attitude dimension — the leader’s settled sense of who they are and what they are here to do — is what enables them to operate from the three responsibilities rather than defaulting to reactive busyness. The Purpose dimension provides the navigational clarity. The Confidence dimension provides the willingness to say no to the things that are not their responsibility and yes to the three that are.
What Leaders Tend to Do Instead
The displacement activities that fill the space where the three responsibilities should be operating are consistent across sectors and seniority levels.
The most common is the operational work that belongs in the team. Leaders who are technically excellent at the subject matter of their field often find that doing the work is more immediately satisfying than developing the people who do it. The work is concrete, it has clear outputs, and it feels productive. Developing people is slower, less immediately visible, and requires a tolerance for the messiness of other people’s development journeys.
The second is excessive meeting participation. Leaders who are visible, helpful and engaged are often in too many meetings. Their presence adds value to each individual meeting. Their absence from developing their team and their own Resilience Wheel is the invisible cost.
The third is problem-solving that should stay in the team. When team members bring problems to the leader and the leader solves them, both parties feel productive in the short term. The long-term effect is a team that brings its problems upwards rather than developing the capability to resolve them.
A Practical Self-Assessment
This week, track how your time is actually spent. Not how you would like it to be spent — how it actually is. Then ask three honest questions:
1. What proportion of my week was spent in activity that maps to brilliant delegation, building a resilient team, or developing my own Leadership Resilience Wheel?
2. What was I doing with the rest of my time, and how much of it genuinely required me rather than someone in my team?
3. What is one thing I could stop doing, or transfer, that would create space for the three responsibilities?
The Leadership Resilience Diagnostic is the starting point for the third responsibility. It gives a clear, structured picture across all seven Resilience Wheel dimensions — so that personal development is specific, grounded and connected to the leadership outcomes it is ultimately designed to support.
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Start with the Leadership Resilience Diagnostic — a structured snapshot across The Resilience Wheel.
Leadership Resilience Diagnostic:
theresiliencecoach.co.uk/resilient-leadership-diagnostic
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