I had an amazing few years reporting directly to a VP. I feel like I learned a lot about leadership by working with him, but, honestly, I still have no idea how he did most of the things he did. Much of the time it felt like he wasn't doing much, but things worked out far too well and too consistently, so he was doing something behind the scenes. I'm pretty sure it was a lot of tacit skill: not so much about formal management structure or processes (he really did not go in for any formal process), but just being really good at making things happen by talking to people and understanding stuff.

That said, I noticed a few things. The biggest was trust. He started by trusting me, rather than needing me to "build up" trust with him, which gave me both scope and motivation to do really good work. He didn't worry about specific goals or timelines, but he made sure that everybody working with him understood the direction we needed to go, and that we felt like we were part of setting that direction. (A simple thing I learned: the best way to make somebody stick to a decision is to make them feel like they were legitimately involved in making that decision; the best way to make somebody feel like they were involved in making a decision is to actually involve them.)

My leadership philosophy now is that people naturally want to do good work. If you give them trust and space and you expect them to do good work, they'll rise to the occasion. This won't always work for everyone, but think of it as a portfolio optimization problem: the "hits" will more than pay for the "misses". The most effective teams I've seen are not the ones where everyone is constantly "utilized" and consistent, but rather the ones where people have the room to shine and do high-leverage work. And to have that space, people need slack. That slack might superficially look like waste, but it's how you enable good work and make your team far more resilient.

One tendency I noticed: whenever somebody came to him with an idea they were enthusiastic about, he always encouraged it unless there was some specific risk or obstacle. Even when something doesn't seem like the highest priority, if somebody is enthusiastic enough to push for it and it fits in the general direction we're moving, it makes sense to have them try it out. A person working on something that was their idea is going to do a far, far better job than they would otherwise. Supporting that is going to have a higher impact in expectation than monomaniacally focusing on "the most important thing". (That has to be one of the worst thought-terminating cliches in business!) And, besides, if somebody is really enthusiastic about something, perhaps they realize—consciously or subconsciously—something that you don't. At the end of the day, just how confident are you in understanding exactly what is more or less important to do? In the cases where it's obvious it'll be obvious to everyone; in the cases where it isn't, it makes sense to hedge your bets and let people work on different things.

If you as a leader yourself have the room to really trust your team, you can take this much further than it seems. The book Turn the Ship Around (summarized in this video) is a great illustration of what this looks like. Having seen a leader who operated like this first-hand, it's amazing how much more effective his approach was compared to everyone else I've worked with—and how nobody who hasn't also seen this first-hand understands or believes me when I talk about it. The VP I worked with started his career at Strats in Goldman working under Armen; at some point, I found a hilarious story about how Python got into production at Goldman that really captures one aspect of what effective leadership can look like.

From what I've seen, it's a rare organization where senior leadership is willing or able to lead in this style. But when it happens, it's amazing.