🚩 Tactical Memo 060: You're not the leader you think you are

Read time: 7 minutes

👋 Hey, it's Justin. Welcome to Tactical Memo, my weekly newsletter for leaders who plan to win the next decade of work.

If this newsletter helps, my Substack will too. I post 3 times a day, 7 days a week. That's 21 tactical tips a week on leading in the AI era. Over 1,000 a year. Free. Subscribe here.

A memo can only take you so far. My courses, workshops, and free webinars take you the rest of the way.

👉 Why Read This Edition: You'll learn the three quiet tests that decide whether you're actually leading or just performing the part.

The number that should sting

Gallup published its 2026 quarterly workforce study after surveying more than 23,000 employed U.S. adults.

They asked leaders to rate themselves across seven core competencies. Building relationships. Developing people. Leading change. Thinking critically. Communicating clearly. Inspiring others. Creating accountability.

Accountability finished last.

Fewer than half of leaders called themselves outstanding or exceptional at holding everyone responsible for performance, including themselves.

Their own managers rated them lower than that.

Read that again. The people who report to these leaders trust them on accountability less than the leaders trust themselves.

That's the gap. That's where careers quietly stall and teams quietly rot.

Strong leadership isn't a title. It's not a Slack handle with a fancy job description under it.

It's a set of behaviors that show up when nobody is watching, when the answer isn't obvious, and when something has just gone wrong.

Three behaviors tell you everything.

Sign 1: your team performs when you're not in the room

I coached a VP who looked like a star on paper.

Smart guy. Hit his numbers. Always the loudest voice in the executive meeting.

He ran an org of about forty people, and on the org chart it looked clean.

Then I started watching how the work actually moved.

Every decision routed through him. Pricing exceptions. Hiring approvals. Vendor calls. Slide reviews.

His team would draft something and then sit on it for two days waiting for him to bless it.

He showed me his calendar one week and counted twenty-three meetings where his only job was to say yes or no to something his team had already figured out.

Then he took a vacation.

Five days. Caribbean. Out of pocket.

His org went dark. Two deals stalled. A client escalation got escalated again because nobody on his team felt empowered to respond.

By day four, three of his directors were in the COO’s office asking to make calls he should have delegated months ago.

When he came back, I sat him down.

"Your org doesn't work without you. That isn't a compliment. That's a liability."

He pushed back at first. Said his team wasn't ready. Said the stakes were too high to let calls happen below him.

Classic bottleneck logic dressed up as accountability.

I gave him a single rule for the next ninety days. He could not be the first approver on anything under a defined threshold.

If a director needed his sign-off, the director had to make the call first and then tell him what they decided.

He hated it. His team loved it.

Cycle time on internal decisions dropped by half. Two of his directors got promoted within a year because suddenly people could see them.

And he got his nights and weekends back, which he claimed he never wanted but absolutely needed.

Here's the test for you. Cancel your next two one-on-ones. Skip a standup. Take a Wednesday off without warning.

If your team's output drops, you don't have a team. You have an audience.

Reed Hastings built Netflix on a model he calls the informed captain.

The person closest to the decision makes the call. The leader's job is to make sure that person has the context, then get out of the way.

Most leaders say they believe this. Their calendars say otherwise.

Strong leaders build operators. Weak leaders build dependents.

If you can't leave the room, you haven't led. You've performed.

Sign 2: you can form a point of view in real time, without an AI tool

I watched a director get asked a direct question in a steering committee meeting last quarter.

"Should we kill the integration or push it to next quarter?"

Simple question. Real stakes. The room waited.

He pulled out his laptop and started typing into ChatGPT.

I'm not making this up. He typed the question into a prompt window while eleven people watched.

The CFO closed her notebook. The conversation moved on without him.

He never recovered in that room. Three months later he was managed out, and everyone in the meeting knew exactly why.

AI is a phenomenal tool. I use it every day.

I've built workflows around it that have saved my team hundreds of hours. That's not the issue.

The issue is using it as a crutch instead of a tool.

A point of view is the product of judgment. Judgment is the product of reps.

Reps come from being wrong, getting corrected, and trying again.

If you outsource the reps to a model, you never build the judgment.

You become a person who can produce competent answers but can't defend them, can't pivot when challenged, and can't read a room well enough to know when the answer in your prompt window is the wrong one.

Ben Horowitz has a line about this in The Hard Thing About Hard Things.

He talks about CEOs who ask their board for the answer instead of bringing one. The board, he writes, can sense the difference instantly.

So can your team. So can your boss.

Try this. The next time you're in a meeting and someone asks you a hard question, sit with it for ten seconds and answer from your own head.

Be wrong sometimes. That's the price of building the muscle.

If you can only think when the model is open, you're not thinking. You're transcribing.

The leaders who will own the next decade are the ones who use AI to extend their judgment, not replace it.

The two are different sports.

Sign 3: when something fails, you own it before someone asks you to

Back to the Gallup number. Accountability finished last out of seven competencies.

The ranking isn't an accident.

Owning failure is the hardest thing a leader does, and it's the thing the system rewards you for avoiding in the short term.

Here's how it usually plays out.

A project misses a deadline. The leader walks into the review meeting with a deck.

Slide three has a section called "External Factors." Slide four has a section called "Dependencies."

Slide five has a section called "Lessons Learned" that names no person and no decision.

The leader leaves the meeting feeling like he handled it. Everyone in the room knows he didn't.

Compare that to the leader who opens with one sentence.

"This missed because of three calls I made. Here's what I'd do differently. Here's what we're doing now."

The room exhales. Trust goes up, not down.

You'd think it would be the opposite. It isn't.

Stanley McChrystal wrote about this in Team of Teams.

He took ownership for failures inside Joint Special Operations Command in front of subordinates.

He didn't lose authority by doing it. He gained it.

People followed him harder because they knew he wouldn't throw them under a bus when things went sideways.

Ownership is leverage. The leader who owns the miss controls the narrative.

The leader who hides from it gets the narrative written about him by people who don't like him.

Here's the test. The next time something on your team fails, count the seconds between the failure and your name showing up next to it.

If your boss has to come find you, you've already lost.

If your team has to nominate you in a retro, you've already lost.

If you're still drafting an email about why it wasn't really your fault, you've already lost.

Walk in. Say it. Move on.

Why this matters now

The Gallup data tells you what a lot of leaders are doing.

They're rating themselves high on the easy stuff and low on the hard stuff.

Their teams are rating them lower than that on the hard stuff.

Accountability is the gap, and the gap is widening because AI is letting weak leaders look productive without ever building the underlying skills.

You can hide a lot with a polished output.

You cannot hide an empty room when you step out, a blank face when the hard question lands, or a finger pointed at someone else when the work breaks.

The next decade of work will sort leaders into two piles.

The pile that built operators, judgment, and ownership.

The pile that built decks.

You already know which pile you're in. The question is what you do about it this week.

Make the call this week

Pick one of the three. Don't try all three at once.

If sign one is your weak spot, cancel a standup this week. Tell your team you trust them to run it. See what comes back.

If sign two is your weak spot, close the laptop in your next meeting and answer from your own head. Be wrong if you have to.

If sign three is your weak spot, find the most recent thing that broke on your team and send a note to your boss today owning your part in it. Before she asks.

One move. This week. That's it.

One question

When your team talks about you in the room you're not in, which of the three signs are they describing?

Sit with that one.

If this helped you, send it to someone who could use it this week.

Until next time,

Justin

✍️ From the Desk of Justin Bateh, PhD
Become an indispensable AI-era leader