The Leadership Work You Think You Should Apologize For
Photo by Carolina Gallon Londono on Unsplash
"I’m sorry, I know we should be discussing vision and strategy, but..."
This is how many of my senior leadership coaching sessions begin. Leaders apologize before admitting where their time actually goes—not always on vision development, financial performance or market positioning, but instead on the endless complexity of human dynamics.
Behind closed doors, they share their leadership guilt and frame it as failing because they're not being "strategic enough."
What if that's exactly backwards?
What if the work leaders feel guilty about focusing on is actually the most sophisticated, strategic, and impactful part of their roles?
The Sophisticated Work Behind the Scenes
When leaders are hired and/or promoted, the focus tends to be on their experience with business fundamentals like vision, strategy, and financial performance. The job descriptions highlight "drive results," "strategic thinking," and "strong business acumen."
And yet, JB Coaching data revealed leaders are consistently navigating topics around: team dynamics, complex conversations, expectation alignment, trust building, energy management, nuanced feedback processes, to name a few.
3x more sessions focused on the nuanced human orchestration required to make business strategy actually work than actual strategy itself.
What does this tell us? Leaders aren't avoiding business work—they're doing the advanced team and interpersonal work that enables both short- and long-term business success.
It's like being a master gardener who cultivates growth by understanding the soil conditions, providing the right nutrients, and tending to each plant according to its unique needs, growth pattern, and potential to create a thriving ecosystem.
Think about it this way: That team dynamic work you're worried about? It creates the collaboration that turns market expansion ideas into actual market share. The energy management you think is a distraction? It sustains the trust that drives engagement and retention. Those difficult conversations you're navigating? They create the clarity that elevates both individual and organizational performance.
We've been thinking about leadership backwards. Instead of viewing leadership as primarily hard business skills with some people management on the side, what if it's actually human dynamics orchestration with business acumen as the essential foundation?
Stop the Apology Tour
Photo by Stan Slade on Unsplash
Remember that leader who started our session apologizing for not being "strategic enough"? By the end of our work together, they realized they weren't avoiding strategy—they were executing the most sophisticated strategy of all.
So here's your invitation: stop apologizing for the human work. Start owning it as the strategic advantage it is. Your instincts about where to focus are exactly right.
The sophisticated human work isn't separate from business leadership—it IS business leadership.