Knowing when to quit: Stepping aside is ultimate leadership

I had a great discussion with Kevin Norquay from the New Zealand Post last week about the challenges of leadership, including the biggest decision of stepping away.

For Australian leadership expert Dane Hudson, knowing when it’s time to go can, itself, be an act of leadership. New Zealander Fleur Marks was, by her own admission, an over-achiever until a health crisis pulled her up short. Kevin Norquay talked to both authors about what they’ve learnt about leadership.

Australian author Dane Hudson is a mentor to CEOs. Having been there and done that, he knows what makes a good leader and what makes a crap one: he’s put it all in a book.

How can a leader know when they’ve stopped being effective? The Post put the question to the author of Discipline Beats Vision.

What if your vision attracted investors, your product gained traction and your team grew, but now you’ve hit a wall? What got you here isn’t enough, and it won’t take you to the next level. How do you know when it’s time to go?

The answer has less to do with quarterly earnings or charisma, and more to do with self-awareness, emotional intelligence and whether those around you still feel safe enough to tell you the truth, Hudson says.

CEOs can have massive leadership blind spots. They might be exhausted and no longer feel the joy, or they could be a narcissistic founder who simply cannot see that their company would be better off without them.

It is a rare leader who understands that stepping aside can, itself, be an act of leadership.

Before looking at company performance or board reviews, leaders should look in the mirror and ask: Do I still want to do this job?“Every morning, you’ve got to get up and go, ‘I’m really excited about the people I’m going to engage with, the problems I’m going to solve…’,” Hudson says.“Firstly, leaders have to realise when they’re not enjoying what they’re doing. That’s step number one.”

Good leaders absorb uncertainty, setbacks and conflict without infecting the team with despair. If those frustrations no longer feel manageable and begin to overwhelm your sense of purpose, stagnation – or worse – sets in.

Hudson argues that leadership is emotional labour. Once the joy disappears, the people around you will feel it long before you admit it to yourself.

Then there’s the issue of scale. A leader who excels with a small company might not be the best person to drive it forward as it grows. A founder who successfully launched a burgeoning 20-person start-up may be hopeless at running a 1000-person corporation. Past competence does not equal permanent competence.

Self-awareness is critical. Hudson uses the emotional intelligence framework popularised by American psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and social skills.

Effective leaders constantly reassess whether they are growing alongside their organisation; they study leadership as if they are pursuing a doctorate.“Great leaders build a toolkit over time,” he tells the Star-Times. “Become a relentless student of leadership… Just like doing a PhD, you don’t just suddenly become good at it.”

The worst leaders are those who genuinely cannot see their own failures. “The more challenging scenario is when they’re a narcissist and they just don’t realise they’re not a great leader,” he says.

For them, robust feedback mechanisms become essential: boards, mentors, investors, and 360-degree reviews. Without these, power can create an echo chamber in which disagreement disappears and incompetence is allowed to flourish.

While Hudson is convinced that discipline beats vision, he acknowledges that dictatorial leaders can still succeed commercially.

Tech icons such as Elon Musk (Tesla) and Steve Jobs (Apple) rate as brilliant, abrasive, and incredibly difficult to safely imitate. But most people are not geniuses and most organisations require dissent and internal self-examination to survive.

What if you hate laying people off or shrink away from hard decisions? It’s brutal, Hudson admits, but it is necessary – and the aftermath is the ultimate test of a leader.

As a CEO, Hudson oversaw major redundancies, calling them emotionally bruising obligations.“You’d be a very unique human being if you enjoyed firing people,” he says. “I’ve probably done 20 big corporate restructures in my career. Every time you let someone go, it’s tough, it’s challenging.“But I suppose that’s what made me a better leader. I could have empathy and understanding, but I also had an obligation to the shareholders, the performance of the business, and the surviving members of the organisation.”

Leadership is truly tested after the cuts. Survivors often experience guilt, anxiety, and paralysis, meaning the leader’s role shifts from operational to psychological.“When you reduce an organisation by 20%, you, as a leader, have to be a person of hope.”

He invokes the movie Gladiator and Russell Crowe’s character Maximus Decimus Meridius. “People followed him because they believed they could survive and win. People are in your company because they believe in you.”

But once leaders lose the ability to authentically inspire confidence, they become liabilities. A great leader harnesses diversity, opens the floor to a wide range of voices, allows them to speak honestly and listens.

For that to happen, staff must feel psychologically safe.'Diversity is immensely powerful, but only if people speak up honestly … It only works if you as a leader create trust and psychological safety.'And then, there is the final golden rule: 'Great leaders – impactful leaders – speak last. The second you as a leader speak, there’s a stake in the ground.'Listening is less about company democracy and more about information gathering.

Leaders still make the final call, but the best decisions emerge when expertise flows upward rather than being crushed downward.

So, are leaders born or made? Can anyone handle the big jobs?

In Hudson’s opinion, leadership is not a personality trait bestowed upon a lucky few. It is a craft, a discipline and a process of constant recalibration and learning.

Once a leader stops learning, they should stop leading.

Hudson never intended to write a book. But after serving as a CEO across six different industries and mentoring other executives – he has helped an estimated 150 CEOs over the past six years – he discovered he had accumulated more than 1000 pages of notes.“So it was actually surprisingly easy,” he says.“It's my first book, but I could probably do another three.

I'm not doing this for the money; I’m just getting my message out there and having a bit of fun.“I've always been good at reinventing myself. Leaders need to be. I reinvented myself as a mentor and a coach six years ago, and now I’m adding 'author' to the list.” Discipline beats vision: How to be the leader your company needs starting Monday by Dane Hudson (Wiley, $36.95), available at all leading retailers, and .

Originally published on LinkedIn. Read the original →