Five 10-minute curated insights in a private podcast to help you face CEO pressures. Then, each Wednesday, The Leadership Letter delivers one piece of clear, honest thinking from someone who has spent 20 years in the seat you're sitting in. Practical enough to use. Human enough to matter.
How to avoid being blindsided by detail
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Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more. READ TIME: 7 MINUTES | 15 APRIL, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM The document was on the table. It was a big deal and close to done. The company had been building toward this for months. The strategic logic was sound and there was in-principal agreement. All that remained was working through the final terms. The call came late one afternoon. The CEO I had been working with for months asked me to look it over because something felt off and she couldn’t name it. She was right, it was off. Significantly. The intent of the deal had been clearly articulated. The terms that would give that intent its teeth had not been. The people who should have known those terms cold, the subject matter experts her organisation was relying on, had left the detail thin. Thin enough to cause serious problems downstream, if not collapse the deal altogether. In retrospect, the symptom had been visible well before the 11th hour. She just hadn’t called it. There is a phrase that circulates in executive teams. You’ve heard it. You may have said it yourself. “I’m not across the detail, but…” It sounds like strategic seniority. It sounds like someone who has learned to operate at the right level, above the weeds, trusting their team. In my experience, that’s rarely what it is. When someone in an executive team leads with that phrase, what they’re often signalling is that they haven’t done the work. The “but” that follows isn’t a strategic observation. It’s a contribution that hasn’t been earned. A way of staying in the room, appearing engaged, without being accountable for the ground they’re standing on. That’s politics. And it compounds. When someone in the team is not across the detail they should own, and no one calls it, that gap gets packaged up and passed upward. It gets presented in a briefing, summarised in a slide, referenced in a recommendation. Each layer of the organisation that passes it on adds a layer of assumed credibility. By the time it reaches the CEO, the gap has become invisible and what arrives looks complete. See you next Wednesday, Phil Hayes-St Clair |
The Leadership Letter with Phil Hayes-St Clair
Five 10-minute curated insights in a private podcast to help you face CEO pressures. Then, each Wednesday, The Leadership Letter delivers one piece of clear, honest thinking from someone who has spent 20 years in the seat you're sitting in. Practical enough to use. Human enough to matter.
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