As managers we mostly think leadership is about building a ceiling.
How talented can I make this team? How much can we achieve? How high can we push performance?
When you build a ceiling, people notice. Your team delivers impressive results. Deadlines are met. Senior leaders talk about your department as the example everyone else should follow. From the outside, it looks like you've built something exceptional.
But over the years, I've come to believe that the best managers aren't obsessed with building a ceiling.
They're building a floor.
Let me explain.
A floor is what your team stands on when something goes wrong. Eventually, something always goes wrong.
One of your best people resigns. A critical project falls behind. The business changes direction overnight. A customer escalates an issue that nobody saw coming.
It's in those moments that you discover whether you've been leading a team or simply enjoying a period when everything happened to be working.
Early in my management career, I was fascinated by high performers. If I could hire enough smart people, give them ambitious goals, and stay out of their way, I thought everything else would take care of itself.
And for a while, it looked like I was right.
My team was productive, and people were recognised for their work. We solved difficult problems and it felt like we'd built a very high ceiling.
Then one person suddenly left.
What caught me by surprise wasn't how much work they had been doing. It was how much critical knowledge left with them. Decisions slowed down because nobody else was quite sure what the next step should be. Simple questions suddenly had no obvious answers. Projects that looked on track started to wobble.
Nothing dramatic had happened.
We'd simply discovered that our ceiling had been resting on a very fragile floor.
That experience changed how I thought about management.
I became more interested in creating systems. We documented more, shared knowledge more freely, and made sure important work wasn't trapped inside one person's head. Cross-training became less about development and more about protection.
Interestingly, none of those things made the team look more impressive, but over time something changed.
The team became calmer, new people ramped up faster, holidays didn’t create panic, and decisions didn't stop whenever someone was away. Performance became more consistent because the team no longer depended on a handful of exceptional individuals.
The irony is that building a stronger floor eventually gave us a higher ceiling. We weren't starting over every time something went wrong.
So this week, don't look at how high your team can go. Look at what's underneath it.
If your best employee resigned tomorrow, what would happen? If you disappeared for two weeks, would decisions still get made?
If the next quarter was your hardest one yet, would your team pull together, or would it begin to fall apart?
Nobody will ever compliment you on the floor you've built.
But when the day comes that something breaks (and eventually it will), you'll discover that it was the most important part of your leadership all along.
See you next week.
- - Good Enough