27: The True Test of Great Leadership

If your team can’t function without you, it's not always a sign of loyalty or high standards, more often than not, it's a design flaw. We dig into a question that cuts through the noise for any leader, manager, or business owner: what actually happens when you’re not in the room? Because the moment you step away is when the truth shows up, whether the work keeps flowing or the whole system clogs with approvals, escalations, and quiet panic.

We talk about how modern leadership myths get reinforced, like the idea that leaders must be visibly present, full-time, and always available. That model creates bottlenecks, turns managers into single points of failure, and drains energy from teams through compliance instead of confidence. We also go beneath the surface to the harder part: ego and the unconscious fear of being replaceable. If a team thrives without us, what does that say about our value? The answer is more liberating than it first sounds.

If this sparks a rethink about how your team operates, share the episode with a leader who feels stretched, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s next, and leave a review with your answer to one question: what happens when you’re not in the room?

And if you want to learn more about our programs, head to our website

https://brillianceinspired.com.au/programs

References: 
 Gallup. (2026). State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report: The Human Side of the AI Revolution. Gallup, Inc.

Laloux, F. (2014). Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness. Nelson Parker. 

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I am a Confidence and Impact Coach for leaders, Organisational Development Consultant and independent Leadership Circle Profile® Certified Practitioner. Information shared about this tool is courtesy of Leadership Circle®, all rights reserved. www.leadershipcircle.com

Transcript

The Real Test Of Leadership

Jolynne Rydz 0:00

Ever noticed what happens when a leader leaves? So whether that's they go and leave temporarily or they actually exit an organization. For some teams, things keep ticking along smoothly and things get done. For others, they completely fall apart at the seams, whether that's their productivity, people slack off, or with maybe they start fighting with each other. So I've worked with both camps, and one is really carefully managed often, and the other is powerfully led. And the difference comes down to something really, really simple. So often both of these types of leaders have great intentions. They want to get results, they want to get the most from the team, but they have very different approaches and therefore very different outcomes. And when they have different outcomes, they also have different development needs as leaders. And that flows onto the teams as well. So I want you to picture yourself and think about when you are in the room and everything's humming. It's really easy to go, great, I'm doing great as a leader now, aren't I? Everyone's happy, the work's getting done, people are getting along. Fantastic. But the true test of leadership is what happens when you're not there. It's how things run without us. And I want to ask you as a leader, so maybe you're a business owner or maybe you're a leader in an organization, do you even feel like you can take a break? Because I know there are many leaders that feel like there's so much on that if they take a break, it will fall on their teams, or they they they just can't take a break because there's so much pressure on them. And so when you do take that opportunity to take a well-earned break, does the work still get done? Or do things slow down? Do the approvals pile up on your desk and you have more work to get back to when you come back from your break? What happens when a challenge arises? Does the team band together and just solve it? Or are you on speed dial to solve the crisis? Now, obviously, this is going to be different depending on the kind of role that you have. But ideally, the test of a great leader is what happens when they're not there. And so often we see leadership as this critical point, this constant that has to be around. And it's a narrative that's very alive in our society today. It's this leadership that is focused on a single position. And you see that in hierarchies because organizations get narrower and narrower and narrower up the top, right? You you report into less and less and less people until you stop at the CEO. And so the way this shows up is the number of times I've I've had a conversation, often with a woman who wants to be a leader, or maybe they have been a leader in the past and have taken a break to become a parent, and they come back and they say, Well, I can't go back into leadership because I want to be part-time. Oh, I hate when people say that. Not because I hate them saying it, but I really strongly dislike that in our society we assume that you have to be full-time as a leader because you don't. But how how many co-CEOs do you know?

Why Presence Becomes A Bottleneck

Jolynne Rydz 3:24

I happen to know a couple, but how many how often do you see that? Just pause to think. Right? So there is this underlying assumption that you have to be present full-time. Often leaders in their whole return to work, work from home debate, often leaders are expected to be more present in the office than people without leadership responsibilities. Why is that? That tells me that we don't actually know how to lead people without our presence being there. And it makes sense. In the past, we've praised leaders for showing up, for managing resources, for making sure things get done, for being the point of escalation, for writing approvals on finance, procurement, all of that stuff, for motivating the team, for making decisions. And all of that is important. And we evolve to a great leader when all of that happens in our absence. So a good manager can actually become a bottleneck because we've built it into the system. So when they're away, decisions stall, they pile up on people's desks, the flow stops, and leadership becomes a risk because it's a single point of failure. So the true test of leadership is met when great work is still done, even when we're not in the room. So if the true test of leadership is what happens in our absence, what stops us from passing this test? And there's a big one. And it's one I've encountered even in some of the most progressive organizations, because it's there, often there. I've I've yet to personally come across an organization without this present. I've come close, but it it's still there. And the thing that's there is our ego and our unconscious fear about being replaceable. Have a think about it. If the team runs well without me, what does that mean for me and my job as a leader? So whether that's a conscious fear for you or not, for a lot of us, it's going to be there in the background. We don't want to be replaceable, we want to be needed. And we we want a job because we want to put food on the table and do all the things that we want to do in our life. So here's the shift that I'm inviting you to make is to think that great leadership isn't just about

Ego And The Fear Of Replaceability

Jolynne Rydz 5:46

what you do, it's about what you enable. So great leadership isn't just about what you do, it's about what you enable. So I've caught the title of this episode, The True Test of Great Leadership, because it reveals this critical difference. So a great leader doesn't just build a team that functions with their approval and their hands-on management. It thrives, whether they're there or not. Because there's structure, there's clarity, there's systems, there's trust, there's empowerment. And there's so many ingredients in this mix. So the team can step up no matter what happens. And yet, when the leader is in the room, it's even more magical. So you don't become redundant if you if your team operates without you. You actually create this wonderful synergy where you can you can build and thrive with each other. So the team is lifted by your presence, but not tied to it. So presence matters when you're around, and absence is the test of what you've built. And so, what's the evidence around some of this? I came across an amazing book a couple of years ago, which is called Reinventing Organizations by Frederick Lilot. And here's a quote from him: In self-managing organizations, the role of leaders is not to direct or control, but to create the conditions for teams to thrive. I'll just let that land. It's not the role of leaders to direct or control, but to create the conditions for teams to thrive. And so this is about truly letting go of that control. And, you know, a lot of us have a little bit of a control in us. You know, we feel out of control when we we don't know what's going on or we don't have a finger on the pulse. And that I'm not saying we we lose control completely, but we have to be aware as a leader of when we are being driven by a fear of loss of control rather than I'm controlling because that's my value add right now. And control and authority and and domination from a leadership standpoint has been the predominant model that we've had for so long. And the challenge in today's society, and I truly believe this. The reason why we are struggling to grapple some of the world's biggest challenges is because we are fixated on the leader needing to know it all, being able to solve it all, being having to control it all. We are not activating the potential within our teams because we are one, scared of being made redundant, but also two, we're not enabling their self-leadership to come out. We're not giving them the systems and the environment for that self-leadership to flourish. So in the Lau's book, he did a case study. And, you know, if you're a Dutch listener, I want you to tell me if I've pronounced this correctly, but the Bertzog organization. So it's a Dutch community that grew from a small pilot team of nurses to now over 10,000 nurses. And basically, they have no traditional managers in their organization. They're teams of 10 to 12 nurses that focus on their local community. And so what they removed in their organization, there's no middle managers, there's no micromanagement, there's no daily oversight

Self-Managing Teams That Outperform

Jolynne Rydz 9:20

of tasks and what gets done, there's no layers of approval to make purchases, there's no central scheduling of what they do. Now I'm I'm imagining if anyone here is listening and is a nurse, there might be a collective like, ah, because sometimes in in that industry I've come across that there is a lot of um control going on around schedules and and things like that for good reason. And this is also an example of where it's working without that. But I want it's a very big but, an intentional but there, because there are factors present in this Berzog organization that are not necessarily there yet in other organizations. So it's not something we can just switch on. It's something to work towards. So what Bertzog added instead of the traditional style of management and leadership is they really honed in on their clear purpose. Every single nurse and person in that organization knows that their purpose is to help people live meaningful, autonomous lives. So as long as what you're doing is aligned with that, great, go for it. And there's a there's a couple of other factors around that. Obviously, whatever you're doing needs to do no harm. And they also distributed the decision making. And I see a lot of organizations attempting to do this. They try and push decision making to the lowest possible level. So that's a great start. But again, intentional, but they try and do that, but they are unaware of the very factors and fears and systems and legacy beliefs and narratives that are holding that true distribution of decision making out. So you've got to have someone who can come in and see those and spot those and help you shift them. So on top of distributed decision making, they also have peer-based accountability. So what this looked like is if someone was underperforming, and I see this a lot in organizations, right? What tends to happen is someone behaves poorly or isn't doing their job. The person that witnesses it, if they're not confident enough or don't have the skills and it's not normalized in that organization, they'll go chat to either a colleague and gossip about it, or they might tell their manager and expect their manager to do something about it. And then it becomes this awkward conversation where the manager has to come back to this person and, you know, so-and-so told me this, and it becomes a he said, she said, and it's really not very nice. So in this Bertzog organization, what they do instead is when someone has an issue like that, they bring it to either directly to the person because they are capable and enabled and have that trust, or they bring it to the group. So even if someone wants a pay rise, the whole team talks about that and whether or not what that person is doing and the value they're adding and the value that they are pitching to add is worthy of the pay rise. So it's really interesting because I I do believe there is a massive trust requirement and also a massive personal leadership and confidence requirement that's required to be able to do something like that, which I'll talk about in a minute. So, yeah, high trust is essential in this kind of organization. And what you might be saying, well, are there are there any leaders at all? And yes, yes, they are, but they play a very different role. So the leaders in this organization are coaches. So in a nutshell, uh, my definition of a coach is someone who helps you to understand what your goal is and guides you towards that. So using questions more than telling answers. So even in the absence of managers, Bertel consistently outperforms traditional hierarchical nursing organizations on so many factors. It's it's crazy. I I want you to go read this book. It's so cool. So they outperform them on client satisfaction, employee satisfaction, outperform them on costs, on the care outcomes, the handling of complex cases, and the speed of decision making. Now, these are all factors that I know a lot of organizations are trying to shift, right? But you're trying to shift it with a bottleneck at leadership. Yeah. We are hamstringing ourselves if we don't look at this as a potential way forward. So this this system, the birth birdsock system, is so cool because it doesn't rely on any single leader. The team is capable and empowered and trusted to act whether a leader is present or not. And I want you to pause for a moment and have a think about your organization and whether that's the case for you. So why this single point of failure thing doesn't work. I actually used to be a student pilot and I loved watching aircraft investigation because you can learn so much about the decisions the pilots make and what goes wrong in any of these events. And I remember watching one episode where there was a pin in the tail fin, and there was only one, and that pin was not well maintained, and it sheared off and it broke the tailplane, and then there was an absolutely horrific crash as a result that killed everyone on board.

Removing Single Points Of Failure

Jolynne Rydz 14:52

So in aviation, they do a lot of work to make sure there's no single point of failure. And they learnt a lot from that case. So why is this important? Because, well, firstly, and aircraft is defying gravity, so the natural laws of our planet. So they want to have different systems in place in case one fails. And for example, the hydraulic system, the thing that controls the wings and the ailerons and the tail fin, there's often up to three backup systems on board. So that might feel heavy and redundant, but in that case, because safety is paramount, it's it's seen as a good thing. So the same thing can happen in an organization. So if if we have a single point of failure or bottleneck in a leader, it slows everything down or it creates a lot of risk. I don't even want to say that saying, but you know that saying that people say, what if that person gets hit by a bus? It's it's so true. You've got to have, for business continuity, a not just people's knowledge, but the actual way the organization functions and the decisions that get made and the flow of work shouldn't be constrained by a title. And so if everyone can take the lead, it actually takes the pressure off. So in a nutshell, over the past few years, managers and leaders have always had a higher engagement level than individual contributors. And there's probably a lot of reasons for that, which is a whole nother episode. But for now, the over recent years, the level of engagement of managers and leaders is is dropping very rapidly. And it's now only about a two-point difference between the engagement of employees and the engagement of managers. So that tells me that there's a lot of potential pressure that leaders are feeling. So there's an opportunity here to help take some of that pressure off our leaders and decentralize. So I don't know, you might be thinking of that saying too many cooks spoil the broth. Right? All of these cute little sayings, they all change the way we shift and see the world and what we believe. And I think this is true, but only when control is the aim. Yeah, so if you want one head chef that is controlling everything and you know, he's at the pass making sure everything's great and and going out in in their specific way, then great. But when you need something with more creativity, innovation, and flow that is able to adapt to really challenging and really rapidly evolving situations. Um, does that sound familiar? Does anyone experience that right now? We need different strengths, it's different times. So we do need this fluidness to be activated in our organizations. And ultimately, this is where things like uh diversity and inclusion becomes really powerful within the container of a shared vision. So imagine everyone being activated to achieve their full potential, to be fully engaged, to love what they do, to have a purpose in this world that is related to their work. The power of that, I don't think we've fully measured, right? It's it's so, so powerful. Actually, you can see it. You can see it in the people that go out and and do volunteer work outside of ours. The the things that they do. I was reading an article by a friend the other day. They they love writing and they they just went to a meeting, got inspired, went home and smashed out a 2000-word article, and it was brilliant. And that was unpaid. And there's so many brilliant people do things that people do without pay involved. And if we can align those things, like they're the opportunities are incredible. So I have an example of of where this worked really well. So many, many, many, many, many moons ago, I was in a leadership challenge, and we had it was basically like a mini Olympics to test your leadership skill. So teams were pitted against each other. We had teams of about six to eight people, and then there were different tasks that would be dropped into our team room and we'd have to work on. So one might be uh running the numbers and and working out, you know, the best rate to sell a hotel room. Another thing was coming in and pitching for a certain

How We Train People To Wait

Jolynne Rydz 19:50

project to get across the line. Another one was dealing with a media trauma. And we we kept getting interrupted as we were doing each of these challenges. So it meant that we couldn't rely on one person to sort of lead the way. We had to diversify and see who had the best strengths to lead which of these activities. And so the more you're set up to do that in an instant, the better it is. And the difference I see is when people look to leadership versus them just jump jumping in and doing it and not being afraid of the consequences that come later. So I want to take you back to school. Some of the most unrecognized leaders in our society, I believe, are teachers. Think about it, they're leading the development of young people, and that's not just their academic development. They're trying to nurture their social skills, their teamwork, their ability to manage their own emotions as well. And I talk about this a lot, so many of you probably know that I had a Montessori schooling, and I I truly think that was a blessing as a young person. And in Montessori, the teacher is a coach. So they're not up the front of the room telling you what must be done with all of these rules. They're there as a coach and a guide, and it's so decentralized. There's a room full of activities, and you just go and you choose one and you work on it, and you might have a couple of goals that you've got set for the week to achieve. And the difference I saw between myself and people that I knew that went to other schools is that the people that went to the Montessori school had this initiative and this drive from a very young age to manage their own learning because they knew the benefits to them and they knew the benefits it would have to the people around them. Whereas for the people coming through the more traditional system, what I was seeing was this um deferment to authority of, oh, well, what do I do next? Yeah, it was a real passive, more much more passive. Learning style. And that translates to the workplace where you see people that are passively wait to be told what to do. And if something goes wrong, they they struggle or they don't know how to jump in and make it happen. And sometimes I see organizations that actually condition this into people. I've been in one of those organizations. I remember very vividly at one point thinking, why is it so hard to get stuff done here? And when I left this organization and years down the track when I started my Brilliance Inspired, I was astounded at how much work I could get done and so quickly. And I was like, what's the difference here? Because I definitely don't have the same level of resourcing. I don't have a team to support me, but yet I'm able to do some things 10 times faster. And when I really reflected, I realized in a lot of my jobs, I spent 50 to 75% of my time negotiating and influencing to do the job that I was employed to do. Now have a think about that. How much of your day is spent convincing someone to just be able to do something that your skill, your experience, your instinct is telling you is the right thing to do. But the reason you can't do it is either because there's very strict hierarchical structures about where decisions can be made and who can press go. And potentially also, or there's an aversion to failure and it's not okay to fail. So you have to kind of get lots of approval and lots of people on board to make sure that we're doing the right thing because, oh my gosh, let's not fail. So these things are so prevalent. And if I come back to schooling, I'm seeing this play out even today. So I was recently watching some junior football. So kids under 10 years old running around playing a match of footy. Now, I don't know all that much about football. I am not the biggest um, you know, weekend warrior that's there every week knowing exactly what's happening. But I did notice something really interesting was that the the younger the kids were, the more they paused. And instead of going with the flow of the game, they just waited for direction. They waited for someone to tell them what to do. And that to me is a sign that we are still teaching our children to take direction from a leader rather than be in a moment and learn how to respond to what's needed based on some guidelines, of course. So our leadership style and our culture can do the same thing. We we we actually train people to wait. And I see this when people come out of environments where they they're not allowed to do anything, they're they're too scared. And I've experienced my this myself. You you get stunted almost and not know where the boundary is and not where know where it's okay to step. And someone who hasn't been in that that environment can just run and make it happen. So we've got to be, as leaders, really aware of where we're generating fear in a system. So that was a really bit of a tangent, but hopefully you're still with me. So why don't more autonomous teams exist? If the true test of leadership is what happens when you're not there, why aren't there more of these teams? So there's four key factors that need to be in place for this kind of work to begin. The first one is role clarity, and role clarity is something that I see break down so many times in so many different places. It's often a root cause of people's interpersonal issues, of people underperforming, all sorts of things. So role clarity is critical, and I often

Four Conditions For Real Autonomy

Jolynne Rydz 26:00

don't see it done well. The second thing is we spend so much money on developing leaders in formal positions of leadership and management, but very, very little is spent on developing self-leadership in individual contributors. And I think the reason for that is they haven't found me. I'm a shameless plug here that I do have a program that's very scalable and that is intended to develop self-leadership in organizations across all levels of stuff. And I think that's something that's been missing is how to develop that at scale without it costing the same amount that you would put through your more senior leaders through a leadership capability program. So when people have self-leadership, this is so important. When people have self-leadership, what it means is they can manage their own emotions. They have emotional intelligence. When things go wrong, they can respond instead of reacting out of fear in the moment. They can also take initiative, just take something and run with it without waiting for direction. And there's so much more in self-leadership, another passion of mine. So the third thing that needs to be there for this work to begin is we need to have a servant's heart. And I believe that needs to be at all levels, but most importantly at the leadership level. If that leader is there for status and entitlement and the money only, then that's usually a problem because they are the ones that often are fearful of being replaced because their status, their title is attached to their identity. And that makes it very hard to serve the people that you're here to serve. So servant's heart being, you know, I am here to do what I can to empower the people around me. And I don't have to take the limelight. Sure, I can if I want to, but that's not the sole reason why I'm in this position. And over the years, I've become very good at picking who is in it for their ego because, and that might be unintentional. They don't even realize their ego is driving them, versus who is here to serve because they can see and get fulfillment from empowering those around them. And the fourth thing that's absolutely critical for this kind of work to succeed is psychological safety. People have to feel safe at work. They have to feel safe and like they have the option to bring their whole self. They have to feel safe to try things and give things a go. They have to feel safe to have open conversations about what's okay, what's not okay, and give and receive feedback. So if any of this is making you uncomfortable, great. Then I maybe we're pushing up against an unconscious fear. And it is a natural fear as a leader that we don't want to feel like we're not needed, and that's not the case. What I'm trying to say is that this is an evolution. To see this as an opportunity, how can you activate leadership at all levels so that things happen when you're not there and they happen brilliantly? All right, so I've talked about what you need as a precondition for this to happen. And now I want to share how we pass the true test of great leadership. So, what are some things that we can put in place? So the first thing we can focus on is clarity over control. So if one of our biggest fears is if I don't control things, what's going to happen? We need to look at that. Yeah, we need to get someone to help us with that. We need to identify where that's playing out and where it's it's actually influencing the teams and the way we lead and what kind of impact that's having. So clarity gives us certainty around the boundaries and the expectations of what happens

Clarity Confidence Autonomy To Close

Jolynne Rydz 29:53

and what can happen. So it's so so important that people have clarity so they can act intentionally without having to check with you. And so this is not about short-term results, but it's that about long-term capability and uplift. If we let go of control and focus on clarity, we're empowering people to make better decisions and lead without us being there. So the second thing you can do to pass the test of true leadership is to choose confidence over compliance. Yeah. Where are you seeing compliance happen? Because compliance just it's transactional, it just instantly saps energy from a team and a system. But where you have someone with confidence coming in, knowing that what they have clarity and what the job is, and then they have the confidence to do it, wow, amazing things can happen. And if you want to dive deeper into this, the research around self-efficacy from Bandura is uh is amazing to dive into. How to do this is to have less rules and more focus on what is our shared purpose here and how do we how do we build people's confidence where it's lacking? And so the third thing you can do is to choose autonomy over dependency. So be a hunter. Where are the dependencies in your system? And is it you? Is it is it on a person? And is it critical or is it habitual? Because some dependencies are important, right? There's there are people at certain levels of an organization because they are there to make certain decisions over risk and what happens and strategy, all of those things. But I want you to ask yourself, is it critical or habitual? And what are you afraid will happen if you remove the need for your approval? So the opportunity here is that if the decisions are being made in a decentralized way, it releases you to do the real strategic work. So as a summary, the three things you can do are clarity over control, confidence over compliance, and autonomy over dependency. And as we wrap up today, I want to leave you with one simple question to sit with, which is what happens when we're not in the room? Because the true test of great leadership isn't found in our presence, it's revealed in our absence. It's the clarity we've created, it's the trust that we've spent time building and the capability we've grown in the people around us and the people we serve. And so when we learn to step back, our teams step forward. And that's where real leadership lives.