Whether you’re a CEO, CFO, Head of HR, or in any strategic advisory role, your job is to guide, not control. If that doesn’t sit right with you, you might want to revisit an earlier blog I wrote.

Once you accept that your role is to guide, the next question is: “How should I guide?”

You can pop in with some direction, then step back and check in only when needed. You can provide guidance and keep a close eye. Or you can land somewhere in between. Which is best?

The instinctive answer is: “It depends.” And yes, it does. But the best leaders don’t stop there. They move past “it depends” to “In this case, I will do this, because…”

When it comes to guiding – whether you’re steering an organisation as a manager or advising leaders at the top – you can’t go past this simple set of three considerations:

Opportunity – What is the scale of the opportunity being pursued?  The bigger the opp, the more you should care that you get your hands-on vs hands-off guidance precisely right.

Capability – Do you and/or the business have the capability to grasp the opportunity?  The greater the capability the more you should be hands-off.

Appetite – Is this something the organisation should really be caring about?  If the opportunity is going to distract leaders from the bigger game, you should strongly guide decision makers away from it.  If it is on the critical path towards the holy grail, you should strongly guide towards it.

Simplicity of thinking, such as thinking in threes, is so important for fast, agile decision making and for providing clear and credible advice.