Score your leadership system, and use rest to test it

1. The half that sits with you

This is the next piece of the operating system, and one bound up more closely with you, above all when you are small: some of it, and it might be all of it, falls on you for now. Where you do have leaders, it covers them as well as you. These are five practices picked out here as the ones that make great leaders, and they are what stop you from topping out at the level you have reached.

2. The five practices of leadership

1. Direction. Keep telling people which way the company is heading and the reason it matters, so each person can line up the day's work with the vision for the long run. The aim is that the team sees how its daily work fits that vision and builds toward it. A vision people can picture, and want a place in, is the subject of SOP 262 — Write a vision so big your team's own visions fit inside.
2. Resources. Get ahead of obstacles and clear them, and make sure the team has the tools, the staff, the training and the backing it needs to get the work done without being held up. It is seen a lot of times: a leader's job is to gather resources, whatever they turn out to be, going out to fetch them and bringing them back for the team.
3. Autonomy. Train the team to decide for itself, and trust people to own results without asking your leave for everything. As questions: does your team actually get autonomy from you? Are the other practices far enough along for people to value it and truly feel they have it: able to act without you, and not dependent on you?
4. Long-term thinking. Decide by what builds value that compounds over three years or more, rather than by what makes this quarter's numbers look best. It is very important and often missing; a second figure puts the span at three or five years. You can read how mature a founder or chief executive is from the stretch of time they talk in: if they say they are weighing the next few weeks, that is one thing; the next five years is another. Is the long view always right? No; the world changes a great deal and nobody knows. The view here is to keep it anyway, because at least you know you are thinking long term, toward what everything is building up to, and that lets you make choices that might be less enjoyable now but are better later.
5. Rest. Guard your capacity, physical, mental and emotional, so that you lead with clear thinking, sound judgment and composure, not from burnout and snap reactions. Rest comes up elsewhere too: the stamina trait, in which rest is half of conditioning, is section 6 of SOP 264 — Rate yourself layer by layer on a pyramid of leadership traits. Think of the best leaders you know: they do not arrive running on caffeine (though people sometimes have to), they arrive prepared, rested, ready and conditioned.

3. The fifth practice: rest, or development

Flag: rest or development. The list of practices names the fifth as rest, and the joint audit in section 6 names it rest again. The rating between them names it development instead: growing your people's capacity. One asks about protecting your own capacity; the other asks about growing other people's. This page does not settle which reading is right.

The table in section 4 follows the rating and gives development; section 2 gives rest as the list does.

4. Rate yourself on each practice

Give each practice a score from 1 to 10, and be honest. The table describes a score of 10 and a score of 3; where a second wording differs, it follows in parentheses after "or".

Practice	A score of 10	A score of 3
Direction: where the company is going, with the vision and the strategy	You restate the vision in every major meeting or setting, weekly or more; the team can explain it when you are not there; the strategy is plain and restated in one line: "what we do, to reach what, by when" (or: you have a clear vision)	You raised the vision once, at a kickoff six months back (or: it comes up once in every six months); strategy shifts each month with whatever is urgent; the team cannot say where the company is heading over the long run
Resources: clear the roadblocks, supply the tools	In every one-on-one, each week, you ask what is in the way; obstacles are cleared before they become emergencies; the team is equipped with the tools, training, budget and support the work needs (or: you keep asking people what is blocking or constraining them)	The team is constantly stuck waiting on you; you answer a request by telling people to sort it out themselves; tools and support turn up only after weeks of complaints (or: you are the one blocking and constraining them; you are the problem)
Autonomy: trust the team to decide	The team works at level four or five on the dial of ownership; people decide and tell you afterward instead of asking first; you have trained them in ways of making decisions, not only in doing tasks	Every decision waits for your permission (or: everything does); you sit in every meeting because you feel you must know what is going on; you claim to want autonomy but step in and take control once people make mistakes
Long-term thinking: build for tomorrow as well as today	You put money into systems even when doing so slows the work in the short run (or: because they build momentum for the long run); you hire before the need arrives, not after it; you decide on the effect over three years, not on three months of results	Every decision rests on this quarter's numbers (or: this quarter's sales, or worse, the month's); you are always reacting and fighting fires; you cut spending on people and systems when revenue dips
Development: grow your people's capacity	Key people have formal development plans (or: everybody does); you regularly promote from inside; you put time into coaching, not only into managing	People leave for want of a path to grow (or: a plan for growth); you hire from outside because, you say, nobody inside is ready; you manage tasks instead of building what people can do

The levels of ownership that the autonomy row refers to are set out on SOP 266 — Set each role's level of ownership and train people up the dial. Add the five scores together; the highest possible sum is 50.

5. Read the sum

• Below 30. One reading: you are managing rather than leading, and your company will level off at your own personal capacity. Another: you are probably managing in place of leading, and that is all right: the point is to see where you stand. Why a company stops where its founder stops is set out on SOP 263 — Find where you are the ceiling, then fix what your team mirrors.
• 30 to 40. One reading: you lead at moments but without consistency, so work on your two lowest scores. Another: you probably have some real leadership in you but probably lack consistency, and the work is to become consistent in what you do.
• Above 40. A strong foundation (or: pretty strong). Now turn to developing other leaders, building on what you have so that they repeat your success.

Circle the two lowest. Those two are why the company feels as though it depends on you. Why rate yourself at all: so that this sticks, and is felt, rather than only being read, and so that you ask where you stand and how it applies to your own business.

6. Score both halves side by side

A short audit, timed at 3 minutes, then scores the whole operating system. Rate each practice from 1 to 10, with a management column (expectations, accountability, communication, cadence, recognition) beside a leadership column (direction, resources, autonomy, long-term thinking, rest).

• Circle the two lowest in each column. They are what you build next.
• Be brutal. A score below 7 means that system does not exist and you are just winging it.
• Read what each pair explains. The two lowest on the management side are why execution feels chaotic; the two lowest on the leadership side are why growth feels stuck. Fix them, and everything picks up speed.

Treat it as a starting point: find the lowest pieces on each side and begin there. You might find room to improve on all of them, but pick the very lowest, the two lowest scores, and look at nothing else for now; more than that, in the view here, would be too much to take on at once, when there is already a lot to think about.

7. Take time off, and see what breaks

A week away. In one example, an owner took a week, the first in six years, fully away from work, with no team chat and no email. For years the owner had believed they could not step away: who would handle this, what if that broke, they needed the owner. That belief came from ego, not duty: a belief that no one else could match the owner at the work. The owner came back expecting either a great deal had broken or nothing had. Instead plenty had gone wrong (someone important resigned, and every one of the company's ads was switched off), and the team had dealt with all of it without the owner. Nobody called. That was not because the owner did not matter; it was because systems were at last in place that worked without the owner there.

What it taught. A business that stops working when you step out is not yet a business in this sense; it still depends on you. The other side: once it can carry on in your absence, your job is done. You and the business are separate things: you build it, and you are not it.

Time away as a test. The view here is that a break from the business lets you see where its systems are weak. It is often advised here to take a week off, or a vacation, to find out what breaks: you will not know unless you try, and it is about the quickest way to find out. Another spell away from work, one the same owner had no choice about, showed the holes in the business far sooner than being inside it would have.

Why it pays. You come back sharper, and protecting rest is how you lead for decades rather than only for years. It is also why stepping out for space matters, even for a day: you need time spent building the business, not only time spent working inside it.

8. When the work thoughts will not stop

How do you quiet your mind during rest, so that work stops filling it? It is a loop that feeds itself.

Why the thoughts get louder. If all you ever do is work, your brain learns to produce work thoughts. Interrupt that with rest and the brain protests, because brains like things predictable. So when you first rest, the thoughts grow louder than before; you get irritated, give up and go back to work, since you do not know how to make them stop. Stopping reinforces the brain's view that resting is a bad idea.

What changes them. What you have to do is simply understand this; the view here is that knowing the science side of it is important. Your tolerance for something rises the more you are exposed to it. As your tolerance for the thoughts rises, the thoughts themselves fall away. They will still come the first few times you rest. Keep resting and they fade, until in the end you no longer have them.

One owner's case. A coach warned one owner that the first days off would go to thinking about work all day; the owner had never been able to rest, and on a day off work was all the owner thought about. These days that no longer happens; on a day off, or even for a few hours, the owner can simply be present. The thoughts stop because you come to see that not working poses no threat; you have trained your brain to know it.

What to do. Nothing is wrong with you; everyone goes through this. The question is whether you get through it: rest while the thoughts are there, and put up with them until you reach the far side, where you can rest without them. Stop resting and you start the cycle over.

9. Choose rest that restores you

Does learning new skills or reading count as rest? Yes, in effect: rest is restoring yourself, and the view here is that this is the heart of it. Ask how this time can restore you; the answer is different for each person. For one owner it is things like walking outside, reading, talking with people and seeing friends, and making something creative, such as writing, which gets thoughts out of that owner's head and can be restorative (the owner cannot do it often). You might prefer to be alone. It is up to you to settle what that is for you. The question to ask yourself: when do you feel most present, and when do you feel content? Those, one would say, are the best two words for it.

10. Finding a coach

How do you hire a personal coach and know it is the right one? The answer comes with a caveat: this is not really known. One would say referrals are always the best route, if you have people you trust: people with coaches they really like, or coaches who have worked with people you admire, which one would say is great. The right coach is one with whom things get better, not worse. Whether this means a coach for you or for the business is not established on this page. Progress, one would say, is the first measure, and the view here is that the best coaches can help you change a lot in a short time rather than a long one, which, one would say, makes it worth looking for.

11. What this page does not decide for you

• Which fifth practice to rate. The flag in section 3 stands.
• The scores in between. Each practice is described at 10 and at 3 only. What a middle score looks like: Not established on this page.
• How far ahead to think. Two figures appear for this: three years or more, and three or five years. This page gives no single figure for the horizon.
• How long the work thoughts last. This page gives no figure for it beyond the first few times you rest.
• When to score yourself again. Not established on this page.

12. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Score yourself from 1 to 10 on direction, resources, autonomy and long-term thinking, and on the fifth practice (section 3 sets out its names), honestly
2	Add up the five and find your band in section 5
3	Circle your two lowest scores
4	In the joint audit, rate the management and leadership practices side by side, circle the two lowest in each column, and read any score below 7 as a system that does not exist yet
5	Start with those lowest scores alone, and leave the others for now
6	Take time off, as is often advised here, and see what breaks while you are away
7	When work thoughts crowd a rest day, keep resting through them until they fade
8	Choose rest by what leaves you present and content

13. What this page does not cover

The management practices, rated the same way, belong to SOP 271. Conditioning as a leadership trait is on SOP 264, and the founder as the limit on growth on SOP 263. Growing each person along a clear path is on SOP 270 — Onboard every hire against a written plan, then keep them growing. Personal health is not covered on this page.