Why You Can’t Scale Delivery Without Focused Leadership
- Darren Emery
- May 5
- 4 min read
Executive Attention is the Hidden Bottleneck Holding Back Transformation
The Real Constraint Isn’t Funding or Headcount. It’s Focus.
When delivery slows, most execs reach for familiar levers:
“Do we need more people?”
“Should we invest in better tools?”
“Is it time for another reorg?”
But rarely do they ask the better question:
“What are we actually paying attention to?”
Here’s the hard truth:
Your organisation can’t move faster than your leadership’s ability to focus.
And in most enterprises, executive attention isn’t just stretched – it’s breaking. Fragmented across too many initiatives, spread too thin across too many priorities.
As Stephen Bungay, author of The Art of Action, puts it:
“The role of a leader is not to tell people what to do, but to create the conditions where they can succeed.”
But direction requires clarity. And clarity takes focus.
Leadership Attention: The Invisible Bottleneck
There’s a cognitive ceiling to how much any senior leadership team can truly steer.
But that doesn’t stop most from trying.
So what happens?
Leadership tries to lead everything.
Middle managers spend hours preparing updates for steering groups that barely remember what was agreed last time.
Teams spin in circles managing upwards instead of solving problems.
The result?
A backlog of half-approved “top priorities”
A culture of signalling over substance
A delivery system running at half-speed while leadership debates the plan
According to McKinsey, executives spend just 9% of their time on strategic direction. (Yes, the same group expected to lead agile transformation and increase delivery velocity.)
And when everything is marked as urgent, nothing gets done well.
Why It Matters
You can’t empower teams while disempowering decisions.
If the executive team is stuck in budget reviews and chasing status, don’t be surprised when product delivery stalls.
Worse still - when direction is unclear, teams look upward for answers.
If those answers don’t come, they either wait, or guess…
…quietly betting on which one will be the top priority for leadership in the next board meeting.
Execution doesn’t follow strategy. It follows attention.
And when leadership focus fragments, so does everything else.
If You’re a Senior Exec…
If you're a CEO, COO, Chief Transformation Officer, or Head of Delivery scaling delivery across the enterprise and trying to increase throughput and clarity, know this:
The real constraint isn’t on the delivery floor - it’s in the boardroom.
Where Does Executive Attention Go?
Try asking this at your next leadership meeting:
“How do we decide what deserves our attention this week?”
Here are a few anti-patterns that regularly sabotage strategic alignment and executive effectiveness:
🧯 Everything Is Urgent
You’ve got 12 “strategic” initiatives and all of them are business-critical.
Nobody believes it. Teams tune out the noise and bet on survival.
🌀 No Clear Ownership
Initiatives have five owners and fifteen stakeholders.
Congratulations—prioritisation is now everyone’s problem and no one’s responsibility.
🪞 Exec Meetings Focus on Reporting, Not Decisions
If your leadership cadence is just reviewing RAG statuses, you’re already too late.
That’s scoreboard watching—not strategy.
Scaling Delivery: What Actually Works?
To move faster, you need to reclaim executive attention as a strategic asset.
Here’s how:
1. Limit Strategic Work in Progress
If you’ve got more “number one” priorities than leadership team members, you’ve already lost.
Set a hard cap: No more than 3 strategic focus areas per quarter. Then actually commit to them. This is the foundation of strategic portfolio management.
2. The One-Hour Leadership Reset
Create a weekly habit. Just one hour.
It’s not a meeting - it’s a discipline.
🕒 The Weekly Agenda:
What do we need to focus on this week?
What’s in the way of progress?
Where is attention drifting?
Over time, this cadence becomes your operating system.Because alignment isn’t a quarterly deck. It’s a weekly practice.
3. Cascade Alignment, Not Tasks
Executives shouldn’t prescribe solutions - they should clarify outcomes.
Define what success looks like, then trust empowered teams to figure out how to get there.
That’s outcome-based leadership.
Bonus: Shift From Updates to Impact
Swap status meetings for outcome conversations.
Move from “What did we do?” to “What did it change?”
When teams engage in regular outcome check-ins, they start thinking like leaders.
Ask:
What problem are we solving?
What signals are we seeing?
What have we discovered that might change direction?
This isn’t about reporting.
It’s about meaning, learning, and adaptive execution.
Final Thoughts: Attention Is a Strategic Asset
In an age of complexity and constant disruption, focus is the new competitive advantage.
Speed doesn’t come from effort. It comes from removing drag.
As a senior leader, your job isn’t to do the work.
It’s to make sure the work gets done - by giving it your best attention, not your leftover time.
Your teams aren’t struggling because they’re not working hard enough.
They’re struggling because they’re working on too many things, with too little clarity.
And the only people who can fix that?
Leadership.
Because if you’re trying to lead everything, you’re leading nothing.
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