Leadership As a Valuation Factor (Reason #3 - Channelling)

Schopenhauer wrote that talent hits a target no one else can hit, while genius hits a target no one else can see. Most leadership content is about talent - working harder, moving faster, doing more. Channelling is about the other kind of sight. It's the ability to look at a hundred competing priorities and see the one that actually matters.

Tim Ferriss put a name to the opposite of this. Busyness, he said, is a form of laziness - lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Activity feels like progress because it's visible and it's tiring. Discernment rarely feels like either. It looks, from the outside, like doing less. What it actually is: finding the single domino that, once knocked down, lays out the rest in exactly the order you wanted.

Finding that domino requires availability. Not just physical presence, but mental and emotional presence too - and that availability comes from a leader's state, not their intelligence or their calendar. A grounded leader will make herself avaialble to be fully present in the single meeting that actually matters, rather than frantically attending (and therefore being semi-present across) seven. The same discernment works in reverse. A grounded leader can recognise a heated meeting two levels below their pay grade for what it is, and stay out of it entirely. A reactive leader does the opposite on both counts - diluted across too many rooms, while getting pulled into ones they never needed to enter.

There's a line from the TV show Suits that captures this better than most leadership books manage. Edward Darby - Founding Partner of a British Firm with which the American firm is merging - is found mid-crossword by Harvey, who asks if he doesn't have any work to do.

"My dear fellow," Darby replies, "if I have to do work, then I'm not doing my job."

He's not describing laziness. He's describing a leader whose actual job is discernment in place of delivery - and who's disciplined enough to stay out of the tasks that would keep him from seeing the one thing that matters.

I once coached a senior leadership team where every member, individually and separately, described the same moment. None of them had been in the room for it. It was a meeting between several executives that none of the SLT attended - and yet the way those people left that room reverberated across the entire office floor. Nobody had been told what was said. Everyone could feel the state those executives had left it in. It moved through the building without a single conversation happening.

That's the multiplier hiding in this. A leader's availability doesn't just improve their own decisions. It determines what they're physically, mentally, and emotionally equipped to bring to their teams - and a team can feel the difference between a leader who is genuinely present and one who is merely in the room. Get this right, and the effect compounds outward, well beyond whatever decision the leader was actually making.

Effort that reaches the customer, and effort that exists in the first place, both matter. But neither means much if it isn't aimed at the right target. Channelling is what makes sure it is.