Key leadership principles to generate business growth
Explore how high-performing leaders drive growth, ignite innovation, and inspire teams to excel—even when under extreme pressure.
What sets a good leader apart from a high-performing one? Well, the right leader doesn’t just keep your organization afloat—they set it on fire in the best way possible.
Over the last few years, as an executive search firm, we've seen a reckoning in the leadership ranks of the technology industry.
While the waters were high, making the right decisions and performing was relatively easy: almost anything you did seemed to work out well. As the market levels dropped, many were caught standing with their pants down.
We hear it again and again when speaking to HR: "They were great when business was booming—but now that the market is tougher, they're completely lost."
So, we asked ourselves what set those leaders apart who were able to adapt and withstand the pressure and changes in the market from the ones who couldn't?
Every successful organization has its own take on what leadership principles are important. But there are some that come up repeatedly. We're diving into these three powerful principles that show up again and again. These are not abstract theories, but actionable strategies drawn from real-world examples and hands-on experience interviewing some of the most accomplished leaders in the world.
Explore how high-performing leaders drive growth, ignite innovation, and inspire teams to excel—even when under extreme pressure.
Principle 1: Lean & Innovative by Default
We spoke with Teal Frost, Talent Partner at Hummingbird Ventures, a leading seed investor backing exceptional founders. We asked her what leadership traits she believes have been most impactful in the past few years. Her thoughts align closely with ours:
"I think that if you made it or not (as in, you were laid off), there’s a heavy dose of humility and adaptability involved. They are obviously applied in different ways - getting a team through a rough time vs being on the hunt in a terrible market."
We see humility and adaptability as operating lean and, through that, staying innovative. Top leaders are comfortable operating within an environment with tight constraints and minimal resources. Importantly, even when times are good, they stick to this principle of leanness rigorously, recognizing that this doesn't just deliver higher ROIs but also breeds innovation. Innovation is not just in terms of finding creative solutions—DeepSeek anyone?—but also in terms of being able to adjust to market trends quickly because your team isn't bloated.
This alone separated the pack in the growth-stage tech market in 2022 when interest rates changed and money was no longer cheap. While some organizations found it easy to switch gears and become profitable or improve profitability because frugality and lean operations were baked into their core (take Revolut posting record profits or Lime's turnaround as great examples), other companies were left scrambling. Many of those are still struggling today, often having to reboot their approach to growth. If your default mode to solve a problem is to spend your way out of it, your team and culture needed a hard reset—and the experience you built as a leader was no longer relevant to the new market context.
But efficiency isn’t just about innovation; it’s about being proficient with your numbers and understanding the underlying business drivers. Efficiency comes by being in touch with the data that matters to the organization. This dispassionate approach also means high-performing leaders can cut low-performing investments, make faster decisions, and double down on areas with a high potential. They're constantly testing and iterating and more than willing to kill their darlings if needed.
You see the link between efficiency and innovation time and again. The world's top organizations like Meta, Amazon, or Microsoft have all tightened their organizational structures, increasing Free Cash Flow and posting record profits—all while taking part in one of the most demanding innovation races the world has ever seen: AI. Similarly, back in 2022, Amazon's FCF was in the negative, and the financial press was all over the stock, saying the company was struggling without Jeff Bezos’ leadership. Turns out the leadership principles of Amazon, one of which is frugality, run deeper in the company than just the CEO layer. The company is posting record FCF levels today, released top AI models, and is implementing AI very successfully across the business.
Principle 2: Set Big Visions, but "Milk the Cows Every Day"
"People lower their standards in an effort to move things along and get things off their desks. Don't do it. Fight that impulse every step of the way." Amp It Up by Frank Slootman.
High-performing leaders don’t just set goals; they challenge the limits of what’s possible, ignite innovation, and drive progress. They define audacious long-term objectives and then keep the short-term urgency and bias to action going, in line with their data-driven approach. This leads to measurable outcomes.
When Revolut was just a Series A start-up, the ambition was to build a global $100bn digital bank. Over the last 10 years, this North Star hasn't changed at all. It's a compelling vision that galvanizes employees and pulls the team together behind a common cause and larger ambition.
However, alone, this would be just an unrealistic pipe dream. Unrealistic targets can backfire, demoralize your teams, and hinder progress. Frustration, burnout, and decreased motivation are just the visible parts of the iceberg. Your employees are also less productive, less willing to adopt a transformation mindset, and more disengaged and demoralized. Consider the case of Nokia, once a giant in mobile manufacturing. To adapt to the new generation of mobile phones and stay competitive, the top management, lacking technical expertise, set unachievable targets. Worried about not meeting their quarterly objectives, they started intimidating middle managers for a perceived lack of ambition. It resulted in organizational fear and led the middle management to lie, accelerating Nokia’s fall.
What makes a grand vision believable is the short-term urgency and execution prowess behind it, leading to day-to-day measurable progress and improvements. It needs to start small before it can compound. That's why, for a long time at Booking.com (another Free Cash Flow beast of a company), one of the main principles was to "Milk the Cows Every Day"—instilling a hard-working culture focused on the now.
Top leaders communicate the bigger picture but then focus the team on the immediate, measurable milestone that needs to be achieved.
Principle 3: Empower by being extremely hands-on
Conventional wisdom often promotes decentralization as the key to scaling and running larger organizations. The idea is decentralizing decision-making creates a culture of ownership and accountability, empowering employees to see organizational goals as their own. Thus, leaders are advised to hire top talent, point their team in a direction, and "creatively" let them figure out what they think is best. This approach is intended to create agents of change, enabling initiatives to scale sustainably and effectively.
However, this strategy lacks some important details. Without clear alignment and a leader who ensures people are following the same path, this is a recipe for everyone rowing in different directions. You can be data-driven and great at execution, but if you're all pushing in different directions, it won't matter. In fact, the more you decentralize and give freedom to your employees, the more you need to ensure they are aligned with your vision.
Brian Chesky, co-founder of Airbnb, highlights the limitations of this traditional management—what he calls manager mode. Instead, he provides an alternative approach—referred to as founder mode—which allows him to remain deeply involved in critical decisions.
You can love or hate the term and disagree with it to varying degrees, but what seems indisputable is his approach to ensuring the team is completely aligned with his vision and priorities before empowering them to act. That alignment usually begins with close collaboration, working together to precisely iron out the details, with Brian being very hands-on and only then stepping back when he feels his report and him are locked in on the same target.
In this context, empowerment doesn’t mean stepping back entirely and hoping the team will figure it out; it means empowering teams within a framework of alignment and clarity. That way, with the knowledge that you're pushing in the same direction, your team can take more and more ownership and space to make decisions independently.
Harmonizing the key principles of leadership
The real test of leadership isn’t performance in easy times—it’s the ability to navigate uncertainty and adapt when conditions shift.
By staying lean and innovative, you can build resilience in your organizations, making adaptation second nature rather than a last resort. By setting bold but executable visions, you create clarity and direction without losing sight of the immediate steps needed to get there. By empowering through hands-on alignment, you ensure teams can act creatively within the boundaries of the path you've chosen for your organization.
Let us know if you think we missed a critical trait.
Good luck!
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