Leadership has a branding problem.
Somewhere along the way, we started confusing leadership with authority.
We assume the person with the title is the leader. The person at the front of the room. The one making the decisions. The one with the office, the rank, the corner parking spot, or the biggest paycheck.
But if you’ve spent any amount of time around truly exceptional leaders, you realize pretty quickly that’s not how it works.
The best leaders don’t spend their time reminding people they’re in charge. Most of the time, they barely have to.
That lesson hit me while sitting across from Dave Doyle on the CrossFit Rife Podcast.
Dave has spent more than three decades in the Navy. Today, he’s responsible for roughly 800 people at a Fleet Readiness Center in Norfolk. Eight hundred people. Different departments. Different personalities. Different backgrounds. Different problems. Different priorities. If anyone has earned the right to pull rank, it’s probably him.
Instead, when I asked him what the purpose of a leader is, he didn’t talk about accountability. He didn’t talk about authority. He didn’t talk about being the smartest person in the room.
He said something that’s stuck with me ever since.
A leader’s job is to give people a purpose, establish expectations, and then remove the barriers preventing them from accomplishing the mission.
That’s a completely different way to think about leadership.
It shifts the question from: “How do I get people to do what I want?” to “What’s getting in their way?”
That sounds simple. It isn’t.
Most Leaders Accidentally Become Bottlenecks
Here’s what I see happen in businesses all the time.
An owner starts the company because they’re really good at something. Maybe they’re a great coach. Maybe they’re an incredible technician. Maybe they’re just willing to outwork everyone else.
Eventually the business grows. Now they have employees.
Instead of changing how they lead, they simply keep doing more of what got them there. More decisions. More approvals. More oversight. More control.
Without realizing it, they become the biggest bottleneck in the company.
Every question has to come through them. Every decision waits for them. Every problem lands on their desk.
From the outside, it looks like they’re indispensable. From the inside, they’ve built an organization that can’t function without them.
That’s management. Not leadership.
Leadership is creating an environment where other people can succeed without constantly needing your permission.
Dave described something that every business owner should hear. When he took over his current command, he didn’t walk in trying to solve fifty problems. He focused on a handful of priorities and built the organization around them because he believes large organizations can only execute a few important initiatives exceptionally well. Try to chase ten priorities, and you’ll end up accomplishing none of them.
That idea applies just as much to a CrossFit gym as it does to an organization with hundreds of employees.
Owners constantly ask me what they should focus on next. Marketing. Retention. Sales. Coach development. Systems. Technology. AI.
The answer is almost never “all of the above.” It’s figuring out the next constraint and removing it.
Because that’s what leaders do. They remove constraints. They don’t create new ones.
Titles Can Force Compliance. They Can’t Create Trust.
One of my favorite moments from our conversation wasn’t about strategy. It was about something much simpler.
Dave admitted that earlier in his career, he tried to lead through authority. His mindset was essentially: “I’m in charge. This is how we’re going to do it.”
He’s not proud of it. He openly talked about those mistakes because they taught him something far more valuable than success ever could.
People may comply because of your title. They don’t trust you because of it.
Trust is earned in much smaller moments. It’s earned when you do what you said you were going to do. It’s earned when you advocate for your people before you advocate for yourself. It’s earned when they know you’ll keep your word, especially when it’s inconvenient.
One of the first promises Dave made after taking command was restoring time for physical training. The policy already existed. The people simply hadn’t experienced it.
Some of his own leadership team pushed back. “We’re behind.” “We don’t have time.” “We should wait.”
His answer was simple: “They’ve been hearing that for a year.”
So they made the change immediately.
That decision wasn’t really about workouts. It was about credibility. It told hundreds of people: “You matter.” Not someday. Today.
That’s how trust gets built. Not through speeches. Through consistency.
Leadership Isn’t About Having the Answers
One thing Dave said stuck with me because it’s the exact opposite of what most people believe leadership looks like.
He told me he doesn’t consider himself the smartest technical person in the room. In fact, he estimated he’s probably around the 80th percentile in technical knowledge – not the top one percent. He knows where to find the answers, but he’s spent far more time becoming a better communicator than becoming the world’s foremost expert on policy.
Think about that for a second.
The man leading an organization of roughly 800 people isn’t trying to win the contest for “most technically knowledgeable.” He’s trying to become the person who gets the most out of the people around him.
Those are two completely different skill sets.
Somewhere along the way, especially in business, we’ve convinced ourselves that leadership means becoming indispensable.
It doesn’t.
Leadership is making yourself progressively less indispensable.
Because if every decision requires you, if every problem needs you, if every relationship depends on you, you haven’t built a team. You’ve built a dependency.
The best leaders aren’t the center of every solution. They’re the people quietly creating more leaders around them.
Coaching Taught Me the Same Lesson
This is something we talk about all the time inside CrossFit.
A mediocre coach thinks coaching is about talking. A great coach realizes coaching is mostly about observing.
If I’m coaching a class and I spend the entire hour barking cues at twenty people, I’ve probably missed the point.
Instead, I’m watching. Who’s frustrated? Who’s confused? Who’s capable of more than they think? Who’s checked out today? Who’s one cue away from finally getting it?
The cue isn’t the goal. The athlete is.
Dave made a comment that immediately reminded me of coaching. He talked about spending years learning how different people receive information because one style of communication doesn’t work for everyone. The goal isn’t saying the “right” thing. The goal is saying it in a way the other person can actually hear.
That’s coaching. That’s parenting. That’s leadership.
We spend so much time worrying about whether we’re delivering the perfect message that we forget to ask whether it’s actually being received.
I’ve said this to our coaching staff for years: There isn’t always a perfect cue. There’s only the cue that works for that athlete.
Leadership works exactly the same way.
The Most Important Question a Leader Can Ask
Business owners constantly ask me questions like: “How do I get my staff to care more?” “How do I get my coaches to take ownership?” “How do I get people to step up?”
They’re fair questions. But I think they’re often the wrong questions.
Instead of asking, “Why aren’t they doing more?” try asking, “What have I built that’s making it difficult for them to succeed?”
That’s a much harder question because it points the spotlight back at us.
Maybe expectations aren’t clear. Maybe they don’t have enough training. Maybe they don’t know why their work matters. Maybe they don’t feel safe making decisions. Maybe every time they make one, we override it.
You can’t ask people to take ownership while simultaneously refusing to let go of control. Those two things can’t coexist.
Culture Is Built in the Small Decisions
One of my favorite stories from the episode had nothing to do with leadership books or military strategy. It started with pull-ups.
Dave challenged his people. If they beat him in a strict pull-up competition, there was a reward attached to it.
Nine people showed up. All nine beat him.
By itself, that’s a funny story. But that’s not what mattered.
What happened afterward is what mattered.
Departments started installing pull-up bars in their offices. People started knocking out pull-ups throughout the workday. Groups challenged each other.
Fitness spread through the organization – not because someone made it mandatory, but because someone created an environment where it became normal.
That’s culture.
Culture isn’t what you write on the wall. Culture is what people do when you’re not standing there.
The same thing happens inside a gym. You don’t create community by saying, “We’re a community.” You create it because members start grabbing coffee together after class. They check on someone who missed a week. They celebrate each other’s wins. They remember birthdays. They introduce themselves to new people before the coach has to.
That’s culture. Leadership simply creates the conditions where culture can grow.
Respond. Don’t React.
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Dave what lesson he wishes he’d learned twenty years earlier.
His answer was immediate: Respond. Don’t react.
Simple. Not easy.
I’ve failed at this more times than I’d like to admit. Every coach has. Every business owner has. Every parent has.
Someone asks the same question for the tenth time. A client sends an email that rubs you the wrong way. An employee drops the ball. Your first instinct is to react.
Sometimes loudly. Sometimes sarcastically. Sometimes with an email you immediately regret sending.
The older I get, the more I realize leadership is often measured in seconds.
Can you create enough space between what happens and how you respond?
Because once words leave your mouth, you don’t get to decide how long someone carries them.
Dave said something else that hit me. He talked about giving people grace because we’ve all said things out of emotion that we wish we could take back.
That’s not weakness. That’s maturity.
The Leader Everyone Wants to Follow
When people think about leadership, they usually imagine someone standing in front.
I don’t.
I think about someone quietly walking around removing rocks from the path. Making someone else’s job a little easier. Giving people clarity. Creating opportunities. Following through on promises. Helping someone avoid mistakes they already made. Developing people who may eventually surpass them.
That’s leadership. Not because it’s glamorous. Because it lasts.
The best leaders I’ve ever met – from the Navy, from CrossFit, from business – have all shared one thing in common.
When you left a conversation with them, you felt more capable than when you walked in.
That’s the standard.
Not being the smartest person in the room. Not having all the answers. Not winning every argument.
Just leaving people better than you found them.
If you can do that consistently, the title eventually becomes irrelevant. People will follow you anyway.
Listen to the full conversation with Dave Doyle on the CrossFit Rife Podcast HERE to hear the stories behind these lessons and why leadership, fitness, and service are more connected than most people realize.
If you’re in the Virginia Beach area and you’re looking for a gym that develops people – not just athletes – we’d love to meet you.
Schedule a free consultation HERE.
