The Two Roles of Leadership: Hub and Spoke
The choices are endless—hands-on, hands-off, everything in between
Sitting down to decide where to focus your energy as a leader is genuinely difficult. Are you the hub of the wheel, ensuring everything spins in the right direction? Or are you just one of the spokes, part of the great collective?
Everyone starts their career as a practitioner. Everyone does the work before they manage it. This creates a natural pull toward the details, a comfort zone in the weeds as a spoke.
But as you grow, you realize something critical: diving into details (while occasionally necessary for planning) usually demotivates your team. This is when you need to be the hub, making the organization turn in unison, everyone moving in the same direction.
Over twenty years ago, as a young VP managing a digital team, I visited Google’s campus in Silicon Valley. Walking through those offices, seeing how people were treated, the culture they’d built... it was game changing for how I thought about leading people. That’s where it clicked: take care of your people, and they’ll take care of you. My number one responsibility as a leader became clear: prioritize my team’s needs, ensure they feel valued and proud, and motivate them to win.
Leadership as Art
I love leadership because it’s an art, not a science. I never excelled at fact-based learning. But ideas? The development and evolution of ideas? That’s when my brain came alive. The challenge of organizing and motivating people to climb from one side of the mountain to the other... that’s what I was built for.
Great leaders know their organization intimately. They understand when to step in and when to step back. They know what makes their people tick.
The Dance Between Hub and Spoke
Our agency ran on culture. I worked every day to uphold and evolve it as we grew. I learned to start as the hub of the wheel, then recognize when it was time to become just another spoke. To get in line and be the last one to eat lunch.
People want clear direction on how you’re leading them, but they also appreciate when you can simply be one of them. So to keep the car between the lines, learn how to be both the hub and the spoke.
Jim