The Unflashy Art of Leading Real Teams
What Elon Musk, Bob Iger, and 30 years of practice taught me about team excellence.
Not long ago, a colleague shared their frustrations: misaligned priorities, stalled projects, and the usual mix of politics and obstacles. I asked if they’d raised these issues with their boss or peers. They hadn’t. Their next one-on-one was weeks away, and they rarely met with peers at all. No regular team rhythm, no shared space to surface and solve problems. I found that culture baffling.
It couldn’t be further from how I was trained. Twenty-five years ago, I worked for Steve Williams, a retired Army Colonel who believed in the discipline of the weekly team meeting. Every Wednesday, we gathered to review the work, troubleshoot challenges, and move forward together. I’ve followed that rhythm ever since. Over time, it’s become instinctive: central to how I lead, develop talent, and build trust.
In this week’s Dispatch, I want to explore why that approach is essential to strong teams, how leaders like Elon Musk and Bob Iger embody its core principles, and offer a clear articulation of the guiding principles that make this leadership style enduring.
What Elon Musk gets right about meetings
Recently, I found myself scrolling through X in a dopamine-fueled bout of evening free time, a ritual we all know too well. Amid the noise, I stumbled across a short clip of Elon Musk answering a question about employee and team management.
The interviewer asked, “What is the optimum employee management strategy?”
Elon Musk replied, “I don’t know. I just meet with my team and we go around the table and talk about what everyone got done this past week and what they plan to do next week. Then we make some decisions about product design and direction or solve some particular technology problem. They’re quite collegial. It’s not me talking. I talk the least in the meetings.”
Elon’s simple, almost offhand comments stuck with me. Distilled into a few simple guiding principles, you could say that his approach favors:
Being collaborative over hierarchical: Meetings are collegial and flat. Everyone shares progress, ideas, and roadblocks on equal footing.
The leader talks last: Musk speaks sparingly, creating space for the team to lead with substance. It’s a masterclass in active listening.
Weekly accountability: Everyone shares what they did last week and what’s next. No fluff. Just traction.
Decisions through discussion: Design choices and technical direction emerge from dialogue, not top-down decrees.
Bias for solving real problems: The agenda centers on fixing issues, not status theater.
Autonomy by default: By staying quiet, Musk empowers the team to own decisions. It’s trust in action.
This style of leadership mirrors the approach I’ve used in team meetings for nearly 30 years, a style I learned from one of my best bosses, Steve Williams, early in my career. And a style that very few higher education executives I know adopt for themselves.
Iger’s upgrade: shared standards, not shared control
Robert Iger has described his similar approach as “sweating the details together,” a phrase I’ve come to adopt myself. It captures something essential: not just attention to detail, but the shared responsibility for excellence. Iger doesn’t fixate on control; he focuses on creating a culture where teams produce the work, together.
Sweat the details, together: Instead of individual ownership, Iger emphasizes shared scrutiny of the smallest details. Everyone is expected to contribute to refining the work. It’s not about hierarchy, it’s about standards held in common.
Empowerment with accountability: Iger decentralizes authority, especially among creatives, but stays close to the work. The freedom to innovate comes with the expectation to deliver at the highest level.
Clarity creates confidence: Iger repeats priorities with discipline. Teams don’t waste energy wondering what matters, they already know. It’s alignment as fuel.
Lead visibly, but don’t dominate: Like Musk, Iger listens more than he talks. But he’s also deeply present, using presence and respect to build trust rather than urgency alone.
Respect as strategy: Iger’s teams function not just because they’re smart, but because they’re seen. He leads with integrity, which sustains morale through setbacks and scale.
These two approaches are not flashy or performance theater. For me, they are intuitive habits that feel right, but go beyond comfort or instinct. This style fosters maximal team performance, collective accountability, sharpens practical problem-solving, and demands the discipline of sharing real progress. It cuts past criticisms of micromanagement or wasted time. It’s about succeeding or failing as a team.
From instinct to intention: being explicit about my style
I’ve long led by feel, drawing on experience, urgency, and trust, but I’ve never written down what makes the way we work both effective and intentional. Below is my attempt to define what “sweating the details together” means to me, and to lay out with clarity the habits and expectations I believe sustain shared excellence.
Show up prepared. Every meeting is a work session, not a performance. Bring clarity, data, and progress. Preparation isn’t optional, it’s what moves the room forward and honors everyone’s time.
Own the outcome, not just the task. We’re not here to complete steps. We’re here to achieve results. Everyone is expected to think systemically and take accountability for whether the work actually delivers.
Speak with clarity, not theater. We don’t reward vague updates or corporate speak. We expect exposition: clear reasoning, well-structured insight, and plain language that helps others make sense of what’s happening and why.
Leadership listens first. The role of leadership isn’t to dominate the room, it’s to listen, connect the dots, and offer framing that helps the team align. Direction comes from the work; our job is to shape context and clarity.
Debate without ego. Healthy disagreement is expected. Everyone, regardless of title, is encouraged to speak up, challenge assumptions, and test ideas. We defend the work, not our pride.
Trust is built through follow-through. We don’t blindside. We don’t withhold. We say what we’re going to do, and we do it. Reliability is the currency of trust, and it’s how we lead: up, down, and across.
Develop the next generation. We don’t limit the table to senior voices. Our meetings include direct reports and future leaders, because the best way to grow talent is to bring people into real work, not abstract training.
No devices, no passengers. We collaborate face to face. Paper and pen sharpen focus; laptops dull it. If you’re in the room, you’re contributing. Presence isn’t symbolic, it’s participatory.
Precision is a team sport. Everyone scans for friction points, catches loose ends, and helps refine the work. Excellence doesn’t belong to one role; it’s built through shared scrutiny of the smallest details, together.
Problems are everyone’s responsibility. If something’s broken or off track, you raise it. We don’t wait for someone else to notice. The work improves when the whole team owns the system, not just their slice of it.
These principles aren’t about control, but coherence. They help us build trust, sustain momentum, and hold each other to standards that matter. They create the conditions where excellence becomes a shared habit, not a heroic exception.
The bottom line
Robert Iger reminds us “excellence is a collection of very small things,” not large ones. Sweating the details together means we show up fully, think beyond ourselves, and stay anchored in the belief that how we work is just as important as what we deliver. It’s leadership rooted in presence, not performance, and it scales because it’s real.
That’s culture to be proud of, but more importantly, it’s how genuine progress is made.