Become a Strategist, Not a Schemer
Why owners keep hiring the wrong kind of leader — and how to stop.
You're the owner or CEO of a manufacturing, oil and gas service, or construction firm doing $5M to $100M in sales. You've built a real business. You have managers running operations, sales, and the shop floor. You review numbers weekly, you work hard, and you've gotten this far by hiring capable people.
A few weeks ago I came across a piece in a piece in Michael Lombardi's The Daily Coach on the four types of coaches that college football programs hire. It's about football, but every sentence describes the companies we work with at The Margin Builders. Swap "head coach" for "owner," "GM," or "plant manager," and the picture is identical.
Whenever performance slips, the same pattern repeats. A manager gets fired. The next hire is strong in the exact area the last one was weak. Six to eighteen months later a different weakness shows up and the cycle starts again. Margin stays flat. Turnover stays high. You're spending more time hiring and firing than leading.
The Daily Coach piece names why. Most hires fall into three types, and all three are managers in leader's clothing:
The Schemer is a tactical specialist. Great at one thing — a sales playbook, an operational method, a specific product line. You hire them hoping their specialty will pull the whole company forward. It rarely does.
The Caretaker is the brand-name hire. Impressive résumé, delegates most of the real work, and handles problems by firing someone and bringing in another expert.
The Recruiter is the connector. They know everybody and can fill a roster fast, but they can't build one.
All three are doing things right. None of them are doing the right thing.
So what are you actually missing?
You're hiring managers when what you need is a Strategist.
As Warren Bennis put it, "the manager does things right; the leader does the right thing." A Strategist combines all three of the manager capabilities above and adds the ones that actually matter: anticipating problems, asking the right questions, and developing the people already on the team. They care about the present and the near future. They build something that lasts after they leave. In Jim Collins' language, they are clock builders, not time tellers.
When The Margin Builders runs a margin audit, we aren't looking for a new machine to buy or new software to install. We're looking for the dysfunction that's preventing a team from solving problems they already know about, with tools they already have.
When the owner tells us, "Go fix those folks — they're lazy and they don't listen," we already know where the problem is. It's almost never the front line. It's a manager who has stopped being a strategist, or never was one.
Back to the Future
Here's the tool I use with every leader I coach. I ask them to pick a point in the future — three months, six, twelve — when everything is perfect. Not "better." Perfect.
Then I ask: how did you get there?
Most leaders immediately snap back to the present: "Well, I tried this..." or "I don't know where to start." I stop them. No — this is twelve months from now and everything is perfect. What happened? We stay in the future and work backwards, step by step, until the plan is on paper.
That's the difference between a plan and a wish. And it's the difference between a manager and a strategist. Bryar and Carr describe this same mechanism at Amazon in Working Backwards: start from the defined end state and work your way back to today.
Leaders who do this start seeing the present differently. They stop reacting to the latest fire. They start building the team that prevents the next one. Software helps. A new CNC machine helps. But the tools don't run themselves — your leaders do.
I've seen this in my own companies and in the companies we work with. Safety jumps on an oil and gas rig. Downtime drops on a manufacturing line. Millions show up in savings and new sales. Every single time, the change started with a leader who stopped scheming and started strategizing.
What to do this week
Close your laptop for fifteen minutes. Pick a date in the future when your company looks exactly the way you want it to. Write down what's true on that day — revenue, margin, headcount, the three things you're no longer worried about. Then write down the one or two steps that got you there. Bring your team in.
If you'd rather not do it alone, that's what our margin audit is for. We come in, find the dysfunction, and help your leaders become strategists — so the fix lasts after we leave.
Do this, and you'll find your margin.
Further Reading
- Bennis, W. On Becoming a Leader. The foundational distinction between management and true leadership: "the manager does things right; the leader does the right thing."
- Bryar, C., & Carr, B. Working Backwards. The organizational mechanism of working backward from a defined end-state to ensure long-term focus and alignment, shifting away from orientation toward short-term gains.
- Collins, J. Good to Great. The concept of "Clock Building, Not Time Telling" — great leaders build enduring systems and organizations rather than relying on their own individual problem-solving.