Great leaders aren’t defined by their title, their charisma or even their strategy. They’re defined by the environment they build every day, long before that environment gets tested under pressure. That distinction shapes how leaders make decisions, build trust, handle their most talented performers and manage teams that never share a room.
On today’s episode of Business Trends Today, Ed Hawkins, Founder and CEO of Six Beacons Partners and author of Beacon of Hope, joins us to talk about how leaders build environments where excellence becomes the standard.
The danger of over-instructing teams
Hawkins said the biggest mistake leaders make is over-instructing their teams. When every decision is dictated from the top, people stop thinking for themselves. They fall back on rote memory instead of developing the judgment to handle situations on their own.
"If you create the right situations where people are free to learn and live into them, they become lasting capabilities."
The alternative is putting people in situations where they have to make their own calls and live with the results. Hawkins said this approach, drawn from his years coaching youth soccer under his own mentor, scales in a way that top-down instruction never can.
Coaching one player through one decision at a time doesn’t translate across a team of 20, 30 or 40 people. Creating an environment where everyone is forced to develop judgment at the same time does.
Hawkins said the same principle carries directly into the workplace. Leaders who create the right conditions, rather than managing every decision themselves, build capabilities in their people that last.
Culture runs on principles, not permission
Large organizations make key decisions every day, often on projects worth millions of dollars. Hawkins said there isn’t time to send every one of those calls up and down the chain of command for approval.
"There's no time and space to negotiate every single decision every single time"Â
Instead, decisions have to be made based on principles the rest of the organization can rely on. Hawkins said leaders who are developed through environments that build strong decision-making skills, rather than leaders who wait for permission, become one of an organization’s biggest assets.
Building a stronger team
Business owners looking to build stronger teams often start by chasing the most skilled or most energetic talent, according to Hawkins. He said the real starting point is different, and it comes in two parts.
The first is building trust from day one. Hawkins said that means understanding what every player, coach or professional wants out of their experience, then finding ways to develop them while developing the organization at the same time. That mutual investment is what builds trust across a team.
The second is rethinking what recruiting should prioritize. While researching the book, Hawkins asked a number of collegiate coaches what they look for first in a player. None said skill, speed or knowledge, and instead they looked for the player’s ability to watch over and support teammates.
“Who is going to make sure they’re watching over their peers and supporting their peers? And that’s the first player I want,” Hawkins said.
The star performer problem
Top performers who get results but drag down everyone around them create one of the toughest calls a leader can face, according to Hawkins.
There are typically two types of standout talent, Hawkins said. People who do unusual things exceptionally well, and people who do usual things unusually well. Organizations need to decide which type they can sustain over time without damaging trust across the rest of the team.
Hawkins said he has consistently chosen to build around the second type. Team players who do the fundamentals unusually well tend to bring others into the conversation and lift the group’s overall performance, without the cost of managing an outlier’s behavior. A talented but corrosive performer can still belong in the workforce, Hawkins said, but only in an environment built to support that kind of role, one where the rest of the team is comfortable staying in a supporting position.
Without that structure, Hawkins said organizations risk something worse than one difficult employee. People quietly disengage, and the message sent to the rest of the team is that results matter more than how people treat each other.
When purpose gets lost in efficiency
Businesses have leaned too heavily on efficiency and growth while neglecting purpose, according to Hawkins. That imbalance is becoming harder to ignore as AI takes on more of the technical work.
It shows up in the remote-work environment as well. Remote workers can start to feel like inventory rather than people, and the lack of regular, in-person contact with managers leaves some employees feeling passed over for opportunities, even when their output holds up.
Explaining a dynamic on a whiteboard with a few people in the room carries a different weight than trying to message the same idea over a video call, where much of the collaboration, expression and body language gets lost, Hawkins said.
A new book in the works
Hawkins is working on a follow-up book, Chalice, built around four elements he believes every leader needs:
- A foundation of passion and purpose
- A stem that connects an organization’s resources in a way that’s meaningful to everyone
- A cup that represents how people work together to perform at a higher level
- A rim that lets that performance spread across the entire enterprise
Together, that framework is less about individual leadership tactics and more about building a culture that sustains itself. One where excellence isn’t dependent on any single person staying in the room.
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