EP07 - From Overprotection to Strategic Leadership
I used to believe that my job was to absorb the pressure. Not just to lead through it, but to shield others from it. It came from a place of care.
In this Episode:
Francois Jacquemin reflects on how overprotecting executive teams can quietly block their growth. He shares how distributing pressure builds strategic maturity.
And for a while, it worked until it didn’t. Because when you remove the pressure, you remove the conditions that form strategic leadership.
The Operational Illusion.
Most executive teams function well at the operational level. Everyone knows their field. Finance owns the numbers. Operations run the machine. Commercial leads the growth. This level is clear. It rewards execution and expertise. It builds confidence. But it is not where leadership is forged. Leadership begins when things stop being clear, when roles blur, when outcomes depend on someone else’s pace or decision, when the pressure is not just on what you deliver, but on how you contribute to something shared.
The Interface I Had to Rethink.
In those moments, I often stepped in. I took the tension on myself. I believed it was my role. But that quiet habit had consequences. The team never learned to carry what I was holding. They stayed in their zones. They performed. But they did not grow. It took time to see it. And even more time to change it.
Two Levels of Thinking.
What helped was reframing leadership in two layers. The first layer is functional. Each executive leads their domain. It requires focus, competence, and rhythm. The second layer is strategic. It requires a different kind of presence. Less certainty. More negotiation. Fewer answers. More alignment. This is where pressure accumulates. And if the CEO holds it all, the system never adapts. So I began sharing it. Gently, but intentionally. I asked better questions.
• What do you need to lead across functions, not just within?
• Where is tension accumulating?
• What expectations are you carrying alone?
We began naming the pressure together. Not to dramatise it, but to understand it. To learn to move with it.
Integration as a Stress Test.
Nowhere is this more visible than in integration. Two teams. Two cultures. Sometimes one of them disappears. And you are left rebuilding everything but the P&L. In those moments, pressure is everywhere. And the temptation to overprotect is strong. But what I have learned is this: if the management culture is not rebuilt deliberately, the early signs of success will be misleading. People will perform, but not together. And what looks like momentum will quietly be divergence. That is why leadership must be distributed, with pressure included.
The Leadership Shift That Matters.
Leadership is not about holding everything. It is about knowing what to hold and what to share. Not to lighten the load, but to strengthen the system. Overprotection feels responsible. But it quietly teaches your team to stay small. Strategic leadership begins the moment you let your team step into the pressure and stay there long enough to grow.
Timecode:
00:00 Introduction: Empowering the Team
00:30 Operational vs Strategic Roles
01:41 Handling Pressure and Team Dynamics
02:58 Challenges in Mergers and Acquisitions
03:45 Conclusion: Balancing Growth and Synergies
Francois Links:
Apple Podcast
Transcript:
I tend to take the pressure, the team may be overprotected and it needs work on my side to, and, and, and work with the team to give them, um, to empower them to receive the pressure of the board. So it's easy way, it's giving power to, uh, to be under pressure. This is always a challenge and, and everybody's different. One way that we've worked on this is to create two levels of thinking. The first level is the exec team underneath need to be able to do their day-to-day tasks.
So the operational, so A-C-F-O-A-C-O-O will know that they need to do all element that are, um. Financial for the CFO, which is the day-to-day. It's not something that I dive in. It's, I, I, you know, that's just, uh, not, not my field. That's his field. COO, same thing. His field, that's what they need to deliver. The, the CEO will need to deliver the, the contract and the payment, and I mean the payment, the order of payment, which is CFO, will, will, will execute.
That's, that's the easy bit. Then when you move to the strategic level, which is one level up. It's the moment where, oh, what is my contribution here and what is the contribution of each of the executive team members and what will be their expectation from the other? But what is my strategic contribution and what do I need from you dear team to be able to execute that? And usually that's where the pressure starts and that's where the pressure usually will be. Um. Sometimes waived by by them, and that's at that moment, this interface is where I tend to overprotect them. And this is where I worked on myself the most. It's just, how can I just change that? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
But that's, that's the way, uh, executive team are, are always working, is that the dynamic there is, um, is not operational stand, you know, the, the, the, the, the basic level. It's always a bit more on, uh, it, it's, it's what people will say power game, but it's also, uh, pressure relieving games between them. My understanding of where it worked with me, uh, it worked best when there was a symbiotic relationship with the, within the team.
If the team's changing a lot. This is, this is a dynamic which need to be always monitored and it's changing all the time. So in the forming, norming and, and, and the last one. It was always like, uh, you know, going back to storming, there was a lot in, in merger and, and or in acquisition. In integration, you need to balance the, uh, the, the, the executive team with the, between the two parts.
And it's something that doesn't always happen easily because, uh, it can be that for whatever reason, the, the, the executive team on the other side decides not not to stay. Um. Then you need to build a lot. There's a lot of element that you need to build. Two culture need to be integrated, and then there's a management culture that you need to reinstill against forces that are much stronger than if you just have this organic growth.
That, uh, uh, would, would, would, would be in a standard way of simply, I have a team, I need to grow the business and, uh, I align all the element. If you have success in that situation. It's extremely dangerous. I mean, the worst you can ever found is growth, top line success in a merger because you have to create synergies as well as managing the growth and doing the two at the same time is very, very difficult. So it adds to the, uh, to the complexity and the element of, um. Of creating this strategic level to, to improve and, and, and, and drive this executive team to be, to be, uh, highly functional or at least functional.