The best leaders aren’t in your boardroom, they’re in the trenches
The saddest part of my work is this: I meet brilliant leaders every week, but they’ll never sit on your executive team. Not because they lack potential.
But because they lack proximity to power. They are buried in branch offices, operating behind dusty desks, leading teams without titles, fixing problems you never even hear about. And meanwhile, the people you call “leaders” are in air-conditioned boardrooms, debating PowerPoint fonts and pretending to be strategic.
That’s the disease, title inflation. The real leaders are solving customer problems in real time. They are the ones calming angry clients, mentoring juniors after hours, staying late to finish what the rest abandoned. But they don’t wear suits. They don’t belong to golf clubs. So, you ignore them.
I have seen it too many times, in 2022, I worked with a logistics company struggling with last-mile delivery issues. At headquarters, the EXCO blamed systems.
One senior manager called it “a tech issue.” But on the ground in Gulu, there was a soft-spoken dispatcher named Daniel. Every week, he rerouted delivery schedules manually to beat fuel shortages, bribery points, and border bureaucracy.
His region hit 97% on-time delivery, while everyone else struggled below 70%. When I asked why no one had elevated him, the HR manager shrugged, “He’s not very outspoken. Plus, he’s only a diploma holder.”
This is your failure. You think leadership lives in your CV database. It doesn’t. It lives in behaviour.
Most boards are echo chambers who are promoting confidence, not competence. You mistake fluency in English for vision.
You reward those who make the room feel safe, not those who make the business grow. And in doing so, you kill real leadership where it’s born, in the trenches.
How many Daniels do you have in your organization? And how many have you silenced by simply never noticing?
In my village in Munteme, my late grandfather would remind us, “You don’t choose the leader by how loud they speak, but by how many follow them when no one’s watching.”
But in most companies, promotions go to those with the right accent, not the right action.
"The people holding your company together don’t wear suits. They wear patience and grit. They don’t speak in boardroom language; they speak results. But you are too busy listening to polished nonsense in meetings to hear the truth in their silence."
Tweet
- c) Design a Leadership Pipeline from the Bottom. Make it possible for anyone, from cleaner to cashier, to access leadership development through performance, not pedigree.
Tool of the week. The Trench Leadership Index
The greatest leadership failure in most companies isn’t bad decision-making, it’s blindness to real leadership. You’re surrounded by high-performers with no titles, no exposure, and no access to power. These are your Trench Leaders, the ones keeping the wheels turning while executives debate strategy at offsites.
The Trench Leadership Index is how you find, recognize, and elevate these hidden giants. This isn’t a personality test or a fake “high potential” program wrapped in buzzwords.
This is data-driven leadership discovery for executives who are serious about transformation, not just symbolism.
Use it quarterly, use it across all levels, use it to embarrass your current leadership pipeline into mat
How to use this tool
- Apply anonymously. Don’t announce it as a “promotion tool.” Just collect real performance data across branches or departments.
- Don’t use job titles. This index must level the field. A customer service officer should be compared against a regional manager with the same metrics.
- Publish results. Let people see where trench leadership lives. It changes morale instantly. It embarrasses idle “leaders” into self-reflection.
- Act on it. Promote the top scorers. Assign them transformation projects. Involve them in town halls. Give them access. Power. Visibility.
Once you identify the real fighters, reward them and promote them.
The people holding your company together don’t wear suits. They wear patience and grit. They don’t speak in boardroom language; they speak results. But you are too busy listening to polished nonsense in meetings to hear the truth in their silence. Let’s go find your real leaders, before they leave to build something of their own.
Book a trench audit session at www.summitcl.com or call Mr Strategy on 0782610333
