Deliver What Matters · LinkedIn
The Difference Between Giving Direction and Giving Directions
One of the most common leadership patterns I see sounds helpful on the surface. A leader tells the team: “Here’s exactly what I need you to build.”
The intent is usually good. Leaders want to remove ambiguity. They want to help. They want to ensure the team heads in the right direction. But something important happens when leaders define both the destination and every step along the way. The team stops owning the problem. Instead, it owns the instructions.
There’s a subtle but important difference between giving direction and giving directions .
Giving direction means creating clarity about the outcome. Giving directions means prescribing the solution.
One says: “We need to reduce the time it takes applicants to complete the process.”
The other says: “Build these five enhancements, add this workflow, change this screen, and release it by September.”
Both approaches move work forward. Only one encourages ownership.
At CAIP, we found that the best ideas often emerged after the team fully understood the problem. Sometimes the original request turned out to be exactly the right solution. Other times, the team discovered a simpler approach, identified a better opportunity, or found that the real problem was somewhere else entirely. That only happened because the conversation started with the outcome, not the implementation. The team wasn’t asked to deliver someone else’s solution. It was asked to improve a condition.
This is where many organizations unintentionally limit the very ownership they’re trying to create .
Leaders say they want empowered teams. They ask teams to take initiative. They encourage innovation. But then they hand the team a fully defined solution and ask for flawless execution.
The opportunity to think has already been removed .
That doesn’t mean leaders should avoid making decisions. Leadership still provides vision, establishes priorities, makes tradeoffs, and decides where to invest. Those are leadership responsibilities. But once the destination is clear, teams should have room to determine the best path to get there.
Think about the difference .
A leader says: “Our goal is to reduce application abandonment by twenty percent.”
Immediately, the team begins asking questions. Where are applicants dropping off? Why? What evidence do we have? Should we simplify the process? Do we have unnecessary steps? Could clearer guidance solve the problem? The discussion centers on understanding the problem.
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Now imagine a different conversation .
The leader says: “Applicants are abandoning the process. Add a progress bar, create automatic reminders, redesign the dashboard, and improve the status page.”
The team may deliver every one of those requests successfully. But no one ever stopped to ask whether those changes were the best way to reduce abandonment. The solution became fixed before the problem was fully understood.
This is one of the reasons Product Owners and product managers should spend so much time understanding users instead of simply managing backlogs. Their job isn’t just to organize requests. It’s to understand the problem well enough to help teams solve the right one.
That requires curiosity. It requires evidence. And it requires leaders who are willing to define success without prescribing every step toward it.
Giving directions creates compliance. Giving direction creates ownership.
One produces teams that wait for answers. The other produces teams that seek them. One encourages execution. The other encourages learning. Both have their place.
If you’re asking someone to assemble furniture, giving directions makes perfect sense. If you’re asking a team to improve mission outcomes, it rarely does.
The best leaders I’ve worked with don’t measure their value by how many decisions they make. They measure it by how clearly they define the destination and how effectively they enable others to help reach it.
That’s a different kind of leadership. And it’s one of the most important shifts organizations can make if they want teams to own outcomes instead of simply delivering requests.
Where have you seen the difference between giving direction and giving directions?
Reply or comment—I read every one.
CAIP is a program we follow throughout my book, Deliver What Matters.