Mushfig Aliyev is the Deputy CEO of Azerconnect Group.
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As a CEO, learning the real truth about how your company runs rarely comes from board evaluation, 360 reviews or consultants. That lesson shows up during your two-week holiday. If decision making continues uninterrupted, you have a system that works. But if meetings got canceled so that everything’s queued up for your return, you’ve built a system of dependency.
Some executives are quietly flattered by this because being needed feels like effective leadership. But it isn’t. True leadership means providing a service. Consider the telecom industry, which delivers connectivity. Companies in this sector work invisibly, so customers notice only when their service fails. Uptime is the whole job, and the highest compliment a network team can earn is that they disappeared from customers’ long list of day-to-day complaints.
Being a leader is very similar. Your title buys you exactly one chance to earn trust. If you mess up, the trust that arrived to the team in drops will leave in buckets. You may be the boss, but you report to everyone: employees, the board and customers. That’s what makes you a service provider.
Leaders Are The Foundation For Success
McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index (OHI) notes nine key areas that determine effectiveness: accountability, direction, coordination and control, external orientation, leadership, innovation and learning, capabilities, work environment and motivation. Of those, accountability, direction and leadership are the most impactful. This highlights that the work environment is the asset, while the person who shapes it is the leverage.
One thing this means is that, as a leader, your mood can end up affecting the whole company. If you walk in stressed, by lunchtime, at least three teams are feeling stressed as well. Your energy is the one input that every team experiences daily, and disengagement rolls downhill. There’s a price to this: Gallup’s annual “State of the Workplace” report shows that, in 2025, low engagement drained roughly $10 trillion from the world economy as the result of lost productivity.
True Leadership Isn’t About Being A Hero
Any network engineer will tell you a system that depends on one node isn’t resilient; it’s a design flaw waiting for a bad day. So if the CEO is always the smartest person in any room, that’s a problem.
The seat isn’t getting easier. PwC’s “2026 Global CEO Survey” found that less than a third of chief executives feel confident about revenue growth over the next 12 months. According to Korn Ferry’s 2026 “CEO & Board Survey,” 55% of first-time CEOs say they struggle to balance how they spend their time and energy. So perhaps it’s no coincidence that the average CEO tenure has shrunk to 6.8 years, compared to 9.2 in 2023 and 7.7 in 2024.
The hardest part of becoming a CEO is unlearning what got you there. You no longer need to be the smartest person in the room. Instead, you must set up the room so other people succeed in it, whether you’re there or not. There are three key things to establish in this effort: trust, clarity and environment.
• Trust: This is the load-bearing factor of a strong work environment, and no title creates it. Only behavior does. You can earn it through gradual delegation. Try handing over decisions slightly bigger than feels comfortable, then resist the urge to take them back.
• Clarity: People don’t need random inspiration on Wednesday afternoon. They need to know what they have to do, why and until when.
• Environment: Team members, especially the high performers, should be able to run around and explore without supervision.
The Best Leaders Provide Context
Context is what scales, control is what queues. A decision made three levels below you is only as good as the information it was made with. So the real job is making your reasoning flow: what you’re trying to achieve, what you’ve decided not to do and what good looks like. When you hand people conclusions, they’ll be back tomorrow for the next one. But when you hand them context, they stop needing you for every call.
Questions Worth Asking If You Run A Company
You don’t have to wait for a holiday to run the test. Three honest questions will tell you today whether you’ve built a service or a dependency:
1. What is your own uptime? If you were unreachable for more than one week, which decisions would stall? Each answer is a place where you are still doing the work instead of enabling it.
2. What is the most your people consume from you? If it’s approvals, then you’re a bottleneck. If it’s context, then you’re a steady climate nurturing the environment. You have become a service.
3. What happens to the room’s energy when you leave? If it dips the moment you’re gone, you were supplying the energy. If it doesn’t, you built the source.
Telecom taught us long time ago that the network people love is the one they forget is there. Leadership is heading the same way. The measure of a leader is never the room they command; it’s the room they leave behind.
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