A Game of Inches: The Six Domains of Leadership

Years ago we bought an old house, and it came with a roof that needed reshingling. Four chimneys, three of them long out of use. So we sat a series of roofers down at the kitchen table. They each provided credentials, photos, timelines, cost. We asked each one to take the three dead chimneys down below the roofline while they worked. Brick by brick.

One of them was a maverick. A little crazy, wildly enthusiastic. When I got to the part about the bricks, he lit up. He knew a faster way. You take a 12-gauge shotgun shell, he said, pull the shot but keep the charge, and fire it in the base of the chimney. The whole stack drops straight into its own void. No damage to anything around it. You scoop the bricks out by hand.

He looked at me, expectant. Waiting for me to love it.

"Sounds interesting," I said. "But we're going to take them down brick by brick."

Here's the twist, we hired him. He did a beautiful job. Clean, careful, brick by brick. That roof is still in great shape almost twenty years later.

The shotgun is always on offer. It's faster. It might even work. But the roof that's still holding two decades on got there one brick at a time.

Evolution, not revolution

There's a name for this choice. In 1972, in a Harvard Business Review essay that's since become a classic, Larry Greiner described organizations as growing through long stretches of evolution — steady, unglamorous — broken by revolutions, the crises that force everything to change at once. His point wasn't that revolution is bad. It's that revolution usually arrives as a crisis you didn't choose, while evolution is the understated work you do in between.

The shotgun is the revolution. Brick by brick is the evolution. When the problem is hard, we all wish for the shotgun.

When a leadership problem is genuinely hard, you long for a single clean move that drops the whole thing at once. The new structure. The offsite retreat that fixes the culture. The book that rewires how we run meetings. The heroic leap. But there's almost never a shotgun. The gains that last are the other kind — one brick at a time.

A game of inches

Leadership is the same, and the person who taught me that lesson best was an Olympian.

Adam Kreek won gold in the Canadian men's eight. Years ago, when I was the executive director of Leadership Victoria, I brought him in to teach a cohort. I expected the big-race story ... the final, the lungs, the roar. He talked about inches.

Gold, he told the room, is a game of inches. His crew didn't get to the podium by finding one enormous improvement. They got there by hunting one percent. A little more speed. A little less waste. This happened inside every element of how they prepared. They'd break the race down and test the pieces. On a ready, set, go, do we get more power loading the muscles at "ready," or at "set"? A tiny question. A one percent question. And they asked it of everything.

"You row an ocean by taking one stroke at a time," he said. "Inch by inch. Repeat."

The idea comes from Sir Dave Brailsford, who ran British Cycling — he called it the aggregation of marginal gains: win a hundred small things by one percent and the sum is a gold medal. Adam didn't invent it. He rowed it.

And here's the part that I believe matters most. The inches aren't found in the race. They're found in the months before it, in the boring repetitions no one is watching. By the time the pressure arrives, the work is already done. Evolution, chosen on purpose, one percent at a time, is what remains standing when it counts.

Which is why you can't actually get better at "leadership." It's far too big. Like telling a crew to "row faster." Faster how? Leadership only improves the way a boat does, or a roof: in specific, nameable steps, a brick or an inch at a time.

So the useful question isn't how do I become a better leader. It's where's my next inch? To answer that, you need the map. Here's the one I use.

The six domains of leadership

Across decades of leadership research, the experts use different language but keep circling the same handful of questions. The six domains of leadership are those practical questions. Master them one percent at a time.

Strategic Clarity — Do people know what matters most right now? Is your team aligned on the priorities, and is that focus sharp enough to guide real trade-offs. When it's weak, people are busy but quietly unsure they're working on the right things. An inch here, and people finally know what to say no to.

Execution and Accountability — Do decisions actually turn into action? Do your commitments reliably become follow-through, and do your meetings end in ownership instead of ambiguity. When it's weak, you revisit the same issues over and over and momentum leaks away. An inch here, and decisions actually turn into action.

Leadership Presence — How does a leader show up when it counts? Not charisma or style — the actual effect your behaviour has on others under pressure. Whether you can hold tension without rushing to fix it or fleeing it. When it's weak, well-meaning leaders spread anxiety without meaning to. An inch here, and the room steadies instead of catching your nerves.

Team Health and Culture — Can people speak honestly and work through tension? The lived norms, not the values on the wall — do your people raise the hard thing early or let it curdle into quiet resentment. When it's weak, collaboration gets expensive and energy drains into working around problems. An inch here, and the hard thing gets said early, before it curdles.

People Development — Are people growing into responsibility, or staying dependent on you? Is their growth intentional and supported, or left to chance. When it's weak, people get promoted faster than they get supported, and you end up finishing their work. An inch here, and people grow into ownership of the work instead of handing it back.

Adaptive Leadership — Can the organization adjust when conditions change? The ability to respond when the old playbook stops working and there's no precedent to lean on. When it's weak, organizations cling to the familiar approach long after it's stopped fitting. An inch here, and you stay relevant when the world changes.

That's the map. Six domains, thirty skills underneath.

To stretch Adam's metaphor a little more, all six work together the way the parts of a boat do. Strategic Clarity decides where to go. Execution moves the work. Presence stabilizes the pressure. Culture lowers the friction. Development builds the capacity. Adaptive keeps the whole thing relevant when the water changes. Push all six a little and they compound — the same way inches do.

Where's your inch?

Here's the helpful bit. You can't work all six domains at once, but you don't have to. Adam's crew didn't; we didn't drop three chimneys at once. You find the one place where the next inch is hiding, work it until it holds, and move to the next. Evolution, chosen on purpose — one brick at a time.

So if you are looking to improve your leadership, start with location (you can't improve what you can't locate). That's what the map is for. What's your next move?

If you're not sure which of the six is yours to work on next, the Leadership Check-In gives you a current read across all six domains — free, about 20 minutes, no personality type, no verdict. Just a place to find your next inch.

En route — but aren't we all.