Redefining Leadership: Enabling Teams for Scalable Success

Reframing Leadership: Enabling Teams, Not Just Leading Them

A Thoughtful Shift in Perspective

Recently, we came across a piece on LinkedIn that sparked many internal conversations. Written by Aleix Morgadas, the article “Leadership as an Enabling Team” invited us to rethink how we view leadership in today’s complex, fast-evolving organizations. It didn’t present something radically new, but it reframed something familiar in a way that made us stop, take a breath, and say, “Yes, we’ve been seeing this too.”

Aleix discusses how leadership teams rarely see themselves as enabling teams, despite being in a perfect position to fill that role. Instead, the norm is often to delegate when there's a knowledge or capability gap, whether it's around agile practice, system reliability, or product testing. But the truth is, not everything can or should be handed off. Some gaps—especially around strategic alignment, business context, and operational understanding—are best bridged by leadership itself.

It’s not about doing everything. It’s about choosing what not to delegate.

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What Can’t Be Outsourced

One thing we really resonated with from Aleix’s article was the idea that not all gaps are equal. Some are capability-based: think CI/CD pipelines, testing infrastructure, or monitoring systems. These can often be delegated to specialized teams or consultants. But others—like understanding the economic model, the “why” behind new product lines, or how funding decisions align with company goals—those aren’t so easily handed off.

That’s where leadership, as an enabling force, becomes essential.

When we, as leaders, step in to directly address these knowledge gaps, we’re not micromanaging—we’re accelerating clarity. We’ve noticed that when leaders themselves take time to explain strategic priorities or walk teams through real business scenarios, alignment speeds up dramatically. This empowers teams to make autonomous decisions because they understand the larger narrative.

Aleix’s point here hits hard,

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Training While Leading

There’s also a big difference between training and enabling. Training can be formal, structured, and offloaded. But enabling, in the way Team Topologies defines it, is embedded. It happens in real time, in the flow of work, and often with a side-by-side mindset. Aleix highlights this with a helpful reference to John Cutler’s “Journey to Product Teams” infographic, where leadership in smaller organizations often directly participates in building up the team’s knowledge and autonomy.

We’ve seen this happen ourselves: in smaller organizations, leaders are often part of the team. They lead by example, coaching while contributing. But here’s the danger—if leaders don’t consciously shift out of this mode as the organization grows, they risk becoming a bottleneck. Teams can become overly reliant on leadership input and lose speed as a result.

Aleix’s reminder is important: leadership-as-enabling must evolve over time. Early on, it’s about direct involvement. Later, it’s about setting up systems that scale, like reusable training resources, embedded business knowledge, and self-serve platforms.

Bigger Teams, Bigger Gaps

In larger organizations, Aleix points out a tension we’ve experienced too: the leadership team is often buried under process and governance. There’s a growing list of committees, planning cycles, stakeholder reviews, and the actual enabling of product teams gets deprioritized in the midst of it all.

Ironically, this leads to even more delegation—more supporting teams, more layers of communication. But unless those teams have the full picture (which they often don’t), we’re not really solving the problem—we’re just reshuffling it.

This is where the Stream-Aligned Team concept from Team Topologies becomes useful. If leadership can fund, support, and prioritize enabling initiatives—particularly those that give product teams full ownership across design, build, release, and run—we start to see a genuine shift. But again, the early lift—helping teams understand how strategy, opportunity selection, and planning work—has to come from leadership directly. It’s not optional.

Aleix captures this well. It's not just about enabling execution. It’s about enabling thinking.

Our Call to Action

Aleix ends his piece with a vision of leadership as both an enabling and a platform team. We agree with this vision.

If we want to build organizations where teams make good decisions autonomously, we can’t just point them to documentation or run a one-off workshop. We need to equip them with the mental models, the business fluency, and the context to connect the why to the what and the how. That’s enabling at its finest.

As we reflect on Aleix’s ideas, we’ve been asking ourselves: What are we doing today that enables our teams? Where are we still the bottleneck? And which knowledge gaps do we keep delegating, even though we know we’re the ones best positioned to close them?

These are hard questions. But they’re the right ones. And the more we step into that enabling mindset—not just as a task, but as a team identity—the closer we get to sustainable, scalable change.

So, thank you, Aleix Morgadas, for this timely reminder and framework. It’s more than an article—it’s a call to reframe leadership itself.

Let’s rise to it.

That’s it!

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