There is a paradox evident in those who build the great companies. On one hand, they concentrate on high-level vision and strategy while, on the other hand, they involve themselves with seemingly trivial details. The acceptance of the paradox lies in understanding that details are not trivial. Details matter. The most effective leaders are obsessed with both vision and details. They are fanatical about getting the details right.

How you deal with certain details is actually a very high level statement—a statement about the core values of the company. Involving yourself with certain details can send a very powerful symbolic message.

It’s good practice to codify your vision on paper. Writing it down forces you to think rigorously about what exactly you are trying to do. Even more important, it’s a critical step in making it the organization’s vision, rather than the vision of a single leader.

As a leader, you are trying to unlock the judgment, the choices, the insight, and the creativity of your people. But, as we’ve seen in the last two chapters, the way we go about this doesn’t make much sense. We cloister information in our planning systems, and we cascade directives in our goal-setting systems. Instead, we should unlock information through intelligence systems, and cascade meaning through our expressed values, rituals, and stories. We should let our people know what’s going on in the world, and which hill we’re trying to take, and then we should trust them to figure out how to make a contribution. They will invariably make better and more authentic decisions than those derived from any planning system that cascades goals from on high.

As for what you shouldn’t delegate, consider the unique value you’re able to add when it comes to the organization’s top priorities. Some of that flows from your personal strengths. For example, I’m a good writer, so over the years I’ve used that skill to help our team document and share its values—from authoring career guidelines and interview playbooks to putting out internal notes on lessons we’ve learned in building products. One of my colleagues is an amazing operator, so he’s responsible for running our design team’s most complex processes, such as recruiting. My manager Chris is one of the most inspiring speakers I know, so he’s the first person to greet new employees at orientation and tell them about Facebook’s mission and values.

In a complex situation, when you want to empower the entire organization to be able to act without direction from the top, having a shared view of what the purpose is and how each participant fits into it is absolutely critical. It is only with a basis of a shared understanding of what we’re all trying to achieve here that distributed action is possible.