The choice is not between hands-on or hands-off. In our research, the entrepreneurs who led their companies from start-ups into some of the greatest corporations in history generally had both a hands-on style and an empowering style. No matter how big their companies became, they remained closely connected to their people, hyper-aware of facts on the ground, and directly engaged in strategic imperatives. If you lose your voracious curiosity about tactical details, if you lose passionate interest in people and how they are feeling, if you insulate yourself in the protective cocoon of executive comforts, you may well wake up one day to discover your company has already entered a doom loop of decline and self-destruction.

Now give your fixed-mindset persona a name.

You heard me correctly.

I watched as Susan Mackie worked with financial executives who had given their fixed-mindset personas names. They were talking about what triggers their personas, and the top guy said, “When we’re in a crunch, Duane shows up. He makes me supercritical of everyone, and I get bossy and demanding rather than supportive.” A female team member quickly responded: “Yes, and when your Duane shows up, my Ianni comes roaring out. Ianni is the macho guy who makes me feel incompetent. So your Duane brings out my Ianni and I become cowering and anxious, which infuriates Duane.” And on went this amazing conversation. These sophisticated professionals talked about when their named persona showed up, how it made them feel and act, and how it affected others around them. By the way, once they were able to understand each other’s triggers and personas, they could move their interactions to another level and the morale in this unit went up by leaps and bounds.

These are all executives who have been trained for years to grow their own businesses and are compensated based on their profitability. Suddenly I was saying to them, essentially, “I want you to pay less attention to the business at which you’ve been very successful, and start paying more attention to this other thing. And by the way, you have to work on this new thing along with these other very competitive people from other teams, whose interests don’t necessarily line up with yours. And one more thing, it won’t make money for a while.

When Dick Costolo took the role of CEO of Twitter, the board consisted of several venture capitalists, some members of the founding team, and Dick. Bill helped Dick change that and bring in more people with lots of expertise in actually running businesses. You need some other operators to lean on, he told Dick.

Sydney Finkelstein, a Dartmouth professor who studied major failures at over fifty companies, found that those higher in the management hierarchy were more likely to blame factors other than themselves compared to those with less power. Oddly, those with the most power seem to feel they have the least control. So much for the “buck stops here” thinking popularized by U.S. president Harry Truman.