How to Lead Smart People

When was the last time you truly felt in control of your workday? Dermot Crowley’s Lead Smart begins with a provocative question: are you too busy to lead? In today’s world of endless meetings, overflowing inboxes, and constant digital noise, Crowley argues that many leaders confuse busyness with effectiveness. The central claim of Lead Smart is simple yet transformative: elite leadership isn’t about doing more—it’s about leading smarter. Crowley contends that productivity is not just a personal skill but a cultural force that leaders must model, nurture, and sustain across their teams and organisations.

Drawing on his decades of experience coaching leaders in major organisations—from banks to global consulting firms—Crowley presents a structured framework for turning reactive behaviour into intentional, high-impact leadership. He believes that productivity is one of the core strands in the leadership rope, alongside strategy, decision-making, and motivation. Yet, it’s often the strand that frays first under stress. To lead smartly, you must master three interdependent resources: time, energy, and focus. These form the foundation for personal and team-level productivity.

The New Definition of Productivity

Crowley redefines productivity beyond the traditional measure of output. True productivity isn’t just about producing more; it’s about doing the right things in a balanced way. He identifies six dimensions of elite productivity: control, focus, efficiency, impact, proactivity, and balance. Control gives you agency; focus ensures attention on priorities; efficiency creates flow without friction; impact directs effort toward strategic results; proactivity replaces reactivity; and balance protects the sustainability of performance.

This reframing matters because leaders often chase performance metrics at the expense of sustainable effectiveness. Crowley cites clients who equate productivity with working longer hours—logging in after dinner or answering late-night emails. He challenges this mindset, advocating instead for “work/work balance”—balancing time between reactive tasks and proactive goals, between meetings and outcomes. Productivity, he writes, must serve wellbeing, not undermine it.

The Four Horsemen of Productivity

Crowley introduces a memorable metaphor: four “disrupters” that ravage modern workplaces like horsemen of the apocalypse—Busyness, Urgency, Disorganisation, and Distraction. Busyness acts like a contagious virus, spreading through culture; urgency drives constant firefighting; disorganisation causes rework and frustration; distraction shatters attention. Each disrupter erodes productivity for both leaders and teams. The cure? Replace reactive habits with deliberate behaviours that cultivate calm, clarity, and control.

He argues that leaders unconsciously enable these disrupters by rewarding urgency, tolerating disorder, and modeling frantic work styles. “First, do no harm,” Crowley warns—echoing the Hippocratic oath. Leadership itself can generate productivity friction unless leaders consciously design their work habits and team interactions for flow rather than interference. The goal is not infinite output but sustained effectiveness.

The Path to Elite Leadership Productivity

The book unfolds across four parts—Yourself, Team Interface, Your Team, and External Interface—each zooming out from the individual leader to the broader organisation. The journey begins with self-awareness: knowing your productivity style (Organiser, Energiser, or Analyser) and learning to balance time, energy, and focus. It moves to rebuilding work/work balance, developing deep and wide focus, and increasing impact by mastering prioritisation and delegation.

In subsequent sections, Crowley explores how leaders can reduce “productivity friction” between themselves and their teams. He presents practical models—from the delegation matrix to email hygiene routines—that help leaders become responsive instead of reactive. Later, he expands to team cultures, arguing that leaders must create others-centred teams, where members prioritise group productivity over individual comfort. Finally, Crowley addresses external collaboration, urging “respectful negotiation” with peers and stakeholders to protect capacity from undue pressure and urgency.

Why This Matters

In an age of AI, speed, and complexity, Crowley’s message is countercultural yet urgent: human productivity depends not on acceleration but on intentional leadership. The most successful organisations, he argues, aren’t those whose leaders do more but those whose leaders work smarter—empowering others, managing flow, and sustaining focus. His framework encourages reflection: are you creating friction or flow for your team? Are you fostering urgency or cultivating impact?

By the end of Lead Smart, you don’t just learn to manage time—you learn to lead time. Crowley’s blend of anecdotes, psychology, and practical systems transforms abstract productivity into a leadership discipline. In his words, the smartest leaders are those who make productivity a “core strand of the leadership rope”—a skill that binds strategy, culture, and wellbeing into lasting effectiveness.

Crowley begins the practical journey of leading smart by asking a deceptively simple question: how are you wired for productivity? He reveals that every leader carries a bias toward one of three key resources—time, energy, or focus. Understanding which resource you naturally optimise is crucial because each bias shapes how you plan, communicate, and manage stress.

The Three Archetypes: Organiser, Energiser, Analyser

According to Crowley, Organisers are methodical planners whose mantra is “Let’s plan this.” They thrive on structure, lists, and schedules. Crowley—an admitted Organiser himself—describes his obsession with task lists and calendaring as both strength and weakness. While Organisers deliver consistency and control, they risk rigidity and frustration when others are less structured.

By contrast, Energisers operate through enthusiasm and speed. Their catchcry is “Let’s do this!” They rely on inspiration rather than systems, often filling their calendars with back-to-back meetings and deadlines they sprint toward at the last minute. Crowley recounts how his colleague Lisa O’Neill outperformed him in a joint workshop by managing her energy rather than her preparation time—booking a spa session instead of finalising slides the night before. This, Crowley realised, was productive leadership through vitality, not just organisation.

Lastly, Analysers lead through focus. Their mantra is “Let’s think about this.” They prefer long stretches of uninterrupted thought and intellectually dive deep into problems. Crowley’s friend Alex Hagen exemplifies this archetype: a futurist whose productivity comes from managing concentration, not time. Analysers excel at deep work (in Cal Newport’s sense) but can neglect communication and deadlines when left unchecked.

Balancing the Biases

Crowley warns against overstretching any single resource. Over-organising leads to control issues; over-energising causes burnout; over-analysing results in isolation. The best leaders, he suggests, blend all three—choosing the right resource for the task at hand. Like a footballer who can kick with both feet, elite leaders switch fluidly between planning (time), performing (energy), and thinking (focus).

Managing the Three Resources

Time management means building trustworthy systems: calendars for meetings and task lists for priorities. Crowley insists your head is not a valid time-management tool. Energy management means controlling flow—knowing when to go hard and when to recover. He advises leaders, especially Energisers, to identify high-energy hours and reserve them for essential work. Focus management means designing your environment for concentration—choosing the right spaces, breaking tasks into time blocks, and decompressing after deep focus sessions.

By mastering all three resources, Crowley suggests you can elevate from good productivity to “elite productivity”—a state where time, energy, and focus align precisely with priorities. As he puts it, productive leaders don’t just manage schedules; they manage themselves—and in doing so, they set the rhythm for how their teams work.

Crowley flips the traditional concept of work/life balance on its head. In Lead Smart, he argues that the real challenge for leaders isn’t life outside of work—it’s the imbalance within work itself. He calls this missing equilibrium work/work balance: learning to balance your time between meetings and priorities, reactive demands and proactive planning, and inputs and outcomes.

The Three Seesaws

Crowley visualises this balance as three seesaws: Meetings vs Priorities, Reactive vs Proactive, and Inputs vs Outcomes. When the seesaw tips too far to one side—often toward meetings, reactivity, and inputs—leaders lose their capacity for focus and impact. In one memorable coaching exercise, Crowley asked a bank’s leadership team to mark their meeting-to-priority ratio on a whiteboard. Eleven out of twelve admitted they spent 90% of their time in meetings. The imbalance was staggering.

Owning Your Schedule

Crowley challenges leaders to stop being victims of their calendars. “If you don’t own it, others will,” he warns. He encourages “ruthless hindsight” — reviewing the past month’s meetings to identify which were valuable, which wasted time, and which you should decline. Leaders who take control of their schedule create space to think, plan, and be available to their teams rather than constantly racing between calls.

Always Question Urgency

In his earlier book Urgent!, Crowley explored how organisations reward reactivity. Here, he expands that insight: most leaders operate under “false urgency” caused by poor planning. He compares it to teenagers blaming messy rooms on chaos outside their control. In reality, most urgency is self-created. Effective leaders cultivate proactive cultures by asking simple but powerful questions: Is this truly urgent? Why did it become urgent? How can we prevent this next time?

Focus on Outcomes

The final balance—inputs vs outcomes—challenges leaders to rise above operational noise and focus on strategic impact. Crowley borrows Ronald Heifetz’s “balcony” metaphor: leaders must step off the dance floor of daily tasks to see the wider patterns. Regular weekly planning routines, he insists, are your ticket to the balcony. Protect time for reflection and thinking—it’s what you get paid to do. As he reminds clients, “You can't make good decisions when moving at a hundred miles an hour.” Balance is your anchor for elite productivity.

In a world dominated by distraction, Crowley argues that great leaders must master not just concentration but flexibility of attention. He calls this dual capacity deep and wide focus. Deep focus is immersion—thinking, problem-solving, and creating without interruption. Wide focus is agility—keeping multiple priorities visible while switching smoothly between them.

From Juggling to Immersion

Crowley likens wide focus to juggling—managing multiple topics without dropping the ball—and deep focus to balancing a chair on one's forehead, requiring complete stillness. Most executives, he says, overvalue wide focus and neglect deep work. But focus is finite. Leaders must design systems that let their brains “offload” memory onto tools. He champions dated task lists and platforms like Microsoft Outlook and OneNote that bring every meeting, task, and note into one view—what he calls the “delivery dock” of work.

The Power of Systems

He cites a regional MD who told him, “The simple act of getting things out of my head and into a tool I trust frees me to think strategically.” Crowley insists this is the essence of wide focus: managing complexity through visibility. For deep focus, however, you must protect uninterrupted time. Schedule “focus blocks” in your calendar—ideally three per week—and resist giving them away. He advocates the “daily PASS” routine—Preview, Add, Subtract, Sequence—to review priorities intentionally each morning.

Four Commitments for Deep Work

Crowley lays out four commitments: define your focus topic, commit time, minimise distractions, and stay the course. He shares his own habit of retreating up the coast to write free from meetings, embodying Cal Newport’s vision of deep work. Commitment, he notes, isn’t just scheduling; it’s conviction. Leaders must give themselves permission to think—without guilt. He tells of a lawyer reprimanded for “staring out the window,” only for his partner to say: “That’s what we pay you for.”

Protecting Focus in Modern Leadership

Crowley encourages leaders to use environmental cues—standing discussions, short video calls, focus timers—to train concentration. Like Tony Buzan’s juggling metaphor, he concludes that success comes not from catching the balls, but from throwing them correctly: focus first on capturing work in a system and the rest will follow. Deep and wide focus, when maintained, transforms overwhelm into intentional momentum.

Crowley redefines leadership impact through the concept of working above the line. Borrowing from The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, he explains that leaders perform best when they’re open, curious, and intentional—not merely busy. Being “above the line” means focusing on high-value work that only you can do; being “below the line” means drowning in operational detail that others could handle.

Mapping Your Lanes

Crowley’s mentor helped him define his own “lanes”—Think, Sell, Deliver, Team. For each lane, he identifies tasks that belong above the line (transformational actions) and below the line (transactional chores). An executive’s job, he argues, is not to do everything but to manage energy across the right lanes. When your calendar overflows with below-the-line work, you dilute your leadership impact and become “too busy to lead.”

The Five Strategies to Get Above the Line

• Shift: Delegate work to someone better suited.
• Shrink: Reduce the task’s scale.
• Simplify: Streamline or redesign complex processes.
• Suspend: Pause nonessential tasks temporarily.
• Stop: Eliminate work that no longer adds value.

These strategies reflect Crowley’s mantra of choice and agency. He warns that “knee-jerk busyness” drains impact. Leaders must ruthlessly prioritise importance over urgency—an inversion of Eisenhower’s classic matrix. In modern workplaces, urgency dominates as a false proxy for importance. Crowley flips it back: start with what’s significant, not what’s screaming loudest.

The Red Velvet Rope Policy

To protect impact, Crowley proposes a “red velvet rope” policy—borrowed from nightclub bouncers who admit only the right guests. Your time is the club; only high-impact meetings get in. He shares the story of “Andy,” a senior executive whose packed calendar left him unable to accept a spontaneous coffee with the CEO. It was a wake-up call: real power lies in flexibility, not overload. Leaders with capacity can seize opportunities; those without, miss them.

Ultimately, working above the line means leading through purpose, not activity. It’s about redirecting your finite time, energy, and focus toward transformational outcomes. When you learn to manage your “lanes” wisely, you stop chasing productivity—and start leading it.

Delegation, Crowley insists, is not just a management technique—it’s a leadership multiplier. Yet too many leaders cling to control, overworking themselves on tasks that could be delegated. He calls delegation the art of “passing the baton cleanly.” When done right, it frees leaders for strategic work and empowers teams to own responsibilities.

When and How to Delegate

Crowley’s rule: delegate whenever the work is a better use of someone else’s time or skillset. Doing so early prevents last-minute stress and reactive urgency. Late delegation, he warns, creates reactivity ripples across the team. Leaders must delegate clearly—with purpose, specificity, and communication. “Vague instructions create vague results,” he notes, sharing an anecdote about buying the wrong laundry softener because his wife delegated without enough detail. In corporate life, vague delegation leads to rework, frustration, and lost trust.

The Delegation Matrix

Crowley’s Delegation Matrix cross-tabulates risk and experience:

• Low risk / high experience → be hands-off and trust.
• High risk / low experience → be hands-on and partner closely.
• Low risk / low experience → hold their hand, coach without crowding.
• High risk / high experience → stay on-hand, open the space for autonomy.

This model helps leaders calibrate their involvement, avoiding both micromanagement and neglect. Delegation, he says, is an opportunity for “moments of impact” that accelerate team growth.

Tracking and Trust

Because control anxiety often undermines delegation, Crowley suggests systematic tracking—use task lists, project boards (like MS Planner or Jira), or “due from others” reminders. Delegators should capture deadlines; delegates must update progress. But trust remains central: “If it happens once, fix the person. If it keeps happening, fix the process.” Coaching teams to manage their workload responsibly transforms delegation from a chore to a culture.

Crowley concludes: productive delegation is less about workload distribution than relationship design. When leaders master it, they don’t just free up time—they multiply capability throughout the organisation.

Crowley widens the lens to team dynamics, asserting that leaders must deliberately lead productive cultures. In Smart Teams and Urgent!, he outlined communication, meeting, collaboration, and urgency cultures. Lead Smart completes this trilogy: it’s not enough to teach productivity—you must embed it through collective behaviours and trust.

Others-Centred vs Self-Centred Cultures

Using a study from the University of Sheffield, Crowley shows that teams with “others-centred” members outperform “self-centred” ones. Such people value their own interests but prioritise group relationships when conflict arises. He connects this to the Nash equilibrium: teams win when everyone pursues a win/win outcome. The parallel in productivity is clear—others-centred teams minimise friction by designing emails, meetings, and projects that respect others’ time and energy.

Team Agreements

Crowley’s most actionable idea is the creation of team agreements—concise statements of shared behaviours like “We will start meetings on time” or “We will use Cc with purpose.” These bridge the gap between intentions and behaviours. Each agreement transforms vague aspiration into accountable culture. He advises leaders to write them collaboratively, keep them visible, and review them monthly. Five or six agreements per culture is enough—they should fit on one page.

Your Role as a Cultural Leader

Crowley reminds leaders that team culture mirrors leadership behaviour. The five roles of a cultural leader are: inspire vision, communicate expectations, call out poor behaviours, model agreements, and maintain momentum. When team culture decays, leadership neglect is the usual culprit. The best leaders, he says, lead micro-cultures of excellence that generate ripples across their organisation.

Ultimately, Crowley’s productivity cultures are not just operational—they’re human. They transform productivity from a system into a social contract: how we work together determines how we perform.

Productivity thrives in an atmosphere of trust. Crowley’s concept of a contract of trust between leader and team merges accountability and reliability. It’s not a written contract but a mutual understanding: “You can rely on me, and I can rely on you.” His partner Vera, a finance executive, uses this principle to shape expectations with global teams.

Accountable vs Freedom vs Control Cultures

Crowley places accountability at the healthy center between freedom and control. Freedom cultures let everyone do as they please—resulting in chaos. Control cultures enforce rigid micro-management—stifling creativity. Accountable cultures balance empowerment with responsibility. Here, leaders influence through inspiration and trust, not authority. He witnessed this dynamic evolve during COVID, when remote work forced companies to relinquish control and learn to trust outcomes over presence.

Two-Sided Responsibilities

For trust to thrive, Crowley says teams must be accountable and leaders reliable. Accountable teams deliver commitments, ask for help early, and learn from mistakes. Reliable leaders set clear expectations, act with integrity, empower rather than micro-manage, and back their people publicly. He encourages open discussions about calling out behaviours respectfully—a practice borrowed from elite sports teams where players confront each other constructively after poor performance.

Fix the Problem or Fix the Process

Crowley closes with a pragmatic mantra: “If it happens once, fix the problem. If it keeps happening, fix the process.” When mistakes recur, redesign the system instead of blaming people. As in safety engineering, organisations must close the gap between “work imagined” (policy) and “work done” (reality). Leaders who build trust do more than bond teams—they create systems resilient to human fallibility. Accountability paired with reliability is, to Crowley, the grease that makes productivity frictionless.

In the final act of Lead Smart, Crowley addresses the external interface—how leaders and teams negotiate with others across their organisations. He reframes negotiation not as conflict but as collaboration. “Everything in life is a negotiation,” he writes, “but it should be respectful.” This mindset allows leaders to maintain productivity across boundaries without creating adversarial tension.

Collaborative, Not Adversarial

Crowley’s anecdote about friends negotiating for a better table at a restaurant in Amsterdam illustrates his point. Instead of demands, they used open questions: “What could we do to make this possible?” The result was win/win. In corporate contexts, leaders can mirror this “collaborative negotiation” to handle deadlines, resource constraints, and priorities across teams.

The Urgency Dials

To manage unreasonable deadlines, Crowley recommends visualising “Urgency Dials”—adjustable levers such as deadline, scope, quality, budget, resources, and risk. If time is nonnegotiable, adjust scope or quality instead. He uses the marshmallow story from his earlier chapters to teach delayed gratification: offer others the choice between a short meeting now (a single marshmallow) or a deeper one later (two marshmallows). Negotiation, he insists, is about choice and transparency, not compromise under duress.

Holding the Line

Crowley closes with the metaphor of William Wallace from Braveheart: leaders must hold their line against busyness, disorganisation, and external pressure. Coaching teams to negotiate intelligently protects their time and energy. “They may take our schedules,” he jokes, “but they’ll never take our freedom!” Productive leaders, he argues, are calm defenders of focus amid chaos.

Ultimately, respectful negotiation is the capstone skill for leading smart. It’s the bridge between internal discipline and external collaboration—a way to extend your productivity ethos across the entire organisational ecosystem.