Are There Buffaloes Flying in Your Company? What Leadership Looks Like When You Are Not in the Room
As the week comes to an end, it is worth taking a quiet moment to think about a question that may have more to do with the long-term health of your company than almost anything else: What happens when the leader is not there?
Two very different stories brought me back to this question recently. One came from Rainer Rohtla, CEO of Coop Eesti, and his reflections on leadership and responsibility. The other took me back almost twenty years, to Gunnar Okk and the transformation of Eesti Energia, where he often drew on the ideas from Flight of the Buffalo, the management classic by Ralph Stayer and James Belasco.
At first glance, the two stories have little in common. One is about the everyday realities of modern retail; the other comes from an American management book and the transformation of a large energy company at the turn of the century. Yet they point to the same fundamental idea: the biggest constraint on a growing organization is often not a lack of strategy, talent or ambition. It is the leader’s unconscious need to remain in control.
The leadership paradox: what happens when the buffalo disappears?
Think back to the late 1990s, when Eesti Energia was still very much shaped by its Soviet legacy: a large monopoly, little customer choice and a deeply embedded command-and-control culture. As markets opened and competition became real, it became increasingly clear that the old way of operating would not be enough.
The philosophy of Flight of the Buffalo offered a useful way of thinking about that transformation.
Stayer and Belasco use the buffalo herd as a metaphor for organizations built around a single leader. The herd follows its strongest animal. As long as that leader knows where to go, everyone moves in the same direction. But remove the leader and the herd becomes uncertain. It stops, waits and looks for instructions.
A flock of geese operates differently. Leadership moves. When the bird at the front gets tired, another takes its place. The group continues because it is not dependent on one individual. It has a shared direction and distributed responsibility.
Look at many companies today and you can see the buffalo herd in disguise.
The company grows. Revenue increases. More people join. More customers arrive. More complexity appears. And then, somehow, the CEO finds themselves sitting at their desk at 10 p.m., answering emails and resolving problems that should never have reached them in the first place.
Sales waits for the CEO's decision. A project manager waits for approval. A middle manager escalates a problem instead of solving it. Decisions keep moving upward because everyone has learned that the safest answer is to ask the boss.
The leader feels important because the phone never stops ringing.
But something more dangerous is happening underneath.
The organization is learning that the leader thinks and everyone else executes.
If you are the primary bottleneck in your company today, you may become its greatest constraint on growth tomorrow.
Leadership begins where the job description ends
Rainer Rohtla does not tend to talk about leadership in abstract slogans. His world is logistics, efficiency, supply chains and the hard realities of retail—a sector being reshaped by digitalization, labor shortages and changing consumer behavior.
Yet the underlying principle is remarkably consistent: people grow into leadership when they stop seeing their role as a job description and start taking responsibility for the success of the wider system.
That is one of the central paradoxes of leadership.
Many managers believe their job is to have the right answers. The best leaders understand that their job is to create an environment in which the right people can find the right answers themselves.
Writing a strategy is relatively easy. Turning it into a polished PowerPoint is even easier.
The difficult part is creating an organization in which hundreds or thousands of people understand what matters, make good decisions and take responsibility without waiting for permission.
Jeff Bezos described a similar idea through Amazon's Day 1 philosophy. The language may be different, but the principle is the same: build an organization that remains capable of acting, deciding and learning without constantly waiting for the person at the top.
That is what real empowerment looks like.
Not giving people more freedom and hoping for the best.
Creating the clarity, capabilities and accountability that allow people to make good decisions when the leader is not in the room.
Three questions to test your leadership system
If this sounds more theoretical than practical, there are three simple experiments you can run next week.
First, ask an uncomfortable question. Bring your direct reports together and ask: “What is one decision, process or problem that I am unintentionally slowing down or causing as a leader, without realizing it?” Then do something that is harder than asking the question: listen without defending yourself. The answers may be more valuable than the last six months of management meetings.
Second, track the decisions that land on your desk. From Monday to Friday, make a note every time someone comes to you for a decision they could theoretically make themselves. At the end of the week, review the list and ask: “Which of these decisions should have been made without me?” If the answer is more than half, the problem may not be your people's capabilities. It may be the design of your leadership system.
Third, test for 90-day clarity. Pick three key people and ask each of them: “What is the most important measurable outcome you are responsible for over the next 90 days, and how does it contribute to the company's larger goal?” If the answer is vague, overly long or difficult to connect to the company's priorities, you have found a problem. Without clarity, genuine ownership is almost impossible.
What happens when you leave the room?
There is one final question worth sitting with before the next week begins.
If you disappeared completely tomorrow and were unreachable for two weeks, would your organization continue moving in the same direction?
Would people know what matters?
Would important decisions still get made?
Would priorities remain clear?
Would your leaders step forward—or would everyone wait for you to return?
If the answer is no, you may not yet have a scalable leadership system.
You may simply have a very capable leader carrying too much of the organization on their shoulders.
That can work for a while.
It does not scale.
The value of a great leader is not measured by how many people depend on their decisions. It is measured by how many people become capable of making good decisions themselves.
The ultimate test of leadership is not what happens when you are in the room.
It is what happens when you are not.