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An Eredivisie (Dutch Premier League) leadership team hired me after their most successful season in a decade.

Puzzling, right?

"We're winning," the Sporting Director told me. "But it's harder each week. Something's off."

Not much to go on!

But after observing for three days, it came clear.

The Head Coach was getting results, but his influence required constant energy expenditure. He was winning through force, not flow.

Five months later, despite continued success, he was gone. Burned out.

This pattern reveals itself repeatedly across elite sports. Leaders achieve positions of status but find their actual influence diminishing; even as their authority grows.

It's the silent career killer no one talks about: influence that drains rather than drives.

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The Invisible Loss of Impact

Most leadership conversations miss the critical distinction between authority and influence.

Authority comes with the title. Influence determines what happens when you're not in the room.

I hear it regularly on the Legacy Leader Clarity Calls that I host.

A performance director I worked with discovered this distinction the hard way. Her decisions were implemented precisely when delivered directly. But she noticed a pattern: initiatives lost momentum whenever her direct attention shifted elsewhere.

She had complete authority but deteriorating influence. In hindsight, the difference cost her organisation an entire competitive cycle.

The Three Friction Points Most Leaders Miss

After over fifteen years advising elite sports clubs & organisations, I've identified three critical friction points that drain leadership influence. Each operates below the surface, invisible to most leaders until the damage is done.

1. The Clarity Tax

Your directives require extensive explanation. People need multiple conversations to understand what you want. Implementation begins enthusiastically but drifts off course.

When directions lack precision, each team member must expend mental energy interpreting your intent. It's an "interpretive tax" that compounds.

Most leaders mistake verbose communication for clarity. True clarity creates instant, shared understanding.

One rugby head coach I advised reduced his tactical directions from paragraph-length explanations to five-word phrases with specific visual anchors. Player execution improved immediately, but more importantly, players accurately transmitted these concepts to teammates.

He moved from being three steps ahead to only ever remaining a half-step ahead....and his communication was driven by this.

A test for you: Can your directions be repeated verbatim by the third person in a chain of communication?

2. The Consistency Gap

Your team seems increasingly hesitant before taking action. Decision velocity slows. People check with you before making moves they previously handled independently.

Humans are prediction machines. When leader responses become unpredictable, teams develop decision paralysis as a protective measure.

This friction point manifests not in what you say, but in the space between what you've said previously in similar situations.

One EuroLeague (basketball) coach documented his decision frameworks for specific game situations and shared them with his staff. Rather than telling them what to do each time, he showed them how he thought.

The result? His staff began making identical decisions to what he would have chosen...without needing to consult him.

A test for you: Would your team accurately predict your response to a given situation 9 times out of 10?

3. The Attention Mismatch

Implementation quality varies dramatically across initiatives. Some directions receive flawless execution while others face persistent problems despite similar complexity.

Teams don't respond to stated priorities. They respond to demonstrated attention.

When your follow-up patterns don't match your declared priorities there's disconnect. You've created friction between what you say matters and what you show matters.

A baseball operations executive I advised taught me something valuable. He implemented a simple but impactful habit: he scheduled follow-up conversations for each directive at the moment he delivered it.

This tiny shift aligned his attention patterns with his priorities. His team reported that his influence felt "frictionless" because they could predict exactly where his focus would land.

A test for you: Does your calendar allocation visibly match your stated priorities?

The Counterintuitive Truth About Leadership Friction

Here's what separates the top 5-10% of leaders from the rest:

They don't try to eliminate resistance. They relocate it.

Average leaders try to remove friction from the implementation process. Exceptional leaders shift friction to the decision phase, where it belongs.

I know an Olympic performance director who realised this principle. She completely restructured her approach; she invited intense debate and disagreement during decision formation but required absolute alignment once direction was set.

The result? Decisions took longer, but implementation speed doubled. To borrow from Bent Flyvbjerg (who writes on decision-making in mega projects) they 'Planned slow and acted fast".

Your Friction Diagnostic

Most leaders never discover these influence drains until it's too late. Here's how to check your current influence friction:

Ask three simple questions to team members (maybe start with direct colleagues and consider doing it anonymously):

1. "How much energy does it take to understand what I want?" (Clarity Tax)
2. "How confidently can you predict my response to new situations?" (Consistency Gap)
3. "Where does my attention go versus where I say priorities are?" (Attention Mismatch)

The gaps between perception and intention reveal your specific friction points.

Influence That Compounds Rather Than Depletes

True leadership influence should create compound returns over time. Each interaction should make the next one easier, not harder.

When a leader tells me they're tired, I don't look at their schedule. I look at their "influence friction".

Energy depletion rarely comes from the volume of leadership work. It comes from the resistance within the influence system.

Fix that, and your leadership becomes not just more effective, but more sustainable.

As the consigliere to performance leaders across elite sport, I've seen this transformation repeatedly: When influence flows rather than forces, careers extend and your impact multiplies.

The leaders who last aren't those who push hardest.

Yes, they work hard...but more than that they're the ones who've learned to remove the friction points between their intent and its realisation.

Where is friction silently draining your influence?

Next week, I'll share the specific tools for measuring your organisation's "decision transmission efficiency" - the hidden metric that predicts leadership sustainability better than any other factor I've found.

Let's connect beyond here.....

Check out my YouTube channel: Paul Clarke - The Leaders Coach.

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A Master's Voice....

It works the same in for the message leaders out across - people may clap and seem enthused....but how hard have you worked to illustrate to them that it's consistent with a positive dawn for them too?

Imagine they asked "So what??" - what would your response be?

Thank you for being part of the Leaders Coach community. The work on how to lead better is something you have to do alone. But you don't have to do it on your own. Onward and Upward, Paul Clarke

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