When we talk with business leaders, one question we seek to understand is this: With all the tasks you could prioritize and the limited hours available each day, how do you choose what to work on?

Among most CEOs, there’s broad consensus: Senior leaders should focus on the “what”—purpose, vision, strategy, goals, resource allocation, and assembling a capable team. To protect their time for those high-level priorities, they must delegate the day-to-day operating decisions (the “how”) to subordinates. Peter Drucker, arguably the most influential thinker on the manager’s role, wrote, “The executive is not supposed to be a handyman. He is supposed to be a builder.” In the New CEO Workshop program that one of us (Nitin) coleads at Harvard Business School, the faculty admonish new chief executives to move beyond execution and focus on the big picture. They say, “To truly be the chief executive officer, you need to stop behaving like the chief operating officer.” Leaders who get too deep into the details of execution are typically criticized as being micromanagers.

Yet when we study some of the world’s top-performing firms, we see a contradictory set of behaviors. These are companies where the CEOs and senior leaders care deeply about the “how”—that is, how people do their work—spending significant amounts of time observing the way middle managers and frontline employees work and designing systems and modeling behaviors that guide the methods people use to perform their tasks.

For this article we’ve conducted intensive research on four extraordinarily high-performing firms: Amazon, Danaher, RELX, and Toyota. We’ve visited their facilities, interviewed more than 20 executives, and read much of what’s been written about the factors that have led to their success. On the surface these four organizations have few attributes in common. They operate in different industries on three different continents and have diverse histories spanning family-run, founder-run, and professionally managed structures. One was born in the internet age, one in the early 1980s, and two are more than a century old.

The commonality is that each company has leaders who embrace a contrarian view of what a CEO should prioritize. Our study put a particular focus on Jeff Bezos, who founded and led Amazon for its first 27 years; Larry Culp, who led Danaher from 2000 to 2014, went on to steer a remarkable turnaround at General Electric from 2017 to 2024, and remains the CEO of GE Aerospace; Erik Engstrom, who led RELX’s then-largest division starting in 2004 and has been the CEO of RELX since 2009; and Eiji Toyoda, who led Toyota from the 1960s into the 1990s. (He died in 2013.) Leaders like these reject the model in which a CEO is primarily a delegator; instead, they see the chief executive as a vital participant in shaping how work gets done.

To be sure, many CEOs would claim they care about execution. What distinguishes the leaders of these high-performing firms is their sustained and close attention to behaviors and systems. They are not inserting themselves into every decision or displacing their teams. Instead, they act as teachers and system builders: They’re present in the work not to control it or make every decision themselves but to model standards, sharpen problem-solving, and establish behavioral norms that enable others to act with autonomy and discipline. They don’t meddle—they coach. They don’t override—they elevate. They don’t hoard decision rights—they teach others how to make sound decisions on their own. Their involvement is not disempowering—it is energizing. And it is purposeful: to build a system that performs reliably even when they’re not in the room.

In this article we will explore how these company leaders created or sustained systems and cultures in which leaders prioritize managing the how alongside the what. We’ll showcase the techniques they’ve used to do this. We’ll parse the difference between obsessive attention to detail (a positive) and micromanaging (a negative). And we’ll examine how creating an operating culture that’s passionate about the how can be an underappreciated source of durable competitive advantage.

In the course of our study, we found five core principles that guide hands-on leaders.

Let’s look at each one in turn.

[Here’s the first principle.]

They Obsess Over the Metrics That Customers Value

RELX is a 200-year-old London-based company formerly known as Reed Elsevier. In 1995 Forbes magazine predicted the company’s business model would make it “the first casualty of the internet.” In fact, since becoming its CEO, Engstrom has transformed RELX (its name since 2015) into a technology-driven information and analytics powerhouse—one that the London Stock Exchange last year named as the best-performing stock in the 40-year history of the FTSE 100 Index.

Engstrom, who was a McKinsey consultant and an executive at two publishing houses before assuming leadership of RELX, did that by coaching every RELX employee to obsess over “customer value”—the benefit the customer realizes from using a product. He has been repeating the same questions for 20 years: How does the customer measure value? How do we know? How do we measure that? How does using this product improve the customer’s economics? How do we know how much better off the customer is with our product—and how do we know that it is better on that metric than the alternatives are?

All too often when companies talk about customer metrics, they look at numbers such as customer acquisition cost, customer retention, lifetime value, and average transaction size—metrics that reflect how a customer benefits the company. In contrast, the how-obsessed CEOs we’ve studied focus on metrics that reflect how the company benefits the customer. Consider two examples at Amazon. Many companies say they offer low prices. But Bezos has held his group accountable for actually delivering the lowest prices and had a team build a bot to continually track Amazon’s and rivals’ prices on 1,000 items. The bot reprices a product if a competitor’s price drops. This enables Amazon to consistently offer customers what they want—the lowest prices on the widest assortment of goods. Bezos also realized that fast, reliable delivery is important to online shoppers. So he directed a team to build systems to measure precisely how long each package takes to get from order to delivery—then held the order fulfillment teams accountable. This approach has helped Amazon make deliveries progressively faster: reducing a week to two days to, in some cases, hours.

Focusing deeply on how the company creates and delivers value for its customers was a cornerstone of the practices of the leaders we studied. According to our interviews, people in the organization don’t experience this specific kind of detail orientation as micromanaging. Rather, it creates mission clarity. When leaders show how much they personally care about what matters most to customers, attending to details becomes a shared norm for every employee—which expands the decision rights of those close to the front lines.