Make decisions and investments that lift everyone they touch.
Every decision a leader makes reaches beyond the people who make it. A choice about where a team spends its time shapes what another team can deliver, and a budget decision in one function sets limits for others. The leaders people most want to follow weigh those effects deliberately and look for the outcome that works for the business and for everyone it touches.
Over the course of my career, I watched decisions made thoughtfully and carefully that served the person making them first, sometimes at a real cost to others. Those costs were rarely visible to anyone outside the room, and they showed up later in the business, in teams that underperformed and partnerships that never formed. That pattern led me to make the greater good a deliberate part of how I lead.
I learned two things quickly. Leading this way was the right thing to do, and it was remarkably hard to argue against. Leading with the greater good in mind means considering everyone your decisions affect and creating conditions where they can all win.
Hear From Everyone Your Plan Will Affect
The most reliable way to make a decision that serves everyone it touches is to hear from those people while the decision can still change. Start by naming everyone your plan will reach: the peer teams who depend on your work, the leaders who fund it, the teams who will deliver it, and the colleagues who will be asked to work differently because of it. Many of them will never sit in your planning meetings, and their perspective is often what a plan is missing.
Then ask each group what a good outcome looks like from where they sit, what they are accountable for, and what concerns them. Their answers will rarely line up, and that is useful, because it shows you the trade-offs while there is still room to design around them. Understanding why people want what they want also makes it far easier to find an approach they can support. When people see their input reflected in the final plan, they back it, because part of it is theirs.
When I launched a new marketing strategy in two different organizations, I spent the first six weeks presenting the plan to business leadership, account leadership, sales leadership, and others whose work it would touch. Each conversation sharpened it. By launch, the strategy reflected what those leaders needed, and they arrived ready to partner on the results. In organizations where work crosses many teams and reporting lines, this groundwork is one of the first things I coach leaders to do.
“When people see their input reflected in the final plan, they back it, because part of it is theirs.”
Weigh Every Decision Against Everyone It Affects
With everyone heard, the next step is to weigh what you heard against the needs of the business as a whole. Look across the conversations for where people agree, where their needs conflict, and which points matter most to the outcome. Some requests will serve one team at the expense of the rest, including requests from your own team. Setting those aside, and being open about why, earns the confidence of the people who weren’t part of the conversation.
Weighing for the greater good can mean directing more support to a smaller group for a time, because that is where the business needs it most. What makes a decision fair is its design: everyone it affects can see they were considered, even when they did not get everything they asked for.
I once led marketing for more than ten industry sectors with a small number of marketers. We designed the team around shared resources, so every sector CEO received the same level of support regardless of how many people we had, and each sector kept marketing leadership that understood its industry and its clients. The same design let us rally the team around a sector when a time-sensitive opportunity called for more, then return to the shared model once it passed, without any sector losing the context that made our support useful.
Make the Case for What Serves Everyone
A plan built around everyone it affects is the easiest kind of plan to support. When you present it, show what each group gains, what the business gains, and what each group is being asked to give, including your own team. Laying the trade-offs out openly answers questions before people need to ask them. People who can see how a decision treats them, and how it treats everyone else, are far more willing to back it, even when they would have chosen differently on their own.
A position built around one leader’s gain has to work much harder, because it depends on keeping some of its costs out of view, and those costs surface as soon as others start asking questions. Picture two leaders competing for the same budget. One argues for their own team’s priorities. The other shows how a shared investment would lift three teams’ results and the business with them. The second proposal usually wins the room, and the people in it remember which leader had their interests in mind.
Over time, that becomes a lasting advantage. Colleagues bring you into decisions earlier, accept your recommendations more readily, and give you the benefit of the doubt when a call is hard, because they can see you are working for them as well.
Find a Better Way With What You Already Have
Some of the most valuable greater-good decisions start with resources already under your control. Budgets, time, and people tend to stay where earlier plans put them, and a leader who asks where else they could do good often finds that the same money can serve more people without taking anything essential away from the work it already funds. These decisions rarely arrive as a request. The teams who would benefit may not know a change is possible, so the initiative has to come from you.
In one organization, sales needed marketing focused on its priority accounts and had no budget to fund it. Marketing’s money was spread the way it always had been, with much of it spent reaching broad audiences. Nobody had asked me to change that, and my budget was flat. I found a way to free up part of that spend and redirect it to marketing built around sales’ priority accounts while keeping the impact of our broader reach intact. The business gained an approach it had been missing, one that supported clients from first awareness through to closed business, and marketing and sales performed better together in market. Relationships, pipeline, and sales grew across 80% of our strategic accounts.
Design for the People Who Usually Go Without
In most organizations, some teams have been underserved for so long that everyone has come to accept it. A region is too spread out to support well, a group is too small to justify the investment, or a need has gone unmet long enough that it no longer comes up. Leading with the greater good means treating those gaps as problems worth solving, usually by rethinking how the work is done and who takes part in it, so a modest investment reaches people who were previously out of reach.
One region I supported covered a large territory, with people and offices spread far apart and little budget to hire more support. For years, robust marketing there had been considered out of reach. We built a different model. AI tailored materials to the region, and people reviewed everything to make sure it was relevant, accurate, and aligned with regulatory requirements. One marketer coordinated the work, and the sales and account teams, already close to clients across the region, carried it to them and fed back what was working. That model gave the region support it had never had and returned value far beyond the investment available.
Start With the Next Decision That Reaches Beyond Your Team
Choose one decision coming up that affects people outside your team. Before you settle it, talk with the people it will touch whom you haven’t heard from, weigh what they tell you against what the business needs, and look for the version where each of them gains something that matters to them, including anyone who has usually gone without. Then explain the decision in terms of what it does for all of them.
Practiced consistently, this becomes how the people around you expect decisions to be made. Teams tend to share what they know more openly, trade-offs get settled with less friction, and colleagues begin making the same choices in their own work. That is how a leader builds an environment where everyone wins, and any leader can start this week.
About John Fildes
I grow the top line by connecting marketing to business strategy. By leveraging powerful positioning, content marketing, and client insights, I help organizations drive qualitative and quantitative results at scale.
I've built an amazing network of incredibly talented people over the years. What I've appreciated most is those who have invested in me, mentored me, and helped me become the talented professional I am today. I pay it forward by doing the same for other high performing professionals and entrepreneurs.
Learn More: Growth Leader | Business Builder | Leadership Multiplier
All views are my own and not those of my current or prior employers.
