09. Leadership Demands a Train Set

Tuesday, 03 March 2026

Most leadership advice begins in the wrong place.

It begins with behaviours: communicate clearly, delegate effectively, give feedback and set expectations. All sensible advice. Yet before any of these comes a more fundamental question—one that leadership books rarely ask:

What exactly are you responsible for?

Leadership is often described as the ability to influence people. That is only partly true. Plenty of people influence others. Parents influence children. Advertisers influence consumers. Celebrities influence millions. Leadership is different. Leadership begins when something real depends upon your decisions.

Leadership sounds impressive in theory. In practice, it requires something real to improve, test and take responsibility for.

In leadership, that "something real" is your train set.

A train set is any project, product or process over which you have agency. It is the part of the world you can influence, improve or change. Responsibility tells you what is yours. Agency tells you what you can change. The two often overlap, but not always.

Without a train set, leadership is merely opinion.

This is why the first task of leadership is not improvement. It is definition.

You cannot improve a train set you cannot see.

Good leaders begin by drawing their railway. They identify the stations and signals. The bottlenecks and junctions. The dependencies and delays. They define what belongs on their track and what lies beyond it. Surprisingly few do.

Many managers spend their careers reacting to events rather than understanding systems. A defect appears and they fix it. A complaint arrives and they respond to it. A deadline slips and they escalate it. Yet they rarely pause to ask where the tracks begin, where they end and how they connect to the wider network. The result is predictable: departments optimise for themselves whilst damaging others, and local efficiency improves at the expense of organisational performance.

The problem is rarely effort.

The problem is usually the map.

Train sets also come in different sizes. A member of your team may operate a small section of track with a limited number of decisions and responsibilities. Their manager oversees a broader network. Senior leaders inherit railways of extraordinary complexity, where a single decision may affect hundreds or thousands of people across multiple functions and locations.

The principles, however, remain unchanged. The most senior leader is not playing a different game. They are simply operating a larger train set.

This matters because no train set exists in isolation. Every organisation is, in truth, a network of overlapping railways. Your train set intersects with those of your colleagues. A purchasing decision affects production. A sales commitment changes operations. A finance policy shapes customer experience. One team's shortcut often becomes another team's problem.

Most organisational friction occurs at the boundaries between train sets.

Work falls into gaps. Decisions stall. Accountability blurs. Problems linger because everybody assumed somebody else was responsible. In many organisations, the greatest inefficiencies are not found within departments but between them.

Good leaders understand not only their own train set, but the train sets of others. They know where responsibility begins, where it ends and where collaboration is required. Clear boundaries do not create silos. They create accountability. After all, a railway only functions because every signal box, platform and section of track has clearly defined ownership.

One of the most striking things about leadership is how quickly behaviour changes once responsibility becomes clear. Walk through any organisation and you will find problems hiding in plain sight: an untidy workspace, a recurring defect, a dissatisfied customer or a process that everyone complains about but nobody fixes.

Ask why.

The answer is often remarkably simple:

"I didn't realise that was mine."

The moment something becomes part of a person's train set, the onus changes. People stop waiting. They start acting. What was once somebody else's problem becomes their responsibility to solve. Standards rise. Decisions accelerate. Ownership appears.

This is why ambiguity is so costly. Undefined responsibility does not remove work. It merely removes ownership.

A train set left in the attic teaches nobody anything.

The purpose of a train set is not ownership alone. It is use. Leaders rarely improve systems through grand redesigns. More often, they tinker. They adjust a process. Clarify a standard. Move a meeting. Change a measure. Small changes reveal how the railway truly works.

Leadership, in practice, is often little more glamorous than careful experimentation.

The best leaders move constantly between theory and practice. They learn an idea, apply it to their train set and return with experience. The classroom sharpens judgement, but the railway provides the lesson. One without the other produces either ignorance or abstraction.

Before a leader can improve a system, they must first define it. Before they can define it, they must accept responsibility for it. And once they do, something remarkable happens: they stop asking, "Whose problem is this?" and start asking, "What am I going to do about it?"

Leadership demands a train set.