How Great Leaders Create Rhythm, Velocity, and Evolution (The Drumbeat)
November 3, 2025
As a CEO or senior leader, your single most critical skill is creating and maintaining the organizational drumbeat — the rhythm that keeps your company operating with discipline, evolving continuously, and improving with purpose.
This article builds on three foundational frameworks: Getting Ahead and Staying Ahead, Leading "Building the Business" Projects, and Meta-Leading "Building the Business" Projects. If you haven’t read those yet, start there. They define the principles this article relies on.
You run a successful business through three interconnected dimensions:
Running the Business – executing current operations effectively.
Building the Business – evolving systems, structures, products and capabilities.
Leading the People – motivating, aligning, and empowering teams.
To create a great organization that evolves rather than stagnates, your drumbeat must connect and harmonize all three.
Use the following template to help you see a single view of the drumbeat Organization Drum-beat tracker each leader should maintain his own tracker to be kept up to date and reviewed jointly on the regular cadence defined
Running the Business: The Foundation of the Drumbeat
Running the business is about maintaining operational performance — making sure the company consistently delivers on its promises. It’s about stability, quality, and accountability.
Define Cadence by Scale
The frequency and granularity of your involvement depend on company size:
Small teams (5–20 people): daily rhythm.
Growing organizations (20–100 people): weekly rhythm.
Mid-size companies (100–500 people): monthly rhythm.
Large organizations (500+): quarterly or semi-annual rhythm.
A clear rhythm creates accountability and visibility. It defines when you expect updates, how you respond, and what happens next.
The Operational Protocol
Every department should have a defined monitoring and reporting “machine":
Insightful systematized reports sent on a regular cadence (weekly/monthly) from each leader with you as a CEO reviewing them and responding within hours (or days).
Real-time visibility into dashboards and KPIs, with automated alerts that trigger when critical issues arise
Organized Risk management that is tracked and managed.
This cycle — the consistent act of looking, understanding, reacting, and improving — is what creates the “beat.”
If your managers send reports but you never read or comment on them, the rhythm collapses. A drumbeat only exists when both sides play their part.
Test the numbers against anecdotes
You must form a perspective about the reports and summaries you are readying, to do this you form an independent statistical perspective by comparing the reports to your “on the ground” understanding. Conduct activities which give a sense of what’s happening "on the ground” for example:
Skip-level one-on-ones to assess team engagement.
Hallway conversations
Ask adjacent leaders for observations on other teams’ performance.
Pair data with conversations — metrics without context lead to blind spots. Every surprise, ambiguity, or underperformance in running the business is a potential building-the-business project.
Building the Business: Ensuring Future Performance
If running the business preserves your present, building the business creates your future. Like a muscle, if you stop exercising it, it atrophies. Do it continuously and you get faster and stronger.
Building the business includes everything that makes tomorrow easier, faster, or more valuable than today: automation, role design, product innovation, process redesign, or strategic reorganization.
The Purpose
Building the business means systematically identifying what needs to evolve — then turning that insight into tangible projects that:
Increase efficiency or quality.
Reduce risk, cost, or time.
Create new value for customers or employees.
Cadence and Capacity
Each department has its own optimal ratio between running and building, depending on its role and maturity, for example.
Customer Success: 70% running / 30% building — mostly focused on core metrics like renewals and expansion, with some time dedicated to automation or onboarding improvements.
Sales: 80% running / 20% building — focused on selling, with periodic process upgrades or training initiatives.
Marketing: 50% running / 50% building — equally split between execution and experimentation to figure out better performing marketing initiatives.
R&D: 30% running / 70% building — primarily focused on new products, features, or systems, with a small allocation for maintenance.
These ratios evolve as your organization matures. The key is ensuring every team has real bandwidth for improvement, not just maintenance. This is critical, the world around us is moving at break-neck speed.
Tracking and Leading Building-the-Business Projects
Every leader should maintain visibility into three layers:
A backlog of ideas and potential improvements.
A pipeline of active projects with owners, goals, and milestones.
A dashboard summarizing progress and results.
Each project should clearly define:
The problem being solved.
The desired outcome and success metrics.
The owner and their accountability structure.
The plan, timeline, and interdependencies.
If surprises arise — capture them. If an idea surfaces — log it. If an opportunity appears — prioritize it. The backlog is your long-term growth engine.
You should also manage this backlog on a defined cadence — review it weekly or monthly depending on your organization’s size. Ask questions like: Are we moving fast enough? Which projects are stalling and why? Do we need to accelerate specific initiatives based on changing opportunities or competitive pressures? This rhythm of review ensures that your organization isn’t just recording opportunities but acting on them with urgency and clarity.
Refer to Leading "Building the Business" Projects, and Meta-Leading "Building the Business” Projects for details on how to run a specific project.
Our goal here is assess velocity and quality of these initiatives, it’s a mix of art and science.
Leading the People: The Cultural Drumbeat
A company’s rhythm depends on its people believing in it. Culture defines whether the drumbeat feels like a march forward or a forced march.
Leading Leaders
Not every leader has the same ability to drive or create change. You must tailor your drumbeat to three levels of leadership:
High-Seniority Leaders: self-driven, strategic, and capable of originating initiatives. Support them through ideation, feedback, and clearing barriers.
Mid-Seniority Leaders: capable executors who need help with pacing and accountability. Set expectations collaboratively and manage velocity.
Early Leaders: developing leaders who still need direction. Work with them hands-on to model how to plan and execute effectively.
Adjust your involvement to match each leader’s maturity. As capability rises, your control should shift from directive to empowering.
Leading Employees
The cultural layer ensures everyone aligns around growth and improvement:
Reinforce that change equals progress.
Make it clear that improvement creates value — for individuals, teams, and the company.
Reward those who initiate ideas, embrace new processes, and help others adapt.
Every improvement project begins imperfectly. Employees must learn to help shape new systems rather than resist them. This mindset — not perfection — is the essence of a healthy drumbeat culture.
Final Thought:
The organizational drumbeat is how leaders turn time into traction — how great organizations convert repetition into evolution. A strong drumbeat creates momentum, alignment, and adaptability.
May the drumbeat — and the change force — be with you.
Resources
Use the following template to help you see a single view of the drumbeat Organization Drum-beat tracker each leader should maintain his own tracker to be kept up to date and reviewed jointly on the regular cadence defined