Leadership for Leaderless Action

Adapt or Fail

In Mission Critical Medicine, we talk a lot about the importance of shared mental models—how leaders build and deploy them to align their teams.

But not every team gets to wait for instructions. And leaders can’t be everywhere at once.

In a busy ED, or when a patient crashes on a random floor, there isn’t always time to ask what to do next. The team has to act. That’s where high-functioning, leaderless action comes into play.

Elite MCM teams are systems designed to move deliberately and effectively, even in the absence of direct oversight. They stabilize the chaos. They buy time. They start the work until leadership catches up.

So what makes that kind of team possible?

Here are three elements we see in teams that can move without waiting for orders:

1. They know why they’re there.

Mission clarity matters. When a team understands the core purpose behind their task, they don’t need line-by-line instructions. They can adjust the how without losing sight of the why. There's a strong link here to the idea of commander’s intent—we’ll come back to it in future posts.

2. They’ve practiced moving without being told.

Leaderless pivoting is a skill, and, like any skill, it needs reps. This means running drills where plans fail and leaders disappear and then waiting for the team to figure it out. It’s uncomfortable. That’s the point.

3. Their Leadership rewards initiative—even without orders.

If you want teams to act without direct leadership, you have to create psychological and organizational safety around it. In AARs, don’t just ask what went wrong—ask what moved without command. Talk about whether it helped, and how to support it better next time. Don’t punish people for thinking for themselves, train them to think well.

How are you building the capacity for leaderless action into your teams?

Good luck out there.

Dan