Most leaders do one of these well. Some do two. The rare ones do all three, and they do them in that order.
Plant the flag. People cannot commit to a direction they cannot name. Before anything else, the people in your charge need to know exactly what you are all working toward, and what you want to be known for once you get there.
Not a mission statement. A destination specific enough to argue about.
This does two things at once. It creates a common identity, something to belong to and strive for. And it establishes the only reliable basis for priority you will ever have. Without a flag, every request carries the same weight. Every task looks important. And when everything is important, nothing is. Teams without a flag are not lazy. They are unable to choose, which looks identical from the outside and feels considerably worse from the inside.
Provide structure. Structure is what makes the flag reachable. The operating rhythm, the standard, the clarity about who owns what. It is how intent becomes motion.
But structure fails quietly. Push it too far and people stop thinking and start complying. The process becomes the job. Ownership fades, the people closest to the customer stop speaking up, and forward thinking disappears without anyone noticing, because on paper everything is running.
Inspire freedom. Freedom is what makes the work worth doing, and where every good idea you did not personally have comes from. It is also the one that fails loudly. Too much of it produces chaos, competing directions, wasted effort, and occasionally conduct that lands you in a room you never wanted to sit in.
Neither one is the answer. The two are the answer, held in tension.
Get that tension right and something changes in kind rather than degree. You have built a system with enough order to be trusted and enough room to be improved. People stop asking permission and start bringing you better routes to the same flag. Future leaders surface, because the only way to identify one is to leave room for someone to lead. New methods emerge that you would never have designed yourself.
That is the point at which you pass your own goal. Not because you aimed higher, but because you built something capable of finding paths you never planned.
Order alone gets you compliance. Freedom alone gets you noise. Held together, they get you art.
Plant the flag. Build the structure. Then get out of the way. Everybody wins, everybody grows, and the organization goes further than the person who designed it.