– “It will just be faster if I do it myself”.
– “It’s easier if I just tell them what to do.”
– “I don’t have time to coach them through this.”
Sounds familiar?
If you’re a leader, perhaps you’ve said or thought something very much like this. And if you have, you’re in good company. You’d be amazed how often I hear this in my work with clients.
If you work for a leader who thinks like this, you get to experience the other side of it. You’re also in good company. Perhaps you’re even happy to get a straight answer to a straight question like “What should I do now?”, rather than some annoying questions designed to help you think through the issue and come up with your own course of action (“What are some ways you could address this?”).
I get it. Leaders face huge demands and time constraints are real. Developing people takes time and energy and sometimes, it may just be more expedient to tell than to coach. But when you constantly tell, you train people to come to you at the first sign of difficulty or ambiguity. You also reduce the opportunity to leverage someone else’s ideas and problem-solving abilities. What if, with proper support and encouragement, they could have come up with an angle that never even crossed your mind – a better angle?
Making the business dependent on you for too much “doing” and too much “telling” is not the solution. In fact, it’s quite unhealthy.
I was working recently with a team of senior executives and put it to them like this:
If you lead a team of 5 including yourself, your efforts account for about 1/5th of total output. If you work twice as hard as everyone else, that may not be healthy or sustainable, but through your additional effort, you’ve added meaningful capacity to that small system.
Now imagine that you lead an organization of 800 people, including yourself. Looking at the number of hours worked each week across that organization, what is your approximate share of the overall effort? It’s about 1/800th, right? That works out to about 0.13%. Now let’s say that you manage to work twice as hard as everybody else. How much have you moved the needle for your organization if you’re not deploying your efforts in a way that creates real leverage across that system?
Not taking anything away from the importance of having a good work ethic, the badge of honor you should care most about as a leader is not how many hours you work or how many things you’ve personally decided, but how well your team performs. And as your responsibilities increase, that becomes ever more critical.
Your real challenge, as a leader, is to unlock the potential of your organization. The way you do that is by getting people and teams to a point where they don’t need you – or your marginal output – in order to get things done. And when you model such an approach for others, you allow it to cascade down your organization. You create a multiplier effect. You go from 1/800 to 1×800 impact.
It’s a trap that many leaders face: coaching and developing people takes time and energy – time and energy that, perhaps, you feel you don’t have. But how will you ever move the needle in a meaningful way if you don’t escape the trap of being indispensable for everything, by making it a top priority to help the people around you grow into their full potential?
