How To Not Get Pulled Back In After Empowering Others
Loss of control, fear of the unknown, and inbounds from the team secretly pull us back into the weeds. Work on your mindset and team coaching tactics to truly hit escape velocity.
Client: I am trying to delegate more so I can level up. I have a strong team hungry for growth. I need to let go more in execution and focus more on strategic leadership. However, I keep getting pulled back into team execution questions.
“Working yourself out of a job” is a leadership growth principle that I firmly believe in. It’s a fantastic growth flywheel: Learn the job, then coach others to do it, then move on to the bigger job. The focus is to learn how to delegate well rather than taking on more of the work.
Learning this type of delegation can happen at all levels, not just for leaders. Molly Graham wrote in her popular essay “Give Away Your Legos” that in rapidly scaling companies, everyone must frequently hand over tasks to new team members. This process allows individuals to focus on new challenges and enables the company to grow efficiently.
While many people like the idea in concept, they fail to adopt it well in practice. First, delegation often feels like a loss of control. When someone else takes on a task, especially in creative work, they will approach it differently. Long gone are the days of assembly lines where delegation means teaching someone else to do a task exactly as you had done it. As a result, you lose control over exactly how it gets done, how it is presented to others, and sometimes the exact outcome. This is frightening for leaders who need to feel in control of their environments and teams to feel safe and effective.
Another reason is that when you give away what you do well, you are left with what you don’t know as well; Or even worse — emptiness. It’s not uncommon for my clients to ask me: “But if I don’t do X, what else would I spend time on?” In a culture that idolizes achieving more and drives us to fill gaps constantly, we are uncomfortable with sitting with emptiness. If we associate part of our identities with what we do well, growth requires taking on a different identity associated with discomfort and uncertainty.
These fears and discomfort create barriers that make delegation challenging for many high achievers. To truly embrace growth and change and kick-start a positive growth cycle, we need to set aside our egos and re-learn how to learn.
Resist the Urge to Keep “Showing How Good Your Are”
Aspiring leaders often don’t delegate enough to truly escape the gravitational pull of execution work. The draw is strong because of two factors:
The person now doing the work is just learning the work. In the learning phase, they are likely to run into questions they need help with, deliver work at a lower quality, and mess up.
You are no longer actively delivering this value and showing others what a great job you can do. Instead, you are coaching another person from behind the scenes. What is your value? What if others don’t see it?
Yue’s Coaching Corner
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To truly delegate well, it is essential to avoid the following:
Giving them the answer — this is how you do it…let me show you (or worse, let me take a pass)
Jumping in to save the day — I must save them / this work!
Striving for Perfection when the work is already great — This is great but here’s one thing that can be better.
First, when you give your team the answer, you are training your team to come back to you as soon as they get stuck. After all, you have the answer or the best next step. It will be tempting to get back in there — afterall you can do it faster, better, with higher probability of success. Go against your urge and don’t give them the answer (even if you know it). Instead, coach them on how to get the answer from someone/somewhere else. What questions would you ask? Who would you talk to? Teach them how to learn and build relationships, not just come back to you whenever they hit a roadblock.
Second, when you jump back into the work, you take away agency and reinforce dependence. Some examples of this include pre-flighting reviews, answering a question for them when they don’t know it in a group meeting, and regularly sending suggestions their way unprompted. By (unconsciously) being the safety net for them, your team learns that they don’t need to go the extra mile because you’ll be there if they make a mistake. Instead, hold back when they don’t know an answer. Let them figure out for themselves how to handle the situation. Give them support and coaching when asked, but don’t do it for them. Jumping in creates more work for you to stay in the loop on everything and furthers your team’s dependence.
Last, and perhaps most dangerous, avoid nit-picking an already great work product. It’s okay if it wasn’t done exactly how you would’ve done it. It’s fine if they didn’t think about this one small edge case or nuanced risk. When someone comes to you with work that is 80% there, simply give positive reinforcement. If you start to nit-pick at that last 20%, there’s a high chance that the person will never feel confident enough in their work and their decision-making to stop coming back to you.
When you truly let go and empower another person, you’ll find that the tasks and decisions stop coming back to you (frequently), allowing you the space to consider what is next.
That’s all folks. I’ll pick up on this thread next week by diving into how to learn what your next job is with all this new found free time.
See you next week at 3:14 pm.
Yue
Loved reading this.