I made a post last week about spending a few days with our #Canadian senior sales leadership team. We covered a lot of ground, but one of the things I found myself thinking about afterward had less to do with what was on the agenda and more to do with who was leading it.
Over the last few years, I’ve deliberately tried to give away more of the things I used to automatically own. Key meetings, customer relationships, projects, presentations, decisions and, increasingly, rooms where I know I could probably add value.
That isn’t because I have less interest in the business or because I’m trying to remove myself from it. It’s because at some point a leader who continues to be at the centre of everything becomes part of the constraint.
Most leaders I have spoken with over coffee or on my podcast don’t hold onto things because they’re selfish or because they don’t trust their teams. Often, we hold onto them because we’re good at them. If I’ve handled a particular customer for years, I know the history and can probably move the conversation along faster. If I’ve run a meeting twenty times, I know where it tends to run into troubles. If I understand an issue well, it’s often easier to make the decision myself than spend the time helping someone else work through it.
In the short term, that can look like good leadership. Things move quickly and the work gets done. The problem is that speed today can come at the expense of bench depth and individual capability tomorrow for my team.
If every difficult customer eventually gets handed to the most experienced leader, nobody else becomes experienced at handling difficult customers. If every important presentation gets delivered by the same person, nobody else learns how to stand in front of the room and engage with the team. If every uncertain decision gets escalated upward, we shouldn’t be surprised when people become reluctant to make decisions without us.
At some point leadership development must include real responsibility.
To be very clear I don’t mean delegating the work you don’t want. Giving away administrative tasks may make you more efficient, but it doesn’t develop anybody. The more interesting question is what you’re prepared to give away that you enjoy, are good at, and receive recognition for doing.
There is a cost to doing this. Sometimes the meeting won’t run exactly the way you would have run it. Someone may take a different route with a customer. A decision might take longer. You may sit quietly in a conversation knowing exactly what you would say next and decide not to say it to see where it goes. This works in sales introductions when we give clear instructions, let the customer experience the product and possibly make a few mistakes and then point them back to the instructions to learn where they went wrong. It’s the same when you’re developing people. Clear instructions, let them run with it and possibly make small mistakes, debrief after to help them learn.
You also have to be willing to become less important in places where you used to matter a lot. If you do this properly, customers who used to call you will start calling your team. Senior leaders will hear ideas directly from your people rather than filtered through you. Problems will sometimes get solved without anybody asking what you think. Someone else will get credit for work you once would have owned.
That is not a failure of leadership. It is evidence that the leadership worked.
Of course, giving away responsibility is not the same as disappearing. Putting someone into an important situation without clear instructions, authority or support isn’t development; it’s abandonment. There is still work to do as the leader. Make sure the person understands the outcome. Give them the context you have that they don’t. Be clear about the decisions they own and the points where you need to be involved. Help them prepare if they need it and spend some time afterward talking about what worked and what they would do differently.
Then resist the urge to rescue them just because their approach is different from yours.
That has probably been one of the more useful lessons for me as I’ve become more experienced as a leader. My job is not to create increasingly accurate copies of myself. It is to help capable people develop their own judgment and then give them enough opportunity to use it. That requires giving away real things. And it often involves learning from your people not just teaching them.
Earlier in my career I thought about leadership development mostly in terms of coaching, feedback, training and career planning. I still believe in all those things, but increasingly I think giving opportunities is the most important thing a leader can do for their team.
You can coach someone for years on how to lead an important customer conversation. Eventually they need to lead the customer.
You can talk about executive presence. Eventually they need to lead the presentation.
You can discuss decision making. Eventually they need to make a decision where the answer isn’t obvious and the consequences are real.
The real opportunity is where all the other development work gets tested.
There’s also a practical business reason for doing this. An organization where every important relationship, decision or problem runs through a handful of people has a capacity problem. It doesn’t matter how good those people are. Eventually there are simply more rooms than they can occupy.
Creating more capable leaders increases the capacity of the whole organization. More customers can have strong relationships. More problems can be solved where they occur. Decisions happen faster because they don’t all travel up the hierarchy. Senior leaders can spend more time on the problems that require their experience.
And perhaps most importantly, people learn that when you tell them they own something, you mean it.
So what one question can you ask yourself more often?
Do I need to be in this room, or am I here because that’s the way it’s always been?
There is a big difference.
I’m certainly not perfect at it. There are still things I hold onto too long and times when stepping in feels much easier than staying out. But I’m increasingly convinced that one of the measures of good leadership is not how many important rooms require you.
It’s how many important rooms used to require you and no longer do. Because eventually, if we are serious about developing people, we have to give them something more valuable than advice.
We have to give them the room.