Leadership isn’t about being the smartest person in the room or producing the best work yourself. It’s about creating conditions where your team does their best work.

This means:

• Removing obstacles that slow the team down
• Providing clarity on vision and priorities through repetition
• Building trust so people feel safe to experiment and fail
• Creating space for weep work and thinking
• Developing capability in others rather than hoarding expertise

Ideally you’re a complexity sink. Chaos goes in, order comes out.¹

Shift from being an expert to become an advisor. Your job is to multiply the team’s impact, not to be the bottleneck they depend on.

The measure of good leadership isn’t the quality of your own output. It’s whether your team improves, ships better work, and grows more capable over time.

Managerial Solutions

From this blog post by Tim Klapdor:

During one of my many meetings, I pondered, “What exactly do I do?”. How limited are my actions in this process? I decided to write down what actions I am able to actually implement and came up with this short list.

• Debate - bring people together to resolve conflicts.
• Delete - remove the task, it’s not going to happen.
• Delegate - apply someone else to the task.
• Delay - push back the task to a later date.
• Defer - put the task on hold until it is required.
• Double down - add extra resourcing to ensure that it gets done.
• Diminish - reduce the scope of the task to something that will actually be completed.

These aren’t creative acts. They’re enabling acts.

This connects to Lean UX‘s principle of problem-focused teams. Leaders who enable teams to thrive assign them problems to solve rather than features to implement, showing trust in the team’s capability. Still, teams need a vision.