I trained them to need me.

I let messages sit on purpose.

When someone on my team sent me a problem that wasn't urgent, I didn't answer it right away. Sometimes I waited a couple of hours. Sometimes I waited until the next day.

I didn't always work this way.

I used to be the person who always had an answer. Someone would bring me a problem, and before they finished explaining it, my brain was already working on the fix. If I could save them two hours of frustration with a five-minute conversation, why wouldn't I?

Early on, that habit was my value. Having answers is how an individual contributor gets noticed and gets trusted with harder things. So when I moved into leading teams, I brought it with me without a second thought.

It got more complicated from there. I connect dots fast, and I think by talking. Sometimes I'm still working out what I believe while I'm saying it. That works with a peer over coffee. As the leader, it meant my half-formed thinking became the starting point for everyone else's, and people started reacting to my idea instead of building their own.

Eventually I had to ask myself a hard question. When everyone in the meeting agreed with me, how would I know if it was because the idea was good, or because I was the boss?

I was reminded of all this recently while coaching a leader who was drowning. Their plate was overflowing, and they were frustrated that so much of the team's work still ran through them.

As we talked, a pattern showed up. They gave their people very specific instructions on how to do every assignment. When the work came back and didn't match what they had in mind, they corrected it or redid parts of it themselves. From where they sat, that was protecting quality. The more we dug in it turned out that most of their exhaustion was self-inflicted. They were doing their job and that of their direct reports.

Their team had no room to find its own way because the path was already drawn. The standard they were measured against was really just the way their boss would have done it.

In the book Multipliers, Liz Wiseman writes about accidental diminishers. One version is the Rescuer, the well-meaning leader who jumps in to help and ends up shrinking the people they are meant to support.

I understood that leader completely, because I had been that leader.

Every time you rescue someone, you teach them to bring you the next one.

During my MBA program I worked on this with a coach who gave me a phrase I still use.

I hold myself to a very high standard, and I was starting to see how easily I imposed that same standard on everyone around me. I learned that not every situation needs neurosurgeon precision. A lot of work only needs to be good enough to move forward. Spending three hours polishing something already at 90% is three hours nobody gets back. And most times no one notices.

The simplest change I made was to stop answering every problem the minute it arrived. I let it sit for a couple of hours, sometimes a full day. By my count, 70% or more of those problems got solved without me. Someone found the answer on their own, or the problem turned out to less of an issue.

What's on your plate this week. How much of it did you take off someone else’s plate? Would they have handled it if you had waited a little longer?

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh