Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you feel that no one on your team can do their job as well as you could do it? Are you so plugged into the details that you don’t have time to focus on the bigger picture? Do you worry about not being involved in the decisions that your team is making? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations. In coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. The step we’re going to take today involves reducing how much you are the center of all the things and reduce your team’s dependency on you. Years ago I worked with Eli, who was a VP at a client.

I worked with him for quite a while, got to know him pretty well now, he’d been in leadership for a while and with success, had just recently been promoted to vp. He prided himself in being a hands-on manager. He didn’t wanna become one of those executives that loses sight of what’s really going on, and I think that’s really an admirable intent.

His team had quite a bit of respect for his knowledge, and in general most seemed to feel pretty positively towards him. He had a team member who was fairly new in her role as a director and needed some guidance, and so she came to Eli for support and I know Eli was quite pleased about that, was very happy to give her all the answers she needed.

In fact, that seemed to be the norm for how he engaged with all of his team. It made him quite the hub for all his direct reports. If you were sitting near his office, you’d see just constant coming and going of his direct reports in and out of his office just buzzing around and it sure appeared like they were really well supported in getting what they needed.

They kept coming back for more after all. And he certainly seemed pleased that they all sought his input and guidance sort of proved to him that he was still in it. But at some point I was chatting with one of the directors about Eli and in general, still hearing favorable ish stuff, but there was something that just didn’t seem quite right.

There were hesitation around certain topics, particularly when I observed just how helpful Eli seemed to be. Oh yeah, someone told me he, he likes to help us. He’s really happy to give us all the answers. Now the tone they used in saying this kind of thing, said more than just the word. So I probed and the new director in particular, she seemed pretty uncertain about her interaction with Eli.

She appreciated that he was giving her all the answers at first, but over time it seemed to her that she didn’t actually, she wasn’t liking this. She was uncomfortable. She felt stifled and found it actually harder to get her job done without having to keep circling back for more direction from him.

She even admitted it felt to her like Eli didn’t trust her to deal with difficult issues without him, and she wondered what she was doing wrong and how she could go and prove and earn that trust. She just made excuses and said maybe she just wasn’t doing the right things, but she wasn’t alone. I found out from another director that this was actually pretty typical for how Eli interacted.

He said, I don’t know what it really take to prove yourself to him. I don’t think he’ll let anyone operate on their own, and I even heard one person say, I don’t know how he does it, just keep it on top of everything we’re doing, plus his own job. And again, it didn’t really come out as a compliment. In fact, it sounded like what I think of as a bad case of leadership, fomo, the fear of missing out, and that brings us to the enabling principle.

Create autonomy. This is an essential drive to growing other leaders and in growing more deeply into leadership yourself. Creating autonomy means making yourself obsolete in the day-to-day of the team by coaching them and giving them the space to resolve problems without you to make decisions without you.

Now, there’s a lot of reasons why leaders don’t like to do this. You might feel that no one can do the work as well as you can, or that there isn’t enough time to give people space. You don’t know if they can succeed. You don’t trust people to do the job, and you might have other reasons for this behavior yourself, but regardless of the reason, the people you lead will feel that you don’t trust them.

And that’s really demotivating. That’s not going to bring out their best. It’s not going to help them grow. Now to be clear, creating autonomy doesn’t mean abandoning people to sort everything out themselves. Creating autonomy is about giving people enough clarity and coaching with guiding principles so that they can move forward without constantly having to check in with you.

They can make decisions in your absence, and then you need to be ready when they need help, when they make mistakes. This approach helps build confidence in your team and your next level leaders, and it helps create excitement and energy. You can see that you’re starting to succeed in creating autonomy when your discussions with your directs become more about outcomes than just how to do tasks when it’s more about discussing the pros and cons of their approaches rather than just prescribing solutions when your day is less about checking on everything and more about thinking about the future and what’s next for you to focus on for your team and your organization.

In Eli’s case, he needed to step away from the details if he wanted to be in all the details. If he wanted to be an individual contributor, he should have remained an individual contributor. As a leader though, and especially as he was progressing into executive leadership, he needed to stop worrying about missing out on all the little details.

What if instead of simply telling the new director, what to do, he had talked to her about outcomes and what needed to be achieved. Instead of saying something like, go write a report with this, these six attributes, he said something like This other team needs timely information in order to make decisions on where to next spend money on advertising.

Then the new director, instead of asking our team to simply build yet another report, could actually analyze the problem, engage with the people that need the data, engage with their team, and truly problem solve. Or if instead of saying something like, I just need you to call 10 prospects per day. What if he instructed her with the idea that you know, something like, here’s what our ideal customer profile looks like.

We need to create a durable stream of revenue with that customer profile of X thousand dollars. Go find it. Make it happen. The new director, instead of just sitting down and trying to make that 10 calls a day, would strategize, would research, would think about those customer profiles and possibly might make far fewer than 10 calls a day, but might yield better results than if she had simply been told to call 10 a day.

Ultimately, you’re going to realize this is working. When instead of fomo, that fear of missing out, you actually have a fear of getting involved, getting too deep in the details and getting in your team’s way when the buzz of that day-to-day stays mostly just below the surface of your attention, and you’re freed up to focus on next level challenges in the future.

You’re really getting this right. And creating autonomy is essential to growing other leaders. It works well with the notion of alignment and that autonomy might come more naturally with alignment. It creates more confidence for both you and the team you lead, that they’re moving in the right direction.

And this is central autonomy to the notion of the third core principle that leaders create more leaders, not followers. Followers are told what to do. Leaders take on outcomes. They learn to influence others to effectively create durable results. And last, by giving people space to grow, you give yourself the space to grow because instead of waiting deep into the lower level details, you have other people focused on that, and you can focus your energy where it’s truly needed and grow yourself.

The thing I’ve learned is that if you give people all the answers, the main thing you teach them is to come to you for answers. Demanding to be involved in every last detail of your team is exhausting for both you and your team and it’s ineffective. Or maybe more importantly, it prevents your team from growing, and worst case makes ’em think you don’t trust them, which is gonna lead to turnover and it will prevent you from growing.

Creating autonomy by coaching the folks who lead into handling most problem resolution without you does wonders in creating your next level of leadership, and it frees you up to think about vision, about strategy, the future, and for you to handle problem resolution for whoever leads you. So I’ll close by asking you to think about a few things.

How do you show up for the folks that you lead? Are you centering yourself in all the things or are you giving others the space to resolve problems themselves? What’s holding you back from enabling your team to be more autonomous? And what can you do today to gain confidence in your team by giving them the space to work things out for themselves?

Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it, and join me next time where I’m going to talk about making mistakes.