Latest / The Rosanne Callens Podcast / E25: Can You Take a Day Off? How Leaders Accidentally Become The Bottleneck
Transcript
- Rosanne Callens: Hi, friends. If your team falls apart every time you take a day off, that may not be proof of how valuable you are. It may be a warning sign that too much of the work is depending on you. That can be uncomfortable to admit because being needed feels really good. You know, there's something incredibly validating about being the person that. Everyone calls when something goes wrong. You know the answer, you know who to contact, where the information lives, and you can usually get things moving faster than anyone else, right? You leave for one afternoon, and suddenly your phone is lighting up like you've been gone for six months. And part of you is irritated, but another part is secretly thinking, hmm, apparently this place can't survive without me. Well, the second reaction is where leaders need to pay attention. Picture a leader named Lisa. Lisa is Excellent at her job. She cares about her team and she works hard and she's built a reputation for getting things done. Everyone can count on her. When a project starts slipping, she jumps in. If someone on her team is struggling, she helps out. When a client is unhappy, she gets involved because she knows that, well, she could probably resolve the issue faster. And at first, this looks like great leadership. Lisa is responsible and dependable. Her boss trusts her and her team knows that she's gonna come through. The problem is, Lisa starts becoming the answer to almost everything. Her days get longer because she spends most of them helping everyone else with their work. Decisions start piling up because people are waiting for her opinion. And team members are bringing her problems before they have even thought about potential solutions because they already know that Lisa can solve the problem faster than they can. Well, eventually, Lisa has created a very efficient system. But guess what the system is? The system is Lisa. So Lisa gets tired and decides, man, I need to take a vacation. She tells everyone she's really going to unplug this time. She has the sunscreen. She has all the books she's wanted to read for six months. She has an out of office message that even says she has limited access to email. Limited access only lasted for 43 minutes. You know why? Because she checked her phone at the airport just to make sure everything was okay. She checked it again while waiting to board the airplane, and by the time she reached the hotel, she had already answered several emails, solved two problems, because apparently the organization decided her vacation was the perfect time for everything to catch fire. Sound familiar? When Lisa comes back, everybody's thrilled. She hears things like, Thank goodness you're back, Lisa. We really missed you. And wow, that sounds pretty flattering, but it's also telling her something important. If everything has to flow through Lisa, she has not built a stronger team. She has built a team that requires her constant availability. And that's where leaders confuse working harder with leading better. When the pressure increases, capable people tend to increase their own effort. They stay later, they take work back from employees, they jump into meetings that they don't even need to attend, and they personally solve problems because to them, doing it themselves feels faster. And for a while, that strategy, of course, can work beautifully. Which is exactly why this habit is so easy to keep. But eventually the fixer, the Lisa of the situation becomes the bottleneck. Your calendar becomes so packed because everybody needs part of your time. Strategic work keeps getting pushed to tomorrow because all of the emergencies today keep winning. You're going home exhausted and wondering. Whether you need a better productivity system, a better calendar, or one of those planners that somehow promises to reorganize your entire life if you use just the right stickers and of course, post-it notes. the problem isn't time management. The problem is You've built a leadership model that requires too much of YOU. You. This is a major part of my electric leadership framework. Leadership energy should not stop with you. Your job is to not be the sole power source for everyone around you. Your job is to build enough capability around you so that people can think, decide. And move without having to plug back into you every time something happens. And of course, this sounds easy until someone comes into your office with a problem that you know how to solve in 30 seconds. They say to you, What should I do? And you already know the answer. You could tell them exactly what to do, send them back out the door and feel very efficient. But the problem is that you solved the situation. But they didn't practice solving it. They didn't learn how to make that judgment call. So the next time another problem happens, what do they do? They come straight back to you. this is how leaders are training dependency. Most of the time, it's not because they're controlling. It happens because they're helpful. They feel that they are being helpful. Helping feels generous. And taking something off someone's plate really does feel good. to many people, it feels like good leadership. Yet there are moments when the most useful thing you can do for someone is to not give them the answer. Imagine that same employee comes into Lisa's office and says, Lisa, we have a problem with this project. What do you think we should do? And instead of immediately answering, Lisa catches herself and says, Hmm, well, what do you think we should do? Now, there might be a pause, it might be uncomfortable for a little bit. Because Lisa has spent years answering every question. It might be a long, pause. Eventually, though, the employee is going to start to work through the problem. They're going to explain what they know, what they're worried about, and what options they've already considered. And Lisa may still need to challenge or help their thinking or point out something that they missed, but now something different is happening. She's not solving today's problem. She's helping that person develop the judgment to solve tomorrow's problem. And that is leadership development. Just happening in the middle of an ordinary workday, everyone. And of course, there are going to be moments where, you know, Lisa would need to step in. Emergencies happen and deadlines, of course, are real. And sometimes your experience is exactly what the situation requires. So electric leadership is not about standing back and watching people struggle just because you decided, I'm going to empower everyone now. the higher you move in an organization, the more important that distinction becomes because your time becomes way more expensive. If you spend three hours fixing an operational issue because you happen to be excellent at fixing operational issues, those three hours came from somewhere else. Maybe they came from that strategic thinking that your organization really needed from you. You never even got to think about what the team needs to prepare for six months from now because everybody needed you to solve what happened this morning. And that's the hidden cost of jumping in. I hear leaders say, I wish my team would take more ownership. And then they describe to me how they corrected the presentation, how they rewrote emails, they changed the project plan and personally followed up with a client. And there's a real problem there. You know, people can't learn ownership if you keep grabbing the steering wheel every time the road curves. And once again, this doesn't mean lowering your standards, it means changing how you help people reach them. If a presentation is not good enough, instead of you taking it home and fixing it, explain what's missing and let the person take another pass at it. If an email is not working, talk through what the reader needs to understand rather than rewriting the entire thing. If somebody brings you a problem, teach them to bring you a solution or a recommendation along with it. really that one shift can really change a team. Instead of someone coming to you and saying, We have a problem, what should we do? They begin to say, Hey, we have a problem, and here's what we think we should do, and here's why. And that is really cool. It may take longer in the beginning because when you're developing people, it's obviously less efficient. But your team's gonna be much more capable tomorrow because of it. you may spend 15 minutes coaching someone through a decision that you could have handled in five. But if that person can handle the next five decisions without you, those 15 minutes just created capacity for both of you. That is one of the biggest shifts. the biggest, smallest shifts that leaders can make. Stop measuring your value by how much that you carry and start paying attention to how much capability you are creating around you. Your voltage is your value, and your value as a leader is. Is not demonstrated by becoming the biggest battery in the building. It's demonstrated by helping the whole system become stronger. So I want you to take something practical from this episode. Pay attention this week to one problem that you routinely solve for someone else. And the next time that problem comes to you, resist the urge to immediately give them your answer. Just think of the zipper emoji. Just zip. Okay. Pause for a minute and then ask, what do you think we should do? And I want you to stay in the conversation. Long enough to help them think it through, but resist the urge to solve it for them. Just do that once this week. You may discover that the person already has a better answer than you expected. You might even realize that you've been answering questions that actually nobody needed you to answer. You might also end up sitting in an uncomfortable silence while someone waits for you to rescue them. But please let the silence happen. That is where thinking starts. So now let's picture Lisa taking a vacation a year from now. This time she gets to the airport, she doesn't check her email before boarding, she arrives at the hotel, her phone is amazingly quiet, a problem came up while she was away, and her team handled it. Somebody even makes a decision a little bit differently than the way Lisa would have made it. But guess what? It still worked. That does not make Lisa less important. It proves that her leadership has grown Her team no longer needs her in the middle of every problem because some of what she knows has transferred into what they think, and how they operate when she's not there. And that is the goal. So if you're working harder than ever right now. Do not automatically assume that you need longer hours, better productivity, or a fancy new calendar system. Please look at what you're taking back. Pay attention to where your team may have learned to depend on your answers instead of developing their own. you don't need to work harder. You just need to lead differently. So this week, remember, choose one problem you would normally solve and help someone think their way through it instead. That's one small leadership shift. But over time, it's going to change what your team is capable of. And it's gonna give you more room to do the work that only you can do. And eventually, you're gonna make it through the airport without checking your email. And guess what? You will be okay. I know, let's not get carried away. I'll see you next time. Let me know if this leadership shift worked for you. Take care. Bye-bye.