Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Leader Who Gets Out of Their Own Way
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, it's not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Leader Who Gets Out of Their Own Way. Here we go. Today's quote comes from a name most of us think we already know well, though maybe not for this. It's Ronald Reagan, and he said this back in 1975, years before he held any national office, back when he was still building the reputation that would eventually take him to Sacramento as the governor of California, and then to Washington, D.C. as our president. Here's the line The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He or she is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things. Let's sit with that for a second. On the surface, it sounds like something you'd nod along to and move past. Of course leaders get other people to do things. That's the job description. But if you actually look at how most of us operate day to day, that is not how we behave at all. We behave like the measure of our worth is what we personally produced, how many decisions we made, how many fires we personally put out, how many documents have our fingerprints on them. As a friend of mine said, we as leaders don't really do anything. I think about a leader I worked for early in my career who ran the opposite way. She had every skill needed to do the job herself and probably faster than most of us on the team. She made a habit of handing off the parts of the work that were hardest to give away. Not the easy stuff, the really meaningful stuff. When a major client presentation came up, instead of building the PowerPoint deck herself, the way she easily could have, she gave it to the newest person on the team, sat with them while they built it. Ask questions instead of giving answers, and let them present it. It was rough, rougher than her version would have been, but it also taught that person more in two weeks than a year of watching the boss work would have. That's the moment I actually understood the quote, not as a slogan, but as a description of behavior. Here's where a lot of us get this idea wrong, though. We hear get people to do the greatest things and we translate it into something passive. Step back, let go. Get out of the way. So we disengage. We stop giving feedback. We call it empowerment when it's really just absence. That's not what Reagan is describing, and it's not what my old boss was doing either. She didn't disappear from that presentation. She was more present than usual, just present in a different way. She wasn't dooming the task. She was doing the harder task of building the person who could do it. Removing obstacles, asking the right question at the right moment. Being available without taking the pen back. That's not less work than doing it yourself. For most leaders, it's considerably more work, at least at first. Here's the reframe I'd offer: your output is not the same as your impact. You can spend a career being the most productive person in every room you're in and still leave behind an organization that falls apart the moment you're not there to hold it up. Or you can spend that same career building other people's capability, which is slower. Less visible, rarely gets you credit in the room, but it ends up leaving behind something that keeps getting better after you're gone. Those are two very different definitions of greatness, and only one of them scales. So here's something to carry with you today. Think of one thing sitting on your plate right now that you're doing simply because you are the fastest or the most comfortable person to do it. Not something urgent, something habitual. Now ask yourself honestly what it would cost you to hand that thing to someone else this week, not perfectly, not immediately, but as a real handoff, with your time and your patience attached to it. What would that person learn? What would you learn about your own grip on the work? The greatest leaders are not the ones we remember for what they personally built. They're the ones we remember because of who they built. That's the whole idea in Reagan's line, and it's worth carrying past today. Greatness, the kind that actually lasts, is never a solo act. It's what you make possible in the people standing next to you.