Why Doing isn’t Leading

If you are in a senior or leadership role, you started a journey when you got your first job. Back then, you were selected based on academic achievements and your potential. As you moved on and upwards, you acquired knowledge and skills; both technical and transferable.

After a while you were given direct reports and responsibility for a team or teams.

Along the way, you have accumulated a unique profile of experience, expertise, networks, achievements, mentors and colleagues.

You’ll also have had new or additional functions, roles and responsibilities and have created or taken over teams and direct reports.

To work effectively, avoid being overwhelmed and actually enjoy the true potential of a senior role, it is vital that for each step along the way, you adapt your approach.

Moving away from being an individual contributor to leading people means doing less and leading more. It requires identifying and then managing your resources towards delivering team results. However, it can be difficult to do this when you are an expert.

It is likely that any given task will take you less time to do than to delegate, and that, added to the fact that you probably still enjoy the actual work, means you are storing up problems for yourself in the long run.

If you continue to do more than lead, stay in the detail or resist delegating - the following three sets of questions can be a helpful self-evaluation to get you thinking differently and acting more as a leader and less as a doer:

Identify exactly what your role is (and isn’t):

What are the results you are accountable for?

What resources are at your disposal?

How do you plan to use those resources?

Identify the level of your involvement:

What is required from you in respect of each task type or workflow?

What are all the things someone else on your team is best/better placed to do than you?

Are you doing work that you know/suspect would better be done by someone else?

Check your perspective:

Are you correctly positioned to see the context/big picture?

Are you correctly positioned to make decisions on critical aspects of the work?

How are you contributing to the success of the team in this context?

How are you contributing to the development and professional growth of the team?