Let People do their Jobs

So, once you have your high-performance team in place, what is the most important thing to remember as a leader when you're leading that high performance team?

I think that your job as a leader is to work with your team to set the vision. Like what are you trying to achieve this three, five year goal or look of what is this organization going to look like in three to five years, you do that in collaboration with your team. And then you get out of the way. Your job as a leader is to clear blockers, to get rid of the impediments, to be the air cover when it's necessary, to talk people off the ledge when things are getting really tough. But to let people do their jobs, I mean, I think the hardest thing for me as I was becoming more senior was the more senior you get the less work, like the less of the actual work that you get to do. And I loved doing the work. I still love doing the work. And so it was really hard for me to make that transition because I had to let go of getting my fingers dirty and doing the work, the team's like we got this.

Exactly. Yeah. Otherwise you become that micromanager that nobody wants.

Yeah, indeed. And even if you're not being a micromanager, you know, I was in consulting for a number of years and we had very disparaging language that we use to talk about partners who would swoop in, tell you everything that you were doing wrong and everything that needed to change. And then they would swoop back out. I mean, that's not a micromanagement, but it leaves you with that same feeling of eek. We've just worked really hard on this and that's not to say you don't give guidance, you don't help along the way, but it's how you help and how you choose your language and how you communicate in that guidance that you're giving.