Article by @RobertStoneking
I used to believe leadership meant stepping away from the work.
The assumption there being, 'great leaders focus on strategy, vision, and empowering others - avoiding the tactical details'.
Then I became a player-coach and realized: you can still lead while doing, if you do it right.
You have to be constantly aware of the tradeoffs…
In my experience, the three primary areas of positive value are:
- Credibility: When you get involved in the work, your team sees you as a leader who truly understands their experience. This dramatically improves relatability and the development of shared perspective.
- Agility: Being close to the work affords you opportunities to step in quickly to solve problems, keep projects moving, and set the standard for execution. Correcting at the moment of need is quite powerful for changing behavior and almost always an efficiency gain.
- Impact: Firsthand involvement gives you real-time insight into your team’s challenges, creating opportunities for pointed, relevant coaching. This yields results that are usually of higher value to the team.
On the flip side, be sure to balance your approach to avoid problems like:
- Bottlenecks: Sometimes, when you're too involved, decision-making slows down because you’ve acquired biases from being inside the work. And the other thing that can happen is, your team may become overly dependent on you.
- Myopia: Being in the weeds can distract from long-term planning and higher-level leadership responsibilities. Here again, biases become a problem and your ability to be objective relative to strategy development can be impaired.
- Burnout: Trying to be both the leader and the doer can stretch you too thin, impacting both your effectiveness and well-being. And it’s not so much about the work itself as it is the drain on mental capacity from the context switching that occurs from playing both positions.
So, how do you find the right balance?
For me, the key to success lies in stepping in strategically, not habitually - creating the right amount of space so the team still owns results. The best way I’ve found to do this is prioritizing coaching over control - you should strive to work yourself into a full-time coaching gig.
Pachydermos works with leaders in a coaching capacity. If you or your team could benefit from executive coaching - let's chat. Drop us a line at info@pachydermos.com.