Leading Is Not a Solo Journey
An invitation for promoting your 'seconds in command'
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
Recently a friend told me a story about a manager who got promoted, but instead of going up the corporate ladder, she got even more work. Her scope was increased, but the team and the organization inside it remained the same. My friend was complaining about how unequal the workload share was inside the team. By unequal, stating the manager took the majority of the work had no time to train the recently added intern, to review the internal processes, and was continuously accepting new responsibilities. Despite the fact the team organization was not getting scaled and reorganized with the new workload.
This story might be sound familiar to many of the readers, and some theories might had pop-up in your head of why this manager is conducting herself like this. The prevailing theory is that she is afraid of delegation. If she delegates, she feels that will lose the influence and value in the position, and these new tasks will recertify her inside the organization. The main goal, for some reason, is that she will not get fired for whatever hypothetical event that might happen in the future.
The consequence of this one-man (or woman)- army, will hurt the leader’s personal life and possibly their mental health if the workload charge prevents her from properly assessing and addressing risks and pivot moments which could impact the overall performance. But also, her expertise is probably misused and under-performing.
This takes us to this article's main topic: A leader should not be alone inside the team. Much of the literature about this topic is centered on how a leader should delegate. However, for this article, I would like to take a different angle on the best practice. I want to demonstrate how the leader could greatly benefit from promoting “seconds in command” within the team.
As a personal note, “unfortunately” in the past, I was also “promoted” with more work. In this particular case I got my scope increased. I was already leading a team and the possibility of leading another team was almost sealed. The first thing I assessed, was how the structure and my organization with this new scope. Luckily I had good people on both sides who could be coached to take on new roles and responsibilities.
On my initial team, the structure was already in place so I would “just” increase the scope of my “seconds in command”. For the new team, I would need to promote the “second in command” and coach a colleague to take on more leadership responsibilities. This way I could be more focused on tactical and strategic projects and decisions, and let the business as usual tasks to my “second in command” on both teams.
Here, my dear reader, you can already see a big advantage of delegating responsibilities. A leader can focus on more strategic aspects inside the organization and become more impactful on the future of the company and their products.
Business as usual related tasks, are important and are what makes the company operate on the day to day. However, if someone is recognizing the value in your work, is mostly because you provide insights and decisions that provide results. Once those skills are applied to more strategic aspects, the more valued your work becomes.
Going back to my friend’s manager, she was a “task robot” whose insight and technical expertise were greatly valued by everyone. Unfortunately, this expertise was rarely seen outside of day-to-day activities since she was afraid of losing value if she delegated. With the improvement of technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Robot Process Automation, the “task robots” will probably see their tasks being reduced. This might be a good news for her. However, because she doesn’t provide strategic added value, nor leadership guidance or coaching to colleagues, and she is far from becoming an “engine of change”, she might lose a lot in a near future. All these aspects require day-to-day practice and years of experience to master, as are not leadership skills that can be learned in a classroom alone. In a way, eventually she might become what she is afraid of: obsolete.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur