The biggest challenge with new leaders is letting go

If you are in the top end of seniority in your team or company, either in technical or domain aspects, chances are you will quickly understand the issue or a new feature your team is presented with and you’ll also have a good clue on how to approach it due to your technical knowledge or familiarity of the product and the system. This is great and extremely valuable to the organisation, but it’s not always beneficial to immediately share your insight with the team.

This is one of the most fundamental mindset shifts when moving to a leadership focused role and it’s often one of the most difficult ones, I know it was for me. It is a great feeling to be the person with all the answers, the dopamine hit of everyone listening and agreeing with you when you shoot a great solution out immediately as you were presented with a problem is very addictive, but it stops being productive rather quickly.

Your job now is to support and develop others, if you are always presenting solutions, you are not doing that because others don’t have an opportunity to learn and develop and because of this, I will go even as far as to say that always presenting solutions is hurting the entire organisation in the long term. What happens if you get hit by a bus or, more probably, go on a vacation for two weeks? Will your team become paralysed? Will they be able to solve a crisis?

This gets proportionally more important with high achievers who want to be noticed and want to solve the big problems and if they don’t get the chance, they will either leave, or worse, stop striving for more due to a lack of motivation. Ask them directly how to solve a problem, it’s mutually beneficial, and it’s supposed to be genuine, not tricking others into a false sense responsibility, it won’t work if you make a ceremony out of it.