the double benefit of leader as teacher
made w/ midjourney
When you’re a skilled leader, there’s a double benefit available in every good move you make. Many leaders only grab one of the two benefits, by default.
The first benefit is The Thing Goes Well. You give a good speech, or write a good report, or navigate a sensitive partner meeting. Yay. The company needs that and you delivered.
The second benefit, the one too often ignored, is Someone Other Than You Learns How to Do the Thing Well. The taller the hierarchy, the easier it is to assume a special province of leader stuff that folks lower in the hierarchy can’t or shouldn’t participate in. The easier it is for folks outside of that province to assume that The Thing Went Well because the leader is possessed of “genius” or “talent” instead of skill from practice.
You can get some of the second benefit with something as simple as a ride-along. Someone just joins you and watches you do your thing. You can get more of that benefit with deliberate teaching and delegation.
From what I’ve seen, teams that achieve significant growth, person by person, flip the presumption from “Leaders do leader stuff alone, they’re leaders, duh” to “Leaders constantly teach others how to do what they do.”
-eric
