the surprising thing the whole team wants from you (the leader)

The whole team wants an executive that is thinking about all the things that they themselves are not thinking about. Typically, in a decently healthy organization, people joined at least in part because the executive presented some promise of direction-setting, vision, and achievement of the organization’s purpose that prospective teammates really trusted at a personal level.

So when those teammates hear that the leader is doing all kinds of low-level work, consciously or not, teammates closer to the front line are pretty disenchanted. They feel that the promise they signed up for is being broken. Coming to them with the news that "I'm finally able to just sit and think about what's next, and really strategically plan, and really vet and test, and understand internally where we are, and where that fits within the larger external context"—people are delighted to hear this about their executives.

Yet many executives suffer from the "what got me here won't get me there" problem. They resist the delegation and executive thinking the team needs and wants from them. They think, "No, no, the team just wants to know that I'm working as hard as they are." These executives miss out on the chance to build the power of the team to do new, big, hard things the executive would otherwise have held onto herself. And so often, despite inordinate sweat and too-little sleep, they don’t get “credit” from their teams for all their heroic individual efforts.

My take is they shouldn’t get credit for those efforts. In that mode, executives are mis- using their power. The highest and best use of that power may fairly be called their central responsibility. 

-ben