Do the Things Your Team Can’t

As a leader, you must be good at deciding what you get hands-on with and what you delegate (and empower others to do).

When you come from a technical background and have good technical skills, it's easy to default to getting hands-on with the tools anytime there is a problem.

The problem is you're taking an opportunity away from the team to own, solve the problem and become self-sufficient while creating more work for yourself.

The team probably is capable. You need to provide more training, hire more people, share context and create shared understanding so they can get started.

Realize that there are some things your team is incapable of doing, and you should focus your time on those things.

Things like advocating for your team, getting executive buy-in for your team strategy and contributions, securing the budget to execute, and little things that are easy to forget, like ensuring the team has easy access to business credit cards to buy something.

This is all stuff that only you can do, and it increases the overall performance of any team.

Choose what you get hands-on with carefully.