The Leader Who Makes His or Her Own Job Harder (TPL Insights #324)
- Jul 30
- 5 min read
By Rob Andrews
This is a recycled piece I wrote in 2014. I keep walking into the same problem in different buildings. A senior leader, worn down, tells me the job has gotten too big. In one company it's the CEO. In another it's a division general manager running a business the size of a mid-cap company. Different industries, different balance sheets, same complaint. Everything routes through me. Every decision, every squabble between two of my direct reports, every handoff that should happen without me. They tell me they need stronger people.
Usually, they don't. They've built the trap themselves, and they've built it two ways.
The first way is subtle enough that most of them never see it. They run their leadership team as a set of individuals who happen to report to the same person. Each executive has a private relationship with the boss. The boss knows what each one is working on. The executives, for the most part, do not know what the person two doors down is working on, or why, or what's keeping them up at night. So, when their work collides, and it always does, there's only one place the collision can go. Upstairs. The boss becomes the integration point for the entire enterprise. A leadership team that only connects through the person at the top isn't a team. It's a switchboard, and the leader is the operator, patching calls all day and wondering why the lines are always lit.
Here's what that costs. The CFO and the head of ops are quietly competing for the same capital, and neither of them says so out loud, because they've never been asked to solve for the whole business. They've been asked to defend their function. The head of sales overcommits the company because nobody told her what operations could actually deliver, and operations never told her because the two of them talk maybe once a quarter, in a meeting the boss runs. Then the number gets missed, and the leader gets surprised, and being surprised by your own company is an expensive habit.
I've measured this in dozens of organizations over thirty years. The healthiest ones share a trait that has almost nothing to do with strategy and almost everything to do with how the top team behaves toward one another. The people at the top know each other's goals. They help each other hit them. They will walk into a peer's problem uninvited because they've been told, explicitly, that the peer's problem is their problem too. We call that Unified Leadership, and I'll tell you plainly, it is one of the hardest of the nine principles I've spent my career studying, because it asks accomplished people to subordinate their turf to a result they can't claim sole credit for.
That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because the leader builds it on purpose, and most leaders don't. Most leaders assume collaboration is a personality trait. Some of my people are team players, some aren't; what can you do? What you can do is stop hiring for it and hoping, and start engineering for it. Put the team in a room and make them present what they're actually working on, not the polished version, the real one, with the risks attached. Make each of them responsible for one enterprise outcome that lives outside their own function. Reward the executive who fixed a problem that wasn't hers. Watch how fast the switchboard goes quiet.
The second way these leaders make their own lives harder is that they never say what they actually expect. And they're convinced they have.
I sat with a CEO last year who was frustrated to the point of anger with his leadership team. Sloppy work, missed commitments, decisions made that he'd never have blessed. I asked him a simple question. What are your non-negotiables? The things that, if violated, mean we have a real problem regardless of the outcome. He gave me a long pause and then a list that changed three times while he was saying it. If he couldn't name them cleanly sitting across from me, his team had no chance of reading them off his face in a Tuesday meeting.
People cannot read your mind. Obvious, I know. Yet I watch smart executives run as if the opposite were true. They carry a clear picture of what good looks like, keep it to themselves, then act surprised when the work comes back shaped like someone else's guess. Ambiguity doesn't buy you freedom. It buys you ten people inventing ten different standards, and then it buys you the leader redoing the work he swears he has no time for.
There's fear underneath the vagueness. Leaders worry that spelling out expectations makes them a micromanager. It's backward. Micromanagement is hovering over the how. Non-negotiables are about what and the why, the handful of lines that don't move. Tell me the deal cannot close without legal reviewing the indemnification language. Tell me we do not surprise the board. Tell me we don't lie to a customer to save a quarter. Name those, and you've handed your people the map. Not everything is on the list; they get to figure it out themselves, which is the part that actually develops them. Clarity at the top is what makes autonomy safer.
The two failures compound. A team that doesn't operate as a team, led by someone who won't say what he wants. Now every gap in the instructions has to be resolved one-on-one, upstairs, because there's no lateral trust to resolve it sideways. The leader's calendar fills with clarifications he could have delivered once, to the group, in plain language. He goes home tired and tells his spouse he's surrounded by people who need too much handholding. He built the need for handholding. He just didn't send himself the invoice.
I'll say something that will land wrong with a certain kind of leader. If your job is exhausting in this specific way, if you are the bottleneck and the referee and the only one who sees the whole board, that is not a sign of how indispensable you are. It's a sign of work you haven't done. The indispensable-feeling is seductive. It's also a ceiling. A business can't grow past the throughput of one human nervous system, and you are the one human.
The fix isn't complicated, which is different from saying it's easy. Get the top team in a room and make them accountable to each other, not just to you. Say your non-negotiables out loud, in language a tired person could repeat back, and say them until you're sick of hearing yourself. Then hold the line on those and let go of the rest. Do that, and the job gets smaller. Not because you did less. Because you finally did the part only you could do and stopped doing everyone else's.
Most leaders I meet are working harder than the job requires. A fair amount of that extra weight, they packed themselves.
Rob Andrews
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Celebrating 28 years of Executive Search, Executive Coaching & Culture Shaping Excellence
Direct: 713.489.9724/ Mobile: 713.301.6130
1800 St. James Place, Suite 510, Houston, TX, 77056
