When leaders treat leadership as a side dish, their teams suffer.
We see it often. Senior people promoted for how well they used to deliver, and still delivering. Heads down, tasks ticked, to-do lists a little shorter at the end of the week.
And the team they were meant to be multiplying? Still waiting.
Leadership has quietly become the thing senior people get to once they’ve finished the ‘real’ work, which they never quite finish. A recent guest on the We Not Me podcast had a phrase for these leaders: overpaid doers.
It’s tempting to blame the individuals, but most of this is on the system. 40% of organisations cut learning budgets during the pandemic, and more than a quarter still expect further cuts. Budgets pulled in a crisis rarely come back. So people step into leadership roles without ever being shown what the role actually is, and they default to what they know: doing.
The work of a senior leader is to unite their team and help it, and the organisation, achieve more. That means less doing and more multiplying: setting direction, building the conditions for the team to work well, and getting out of the way.
If your week is full of tasks you could hand to someone else, ask yourself one question: who is leading the team while you do them?
Pia and Dan