Kelly Jones on why managers should stop fixing problems for their team. When you cover everything, people never learn to lead. Let them do the uncomfortable work, even if they'll do it differently than you would.
Chapters
Actually, the best piece of advice that I was ever given was in a moment where I was earlier in career and I'm just going to pass it on. It's not mine, but I'm going to pass it on in the spirit of paying it forward. I was early in career and I was trending from that, moving to an IC to leading a team. And when you are at that point in your career and as you continue to advance into different leadership roles in your career, you almost have to re contract with yourself about how you get work done and the piece of it. And what I mean by that is the piece of advice I got was every time you jump in to fix a problem when you should let your team do it, you are taking away someone's opportunity to learn to be you. And it was advice I got when I was going on PTO and I met with my boss and I said, okay, I'm out for the next week, but here are all the things that are coming up and here's what I've done to cover them all. I've got all these things taken care of and nothing should come up. And. And there was a pause in the conversation and Paul, my boss at the moment, said, kelly, you realize that whoever's backing you up next week has an opportunity to learn to be the leader of this organization if you allow them to do these things. So in your desire to take care of things, you've basically hamstringed their ability to learn these things. And it was powerful advice and I kept it with me. And those of us that tend to not want to send out a lot of action items to others often feel like we can just do all these things our own. So I guess the advice in summary is make sure as you're progressing in your career, you're thinking about the others. You're thinking about the others that are on your team and with you. And how do you create opportunities for your team to learn to be you and for others to become uncomfortable in some of the jobs, don't allow yourself to overwork and do the work that you should allow others to do out of a weird sense of ego where I have to be involved in it.
