I was recently coaching a client on their goals for work and they indicated one was intended to create automation throughout a large organization, but they needed to do it themselves. They couldn’t ask their direct reports to take it on because they had “too much to do already.”
To start, let’s just be frank about what this really looks like in action. If you are the leader, you say you will lead, but you aren’t in the day to day, so that means continuously tapping into your leaders in order to get answers. You pull them into every meeting you are in and the drain is essentially the same or more than it would have been if you just delegated. You make decisions from afar, not really understanding the impact to the end user. Yes, you plow through to some state of “doneness” because that’s the part you do well, but you’ve angered your entire team in the process. Bottom line, they still ended up doing the work.
“I’ll just do this one project, it will be easier for everyone that way” is the lie we tell ourselves in order to push a project forward even when we know the organization can’t handle it. We do it to avoid saying “no” to other things that we also want done or to provide our own brain with the illusion that if we do it ourselves, we can for sure know it’s being done correctly. The main point is that all of this work is coming from negative energy. It masks itself as determination, but it’s really control and fear. Fear that if we delegate the work to the place it best fits that something or someone else might break. Fear that if we say “no” to something else as a result of making this a priority that it will reflect poorly on us. Or fear that if we give the control to someone else, they won’t complete the project to our standards.
As much as we try, we don’t do our best work when leading from fear. Automating processes requires innovation which also requires an open mind. A mind that sees all the possibilities for the organization. So what if you start from that place instead and ask yourself what is possible if you have the people most impacted by the automation vested in creating it?
Your role as the leader is not to figure out the nuts and bolts of the systems, how they work together and how users might interact with a system. Leave that to the people who are in it day to day. Your job is to create a vision of what is possible in an automated world, how it makes their jobs easier and increases their capabilities. It’s to motivate them to keep pushing through the project, even when things get hard. It’s to remove barriers and yes, even say “no” to other priorities temporarily or permanently so they can focus on making the vision a reality.
It’s hard to step back because our brain loves to focus on tangible items. That’s how we succeeded early on and it creates a deep habit in our brain for how things get done successfully. As a leader, you have to recognize the lie and reset on where your success comes from. Anytime you find yourself trying to do the work instead of leading the work, it’s a good indicator to check in with what’s going on.
Is this part of your core responsibilities?
Why are you doing it yourself?
What energy is it coming from?
Expect your brain to tell you that this is the only way. That’s a pretty normal answer for why we choose to do it ourselves, but that too, is a lie. We can’t see possibility from a place of singular answers like that. It’s a great indicator to step back and question yourself.
If there were other options, I wonder what they would be?
And don’t rule them out, just allow your brain to be a little crazy and see other options even when they don’t even feel realistic.
Good luck!