I remember the first time I was promoted to a leadership position. I was thrilled, looking forward to all the new challenges this new position would bring. But I also remember the week after, how I found myself trying to complete the same tasks as before, but now also juggling additional meetings and management tasks.

Clearly, something was wrong; becoming a leader shouldn't be "doing the same work but having more meetings".

And it’s definitely not. I was seeing it from the wrong angle. I was about to learn that being a leader means you are not a player anymore.

You are not a player anymore.

Imagine for a second that you are a soccer player and you're promoted to be the team's coach. Can you imagine yourself on the pitch, trying to score during the match?

Yeah, it sounds ridiculous! Coaches are not supposed to play the match, but to guide the team. The same applies to any leader. Your goal is to guide your team to achieve the best results, not to do their job.

As a leader, you should focus on defining the strategy, clarifying goals, setting the right expectations, providing your team with the tools to succeed, and then letting them play the match.

You should interiorize this concept because you'll find a lot of challenges that will test your leadership skills, like the delivery trap.

The delivery trap

All projects have milestones and deadlines; the closer the deadline, the more conscious you become about the performance gaps in your team. In these situations, you might feel tempted to jump in and start doing their work.

You'll find a lot of good reasons to jump in, "I want to lead by example", "It will be faster if I do it myself", "I want to support my team"...

They are all excellent reasons, but it’s also the wrong decision. Everybody loses if you jump in and start working on your team's tasks.

By jumping in, you are:

1. Removing the opportunity for your team to face the challenge and learn from it.

2. Losing the opportunity to improve your leadership skills, because you’ll only be polishing the skills you already had from your old position.

You should focus on improving your leadership skills to help your team.
With the pressure of a deadline, you should focus on redefining the plan, ensuring the expectations are clear, figuring out what's blocking your team, and helping them to perform at their very best.

That way, iteration by iteration, your team will become better. Your ultimate goal should be to make your team grow to the point that they don't need you. The goal is to make yourself redundant.

Make yourself redundant

One of the many good things about being in a leadership position is that it allows you to help people grow and develop their potential. If you do it well, after some time, your team will reach a point where they will be able to do their job without needing you; that's the ideal scenario.

Once your team doesn't need you, you'll have the opportunity to join a different team and continue helping there. That is one of your key goals as a leader, to help people grow, and in doing so, help the company grow.