When not doing your job is the best thing you can do

I’m obviously a big fan of not doing more than you need to do to get the job done (and also not doing less than you need to do).

When I got my first big gig leading people I went from leading a team of 2 to leading a team of 100. I needed a lot of guidance. It turns out I didn’t need as much “helpful advice” as I got, but I definitely needed some.

One piece of advice that has stuck with me was given by the manager I was replacing. He said “Don’t do your job…for a while, anyway.”

Odd advice

So that’s pretty unusual advice, kind of like my 85-15 rule. In this situation though, it was perfect.

The manager I replaced had a different style than I have. He was much more involved in the day to day operations of the center and the making of its decisions. His organization was almost totally flat, where mine is somewhat hierarchical and I do a lot of delegating.

In this situation the staff I was inheriting had been trained for 5 years to depend upon the manager to do a lot of the thinking for them. We both recognized this as a weakness that needed fixing in order to create a more durable organization.

Thus his suggestion that I not do my job. What he was really advising was that I don’t do the job the way he was doing it. Don’t make day to day decisions and lean heavily on the staff to attend meetings, summarize important issues and make recommendations, even on things that I would normally handle myself.

Not making the day-to-day decisions and delegating most other things would encourage everyone to sink or swim: you make the decision for yourself, or it doesn’t get made.

I’m not the best student

I didn’t take his advice, at first. As a new leader with a high profile gig I was pretty paranoid about screwing it up and I kept a lot of things close to me.

Since I didn’t take his advice everyone assumed that it was business as usual and brought me a lot of decisions to make. I was quickly drowning in the kind of tactical, everyday decisions that 100 other people should have been making, and the organization suffered.

The right way

I ultimately did take the plunge and step back from my urge for control by delegating more and more responsibilities away from my office. What drove me to change my behavior is that I was more afraid of the damage I was doing by gumming up the works than the damage that everyone else might do by making a bad decision.

Of course, this is the Right Way™ to manage and lead people, and it’s now a cornerstone of my leadership style. When you find yourself in a similar situation, consider whether not doing your job is the best way to get things done.