Enabling Leadership from Others
Photo by sheng-fa lin 林勝發
Months ago, I had the pleasure of mentoring Tobe Nneji as part of Women in Agile’s Launching New Voices program. Her story inspired me to evaluate how I was spending my time, change my Kanban board structure, and reflect on who I want to be. My home office and calendar look different because of the time we spent together refining her lightning talk. You can check out her talk here.
Tobe became a leader for me and then for others with her message. Sharing our stories is one of the most powerful things we can do for ourselves and for others. It is an act of leadership.
Recently I went through a leadership assessment exercise that has me reflecting on delegation as a skill. There’s a typical view of delegation as giving people responsibility for well-defined tasks and holding them accountability for the execution. Part of me hears the “it would take me just as long to tell them how to do it as it would to do it myself” excuse that comes close behind that definition. I try to think of when I’ve been excited to take on a task that was delegated to me. Asking someone to take on tasks can mean we inadvertently set them up for future judgment—did they deliver as well as we wanted, or did we see shortcomings? It can be hard to accept that gaps may reflect as much on us (if not more) than it does on them.
That has me thinking about different flavors of delegation. Where we invite people to own the outcomes and then prepare to be surprised. How we can lean into the talents of those around us to tackle problems in their way, not ours. When we can give them high-stakes opportunities to do something meaningful for our companies and trust our collective ability to recover if needed. I can grow as a leader personally by creating ways for others to step up as leaders and challenge me back.
Sometimes it’s a self-assessment that helps us to see the gap between our intent and our impact as leaders. More often though, it’s probably someone acting as a coach and reflecting it back to us. Every one of us can be that coach for someone.
