A leader is best when people barely know he exists; when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.

-Lao-tzu

Stop doing the Work. The shift from Maker to Manager.

Principle: To create stability, shift your mind-set from doing the work to leading the work.

When you do the work, the capacity of your team never scales beyond you—you are training your team to defer to you instead of letting it grow into its potential. Once you assume a leadership role, your job performance is no longer measured by your personal accomplishments. Instead, your job is to unload the creative potential in others.

Trust is the primary currency of creative teams.

You need to loosen your grip on the work for your team to grow creatively, or it will forever be limited to the scope of your direct involvement.

Although many organizations say “Just take care of the team, and we’ll take care of you,” the reality is often much different. In some organizations, an invisible leader is a forgotten leader, and it’s possible that you could become seen as expendable if the value you bring to the table isn’t perceptible to your leadership. This is especially true in creative work, in which each individual’s contribution is often diffused because it’s difficult to measure. Ensure that you are still managing your career effectively while fulfilling your role as a leader to unleash the best in the people you lead. 

Focus, Function, and Fire.

Focus

  1. What are we doing?
    What are we doing? This is not a trick question and it’s not as obvious as it seems, because you can answer it on multiple levels. What we’re doing with this specific task or project might be answered differently than what we’re doing overall in terms of client strategy. Your job is to ensure that everyone on the team has a crystal clear understanding of what a successful outcome looks like on every level. Further, as we will see later when we discuss focus, creative work primarily consists of problems to be solved, not projects to be completed. As the leader, it’s your job to define those problems clearly and ensure clear accountability for solving them.
  2. What are we NOT doing?
  3. When are we doing it?

Function

  1. How will we do it?
    How will we do it? Ensure that there is a clearly defined and articulated path to accomplishing your objectives. That doesn’t mean that there won’t be unexpected problems or hiccups along the way, but your job is to ensure that the system itself isn’t the bottleneck. Clear obstacles out of the way and stay a few steps ahead in order to spot potential problems before, they become big issues. Creative people need the stability of a clearly defined playing field in order to feel safe to do their best work.
  2. What do we need in order to do it?


Fire: As the keeper of the flame, you have to diligently tie what the team is doing to why it is doing it.

  1. Why are we doing it?
  2. What will it mean?

This means learning to speak their motivational language not as a means of manipulation, but as a means of helping them kindle their own fire.

SCOREBOARD: What you measure

Did we accomplish our objectives?

Did we maintain our values in the process?

Are we poised to do it again?

DASHBOARD: What you monitor

Pace:

Health and Energy

Engagement/Enthusiasm for current project load

Psychological Safety

The efficiency of communication.

Leading measures are often difficult to correlate to the goal. For example, a car’s dashboard might include things like oil pressure, engine temperature, RPM, how much gas is in the tank, and speed. Individually, none of these things tells you whether the car is going to get you to your destination, but collectively they tell you how the car is functioning in the moment and whether it needs maintenance. If you ignore the dashboard warning lights for too long, your car will eventually break down.

If your only measure of success is whether you crossed the finish line on time and under budget, or whether the client is pleased, you might very well hit your objectives while destroying your team in the process.

Conversations:

What else do you need from me right now?

Is there any place where you’re confused about our objectives or my expectations?

Is there any place where I am suffocating you and not allowing you to do your best work?

As a leader, you need to turn your creative energy from doing the work to thinking creatively about the team dynamics. The transition from maker to manager is one of the most challenging leaps for new leaders to make, because it feels like you are ceding control over your own destiny.

In truth, that’s exactly what you’re doing.

Put your faith in the capabilities of the people on your team, and dedicate your days to helping them unleash their best work. That’s the only way they will grow into their potential and the only way you will grow into the full measure of your influence. Ralph Nader once said, “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”

And then, once you remove yourself from the work, you need to make another transition: from owning just your stuff to owning everyone’s stuff.