You want to be in charge? Then you probably aren’t qualified.

So, you think you want to be in charge. Be the bossman. Everyone comes to you to ask for permission to start new projects, buy new laptops, whatever. It comes through you. You are The Man. Or The Woman. Whichever.

Congratulations, you aren’t qualified to have the job.

If you are leading—not managing, herding, or driving—your team then most of the good (and some of the great) decisions will be made and actions taken even before you are aware of what’s happened. Initiatives will grow around the themes that you set. Problems will be identified and solutions crafted by the people most affected. All of this will happen without your direct involvement and sometimes without your direct knowledge. The daily stuff will just get done, and you’ll find yourself with time to think. Time to lead.

You will have made yourself the least important person, not the most.

The least important person?

This is not a get out of jail free card. There are decisions and responsibilities that you must take on your own. They are the job of the person in charge.

But at some point, when your team is large enough, your job won’t be to do any of the work that your organization does. Your job will be to enable other people to succeed.

This was a big adjustment for me. I was used to doing, and my transition to management involved a rather unusual jump from a two-person team to a hundred-person organization, and then a jump to a 500-person organization and a big mission. If you are tempted to think that all this leadership stuff and career planning doesn’t matter until later in your career, remember that you don’t always get a lot of notice before the jump up. I didn’t, either time.

And at first I tried to stay very hands on, actually doing some of the same work I had been doing before I took over my organization. It was a hard lesson for me that this was not going to work. I was unavailable when things needed to be done or when people needed to see me. There were decisions that were legitimately mine to make that I didn’t take time to handle because I was still doing the job that I used to do.

My job was now to set the stage for the team’s success, to define the tone of the workplace for the team, to identify and nurture each team member’s special talents, and to form a vision for where we would go from here.

Build strong leaders on your own team

Rather than imposing your will upon your organization, you have to make yourself available to others to shape and mold them into the people who will help you find surprising directions that support your vision.

This kind of leader is self-aware. Self-aware people know what motivates them, and can recognize these factors in others even if the others do not see these traits in themselves. A self-aware person with a vision rightly comes across as credible, honest, and nurturing. People sense the genuine desire to help rather than push, and they respond to that. At the same time, the leader is prepared to make, and capable of making, the final decision.

So if you’re picturing yourself all puffed up strutting around your corner office barking important things that people are standing in line to hear, stop. If you make it, you’ll damage yourself and everyone around you. And we have enough of those kinds of people. The real reason to lead is to build something bigger than yourself that accomplishes things that surprise you. This is the kind of person you want to work for right now, right? Do the next generation a favor: be that person now.

This post is inspired by material in my book, The Only Trait of a Leader.