If leadership is a journey, how will you know when you’re there?

OK, so you’re on your way into leadership. You think you’ve got your head around the whole “leadership is a journey” thing, but how will you know if you’re making any progress? Are you doing it right?

Here’s the benchmark I use: you will know that you are getting there when you become the least important person in your organization.

No, really. It’s a good thing.

Now that you’ve uncurled from your protective fetal position, let’s talk about why this makes sense and why it’s a good thing.

Decisions—the right 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 and, you know, lead.

The least important person?

So it’s a little bit of hyperbole to say that you will be the least important person in your organization. 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.

The adjustment

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 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).

At first I tried to stay very hands on, actually doing some of the same work I had been doing before I took over as director of 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; the job that someone else now had. 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.

If you are genuine in your push to become a leader you’re more likely to come across as credible and honest, even when you make inevitable mistakes. And this is key: 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.

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