build your bench of leaders

made w/ midjourney

There are specific tactical ways that you can delegate individual responsibilities to your people with great success (see last week’s issue for some of those). We think it’s even more important to embrace a mindset that leads you to delegate by default. Instead of delegating as an emergency measure when their calendar gets too full, an effective leader relentlessly builds the capacity of others on the team to lead. 

If you’re playing any kind of long game, that is, planning to chase a mission with this group of people for more than even a few months, the most valuable resource you can build and pass on is more effective leaders. 

This is a high expected value bet: you significantly increase the upside of the organization and incur minimal downside risk. With more effective leaders, you can scale the organization by cloning it at its current size (franchising). You can scale by ceding leadership of existing layers to those leaders you’ve built up and then take on new layers of leadership yourself. You can, if needed or desirable, step out of the organization altogether and hand the reins to an in-house successor. 

All of these transitions are frightening, high-variance propositions for most organizations. So often, that is because the bench of viable leaders that can lead those transitions and the work on the other side of them is far too thin. 

-eric