Happy August. The summer slowdown is a myth, but the summer quiet is real, and quiet is when patterns get loud.
An hour into a session last week, a client was walking me through a reorganization. Big operations group, seven managers under her, and she’d thought hard about all of it. Then she said something that stopped me. “I can’t influence fifty people all at once. But I can influence the seven, and the seven can influence the fifty.”
That’s the right answer. Textbook, actually. I told her so.
But something kept nagging at me while she talked, and it took me most of the hour to name it. Every problem she described, she was solving. Not assigning. Solving. The escalation from the floor, hers. The friction between two departments, hers. The employee on the edge of quitting, hers. She had the seven managers on an org chart and a plan for developing them, and meanwhile she was personally absorbing every problem the fifty produced.
So near the end I said it. The holdup isn’t the structure. The structure is fine. The holdup is that you still want to take it all on. At some point you have to stop fixing things and start teaching people to fix them, and that point was probably a year ago.
She went quiet. Then she said, “That’s my pattern, isn’t it.”
Not a question, really. More like someone reading a sentence they’d written and noticing it for the first time.
Here’s what I keep thinking about. She’d spent an hour designing the right structure. She could see the whole system. The one thing she couldn’t see was that she was the reason it wasn’t working, because the skill that built her reputation, being the person who could absorb anything, was the exact thing keeping her seven managers from becoming leaders.
I’d bet you have a version of this. The thing you’re best at is the thing you can’t stop doing, even after it stopped being your job. Especially after it stopped being your job. And your team has learned to let you.
The org chart was never the problem. It rarely is.
And yes, this is the part where I mention my thing. Because she’s the reason my thing exists. If something in this week’s newsletter described a pattern you’ve suspected but couldn’t name, that’s exactly what Executive Triage is built for. One conversation. One pattern named with enough precision that you can’t unknow it. 90 minutes, an eight-page brief, $3,500. cynthiacorsetti.com/executive-triage
This week’s read: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. Wiseman spent years studying why some leaders make everyone around them smarter and some accidentally make themselves the only brain in the room. The chapter on accidental diminishers is worth the whole book. Most of them are the hardest workers in the building. Find it here.
She asked me what to do about it. I told her she’d just done the hardest part. I wasn’t being nice.