There's a line I say to myself almost every week: be the leader who lets go.
I first heard it from business coach Fabienne Fredrickson, who, like me, spends her days helping leaders and business owners build up the people around them. It stuck with me because it names the hardest shift in leadership. It's not learning a new skill. It's letting go of the old one.
The skill that got you here
Think about how you got your leadership role. Chances are you were very good at the work. You were the person people trusted to get things done, and you built real skill and knowledge doing it.
Now that you're leading, your job needs different skills. It's no longer about doing the work. It's teaching other people to be as good as you were, so you can step back and focus on managing.
At the very fundamental level, the role has changed, but many leaders take way too long to realise it. As a manager or leader, your job is to know what the business is trying to achieve, and then organise the resources to deliver it: your budget, your people, your assets and your time. When you're busy doing the work instead of showing others how to do it, you can't step back far enough to see how those resources could be used better.
Letting go starts in your head
Letting go is a mindset before it's a set of tasks. That's why I suggest saying it to yourself, out loud if you need to: I am the leader who lets go.
Once you start looking at your week that way, a useful question pops up. Why am I doing this? Why isn't someone else doing it?
If there's someone you can train, train them. If there isn't, look at how you could arrange your budget, your time and your other resources to get the support you need. If that's not possible either, it may be time to talk about changing what's expected.
And as you move into more senior roles, it keeps going. At first you teach people how to do the job you used to do. Later, you teach the leaders under you the mindset and systems so they can let go too, so their teams can deliver whether the manager is watching or not.
The voices that keep us holding on
I'll be honest: this is one of the hardest things to do when you first take on a leader's mindset. Most of us have heard these thoughts in our own heads:
"No one else will do it as well as me."
"It's quicker to just do it myself."
"I'm not sure how to explain it yet, so I'll just do it."
I've said every one of them. And yes, the first time you hand something over, it will take more of your time. But each time after that, it takes less, until one day the work just gets done and you haven't had to touch it or even think about it.
I personally had a double-whammy version of this to overcome. I trained as a trainer long before I trained as a coach, and trainers are there to have the answers. Learning to ask questions instead of jumping in with advice was a real mindset shift for me, and it's the same shift most leaders face when they step up.
That's a day to celebrate
Last week, a new process we've been setting up with a new team member ran from start to finish without me. I found out about it afterwards. My expertise is all over it, because I trained the person who did it, set up the templates and knowledge base, and we used some AI along the way. But my hands weren't on it.
I did a little happy dance.
That's what letting go gives you. It gives you leverage, and it gives you time. Instead of doing that task, I now have time to visualise our goals, plan out projects, and think about my people, my budget, my assets and my time, and where they'll do the most good. That's what management is really about.
These days I've learnt to explain what I need and let team members work out the solution, using their own expertise and the tools around them. You'll be surprised what other people can do when you give them the chance.
Where are you still holding on?
If you're not sure which parts of your role you're still holding too tightly, our free Leadership Impact Audit can help. It shows where you're still the bottleneck and what's limiting your leadership, and it comes with a free 45-minute debrief with me and a personal Momentum Roadmap of your next best steps.