How Shortcuts Compound
A wrap-up on our Leadership Development series.
Over the past four posts, we've covered the steps we all take to establish ourselves as leaders. From that first emotionally crushing experience, where we acknowledge the difficulties and the challenges in front of us, to learning how to step back and let others go through the same thing. It's an important arc in understanding how we develop as people, and how we develop and influence others.
Every stage is a decision
Each of the four stages is an inflection point. Every one is a decision point where there's an easy wrong and a hard right. The experience also stacks as we move through them, so any mistake or shortcut taken early compounds and shows up disastrously later on.
Will for skill. It's easy to mistake will for skill. A crucible hands us conviction and a diagnosis, and both feel enormous, but neither one is capability. Knowing what failed us is not the same as being able to do it next time.
Information for capability. The same thing happens when we substitute information for capability. The book, the course, the program, the certification. All of it moves our skill set, and none of it moves our personal acumen, because none of it builds the one critical skill we need: judgment. Judgment in front of a person, during a crisis, with consequences attached, takes time, practice, and intentionality to develop.
Handing off more than the task. Delegation goes deeper than the handoff itself, because what we hand off isn't just a task. We have to hand off responsibility, ownership, and consequences, and build accountability for both the good and the bad while we teach people to hold themselves and others accountable.
The rules and the reasoning. The last piece in establishing our legacy is taking everything we've learned, building the best practices, and passing along not only the rules but the reasoning behind them. This is the one thing leaders miss most, because the reasoning gives the next person insight into our judgment and helps them see where they might do something different. We want to maintain the intent when the situation has changed.
Why we take the substitute
We’re inclined to take the substitute because it's easier and it's simpler to justify. When we hit a bump in the road, it's easy to say "oops" and skirt around it, rather than facing the hard truth of what we were lacking and sitting through a difficult diagnosis and a long development.
What we're supposed to build accumulates quietly, and it only shows up when we’re under increasing pressure. As that pressure bakes in, the mistakes start to stand out. If we don't use the calm times, when there’s no pressure, to build the skills, we fall right back into old habits the moment pressure hits.
As we move through the stages, the delay grows each time, and it becomes harder to spot mistakes before they surface. The consequences get greater at the same time. The risks rise, the pressure increases, and the fall, when it comes, is that much harder.
We also rarely see the full effect of any of this. There's no immediate gratification here, and where there is, it's few and far between. Recognizing those moments matters. Carrying on through the difficulty of developing ourselves and developing others becomes its own exercise in resilience.
What the stack looks like
As we skip steps, these things stack. Make the mistake early and take will for skill, and you reach the delegation stage genuinely committed but without the judgment to tell whether anyone else is ready. There's no way to tell a good call from a lucky one, so decisions get held closer and meaningless standards get built around them. By the fourth stage, they're writing down rules they can't explain the reasoning behind, because they never built the reasoning.
Certain, informed, nominally delegating and thoroughly documented. We have to be intentional about how we build ourselves and how we build the leaders in our organizations. Looking harder at the org chart doesn't surface this. It's personal acumen, and being a good judge of how people will hold up and what decisions they'll make is a long game.
Look at the last time pressure arrived. Who made the calls, and what did they base them on? If everything routed upstairs, there's the first red flag.
