Not many service firms approach their business with the goal of putting themselves out of it. Similarly, not many people spend much time thinking about how they can make themselves redundant at work. But that’s exactly what they should be doing, if they are truly professionals with a warrior’s attitude. And that takes courage.
If you start with the premise that leadership is the act of catalyzing others’ learning, advancement and success in life, then self-sacrifice and service are the two fundamental pillars of leadership. Not everyone starts with this assumption, however. In fact, one might argue there’s evidence most leaders in the world of business don’t. The low level of employee engagement in the U.S. (30%) and the world as a whole (15%) would seem to indicate leaders around the globe don’t approach their role with these principles. But even those who do often fail at developing talent in their organizations because they haven’t yet faced the fact that to be successful in helping others succeed, they need to work towards their own professional demise. They have to work themselves out of the job.
It sounds great when you read about self-sacrifice, all the inspiring stories of when and how humans gave up something for someone else. Sometimes they gave up a lot, like their lives. In between the small and the ultimate self-sacrifice lie the daily choices we make to perhaps put ourselves ahead of our leadership responsibility to help others succeed. The courage to serve others at our own expense typically isn’t challenged often at the most extreme conditions. The call to courage comes in the mundane and the routine.
You walk into the office of your direct report for a discussion about how to help them get more international business experience so that they understand how the company operates more clearly, thus allowing them to make future decisions based on direct knowledge, rather than coming to you for decisions as often as they do now. You look at the series of upcoming travel options that would connect your employee to the existing events that fit the business planning of the various global locations where you operate. There are five such opportunities during the year. You could send your employee to all five in the coming year, if you didn’t attend four of them, so that your travel budget limits were achieved. You decide to take three, rather than one trip, and reduce the employee’s opportunities for the experiences. That will slow down their growth by a significant amount. But you want to take the trips because you enjoy the relationships and the work that you’ve done over the last several years. And the locations are interesting, like China, Poland, Portugal and Egypt. You love working internationally.
An opportunity lost to better serve your employee’s development.
Your hard-working employee comes into your office distraught. They are doing twelve hour days, and have been for weeks. They still are behind in two goals that are essential to making progress for the company. The original project timelines you agreed to didn’t anticipate certain factors changing externally, which they have, and there’s no recovery possible in the time frame unless your employee basically works eighteen hour days for the next two weeks. You have a stay-cation planned for the coming week, having scheduled hikes and theater and concerts with your husband and two children. You could help out by skipping three of the five days planned vacation, and relieve your employee of having to add six more hours of work a day for the next two weeks. You tell your employee, “There are lots of reasons, but no excuses” and leave for vacation.
The leaders who would make the choices described above are also not likely to want to leave their roles, such as in retirement, if they’re having a lot of fun, earning good money and get to make most of the decisions in their work. They hang on longer than necessary, after the point where someone else is more than ready to step into their role.
It’s all well and good to talk through succession plans, to identify the people who are growing into higher capabilities, to help them get what they need for development. It’s fine and even necessary to plan out the scenarios for succession, for both expected and unexpected transitions. Most companies do this to some degree. These activities don’t require bravery, however.
The point of courage comes when you look yourself in the eye and say, “It’s not about you”, and you put your own needs aside, in little ways, every day. The irony is that after having been courageous a few times following self-sacrificing leadership principles, you begin to experience the incredible gifts that come with that approach to leading others.
Do I need to list them, or are they fairly obvious?