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Leading Without Losing Your Own Direction
You can carry other people and still know where you are going. Most leaders give up the second half without noticing.
Filed under Leadership
The failure mode of a good leader is not indifference. It is availability — being so responsive to everybody else that the direction they set quietly becomes somebody else's.
The drift is gradual
No single week looks wrong. You are helpful in all of them. Then a year has passed and the thing you set out to build has been replaced by the thing that was urgent at the time.
A leader who has no protected thinking time does not have a strategy. They have a calendar.
What I ask leaders to protect
- Two hours a week where nobody can book you and nothing can be escalated.
- One weekly question in writing: what did I decide, as opposed to what did I handle?
- One boundary that is visible to the team, so they learn it exists.
The boundary is the hard part. An invisible standard cannot be respected, and a leader who never shows one teaches the room that nothing is protected — including its own direction.