Are you working a pay grade or two below you?

As a leader, your job is to work out where your team or organisation is going. What will it look like, and be doing, in one, two, five years? Having sorted that, you and your people need to start heading there.

Sounds obvious but, in practice, many organisations have only the faintest idea of where they’re heading, except perhaps to get to the end of the quarter without calamity.

One reason is that people rise into leadership roles because they’re good. Talented nurses, engineers, teachers, software developers, architects, salespeople, and doctors solve problems, and so get marked for management.

But they can tend to think their new job is still solving those problems. One chief executive I worked with used to see his job as personally sorting out all client and technical issues. He often complained how little time he had for strategy.

The thing is, he knew how to do his juniors’ jobs, a pay grade or two down. It was his comfort zone, and he couldn’t stop dabbling in it.

What if everyone was working a pay grade or two down? It’s a sobering thought, and may go some way to explain Britain’s stubbornly poor productivity.

More on delegation here: https://dsabuilding.co.uk/deep-and-deliberate-delegation/