Mistake #2: Filling the Gap

If you’re a manager often working overtime, jumping into the deep end with the team or filling confidence or ability holes, this is for you. (And this might hurt—the truth often does—but you need to hear it so you and everyone around you can get up and grow.)

That thing that you do, the whole stretching-yourself-thin and covering-up-every-gap habit?
It doesn’t come from a place of strength but of weakness.

While you think you’re simply protecting your team and rooting for success, you’re actually creating weakness by:
– picking up the slack so no one looks bad (including yourself)
– looking for praise or approval in the short term instead of effectively training your team to do the work themselves or assessing if you have the right people in the right places
– not teaching them to be responsible for their work product, but facilitating codependency and neediness (If you’re an answers machine, you’re training your team to come to you instead of thinking for themselves)
– rescuing them so they don’t experience pain or grow without you when what they need is the chance to impress you, exceed their own expectations and rise to the occasion

What you’re effectively doing is stifling growth—including your own—and sacrificing the higher-level strategy work you need to be doing if only you could get out of the weeds.

So, stay with your team and let them know you’re at the front of the ship, but don’t get into the dirty details and on their level.

They need to rise.
Just like you do.