“Scaling” leaders is a mistake

We should be focusing them but not doing their busywork

As a product ops person, I’m often asked to help our leaders deal with various work that they do.

There has been a pattern I’ve started to see that has the leaders think about using my role as someone to “scale” them. I’m meant to challenge and eventually help transform the leaders and their teams into something more effective and performant.

In the case of a status reporting mechanism, it might be to summarize their team’s status for them to pass on to someone else higher up in the org. We are constantly teetering on the edge of work that is doing the helpful and not helpful thing for that leader.

I’d say that helping them understand their team is incredibly important and something that I’m there to do. However, I’m not there to do the job of understanding for them so they don’t have to.

I’ve started to wonder if “scale” is what leaders need, rather than being effective at the job they are supposed to do. This could be implementing a strategy across the org, helping them be more effective at decision making, creating places for that decision making, allowing better delegation to their team, etc.

This isn’t for me to do the work so they don’t have to. If anything, the above help requires me to limit their role within the team to a few activities.

Not to do busywork.

If we take the extreme case for this, is it my job to just usher the leader between meetings to say “yes, no, rework” to everyone? If I can automate a job they should be doing, should anyone be doing it?

Something keeps irking me about this role and the default modes we fall into. I wonder whether I’m just annoyed or whether there is something larger here?

Axioms:

• Time and attention is the most important thing the leader has.

• Teams are not there to do the leaders work, they are there to do their work.

• Automation will come for busywork first—probably because it is annoying for everyone involved.