As you move toward Director and beyond, people naturally begin bringing you more of the organization's difficult problems.
Your calendar fills up with important meetings, you're increasingly asked for your perspective, and senior leaders trust you with increasingly complex work. When your reality looks like that, it's easy to conclude that your value comes from personally helping the organization work through its toughest challenges.
Think back to the last time your team worked through a problem that crossed multiple departments. You gathered the right people together, asked questions, uncovered where things broke down, and helped the group arrive at a better solution.
That's good leadership, but it's only part of the job.
As your responsibilities grow, the nature of leadership begins to change. Early in your career, your value comes from helping solve the organization's problems. Over time, your value shifts toward helping the organization become better at solving them.
It's a subtle distinction, but one question makes it surprisingly easy to see.
Would the same outcome have happened if you weren't there?
Most of us never stop to ask that question because we're focused on getting the work across the finish line. But over time, it becomes one of the clearest ways to understand whether you're simply solving today's problem or making the organization stronger for tomorrow.
Organizations don't become more capable on their own. They become more capable because leaders intentionally develop the judgment, confidence, and problem-solving abilities of the people around them.
That's one of the biggest shifts you'll make as you move toward Director and beyond.
The Unwritten Rule:
The role of a leader isn't to solve every important problem. It's to develop people who can solve important problems without you.
Every time you provide the answer, you improve one decision.
Every time you develop someone else's thinking, you improve every decision that follows.
Once you begin looking at leadership this way, you'll notice it everywhere.
The executive whose team continues making smart decisions while they're on vacation, the department that keeps improving without waiting for leadership to step in, or the leader who spends less time providing answers and more time asking questions that strengthen the team's thinking.
These leaders aren’t less involved. They’re just intentional about ensuring every interaction leaves the organization a little more capable than it was before.
Try this tomorrow:
The next time you're invited into a complicated discussion, don't immediately assume your role is to solve the problem.
Instead, pause long enough to ask yourself:
"Am I here because this decision genuinely requires my judgment, or because this is an opportunity to strengthen someone else's?"
If it's the latter, resist the urge to provide the answer. Ask what evidence your team is using, what assumptions they're making, what alternatives they've considered, and what recommendation they would make if you weren't in the room.
You may be surprised by what happens next.
People begin thinking more deeply before bringing you a recommendation. They develop stronger judgment because they know you'll challenge their thinking instead of replacing it. Over time, your value becomes less about solving the organization's hardest problems and more about increasing its ability to solve them.
Until next time,
Andy
ABOUT UNWRITTEN RULES
The next level of your career isn't earned by having all the answers.
It's earned by becoming the person people trust when the answers aren't obvious.
Every Tuesday and Friday, Unwritten Rules reveals what experienced leaders see that everyone else misses—and helps you recognize those patterns in your own work.
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