Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

It’s a conversation I’ve had with more than a few senior leaders lately.

When you’ve honed your craft over years and stepped into more senior roles, you don’t suddenly lose your subject matter expertise. It’s still there, sharp as ever. And it’s sooo tempting to jump in when you see a better way forward. The desire to solve / create / get your hands dirty is often HUGE.

The reasons behind this temptation are varied:  You see the path forward so clearly so why not save everyone the thinking time? Maybe it’s because compared with the complexity in your current role which often feels hard, the old role feels so much easier and sometimes a bit of thrill to get the deal, create the process, write the strategy… And then there’s the case where the person in the role just isn’t able to do a good job or perhaps isn’t being accountable for delivering so really, it’s just easier to jump in and do it.

…the result is the same.

You say yes to doing the work, and in doing so, you say no to the role you’re actually meant to be taking up.

The cost? Often it’s the core work of leadership:

• Building capability in others
• Creating the space to think and connect strategically
• Holding people accountable for what’s theirs
• Developing a team that has capacity within themselves to deliver

In times of inflection, those critical points where everything is shifting it’s critical to refocus your role.

It’s about asking ‘What is required of me now in this context – this time of geopolitical, technological and demographic change and upheaval? What does the business, the team, maybe even the sector require of me?

It takes courage and discipline to lean into the areas you need to focus on and not get sidetracked by the things that come easy or give you that sense of achievement when they’re not yours to deliver directly.

Take a moment today to do a quick check on yourself (there’ll be clues in your calendar). Have you been leading or doing the stuff that comes easily to you?

You know it’s beautiful thing when the team you’re working with can see the patterns without you having to point them out. And even better when they can pinpoint the exact moment that things shifted, positively or negatively.

Standing around a rough timeline drawn on flip chart paper along the wall, the team, marker pens still in hand, reviewed their handiwork noting the highlights and lowlights, the wins, the misses, key activities, people leaving joining, policy announcements, restructures, changes in the market and so on they had recorded on the wall.

As they commented on year that had been, taking time to acknowledge all that they had achieved with limited resources and a shifting market, the leader called out “there it is, the inflection point! That’s when things started to go south. We stopped communicating, we could see what was happening and we were too slow to move”.

It was only in retrospect that they could see the inflection and while it provided a great ‘we need to do things differently’ moment (and let me tell you this leader grabs learning moments and uses them every time!), an opportunity had been missed and there were repercussions.

Inflection Leadership™ is about getting on the front foot, creating space to notice what’s coming, tapping into your intuition and experience to make sense of it, having the smarts to design possible responses or gathering the smarts around you to determine the way forward, and finally, the courage to make the calls on ‘what next’.

This can’t happen if you’re racing all day, filling every hour of the day with meetings and activity.

It can’t happen if you’ve set a pattern that everything comes through you and the team doesn’t know how to work together to solve or create.

It can’t happen if there’s fear about getting things wrong even though we have culture presentations saying it’s ok to fail.