The Leadership Vacuum: How to Step Back Without Stepping Away

How to Delegate As A Leader

There comes a time in your leadership journey where you have to move further away from the details of the business in order to grow as a leader. You need time to work on cross-functional initiatives and build relationships with your first team. I've seen a few extreme behaviors happen during this time while leaders learn to delegate: The nervous leader: This leader is concerned about getting too far away from the details. They worry that someone will ask them something they don't know. So they actually get closer to everything that's happening. They ask for updates in 1:1s, they ping their leaders for details at any and all times. It's almost always one-way communication, where they ask repeatedly for the latest details and then pass those details along. Everything feels urgent. Always an emergency. You start to twitch every time you hear an email, slack or text notification. The absent leader: This leader has realized they don't have time for everything, so the first thing to go is attention to the team. Their whole focus becomes managing up or across and their team finds themselves trying to just figure things out for themselves. They create a leadership vacuum as they seem to disappear. 1:1s are canceled more often than they happen. Forget about team meetings or team communications. You're lucky if you get time with them, but maybe that's OK? Then it's time for skip levels and your skip doesn't seem to know anything about what's going on in the team, let alone know about you. Maybe the absentee manager does have it's drawbacks. There's another way. There's another option for leaders who not only want to grow their scope, but also grow the leaders reporting to them. Create an intentional leadership vacuum. There are very few jobs these days where you do the same thing day after day after day. But oftentimes, we keep up the same process long after the need for it has changed. Think about a new activity or responsibility you and your team have. When I joined Gong, we'd just started doing these weekly account and customer reviews. The idea was that each week, 1 or 2 CSMs would join a meeting and present their accounts that had risk. The attendees were the presenting CSMs, their direct manager, their segment leader and me, the SVP. When we first started this process, it was new for everyone. I was new to the company. The CSMs, managers, and leaders were new to forecasting renewals and projecting upsells and working through negotiations. There was a learning curve. Over time, we started to see patterns. Managers would meet with their CSMs ahead of time and instead of a working session, it became a presentation or a "let's confirm we're doing enough." The meeting itself wasn't really serving the purpose it once did. We had a choice: do we keep the meeting and just keep the process going, or do we change it to meet a new need? One change is that I stopped going to the meetings. I wasn't adding any value and I didn't want it to turn into a "present to the SVP" meeting. What happens when you stop going to the meetings? If I'd stopped going and not communicated to the team, then it might have looked like I didn't care or didn't value this time. And it was a concern that I wasn't going to get the same small group time I had been getting with the CSMs. But there were other topics that demanded my attention. So I had a conversation with my segment leaders and said I would no longer be joining. I talked about how we could change these meetings so that they were still valuable for the people involved, but they didn't feel like the meeting after the meeting. This was my attempt at creating a leadership vacuum, where the segment leaders, the CSM managers and the CSMs themselves all would be asked to take on a more senior level than when we first started this. What's an intentional leadership vacuum? At its core, it's a choice. It's looking at the processes, the places where you're working "in" the business and deciding which places make sense, which need to evolve and which ones you can step back from. By making these changes, ideally you've created places where your leaders can step up and step into more responsibility. This gives you more time to work "on" the business. Below are more details about creating an intentional leadership vacuum, or a leadership vacuum that doesn't suck.