For most of my adult life, I’ve been the person who makes the call.
I’ve founded organizations, served as CEO, built teams, set vision, made decisions, and lived with the consequences when those decisions were wrong. I’ve had the privilege of leading incredible people, and I’ve made enough mistakes along the way to have the scars to prove it.
Recently, I decided to do something different. I joined another organization working in an area where I’ve spent years leading. Except this time, I’m not the founder. I’m not the CEO. I’m not setting the vision or making the final decision.
I’m following. I didn’t realize how difficult that would be. It has also been one of the most refreshing leadership experiences I’ve had in a long time.
People who know me know I move fast. Part of that is personality, but much of it comes from experience. After enough years of building organizations, solving problems, making mistakes, and trying again, you begin to recognize patterns. You learn which problems need attention and which ones do not. You get better at moving an idea from conversation to execution without spending six months talking about it.
Those repetitions create capacity. The battle scars make you more effective. They can also make you impatient.
When you’ve spent years carrying both the vision and the authority to execute it, you may not realize how natural it has become to decide when, where, and how something gets done.
Now I can spend hours doing the groundwork. I can research an issue, have the conversations, develop a recommendation, and believe strongly that I know the best path forward.
Then I have to hand it to someone else. Sometimes they agree with me. Sometimes they don’t.
My responsibility is to give my best advice, be honest about what I see, and bring whatever experience I have to the table. Eventually, though, I have to be able to say three words that sound much easier than they sometimes feel: “It’s your call.” For someone who has spent decades making the call, that requires a different kind of humility.
There is a real difference between influence and authority. Influence gives me the opportunity to shape a decision. Authority gives me the responsibility to make it. For much of my career, I carried both at the same time. Having one without the other has exposed some things in me.
I’ve had to recognize when I’m fighting for the best idea and when I’m simply fighting to have my idea win. I’ve also had to remember why I’m there. My job is to help someone else’s organization succeed, not quietly turn it into my own.
That means I don’t have to agree with every decision to honor the person responsible for making it. When I’m representing the organization, especially when its leader isn’t in the room, I try to represent that leader the way I would want someone to represent me.
There is something powerful about being able to disagree without becoming disloyal. I wish I had understood that earlier in my career.
Following has also changed the way I think about the people who have worked for me. I’ve always expected my teams to understand the vision, execute well, and recognize which decisions were theirs to make and which ones needed to come to me.
Sitting in a different seat has shown me how much responsibility the leader carries for making those expectations clear. What seems obvious to the person carrying the vision is not always obvious to everyone else. Sometimes what looks like an execution problem is really a communication problem.
That realization is changing how I lead my own teams. If I want people to represent me well when I’m not in the room, I have to make sure they understand more than what we are doing. They need to understand why we are doing it.
Following is making me a more complete leader. It is easy to talk about humility when you’re making the final decision. It is harder when you’ve done the work, believe you’re right, and someone else still gets to decide.
It is also easy to say the mission matters more than your position when you occupy the highest position. You discover whether you really believe it when you don’t.
The strongest leaders I’ve encountered do not need to prove they are the most important person in every room. They know how to contribute without controlling, disagree without undermining, and recognize when it is time to let someone else lead.
There is strength in that kind of restraint. I’ve spent decades learning how to lead when the decision is mine. This season is teaching me that leadership is also revealed by what I do when it isn’t.
I’m beginning to think every leader should spend some time in that seat.
