shriker.caDay 278 of corporate infiltration: My role is that of a leader. My job, in the words the upper echelon gave me during the offsite, is to make this stick.
They handed me a team, a transformation, and the quiet implication that if the team fumbled it, I had fumbled it. So I sat with that, and I slowly considered all of the potential traps.
The primary trap was this: the fastest way to make the thing work is to do the thing yourself. You have done this before. You could have everything running in an afternoon if you just, you know, grabbed the wheel.
So, do you grab the wheel? Nah.
Your job isn’t to hold their hand. It’s to hand them the MapQuest printout, teach ’em to read it, then get out of the way before you screw up the road trip. I am going to argue that is the entire leadership problem, compressed into a sentence, and that most of us fail it in the exact same way every damn time.
The thing missing from the org chart#
An enabling team exists to build another team’s competence. Short-term, collaborative support. Capability uplift, not delivery. They are not a service desk. They are not a permanent dependency. The moment that’s true is the moment they stop being an enabler and become a fallback.
If they stick around too long. The other teams learn to wait. The practice never actually transfers. The skill sits in someone else’s head, and the team performs like it has it.
You’ve seen this. It looks like success. It is not success. It is a hostage situation when the actual goal is independence and autonomy.
If your help is directive, if it’s controlling, if the other team is waiting on you to feel like they have permission, you have not uplifted them. You have adopted them. They know there is a difference, even if they can’t name what it is.
The wheel thingy#
I’ve been the fallback before and I have receipts in the form of tired people who stopped bringing me questions.
The urge to take the wheel is not a failure of kindness. It’s a failure of ego. You take the wheel because you can do it faster and cleaner. Because watching them do it badly is a physical itchy sensation, somewhere near the sternum. Because your lizard brain has a need for speed and results right meow. Because if you do it yourself, you are the one who gets credit when it works, and you are the one who has to live with it when it doesn’t.
All true. All fantastic reasons you should not take the wheel.
The thing that takes too long, the coaching, the letting-go, the staying on the call for two more minutes just to hear where the stuckness is. That is the thing that makes you not needed. Coaching is the path to a team that runs without you, and it is the exact thing that lowers your own workload over time.
The quick stopgap and the MapQuest printout are two sides of the same coin. You just have to decide which one you’re offering at which moment, and you have to be willing to let go before your ego files a complaint.
Letting go is not a favour you do a team. It’s the mechanism by which their competence compounds until your direct effort is no longer required for execution. I say let them lead. I genuinely mean it.
The mastery ladder is your exit ramp#
This is the tool I use to know when to step out. It isn’t a closely guarded secret.
Mastery moves through stages. Unconscious incompetence. They don’t know they don’t know it. Conscious incompetence. They know they don’t know it. This is the one people hate, because the gap is painfully felt. Then conscious competence. They can do it, but only with heavy focus, only with you in the room, only with your hands near the wheel. And finally unconscious competence, where the behaviour is automatic, where it’s what they do.
You exist for the third stage. That’s the whole job. You are not there to keep them in it. You are there to burn through it, one rep at a time, until it’s automatic and you can step out.
If a team is still in conscious competence a month in, and it’s because you keep hovering, that is not protection. You are being the safety net.
What “out of their way” looks like on a Friday#
These rules only mean something if I follow them the way I’d want someone to follow me. I hold myself to the same standards that I desire from others.
-
Diagnose before you act. Find the constraint and the gap before you touch anything. If you fix the wrong thing you’ve just added to the load.
-
Short engagements, not open-ended presence. Enable in bursts. Not as a permanent looming shadow on the team’s output.
-
Transfer knowledge, not outcomes. If I can’t leave without the thing breaking, I didn’t enable. I took over.
-
Let them do the ugly version. The heavy focus stage is where competence is built. Stepping in to smooth it out skips the exact stage that makes it stick.
Watch for the human freeze and do not mistake it for incompetence. Stuckness is a biological response to disruption and uncertainty. It is not a reason for you to take over the road trip.
Sometimes the honest answer is that I do the thing anyway, and that’s fine, but I name it. I don’t let the dependencies sneak in quiet, like I used to slide into the basement window while returning home at 4 am as my parents slept. (It wasn’t that difficult. Our black labrador Zeke snored so loudly that he vibrated the subfloor.)
Helping well is the harder thing. It means your best work is a version of the task you no longer get to do.
The best part is when you walk out of the room and the thing is still running. The roadtrip is trippin’. The team has their shit together. That’s the win.