When Leaders Get Too Busy to Choose Leaders
An appointment can relieve a senior leader's workload while leaving a team without the leadership it needs. I think the difference deserves more attention.
Building Stronger Teams · Potential & Development · Delegation · Building Leaders not Followers
This article is inspired by real workplace and leadership experiences. I do not use real names, company names or identifying details. Roles, teams, organisational structures, projects and business context may be removed, generalised or combined to protect the people and organisations involved while preserving the underlying leadership reflection. Where conversations are referenced, wording may be edited for clarity and anonymity.
There is a particular version of a management appointment that I can understand a little too easily. An overburdened leader needs someone who can take the questions away. The strongest specialist knows the work, can make decisions quickly and seems capable of getting on with it without another hour in an already impossible calendar.
Under those conditions, choosing that person can feel thoroughly responsible. The work needs attention, the team needs direction and the senior leader cannot remain involved in every tactical decision. Someone has to take ownership, preferably someone who will not need the whole situation explained again.
What interests me is how easily that practical need could become the entire basis for the appointment. The question starts as who could lead these people well. Somewhere under the weight of everything else, it becomes who will need the least from me.
I am describing a possibility here, rather than pretending to know why any particular leader chose a particular person. Pressure is not proof of a careless decision. But I think it is worth examining the difference between the relief an appointment gives the person making it and the leadership it gives everyone who has to live with it.
The first is easier to notice. Fewer questions reach your desk. Someone else handles the detail. Things that used to wait for your involvement appear to move without it. If your working day has become a procession of decisions you do not have enough time to make, that improvement is going to feel significant.
The experience underneath the new manager may take longer to understand. People can receive quicker answers while losing opportunities to exercise their own judgement. Decisions can become more efficient while the team grows less confident about making any of them. From above, those two developments might look remarkably similar for a while.
This is why I struggle with treating technical independence as sufficient evidence of leadership readiness. A person who needs little help doing the work may still need considerable support learning to lead others. We have not removed that need by giving them a title. We have made it easier to overlook if their technical competence keeps the immediate problems away.
There are also perfectly legitimate reasons to appoint a strong specialist. People deserve a leader who understands enough of their work to make sensible decisions, recognise good judgement and challenge weak reasoning. I would not want enthusiasm for developing people to become an excuse for being unable to understand what the team is trying to deliver.
The difficulty is that the appointment asks for both. Someone needs to care about the work and about the conditions in which other people do it. That includes whether people can question a decision, whether responsibility comes with authority and whether a capable person has room to become more capable without first becoming indispensable to their manager.
None of those questions becomes less important because the senior leader is exhausted. They may become harder to answer properly. That is the uncomfortable part. The moment you most need a person to take work off your hands may also be the moment when you are least inclined to examine what support that person will need from you.
I wonder whether this is one way leaders drift away from the qualities they once valued in themselves. You may believe deeply in coaching, trust and developing judgement. Then the workload builds, the questions multiply, and someone who simply makes the immediate difficulty disappear starts to look like the obvious choice.
There does not need to be a cynical intention behind that. It can be a tired person's practical response to a real problem. But the absence of a cynical intention does not remove the responsibility to notice what the choice is producing.
If I appoint someone to lead, I think I remain responsible for being interested in how that leadership is experienced. I cannot judge the appointment only by how often I now get interrupted. The people reporting to them are also evidence, including the ones who are unlikely to volunteer an uncomfortable assessment when the new arrangement seems to be making my life easier.
That does not mean undermining the manager by becoming a second route for every decision. It means having enough contact with the work and the people to distinguish healthy independence from silence. It means discussing the new manager's approach to delegation and feedback with the same seriousness I would give to their delivery commitments.
There is a harder possibility to face as well. The person may be excellent and the role may still be wrong for them. We should be able to recognise exceptional specialist contribution without making responsibility for other people's development the only credible way to reward it.
I don't think a good appointment requires certainty about how someone will develop. Potential matters, and people need opportunities before they can demonstrate every part of a job they have never held. What concerns me is an appointment whose success depends on us never having to think seriously about that development at all.
The next time a candidate feels particularly attractive because they will take so much off my plate, I want to pay attention to that relief. It may be evidence that they are exactly what the situation needs. It may also be telling me more about my workload than about their readiness to lead.
I would want to understand which before asking a team to find out for me.
