I recently interviewed a senior leader and got a great amount of lessons, one of these was leaning on others to help achieve success for the team or business.

From this leader, I learnt some great lessons that I want to expand upon in the coming weeks. Not only do I want to share some of these lessons, I want to let you listen to the entire interview. Yes, I used this opportunity as my first pod-cast. Once the editing is complete, I will let everyone know on this blog along with some others I am planning to interview.

Leaving that comfort zone

We got talking around role transitions especially the transition from individual contributor to manager and then again from manager to senior manager. A big takeaway was leaving the comfort zone of being an expert in that area and leaning on others to help.

I can relate to that transition myself having done the that when moving to manager and wanting to hold onto that technical specialisation I had. The sense of one foot that is planted while the other is finding the depth of water, feeling to make sure it’s not too deep or daunting.

The fact is, you will never truly reach far enough if you always have one foot planted on the ground and jumping in with both feet is required at some point.

Relying on those around you

As you progress in any walk of life, you cannot know everything. There are always gaps in your knowledge, either because you are not interested or it is something you just don’t know. We think that to accomplish that big hairy goal, we need to know every nut and bolt, thus allowing us control of the situation and understanding if something goes wrong.

Take stock of your situation, get some perspective and be results focussed on what you need to achieve. Be conscious of your own limitations, limitations such as time, interest and knowledge. If you can park that ego and look at that larger picture. You will soon start achieving more results utilising less effort.

Lean into it!

I am no expert on this and still working on getting this right, I can say the below has helped and keen on feedback on what else works for others

1. Trust others with the work. Really trust them with it and let them own it and execute it with how they work best. You can stay close and monitor, provide assistance if needed. But do not interfere with their work, let them progress and simply set boundaries around when it is needed. You will be surprised with can happen.
2. Be realistic with what you can do. Sure, you can do that excel spreadsheet manipulation but will take you best part of a day to do it to the levels expected. Why not see the expert to see if they can help you, either teach you or help out with some of it? You will achieve the results quicker than expected and better than expected.
3. Be results driven. What are you really trying to achieve? Best outcome for the business or the team? In which case does it matter who does it or if you ask for help. Get away from your ego and really assess what you are doing this for, that way you will put that ego aside and deliver results than just yourself.