The bitter-sweet taste of transitions

As a mother of a teen and pre-teens, I start to feel the bitter-sweet sensation of not being “necessary” anymore.
While on one hand it is indeed liberating to be able not to feel “on duty” the whole time, and be able to enjoy some luxuries such as a dinner out with friends without the need to carefully plan babysitting options in advance, on the other hand, the feeling that your presence is not always needed (and sometimes not even welcome) can be a bit disorienting.

The same type of sensations can happen in the workplace.
It definitely happened to me a few years back.
I was leading a newly formed team, a mix of younger new hires and more senior people with already good experience in the Company but in totally different roles.
Being the only one with previous experience in the field, I felt the need to mentor, teach, role model, be as present as I could.
As time went on, I became increasingly confident in delegating to my team members, and I think some of them had almost full ownership on some projects, but at the end of the day, I was still feeling the urge to oversee projects and the responsibility for the final outcome.

During my maternity leave, I started realizing that in many areas, I could let go completely, much more than I had dared to.
The team proved to be able to cope with all the uncertainties coming along, organize itself and still deliver great service to our clients.
Again, on one hand that was absolutely great, and allowed me to fully enjoy my maternity leave without feeling the urge to go back, but on the other hand, I had this thought in the back of my mind of what was my role going to be when going back.

In both transition cases, I think it’s all about redefining our role.

It’s about letting go of the inner belief that in order to be a good manager, or a good parent, we need to be necessary.

At the end of the day, our success as parents is all about letting our kids fly by themselves and not attached to us, even when this can be frightening or painful.
As leaders, we should “upgrade” our belief from being necessary to being enablers of our team’s thriving, even when that requires us to redefine how we see and position ourselves.

Of course this can be scary, at times even terrifying. And it is especially so when we have built our identity of a great manager that achieves results on our ability to coordinate people and tasks, solve problems, be the go-to person and the decision maker.
It can be rewarding to have your team members reaching out to you asking for advice on a multitude of topics, and be able to give a good reassuring answer to all. It can make us feel important, powerful, competent, reliable… but on the other hand, it can become not only exhausting but also not empowering for those around us.

Let’s not forget that what has helped us in the past to thrive (e.g. our ability to “manage” the team, take timely decisions, be the problem solver, meet all the deadlines…) might not be useful anymore, or may even get in the way.
In my case, my absence due to maternity leave helped me to gain a better perspective, but how can we gain that perspective without an extended leave? How can we encourage multiple feedback, be curious and open to more possibilities in our leadership style?

This openness and curiosity is what can truly help us in redefining our role and seeing that, in order to provide additional value, we could concentrate more on removing barriers, stimulating lateral thinking and creativity, giving the team more opportunities to be visible inside and outside the organisation thus scaling our collective impact…

After all, as R.J. Anderson and W.A. Adams state in their book Scaling Leadership: Building organizational capability and capacity to create outcomes that matter most: “Scale can only be achieved by developing capacity and capability in others. Effective leaders develop other leaders”.

If you are interested in digging deeper into this topic, check out my blog post “Scaling Leadership by Letting Go”