THE HARD PART

One day you may find yourself in a senior leadership role in your organization. Whatever path got you there, somewhere along the journey you passed a point that really mattered. You may not have noticed it at the time. There probably wasn’t a signpost or anything to mark that point as in any way important. But it was the point when it was no longer good enough to talk about problems. It was the point where people started looking to you to solve them, or at least to provide them with some guidance for how to solve them.

I’m often surprised by how many leaders seem to have missed that transition. They willing accept all the other trappings and responsibilities that come with a “leadership role.” But presented with a change or a new piece of work or new direction, their response is “but how are we supposed to do that on top of everything else?” Whose job exactly do they think it is to figure that out? Whose job do they think it is to make the tough decisions about how to manage competing priorities? Whose job do they think it is to help their teams work through those same questions? There aren’t many, if any, organizations where it doesn’t feel like there is too much work and not enough time and people and money to do it all. Figuring out how to rejig the pieces of that puzzle to get stuff done is the job of leadership.

Yes, sometimes that’s really hard. But hard is why the job comes with the pay cheque and the office and the title. Hard is part of the job. And that can be a hard lesson to learn. But it’s also a necessary one. It’s easy to just wait for the cavalry to come charging over the hill to save everyone when the going gets tough. It’s harder to accept that maybe you actually are the cavalry.