Are Your Leaders Leading Or Busy Doing The Team’s Work?

What if the biggest leadership problem isn't a lack of talent, but a lack of clarity about what leaders are actually supposed to do?

In this episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson challenges one of the biggest misconceptions in leadership development. While organizations invest billions of dollars each year in communication skills, emotional intelligence, and personality assessments, many leaders still struggle because they've never been taught the actual work of leading.

Ed introduces a practical framework that helps leaders distinguish their work from the work of their teams. Rather than getting buried in daily operations, great leaders focus on three essential responsibilities: Structure, Operate, and Perfect. These three leadership domains create organizations that are aligned around purpose, execute with consistency, and continuously improve over time.

You'll discover why leadership is a discipline rather than a personality trait, how to create a willing, capable, and sustainable team, why every promotion requires letting go of your previous expertise, and how building systems instead of solving every problem yourself creates stronger leaders at every level.

Whether you're an executive, manager, entrepreneur, or emerging leader, this episode will challenge the way you think about leadership and provide a practical framework you can immediately apply to your organization.

Because leadership isn't about doing your team's work better.

It's about building the systems that allow your team to do their best work without you.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Transcript

Speaker 0:01

If you're leading a team that feels stuck in chaos, conflict, or constant pressure, then this podcast is for you. Leadership SOPs gives you the framework to create clarity, drive results, and lead with consistency. So here's your host, Ed Tyson.

Speaker 1 0:23

Are your leaders leading? Are they doing their work or the teams? If they are leading, if they can clearly differentiate their work from the teams, hats off to them and to you. Well done. According to a U.S. News ⁇ World Report poll from last year, we are experiencing a pervasive leadership crisis across business, education, healthcare, and public service. The only real question in that poll was not which segment is suffering, but which one was suffering worse. 72% of Americans can see it in business, and a whopping 80% see it in public service, and education and healthcare fall somewhere in between. And unfortunately, there is nothing unique about the data coming out of the United States. Our investments in leadership development are climbing, and the data is getting worse. More money, more coaching, more training, and somehow less leading. DDI's 2023 Global Leadership Forecast uncovered a worrying pattern here as well. The top skills leaders say they need by an overwhelming 70% is strategic thinking, followed by identifying and developing future talent, managing successful change, and decision making and prioritization. Yet only 29% of companies train on any of these top requested skills. The other two-thirds plus are obsessed with personality assessments, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal skills. Is it possible this obsession with the soft stuff is making leadership harder or obstructing what it even is? I'd say that's not just possible, it's highly probable. Want to test the theory? Ask your leaders what the work of leading is. Can they do it? Here's a rougher question. Can you? I couldn't. Ten years ago, when the leadership SOP's methodology came to me, it was pretty simple, right? And it was totally absent a framework for leading, absent the work. And I was deep into the space. I had read everything from Machiavelli to Green Leaf and beyond. I was super grounded in the feel of it, but I couldn't really teach it, not in any cohesive or holistic way. So when I would suggest a leadership SOP for this type of work or that type of work, the leaders I was coaching would inevitably turn and say, Cool. But what other ones do I need? What else is missing? At first, I was content to clumsily mention random components, strategy, business planning, etc. But deep down I could see I was losing them as my list went on and on and didn't hang together. Finally, after enough embarrassment, I went about the business of forming a perspective, a clear perspective on the work of leading. Hello, and welcome back to the Leadership SOPs podcast. I'm Ed Tyson, executive coach and organizational consultant, author of From Expert to Executive, and creator of the Leadership SOP's Framework, Methodology, and App. Last episode, we tackled a deceptively simple but foundational question. Why do we lead? What is leadership for? We sidestep the problematic notion that the purpose of leading is goal attainment, replacing that idea that we lead as a means to an end with a more meaningful one, literally focusing instead on the means required to produce the ends. In other words, the purpose of leading is to cultivate the exact right community of effort required to pursue together what we could never pursue alone. Today, I want to push that conversation one step further. From why to what? From the purpose to the work. By the end of today's episode, you will be able to help your leaders differentiate the work of leading from their team's work. Not for some obscure academic purpose, but to set basic expectations, model routines yourself, and get your leaders leading. Guaranteed, if you strike up a conversation about leading with just about anyone, the conversation almost immediately turns towards communication style, executive presence, emotional intelligence, confidence, influence, empathy, authenticity, maybe a little inspiration and integrity thrown in there for good measure. If you're lucky, you might even hear a little bit about vision, strategy, accountability, and coaching, but surprisingly, very little. It's mostly personality tests, presence, active listening, and the like. And none of that actually tells a leader what to do on Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. when three departments are misaligned, priorities are colliding, accountability is fuzzy, and the wrong messages about why are making their way to the top. None of it addresses how to achieve alignment on the highest level why, what, and how. It ignores the importance of establishing operational rhythm and developing the team. Is it any wonder the question, are leaders born or made, persists? Effectively propagating the magical idea that leadership might be in your blood, not in your behavior? Let's try this. If you and I were to create a generic job description for a leader, what would it look like? We might have different perspectives on leadership, but I bet we could agree pretty quickly on at least the format of the job description itself. Just picture the last one you looked at. I bet it had some headers at the top for title, level, and the supervisor the position reports to. Then it went into a position summary, and below that a numbered list of work functions or job responsibilities. After that, my guess is it went into a section on skills and competencies, job requirements. How would we begin now that we've agreed what the basic format would be? My guess is we would focus on the work functions and job responsibilities section. Because it's the meat of the job description, right? And yet, where do most leadership programs, coaches, and mentors start and often stay? The skills and competencies, yep, all day long. Which is like starting with the icing and then moving to the cake. We spend collectively $366 billion a year almost entirely on what amounts to the skills and competencies section of the job description, which isn't just nonsensical, it leaves aspiring leaders confused about what the job is, increasing the chances that the best we can expect is that they learn to listen deeply, empathize with others, and deploy that emotional intelligence while doing whatever it is they think the work is. We mistake the finger for the moon, and we leave them to do the work they know best, because we never told them otherwise. Bottom line, a pleasant surgeon without an MD is no surgeon at all. Likewise, people who listen deeply and communicate beautifully, but cannot organize human systems at scale are not using these interpersonal skills to lead. So many people resist this logic, despite its validity, because it feels dangerous. I know you've seen the damage toxic leaders can do, and I have too. But leadership training should focus on leadership. It's not finishing school for problematic people who we keep promoting into positions of power. That's dangerous. Power, it turns out, does not help people self-regulate, it spins them out of control, particularly when they don't know how to spend their time. And this brings me to one more point. How many of your leaders seem toxic because they are effectively scrambling to add value? But what they know best is the team's work. And so, in their desperation, that is exactly what they do. Every step on the journey from expert to executive leads away from your craft. These are the first words in my book, and they encapsulate a lovely sentiment, which I wish were always true. Because I think you and I both know, many executives, have walked this path, taken the journey, but held their crafts close, clumsily clamoring to stay in the details, on top of the work, positioning leadership as control and production excellence, crowding out good ideas, new techniques, and initiative, essentially making them enemies, a challenge to their leadership, and leaving enterprise leadership totally unattended to. And this is precisely why we must be clear about what the work of leading is, because most leaders have spent millions of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars honing a craft which is almost never leadership. Every promotion marks a theoretical shift. But toward what? When we embrace an objective that we cannot achieve alone, we must engage in the process of leading to cultivate a community of effort that is equal to the challenge. Your community that you produce, that you cultivate, must be willing, for leadership requires willing participants. It must be capable because motivation isn't enough. And the system you establish has to be sustainable, or entropy will take its toll before the objectives can be reached. But what's the work to produce that willing, capable, and sustainable community of effort? I can almost feel you reaching out to rip the answer from me. And that feeling, the one that has you frustrated that I'm taking too long to tell you, is my final point. Most of your leaders are feeling this way too. So let's get after it. To produce the exact right community of effort, we need to design it, manage it, and improve it. Or as I call it, structure, operate, and perfect it. You can use whatever words you want. I chose structure, operate, and perfect because it allowed me to use the SOPs in the leadership SOPs as a mnemonic double entendre, standing for both my methodology, creating standard operating procedures, and these three domains, structure, operate, perfect, collectively creating what I refer to as the SOPs of leading. By structuring, I mean efforts used to scope the work, establishing and aligning on the highest level why, what, and how, and translating the resulting strategy into an organizational design, essentially defining and designing the community of effort. Likewise, operating efforts include SOPs designed to set the pace via tactical planning, accountability, and stakeholder engagement. And lastly, because the scope is always evolving and there is always room for improvement, I need to have my routines for perfecting my community of effort, don't I? These are the things I do as a leader to develop the might I need to do it tomorrow even better than we did it today. Which includes my development, individual coaching, team building, and enterprise improvement. Structure, operate, and perfect. These are the three domains of leading. You lead when you act in service of these domains. You lead well when your systems, your SOPs, increase the morale, capability, and resiliency of your community of effort. And you lead a legacy when you transfer those SOPs to others. When you take the time to engage your executive stakeholders to build the trust you need before you need it, to clear a path with other functions, they value it, your team values it, and they do it when they lead. When you spend time on the why, they spend time on the why. When you take the time to translate the concept of empowerment into systems of authority and action, well, you get the picture, and so will they, so will your leaders. Imagine the impact you can have by pushing the work of leading into every job description, to pulling it through every coaching discussion. Trust me, it changes the conversation to something far more pragmatic and executable. Whether your leaders are scientists, lawyers, doctors, nurses, accountants, builders, or engineers at heart, I know they are humans and I know this will help. They sense you need more. And so they press the team for more in some very concerning ways. The data says they feel like they are failing. Try this, do it with your words or mine, or better yet, support them as they develop their words to describe it. Repeat this journey that we've begun here together with them. And speaking of our journey, now that we have unpacked the purpose and work of leading, moving from why to what. Next up is how. Translating the purpose and work into the process of leading. Next on the Leadership SOPs podcast. Until then, subscribe, share, and review this episode. Visit askedtyson.com to ask a question or make a suggestion. Join my community of effort on the Leadership SOPs app or LinkedIn, and of course, lead on.

Speaker 16:42

So that's it for today's episode of Leadership SOPs. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 value VIP Day with Ed Tyson himself. Be sure to head on over to leadershipsopspodcast.com and pick up a free copy of Ed's gift. And join us next time.