Empower Others

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Was this forwarded to you? Subscribe here to get one leadership framework per week.<br>This is the sixth post in a series where I'm going deep on each mantra in my Mantra Dashboard. Last week, we explored why "everything is important" is lazy leadership and why force-ranking your priorities early and often is one of the most important things you can do: Make Tradeoffs Explicit.<br>This week's mantra lives in the Who Makes Decisions category of my Subculture Coverage Matrix. Because once you've made tradeoffs explicit and your priorities are clear, the question becomes: do you trust your people to act on them? Or are you still holding all the decisions yourself?<br>The mantra is: Empower Others.<br>The Mantra Ladder<br>Here's the full Mantra Ladder for Empower Others. The rest of this post unpacks it.<br>Goal (What We Want): We want a team where people grow by taking on real responsibility, not waiting for permission.<br>Mindset (How We Think): We think that people rise to the level of trust you place in them, and that hoarding decisions stunts both the leader and the team.<br>Value (What We Prioritize): We prioritize developing others' judgment over protecting our own control.<br>Standard (What We Expect): We expect leaders to actively push decisions down, give people room to own outcomes, and coach rather than direct.<br>Mantra (What We Say): Empower Others.<br>The Question Every Leader Needs To Ask<br>There's a simple diagnostic for any organization: Are your leaders focused on accumulating control, or on empowering the people around them?<br>Too many people in positions of power are overly focused on themselves. They hoard decisions. They micromanage. They grab power. And the people around them suffer for it. Those employees wait for direction instead of taking initiative. They bring problems instead of solutions. They ask "now what?" instead of saying "here's what I think we should do."<br>That is not leadership. That is control. And it creates dependency, not growth.<br>The best leaders I know operate from the opposite instinct. As I wrote in One Consultative Decision-Maker Per Lane: "Your job isn't to make all the decisions. It's to build the system that enables others to make great ones." That single sentence captures the entire mindset of this mantra.<br>The Hit By The Bus Problem<br>Every founder discovers this at some point. I certainly did.<br>You build something in a scrappy way. You're involved in everything. You're the person who knows how it all works, the person everyone comes to, the lynchpin that holds the whole thing together. And for a while, that's fine. It's how things get off the ground.<br>But at some point, successful leaders need to make a transition. They need to solve what I call "the hit by the bus problem": could your organization run without you? If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, would everything fall apart? Or have you built the culture, the systems, and the people around you so that things would be fine?<br>That is actually what successful leadership looks like. Not having the company depend on you. Having it be able to run on its own because of what you've built.<br>That's a hard shift for a lot of people. Because being the person everyone depends on feels like power. It feels like job security. But it's actually a trap. You can't grow, you can't take on new challenges, you can't move up in the world if everything would collapse in your absence. The leaders who build teams where multiple people could replace them when the time is right are the leaders who actually move forward. That's not a threat. That's success.<br>And in the right culture, a leader who doesn't build other leaders around them isn't someone you retain. They're someone you replace. If your definition of leadership success is making yourself indispensable, you have it backwards.<br>Surround Yourself With People Better Than You<br>This starts with hiring. And the hiring principle is simple: surround yourself with people who are better than you.<br>Too many leaders think that if they're in charge, they need to have all the answers. They need to be the expert in everything. They need to be the smartest person in the room. This is the mind of an underdeveloped leader. Leaders get into a lot of trouble when they think they have to be the smartest person in the room on everything and then hire people who won't be threatening to them.<br>A great leader has the humility to surround themselves with people who have more expertise, more experience, or more talent in their specific domains. And then they conduct the orchestra. They ask questions. They stay curious. They resist the urge to prove that they're smart. And they absolutely do not protect themselves from the possibility that someone on their team could eventually replace them.<br>As I wrote in Lead With Vulnerability: vulnerability is the willingness to say "I don't know," "I might be wrong," or "I need your input," especially when the pressure to appear certain is highest. That's not weakness. That's...