Executive Function

If you do all the thinking for your team, you don’t have a team.

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When you are an individual contributor your job is to take a problem, find a solution and solve it. This is true whether you are an engineer, a sales person, a marketer or any other function. The operative word is “individual” as you need to solve as many problems on your own as possible.

When you become a leader, that way of thinking doesn’t go away. You will always see problems and immediately move to solutions. Even if the problem is something your team can handle, the instinct to dictate a solution can be strong! If you aren’t careful, you start telling your team which problems to solve and how.

You start to micro-manage them.

As a leader, your job is not to tell your team what to do and how to do it. Even if you wanted to, it doesn't scale! Once your team is of non-trivial size, trying to figure out how to solve every problem becomes impossible. You become a bottleneck on everything your team does because they learn to wait for you to tell them how to solve problems.

You teach them to let you do all their thinking for them.

That’s not what you want! You want your team to have the same ability you had as an individual contributor: to take a problem, find a solution and solve it. That is called executive function, and the higher the executive function on your team the faster you can move and the faster you can scale. Teams where everyone has the ability to work independently (even if they don’t always) can get more done, faster.

So, how do you encourage your team to develop their executive function?

The first step is to realize your job as a leader is to set goals, and then hold the team accountable to those goals. It’s up to your team to figure out how to achieve those goals. That separation of responsibilities is critical, and you need to reinforce it.

For example, it would be micromanaging to have a weekly meeting with your team where you go through every problem and tell them how to solve them. It would be better to have a weekly meeting where you set goals for the upcoming week, review whether the goals for the prior week were achieved and why. The latter gives your team agency and accountability, while the former makes them passive automatons.

Setting goals, and then holding the team accountable to them, forces your team to develop their executive function. Instead of using you as a crutch to solve problems for them, they need to do it themselves. You can provide advice and guidance, but they need to figure it out on their own. Since you’re holding them accountable, they have every incentive to do so.

It’s scary to give your team agency! If you were an amazing individual contributor you know you’re the best person to solve any problem, and you are probably right. It feels safer to do the work yourself instead of letting your team fail.

I have lost count of how many leaders I have coached that fall into this trap. They are exhausted and overwhelmed, complaining about how their team can’t do anything if they don’t tell them exactly what to do. In some cases they hired poorly, but in most cases it was the leader’s inability to let go and trust their team that held everyone back.

Setting goals and enforcing accountability does mean the team will make mistakes you would not have made. However, it also means the team might achieve things you would not have. The benefits greatly outweigh the risks, and it allows you to scale your team indefinitely!

This works recursively as well. When you promote someone into management, make sure they don’t fall into this trap. Lead by example, but also be explicit about how important it is to develop executive function in your team no matter what the size. Managers will never become leaders if you don’t help them learn this lesson.

As a first time leader there is nothing scarier than letting your team make mistakes, but as an experienced leader there is no better feeling than seeing your team execute with strong executive function. Finding creative solutions, solving problems you didn’t even know existed and constantly impressing you with how fast they can move.

That sounds like the kind of team any leader wants to lead.

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For more on Leadership, see:

• Don’t Confuse Motion with Progress

• The Art of Being Unreasonable

• Leading By Example Doesn’t Scale

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