The Problem With Being Good at Your Job
There's a version of this that's almost flattering, and it's the one most leaders arrive at on their own.
You got good at solving things. So people brought you things to solve. You solved those too, usually faster than handing them off would have felt, and word gets around inside a company the way it always does. Now every hard call routes to you. Your calendar is full of work you are genuinely excellent at.
And somewhere in there, being excellent at the job you've always done crowded out the job only you can do.
Most leaders recognize that in about four seconds. It's also the most comfortable explanation available, because it puts the cause somewhere else. The organization did this. The team leans on you. The business demanded it, and you answered, because that's who you are.
Here's what it doesn't explain.
You've known this for a while. And you have more authority over your own calendar than almost anyone alive.
So why is it still like this?
If you just produced an answer, notice how fast it came. Ten seconds, maybe less. Something about the stage the business is at. The bench not being deep enough yet. The timing being wrong to step back right now, though it will be better in a quarter or two.
It's a good answer. It might even be partly true.
It's also the answer you've been giving yourself for years, and nothing has moved.
So try a different one.
An organization can only fill what's already been left unguarded.
That isn't an accusation, it's just how it works. Nobody took those hours from you. They were sitting there, and in a growing company, hours that are sitting there always find a use. The question isn't why they got filled. It's why they were sitting there in the first place.
Which leads somewhere most leaders never go, because the question sounds wrong when you first hear it.
What does solving give you?
Not what it costs you. Everyone can list that. What does it give.
Certainty, in a day made almost entirely of ambiguity.
The feeling of being useful. Immediately. No ambiguity about it.
Proof that you still matter to the thing you built.
Or maybe it keeps you away from the questions where there isn't a right answer, and nobody can tell you whether you got it right.
I don't know which of those is yours. There's a decent chance you don't either, because it's not something you'd ever catch yourself doing. It just looks like being busy, which is socially acceptable, and like being needed, which feels like proof you're doing it right.
And sometimes being needed is easier than deciding what you want.
Don't go looking for the answer directly. Ask yourself why you've allowed this and your mind will hand you something plausible before you've finished the question.
Do something smaller. Walk back through last week, the one that actually happened rather than the one you planned, and find one thing you took on that somebody else could have done. Not should have. Could have.
Then ask what you got out of being the one who took it.
Probably nothing comes of it the first time. Do it again next week. What you're after isn't in any one instance, it's in the shape that appears once you have four or five of them side by side, and that shape is almost never what you'd have guessed.
There's a cost to all of this, and it isn't the one people usually think of.
The obvious cost is your time, and you already know about that. The one underneath is harder to see, because it's never on any week's calendar.
You become indispensable to the present and increasingly absent from the future.
What made you valuable early can be the thing holding the company back later.
Every hour spent solving something that someone else could have solved is an hour not spent on the only work that genuinely requires you. Deciding what this company is actually for. Whether the thing you're building still matches what you want. What the next five years should cost you, and whether you're willing to pay it.
Nobody escalates those. They don't arrive in your inbox marked urgent. There's no meeting where someone asks you to think about them, and no consequence this quarter for not having done it.
So they wait. And the calendar, which is very good at filling itself, fills.
Here's a way to check.
Look at last week again. Point to the hour where you decided something rather than responding to something.
Not a meeting where a decision got made. An hour that existed because you decided it should, on a question nobody else raised, that will matter in a year.
If there isn't one, that's the finding. Don't fix it yet. Just notice that it wasn't there, and ask what filled it instead, and who put that there.
Most likely, you did.
Anthony DiMarco works with founders and leaders on the business and the person running it at the same time. Because the company only ever runs as well as the leader.