Hi Reader

( 2-minute read at most)

Readwise is an really great piece of software. If you don’t know of it here’s the 10-second summary….Readwise imports the passages/lines you highlight in Kindle and then daily & weekly send you some random samples of same as a method of keeping your learnings fresh. The ones I receive prompt me to dream up these kind of posts.

So today’s ‘highlights’ from Readwise were a mish-mash focused on leadership and they’ve have led me to think that leadership development needs a rethink in its messaging.

John Wooden insisted you "carefully plan every minute" of every meeting with your team.

FC Barcelona's youth academy produces players who "scarcely need a coach."

These sound like apparent contradictions on first pass but I think they're one and the same strategy.

Most leaders plan to be needed. They meticulously organise, strategise, and position themselves at the centre of every decision thereby ensuring their indispensability. Everything is designed to flow through them.

But let’s read Wooden's full instruction.

“Each meeting with your managers and employees offers a unique opportunity: a chance for you and your team to get better at something, share vital information, boost team spirit, and the like. Don’t waste a moment of it; carefully plan every minute.”

He doesn't say plan every minute of what you'll say. He says plan every minute as "a chance for you and your team to get better at something." The planning is in service of their capability and not your control.

Ricardo Semler also talks about leadership in “The Seven-Day Weekend” i.e. "injecting fundamental ideas and processes into the bloodstream" rather than dictating. Similarly what L. David Marquet is after with his question: "How do we release the intellect and initiative of each member?"

The word "release" is key. You don't release what you're holding onto, right?

FC Barcelona discovered that treating young players as "human beings with free intentions" i.e. social, affective, emotional, coordinated, creative, produces better footballers precisely because they learn to make their own decisions.

The coach’s/leader’s job isn't to have all the answers. It's to create people who develop their own.

So if your team can't function well without you then haven’t you've built a dependency instead of a team??

Top copywriter Dave Trott cuts through the noise: "If no one makes it happen, it doesn't happen." So I think the question isn't whether YOU can make it happen. It's whether you've created the conditions where THEY can make it happen when you're not in the room.

And this is why, I increasingly believe, the leadership development ‘industry’ largely is wide of the mark.

As Stephen Bungay in “The Art of Action” observes, we're drowning in advice about what to do, but lost on what actually matters. Most of that advice, even the catchy "empowering" kind, is secretly about making ‘the leader’ more essential, more brilliant, more indispensable. It’s being bought left, right and centre because it appeals to the ego.

Real leadership is the opposite.

Yes, plan meticulously, but plan for your own obsolescence. (That’s possibly a bit of a Jerry Maguire moment!)

Connect deeply and inject the ideas so deeply that others carry them forward without you. Build capability so thoroughly that your absence barely registers.

I’ll leave you with another paradox that has become apparent to me. The more carefully you plan for people not to need you, the more they'll actually want you there.

Another Newsletter you might find useful....

Emerging Leadership Alexis Monville Co-Founder and Executive Leadership Coach at Pearlside. I’ve led teams for more than 30 years, from startup leadership to serving as Chief of Staff to the CTO at Red Hat. My work blends strategic thinking with hands-on experience helping organizations scale with clarity and alignment. I care deeply about building leadership teams that last. Subscribe​

Thank you for being part of the Leaders Coach community. The work on how to lead better is something you have to do alone. But you don't have to do it on your own. Onward and Upward, Paul Clarke

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