I’ve observed over the years that we are often our own worst enemies when it comes to our own career growth. We initially succeed through mastery, but it is mastery that holds us back from moving forward. Being the best in the company on a particular subject matter is great. It makes you the go-to person, gives you purpose, and earns you respect. This is a really strong motivator. It is so strong, that we hold fast to it, even to our own detriment.

The way to grow in your career is by adding capacity. Your boss cannot give you additional opportunity if you are already maxed out at capacity.

Rule #1: Always have a successor (or two)

We often think about succession planning as something for top leadership. It’s pretty critical there, but the same principle works everywhere. If you are an individual contributor and an expert on a specific technology, who is your apprentice? Do you really want to be on-call 24x7x365 for life because you are the only one that knows your stuff? Find someone and teach them everything you know.

Even if you aren’t a techie, the same very well may be true for you from a process standpoint. Do you have years of tribal knowledge in your head and does everyone around ask you for answers like you are Google? Write this stuff down so others can self-serve. Also, teach what you know to as many people as possible. Don’t be a tower of knowledge.

Rule #2: Do what only you can do

If someone else can do it (even if not as well), you need to let them do it, so you can have time to do what only you can do. This can be scary for leaders. After all, you can delegate a responsibility to one of your team members, but you are always ultimately accountable for the result. This makes you feel like you have to do it yourself in order for it to be done right. Resist the urge. Teach and be patient. Perfection isn’t the goal. Scaling impact is.

Rule #3: Always be willing to become dumb again

This is humbling. You got to where you are because you are smart. But you didn’t start smart. You got smart. Scaling your abilities and competencies means letting go of what you are currently smart at and adding something new to learn: something you are currently a dummy at. Trust your ability to learn. You’ve done it before, you can do it again. I wrote an entire blog article on this subject. Read it here.

Rule #4: Don’t run your operation

Earlier in my leadership career, I was always on-call. Sure, I had plenty of competent experts on my team, but I was the one that stepped in when things went pear-shaped. Whether it was an incident, or a project gone bad, I did a lot of fire-fighting to keep things going in the right direction. This meant that my cell phone rang a lot on nights, weekends, and on vacations.

Over-time, I learned to delegate all of that by empowering my managers and team members. Sure, I am still ultimately on-call as an escalation if something really bad happens, but that’s very rare. The point of this pursuit is not just so I can have my nights, weekends, and vacations back, although that is nice.

The point is that if I’m busy doing all of that, I cannot focus on the most important aspect of my job: change. Now, that’s what I am able to do most of the time. I could theoretically take a three-month vacation, and my team would keep on running as they are. What they cannot do without me is change. I am the one that needs to change the team to meet the future needs of the business. If I use all of energy just keeping it running, I will fail in that pursuit.

Rule #5: Don’t delegate blame

As you can tell, I’m all about delegating as much as humanly possible. There’s one thing you can’t delegate: blame. When we fail, we fail as a team, and I take it personally. I own the lessons learned. I like to quote Hopper from Disney’s Bug’s Life: “The first rule of leadership is everything is your fault.” I wrote a blog article about that subject here.

Rule #6: You benefit last

Servant leadership is core to this method of delegation. While you should remain focused on your goal of scaling your impact, everyone in your organization must get there first. Here’s what I mean: As a director, if you want to do more, then you have to delegate some of your responsibilities to your managers. However, your managers are already busy. Your managers need to delegate some of their responsibilities to their team leads. Your team leads are already busy. They need to delegate to their senior engineers, but they are already too busy. The engineers need to automate and document their processes, so operations can run them. Only until you follow that path in reverse order, does the director get any additional capacity.

Again, this isn’t just about making increasing your capacity as a leader, but it’s about raising the overall capability and capacity of your organization. This has a multiplication effect. This is how you scale your impact as a leader.

Thoughts on Zach’s theory of delegation? Agree or disagree? Please share your comments below.